The Stager: A Novel Page 3

  “The lady forgot her bag,” Nabila says. This is true. We both look toward the spot in the corner where she’s left a big orange bulging bag. It’s open, and her things are spilling out of it onto the floor. A hairbrush, a notebook, a French fry.

  “I guess she’ll be back.”

  “I don’t know,” says Nabila. “I’m going to ask your mom. Something about this smells a little fishy to me.”

  LARS

  On our way to meet the Craigslist contractor, anxiety attacks me. That’s really how it feels, like I have been jumped from behind in a dark alley and anxiety is tightening his meaty, angry fist around my throat. Although, in this case, to be more precise, he grabs me as we emerge from the taxi on East Heath Road. I begin to sweat, even though there is enough of a chill in the morning air so that Bella and I are wearing coats. Apart from the malaria-like delirium in which I’ve spent the last few nights, I’m not generally a spontaneously sweaty kind of guy, but as soon as I glimpse our new house again, I experience an episode of real physical panic, animal in its pureness and intensity. By the time we get to the front door, I must be a mess, because Bella unwraps the scarf that is draped artfully around her neck and hands it to me to blot my excretions.

  She looks at me less as a husband than as a lab rat in a cage, with a sort of morbid curiosity.

  “You okay, Lars?” she inquires casually, as if I have merely stubbed my toe getting out of the cab.

  “Fine,” I say. “It was just a little suffocating in there.”

  The ethos of our marriage demands that I always say I am fine even when I’m clearly not. I’d say I was fine even as my fingers fell off from frostbite, fine as I was being burned to a crisp in a fire, fine as I bled internally, which in fact I fear I am doing right now—which is to say, I am unsure of my answer, and wonder if I am possibly on the verge of a catastrophic event.

  Bella thinks the problem, or at least the part of it that involves the light, began when I first saw the house three days earlier. And though it’s true, that visit marked the first time my anxiety manifested as a physical thing—it felt as if my heart were being squeezed, or crushed, or pulped for juice—the matter of the light is nothing new; it has been growing inside of me for the last three years, ever since I swallowed, inadvertently, the first seed of truth. Or maybe since I swallowed the first blue pill, the one meant to cast some shade on the brightness. (I don’t mean to be obtuse, but it’s hard to separate these events entirely, because they were roughly simultaneous.) (Truth and light are roughly simultaneous, too.) (Or maybe what I mean is that they are close relations.) There is even a passage in the Bible about this—“Whoever lives by the truth comes into the light.” I would tell this to Bella, but she is not easily impressed by religious symbolism. Still, you don’t need religion or symbolism or truth or pills to appreciate that the darkness in the house we have just purchased is a tangible, toxic thing, like mold.

  Poor Bella. That look of desperation three days earlier, when I first explained the problem of the light! She always thinks it’s about her, but it’s not. Not always. I’m not trying to punish her, although my forgiveness is something she regards with suspicion. Because I can see the light now, I can also see that there is so much to be gained in forgiving her that it actually constitutes an act of selfishness on my part to let go of her mistake, which I have, at least to the extent that I can when the past is present in my everyday life.

  Anyway, there is no need to be dramatic about the fact that the house is deficient in light. Some houses simply are, the way some people are short, or bald, or too fat or too thin. It is almost certainly on the top-ten list of complaints a potential home buyer might have when inspecting a property for purchase, and it is offensive to insinuate that the person observing the gloom is demonstrating signs of mental illness or experiencing an adverse reaction to the pharmaceuticals his wife insists he take. Besides, all I really said on that first visit was that the place might benefit from a good washing of the windows. It was on the second visit that I had the idea that we should hire a contractor to put in a skylight.

  It only took an hour to identify a carpenter on Craigslist. He was willing to begin right away, and to do it for cheap, so there was really no need for Bella to make this a bigger issue than it was. But she began to obsess on the subject. She said she knew it had been a mistake to buy the house without me there, to believe me when I insisted that anything she chose was fine, to think I was better. Every little thing in the present, it seems, goes straight back to the past, becomes a low-hanging fruit, ripe with significance, when really, seriously, all I want is a little more light!

