by Sonya Cobb
In the meantime, thanks to all the renovations and their attendant surprises (bad wiring, corroded plumbing), she’d had to perform some financial sleight of hand to get through the month: shifting balls in and out of cups. Send a payment to the plumber, put the cable bill on a credit card, make the minimum mortgage payment, write the babysitter a bad check for now, make up for it with cash the next week. She didn’t say anything to Brian, not wanting to worry him; she knew it was a temporary situation. She also wanted to avoid giving him the opportunity to complain about the house.
To make things worse, Elliot had begun climbing out of his crib and scaling the changing table, bookshelves, and dresser, requiring Sophie to come downstairs several times a night to put him back to bed—silently, with no eye contact or cuddling, as directed by the child-rearing experts. As if cuddling were actually a temptation, after being yanked awake at the hard-won, blissful moment sleep arrived. Exhaustion and anxiety sharpened the edges of Sophie’s mind, the way it had in the first sour-milk-scented weeks of her children’s lives. She felt like she’d been scrubbed all over with steel wool. Lights were too bright, voices were too loud, the clutter of toys and shoes all over the house was a personal affront. Details slipped out of her mental grasp, and making any sort of decision, whether she was choosing pizza toppings or health insurance, left her quivering with confusion. Her voice took on a sharp edge that made the children wary. Brian kept his distance.
One airless June night, after several rounds of returning Elliot to his crib, Sophie retreated to her office to wait for his next foray. She turned on her desk lamp, and a moth fluttered into the room; they still hadn’t ordered screens for the third floor windows. She picked up a stack of envelopes and started sorting them into piles: bills…credit card statements…credit card offers worth considering…refinance offers…junk mail….
She came to an envelope that read: “An important message about your mortgage.” Again? How many times could one mortgage change hands? She neatly sliced the top edge with her letter opener and scanned the dense type: “…to inform you…adjustable rate mortgage…London Interbank Offering Rate plus margin…” She shook her head. At the bottom, a box that said “Your new minimum payment, as of August 1, 2006” was set apart from the rest of the text. Was this some kind of offer? If so, it was laughable. The new payment was double what she was currently paying.
She set it aside, not sure what pile to put it in, and turned to the credit card statements. Scanning the charges, she was amazed by how many times she bought diapers at the corner market, where they were twice as expensive as anywhere else. She needed to get a membership at one of those bulk stores.
She returned the statements to their pile and picked the mortgage letter back up. It didn’t look like an offer. She tried to decipher the words. It was definitely from her mortgage company, MortgageOne, and it was specific to her loan: there was her account number. She found the words “your new interest rate” buried in the final paragraph. She couldn’t remember exactly what the original rate had been, something with two or three digits after the decimal point, but she was sure it was much lower than this one.
All right, so their interest rate had gone up. It seemed crazy that it had happened so fast; hadn’t Ron told her it was good for a few years? Or was that something else? She fanned herself with the envelope, blinking away her exhaustion. It was so hard to remember what had happened in that cubelike, acoustic-tiled room so long ago. She recalled bouncing Elliot in her arms until her shoulders ached, but that was about it.
She squared the edges of the piles of envelopes, arranging them in a symmetrical pattern on her desk. Clearly, she couldn’t make the new payment. It was absurdly high—and with virtually no warning! But wasn’t there always room for negotiation? She’d been scrupulous about making payments on time, which should count for something. She pulled a colorful envelope out of the recycling bin: “REFINANCE TODAY!” Of course—that’s what you do. She vaguely remembered hearing Ron tell her this. She looked at her watch. Five fifteen. She could call him in four hours.
***
“Well, hey, Sophie! Of course I remember you. How are those kids?” Ron’s voice had the same cheesy-but-reassuringly-bouncy quality Sophie remembered. She explained the letter, the new payment.
“Yep,” he said. “Well, as you probably remember, we went for the one-year ARM, ’cause you were looking for a lower payment at the time, while you got your business going again. And I got you that awesome promotional rate at the time…I do remember that.”
