As Long As It's Perfect Read online

This news sounded serious, and I wanted to say something helpful, but I bit my tongue, telling myself it was best to avoid irritating him, hopeful that as long as he still had a job and a paycheck, we were okay.

  CHAPTER 20: WIM AND THE HOE

  Lexington Ave, Rye – June 2007

  As eager as I was to begin the excavation, I was nervous. I couldn’t help but think of the story I’d recently heard about a project that had been brought to a standstill when a backhoe driver hit a gas line and it ruptured and exploded. Still, this feeling of jubilation rarely entered our lives anymore—it was generally reserved for bonus time and birthday sex—and now here we were, far from year-end compensation or significant anniversary dates, watching our kids do a tippy-toed happy dance and clap their hands in gleeful anticipation of the big event.

  We stood under the blue morning sky, the front yard bustling with a small crew of helmeted demolition workers shouting commands.

  “It’s really happening,” Wim said, putting his arm around my waist and giving my body a half squeeze. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen him this happy. I glanced at the houses on either side of us—to the left, the Zambonis’ large traditional home, distinguished by the Palladian window over its front entry, and to the right, a smaller but quaint brick Cape.

  “I’m sure the neighbors are ready too,” I said. “How many months has it been?”

  “Months?” Wim shook his head. “It’s been over a year.”

  “Hard to believe it’s been that long,” I said. “But we’re going to get exactly what we want.”

  I imagined coming home to our dream house, pulling into a two-car garage with attached mudroom and entering a space with high ceilings, abundant windows, and oversize closets. The thought made me shudder with joy.

  “Farewell, old friend,” I said, looking across the dry lawn to the forty-five-year-old house, its dormered roof illuminated by the rising sun. The exterior, a sweet white Cape, was charming in a quiet way. A cluster of English ivy clung to the white brick foundation and trailed upward toward weathered aluminum siding. Green shutters flanked the two bottom windows, which were buffered by an uneven row of boxwoods and azaleas. A patchwork path of red and gray flagstone curved from the driveway to the front door, painted green like the shutters. A modest portico, supported by two narrow aluminum columns, arched over the door. I wondered about the Adamsons, the family that used to live there. What would they think about their house being torn down? Would they be horrified? Would they have done the same thing themselves, given the opportunity?

  An excavator nearly as tall as the house roared to life in the driveway.

  “Here we go!” I squeezed Wim’s hand as the crew began. “Kids, this is it!”

  All three of our children stood mesmerized. We winced at the raw screeching of metal against metal as a giant arm flexed forward and steel teeth clamped down onto strips of siding. Shreds of house fell to the ground.

  “How long do you think it will take?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. This is my first demolition.” Wim’s lips curled up into a broad, dimpled smile, the creases around his sparkling eyes squeezed tight. He readied his Nikon D3, pulling the black camera strap over his head and placing it over the folded collar of his shirt. He peered into the viewfinder and adjusted the lens.

  The crew methodically shaved off layers of brick and aluminum siding to segregate recyclable materials; the noise was so deafening, it drowned out the camera’s shutter. The driver of the excavator gracefully maneuvered the gigantic claw. He looked like a sculptor scraping away layers of clay.

  “There’s no going back now.” Wim waved his hand toward the shelled house, which, just moments before, had stood under the false protection of centuries-old oak trees. “Take this.” He handed me the camera.

  “Mom, look!” Paige shouted, tugging at my arm so hard that her curly brown locks bounced around her head like box springs. The claw struck another section of the house, sending debris flying into the air.

  I turned to Wim to see his reaction, but he was gone. A few neighbors had wandered outside and gathered to watch the demolition.

  “Kids, where did Daddy go?” I shouted, even though everything had fallen silent.

  I heard an engine rev. It was hard to make him out through the cloud of testosterone that had formed around his body, but I knew that my husband, who hadn’t even driven a stick shift in twenty years, was behind the wheel of the backhoe, his banker’s butt straddling the vinyl seat, living out his dual fantasies of operating heavy machinery and pulverizing a house.

  That Wim was driving the backhoe didn’t come as a complete surprise. Weeks ago, when we were bidding out the demolition, I’d heard him on the phone with one company after another, asking the owners if he could operate the backhoe when the time came. Most of them had just laughed and hung up, but apparently he’d struck a deal with the one he’d ended up hiring. I could picture him working his charms, the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder, sitting in our home office, chair tipped back precariously onto two legs, his feet on the desk, crossed at the ankles, his hands clasped behind his neck. Wim was persuasive; it was something I had always admired about him.

  “Why do you want to do this so badly?” I’d asked at the time.

  “Doesn’t everybody want to knock a house down?” he’d responded.

  I knew he saw this as an opportunity to fulfill his need for novelty—the same need that had once gotten him up 2000 feet off the ground in a biplane at an airplane museum in Pennsylvania, and racing 190 miles per hour on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway during a client outing. Whether his thrill-seeking was due to boredom or an addiction to dopamine release, I had no idea. I had long ago learned to stop questioning him.

