Dream House (6 page)

Mitzi hung up and leaned into the screen, the symmetrical curves of her hair rocking against her cheeks.

“I'm okay, I think,” Gina said. “It's been a rough week.”

“You poor thing,” Mitzi said. “Thanks
so
much for agreeing to talk today.” Thin and high-strung, she was dressed in an orange workout top and a Giants baseball cap. Her phone chimed with a text and when she picked it up to look at it, Jeff said, “Mitzi, put it away! That's rude.”

Mitzi stuck out her tongue at Jeff and winked at Gina. “Is it true what they say—that remodeling destroys marriages?” She laughed as if such a thing could never happen to her.

Gina cringed, wondering if she'd be able to rise to the occasion this morning of being the Stones' architect, a position she'd been navigating for over a year. The Stones had moved from St. Louis and bought a fifteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion in San Francisco that sat on a hill of solid rock, one-hundred-twenty feet back from the street. When Gina first toured the house, she'd been awed by its audacious expenditure of space, the colossal volumes that seemed to presume inhabitants who themselves were larger-than-life and had a royal-sized entitlement to earth and air. The walls of the main rooms were lined with low wainscots and pierced with mean little windows—like the eyes of a behemoth. Worn from neglect, the house was clunky and visually busy, with a tortuous floor plan.

A tear-down, Gina had thought to herself. She'd wished away the thick, stucco walls and in their place, imagined planes of light—perhaps a double-height living room—that celebrated the large and luxuriant yard, filled with sun and tall trees. She wasted no time in making her proposal to Mitzi and Jeff. Without missing a beat, Jeff had said, “I want that.” Mitzi had been harder to convince, explaining that
she associated the house's imitative European style with classiness. Gina's solution—to retain the façade while completely recreating the house behind—would satisfy both Mitzi's vision and San Francisco's codes enforcing the preservation of potentially historic buildings.

And now Mitzi clapped her hands, rattling her gold and jade bracelet every time Gina pointed out a detail that defied tradition; she cooed about the “architectural statement” they were going to make to the world—or at least, to Pacific Heights. Besides the façade, she remained committed only to the size of the original house. “We want a home where everyone can visit. Plus, we want to have four bedrooms for our kids,” she'd explained.

So far, there were no children; Mitzi had confided to Gina last month that they'd been trying to get pregnant for three years.

“Gina,” Mitzi said, reaching for something. She held a page of a magazine up to the screen. “I thought this was a great idea—a gift-wrapping room. When you think about it, we women spend half our time wrapping presents, you know? Could we make something like that?”

“Why not?” Gina said. “You have the space.”

“Fabulous!” Mitzi beamed. “I am just
so
excited about this house! I was wondering, do people with nice homes in San Francisco ever name them? We've been to Jeff's client's place in the Hamptons—one of those big, shingled houses with a huge porch and a widow's walk? On the east coast, a lot of homes have names. His is called ‘Firefly House.' Isn't that romantic?”

“Mitzi,” Jeff patted her hand. “Gina knows all about houses with names; she's an Ivy League-educated east-coaster.” Jeff, a Harvard Business School alumnus, grinned at Gina with an air of fraternity.

“Oh, yeah!” Mitzi said. “Maine. Did the house you grew up in have a name?”

Gina glanced at the original claw-foot tub with its jerry-rigged
shower, the peeling ceiling paint, and the cracked black-and-white linoleum. “No,” she said. “No name.”

Mitzi's phone rang. “
Ma
,” she said into the phone, “I'm still in my meeting. No, September's no good. Okay, thanks—you're too adorable. Love you.” She hung up. “My mother!” she complained. “But she's like my
best friend
.” She caught herself, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, Gina, I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking . . .”

“No worries,” Gina said, feeling a vacancy inside more cavernous than Mitzi could possibly imagine: the missing of her mother that she'd experienced long before her mother had died.

