The Stager: A Novel

by Susan Coll

  I made a quip about how, if there was going to be a spate of serial arson, it wasn’t surprising it should have happened this summer, what with the record-breaking heat. I should have stopped there, but in a short, boastful monologue that would later make me cringe, I heard myself go on about how it had been so hot the entire month of August that meek little wives would fondle the edges of their carving knives and study their husbands’ necks.

  I drew perplexed stares, and felt suddenly old. I turned my gaze toward Bella, a few feet away, and watched her throw her head back and laugh at some thread of conversation I strained unsuccessfully to hear. No sign of nervousness, no darting of the eyes as she mingled with her superiors, no sign of concern as she bit into another piece of sushi that she might have just said something profoundly dumb, or that she felt self-conscious about her age. I sensed I was observing a woman who did not appear to have spent the better part of the week fretting about what to wear to this party, or what she should, or should not, say, to any number of the important people in this room, including the newly elected mayor of D.C., or the famous financier turned poet, Raymond Branch, who had roomed with our boss, Norman Roth, when they’d both spent a year at the London School of Economics back in the 1980s. They had remained close friends.

  Bella must have noticed me staring, and she looked at me and smiled. She then came over to where I stood, and we all shook hands and made the usual round of introductions.

  “Eve sounds a little unhinged. She was just going on about wives and carving knives and husbands’ necks. Ought I call and warn someone?” Ahmed asked.

  “Oh, I love Raymond Chandler!” said Bella.

  I felt like throwing my arms around her, and I confess I nearly did. Quickly the conversation moved on to other books we loved. Joan Didion essays punctuated by dust motes, gauzy curtains, and certain slants of light. I had never before encountered anyone with a specific memory of the description of, yes, of all things, a chair, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. More specifically, one sofa and chairs, plural: “fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.”

  Was this enough of a foundation upon which to build a friendship? A mere convergence of taste in books? Well, it’s not nothing, not something to be shrugged away. But with hindsight, to have thrown myself at Bella as if I had just found true love, to have assumed we spoke the same language, that we would make the same well-considered choices, that we would never betray a husband or a friend? That’s a different story, as it happens. I can only say that, just like that, Bella Sorkin was my new best friend.

  This may sound like a stretch, and yet it’s true that, at some basic level, everything you need to know about me and about Bella Sorkin, the entire DNA of our friendship, is contained in the moment of our meeting. Though there’s a painful and salacious narrative that bookends the then and the now of me and Bella Sorkin, it’s also true that you can isolate that moment at the party and map the entire me-and-Bella story, the arc of my conflicting, jealous emotions so easily tamed by her attention. Of the wrenching outcome when things went bad.

  It’s mind-boggling to consider that there at the party was Raymond Branch. He seemed to me a bit of a cad, what with his slicked, thinning hair, the smart linen suit with a silk handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket, the polished wingtips—who dressed that way for a casual summer garden party, in Washington, in August? But he was so handsome in that worldly way of an older man that his vanity was forgiven, at least by some. One other distinctive thing about Raymond that added to his supposed allure (please know that he did nothing for me personally): while he was spending that year at LSE, he rode in a subway car that got blown up by the IRA. His leg was mangled when the aluminum ceiling collapsed, pinning him for hours, and he also lost a thumb. Oh, he was a catch, all right, but I’d suggest that, had he been anything other than a gazillionaire with two celebrated collections of published poetry—had he been employed as, say, a Target cashier—a girl might not necessarily have swooned to see him wobble through the crowd, his four fingers clutching the stem of a glass from which wine sloshed over the rim.

  At some point while Bella and I were talking, I noticed the two of them connect. He walked over to us, and small talk ensued. The weather provided a natural opening, since we were clearly moments from the eruption of a violent summer storm. Quickly the subject drifted to baseball—there was a game of some import that night, and they were concerned it would be rained out. Bella and Raymond discovered they were both Yankees fans, which, too, would prove farcically, tragically significant. Then a woman who was presumably Raymond’s wife came over, and he put an arm around her waist and introduced her as Seema. Raymond’s wife was Indian, or so I presumed from her coloring and jewelry, and the textured shawl draped artfully around her shoulders. Bella and Seema began to chat. Bella complimented her on her shawl, and Seema unwound it from her shoulders so both women could inspect the cloth, and then Bella tried it on. Moments later, pictures of the three Branch children were produced from Seema’s small jeweled bag. Bella made a fuss, asking their names and ages, then cooing loudly about the adorableness of each one.

  Did I sense, all at once, something bad in the air? By this I mean something more than the obvious rumbles of thunder. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m prophetic; if I were able to see the future, then I’d have no excuses for my own bad choices, including the one I made that night to attach myself to Bella. I could tell, or I thought I could tell, that Bella had her sights set on Raymond, which made me uneasy. I politely excused myself, aware that I had become extraneous to this conversation.

