How to be a Husband (8 page)

When it comes to the subject of buying replacement items—from potato peelers to sofa beds—I am like a lawyer arguing a case before a judge. If I do not prevail, then I may feel I have presented my case poorly, but ultimately it's not up to me. I don't mind. The stupider acquisitions that I argued so eloquently against—like the second dog—sit around all day serving as examples of what happens when my wisdom is not heeded. The stupid ones that I insisted upon, I hide.

12.
Nameless dread.
I retain sole charge of nameless dread: lying awake through the small hours, freaking out about things that haven't happened yet, but might. It's demanding and unrewarding, but if I didn't do it, it simply wouldn't get done.

In the tit-for-tat labor market of marital chores, nameless
dread is a difficult commodity to trade. You can't get out of a trip to the supermarket by saying, “But I was up half the night worrying about interest rates!” It will be pointed out to you, again and again, that nameless dread is irrational and serves no earthly purpose. Some spouses will even go so far as to claim that it doesn't deserve its place among the Twelve Labors of Marriage, because it's really more of an illness. Such a spouse may even lobby for nameless dread to be supplanted in the list by DIY, in a bid to trick you into putting up some coat hooks.

But DIY is not one of the Twelve Labors of Marriage. DIY is a separate sphere, a territory that increasingly goes unclaimed by anyone. For the sake of your own continued relevance, mate, I'm going to suggest you make it your own.

DIY: Man's Estate, Even Now

I
t is a function of our increasing dependence on technology that each new generation has a more tenuous connection with how stuff works. When my Wi-Fi starts performing poorly or patchily, I don't really understand the nature of the problem. I just resort to a sort of self-taught voodoo, wandering through the house with an iPad in search of a spot where the air is thicker with Internet.

You'd think that in such bewildering times we might seek refuge in the baldly mechanical, in nuts and bolts and nails and wire. In fact the age of the Internet should be a boom time for DIY—there are people out there whose only passion in life is posting online videos showing you how to change the drum belt on your tumble dryer—but it isn't.

DIY sales have been falling 4 or 5 percent a year on average, for a decade. And this lack of purchasing seems to be related to a general decline in skills. Surveys have shown that a majority
of modern twentysomethings do not know how to change a fuse or unblock a drain. Are they not embarrassed? Do they call in an electrician when they need a new plug fuse, or do they just buy a whole new toaster?

It would be marvelous if women were to achieve equal footing with men in the DIY department. It would be pretty good if we were even heading that way, but it's more likely that the sexes will only draw abreast on the downhill charge toward total incompetence. Men are losing their DIY skills, and women aren't taking up the slack. If you think ceding this ground has no consequences, think again. These days less than half of all adults—and only 17 percent of women—know how to change an automobile tire. One direct result of this national deskilling is that only about half of the new cars sold in the UK actually come with spare tires. It saves on cost and weight, and if nobody can put one on anyway, what's the point? By increments, your helplessness will be enshrined, and you will be left standing by the side of the road.

DIY may not be an inherently male thing, but it is sort of manly. Being handy remains a key component of What Women Want in a Man. Sensitivity is also good, but you can get away with being pretty emotionally stunted as long as you know how to put up a curtain rod. No one is suggesting you need to build an extension or reslate the roof, but at the very least you should be able to take the top off a toilet tank and not be surprised by what you find in there.

As a husband, you're not only in charge of all the DIY jobs your wife can't do, you're also in charge of the ones that you can't do either. You just have to learn how, because your wife
will come to think less of you for not being able to fix a leaking tap. It's not her fault. It's the way she was raised.

You might say to yourself: Who cares what she thinks? As a man living through the End of Men, busy coming to terms with my own irrelevance—why should I bother with DIY now?

There are two reasons: first, I've already tested this excuse, and it doesn't go down very well at home; second—and you must imagine I'm whispering this—DIY is empowering. Competence is addictive. Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, life is not too short to countersink a screw.
*

Getting to grips with DIY is not just a simple question of saving money, or making do instead of buying new. Actually, in many cases you'll find the economics are against you—replacement is often cheaper than repair. This is about taking control of your stuff, gaining a little mastery over your machines, and taking a hammer to the parts of your house that are pissing you off.

Like me, you may not be very good at DIY, but that just makes it all the more thrilling when things inexplicably go right. Don't worry about your lack of skill. One must proceed with the bold assumption that all there is to know about tiling is contained in the two-hundred-word instruction panel on the back of the tub of grout. Everything else comes from within.

