The Stager: A Novel (34 page)

A mere statement of fact. The confirmation of a theory. Although Bella is calm, I get that this is not going to turn into a happy reunion of girlfriendy screams and long embraces and oh-my-God-how-have-you-been-you-look-exactly-the-sames!

“No, Bella.
You
are the Stager,” I say. “The master manipulator. I just take out the trash and move the furniture.”

“I would like you to leave my house, and cease all contact with my family.”

“You’re welcome, Bella.”

“I’m supposed to thank you? Please, let’s not go there.”

“I’m taking my pig.”

“It’s not your pig.”

“No, it’s not. It’s
our
pig. You’ve had it ten years. Now it’s my turn.”

“Keep it.”

And so we come to the end. I’m not sure what I expected after all these years. Maybe I wanted blood. Silly as it sounds, I at least wanted her to fight me for the pig. I wanted it to be important enough to get her riled up. I wanted the bounce of Indonesia, and the toxins of her secret, to have as much of a grip on Bella as they do on me. But not all endings are dramatic. Once you let a secret go, it loses steam. Your uncle was a cross-dresser, your great-grandmother half Cherokee, your brother-in-law did heroin in college. At the end of the day, after the news is absorbed and everyone gets over the shock, who cares?

I say goodbye to the girl and then walk down the stairs and out the front door. I don’t need to retrieve the pig, because I’ve already taken it home.

DOMINIQUE

I don’t know what became of them.

I understand that this lack of clarity will disappoint, but I’m an honest rabbit. I could medicate or drink a little tea and give you a more satisfying dénouement, but after the time I spent with the wreck of Lars, you will understand my reluctance. Even Advil gives me pause.

What occurred within my line of sight is therefore all I can relate. The day after the Stager drove away, a placard that said
UNDER CONTRACT
was affixed to the
FOR SALE
sign. It hung from metal hoops, and swayed whenever the wind blew. Once, during a powerful storm, it blew off and landed across the street, in the neighbor’s yard; I watched Elsa retrieve it, and then, later that afternoon, Amanda Hoffstead came to hang it back up. A few weeks later, a Japanese family arrived to look at the house they had purchased sight unseen. Their car had diplomatic plates.

One steamy summer day in June, I watched a Salvation Army truck back into the driveway. It clipped the rosebush, breaking off a stem. Two men went in and out of the house several times and put some boxes and furniture in the truck. Another day, an old guy with a scruffy beard came and kicked the tires of Bella’s car a few times, looked under the hood, wrote her a check, and drove it away. Finally, the first week of July, the moving trucks appeared. The day after that, the family got up at dawn and climbed into Lars’s SUV, and then they were gone.

*   *   *

I GET A
glimpse of my old life sometimes, in the wee hours of the night. The house is featured in a series called
Suburban Celebrities
that airs on cable television, and I even have an off-screen cameo: “A stager was employed, in part to repair the damage inflicted by a pet rabbit,” the voice-over says. I read in the newspaper that Bella filed a lawsuit to get an injunction against airing the rest of the footage, so there’s not much more substance than this. We are all reduced to sound bites in the end.

That’s all I know. There are many things that confound me. What did they do with Lars’s car, for example? Did they leave it at the airport? Did they hand it off to someone en route? In my heart of hearts, here’s what I hope: I hope Lars dropped his family at the airport and recalibrated. That would be my version of a happy ending, that he began his life anew but found a way to hang on to Elsa.

But who can say? Sometimes people extricate themselves from bad situations, and sometimes they don’t. As for the child, I hope that she is happy and that she has found herself a better pet. It wasn’t her fault we didn’t get along; I was in a bad place myself, and I take responsibility for my behavior.

I still see the Stager, you might be surprised to hear. She staged a few other houses in The Flanders, riding the success of the Sorkin-Jorgenson’s speedy sale, deserved or not. I see her crossing over to Unfurlings sometimes at the end of the day. She stops at the farm stand to buy vegetables, and then takes long walks with a man.

Privately, I urge her to be careful. The cars come around the bend too quickly here, and the roads have not caught up with the pace of development. One of my sisters was squashed by a garbage truck at the very spot where the Stager now stands.

It’s best to be mindful in this world. You never know what life has in store. A little counting of the daily blessings, an occasional prayer, a reverence for superstition—none of that can hurt. As Elsa will learn from her new British friends, on the first day of the month, to bring good luck, the first words she speaks will be “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The three section headings are from
A Pattern Language
, by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel. If you haven’t heard of this 1977 bible of architecture, find a copy and keep it by your bedside. Dip into it like poetry. It will change the way you think about the way you live. It may even make you want to dance in the street.
Home Staging for Dummies
,
Staging to Sell
by Barb Schwarz, and an amalgam of newspaper and magazine articles as well as websites and informal conversations with stagers and Realtors helped inform the sections on home staging.

*   *   *

Thank you to Melanie Jackson and Sarah Crichton for their loyalty, support, and belief in reinvention. Also at FSG, to Jeff Seroy, Lottchen Shivers, Nick Courage, Sarita Varma, Marsha Sasmor, and Dan Piepenbring, as well as the brilliant production and copyediting teams who saved me from humiliations large and small.

Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham at Politics & Prose, along with Barbara Meade, gave me a fresh start and an extended family of fellow book nerds, including Sarah Baline, Hannah Oliver (seriously, those hugs keep me going some days), and Mark Laframboise. Lars Townsend generously gifted me the gun in the refrigerator. And, Ron Tucker, thanks for the “b.” Truly, I wish I could thank every single person I have worked with over these last three years, but the number is too great and every attempt at naming even those I have worked with most closely inevitably leaves someone out, so let me just say that these are truly the greatest, most scarily smart and well-read colleagues in the world, and I love you all. Thank you, too, to everyone at Modern Times Coffeehouse for the caffeine and good cheer, and to every customer I have accidentally disconnected on the phone or whose transaction has required a void.

David Groff offered encouragement and invaluable manuscript advice at a critical early stage, and the following friends and family helped in ways both tangible and not: Dylan Landis, Lisa Zeidner, Jean Heilprin Diehl, Paula Whyman, Leslie Pietryzk, Michelle Brafman, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Kitty Davis, Gary Krist, Susan Shreve, Howard Norman, Ally Coll Steele, Emma Coll, Max Coll, Rory Steele, Valerie Strauss, Joanne Reynolds, Lisa Mandel, Julie Langsdorf, Alexandra Viets, Geoff Coll, Jonathan Keselenko, Kara Sargent, Marian Keselenko, Mel Tomberg, and Steve Coll. Also thanks to the crazily talented trailer crew: John Becker, Matt Ong, Andrew Clark, Susan Derry, Maggie Erwin, Phil Hosford, Ally, and The Rabbit. And Paul Goldberg, thank you for the close read, the tight edits, and the recalibration.

ALSO BY SUSAN COLL

karlmarx.com

Rockville Pike

Acceptance

Beach Week

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Coll is the author of the novels
Beach Week
,
Acceptance
,
Rockville Pike
, and
karlmarx.com.
A television adaptation of
Acceptance
, starring Joan Cusack, aired in 2009. Coll works at Politics & Prose bookstore and lives in Washington, D.C.

Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2014 by Susan Coll
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coll, Susan.

      The stager: a novel / Susan Coll.

         pages  cm

      ISBN 978-0-374-26881-7 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71072-9 (ebook)

      1.  Home staging—Fiction.   I.  Title.

   PS3553.O474622 S83 2014

   813'.54—dc23

2013049020

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*
 I have deliberately left myself out of the rough chapter outlines, because this story is not about me.