Property

by Lionel Shriver

  “So what are your plans for Christmas?” Rosalind attempted the airy delivery she’d learned from Chantelle.

  “Oh, Chant and I will go to my parents’, I figure,” Graham said with an identical airiness. “Do the usual prezzies, soup-to-nuts palaver. What about you?”

  “Well, my parents will be in Spain, so there’s no point in my heading to Wimbledon.” Being honest about this bit made it a tad easier to append more fanciful information. “Aiden’s not on speaking terms with his family,” she extemporized, curious what this tragic falling-out might possibly be over. Storytelling was so demanding! She’d no understanding of how novelists and other congenital liars managed. “So we thought we’d splash out on a big holiday meal at Kenwood Hall, just the two of us.”

  Since Graham could resort to the more seasonally apt comforts of home and hearth, she’d no idea why his expression grew so wistful.

  Rosalind’s pride in her budding narrative prowess wilted on the realization that she was now obliged to make herself scarce on a day she had no earthly thing to do. On Christmas Eve, her new powers of invention failed her dismally, and to Graham she made up something lame about “a party,” with none of the details like where and whose that would make it ring true. She doubted people ever threw parties on Christmas Eve, and if Graham had been paying attention—if he weren’t himself so oddly distracted and perhaps even a shade forlorn—he’d have smelled something fishy. He said “Chant” wanted to spend Christmas Eve with her own family; he’d probably just stay in.

  Thus at the door around eight p.m., Rosalind stalled in one of her best frocks—in which to head to a pub by herself, and that was assuming she could find one open. Graham was settled contentedly in front of a recording of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on their set-top box, sipping a glass of stout. It was cold out. She yearned to fling off her coat, along with the pretense of this apocryphal “party,” and join him in one of his signature suppers, simple but stylish, a knack for which had lured him so disastrously into conceiving Say La Vie. But when he said, “Have fun then!” she was trapped by her own theater. She spent the evening around a bunch of pawing drunks who, presumably like poor Aiden, were also not on speaking terms with their families—for good reason, as far as she could tell.

  Christmas proper was even worse. She kept waiting for Graham to leave that morning, while he seemed, oddly, to be waiting for her to leave as well. In the end, they left the house together, waving with forced smiles out on the pavement and then walking off in opposite directions. Not wanting to drink and drive, neither had bid for the car. Rosalind was ostensibly meeting Aiden in the city center, and Graham could walk to his parents’.

  Rosalind trudged just long enough to confirm that the atmosphere in the city was like one of those postholocaust films, after a plague or a neutron bomb. Not a soul on the streets, and everything closed. Tracing a route sure not to intersect with Graham’s, she circled back. It was Christmas, it had started to rain, and she wanted to go home. Some Stinking Bishop in the fridge and a handful of savory biscuits in the breadbox could stand in for the fabulous bash at Kenwood Hall she’d be obliged to fabricate when Graham returned, like feeding the five thousand from a few loaves and fishes.

  Yet when she rounded the corner onto their street, there was Graham not twenty feet from their gate, approaching the house from the opposite side.

  “What are you doing back here?” she asked.

  He sighed at his hands. “Truth is, I’ve never got up the courage to tell my parents we’re splitting up. They like you. So I could hardly show up with Chant on my arm, eh? And coming alone would set off alarm bells.”

  Rosalind unlocked their front door, with its lovely curlicue pattern in the frosted panes, eager to get out of the rain.

  “But what are you doing back here?” Graham asked behind her. “Have a fight with Aiden?”

  He’d handed her an excuse. Plopping into a dining chair and drying her face with a tea towel, Rosalind declined it. “Oh, there is no Aiden.”

  “For a figment of your imagination, he sure had powerful bad breath.”

  “I mean there hasn’t been an Aiden for weeks.”

  “Ah,” he said. “So you won’t mind my having borrowed your Kenwood Hall story. I told the family we’d decided to have Christmas just the two of us.”

  “Well, why don’t we?” she proposed shyly. “I mean … I’m starving, aren’t you?”