An awkward silence followed. “Can we talk about bathrooms?” Jeff finally asked. “I really think a house with this many bedrooms deserves five baths.”

Gina counted to ten in her head and recited her mantra: “needs expand to meet the budget available.” Aloud she said, “No problem. Let's see.” She shifted her laptop so she could stretch the roll of tracing paper over the drawing, and with her pen quickly reconfigured the second-floor laundry room and closets to accommodate another bathroom. She wondered: How would Mitzi and Jeff feel, shuffling around those rooms, if having children didn't work out? Five bathrooms, two dishwashers, and an au pair apartment didn't have fertility powers. She held up the drawing for them to see.

“Gina, where are you, anyway?” Mitzi said, leaning toward the screen. “Are you, like, in a
bathroom
?”

Gina stood and quickly rearranged her laptop. “Oh, yeah. It's the only place in the house that gets a good connection.”

Jeff smiled, baring his over-bleached teeth. “It looks quaint,” he said. Gina was relieved that they seemed reluctant to ask where, exactly, she was staying.

“Okay. Great,” Jeff said, looking at his watch. “We've got the baths. Thank you for indulging us.” He flashed his smile again. “What I love
about architects,” he said, his voice suddenly silky, “is that you ask, ‘What
can
we do—what is the dream?' instead of, ‘What
needs
to be done?'”

After more than an hour of talking with the Stones, Gina closed her laptop and sat for a moment, soaking in the sunlight pouring through the bathroom's high, east-facing windows. No amount of space, of marble or fancy plumbing fixtures, she thought, could match the luxury of beginning the day in a sun-drenched room.

She stepped down the stairs, put on her fleece jacket, and walked out of the house with her suitcase. She locked the front door, her hand unsteady as the bolt thunked into place. Turning over the key with its twenty-year-old paper tag in her hand, she had the thought that she should do something ceremonious with it. She set her suitcase on the porch, ran down the hill to the cove, and with a dramatic sweep of her arm, hurled the key; when the water swallowed it, she immediately regretted her impulsiveness.

She climbed back up the steep hill to the narrow band of level lawn that had been their patio. “The view!” she remembered Kit exclaiming yesterday. Indeed, it was a celebrity view, having appeared on the covers of magazines and calendars as captured by her father's camera. Unlike the breathtakingly wide, uninterrupted ocean of the West Coast, this panorama offered places for the eye to rest on its way to the horizon: the shimmering, horseshoe-shaped cove rimmed by tall, straight spruces, two tiny islands, a changing cast of picturesque boats, the lighthouse marking the harbor's outer edge. Many a painter had set up her easel in the yard, but Gina and her family had always agreed that simply sitting and watching as the landscape changed from moment to moment was a creative activity in itself.

All of her adult life, every year on arrival here, Gina had dashed from the car to stand in this spot, embracing the smells and
scenery of her childhood, her parents' ecstatic welcome and summery moods. But after a few days, a kind of winter would move into her; the optimism she'd arrived with would fade and she'd begin looking forward to leaving—sometimes, in the final few hours, nearly holding her breath. There would be the tearing away from her parents at the door on departure day, their tearful eyes and resigned waves from the driveway. As Paul drove toward the airport across the Piscataqua River into New Hampshire, he would put his hand on Gina's knee to ease her melancholy. Her relief to be leaving had made her feel at once unyielding and impotent, like a bad daughter; her wish that things could be different had swelled like a balloon in her chest.

Halfway to the airport, she'd always felt a shift as she turned her gaze ahead to the fresh, wide-openness of the opposite shore. Compression, release: the cycle would begin again as winter turned to spring; she would plan their next trip to Maine, both hopeful and dread-filled. A struggle, but a predictable one and, in its own way, life-affirming. How would life be now, without that cycle?

It was unfair that on this day, cerulean sky, glistening water, and brilliant light would conspire to create a visual feast—a last supper. She put down her suitcase, set up a chaise facing the view and collapsed into it.

