The Objects of Her Affection (4 page)

Ron shook his head. “Those calculators don’t have all the angles. They can’t…massage. That’s what I do. I’m a massager. Whaddaya call it—a massoose. I’m a massoose.”

“Wow. Okay, well, let me show this to Brian and we’ll—”

Ron grimaced. “This rate won’t be around for long. If I were you, I’d get the application in now. Just submit it, then talk to your hubby. At least that way we lock in the rate. You change your mind, fine. We’ll work it out.”

“I’m not committing to anything?”

“Nah, you’re good. Just get these papers in, and when you’re approved you can pull the trigger.”

Elliot arched backward in Sophie’s arms, and almost succeeded in getting himself dropped. “Okay, okay,” Sophie gasped, her lower back a tangle of pain. “You’re the expert.”

“Trust me. You’ll be happy you locked this in.”

And afterward, as she sat at Johnny Rockets, Lucy coloring her menu and Elliot finally dozing in the car seat beside her, Sophie realized that she was, as a matter of fact, happy. All around her the great apparatus was in motion; gears were turning smoothly, slick with silicone and ball bearings. The mechanism was fantastically complicated but breathtakingly silent, gently conveying an entire generation to new heights of prosperity and comfort. And now here was a trio of mini cheeseburgers being delivered on a red tray, no pickles for Lucy, fries, a smiley face painted in ketchup on a paper plate. As they bit into the pillowy buns, the jukebox started playing “Last Dance,” and suddenly the waitstaff dropped everything to shimmy and lip-synch along with Donna Summer’s soaring voice. Twirling, grinning, dapper in bow ties and soda jerk hats, the waitresses and busboys looked as buoyant as root beer floats. It was early; Sophie, Lucy, and Elliot were the only ones in the restaurant. It was a show just for them, and Lucy clapped along and laughed: delighted, appreciative, but not the least bit surprised.

***

Brian pointed out, quite rightly, that they could probably hire two guys to pull up the carpet for less money than they were paying the babysitter. But Sophie wanted to be the first one to tear into the wrapping and finally see what the house was made of. She didn’t mention that she was also planning to take a crack at the drop ceiling, and maybe the wallpaper, if they had time.

It was hot, filthy work. They started in the master bedroom, on the third floor, where the summer heat pooled under the roof. They tore the carpet away from its tacks with a shuddering jerk, releasing plumes of dust into the air, then sliced it into manageable pieces with utility knives and heaved the rolls into the rented Dumpster out front, along with the padding and Ukrainian newspapers. “I feel like we’re waxing the house’s legs,” Sophie said as they caught their breath, surveying the smooth, grayish floor in Lucy’s room.

“If the house were a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old woman,” said Brian. He pulled his dust mask down around his neck.

“Just wait until it’s sanded and varnished. It’ll come back to life.” Sophie picked up a crowbar and began prying the toothy nail strips from the perimeter of the floor, energized by thoughts of darkly gleaming planks. She wondered if she could do the refinishing herself—she loved the idea of smoothing polyurethane into the wood like a salve, slowly coaxing supple beauty out of the grain. She thought about the floors of her childhood—thin, buckled carpet, reeking of mildew and cigarette ash. In the St. Louis apartment, when she was twelve, she’d ripped out the bedroom carpet herself, but underneath there was nothing more substantial than a plywood subfloor, which she’d painted black. The landlord, Mr. Crowley, didn’t return their deposit.

Creepy Crowley. She remembered how he used to let himself into the apartment when she was there alone, pretending he had to fix a leak or check the thermostat. He’d stand in her bedroom doorway, jiggling the keys in his pocket and sucking on his teeth while she played Atari. She always ignored him; after a while he would leave. Eventually she discovered that if she sneaked into the apartment through the bathroom window and didn’t turn on any lights, he wouldn’t come.