  Of course, there was no turkey browning in the oven, no pan of roasties crusting in goose fat, but together they rustled up the very sort of ad hoc supper that Rosalind had envisioned the night before. He caramelized oodles of sticky garlic while she whisked up a toasted pumpkin-seed oil vinaigrette; he roasted walnuts for the salad while she shaved Parmesan. They’d always made a good team—in the kitchen, at least. It may have lacked cranberry sauce and mistletoe, but this holiday had, however wanly, a sense of occasion. According to her Web research, this would be their last Christmas together. So they were celebrating the end of celebration. But maybe that beat not celebrating anything at all.

  “To be honest, I don’t mind taking a break from Chant,” Graham confided, adding another slug of olive oil to the garlic. “She’s a sweet kid, but … Lives on chips and ready-meals. Can’t tell a good Amontillado from Red Bull. And the music! Oh, and you know she really is planning to train as a dental hygienist? She said to thank you, by the way.”

  “It’s a good career,” Rosalind said, grinding pepper into the dressing. “In this economy, it’s important to be doing something necessary.”

  “Unlike restaurants.”

  “Say La Vie will recover, sweetheart,” she said passionately, forgetting herself with the endearment.

  Graham uncorked a red while the pasta water was still coming to a boil, and Rosalind popped off to what it still didn’t feel natural to call “her” bedroom, returning to sheepishly slide an overstuffed woolen knee-high on the table. She’d originally planned the stocking’s delivery for Boxing Day—always a bit of a downer. Fittingly this time, it was a day of overness, of disappointment, of closure.

  “I know we shouldn’t be buying each other presents, this of all years,” she said. “But all those evenings I pretended to be with Aiden … Well, I had to occupy myself somehow.”

  Indeed, she had applied herself to his stocking with all the ingenuity and humor that had escaped her in years previous. One by one Graham pulled out the individually wrapped cherry pitter and pastry crimper, a chocolate-mud-pie-flavored lip moisturizer, a packet of fennel pollen, Grand Marnier truffles, a miniature of avocado oil, and a clockwork chicken—all mixed in with dark-chocolate Smarties, kumquats, and books of Post-it notes for marking recipes. Seeming abashed that he’d not got her anything in return, Graham finally worked himself down to the folded, rolled-up piece of paper in the toe, beribboned like a diploma—for it betokened a graduation of sorts.

  Rosalind bowed her head. “The rest is just a goof. That’s your real present.”

  Graham pulled the ribbon, unfolded a page of printout, and looked baffled.

  “Upmystreet dot com,” she explained. “See that graph of property prices in Sheffield?” She took a brave breath. “We can sell the house.”

  Graham cocked his head. “But don’t you want candlelight with your Christmas dinner?”

  “I suppose, but … ?”

  Rolling the printout back into a cylinder, he strode to their cooker and poked the paper wand into the gas burner under the pasta pot. With the flaming page of A4, he lit the tapers on the table, then tossed the rising graph from upmystreet.com into the sink.

  They sat down to dinner, and Graham raised his glass. “To negative equity!”

  “To negative equity!” she returned with a boisterous clink, then tucked into a garlic pasta and rocket salad supper that, while hardly conventional, had all the makings of a long, joyous, and faithfully kept tradition.

  Vermin

  I don’t know if the moral of this story is that you shou
ld never buy a house. That’s a pretty useless moral anyway, in a country where home ownership is enshrined as such a wholesome aspiration that mortgage interest is tax deductible. Who would listen? And I’m reluctant to reduce what happened between Michael and me to such humdrum advice. Yet other stories would seem to distill to the same cautionary chapter heading of a marital guide: Never Buy a House. Not long ago in Manhattan, some geez in the midst of a divorce was so incensed by the prospect of his ex getting her hands on their landmark Upper East Side town house that he blew it up.