  I told Bella that I was willing to take full responsibility for the problem, and that I would be in charge of the fix. I was the one who had refused to go on the house-hunting trip three months earlier, after all, and I’d insisted that what she’d shown me of this house via e-mails, photographs, phone, and Skype was sufficient. It wasn’t as if the decision had been rash: she’d described the floor plan to me in detail, right down to measuring the insides of the kitchen cupboards to be sure there was enough depth to accommodate our oversized dinner plates, the ones with cabbage roses that had belonged to her great-aunt Mae. And she’d been honest in her own assessment that although the house was lovely, with recent updates including a large two-story addition on the back, it was, after all, just a house. She wasn’t doing cartwheels over it, she’d said. (I had pointed out to Bella that she wasn’t a woman who would ever do cartwheels over a house, especially not in the wrap dresses she favored, and we’d both laughed. I did not insert the thought that she might do cartwheels over Raymond Branch, yes, but over a house, no, because I did not want to mar what seemed a sweet, and rare tender moment, even if it was occurring by way of a transatlantic phone call that was racking up massive roaming charges.) I was reminded, during that call, that we knew each other well, or, to be honest, that we once had (which is to say, I understood that she wasn’t the type to stick Post-it notes in the Crate & Barrel catalogue, to create a wish list of sofas and coffee tables with the hope of plugging, with furniture, some hole—well, really, for Bella, a specific hole—in her emotional life. She wasn’t a woman easily seduced by advertisements for sectional sofas or wing chairs, even if the raffish-looking man who was sitting in one, holding a brandy snifter, appeared to be reading from a book of poetry while watching an NFL game on TV. His wife, perched on the ottoman, stared at him adoringly. I think Bella envied this woman, but not for the reasons the advertisers supposed. It could be exhausting to be Bella, and I think it would have given her some solace to be made happy by the things that money can buy. (The ability to find happiness in the acquisition of consumer goods, or in fashion, or in spa weekends, or in mindless television, is seriously underrated and unfairly mocked and I think ought really to be more widely celebrated as evidence of a person’s ability to experience happiness at all. (Whereas I had once thought it an indication that I possessed a certain shallowness because of the degree of pleasure I took in my putting green and the new set of golf clubs I purchased to celebrate its installation, I have since come to believe that it is a sign of strength. Better to be satisfied by what you can get, rather than striving always for the unattainable and intangible. To be able to move from thing to thing and continue to find new pleasure, over and over and over, in the unwrapping of cellophane, or the snipping off of price tags, is a gift. The high from the new elliptical machine lasted three long months, the flat-screen TV—the largest on offer at Best Buy—nearly half a year. The thrill from the authentic Wassily chair I found on eBay might still be with me had Bella not hated the thing so much. Even the fact that it had once belonged to three-time Wimbledon champ Boris Yablonsky failed to impress her. At least she was more supportive of my search for the perfect cup of morning coffee, which gave me purpose for a long while. Even Bella had to admit that she’d enjoyed the rich brew that percolated from the handcrafted coffeemaker from the Netherlands I’d purchased after months of research.
At sixteen hundred dollars, it was admittedly a bit of a splurge, and complicated to use (Bella said it looked like a mousetrap), and after a while it became a chore to have to special-order the filters from Holland, so I was not as upset as I might—or should—have been when the electrical wiring went kaput, possibly the result of having to run it through a converter to transform it to 110 volts. (I was somewhat relieved because by then I had discovered a new Starbucks in our neighborhood and was drinking my way through every variety of coffee on offer, inventing, in some cases, combinations of shots and flavors, like mixing Blonde Roast with Tazo passion-fruit tea, that the baristas said had never even occurred to them.))))

