The House (9 page)

She walked down to the marina eventually, sat on a bench, and watched people flying kites. In the late afternoon, she walked all the way back up the hills to Pacific Heights, and her apartment. She didn't bother to make the bed when she got back. She didn't eat dinner that night, and then finally, she made herself a salad, and took some files out of her briefcase. They were Stanley Perlman's files, and the one thing she was excited about was seeing his house. She had a million fantasies about it. She wished she knew its history. She was going to ask the realtor to research it for her before they put it on the market. But first she wanted to see the house. She had a feeling it was going to be remarkable. She thought of it again as she lay in bed that night.

She was almost asleep when her phone rang. It was Phil. He said he had been working on preparing his depos all night, and he sounded tired.

“I miss you,” he said in a loving voice. It was the voice that always made her heart do flip-flops, even now. It was the voice of the man who had made passionate and highly skilled love to her the night before. She lay in bed and closed her eyes.

“I miss you, too,” she said softly.

“You sound sleepy.” He sounded nice.

“I am.”

“Were you thinking about me as you drifted off to sleep?” He sounded sexier than ever, and this time she laughed.

“No,” she said, turning over on her side, and looking at the side of the bed where he had slept the night before. It seemed so empty now. His pillow was somewhere on the floor. “I was thinking about Stanley Perlman's house. I can't wait to see it tomorrow.”

“You're obsessed with the place,” he said, sounding disappointed. He liked it when she was thinking about him. As Sarah often said to him, everything was always about him. Sometimes he even agreed.

“Am I?” she said, teasing him. “I thought I was obsessed with you.”

“You'd better be,” he said, sounding pleased with himself. “I was just thinking about last night. It gets better and better with us, doesn't it?” She smiled.

“Yeah, it does,” she conceded to him, but she wasn't entirely sure that was a good thing. More often than not, the good sex they shared clouded her vision, and she didn't want it to. It was hard to weed out the wheat from the chaff in their relationship. Their sex life was definitely wheat. But there was a lot of chaff as well, on a variety of subjects.

“Well, I've got to be up early tomorrow. I just wanted to kiss you good night before I went to bed, and tell you that I miss you.” She wanted to remind him that there was an easy solution to it if he missed her, but didn't say a word.

“Thank you.” She was touched. It was a sweet thing for him to do. He was sweet, even though he disappointed her at times. Maybe all men did, and it was just the nature of relationships, she told herself. She was never sure. This was the longest relationship she had ever had. She had always been too busy before that with school and work to commit herself fully to a man.

“I love you, babe …” he said in the husky voice that turned her guts to mush.

“I love you too, Phil…. I'll miss you tonight.”

“Yeah, me too. I'll call you tomorrow.” The sad thing was that whenever they got closer to each other on weekends, he somehow managed to dispel it during the week, and put distance between them again. He was never willing or able to maintain whatever intimacy they established. He seemed to feel safer keeping her at arm's length. But they certainly hadn't been at arm's length the night before.

She lay in bed thinking about him after they hung up. He had gotten his wish. She was thinking about him, and not Stanley's house. As she lay there, her eyes drifted closed, and the next thing she knew, the alarm had gone off and the sun was streaming in her windows. It was Monday morning, and she had to get up.

An hour later, she was dressed, rushing out the door, and on her way to Starbucks. She needed a cup of coffee before meeting the realtor at Stanley's house. She felt as though she were about to go on a treasure hunt. She drank her coffee and read the paper in her car, while waiting for the realtor in Stanley's driveway. She was so intent on the newspaper that she didn't notice the woman approach until she tapped on Sarah's car window.

Sarah quickly pressed the button, and the window sped down. The woman standing there facing her was somewhere in her fifties, and her appearance was between businesslike and frumpy. Sarah had dealt with her on estates before, and had liked her. Her name was Marjorie Merriweather, and Sarah looked at her with a warm smile.

“Thanks for meeting me this morning,” Sarah said as she got out of her car. It was a small dark blue convertible BMW she had bought the year before. She usually left it in her garage and took a cab to work. She didn't need a car downtown, it just cost a fortune to leave it sitting all day in the garage. But this morning, it had been easier to drive.