“Okay, but this is ridiculous. We can’t pay this. We need to refinance.”
“I hear ya. I hear ya. You did an option ARM, right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been paying the whole enchilada every month?”
“Well, the minimum. It’s all I can do right now. I haven’t missed any.”
“You did some work on the house, right? Any new bathrooms? Add any square footage? Deck?”
“We did a lot. Took care of the lead paint, fixed some walls, did the roof. Finished the floors. Electrical stuff.”
“’Kay. ’Kay. Tell you what. Why don’t you call the lender, explain your situation, see if you can put your heads together and craft some kind of solution.”
“Craft—but can’t you help us refinance?”
Ron coughed. “That’s not gonna be an option for you. Look, I don’t have access to your account, but it sounds like you’ve been tacking interest onto your balance this whole time. Your home’s worth less than a year ago, your balance is higher; you’re in, you know, you’re in a tough spot. It sounds to me like you might be underwater.”
“What?!” Sophie cried, her sluggish thoughts flailing. “Our house is not worth less. We put every penny of our savings into it; we did the electrical, the pipes. You should see the floors! You haven’t seen it, Ron. You don’t have any idea!” Her throat tightened, and tears moved into position.
“Hey—I’m just sayin’,” Ron protested. “The market’s tanking. I’m sure you’ve done amazing work… Just call your loan servicer. I’m only the broker. I want to help you, but I can’t. ’Kay?”
“Okay.” She tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling, noticing a threadlike crack in the plaster.
“It’ll work out. Call your lender, all right?”
“All right. Thanks.”
She was always doing that—thanking people who didn’t deserve her gratitude. It was a dumb habit. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
That night she lay awake for hours, turning the situation over in her bruised mind. She was an idiot, agreeing to those terms. She’d barely skimmed the application before signing it. And this, after promising Brian she could take care of things! Why didn’t she ever learn? She shouldn’t be left to handle important matters on her own.
And the house. The house was supposed to take care of her family, and she had promised to do the same in return. Could it really be taken away from them? The very idea seemed ridiculous. It was a problem of math, a matter of shifting balls in and out of cups a little faster. She’d call the mortgage company tomorrow. There was time. A good two months before the loan reset.
Elliot’s wake-up call came blaring through the baby monitor at five forty-five. Sophie lay in bed waiting for Brian to make the first move, but he stayed asleep, or pretended to, snoring lightly.
***
The object carts were no longer in the hallway when Sophie visited Brian this time. Instead, half of them had been crowded into Brian’s office, where Sophie had to scoot sideways, holding her messenger bag high, to get to the chair beside his desk. “Sorry,” Brian said, moving a pile of reference books to the floor so she could sit down. “I’ve left the art handlers a million voice mails about this, but apparently nobody’s home.”
Sophie looked at the mess surrounding her and wondered what kind of help she was expecting to find here. She felt h
er resolve slipping, but tightened her grip. The conversation she was here to have—about the bills, the mortgage, the shell game—this was what married people did. They shared their troubles, confessed their mistakes, accepted help when it was offered. This was normal. Nothing to be afraid of. And she knew exactly how Brian would respond—with restraint. He wouldn’t yell, he wouldn’t blame. He’d just sigh and press his lips together, repressing his “I told you so.” And in a way, this is what she was dreading most: his tranquillity, his bottomless well of tenderness. He would try to make her feel better, telling her it was an honest mistake, promising they’d work it out together. He was always nicest to her when she deserved it the least.
Gathering her courage, Sophie turned to face him squarely. But Brian was uncharacteristically animated, swiveling in his chair and drumming his fingers in a way that looked almost gleeful. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I think I just figured out there’s a piece of Saint-Porchaire on the loose.”
“A piece of what?”
“French ceramics from the fifteen hundreds. Really ornate.” He played his chair arms like bongos. “There’s probably only about eighty of them in the world, a few of them in museums. We don’t have any. Yet.”