  I came across another local story, too—subtler, so you had to read between the lines. A rich banker married a younger woman shortly after his first wife died. These newlyweds also bought a flashy house in the city worth millions, and spent three years doing it up. But by the time the couple finally moved in, the marriage was on the rocks. He packed up after a few months. I read about the court case. The banker was appealing the decision that he had to keep paying fifty grand a month in mortgage payments since his former wife still lived there. Apparently in the divorce papers he’d charged she was “unreasonable.” I laughed. It wasn’t in the article, but I knew what had happened. They fell out over the house. He learned the kind of woman he’d married only when she started obsessing over the wainscoting.

  But that’s not my story, exactly. We never had any wainscoting.

  I’ll never forget first walking into what I would shortly baptize with affection “the Little Dump.” Michael and I had been together for just under a year, living in his studio in Greenpoint. With my paint box having to compete with propagating guitars, amps, and recording equipment, the apartment was cramped. So we were looking to pool our resources and rent something more spacious.

  Until that afternoon, the search had been depressing. Properties in Brooklyn were proving way beyond our budget, and every place had something wrong with it. Even if the apartment didn’t keep the refrigerator in the living room and the bathtub in the kitchen, we picked up right away that the previous residents had been unhappy there. It’s funny how you can tell; misery steeps into soft furnishings as indelibly as tobacco. So exhilarated with one another, we spurned other people’s residue of gloom.

  Yet the Little Dump was cheerful. In the sleepy family neighborhood of Windsor Terrace, it was located at the very end of a cul-de-sac called Trevanion Close, a designation somehow both intimate and noble. The street was unnaturally secluded for New York; when we met the owner out front, neighborhood kids were sprawled in the middle of the road drawing castles in colored chalk on the tarmac. The jabbering owner hadn’t let us in the front door for more than a minute before I twirled in the big middle room and declared, “I think we could live here.” I hadn’t even seen the upstairs.

  Granted, this tumbledown two-bedroom was cheaply built and flimsy. Wooden parquet maybe, but the floors were thin and creaked. Nothing was plumb: the sill of the back window canted at a good fifteen degree angle to the baseboard below; the bedroom doors upstairs were hung askew. The result was a goofy, fun-house discombobulation that made you slightly seasick. The fittings were trashy and surfaces fake; patterned to look like granite, the kitchen counters were plastic. Over the years, the grungy brown carpet on the stairs must have absorbed gallons of cat pee.

  And yet, the enclosed front porch was faced with a bank of sun-drenched windows. At the back, the windows of the kitchen and dining room were overgrown with an enormous grapevine, reaching beyond its square-framed trellis in the tiny yard and climbing the exterior brick. I admired the vine’s ambition. In late September, its leaves were still broad and green, and I wondered if we might pick them for making Greek dolmades, or collect the next harvest of fruit and try our hand at homemade wine. (Okay, we never attempted either project. Grape leaves have to be brined, and if I wasn’t up for that, I definitely wasn’t up for wine. Still, the caprices were enticing at the time.) The foliage tinted the air green, and so canopied the panes that they wouldn’t need curtains. In all, a happy house—or it was.

  Besides, a junky, knocked-together quality was intrinsic to the property’s charm. The house didn’t take itself too seriously—it was a joke house—which meant that we wouldn’t have to take it seriously, either. In those days, we cherished a drollness to our environs, a lightness and silliness and transience reflecting the fact that wherever we stood was mere backdrop. That’s what it’s like when you’re first in love. You feel so hyper-real, so radiantly authentic, that no one and nothing else can compete—as if you and your beloved alone are three-dimensional, and the rest of the world is flat. That’s why the frank fakery of this ramshackle dive on Trevanion Close was so appealing, like its farcical excuse for marble around the bathroom sink (more plastic). The two-story hovel had the atmosphere of a cardboard city in Hollywood, and that made us the stars of the show.

  Even our negotiation of the lease with the landlord was bogus, a mere gesturing toward due process. I guess the place had been empty for weeks, and Bob was desperate for cash. (Once months had gone by and he still hadn’t repaired the leak in the porch roof, we’d be pronouncing his name in eye-roll italics.) We’d been worried that this nervous, shifty-eyed owner would insist on a credit check, or recoil from our bohemian self-employment. But all he cared about was his deposit, until Michael finally asked in puzzlement, “Don’t you at least want to know what we do for a living?” So Bob asked, but only because Michael had told him to. God, we couldn’t believe we were in New York. I mean, we weren’t squatters and we were responsible and we would, somehow, by scraping for every job, pay the rent on time, but Bob didn’t know that. From someone who proved a pretty dubious character himself, the trust was baffling.