“I'm delighted to. I've always wanted to get in and see this house. It's a treat for me,” Marjorie said with a broad smile. “This house has a lot of history to it.” Sarah was pleased to hear it, she had always suspected it had, but Stanley insisted he knew nothing about it.

“I think we should do some research before we put the house on the market. It will give the place some more cachet, and it may make up for turn-of-the-century electricity and plumbing,” Sarah said with a laugh.

“Do you know when the interior was last remodeled?” Marjorie asked her with a businesslike air, as Sarah took the keys out of her handbag.

“Well, let's see,” Sarah said cautiously, as they walked up the white marble steps to the front door. It was glass with an exquisite bronze grille over it, which was itself a work of art. Sarah had never come through the front door, but she didn't want to bring the realtor in through the kitchen. She wasn't sure Stanley had ever used the front door during his entire tenancy of the house. “Mr. Perlman bought the house in 1930. He never mentioned a remodel to me, and he always intended to sell it. He bought it as an investment, and then somehow never divested himself of it. More by accident, I think, than by design. He just got comfortable and stayed here.” She thought of his tiny little room in the attic as she spoke, the maid's room, where he had spent seventy-six years of his life. But she didn't tell the realtor that. She would probably notice it herself when they toured the house. “My guess is that it hasn't been remodeled to any significant degree since they built the house. I think Mr. Perlman said that was in 1923. He never told me the name of the family that built it.”

“They were a very well-known family that made their money in banking during the Gold Rush. They came over from France with a number of other bankers from Paris and Lyon. I believe they remained in banking for several generations here in the States until the family died out. The man who built this house was Alexandre de Beaumont, with the French spelling. He built the house in 1923 for his beautiful young wife, Lilli, when they married. She was a famous beauty at the time. It was a very sad story. Alexandre de Beaumont lost his entire fortune in the Crash of '29. I believe she left him after that, roughly around 1930.” The realtor knew a lot more about the house than Sarah did, or Stanley ever had. Although he had lived there for three-quarters of a century, he had had little or no emotional attachment to the house. It had remained for him, until the end, merely an investment, and the place where he slept. He had never decorated it, or moved to the main portion of the house. He was happy living in the maid's room in the attic.

“I think that's when Mr. Perlman bought the house, in 1930. He never said a word to me about the de Beaumonts.”

“I think Mr. de Beaumont died sometime after his wife left him, and as far as I know, she vanished. Or maybe that's just the romantic version of the story. I want to research it some more for the brochure.”

They both fell silent as Sarah struggled with the keys, and slowly the heavy bronze and glass door creaked open. Sarah had told the nurse to remove the chain closing it before she left, so that she could bring the realtor in through the front door. The door opened and revealed a yawning darkness. Sarah walked in first, and looked around for a switch to turn on the lights. As she stepped inside, the realtor followed. They both had an odd, eerie sense as they entered the house, part trespassers, and part curious children. The realtor opened the door wider behind them, so the sunlight could enter the house and light their path, and then they both saw the light switch. The house was eighty-three years old, and neither of them had any idea if the switch would still work. There were two buttons in the marble entranceway where they stood. Sarah pushed each button in turn, and nothing happened. In the dim light, they could see that the windows in the entrance hall were boarded up. Beyond them they could see nothing.

“I should have brought a flashlight,” Sarah said, sounding annoyed. This was not going to be as easy as she had hoped. As she said it, Marjorie reached into her bag, and handed one to Sarah. She had brought another for herself.

“Old houses are my hobby.” They both turned their flashlights on, and peered around. There were heavy boards on the windows, a white marble floor beneath their feet that seemed to stretch for miles, and overhead an enormous chandelier that was electrified, but the connections to the switch must have decayed over the years, along with everything else.