Expertise is not your goal. You certainly don't want to get a local reputation for being good at stuff. Anyway, at its best, DIY is a voyage of self-discovery. For the professional installer,
the laying of a rubber floor is not an epic fourteen-hour struggle of man versus glue. It's just another day at work. Personally, I lose interest in a DIY technique almost as soon as I've mastered it. That's why one of the cupboard doors under our stairs opens so smoothly, and the other still comes off in your hand. Repositioning hinges? Been there, done that, never again. But you know what? I just bought a new chisel and I'm keen to try it out. Show me something that needs gouging.

When embarking on a challenging repair job, never ask yourself, Will I make it worse? You cannot make the problem worse; you can only move it forward to a stage where professional intervention becomes urgently advisable. Bear in mind that before you started trying to fix it, it wasn't broken enough to justify a huge emergency call-out charge. Now it is. That's progress.

That said, there are some jobs where the risk/reward ratio makes ringing a qualified professional a better bet from the outset. Before you get stuck in a complex and daunting DIY project, run through this checklist of questions:

• Does the manual expressly forbid amateur installation or repair?

• Show your spouse the relevant wording, and call the experts.

• Does the prospect of attempting it make you feel like crying?

It's not that you can't do it, but perhaps you're just not ready. If paying someone else to do it will make you stop crying, then it's probably money well spent.

• Has the object in need of repair presently got flames shooting out of the back of it?

Strictly speaking, that's one for the fire brigade.

• Are you missing a necessary tool that costs more than £100?

A DIY project should not be an excuse for reckless shopping. Of course, once you've got your own personal diesel-powered compaction plate, you may end up using it all the time.

• Is it one of those jobs that requires you to know where hidden pipes/wires are/aren't?

These days pipes and wires are installed at a depth beyond the reach of the average shelf screw, but you do not want to find out the hard way that yours aren't.

• How high off the ground is the site of the problem? Would you die if you fell from there?

Before we got satellite TV, one of my regular maintenance jobs involved climbing out of a second-floor window and hauling myself onto the flat roof at the back of the house in order to whack the aerial back into position with a mop handle. Looking up there now, I honestly do not know what I was thinking.

• Is the cause of the trouble so baffling to you that you suspect poltergeists?

This has happened to me twice: once when it started raining in the sitting room, and once when the burglar alarm started going off whenever the phone rang. In the latter case, I didn't even know what sort of repairman to call. I thought about ringing a priest.

I was not born to this work.

My first adventures in DIY involved standing or lying alongside my father as he tackled small repair jobs. Although a dentist by training, he did not fear basic plumbing, routine engine maintenance, hard landscaping, or simple carpentry. He
could gap a spark plug, patch a driveway, or plant a fence post—jobs I have never had occasion to attempt. He did not, in any formal sense, teach me anything about DIY, but I learned a lot about swearing. He also instilled in me the belief that in most cases it was worth having a go, and he once showed me how to mold a missing lawnmower part from the stuff they make dentures out of.

It is a tradition I have carried on with my sons. I never undertake a big DIY job without first tracking down a child to hold my tools.

“Why me?” the child always screams.

“Because I found you first,” I say. “Bad luck.”

Usually I preface the task with a short lecture—an overview of the problem, and my proposed solution, right or wrong—before moving on to step-by-step narration.

“So by turning the valves on either side to the twelve-o'clock position,” I say, “I isolate the filter from the system, enabling me to remove the bottom portion. Or so says YouTube.”

“And why I am here?” says the boy.

“You are here because insurance companies like witnesses.”

“But it's boring,” he says.

“Boring is good,” I say. “Trust me—we do not want this to become in any way interesting.”

“If you say so.”

“Hold the torch higher.”

“I am.”

“Christing fuck, where is all this water coming from?”

Not many skills are passed on in these sessions—they're mostly small lessons in coping with humiliation—but I feel the
need to show my sons that sometimes a determined incompetence is all it takes to get the job done. You need no special gifts beyond a certain patience with your own uselessness.

When I was their age I possessed as few skills as they do, although I eventually became adept at fixing the things that broke in our house most often. I could fit a new screen into a door blindfolded, because the dog burst through our screens on a weekly basis in summer and my mother took to buying replacement screening in big rolls to keep up with the damage. The job even came with its own special tool—a spline roller, it was called—which I wielded with considerable aplomb. But my knowledge remained local and specific, with large gaps in my understanding.