  Until that moment, the only claws Wim had ever maneuvered were the ones belonging to the crane games at the Jersey Shore arcades. Now he was propped before a half dozen control levers and gauges. I pictured his hands compressing the levers and pushing forward. Wim was like a Minotaur—half human, half bull—on the offensive and ready to charge. Confident, competitive, and forceful, the same first-born-child drive that had earned him a profit selling “magic” rocks door-to-door for a quarter each as an eight-year-old boy, and that made him such an effective investment banker as a grown man. His eyes were lit up, his lips set in a grim line of determination. He was empowered; he was a trailblazer; and he was … stripping the gears. The mustard-colored machine started bucking up and down in a grinding fury. Wim seemed as if he were battling the vehicle itself instead of the house.

  “Is Daddy going to fall over?” Paige asked.

  The smell of diesel fuel wafted in the air as the engine droned steadily. Wim finally shifted into gear and propelled the rumbling vehicle forward on its tank-like treads. He clamped down again and this time shifted backward, which triggered a series of backup beeps. I didn’t doubt his ability to bulldoze the house as much as I feared him taking down a gas main along with it.

  Suddenly, the backhoe barreled ahead and the claw pivoted and came crashing down, taking out half the garage. Wim continued to ram the swing boom wildly into what was left of the garage, kicking storms of dust into the air. The four-person demolition crew shielded their eyes with their sleeves.

  In less than a minute, Wim had reduced the two-car garage to smoking rubble. Seemingly having taken his fill of wreckage, he switched the machine off. The landscape grew quiet. My husband came off the digger as wobbly as a cowboy climbing off a bucking bronco.

  He made his way across the front yard in his loafers, clumsily stepping down on the giant clumps of earth torn up by the six-ton vehicle. Droplets of sweat were beaded on his forehead. He was shaking.

  “Holy shit!” he said. “That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done with my clothes on!”

  CHAPTER 21: OF UFOS AND PENISES

  Lexington Ave, Rye – October 2007

  Let’s build a cupola,” Luke suggested, the result of our simple request to make our house look
original.

  “A what?” Wim and I asked.

  A cupola, otherwise known as a lantern, turned out to be a dome-like architectural feature used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air. Luke thought it could provide light to the upstairs hallway and give the house character. Wim thought it was a great idea. I was skeptical. So it immediately became a point of contention between us.

  “You said you want the house to be unique,” Wim said.

  “Unique, not bizarre,” I said. “I don’t want it to look like a UFO landed on top of my house.”

  “It’s a simple ornamental dome. It looks distinct.”

  “Maybe on a post office,” I said. “People will be knocking on our door asking to buy a roll of stamps.”

  We argued back and forth for days: “It’s frivolous”; “It’s stylish”; “It’s pretentious”; “It’s whimsical.”

  My real problem was that this type of distinction was unheard of in Rye. I was not only worried how the ornament itself would look; I was worried about how it would make us look. This was a neighborhood of subdued rooflines. I imagined people walking by our house, pointing and whispering.

  But as much comfort and satisfaction as I found in following rules, Wim found even more in challenging them. He and Luke both pushed for the cupola, so eventually I came around.

  At least, I said I did. In reality, I couldn’t stop worrying about it.

  The day Luke dropped off the front elevations—the architectural drawings showing a vertical perspective, how the front of our house would appear—my heart sank a little.

  Wim looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I assured him. I was afraid to bring it up for fear of sending him over the edge.

  “Janie, if there’s something not right you’d better speak up now, because in a few days they’ll be pouring cement.”

  “It’s the roof,” I said.

  “Really?” He looked surprised. Apparently, I’d done a very good job pretending I liked the idea. “What don’t you like about it?”

  I hesitated. I couldn’t admit that I had a problem with the very feature he’d been a fan of all this time.

  “The cupola?”

  I nodded.

  He scrunched his face in irritation and confusion. “I thought you liked it.”

  “I do like it; I’m just not convinced that I like it on our house.”

  Wim closed his eyes in that agitated way of his.

  “I’m afraid that when it’s built, in real life, it won’t look right.”

  “You have to tell Luke,” he said. “Soon.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I promised.

  Two days later, Luke and I sat side by side at his drafting table, under a cozy, slanted eave, discussing rooflines. Despite my anxiety, I’d been waiting impatiently all morning to meet with him. Seeing him always gave me a feeling of warmth and energy, like that first sip of coffee in the morning.

  Sometimes when I was with Luke I’d find myself thinking back to work relationships I’d had in the past and reflecting on how interesting it is that when you work closely with someone, you sometimes start to have feelings that you question—feelings that you probably shouldn’t be feeling.

  “I want to understand exactly what concerns you about the cupola,” Luke said, transferring his gaze from me to the drawing spread out beneath the octagonal skylight. The bright morning sunlight poured through the window and reflected off the drawing, creating a halo effect around the front elevations that, in my mind, exaggerated the cupola even more. “Of course we can make changes if we need to,” he assured me, though he looked horrified.

  I stared at the drawing and tried to formulate an intelligent response, but something about sitting this close to him made my breath come up short. “I’m just afraid,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” he said. And for the next twenty minutes, he lectured me on residential roof design, throwing around terms like slope, pitch, and vertical proportions. I tried to concentrate on his words but ended up merely staring at his lips.