  I remain certain that for close to two years Michael and I were supremely contented in that house, although it saddens me that what happened later inserts a dimming scrim between then and now. The present so shades the past that it’s amazing we can remember anything at all, really—and maybe we can’t.

  The romances of strangers are somewhere between inaccessible and incomprehensible to other people, so you’ll just have to take my word for it how vertiginously I was in love with Michael Espiner, and he with me. (Sadly, at this point I have to take my own word for it.) There was something about his hips, his excruciatingly narrow hips, and the way the thick black leather belt settled on them just so … He was a gigging musician then, and when I watched him strum in clubs I remember being jealous of his guitar. On breaks between sets, we’d cocoon on one of the ratty sofas that lined the funky, pass-the-hat dives he played, my head on his shoulder with, I now realize, the kind of dreamy, gooey look in my eyes that makes other people sick. I’ve a feeling we may have been the butt of a few jokes, but even if we’d known that, we wouldn’t have been fazed. We were impervious. Which is just what makes folks who don’t happen to be in love themselves especially nauseated by swooning couples: that you so obviously don’t give a shit that you’re making them sick.

  Sure, the whole musician thing was a turn-on, but I wasn’t enchanted solely by the mystique of Michael’s smoky, freewheeling life. I loved his music. Not rock exactly but a bluesy, reflective, sorrowful style that I could best compare to Jeff Buckley. The lazy, lingering, lateral feel of his tunes also infused Michael’s manner. Sitting, he’d prop his tailbone on the edge of a couch, stretch his long legs straight out as if daring someone to trip over them, and extend both arms along the back cushion with the fingers draped. He exuded a savorous lack of urgency that was relaxing, and that sank us into moment by moment as into a sequence of plush pillows. He was a man whose unusual inhabitation of the present tense made you wonder in what distant temporal dimension everyone else was living.

  Michael also had an impetuous, fuck-it side. On one amble through the East Village, he pulled me into a chic retro shop and demanded the woman’s hat in the window—a cocky red number with a partridge plume—without even asking the price. It was $140. He couldn’t afford it, but he didn’t blink. I still feel badly that the feather got bent i
n our final move.

  Yet if Michael had a cool career, I liked to think that I did, too. Maybe I’ve attended to those news stories about mansions ruining people’s lives because back then I was hired to work in many similar east side town houses in Manhattan. I painted indoor murals: a nature scene on a bathroom wall, a jungle theme for a kid’s room. The duller but harder jobs entailed daubing plaster columns with the swirls of marble, streaking Sheetrock with the fine, variegated layers of wood grain, or pointillating a surface with the multiple grays, pearls, and blacks of a pebbled beach—making the bald artifice of our countertops back home seem fitting. The latter sort of work had a particular art to it. You had to stylize the execution just enough to indicate that you knew you weren’t fooling anybody. Yet fakery done well enough, painstakingly and honestly enough, has a beauty all its own. By the time I met Michael I’d accumulated just enough clients by word of mouth that I could do my part in keeping Bob off our backs.

  The point is, we were both freelancers, so we made our own schedules—though maybe it’s time I clarified that despite the seat-of-the-pants finances we weren’t kids anymore. Michael was thirty-five when we met, so I must have been thirty-three. Both old enough to have been through the romantic wringer; old enough to get worried. That it was never going to happen for us. That a cold roast chicken from the deli section of Key Food, noshed straight from the plastic tray while propped before yet another rerun of Requiem for a Dream, with no one to whom to marvel why this incredible film still seemed so culturally obscure, well, that’s what life was going to be, period: getting chicken grease on the remote and talking aloud to yourself in front of the box. So on top of being in love, we were grateful to be in love. I do remember that much. I remember being grateful.