  With a tiny video camera lent to her by the estate agent, Bella had shown me the faucets on the porcelain farmhouse sink of our new home, had ignited the burners on the stove, had even given me a virtual tour of the shelf space in the laundry and utility rooms. She’d gone outside and filmed the grounds, such as they were—this was a far more urban environment than we were used to, having lived in suburbia for the last eight years with a pool and putting green in our own backyard. She’d filmed the stone rabbit that stood sentry in front of the house, and, hoping to get a smile out of Elsa, she’d draped her scarf around its neck and done a silly voice-over in a high-pitched, pretend-rabbit voice. Elsa’s reaction had been a little frosty, and it’s true that the two of us might have cut Bella a little more slack. Lord knows the woman was trying hard!

  Bella considers the existence of this silly stone rabbit a sign, although, as an empiricist, she is probably aware that she was in search of a sign, or of anything that would allow her to get the house hunt over with. After all, at some basic level, one charming, ivy-covered recently renovated English Tudor in a fancy upscale North London neighborhood is as good as the next, is it not? And who can blame her? She is under tremendous stress—not that Bella ever really feels stress, since she is one of those wonder women you read about in magazines, the kind who pumped breast milk while writing prize-winning articles on deadline, who managed, once, to get from a conference in Tokyo to Elsa’s field-hockey game in some remote Maryland suburb just in time, who shepherded her mother through the end stages of dementia while working full-time.

  Settling in London is a step in the direction toward a more consolidated life: at least she won’t be commuting five hundred miles most weeks. Still, the job is highly visible, and she is often on television, so the stress must be lodging somewhere, or so it seems to me, although that’s to presume that stress is a physical property, like light. Luxum is doing a huge media blitz to highlight the rebranding campaign, and these next few weeks are critical to a successful transition. Or at least that’s what she says; even if I understand only about half of what her new job is about (which is more than I’d understood about the equity-derivatives job), she is managing so many moving parts and so much data that her phone keeps freezing up.

  On top of this, there’s Elsa. She is unsettled by the prospect of the move, and reports from home are confusing at best. Nabila insists everything is fine, but even the most oblivious parent can’t help but detect holes in the otherwise chipper reports. Which is all to say that Bella is entitled to take her signs as they come, or as she thinks they come, and a stone rabbit standing sentry at a house that’s for sale is as good as any reason to go to contract, even if none of us actually likes rabbits—not even our own. We haven’t actually had a conversation about whether our own rabbit, assuming he has not disappeared forever, will come with us to London. It’s possible we each privately see this as an opportunity to unload Dominique and to blame his abandonment on the United Kingdom’s draconian quarantine laws.

  Mostly I can get things right in my head. I can sort my issues into tidy piles: my physical injury; my wife’s betrayals; the problem of the light. I can even make everything stay put, sometimes for days at a time, but it only takes the smallest trigger to unravel it all, and this attack of sweatiness feels possibly like the beginning of something bad. I once heard a philosopher, or maybe one of the therapists my wife sent me to (or maybe it was a character on a television show?), say that confusion was good, that it would eventually give way to wisdom, but it’s been three years, and I wonder how long this transition is meant to last. The mess I am, the full-blown wreck of me, can be really quite embarrassing. I do my best to keep the worst parts hidden, so when Bella asks again whether I’m okay, when she puts her hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye, this time with genuine concern, I insist, somewhat testily, that I am fine. Maybe I’m not fine, but I am determined to be, and that is half the battle—or so I also read somewhere. It might have been in an article in an in-flight magazine about jet lag and how it’s best just to power through it.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES, AS WE have already established, an easy, albeit temporary, fix comes along in the form of an entertaining new kitchen gadget, or a new kind of pill, or, in this case, a Polish contractor named Jorek, who arrives at the house right on time. The minute we shake hands, my symptoms disappear. Don’t misunderstand: there is no ambiguity in my sexual orientation (I am, or was, a real ladies’ man. One newspaper described me as looking like Liam Neeson, another like Peter Frampton; go figure, since the two men do not have much in common, apart from being, to women, devastatingly attractive), and yet I feel something like love, and an intense magnetic attraction, as soon as Jorek steps through the door. I know he will save me, and I wonder if I have conjured him somehow, especially since he turns out to be the kind of person who is exactly as you might imagine him to be from the sound of his voice on the phone—a pleasant, skinny fellow who speaks very little English, but who understands intuitively the problem with the light.