  I loved Luke’s patience and his passion, but I was so nervous I almost wanted to stop the project altogether. Perhaps everything was moving too fast and I was trying to slow it down. Perhaps I had cold feet. Maybe I couldn’t handle this type of risk.

  “It’s just so hard for me to imagine,” I said.

  “What can I do to reassure you?” Luke asked. And then he said, “I have an idea.”

  The following Saturday morning, when the three of us were about to convene around our dining room table, Luke was holding something in both hands that I didn’t recognize—neither his usual briefcase nor a drawing tube.

  He carefully placed a 3-D house model on the table as if it were a royal wedding cake. The model resembled a giant gingerbread house, though it lacked both peppermint candies and gumdrops. “Here’s your house,” he said, leaning back to admire the small foam-core rendition of our soon-to-be-built home.

  I stared at the model, willing it to show me that my fears were unfounded, but all I saw was a bulky box with what looked like an enormous gun turret stuck on top.

  Wim popped his eyes at me, as if to say, Say something.

  “Thank you,” I said. But what I wanted to say was, It’s going to look like an alien spacecraft crash-landed on our roof. I could already hear my new neighbors deleting our names from their holiday party lists.

  “How lovely,” Betsy said when I stopped by her office to show her the front elevations of our house a couple of days later.

  “What do you think of the cupola?” I asked, surprised that she’d needed prompting.

  “I don’t think you need it,” she said, although she didn’t seem appalled by it, as I’d expected she might.

  Had I just wanted another opinion? Or had I secretly hoped that conservative Betsy, whose idea of liberal was to wear pants, would not be keen on our bold architectural idea and would provide me with the ammunition to shoot it down?

  Later that day, I said to Wim, “I asked Betsy what she thought of the cupola.”

  “Betsy? She’s a real estate agent, not an architect. Why would you ask her?”

  I couldn’t tell Wim what was churning inside me: A fear that if our cupola looked defective, then I would look defective. That others would judge me as critically as I judged myself.

  After all the back-and-forth about whether to go ahead with it, I finally came to terms with the cupola. And even though it would cost about the price of a used Prius, I’d actually become excited about the idea of being the first in our neighborhood—perhaps the whole town—to have one.

  The day the cupola was being framed, I stopped by the house to see how things were progressing. I pulled up past a bevy of construction trucks and parked under the tall oak tree. With my fingers still gripping the steering wheel, I peered through the passenger window and up at the roof of our house. What I felt was not the pride I’d hoped for, however, but dread.

  The shaft had been built five feet too tall. Capped with its mushroom-like roof, it looked like a gigantic penis projecting from our rooftop.

  How many people had already witnessed this phallic monument protruding from my home? How many people were delighting in my misfortune? One thing I had learned from this project was that when friends and family asked how the house was coming along, they didn’t want to hear that things were going well. They wanted unpredictable; they wanted scandalous; they wanted disasters.

  I called Wim. “The cupola looks like an oversized penis jutting from our rooftop.”

  “Penis?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  “Is this you overreacting? You never like anything at first.”

  “No, I swear. It doesn’t even look like a cupola,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

  A hundred penis jokes surged through my head, and a part of me wished I could see the humor in our circumstance. I got off the phone, turned to the framer, and barked, “Get that thing off my roof.”

  Later
that day, I stood at the street with Randy, the site supervisor, our necks craned to watch the roofers dismantle the cupola.

  “I agree, Janie. It looked wrong. But we were just following the plans,” he said earnestly, his bushy brown mustache pulled down in a frown.

  The offending structure was reconfigured as quickly as it had been erected, and by the next day, the dome had shriveled down to half its original size. Now in proportion with the rest of the house, the new and improved cupola looked good, and after all of my hemming and hawing, I was beginning to like it more each day. It was simple. No gun turrets, no UFOs, no three-eyed aliens. Just an elegant lantern adorning our rooftop.

  CHAPTER 22: OUT OF BALANCE

  Raymond Ave, Rye – October 2007

  What time will you be home tonight?” I asked Wim after spending an afternoon with the contractor talking materials, specs, and timelines, ordering tile, carpooling kids, and feeling like a single parent. I’d had a particularly rough day. Our oldest daughter, Hailey, now twelve, had come home with a fever, compounding my stress. Now I was pressing Wim to come home early.

  “I’ll be home by eight,” he said finally.

  Eager for us to share a meal together, I prepared his favorite steak. Eight o’clock rolled around, but there was no familiar sound of the key in the door.

  Wim finally called at eight thirty.

  “What happened? I’ve been sitting here waiting for you,” I said before he’d had a chance to say hello.

  “Sorry, just as I was about to leave the office, Grant called a meeting.” He sounded tired, but I couldn’t bring myself to empathize, given how much we’d been bickering lately.

  I’d wanted so badly to build a house; how could a project that made me feel hopeful and excited also have become such a source of conflict?

  “But you said you’d be home by eight. Couldn’t you have told him you had to leave?” I said, on the verge of tears.