The Stager: A Novel

by Susan Coll

  We had once done a feature on this iconic chair, designed by Marcel Breuer and named in homage to his friend and fellow Bauhaus instructor Wassily Kandinsky. It was considered revolutionary in its use of tubular steel. One of the designers we quoted in the story quipped that it was “the second most disturbing chair in the world, the first being the electric chair.” Another said that sitting in it felt like “inserting a broomstick up your ass.”

  Amanda noticed me staring at it. “That’s going in the attic for sure,” she said.

  Regardless of its possible value, I didn’t disagree.

  Turning my focus back to the main area of the room, my eye moved slowly, hesitantly, upward to the gigantic portrait that hung above the fireplace. I was still holding out a flicker of hope that I’d see, there above the fireplace, something else. I don’t know what. Just something other than the Sorkin-Jorgenson family of three.

  I had never met Lars. And there he was, if not quite flesh and blood, at least rendered reasonably lifelike in oil—blond-haired, blue-eyed, and entirely worthy of his God of Tennis nomenclature. Adding to the surreal nature of this moment was the fact that I had not stopped to consider him as someone who might occupy a home. It may seem silly to say, but I had simply not thought about him as a man who might do things like eat eggs for breakfast or brush his teeth or recline on a sofa or contort into a Wassily chair. The Lars in my head was merely a synonym for something sad and lost and washed-up.

  And the child! In this painting she looked to be about five years old. I’d never seen Bella’s daughter.

  My own daughter would have been her same age.

  I stood gaping at the painting for so long my neck began to cramp. The girl looked just like Bella—so exact a replica, in fact, it seemed she might have simply been cloned.

  “Out-of-body experience” has always seemed to me one of those phrases so overused it has become devoid of meaning, and yet there I was, having one of my own. I observed myself standing there in awe, the light streaming in blue through the colored glass above, and then I could also see, as if I were watching a split-screen television, the toothless shopkeeper who had sold us the pig in the lobby of the Jakarta Four Seasons Hotel. He was laughing, as if he could see ahead to this improbable moment, many years and many thousands of miles away, like this outcome was preordained. I could even feel a rumble, like the ground beneath my feet when the stirring first began, although this was less portentous—it was simply Amanda, dragging the coffee table to the side.

  “Holy Mother of God,” she said. We both stared at the asymmetrical explosion of shredded carpet and small brown specks, which had, until a moment earlier, been obscured by the table. Even though I have worked with words my entire life, I’d need a camera to convey properly the nature of this mess. It looked like something Jackson Pollock might have created had he used as his medium animal excrement instead of paint.

  “Let me get some paper towels,” I said calmly, heading in the direction where I assumed I’d find the kitchen. At the same time, I asked myself, What is wrong with me? What sort of terrible person clinically assesses damage to a rug under these circumstances? Wouldn’t the better woman have already fled this house, the way an animal bolts upon hearing the sound of a gun?

  I suppose I was seized by a morbid curiosity. But also, in my defense, I had the sense that fate had brought me here for a reason, and until I could figure out why, the thing to do was simply switch to autopilot and stage—by which I also mean mend and repair—this home.

  This was surely possible. As it was, the job required the ability to detach. In my own life I was sentimental and superstitious; I kept messages from fortune cookies with projections of which I approved, even the ones that were laughably wrong: harbingers of a long, happy marriage, or of a houseful of children, or of tremendous wealth. But when it came to other people’s homes, I stuffed into boxes, without remorse, the framed photos on the mantel, the hurricane lamps full of shells collected at the beach, the family of snowmen the kids had made from clay. Those diplomas on the wall, the Little League trophies, the photos of the great-great-grandmother getting married in the shtetl—into a box! Surely, here, too, I could shift into clinical home-stager mode.

  In the kitchen I found a spare roll of paper towels under the sink, but as I was searching around for some form of disinfectant cleaning solution, I was hit by a wave of nausea. The smell, which had seemed tolerable when I’d first entered the home, was closer to rancid in this room. It was hard to isolate. I couldn’t tell if this was the same smell, or a new smell. The smell seemed to shape-shift, but if I had to guess, I’d say it seemed to be bubbling up through the floor. I opened the back door to let in some fresh air before returning to the living room.

