by Corine Gantz
Her parents had been wrong. Everyone had been. Their ten-year marriage proved it. Yes, Johnny had been immature, independent, but in a way that made every day an adventure. And he wasn’t unreliable at all. She trusted him.
It had taken her ten years to feel halfway settled in her new life. And then Johnny died. His death was terribly sudden. Gruesome. Shocking to all. None of it felt real or possible. Her pain had been abject, the despair of the children intolerable, but also—and this within days of his sudden disappearance from her life—it became clear that she’d never had a normal maturation from young woman to adult. Since arriving in France, she had relied almost entirely on Johnny for everything that took place outside the house. It was in Johnny’s nature to take charge, and she had found it easier to let him. She had let him sweep her off her feet, transplant her to Paris, keep her barefoot and pregnant. She was good at being a mother, possibly a mother to the exclusion of everything else. Johnny did the rest. He and his brother Steve had thrown themselves into their business and worked relentlessly at growing it. He traveled a lot in and outside France, and handled every aspect of their personal finances—something she would come to bitterly regret after his death. He bought and drove fast cars, dressed more French than the French, became an expert in wine, and because he needed to entertain large groups of people for business, he spent entire evenings in the best restaurants around Paris.
She never much liked the concept of entertaining to improve business, but one day she got the idea that she should entertain those people at home. At least by inviting people over, she and the children got to see Johnny. Via forced practice and also because she found it fun, she soon became an accomplished cook.
By the time Johnny died she had done little in France besides making babies, nursing, pushing strollers, and cooking. When he suddenly disappeared, she was lost again. Once again she had to figure out everything else. Some things never got figured out. The question of how to keep the business going, for example, never got solved. The business was shut down and with it all hope for an income. Another aspect of her life she had not been able to figure out yet was how to recover from more subtle losses: her carefree nature, innocence, playfulness, and the luxury of trust.
She was tough now, tough as in strong, and tough as in hard. She was a tough-as-nail mother, and tough-as-nail femme au foyer, or what Americans call a homemaker. She couldn’t argue the making part. She was making that home all right, if it killed her. Two and a half years later she was no longer the soft mother, the round-hipped and milky-breasted creature protected and taken care of by a man. She had become a she-bull that everyone (beside her children—hopefully not her children—and the indefatigable Lucas) feared and avoided. She had become the Sarah Connor of remodeling projects, as rough as the skin on her hands, as heavy as the bags of plaster she hauled up the stairs, and as hard as the planks she fed into the circular saw. She was busy building herself and the children a house out of something stronger than brick; something strong enough to never again let pain in. That home—that house—was her Great Wall of China, her Maginot line. It was her refuge and her jailor, her passion and her foe, her salvation and her demise.
She rubbed cream on her hands where the skin was the worst. She did everything herself in the house. No job too small, or too big. The very table she sat at was an example. She had painted it a warm tone of red, painstakingly varnished it, and had nearly passed out from the fumes. The stairwell was another example of her work, reconstructed plank by plank, so were every chair, couch and sofa in the house: scavenged, reupholstered and the woodwork refinished by yours truly.
The soft January light flattered and caressed every surface of the beloved kitchen. The carrera marble countertop, she kept in perfect shape. The ancient tile floor, she had regrouted herself with a hundred-year-old recipe that mixed sand, glue, and pigment. The glorious three-oven eight-burner AGA range, she had recomposed piece by piece.
The light and the silence of midmorning gave the kitchen the wistful feeling of an old painting. Those were lonely hours before the boys came back from school. Maxence was nine now, Laurent seven, and Paul five. They walked to school at the Lycée International, a few blocks away from the house. Thanks to the French education system, they came home for lunch daily so that she could do what she did best—feed them and smother them to death. In exchange, the boys gave her life meaning and purpose.
The enemy was Thinking. No, the enemy was Time, or having too much of it when the kids were at school, especially now that Paul was in kindergarten. Too much time bred too much thinking and that she could not have. Her next therapy, she had already decided, would have the combined benefits of being cheap and brutal. She wanted to refinish the maple wood floor in the entryway, a task that included, but was not limited to, sanding, gluing, restoring, tinting, varnishing, coughing, and crying. But projects didn’t solve everything; as her arms and fingers moved, so did her mind, and in pretty tight circles, too. And projects ended. Once the floor was refinished, then what? And now that she was utterly and desperately penniless, now really what?
Money had come to them via Johnny’s side of the family, in the form of a substantial inheritance at a time when the dollar was worth a whole lot more. She and Johnny had visited dozens of places, penthouses with pools, and apartments with views of the Trocadéro or the Eiffel Tower. The real estate woman wore skintight suits and stiletto heels and walked with each foot precisely in front of the other, as though there were cliffs on either side of her. Annie became excellent at imitating her behind her back to make Johnny laugh.
They saw the house on a spring day. The stiletto woman had shown it to them as an afterthought. “It came on the market this morning. I haven’t seen it, but look at the listing, an eight-bedroom townhouse with a private garden in the heart of the sixteenth arrondissement? There is work, it says. But the street alone is a gem,” she had assured them with a whisper that indicated that awe and respect were de rigueur. “It isn’t authorized to through traffic. There is a gate to the street.”