“Is there one coming up at auction?”
Brian gave her a faint one-sided smile that, for him, represented unbridled joy. “I think it might still be in private hands.” He launched into the story: how he’d dug up the records of an 1893 estate sale in France, which showed the purchase of a small collection of Saint-Porchaire by the Philadelphia shipping magnate Paul Wilder. How he’d traced three of the pieces—a cup, saltcellar, and candlestick—to Wilder’s son, who had eventually bequeathed them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How he’d figured out that there had been two candlesticks in the original sale—not one, as everyone had always assumed.
“So one of them broke when Wilder shipped them home,” Sophie said, knowing that if this were true, Brian would be acting a good deal less jolly.
“That’s the thing. He didn’t ship it. I found the insurance records.” Brian drummed his armrests a little faster. “I figured maybe he kept it in his Paris apartment, so I wrote to his granddaughter, Eleanor. She lived there for years and eventually sold the place, along with all the art he’d been hoarding there.” He snatched a piece of stationery from a pile on his desk and held it up. “I just heard back from her.”
“And?”
“She says the candlestick wasn’t in the apartment.”
“So…it broke before she was born.”
“Maybe. But it’s the way she wrote it.” He scanned the letter. “‘The candlestick was never displayed in the apartment, and the family is not aware of its whereabouts.’ That’s basically all she says about it. It’s not the world’s friendliest letter.”
“But she’s acknowledging that there was one.”
“Right? That’s how it sounds to me. It also sounds kind of like, ‘Mind your own business.’”
“Which you have no intention of doing.”
Brian gave a happy little shrug. Sophie had noticed that it was the pursuit of objects that excited him even more than the acquisition. Was this a man thing?
“Well!” she said, trying to sound encouraging. From her vantage point at home, amid the crumpled laundry and spilled Cheerios and nonringing phone, it was easy to cultivate shameful pockets of jealousy. But now, seeing Brian in his element, practically trembling with excitement, a bit of hair taking its leave from the carefully gelled ranks, she chided herself for being so selfish. Brian had worked hard for his success. He deserved it. If she worked a little harder, she could surely expect, some day, to enjoy the same level of contentment.
Brian took a deep breath through his nose. “So what’s up, anyway?”
“Oh, just, some issues with—um, some mortgage papers that came in the mail.” Sophie wound the strap of her bag around her hand.
“I hope this isn’t going to involve math.” He slid Eleanor’s letter back into its envelope and started rummaging through a pile of folders.
“No, well, sort of. It’s just that we got this thing called an option ARM—”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you have the option of paying just the minimum payment, or the whole interest payment, depending on how things are going, and to be honest—”
Marjorie appeared in the doorway. “Excuse me.” Brian swiveled to look at her. “Brian, maintenance needs to move a case, and there aren’t any art handlers…”
“I scheduled them two weeks ago.” He held out his hands; Marjorie just stood there. He let his hands fall to his lap. “Jesus. Sophie, I’m just going to run to the gallery for a minute; it shouldn’t take long. I want to hear the rest of this; can you hang out?”
“All right,” she said brightly, letting the strap unwind from her hand. It left welts in the fleshy part next to her thumb.
After Brian hurried out she set her bag on the floor and moved into his chair, surveying his desk. She could never understand how he managed to get anything done amid such chaos. Books and CDs were layered into the slippery strata of papers and file folders. One pile was anchored with a large tape measure, another with a dirty coffee mug. The sight irritated her. She started straightening one of the stacks, putting books and CDs into separate piles. Behind a drift of manila envelopes, she found a picture frame lying on its back. It held a photograph of Lucy holding Elliot in her arms, her face lit up by a combination of sisterly pride and the camera’s flash. Elliot was looking up at her with wonderment, his lips parted, eyes wide. The picture had been taken during his chubby phase, when his skin had seemed to rise and puff like bread dough around his joints and under his chin. Sophie couldn’t believe how much he had lengthened and thinned out since then. They were turning into real people before her eyes: Lucy, with her strong opinions and keen ear, had already discovered the pleasure of making people laugh—a benign addiction that would probably be with her the rest of her life. Elliot was fearless and determined, yet mild-mannered. He’d always seemed to take after Brian, but now Sophie wondered if there was a little bit of Maeve in there too. She cleared a space and stood the photograph back up.
