The Stager: A Novel

by Susan Coll

  Fast-forward two years past the official death of his book and the debt incurred, five years beyond the end of our marriage, three months after I lost my job at MidAtlantic Home. I was deep into hibernation, digging in my freezer trying to excavate a Hunan stir-fry from its shroud of ice. The local news droned in the background as I read the directions and programmed the microwave. Then I heard this Gordon Gekko character say something that got my attention: it had been his lifelong dream to build a self-sustaining community based on the tenets of the visionary architect who’d been his guru in graduate school, Sherman Rushlander, author of a series of architecture books that were so popular they had inspired a movie, a series of graphic novels, and a board game. Although I knew that Rushlander had been the subject of Vince’s aborted book project and I knew he was the man behind Unfurlings, sometimes it can take a while for the mind to make the most obvious connections. I suppose I’d only been paying peripheral attention to the Unfurlings debacle, the way one sometimes does, with no small degree of guilt, to news that does not affect one directly, like famine in Africa or revolution in the Middle East.

  I’d called Vince immediately with an idea: that the unemployed might help the foreclosed-upon seemed great synergy—or at least it would get Vince out of his mother’s depressing basement apartment—and my instincts on this proved sound. Vince wound up unexpectedly consulting for Gekko, trying to find a way to make the land generate income while the properties sat idle. He designed farming preserves and helped Gekko think through how to harvest, in mass quantities that would then be packaged and sold to farm stands and small grocers, compost tea.

  Vince was offered the possibility of a low-interest loan and a substantial reduction in price on a small house at Unfurlings. He’d called me a few times to discuss this, and we slipped, as we always did, into a perfectly normal conversation about the pros and cons, as well as the finances, as if we hadn’t been estranged for years—or, more to the point, as if Vince had the resources to put down a deposit. I sometimes mused that perhaps we weren’t technically estranged, that our marriage had simply evolved from childhood friendship to cohabitation to separate domiciles and nightly conversations on the phone, and maybe this was a more enlightened and desirable way to be married than anyone understood, or was willing to acknowledge. Nevertheless, despite my own pinched resources, I was, these days, the deep pocket in this relationship, or at least the one with health insurance.

  * * *

  I ADMIT THAT I did something during this long and lonely Bella-free, Vince-less era that I regret. This was a bad phase of my life. I will not dwell on it, apart from saying there were a number of stark, lonely interludes, the sort from which has sprung many a midlife-crisis memoir, a genre I began to read voraciously. I had thought myself inoculated against life blows of this particular nature, as if the reward for having struggled through events in Indonesia, followed by the wrenching disintegration of my marriage and the simultaneous end of my friendship with Bella, were vaccinations against self-pity. As if planning a feature for MidAtlantic Home, I began to chart the domestic geography of author unravelings to see if there were any patterns to be detected. Some of the more popular memoirists, ones who had won prizes or sat for long stretches on the bestseller lists, were partial to weeping in bathrooms, and suggested that epiphanies about God, abstinence, and divorce tended to emerge while one was hunched over a toilet or sprawled on a cold tile floor. Laundry rooms featured prominently as well, as did kitchens and back patios, so it was impossible to draw definitive conclusions about which rooms were most likely to yield wisdom. I therefore set about sobbing my way through every room, like Goldilocks looking for the best fit.

  The options were depressingly plentiful; there were reminders of happier times everywhere I turned, and I second-guessed my decision to stay in the house after I finally asked Vince to leave. Each stick of furniture sent me back to the moment of its acquisition. There, in the cushions of our aged sofa, was the memory of the coffee we’d had at Starbucks one snowy winter afternoon, just before heading into the mall to buy the couch. How naïve to have considered the possibility that we might have lasted as long as a sturdy stick of furniture! In fact, with its Scotchgarded fabric, it now seemed, cockroach-like, destined to outlive us all.