  Inside the house, alone in the dining room, I watched the catering staff tend to some final arrangements. A woman roughly my age, dark eyeliner unsuccessfully masking too many late nights working parties such as this, gave me a weary smile as she lit the votive candles scattered throughout the room. Another waiter appeared and poured ice into the tubs behind the bartender’s station, while a third made final adjustments to the arrangement of the food platters, in one case replacing the plate of poached salmon with the cold sliced meats, only to have the woman with the eyeliner swap it back. I felt more comfortable around the catering staff than around my new colleagues, even if I could more or less hold my own. After my parents split, my mother waited tables for years. We were hardly destitute—my father was not a monster, and he wrote his monthly checks—but she had no professional skills, and she said this occupation at least gave her purpose. I spent a lot of time as a kid waiting for her in the back of a variety of diners, and in college I followed in her footsteps, waitressing myself through school. Which is only to say that I am not averse to hard work. I take each job as it comes. I have no chip on my shoulder about what some might consider menial labor.

  I watched these quiet, familiarly soothing machinations while inhaling the cool indoor air and studying the sumptuous surroundings. Above me hung an enormous crystal chandelier, the set of Louis XVI dining-room chairs pushed against the wall to provide better access to the imposing table upon which the buffet was spread. I studied the frightening mythical creatures carved into the table’s knees, observing the way they then tapered into fluted shins and sharp-clawed paws. I pulled out my notebook and did a quick sketch.

  Through the window I watched a bolt of lightning strike just beyond the swimming pool. An intern from the sports desk dropped her wineglass, which shattered on the flagstone. She looked around, terrified, as if she might be instantly relieved of her position, but no one seemed to notice in the chaos as everyone rushed inside. Alone by the pool, she knelt to begin picking up the shards.

  * * *

  · Statistically, staged homes sell faster and for more money.

  · Ninety-four percent of staged homes sell in one month or less.

  · Homes that were staged spent 80 percent less time on the market.

  · Staging increases perceived value.

  · Staging is cheaper than a price reduction. />
  · Today’s sellers must do more than ever to compete.

  · A staged vacant house sells faster than an empty property.

  · Home staging can average 340 percent return on the investment.

  · Most buyers take three to six minutes to decide if they like your home.

  · Seventy-nine percent of sellers are willing to invest up to five thousand dollars on staging.

  · Sixty-three percent of buyers will pay more for a house that is move-in ready.

  I am not the sort of home stager you see on those popular television shows—the ones who flit about in heels and perch fetchingly on ladders, pink cocktails in hand. I don’t use words like “sizzle” and “pop,” and I avoid the trends; you will never hear me advise a client to purge his books, or remove their jackets and then color-coordinate the spines. I go about my work quietly, intuitively, certainly, like a fussy old aunt who comes into your room and tells you to clean things up.

  It seems I have a knack, which may not be anything to boast about—being able to strip away the personality of a house requires, in itself, a certain personality, or maybe what it requires is just the lack of one. Whatever the explanation, it would appear I was a smashing success, even though I stumbled into this career, if we can call it that, by accident.

  I had some general knowledge of the subject, of course, having worked for six years as managing editor of the monthly glossy magazine MidAtlantic Home, a job I was offered after two years at the newspaper. At the magazine, we had a regular rotation of stories on home staging, and we’d usually weave in some incarnation of the above-referenced bullet points, tucked discreetly—or maybe not so discreetly—into an editorial package declaring some quirky shade of color to be the new “off-white.” Think “Sea Glass,” for example. Aquamarine by a different name. Hold on to your hats and prepare for a brief run on Duron DCR077.

  You were meant to be seduced, too, by the complicated balloon shades we suggested you could easily make at home “for less than $100 in under three hours” (sure, if you kidnapped three seamstresses and locked them in your attic), or by the exquisite Ushak rug, a nice replica of which was available at Home Depot, which happened to be one of our best advertisers. Back when there were advertisers, which is to say, back before I lost my job.

  Even though I had some basic intellectual understanding of home staging, and I had read Staging Homes to Sell in This Still Volatile Market!, to know all of this, and actually to make it so, to get down literally on my hands and knees and bring a house to move-in-ready condition, is a very different thing from editing stories about how someone else might do it. Just because a person loves to read cookbooks doesn’t mean she can actually cook.

  I committed my first act of home staging on the day of an ice storm. My doorbell rang, and there stood my neighbor in an arresting ensemble, a bracing slash of red wool coat against the white winter landscape. When I saw her, I instinctively prepared for some sort of complaint: we’d lived side by side for nearly nine years, but our relations had always been chilly, mostly because, since Vince moved out and stopped caring for the garden, pretty much every bit of vegetation on my property has emigrated to her yard.

  Her complaints were frequent and vociferous: my bamboo had crept under the fence and was now interfering with three separate flower beds; my bindweed (as if I owned bindweed; as if I even knew what bindweed was) was choking her roses; and we’d recently had a rather unpleasant exchange about the fact that my cherry tree was dripping fruit onto her patio, staining her pavement red. This seemed to me a nonstarter. Cherry trees dripped fruit. So be it. I refused to cut it down. She thought otherwise, and after weeks of fraught exchanges, we finally agreed to split the cost of hacking the limbs that splayed into her yard. There’d been a few more incidents, too, mostly to do with my dog, who was also partial to her yard; no matter what I did, Moses continued to tunnel her way next door. My most recent solution was to embed two feet of chicken wire in the dirt below the fence line. This had done the trick, at least so far, and now that the ground was frozen, I couldn’t imagine what reason Amanda might have to be ringing my doorbell, especially in the midst of a storm.