  As I scooped up the animal excrement (the source of yet another smell, or the same one, I couldn’t say), Amanda reminded me that this was a rush job, and inquired about my ability to complete the staging in less than a week.

  I asked her why the rush.

  The answer was that the Sorkin-Jorgensons had just signed a contract for a multimillion-dollar home in North London, steps from Hampstead Heath, and apparently, even though the homeowners were now raking in big bucks, their resources were only elastic to a point. They needed rather urgently to get their cash out of the Maryland ground.

  “The animal—whatever it is, a rabbit, I think—seems to have had quite the party this weekend,” Amanda said. We both stared at the damaged carpet. “Any brilliant ideas short of replacing the entire wall-to-wall?”

  Bella’s messes were always grand, I thought.

  I pressed my hand to my stomach, made a loud gagging sound, and ran toward the window, which I opened so I could draw a few deep breaths.

  “Something you ate?”

  “It’s just the smell…”

  “Deep breaths. You’ll be fine in a minute. So—first thing I’d say is, all the clutter has to go.”

  “Obviously,” I said. Did Amanda not find the smell unbearably repulsive? I wondered.

  “Also this…” I said, with a nod toward the portrait. I walked toward it again and tried to get a peek from behind, but couldn’t really see much without a ladder. “I can’t quite tell, but my guess is that it’s anchored to the wall with toggle bolts, so it could be tricky. We’ll have to see what we can do.”

  Amanda came closer to where it hung, and knocked on the wall. “You’re right,” she said. “This may have to convey.”

  We both laughed, but it was true that you sometimes heard stories of such things—gigantic mirrors that were hung with such deeply embedded bolts that it would be easier to remove the wall than to detach the fixture, and often such pieces did convey. Imagine living with a giant oil painting of Bella’s family of three!

  This struck me as terribly funny, and I began to laugh, perhaps a little too hard. My laughter may have had the sort of maniacal edge that sometimes morphs into hysteria among psychiatric patients. Amanda was staring at me.

  “What’s the budget?” I asked, trying to pull myself together and behave as if this were an entirely normal situation and not the most shocking thing to have happened to me, ever.

  “It’s more about time than money. Just tell me what you need and I’ll try to make it work.”

  “I need to take in the entire place first, before I come up with a budget,” I said. Although mostly what I needed was time to compose myself, to figure out what to do.

  “That’s a yes?”

  I hesitated. The correct answer was surely no—I should disclose to Amanda my conflict and promptly leave. But I was also thinking this: I could work with the Flemish villa, I could cleanse it of clutter, restore the house to its rightful, faux-Flemish state. I could enable a quick and lucrative sale, and in this way I might make a small private repair, although for exactly what I was apologizing, I wasn’t quite sure.

  “It’s a maybe,” I said. It’s an ‘I’ll let you know in an hour, after I’ve looked around.’” We were parting ways when th
e most critical question of all occurred to me: “Are the sellers going to be around?” I tried my best to sound nonchalant, although the question wasn’t as suspicious as it might have seemed: we’d had an unfortunate incident at another house when the homeowner had burst into tears at my suggestion to replace the entire bedroom ensemble with something more neutral. The woman, a crunchy fifty-year-old artist with wild gray hair and an impressive collection of bird earrings she had made herself from found objects along the C&O Canal, had apparently hand-crocheted the pillows and various throws I was proposing be put on the shelf, and this otherwise minor incident had skyrocketed into such bad tension that we decided it was best if she simply left the premises while I worked.

  In this case, for entirely different reasons, I clearly could not accept the job if there was any possibility of encountering Bella.

  “They’re in London all week.”

  “Thank God,” I blurted with perhaps too much enthusiasm. I felt another wave of nausea taking hold. “How can you bear this smell?” I asked.

  “What smell?”

  How was it possible that Amanda didn’t notice the smell? Was it all in my head? A metaphor for Bella’s lies?