Sophie struggled to pry up a stubborn nail strip, working the crowbar around its edges. She had almost no memory of her parents in that apartment. Randall must have worked at an office in St. Louis. And Maeve, of course, rarely made it home in time for dinner. She was like Brian—oblivious to the passage of time while she worked, lost in her world of wing flaps and wind tunnels. Sophie remembered eating peanut butter sandwiches in the fading gray light that slouched through the kitchen’s louvered window, never knowing exactly when to expect her parents. Normally she would have turned on the radio for company, but she didn’t want to risk attracting Mr. Crowley. She wasn’t sure if she’d felt, then, the sense of unfairness that now dogged her—that she’d wasted so many afternoons dreading the sight of Crowley’s yellowed, short-sleeved shirt in her doorway, unable to articulate the menace it contained, but feeling it nonetheless. She’d mentioned it once to Maeve, but when Maeve asked if Crowley had ever said or done anything, Sophie had to say no, and that was the end of it.

She gathered a pile of nail strips and maneuvered them into a trash bag, trying not to tear the plastic. Then she stood staring at the floor, lost in thought. “What’s going on in there?” asked Brian, gently lifting her dust mask over her head like a bridal veil.

Sophie laced her hands across her stomach. “Just thinking about my parents. Wondering what they’d think of this place. But I guess it wasn’t really their thing, renovating.” Randall had always picked their apartments sight unseen, from the newspaper, based on some algorithm of price per square foot and distance from Maeve’s lab. It was the most efficient approach, Sophie knew—the quickest way to get them settled into whatever new place required Maeve’s services. Maximize lift, reduce drag. Maeve designed wings for commercial aircraft, and Randall freelanced, writing about consumer electronics. Sophie just followed in their slipstream.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” Brian said. “I’m sure they would’ve been proud.” He brought her a cold bottle of water from the cooler, then went to the corner deli to buy sandwiches. They ate on the front stoop, butcher paper spread on their knees, and Brian filled Sophie’s silence with stories about the museum. He’d bought the Milan vase, but his boss, Ted, had gone by himself to give the news to the director, and Brian was sure Ted had taken credit for the whole thing. Also, the clean out of the storage room had stalled.

“Conservation started getting everything ready to move to off-site storage, but they started having trouble matching the pieces with their object cards. So they need Michael to go through everything and figure out the cards, but of course Michael just left on his sabbatical.” Brian gave a little laugh and shook his head.

“So they’ll just have to wait.”

“Yeah. Except nobody told the art handlers, who kept coming every day and loading the stuff onto object carts. I didn’t say anything ’cause it’s all silver and crystal—not my domain. But stuff shouldn’t be sitting around in limbo like that. Michael’s going to have a conniption when he gets back.”

Sophie had heard the stories about Michael’s fits of rage, usually provoked by mislabeled objects or misinformed art handlers. Ted, who was supposedly Michael’s boss, was known to take sick days during Michael’s more prolonged rampages. But Brian refused to be intimidated by his colleague, knowing that the majority of Michael’s fury was born of impotence. He’d never come close to actually getting anyone fired.

“Where are they putting all the carts in the meantime?”

“They crammed them into our offices because they have to be locked up at night, and they don’t all fit in the storage room. Don’t be surprised if you hear I’ve been found dead under a pile of candelabras.”

“So what’s going to happen to it all?”

“I’m sure it’s going to stay that way until Michael gets back. Conservation’s washed their hands of it, and anyway, they’re working twenty-four seven on the Dalí show now. Lord knows I don’t have time to deal with it.”

This was classic Brian: placidly observing the chaos around him, unmoved by any urge to intervene. It wasn’t coldness, necessarily, or even arrogance. It was simply an ability to remain engrossed in his own work, letting others wring their hands over everything else.

This suited Sophie’s temperament perfectly, of course—but she worried that over time their tendencies were becoming more exaggerated, her yin swelling along with his yang. She’d seen this in older couples, like Brian’s parents. His mother had always been talkative, his father reticent. But in their later years her chattiness metastasized into a nonstop monologue, while Brian’s father lapsed into complete silence.

That was the risk, she supposed, in marrying the person who let you be your fullest self. No other man had been completely comfortable with Sophie’s insistence on picking up the check and carrying her own groceries, or her habit of disappearing on long road trips without telling anyone where she was going. With Brian she was free to continue living as an unfettered twelve-year-old with a ten-speed, no curfew, no dinner cooling on the kitchen counter, no one calling the hospitals when she didn’t make it home before dark. Even on their honeymoon in France, she’d spent the first day and a half teaching herself to drive stick because she refused to let Brian be the sole driver of the rental car. “I need to know I can get away,” she’d joked, and he’d laughed, and let her drive the whole time, translating signs for her, reading maps, pointing out Gothic architecture. It was almost impossible to get the cranky Peugeot into reverse, but eventually she succeeded. “
Now
you can get away,” Brian had said with a slow smile as she backed out of the parking lot of the Château de Sully-sur-Loire. She’d always assumed it was his way of holding on to her, this insistence on letting go.