The hallway itself had beautiful molded panels and was very large, the ceiling high. And then on either side, they saw small receiving rooms that must have been rooms where people waited when they came to visit. There was no furniture anywhere to be seen. The floors of the two receiving rooms were beautiful old parquet, and the walls were carved antique boiseries that looked as though they had come from France. The two smaller rooms were exquisite. And in each there was a spectacular chandelier. The house had been stripped before Stanley bought it, but he had mentioned to Sarah once that the previous owners had left all the original sconces and chandeliers. They both saw then, too, that there were also antique marble fireplaces in each of the rooms. Both receiving rooms were identical in size. Both would have made exquisite studies or offices, depending on what the house became in its next life. Perhaps a fabulously elegant small hotel, or a consulate, or a home for someone incredibly wealthy. The interior had the feel of a small château, and the exterior had always suggested that to Sarah as well. It was the only house even remotely like it in the city, or perhaps even in the state. It was the kind of house, or small château, one expected to see in France. And according to Marjorie, the architect had been French.

As they proceeded farther into the enormous white marble hallway, they could see a large staircase in the center of it. Its steps were white marble, and there were bronze handrails on either side. It swept grandly toward the upper floors, and it was easy to envision men in top hats and tailcoats and women in evening gowns walking up and down those stairs. Overhead was a chandelier of incredibly vast scale. They both stepped gingerly away from it, each of them with the same thought at the same time. There was no way of knowing how secure anything was, after all those years. Sarah was suddenly terrified that it might come crashing down. And as they stepped away from it, they saw an immense drawing room beyond, with curtains covering the windows. Marjorie and Sarah both walked toward them, to see if they were boarded up. The heavy curtains shredded in their hands as they pushed them aside. The windows were actually French doors into the garden. There was a whole wall of them, and here they were only boarded with semicircles of wood at the top. The rest of the windows were filthy but uncovered, they saw, as soon as the curtains were pushed aside. Sunlight entered the room for the first time since Stanley Perlman had bought the house, and as they looked around the room they were standing in, Sarah's eyes grew wide and she gasped. There was a gigantic fireplace on one side, with a marble mantel, boiseries, and mirrored panels. It almost looked like a ballroom, but not quite. The parqueted floors looked several hundred years old. They too had obviously been removed from a château in France.

“My word,” Marjorie said in a hushed whisper. “I've never seen anything like it. Houses like this just don't exist anymore, and never did out here.” It reminded her of the “cottages” in Newport that had been built by the Vanderbilts and Astors. Nothing on the West Coast had ever compared to this. It looked like a miniature of Versailles, which was precisely what Alexandre de Beaumont had promised his wife. The house had been a wedding gift to her.

“Is this the ballroom?” Sarah asked, looking impressed beyond words. She knew there was one but had never even remotely imagined anything as beautiful as this.

“I don't think so,” Marjorie said, loving every minute of their tour. This was so much better than anything she had hoped. “Ballrooms were usually built on the second floor. I think this might be the main drawing room, or one of them.” They found another like it, though slightly smaller, on the other side of the house, with a small rotunda adjoining the two. The rotunda had inlaid marble floors, and a fountain in the center that looked as though it had worked at one time. If one closed one's eyes, one could imagine grand balls here, and the kind of parties of a bygone era that one only read about in books.

There were also several smaller rooms, which Marjorie explained were fainting rooms, where in earlier days in Europe, ladies could rest and loosen their corsets. There was also a large series of pantries and service rooms, where food had obviously been sent up from the kitchen, but not prepared. In a modern world, one could turn the pantries into kitchens, since no one today would want their kitchen in the basement. People no longer had dozens of servants to run food and trays up and down the stairs. There was a row of dumbwaiters, and when Sarah opened one of them to inspect it, one of the ropes broke in her hands. There was no sign of rodents or damage in the house. Things had not been chewed, nothing was damp or mildewed. Stanley's monthly cleaning crew had kept it clean, but there were obvious signs nonetheless of the ravages of time. They also found six bathrooms on the main floor, four of them in marble, for guests, and two simpler tiled ones, obviously for servants. The back stairs area for the huge staff of domestics they must have had was vast.