  That would be overwrought, and as a former editor, I like to keep my prose in check.

  * * *

  IT WAS IN the child’s room that I felt the first true chink in my composure. I stared numbly into the closet stuffed with frilly dresses and little patent-leather shoes, as well as heaps of toys and sports equipment of various types. My eye caught on a mud-encrusted cleat, which I studied for a moment, trying to decipher its precise use like it was some alien form: Did these spikes speak soccer, lacrosse, baseball, or field hockey? Or was the footwear for these activities all the same? I shut the closet, only to turn around and confront even more little-girl accoutrements on the dresser to the right of the door: a small basket full of hair ribbons and plastic barrettes, a bottle of sparkly purple nail polish, an impressive collection of eye shadows and lip glosses and face powders, each in a variety of shimmery containers, and all, upon closer inspection, with bits of glitter embedded in the contents.

  Elsa’s room had been fully outfitted to accommodate the little-girl princess phase, and every object seemed to sparkle. Even the canopy bed, which was perched on a raised platform with drawers underneath, had sheer, floating white curtains with bits of shimmering thread woven into the fabric, a design feature echoed by the dressings for the casement windows. The room was larger than many a studio apartment, or the master bedroom of my house. It also had its own en-suite bathroom, a little library corner with bookshelves and a desk, and a set of armchairs upholstered in a regal shade of deep blue velvet. The best thing to do with this room, given the time constraint, was to embrace the whole princess thing and hope potential buyers had a little girl with her own sovereign aspirations—or at least the imagination to see how the space might look, radically transformed.

  The nail polish had me weirdly transfixed; I gave it a shake and watched the glitter dance in the afternoon sunlight before settling back slowly to the bottom of the thick purple slush. At the girl’s small vanity table, I sat on the miniature velvet stool and set to work applying two coats of paint to each nail. As I waited for the enamel to dry, I picked up a hairbrush and studied the tangle of light brown hair snagged between the bristles. I then ran, or tried to run, the brush through my hair, but the soft bristles were no match for my wiry, corkscrew strands. A switch on the vanity table illuminated the oval mirror, and, staring at myself in the harsh light, I spotted a mutant gray hair poking through my left brow. Rifling through the beauty supplies did not produce any evidence of a tweezer, which puzzled me until I remembered that the owner of these products was all of ten. I made several attempts to extricate the offending hair with my fingers, to no avail. I then found a small scissor, which proved a bad idea. I inadvertently butchered roughly ten inoffensive hairs, while the gray one remained elusive. As it happens, there are few problems in either home staging or personal appearance that can’t be solved, or at least improved, by appropriate illumination, and finally, in frustration, I dimmed the light until I could no longer see the damage I’d done.

  Once again I caught a whiff of something foul, but tried to focus on the task at hand. The first thing to do was put these toys away. The Easy-Bake oven; the mounds of stuffed animals; the American Girl dolls sitting at their miniature mahogany dining-room table clad in bathing suits, napkins spread across their laps, the plastic slabs of skewered meat set out on a platter. I walked over to begin disassembling the display, but felt a disarming wave of sadness at the sight of those girls just sitting there, waiting. Waiting and waiting, for the girl to come home from school, to find them compelling enough to sit down on the floor and change them into proper clothing, to help them resume their evening meal.

  Did ten-year-olds play with dolls? Did the princess and doll phases intersect, and which was outgrown first? Ten. At what age did a girl want to set fire to all this, to paint the walls black and plaster them with posters of scantily clad vampires or of her favorite goth bands? What did I know? Not much. I had missed the opportunity to engage in, or, more likely, do battle with, any Ugg-booted, miniskirted, gum-snapping, cell-phone-texting ten-year-old girls. I felt a headache coming on, or maybe it was just that the sliver of my brain that had been cryogenically frozen with the memory of my pregnancy was undergoing an unfortunate thaw.

  I decided this room could wait, and went out into the hall and climbed the next flight of stairs. By this point I was trembling, as if I was about to enter some fraught Jungian landscape marked with totems from my past, and that was before I even realized how apt the metaphor was: until the moment I reached the threshold of the master bedroom, I’d forgotten about the bed.