  “Put two there, done deal, have a nice day!” he says as we stand in the living room. He points to the ceiling above the stairway landing and makes a sawing motion with his hands. He is Slavicly emphatic, his Polish accent thick, but I understand him perfectly, and I explain to Bella that he means to carve two skylights into the roof.

  “Yes, I get that,” she says.

  Then Jorek turns to the window, which looks out onto the back garden, and he says, “Too small. We take these out. One very big one from here to here.”

  I begin to explain this to Bella, and she interrupts me and asks if Jorek has a license.

  I try to translate, but Swedish and Polish are not even remotely the same language, and we are not communicating as effectively as we might. English seems better. He pulls from his back pocket some papers.

  Bella studies them, scowls, and then says that for all she knows, these could have been made at home on a Word document template. My wife, she is really a computer whiz, so she thinks that just because she might be capable of making a fake license on the computer, everyone else might be.

  Jorek begins to say something in Polish, and again I try to translate, and then Bella interrupts.

  “It’s cloudy today, Lars,” she says. “You know that famous London fog they name the raincoats for? It’s because there isn’t a lot of sunlight to be had here. Could you at least consider the possibility that the light in this house is poor because there is no light outside, and not because the house is lacking in windows?”

  “But it is lacking in windows,” I explain. “Wouldn’t you agree, Jorek? It has fewer windows than it should.”

  “Yes, this is true,” says Jorek. “It should not take so much to brighten it up. Skylights is where we begin. That may be enough.”

  “Please, Bella? A little more light is all I need to be happy here.”

  “What if we install a chandelier? A big beautiful one with lots of crystal. The glass will even refract the light. Think of that, Lars. It will bounce light all over the place. Triple the bang. And we can fill the place with lamps. That will be a fun outing. You love to shop. You can take the credit card this afternoon and pick out anything you like! Maybe Jorek can go with you.”

  “It needs to be natural light, Bella. I think you know that. Artificial light
offers no nourishment.”

  Bella looks like she might begin to cry, and I feel awful about this. Please believe me when I say I don’t want to make her life more difficult, nor do I mean to insult the house she has purchased for our family. Now that there is an easy fix, now that I have stumbled onto Jorek, I am actually relieved, and I wish I could do a better job of making her understand that we are now on an upswing. I worry sometimes that we are so connected, me and Bella, that I have unintentionally transferred to her my initial grief, that it has transmuted like particles of light (did you know that ν is the Greek letter nu, which stands for the frequency of the light wave?). Maybe with physical contact I can now transfer to her a few nus, and some of my newfound optimism.

  I take her in my arms and hold her tight. She sinks into me for a moment, but then her cell phone rings and she frees an arm from our embrace and wrestles the phone from her pocket. She looks at the screen and hits a button, and then she looks back at me. She runs her palm across my stubbly face the way you might if you were staring into your lover’s eyes, preparing to lean in for a kiss, except that in this case she quickly retreats.

  “Okay, we can do a skylight, but what if we wait until we move in? I’ll ask around at work, get some contractor recommendations. Or”—she looks at Jorek apologetically—“we can find someone to help … him.” Her phone makes a different sound this time, and she pulls it out and looks at the screen. “Elsa,” she says. “Another ‘socks’ message. Also, I really need to return that other call.”

  “I’ll help supervise Jorek,” I say. “We’re here for four more days, and I have nothing to do. It will get me up and out of bed. We both know I need a project.” I feel a fierce attachment to Jorek, and I’m not going to let him go.

  She looks at Jorek, and then she looks at me, like we are, the two of us, a logic problem on a standardized test: one possibly unlicensed Polish contractor + one emotionally damaged husband with absolutely no manual skills = x. If she stares at us long enough, the solution will possibly come: