The Stager: A Novel (18 page)

Bella once described how, in the middle of one of their trysts—this one in Vienna—he’d taken a call from his daughter, who had just come home from her first day of kindergarten (they called it “reception class” in England, I learned) and was having trouble manipulating scissors. Raymond had gotten out of bed and put on the hotel terry-cloth robe, then sat in a chair, crossed his gimpy leg over the other, and patiently addressed the situation. He’d had trouble using scissors, too! This was surely nothing to be concerned about! As soon as he got home, they’d do some cutting, together! Bella was impressed that he was such a good dad. And that he was so patient and attentive. He was such a good husband, too, she said. He bought his wife gifts, and always interrupted whatever he and Bella were doing to take her calls. He was such a good man!

What was going on in Bella’s head was difficult to imagine, although I did know she was trying to get pregnant at the time, that she and Lars were about to embark on a round of expensive fertility treatments (and, yes, our shared fertility problems were another source of our intense bond), so perhaps she was simply impressed by Raymond’s apparent ability to reproduce. Privately, wickedly, I entertained the image of Raymond teaching his daughter to cut, wondering whether he was left- or right-handed and, accordingly, how one could use scissors without a thumb.

*   *   *

I CONFESS THAT
I’ve struggled, from time to time, with how best to organize my notes, how to structure the scenes from her affair most logically.

By category, perhaps? There are, for example, all the grand hotels of Europe from which Bella brought me details: interior-design motifs, brands of lotions and shampoos, specialties of the room-service menus, descriptions of the pools and gyms.

There are the private details, the things I should not know about Raymond and Seema’s marriage, the headline of which was actually that things were very good. He never spoke badly of his wife, but there was pillow talk all the same, some of which made its way to me. Though I hung on every word, I felt tainted possessing certain intimate knowledge of Seema, like that she’d once had a lump removed from her left breast, and that she waxed, instead of shaved, her legs. The disclosure of these small, meaningless details seemed possibly more violating than the fact of extramarital sex.

And then, in my notebook, are the scenes from the unraveling. This is the part with the most gaps, perhaps because I was beginning to unravel myself. My bullet points include snippets from their electronic paper trail, which was sometimes forwarded to me by Bella (astonishing that she was conducting this private, explosive correspondence on her newspaper account).

Some of my notes are merely anecdotal. Bella told me, for example, that sometimes when Raymond went AWOL for a few days, especially toward the end of the affair, she’d call him at his house. If Seema answered, Bella would deliberately wait a few beats, and then hang up. When that failed to produce any movement toward the dissolution of their marriage, Bella began to slip little trinkets—her nail file or her lipstick, for example—deliberately into his Italian leather travel kit, still without any apparent result.

I told Bella she was doing the emotional equivalent of slamming her head against the wall. Raymond was never going to leave Seema. But my advice did nothing to dissuade my friend from showing up on my doorstep frequently, and at all hours.

She leaned into me so hard, toward the end, that I think our friendship was the only thing fusing her together.

Vince may have had a point: perhaps I allowed Bella to occupy me more than I should have. But I am offended by the suggestion that I was—or am—obsessed with her.

*   *   *

IT IS USUALLY
the case that what you see is what you get, both with people and with homes. I may appear, these days, to be a nervous, tiny, sparrow-boned woman, so jangled much of the time that you might want to slap me, or send me out back with a cigarette and a martini, or even force-feed me steak. But this is not really me.

Once, not long ago, I was confident and self-possessed. When I first landed at the newspaper, unlike most of my colleagues, I did not set my sights on becoming the next Bob Woodward, or on climbing the ladder to a managerial slot and an office with a door. Some might have regarded my embrace of one of the “soft” sections of the newsroom as demonstrative of some intellectual, possibly even moral, failing, as if I had exposed myself as the sort of woman who might choose Disneyland over Paris, or Harry Potter over Proust. But Bella didn’t look down her nose at me, even after she quickly earned a slot as an official business reporter and was put on a highly visible beat following a trail of post-9/11 money through a couple of high-profile banks in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Once, she even said that she admired and respected me; admittedly, that compliment had been solicited, extracted with a whiff of desperation, as if I was asking whether I still looked good in my too-tight jeans.

I had my insecurities, it’s true, yet in my heart I knew I was fortunate to be doing exactly the work I wanted to do. Ought I to be ashamed to admit to a more genuine curiosity as to how the afternoon sunlight would look when filtered through a linen Roman shade than as to, say, who the next Senate majority leader would be? Yes. But I was at least being honest in acknowledging where my talent lay. And I
did
have talent, as evidenced by my rapid ascension to becoming the editor of the Home section within a year and then, a short time later, to being poached by
MidAtlantic Home
.

But all of this was blessedly beside the point with me and Bella. Newsroom politics and gossip blended into the fabric of our conversations, of course, but we typically spoke of other, real-life concerns, as well as about books, movies, television, shopping, and occasionally our troubled marriages. But mostly, for three long years, we talked about Raymond Branch. Even during the height of the sniper attacks in Washington, which occurred two months after we’d met, we went out to a deserted shopping mall in Bethesda so that Bella could buy lingerie, because Raymond was in town and she wanted to surprise him. We laughed as we zigzagged across the parking lot and into the supposed safety of Nordstrom, aware that someone had been shot just a few miles from there that morning, and that no aspect of this was remotely funny.

My own professional climb synchronized neatly, and most likely not coincidentally, with Vince’s descent. He had begun to struggle, although whether under the weight of his own limitations or as the result of my success wasn’t clear. Two months after our arrival, he found a job at a newspaper on Capitol Hill, but he was miserable covering energy policy, and within a year he quit. He wasn’t a Washington type, he said, and this was true. He wasn’t a jacket-and-tie kind of guy, nor was he suited, temperamentally, to the drudgery of regulatory meetings. At the alternative paper in Minneapolis, his wrinkled, sloppy self was acceptably grunge, and his hours largely self-defined, which had worked well enough while he was investigating police-union fraud and occasionally writing music reviews, but did not translate to getting to Rockville by 8:00 a.m. to sit in on briefings at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about acceptance criteria for emergency core-cooling systems for light-water nuclear power reactors, and such.

Anyone who’d known Vince a few years earlier would have said he was on his way to something big, and that things never really clicked for him in Washington was surprising. After he quit the congressional paper, he found bits and pieces of freelance work, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact of his drinking. I’d watch him pour half a bottle of bourbon down his gut each evening and wonder what it was he was quietly trying to exorcise, and whether it was me. Vince wasn’t a sloppy drinker; he never actually got drunk, just more and more morose; he was becoming erratic in ways that were hard to isolate or connect up. He decided somewhat randomly, for example, that he had a passion for gardening. I had known him by then for some sixteen years and was pretty sure he couldn’t tell a pansy from a peony, but I helped him pay for classes in landscape design while he worked at a local garden center. Within a year or so, he became less interested in suburban gardens than in land use and organic farming, which I encouraged, although it was a little eerie, given that my father had been an urban planner, or, more accurately, a designer of strip malls—those convenient if much-maligned blights of the landscape, an integral part of
the way we live now
, although maybe, already, an anachronism, since many of them are already being razed to make way for more public-transportation-friendly lifestyles. And then it seemed that, remarkably, thrillingly, in one of those rare convergences of things meant to be, Vince’s interests were finally about to collide to productive result.

With a manic burst of energy, he put together a hundred-page proposal and scored a lucrative book contract with a major New York publisher to write a biography of a guru architect he’d become familiar with in one of his classes, who, again very coincidentally, had been cited as the inspiration for a new upscale, environmentally friendly development that was at the time first being constructed, amidst county-wide, really statewide controversy:
Unfurlings.

Anyone who lived in the area knew about Unfurlings. New housing developments spread through the suburbs like acne, but this one was particularly vexing and occasionally erupted onto the front page on account of its footprint on what was literally the last patch of farmland left in Montgomery County, or the last lung, as they say in eco-speak. Then the farmer died (that there had actually been a farmer on the farm, one who wore overalls and rode a tractor and was still milking cows until he died in his sleep at the age of eighty-six, took most people by surprise), and his family put the land up for sale.