  On top of this, I’d thrown myself so fully into work that, with hindsight, I could see I’d taken for granted the casual friendship of my colleagues and allowed this to substitute for a social life. They politely answered my calls and e-mails, but I could tell that, unlike me, they had other things to do. Once my sister and her family moved to Seattle, I realized how isolated I had become. Previously, I’d seen my nephew, Zed, every couple of weeks, and I’d sometimes babysat for him when my sister traveled. Now, although we still spoke and e-mailed almost daily, it wasn’t the same as having her a mile away. But the real problem was that I simply had too much time on my hands, especially after the magazine folded, and it proved harder to find another publishing job than I ever might have thought. I sent out hundreds of résumés and called former newspaper colleagues, to no avail. The only offers that came my way were freelance jobs for little and sometimes no pay, and though I took these on, I found it demoralizing to be back where I’d begun, writing eight-hundred-word features about giving your foyer a lift for spring.

  It’s sad to say that I didn’t even have a love interest, not even any minor flirtation I could turn into some sort of diverting Facebook activity. I confess to occasionally looking at Bella’s profile, but her privacy controls were such that I couldn’t get more than a superficial glimpse. But there was Lars, access unrestricted, no picture, five friends. Although I’d never met Lars, I’d always felt connected to him, weirdly fascinated by the very idea of him. A strange sense of intimacy occurs when you know details about a person you don’t actually know, and I knew a lot, as Bella was pretty loose-lipped with me. Me and Lars, we shared a bond: we were both losers in this life, both emotional victims of his wife. I’d always wondered, as I’d heard Bella talk about his downward spiral, if it was true that Lars was a priori damaged goods, or if Bella had made him damaged goods by not loving him, or by not loving him enough. Perhaps it’s better not to love someone at all than to love him halfway. Maybe she would love him fully if he only lost a little weight? If he read more substantive books? If he was a nattier dresser? The questions can destroy the person, who is left wondering what he lacks.

  Lars’s empty Facebook page did little to illuminate me. I thought about friending him, but I knew that would be crossing some line. Parents fret about their children’s online behavior when it is really their own arrested development that ought to be of concern. I visited Lars’s page on several occasions without incident. But one dark night, after a couple of glasses of wine, a Facebook event occurred. A message was sent. A wave of anxiety took hold that to this day has not entirely passed. I convinced myself, in that split second before hitting “send,” that I was doing the morally correct thing. Lars needed to know the truth about Elsa’s paternity. In all likelihood, he was not the biological father. Perhaps I had done this not for Lars but for me. The secret was burning a hole inside me.

  I never heard back. I had no way of assessing the damage. I might have given Lars the most devastating news of his life, or, alternatively, he might not have logged onto Facebook in the past five years.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS into my new career as a home stager, I found myself staring, for the first time in nearly a decade, at Belladonna Sorkin. She appeared on my television screen midday, on an afternoon segment on CNN—my go-to station for folding laundry. I had the sound off, but I learned from the caption that she was a vice-president at Luxum International. I located the remote and turned up the volume. I might have misheard, but it sounded as though she was in the middle of saying something about a goat.

  Random intrusions by Bella were henceforth going to become a regular feature of my life. I’d be going about my business, innocently ironing or sorting whites
from darks; then I’d flip on the television, and there she’d be. Each time, I’d brace myself for some emotional reaction, something tender or something violent, but all I felt was a dull curiosity. What had become of her and Lars, of Elsa and Raymond, of Raymond and the woman I’d locked eyes with on that fateful day in Indonesia?

  Also puzzling: How did Bella still manage to look so good? Of course she’d aged, but not dramatically so; she clearly had at her disposal every beauty resource available—the fancy hundred-dollars-an-ounce moisturizing creams, the newfangled wrinkle-freezing injections—so if crow’s-feet might have formed at the corners of her eyes, or if there was some slackening of the skin, it was not readily apparent, or at least not on my clunky old pre-high-definition television.