  Bella’s distinctive scent emanated from within, fortifying the perimeter like an electric fence. I stopped accordingly. I would not cross this threshold. At least not today. Eventually, of course, I would have to enter, but the idea of touching Bella’s things—the wedding picture on the dresser, the perfume bottles, the earrings on the nightstand—felt to me like a moral violation more extreme than the one I was already engaged in.

  My head began to throb. The bed. I could hardly believe it. I knew this bed, just like I knew that pig downstairs.

  Surely it was possible that I was investing all of these inanimate objects, these mere things from my life, with too much meaning, but ever since Vince and I had separated I’d felt especially sentimental about the matter of the bed.

  Toward the end, I said, cruelly and ridiculously, that our bed was at the heart of our problems: It was from IKEA and it was falling apart. I began to obsess about beds I saw in catalogues and in department-store showrooms. Canopy beds with deluxe pillow-top mattresses fifteen inches thick, as lush as wedding cakes. Goose-down feather quilts tucked inside silk duvets. Once, I saw a Restoration Hardware bed that was so sumptuous, with its mounds of pillows and shams, that I crawled inside, just to feel the Italian 50-Year-Wash sheets against my skin. I closed my eyes, just for a moment, and though I don’t think I actually fell asleep, the next thing I knew a security guard had come over to nudge me along.

  Who can say what that whole bed thing was about? Just one last grasp at the poetry of marriage, at the limp sort of sentiment that makes people cling to something that is clearly dead. Poor Vince. My husband had looked at me, crushed, when, to punctuate my thought, I picked up one of the bolts that had come loose from our sad IKEA contraption and handed it to him.

  But this marriage bed, Bella and Lars’s bed, the bed that should have been mine—this was a sturdy instrument: made of teak, a four-poster, king-sized, low-to-the-ground sanctuary draped in layers of gauzy batiks so elaborate and unusual it seemed to merit some designation apart from “bed.” On this bed, there were no loose bolts.

  We’d discovered it together, me and Bella, in Jakarta, in a little shop behind the Jalan Kebon Sirih Timur market, and I had instantly fallen in love.
Bella had helped me bargain with the shopkeeper to bring down the price, and he was confident he could arrange swift shipment to Maryland. But then I hesitated, and said I wanted to think about it overnight.

  Vince and I were in a phase where we managed little more than polite exchanges to do with questions of household management, notwithstanding the fact that I had finally, unexpectedly, conceived. By that point we were beyond discussing the elephant in the room, the clock ticking on the manuscript he was not writing, the empty bottles in the recycling bin. I was safely past the sixth month, and determined to embrace this marriage, to try to believe in the future.

  Vince had been intensely negative about my decision to go with Bella to Indonesia. I decided to ignore his objections. It was true that buying a round-trip ticket to Jakarta only three days before departure was obscenely expensive, but, then, the hotel room was free, and, really, how often do these sorts of travel opportunities come along? Besides, I saw this as my last hurrah before being constrained, happily so, by a child. On top of which, Bella was having a rough time of things and she needed me along. Or so she said, and I was a sucker for Bella, easily seduced by the idea that I, her trusted confidante, could soothe her through this troubled patch.

  As I stood in the market with Bella that day, I’d thought, optimistically, that perhaps the very thing we needed to go with a new baby was a new bed. This was no ordinary bed; it was huge and worthy of Homeric epic, which seemed to me exactly what it would take to get me and Vince to turn the corner. I had blissful if delusional visions of us parked here for the next few years while we slept, or tried to, and the baby fed, and we healed. Maybe Vince would even plug in his laptop, prop himself up against the oversized batik pillows I’d buy, and finally write his book. That said, I wasn’t sure that the headboard, even disassembled, would fit through the awkward angles of our hallway, and it seemed prudent to call Vince to consult about the dimensions before arranging to ship this behemoth piece of furniture. I told the shopkeeper I’d come back the next day. That had been our first afternoon in Indonesia, before Raymond Branch showed up and the ground shook and there would be no going back to the market, at least not for me.