“A Parisian’s take on the gated community,” Johnny pointed out.
“I’m against it on principle,” Annie said.
But as soon as the three entered the street, bird songs and the smell of jasmine replaced the noise and smell of traffic. The street was lined with centuries-old gnarled sycamores, and the trees’ tender spring leaves filtered light like in a meadow. The real estate woman’s ankles bent in frightening angles on the cobblestone pavement, and Annie admired one more time the way French women surrendered to the enslavement of elegance.
The houses on the private alley were all hôtel particuliers, town houses, which really looked like miniature castles to her eyes, with their beautiful facades and moldings, handsome roofs and tall windows framed by well-kept wooden shutters symmetrically placed on either side of impressive front doors. One hôtel particulier was lovelier than the next. They had been built in the Haussman era and been kept up with respect to the protected historic monuments they were.
All except for the house in front of which the real estate woman was standing. She pointed an accusatory finger towards it. “What a pity. Quelle honte, non?” she said and turned toward them. Johnny made a sour face and looked at Annie.
Annie paid no attention. She was in the process of falling in love. Her face showed it before she knew it herself. This hôtel particulier was the very definition of ramshackle. Windows were broken, shutters missing, and the roof seemed to have collapsed in places, but Boston ivy and wisteria laced the stone walls and added softness to the architecture, giving the house a wildly romantic air. The owner “une folle avec ses chats” as defined by the real estate woman, had lacked funds but steadfastly refused to move. She had recently died inside the house and had been discovered there, dead among her cats a few days after the fact. The gruesomeness of the visual and the condition of the house made it borderline unsellable.
“We’ll take it,” Annie had said.
Johnny
had looked at her with amusement. “Do we know that there is an actual inside to this place?”
The stiletto woman, seeing Annie’s face, started to work on Johnny. With time and money, she insisted, it could become the quintessence of class and luxury in terms of Parisian living. The woman and Johnny spent an inauspicious amount of time trying to open the door, but when they did, Annie thought she had entered Ali Baba’s cavern.
The house had soaring ceilings, original crown moldings, and crumbling chandeliers that had seldom been violated by a dust broom. Years of wallpaper layers fell in patches, and the smell of cat urine grabbed the throat like a claw. There were only two bathrooms, both with impractical claw-foot tubs, broken bidets, cracked faucets, and exquisite mosaic tile Annie knew instantly she would never tear down.
The house was purchased. “With time and money” became the motto. With time and money, the fissured stucco could be restored. With time and money, the wood floors could be brought back to their original luster. With time and money, the stories could be connected with proper working stairs. There had been no plan for time or money to run short.
She now saw things as they were: Johnny had been the world to her, and now the house and her boys were her entire universe. Within the confines of the house, no matter how limiting or punishing it might be, she felt safe. Only in her house did she see herself as master of her life. At home cooking, building, scraping and sanding, she felt capable and purposeful. Focusing on what was still a constant—the house and the boys—she did not need to let questions in, questions about Johnny, questions about what would have come of her had Johnny not died, questions also, about her own worth, the risks involved in loving and trusting someone, the validity of a life devoid of trust or love. Since that night two and a half years ago, she had become like someone with a fear of heights condemned to live on a rooftop.
Her decision, for someone who had so carefully avoided the exterior world, might seem out of character, but in fact it allowed her, with what she considered to be a modest adjustment, to keep the status quo. She would get to stay home. All she really wanted was to stay home like the old woman who had died amongst her cats.
Chapter 3
Lola opened her window wide to improve the master bedroom’s Feng shui, but then she remembered that article in the yoga journal on Southern California’s air being the worst in the nation, so she closed it. Surely it couldn’t be true about Bel Air, with all those trees? They must be talking about the Port area, or the San Fernando Valley. She unrolled her mat and sat on it for a few minutes of meditation. She bit her lower lip, felt it still hard and sore two days after the injection. Coming from the kitchen downstairs were the sounds of a coffee grinder and pans being moved around. Serena, the maid, was preparing breakfast. Lola straightened her spine and closed her eyes. I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out.
The way Mark moved inside the walk-in closet, Lola knew he was getting himself worked up. “Why can’t I find a goddamn thing in this house?” he said.
She relaxed her arms and laid her hands, palms up, on her knees. I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out. Whatever was needed was always elsewhere, far away and rarely in the expected place because the nanny and the maid were always in competition when it came to running the house, organizing closets and cabinets according to their conflicting senses of logic. Lola didn’t have what it took to demand that things be put in any specific place or done any specific way. Instead, she forever adapted, forever navigated her “staff.” She wasn’t a very good hostess, or housewife, or “CEO of the household,” or even “wife on duty,” titles Mark called her for fun.
“Lola!” Mark called. She got up and escaped to her bathroom. In front of the mirror, she tapped her lips with the tip of a finger. They felt like wood. Did she look better or ridiculous? On the walls, her face graced the covers of Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Marie Claire. Twenty years of her life relegated to the walls of her bathroom.