The kids were growing up; even Brian was maturing, coming into his own. Sophie realized that she was the only one who was stuck, who hadn’t grown into her new life, hadn’t learned how to handle things properly, like an adult. She could almost hear Maeve’s exasperated voice: “You’re more responsible than this. What were you thinking?”
She felt the fog of exhaustion rolling over her once again, threatening to condense into tears. She turned away from the confusion of Brian’s desk and picked up a mirror that was sitting on one of the rolling carts. She wiped away a smudge of mascara. She stared at her red eyes, which were sunk in deep shadows. She could not remember how it felt not to be tired.
The mirror was heavy in her hand. The oval glass was set in a rectangular metal frame whose raised decorations were bluish-black with age. She ran her finger over the chubby putti flanking the glass; four women dressed in flowing garments sat in the corners of the frame. She wiped her dusty finger on her jeans, a little guiltily. She knew she wasn’t supposed to touch anything without gloves on. Still, she didn’t put the mirror down. She was drawn to the frame’s endlessly retreating detail, the mysterious array of globes and cubes and strange devices that danced around the figures in an almost random arrangement that, when she stretched out her arm, coalesced into soothing symmetry.
Her fingers tingled. She let the mirror rest in her lap. Brian wasn’t coming back; it was a mistake to try to talk to him at the museum, anyway. He was too absorbed in his work, too busy with important matters. Besides, Sophie was filled with new determination to fix things and move forward—to do what Maeve had always exhorted her to do: grow up! She needed to find her own purpose in life, rather than waiting around for others to
take care of her and give her life meaning. She decided to ask Marjorie to escort her out.
She put the mirror back on the cart, but it wouldn’t lie flat between the wide, spreading foot of a candelabra on one side and a bulbous coffeepot on the other. Several dozen souvenir spoons cluttered the bottom of the tray. Had the mirror been propped on something? She leaned it against an inkstand, but it tipped sideways toward the edge of the cart. She shifted the candelabra to one side, lining it up with a pair of saltcellars, then tried to move the coffeepot the other way. Its handle hooked a bronze figure of a milkmaid, making it teeter, but Sophie caught it before it fell. There were too many pieces on this cart. She tucked the saltcellars into one corner, shoved some spoons aside, and slid the candelabra further to the left. The mirror still wouldn’t lie flat. She felt despair begin to tread heavily on her brittle nerves. The mirror was heavy; it was about the size of a sheet of printer paper. She turned it one way, then another, but it was impossible to find a place for it among the neglected disorder of the cart.
She picked up the coffeepot, feeling her face flush; what if someone walked in and saw her juggling the objects like this? She remembered the look on the face of the art handler in the hallway, when she’d caught Sophie holding that silver candlestick. That was embarrassing enough; now, here she was with a mirror in one ungloved hand and a coffeepot in the other. Out in the hallway, she heard Brian giving Marjorie instructions; it sounded like they were headed toward his office. Sophie tried, once again, to fit the coffeepot and the mirror together on the cart, but nothing was working. She felt a sudden flash of anger, as sharp and unexpected as a leg cramp in the middle of the night. Why did she always have to be the responsible one? What if she didn’t feel like being the grown-up all the time? And why the fuck wouldn’t this mirror fit into the goddamned cart?
Brian and Marjorie were just outside the door. Swiftly, Sophie set the coffeepot on the cart. Then she put the mirror in the only place she could think of…a place where it fit quite neatly, where it wouldn’t be jostled or forgotten: the inner pocket of her bag, right between Elliot’s diapers.