The fourteen hundred acres were purchased by a team that included a developer from New York, dubbed locally “the Gordon Gekko of Sprawl,” and his partner, a department-store heir with a penchant for buying expensive toys, such as amusement parks and NHL teams. The developers countered the criticism by pointing out that the venture wasn’t destroying green space so much as repurposing it as high-concept living, an experiment that would change the way we live and would attract attention and investors from around the world. There would be mixed-use housing, enclaves that sorted people into small communities according to whether they were most interested in art, literature, music, cooking, or foreign policy. There would be organic restaurants and a five-star hotel open to the public. And there would be culture and community: a three-thousand-seat concert hall and a block of art galleries, as well as a solar-heated Olympic-sized swimming pool and the promise of free yoga on Sunday mornings, open to all county residents. Also, there would be animals: horses and llamas and chickens and goats, with other species welcome. It sounded more than a little hocus-pocus to me; privately, I stopped thinking of the place as Unfurlings, and instead dubbed it The Village, since it reminded me of the sort of community M. Night Shyamalan might create were he an urban planner and not a maker of creepy art films.

The opposition was fierce. There were arguments about land use, a conviction that the place would flop, and fear of traffic congestion in the unlikely event it succeeded. There was also a fair amount of cynicism about the idea of utopian living in the guise of multimillion-dollar homes. For months, protesters gathered at the front gates, and when construction began, a young woman threw herself in front of a bulldozer and was killed, in an episode that seemed more Gaza than suburban Maryland. Then her family filed suit, generating a whole new round of headlines.

The Gordon Gekko of Sprawl, who was, in fact, named Gordon Stern, countered that his mission was being misconstrued. Unfurlings was his way to give something back to the community he’d grown up in and loved, which was being aesthetically destroyed by big-box stores and cheap, uniform town houses. It was hard to argue with this, regardless of which camp you were in.

While the neighborhood associations held their meetings and collected names on the petitions, the developers quietly developed, and within six years, before they had even managed to get a second meeting with the county commissioner, Unfurlings had become operational. The flagship five-star restaurant, Unfurlings I, which had famously poached a name-brand chef from a celebrated restaurant in Napa, had opened to rave reviews, as had the adjacent folksy breakfast place called The Farms, which was situated in the original farmhouse. The restaurants were flourishing, even though only twelve families had moved into the community. Within a year, Unfurlings was in foreclosure. Twenty-three would-be homeowners were suing to recover their deposits, and the half-paved roads and houses still in their Tyvek house wrap made Unfurlings look like it had ground to a halt mid-apocalypse, or maybe more like all the would-be dwellers had been felled by plague. That might have been the better analogy, given how quickly the fallout spread throughout the region, depleting the value of all neighborhood homes—one of which I was being asked to stage.

Around the time Unfurlings went into foreclosure, Vince’s book met a similar fate. He worked on it for a year, or he said he did. Mostly all I saw were the bottles that accumulated in our recycling bin. At one point he was spending close to a hundred dollars a week at the liquor store, and I’d say this was the least of our problems except that it wasn’t: I sensed we were going to have to give back the advance he’d been paid for the book, which was already spent, and that was one time I would have gladly been proved wrong.

Fast-forward two years past the official death of his book and the debt incurred, five years beyond the end of our marriage, three months after I lost my job at
MidAtlantic Home.
I was deep into hibernation, digging in my freezer trying to excavate a Hunan stir-fry from its shroud of ice. The local news droned in the background as I read the directions and programmed the microwave. Then I heard this Gordon Gekko character say something that got my attention: it had been his lifelong dream to build a self-sustaining community based on the tenets of the visionary architect who’d been his guru in graduate school, Sherman Rushlander, author of a series of architecture books that were so popular they had inspired a movie, a series of graphic novels, and a board game. Although I knew that Rushlander had been the subject of Vince’s aborted book project and I knew he was the man behind Unfurlings, sometimes it can take a while for the mind to make the most obvious connections. I suppose I’d only been paying peripheral attention to the Unfurlings debacle, the way one sometimes does, with no small degree of guilt, to news that does not affect one directly, like famine in Africa or revolution in the Middle East.