  Would you think I was obsessed with the subject of Raymond and Bella if I pointed out that her hair was the only thing that was notably different, and that the new, darker color, and the way it hung in stiffened, lacquered layers, made it look a bit like Seema’s? Though I had to say, grudgingly, that she looked terrific, her dress was not what I would have recommended for television—a fussy print that made it hard to focus on what she was saying, with a complicated neckline that plunged too low. Then, almost unbelievably, only five days later, there she was again, being interviewed on a 60 Minutes segment about the rebranding of Luxum International, wearing the very same dress. Oh, Bella! This is the sort of thing that happens when you disown your best friend; there’s no one around to advise you honestly on wardrobe choices and the like. I felt a surge of affection, as well as an unexpected nostalgia for the more mindless aspects of our friendship—the shopping and the gossipy lunches, the manicures, the sort of stuff that was so easy and lacking in substance that it would prove, counterintuitively, surprisingly difficult to replicate.

  * * *

  MORNINGS, IN THE intervening weeks, began not infrequently with calls from Amanda announcing real-estate emergencies. Few of these qualified as such. So far, in the four houses I had successfully staged, only one really rose to the level worthy of Amanda’s histrionics—a new-construction home in McLean where the Sub-Zero refrigerator had proved too heavy for the floorboards and crashed through to the den below, which we were in the process of staging with rented furniture. The plasma television and glass coffee table were among the casualties, and a painter doing some touch-up in the living room fell off his ladder and broke an arm; mercifully, no one was killed.

  Even though the market in most of the region remained depressed, with foreclosure signs still as much a feature of the landscape as the quaint farm stands that dotted the roads, there were also pockets where real-estate prices had gone up. Whether owners were hoping to minimize their losses, or quickly cash out while the going was still good, Amanda Hoffstead remained the region’s number one Realtor. She worked hard, reading the obituaries and pouncing on homes, talking up and befriending strangers in the grocery-store line, and handing out cards. She did her homework, paying close attention to houses that were languishing on the market, and then swooping in for the relist. No one seemed to like her much, from what I could tell, but apparently having fuzzy relations with the person who stood to make a 6 percent commission from the sale of your house was not the point, and toward her I adopted a similar, somewhat callous attitude.

  * * *

  SIX MONTHS INTO my occasional employment with her, Amanda asked me to meet her in front of a Flemish-style villa in an exclusive gated golf-course community in Bethesda. She explained in her usual bloviating style that just a few years earlier she could have sold this place with a snap of her fingers. Tiger Woods had once played here in the U.S. Open, back when these cruise-ship McMansions were considered desirable and before Unfurlings went into foreclosure, but now this was like trying to unload a dead fish, especially given that it had failed to sell in the first three months, or even attract a viable offer. The owners needed to act quickly, she said, and in fact they wanted the house back on the market by the end of the week.

  “Brace yourself,” she said before punching numbers into the lockbox that hung from the door. “There are photos of the family everywhere you look, and tons of overly eclectic ethnic crap. The owners must travel a lot. Also a lot of hideous modern art.”

  She paused before opening the door: “Did I mention there are also some problems with a pet? A rabbit, I think? They called me over the weekend; I’m not entirely sure what they were talking about, but it may have escaped its cage and been a little destructive.”

  No, she had not mentioned this. Nor had she mentioned the smell.

  It was the first thing I noticed when I stepped through the door. Vaguely uric, suggestive of cat, it was the sort of semi-tolerable odor that pet owners grow impervious to, apparently no longer even notice after a while, like the sound of a whooshing interstate just outside the master-bedroom window, or the view of a behemoth cell-phone tower from the back deck. Or so they claim to potential buyers of their homes. When people fall in love with a house, they are willing to set aside logic; 95 percent of buyers act on emotion, ignoring warning signs the way one takes on a partner who has a history of philandering, or who is in massive debt.