Once she was down, she was transfixed, her senses drugged. She felt her purposefulness drop away, leaving her helpless to rise from the chair.

When she was a teenager, her mother had sat in this spot, perhaps even in this very chaise, and often said, “Sitting here, who could have a care in the world?” To Gina, the declaration had sounded hollow, even cruel, given that, in this house, her mother had created all the cares in the world.

For more than two hours, Gina gazed out across the landscape, her back warmed by heat reflecting off the house's white clapboards.
Finally closing her eyes, she was visited by another memory: when she was three or four, on summer afternoons, her mother would sometimes let her take a nap curled up next to her on a chaise. Now, she could hear her mother's heart beat beneath the breathing pillow of her breast, feel the tickle of wind on her bare arms, the sun that would leave her upturned cheek pink. Gradually, her limbs lightened and seemed to float away; she succumbed to a peacefulness so profound, she thought she might be sleeping.

A neighbor's lawnmower startled her awake at five o'clock. She stood and picked up her suitcase. The cove was richly colored and velvety. A tranquil sea, fading light, goodbye. Her suitcase held a few treasures, it was true. But of everything the house possessed, this view was what she wished she could take with her.

As she crossed the front yard toward the driveway, the house seemed to stir. She looked up just as something crashed to the ground, hitting the brick walkway with a clatter. A window shutter, she discovered, the one Cassie had climbed up to fix. Its fasteners were worn through. She glanced again at the house's façade, feeling unsettled by the asymmetry caused by the missing shutter. “You'll be okay,” she heard herself say.

It was time to go! She fetched the garbage can from behind the house, tossed the splintered shutter into it, replaced the can, and got into the car.

She couldn't turn to look back up the driveway as she drove out, didn't feel her usual relief as she crossed the bridge out of Whit's Point. This time, she experienced a release too big, like a fish being spewed into open water. A sickening turbulence and its disorientation, a freedom thrusting her forward, the kind of rushing freedom one could drown in.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.

Christopher Alexander

Chapter 4

Insomnia! From the bedside table, the numbers on the clock taunted Gina—two, three, four o'clock. San Francisco's windy, clear days of April and May had blown by, and June found her six pounds lighter—proof that lying awake was a grueling workout. In those wee hours, she plunged into a black chasm teeming with shapeless sorrows. She longed to cry out loud. “They expect you to be sad,” Paul had told her. “You have feelings, too.”

But she would never let her grief drift like a miasma into the rooms of her sleeping children, making them choose vigilance over sleep.

The numbers in the clock flashed seven, and Ben's rosy-cheeked face appeared in the doorway. He waited, as always, for Gina's smile to invite him in and then climbed into bed beside her. She strained to follow his whispered stream of chatter that began with a Byzantine description of a computer game and ended with, “But you have to have special software for that.”

“That sounds really neat,” Gina absentmindedly cooed, pushing her nose into his soft blonde curls. She mourned: tomorrow was Ben's last day of kindergarten; how much longer would he come in for a snuggle? “I'm such a lucky Mom.”

“What? Mom, are you listening? We don't have the right software!”

“You're right! I'm sorry. Well, maybe we'll see if we can get it. Hey, kiddo, time for us to get up and get ready.”

Ben wrestled himself out of bed, waking Paul, and went to his room.

“How'd you sleep?” Paul asked, as he did every morning; it had become rhetorical.

He stood, yawned, and put up the window shades. From the bed, Gina saw blue sky out one window, and out another, fog cascading over the white Victorian cornice of the neighbors' house. They were several miles from the Bay, but she could hear the moan of a ship's horn, confirming that the fog hovered at the Golden Gate.

Paul looked at her, his face full of concern. “I can get them breakfast if you want to try to go back to sleep.”

“No, no,” Gina said. “I'm okay.” Her morning ritual with the kids, their steady expectations of her, were what lately had given her the will to get out of bed each morning.