  Amanda was one of the most successful independent Realtors in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region, and she had come to me that morning with a favor to ask: her car battery was dead, AAA advertised a three-hour wait, her husband was out of town, and the local taxi monopoly wasn’t even answering the phone. She had to meet some buyers, in from Germany, at a house they were about to take to contract, and she wondered if I could give her a ride.

  As much as I dreaded prolonged interaction with her, I was intoxicated by the business of Amanda that day: the briefcase bursting with paperwork, the stylish coat cinched at the waist with a thick leather belt, the mention of wealthy Germans, their pockets bulging with euros, or maybe even with gold. I told her to come in and to give me a minute to change out of my sweatpants and grab my keys.

  That day I began a new career as a home stager. And, as if I were the protagonist in some Shakespearean drama, or, perhaps more accurately, in some farce, I would soon find myself thrust center stage back into Bella’s life.

  * * *

  AMANDA AND I drove the three miles to the property without incident that day. When we arrived, however, there was no sign of the clients. We waited in the car for nearly an hour, with the engine running for heat. I will abbreviate the ridiculous saga of Amanda’s inability to reach the buyers by phone, which involved her slow, dim realization that she did not have international dialing enabled on her wireless plan, and her equally belated understanding, already quite obvious to me, that she was being stood up.

  I will shorten, too, the narrative of how, once we finally went inside, I won over in friendship the eighty-five-year-old widow who owned the decrepit rambler, and made a suggestion or two about sprucing up her house. (I know this may seem full of irrelevant detail, but it helps explain how I came to stumble—innocently!—into Bella’s home.)

  Perhaps I was simply relieved to be out of my lonely, boring purgatory that day, but I set about, unasked, manically plugging the holes in the widow’s walls, making the foyer look twenty years younger by repurposing a mirror from the attic and a table from the corner of the living room.

  I also crafted my first staging tip that day: foyers are far more critical than people realize. Although it ought to be obvious that foyers set the tone, most people give their entryways little thought, even though these are pretty easy to design. All you really need is a mirror so people can check for food in their teeth on the way out the door, and a small table on which to toss mail and keys. A dim, lousy foyer, or one without functionality, is like a flaccid run of words in the lede of the story, and just as you lose your reader, you’ve already doomed the sale.

  Here was another small, related epiphany, the realization that being a home stager was a quite logical next step after being a magazine editor. Home staging and editing share a process; both are about taking what you have and making it flow from the top down. After the lede paragraph of the foyer, you need a nut graph in the living room. This is where you take the key elements and put them in the most prominent spot, and then, from there, you work with what remains. Occasionally you might need to bring in something that was missing from the start—have the reporter contact a new source or find a more coherent quote, or swap in a new armchair or lamp. Bad sentences, bad household décor—both are about untangling things and finding the hidden gem. There is always something to work with, even if it’s mostly crap.

  I looked around this sad old house and felt myself begin to burn; the certainty of my ability and my intensity of desire were somewhat embarrassing. To fix this place up felt not like work or play, but like some sort of inherent need. I wondered if it was possible that I was put on this earth, was hardwired, to repair the world through interior design.

  Amanda and I had a cup of tea with the homeowner and looked (Amanda impatiently and not very graciously) at photographs
of her children and grandchildren. I noted how well tended the house had once been, and gushed to her about the potential to renew: with a little elbow grease, some pruning of the bushes that were eclipsing access to the front door, a few replaced lightbulbs, the opening of windows, and a fresh coat of paint, a person might be able to make the future visible here, as opposed to merely past decay.

  This was step one of what I would come to think of as staging therapy, because, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of emotional volatility involved in selling, never mind staging, a house, and homeowners have been known to burst into tears and/or verbally abuse the stager. My techniques have proved largely effective. In this case, the woman began to speak enthusiastically about having me restore the place to its rightful mid-century grandeur, and this is how I found myself in Amanda’s occasional, less-lucrative-than-it-should-be, cash-under-the-table employ. I worked magic on that old rambler, and it sold within a week for $15K over the asking price.

  * * *

  THE EUPHORIA I found in my new role, particularly at my age, might be interpreted as a positive thing if you are the sort who thinks it good to find happiness in being poorly compensated for creative work, or pathetic if you consider that I had, until recently, been making a six-figure salary in publishing. There is a silver lining, however: it is apparently possible to hit rock bottom and bounce back if a person limits her expectations, and as it happens, severely lowered expectations are themselves the silver lining of finally hitting rock bottom, which is where Amanda had found me that day: unemployed, not quite divorced, in the same clothes I’d slept in, defrosting hot-dog buns to use as toast in an effort to avoid having to get properly dressed to go to the grocery store.