  I looked at Amanda and thought I could see her silently processing the smell as well. I’d recently had another project with a bad-odor issue, a historic row house in Dupont Circle, where the fourteen-year-old Labrador retriever who limped to the door to greet me was wearing a diaper. There had been a long history of bladder incidents in that home, as evidenced by the badly stained wood floors, but by employing the right combination of cleaning products, plug-in deodorizers, and strategically placed throw rugs, I had seen the property go to contract, so I was not unduly worried.

  There was always a solution, and that was part of what I liked best about this new job—the way it forced me to think on my feet, to find quick if ephemeral fixes. It didn’t really matter if the curtain rod I stabilized with duct tape was likely to collapse in six months; by then the house would be sold, or so we hoped, and the whole thing would presumably be disassembled to accommodate the new owners’ tastes. This was the sort of sloppy attitude I would not have tolerated back when I worked in publishing, when any poorly cropped photo or misplaced comma was going to live in cyberspace until the end of days, but the very point of being a home stager was to create illusions, and this suited my current, impermanent state of mind quite well.

  The second thing I noticed in the marbled foyer was the pig.

  A small, round, winking bronze creature, an impish little potbellied thing that could fit in the palm of a hand. It was poised like a sentry on the green marble console, one of its triangular ears eclipsed by a red tulip that drooped from the vase beside it. Flanking the pig’s other side was a tribal figure made of wire and bits of cloth, its belly grotesquely extended. The painting above it was an abstract of black and yellow brushstrokes that had a vaguely Spanish feel. Even as a painter myself, and an aficionado of modern art, I thought it looked like something I might have excavated from my nephew’s backpack after kindergarten, crumpled and sticky with the remnants of lunch.

  One didn’t need to read any staging books to get that all of this would have to go: the last thing you wanted was for would-be buyers to associate the house with swine, starvation, or bad modern art. Before I could commence with a new plan for this entryway, however, I would have to get over the shock of the pig. I knew this pig, or I knew a pig just like it, and at the time of its purchase I had been told it was one of a kind. Bella and I had purchased an identical pig on our trip to Indonesia. We had meant to share it, to pass it back and forth—a pig as an unconventional friendship ring. That I had never had my turn with the pig was not something I had considered until now.

  I was almost certainly overreacting, jumping to the crazy and highly unlikely conclusion that I had just stepped into Bella Sorkin’s home. For one thing, it was hard to imagine Bella in a gated golf-course community in a faux Flemish villa. When we parted ways, she and Lars had been living in a fu
nky, albeit stunning, Capitol Hill row house in what might be politely referred to in real-estate lingo as a transitional neighborhood. Even though Lars had been pulling in major bucks with his endorsements and had wanted to live the more comfortable and, dare I say, flashy lifestyle befitting a professional athlete, Bella had prevailed. She’d still had a dash of Northern California flower child in her blood back when I knew her. She had subscribed to edgy literary journals, dressed with a bohemian flair, and once contemplated a small tattoo on her shoulder, even as she was clearly moving in the sartorial direction of Brooks Brothers and pearls.

  Still, there was no reason to jump to conclusions. Washington, D.C., was a very cosmopolitan region, full of international travelers, and souvenir pigs from Indonesia were perhaps not unusual. After reassuring myself of this, I followed Amanda into an enormous living room with light pouring through the stained glass of a cathedral ceiling. The space was gasp-inducing, a potential centerfold for a magazine peddling real-estate porn.

  Stunning as this was, there was simply too much stuff: photographs and knickknacks and books, dolls and Rollerblades and field-hockey sticks, all incongruous with the shabby-chic French country furnishings that included a stunning pair of washed hemp cane-back wing chairs and a distressed sage-green-and-white sofa carved from oak. There were also a pair of antique Queen Anne chairs, one of which had an unfortunate gash in the cushion.

  Set apart from this flow—at the far back of the room, where it began to bleed into the formal dining room—was a Wassily chair. It faced the wall, forlorn, like a child sent to the corner for fidgeting in class. With its sleek frame and thin leather slats, it looked as stark, emaciated, and weirdly compelling as a heroin-chic model. This chair did not belong in this room. For that matter, this chair did not belong in this house.