And then her babies were born and pulled everything inside out. Instead of needing to know she could get away, Sophie needed very badly to know that she wouldn’t. But that’s what the house was for, wasn’t it? Putting down roots. Making promises she had no choice but to keep.

She folded her butcher paper into a square and smoothed it flat. Their babysitting hours were slipping away, and her breasts were beginning to ache, but they sat a little longer, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. They watched the mailman shove piles of catalogs into slapping mail slots, and listened to the idling thrum of delivery trucks on the avenue. They waved to the old woman across the street who kept stealing peeks from behind a lace curtain. It was a rare moment unhooked from nap schedules and tantrum management; it could almost, Sophie reflected, be a moment lifted from their life before children. But this time she felt the weight of appreciation, and the creeping prickle of guilt.

“Back to work,” she said, putting her hand on Brian’s shoulder and heaving herself to her feet.

***

The block was lined with jack-o’-lanterns by the time Sophie and Brian finally brought the kids to see the house for the first time. It felt strange, after months of stepping over chunks of plaster and rusty nails, to carry their children across the threshold and set them down on the gleaming wood floor. Sunlight poured through the freshly cleaned front windows, illuminating the butter-yellow walls that were were, for a splendid moment, free of crayon marks, handprints, and fire-truck-shaped dents. The trim, stripped to its youthful profile and painted white, outlined each feature like glossy meringue icing, and the chestnut banister stretched upward through the house like a strand of pulled caramel. Elliot pointed at the living room’s new pendant lights, hooting appreciatively. Meanwhile, Lucy marched straight to the locked door of the powder room. “We don’t go in there, honey,” Sophie said. “It’s not finished yet.” They didn’t have enough money to renovate the small bathroom, and the floor was in danger of collapsing, so for now it was off-limits.

They took the children to the second floor to see their bedrooms. Lucy stood uncertainly in the middle of her pale blue room, gazing up at the windows filled with sunny yellow leaves. She peeked into the shallow closet where people had once hung their clothes on hooks, and where, Sophie imagined, Lucy would someday hide her diary, or a Judy Blume book, or worse. Lucy looked up at her mother with a worried expression, and finally asked, hesitantly, if she was going to sleep on the floor. Sophie laughed and picked her up, carrying her around the room and helping her imagine her new big-girl bed against this wall, a wardrobe over here, a table and chair in this corner, some shelves. Later, posters and headphones and a mirror. Slumber parties and heartbreak, rock anthems and rage. A place where Lucy could be alone but not lonely. A place where, Sophie half hoped, a mother might be occasionally resented, but never longed for.

Elliot’s room was smaller, and Sophie worried that this inequity would somehow become nourishment for a lifetime of low expectations. But Brian had assured her that Elliot would never suffer from his sister’s grasping need for rank and privilege. As an only child Sophie generally deferred to Brian on sibling issues, but she also wondered anxiously if it was already too late, and that Elliot’s noncompetitiveness was due to a nascent understanding that he just couldn’t win.

Up another flight of stairs, under the roof, Sophie and Brian’s room had a view of the northern sky through the upper branches of the ginkgo tree. Sophie had chosen a soft taupe for the walls, a color that seemed compatible with deep, uninterrupted sleep. She knew it would be months—possibly years—before that dream would be realized. But this tranquil aerie felt full of promise.

Sophie took charge of the move, marshalling tape, Sharpies, and the best kind of cardboard boxes—double walled; taped or stapled but never glued. The sound of packing tape being pulled, shrieking, from the dispenser was as familiar as her children’s voices. It brought back memories of another set of boxes, labels written, crossed out, written again. A set that had followed her from Seattle to Saint Louis, from Chicago to Bethesda, then to Los Angeles and, briefly, Montreal.