This last year, all the headaches with Simon had probably cost her triple in the looks department, but she was lucky to have good bone structure. Her ink-black hair was cut short in a trendy style. She was tall and thin with imposing boobs—paid cash, as Mark liked to say. She was almost forty and still turned heads.
Leaving Mark to his struggle, she tiptoed out of her bathroom and descended the stairs dressed for yoga. The sound of pans in the kitchen resonated inside the stairwell. Maybe it was the height of the ceiling, but no amount of rugs could muffle the odd echoes. Mark liked the mansion pristine, all 7,640 square feet of it. He had said she’d never lack anything. He was speaking of material things, of course.
In the kitchen, Tamara, the twenty-five-year-old nanny from South Africa, was feeding Simon in his high chair. Lia was only half dressed for school, and her hair wasn’t combed. Lola had helped her nine-year-old select two outfits for the day, to circumvent early morning meltdown, but Lia was wearing yet another combination, and at the moment was stabbing her spoon into her cereal bowl and not making eye contact. Is anger genetic or learned? Lola kissed Simon, took a mini lick of a speck of pudding on his cheek. “You taste delicious today,” she said.
“Mom, that’s disgusting,” Lia said.
Lola kissed the top of her daughter’s head. Mark’s call came from upstairs and tore through the silence of the house like skid marks on white linoleum floor. “Where is my fucking Donna Karan shirt?” Everyone in the kitchen—Lola, the kids, Serena, and Tamara—froze for a heartbeat.
“It’s right in the closet,” Lola called out.
“Not that one, dammit! The white one! Where the hell is it?” Mark yelled from the stairwell. She smiled at Serena, who could barely look at her. Simon flailed his arm at his mother. “Up me.”
“I’m not carrying you, love. You need to finish breakfast.”
In an instant, Simon had wriggled his way out of the chair, threatening to make it topple over. “Up me! Up me!” Tamara picked him out of his chair and set him down.
The pediatrician didn’t know if what Simon suffered from were nightmares or night terrors. What difference did it make? Last time Lola had taken Simon to the doctor, not knowing where to start with the list of things that worried her about him, she had felt like a complete idiot. The doctor had looked at her intently and prescribed a lot of love and a very soothing environment. It made Lola feel as though she was an abusive mother and he knew it. She had done what was prescribed and kept Simon in the house with the nanny most of the day. She limited their outings to visits to the nearby park and had stopped mommy and me classes. Obviously, preschool was out of the question.
Simon’s hands were covered in chocolate pudding and she lifted him in mid-run before he hit the white upholstering of the kitchen chairs. She didn’t need a fight between Serena and Tamara over who would be responsible for cleaning that stain. Simon’s furious little body jerked as Lola held him under his arms and carried him towards the kitchen sink. Mark’s voice thundered from the upstairs bedroom. Lola sat Simon up on her knee by the sink. As she was running warm water over Simon’s hand, it suddenly dawned on her that the shirt Mark wanted was still at the cleaners. She felt dread, wiped Simon’s hands with the cloth Tamara handed to her, thinking rapidly.
“What about the Armani shirt, honey?” she called out with the hint of a shrill in her voice. “Or what about that other one that you wear all the time? They’re clean, pressed, and ready to go.”
She heard Mark running heavily down the stairs. He appeared in the kitchen, his face red and half a dozen white shirts on hangers in his hands. Tamara and Serena stepped out of his way. He came to an abrupt stop on the other side of the kitchen island to face Lola. “Are you saying my white shirt hasn’t been cleaned?”
Lola put Simon down and gave him a gentle push, which resulted in Simon wrapping himself around her leg. “What about the two brand new ones, you know, the...”
“I’m about to have an extremely important meeting,” Mark, roared. “The one thing I ask is to have the prop
er clothes available!”
Lola looked at Tamara in a plea for her to take Simon out of the room. Tamara, on instinct, was already motioning for Simon to come, but Simon tightened his grip on Lola’s leg. Tamara tried to pry him off with no success as Mark stepped toward Lola and inched close enough that she could smell his toothpaste breath and see the pores on his face. His handsome, freshly shaven face, tanned skin, bleached teeth, the face of a winner. “Are you incapacitated in some way I should know about?” he sneered.
Lola glanced at the clock, at Simon wailing in Tamara’s arms, then at Lia who was entering the room timidly to get her shoes tied, and then back at the clock. Mark looked at Lia. “And what do you want?” Lia looked down at her dangling shoelaces. “Nine years old and you can’t tie your own shoes? Is this whole family handicapped, or what?” Lia bent down and tied her shoes. “I need that shirt!” he screamed. “Get me that shirt!”
“It’s at the cleaners,” Lola said. “I’ll be back in no time at all. I won’t even make you late.”
Lola could see Mark’s rage feeding on itself. “You’ve already made me late! I get no support in this house. I carry your ineptitude on my shoulders!”
Had he been physically abusive, maybe things would be clearer. The way it went, it was all so confusing. Later today, they might call what just happened “blowing a fuse.” They might even laugh at it. She would laugh at it. But for the moment, she was scared, but of what? Perhaps of what Simon and Lia were hearing, of what Mark might do or say? Scared, perhaps that he might be right about her.