Later, as a renter specializing in arrears, I never had much use for DIY. Repairs were just something various landlords refused to take care of until I paid up or moved out. My DIY career didn't really get started until I moved to Britain.

*   *   *

D
uring my first summer in London I have nothing to do while the world works all day. I spend the idle hours watching cricket on telly, but it would be fair to say I don't understand the game—I can't even tell whether they're playing or just waiting to play. My girlfriend has recently moved into a one-bedroom flat in a newly refurbished terrace. Or mostly refurbished—the kitchen floor is still bare plywood. In a rash moment, during a touchy conversation about finances, I offer to install whatever sort of flooring she wants.

One day she comes home with a single square ceramic
tile—French, provincial, roughly cast, and about a centimeter thick. I cannot imagine how one would go about making it stick to the floor, but I am outwardly resolute.

“I can do this,” I say. “Easy.” I'm not actually certain I can do it, but how hard can it be? They're floor tiles, not ceiling tiles. Gravity will be on my side.

The tiles are ordered. Only when they arrive do I realize I can't cut them; they're too thick. I can barely smash them with a hammer. Someone tells me I need a wet saw. I pretend to know what that is.

A wet saw, I soon discover, is a high-speed circular saw with a water trough at the bottom to keep the diamond cutting blade from overheating. It is not the sort of thing the amateur floor tiler owns. It is the sort of thing he hires.

I do not possess the credentials required to rent anything in the UK. I don't have a credit card or a bank account or, strictly speaking, an address. I don't even know the words one would use to negotiate such a transaction in Britain. My girlfriend, I decide, must hire a wet saw for me. In terms of personal emasculation, this is a memorable low point. I go with her to the hire shop but insist on lurking at the back, pretending to be another customer.

“Hello, I would like to hire a wet saw, please,” she says to the man behind the counter. He is wearing a long brown coat, and a smirk.

“What do you want with a wet saw?” he says, using the special patronizing tone men in brown coats reserve for women.

“I'm not telling you,” she says.

“If you don't know what you want it for, how d'you know you need one?” he says.

“It's none of your business why I want it,” she says. “Perhaps I'll take two.”

This goes on for half an hour, during which period I feel the need to leave the shop and wait outside. By the time I return she has secured the wet saw, but she is refusing to let the man take her picture with a camera mounted above the till. He keeps pushing the button, and she keeps ducking.

Eventually we get the wet saw home, but it's not until the next morning that I have an opportunity to be alone with it. My standing in the eyes of my English girlfriend is at stake; I have made it sound as if expertise in these matters is something they hand out to everyone in America, and that I am a fairly typical representative of a highly competent super-race. Privately I'm just hoping the instructions will make everything clear, but there are no instructions apart from a sticker warning me not to cut my hand off.

It sure slices tiles, though—quickly, easily and, once I get the hang of it, quite accurately. It's incredibly loud and spews dust into the air, but I get all my cutting done by the afternoon, and am ready to start sticking the tiles to the floor. This is when I realize there's a reason people are paid for this sort of work. It's messy, awkward, and very hard on the knees. The walls aren't straight, and the floor isn't quite level. The next morning I discover that only about 30 percent of the tiles have stayed stuck. I chip all the old grout off the backs of the others and stick them down again. The next day 50 percent of those tiles have come
up, plus 10 percent of the original 30 percent of stuck ones. When my girlfriend is home, I act as if this is to be expected, maintaining a cloudy aura of confidence in my work so far, as if belief itself might hold some more of these tiles to the fucking floor.

It takes a week before all the tiles stay put when you walk on them. If it were my job I'd have got fired on day two, but I consider it a triumph.

Haltingly, I begin to get to grips with being the person in our relationship who's in charge of whatever needs doing in the DIY line. But it's not easy—moving countries means that what little jargon I ever understood is now a foreign language. I don't know the word English people use when they want to buy spackle. In the UK they say “paraffin” for “kerosene,” have two kinds of lightbulb fittings, and don't always understand what the word “Phillips” means when applied to the head of a screwdriver. Everything is measured in metric; every fixing and fastening is a mystery. Few of my native skills prove to be of any use. In twenty years in the UK I have never come across a screen door that needs mending.