Dream House (27 page)

Though sometimes—like now as he pleaded, “Can't you pul-eeze get your bod down here for a couple of days?”—he made her seriously doubt that he was interested in anything more than her body.

“I'm still not feeling good.” She coughed a juicy cough. “Plus,” she whispered, “we can't afford the bus fare right now.”

This was sort of true. Her father had been short of work for the past three months, and while she was home they'd been eating waffles and canned tuna for dinner.

“That sucks. D'you miss me?”

“Yeah, I do,” she said, though she realized she'd missed him more before he'd called.

“I want you, Lo. I can't stand having to wait until school on Monday. Please come visit—I'll pay for the ticket.”

Gina turned again and glanced at Mark's confident face hanging on the line, dripping into the sink. She hated his begging. “I can't—really—I mean, I want to, but I'm sick, and I've got my art history paper to write.”

“Ron?” her mother's bark, through the door. “What are you waiting for, a personal invitation?”

“Oh—dinnertime already? Be right there!” her father chirped. So innocent, as if he hadn't heard the reproach. “Gina . . .” Looking deflated, he gestured toward the door.

“Mark, I've gotta go eat—I'll call you back later, okay?”

“Maybe we can do some more after dinner,” her father said, when Gina had hung up. “We'll see what Mom wants to do.” His sorry tone meant there would be no more darkroom revelations tonight.
Silently, they finished loading the washer.

Gina took hold of the doorknob just as her father placed a firm hand on her shoulder.

“You know, honey, if Mark really cares about you, he won't pressure you like that.”

He'd startled her. From what remote region of him had this protectiveness suddenly emerged? She wanted to linger, to make sense of this fatherly concern. But it had come too late; the minute they left the darkroom, she knew, it would evaporate.

“Don't worry,” she said, unlocking the door and stepping into the angry, bright light of the kitchen.

Valid ambiguity promotes useful flexibility . . . The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program. This promotes richness of meaning over clarity of meaning.

Robert Venturi,
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Chapter 11

Gina was eager to finish drawing the plans, but her concern about Lester grew. Could he be quietly working somewhere in the house? She went outside, lifted the old wood doors on the cellar bulkhead and stepped down into the dark, dirt-floor space. The light caught the metal of a hanging chain, and she pulled it, illuminating a workbench with all kinds of tools, a stack of logs, an old lawnmower, and some beach chairs. No sign of Lester.

Perhaps he was asleep upstairs. She went inside and stepped gingerly up to the second floor where she couldn't remember ever having been. There were three bedrooms opposite the stair. She quickly peeked into them, then turned down the hall where the two main bedrooms occupied the front of the house, facing Pickering Road. One of them had been the original Sidney Banton's; she recognized his writing desk from her father's photographs. The room appeared untouched, its bookshelves lined with old leather volumes. She turned and faced the closed door across the hall and a chill ran through her as she realized it probably led to the room where Fran had died. Heart thrumming, she
put her ear to the door, all at once thinking of the trapped bird at her parents' house.

“Lester?” she said quietly. She knocked and, hearing nothing, she reached for the doorknob. A loud
pop! pop! pop!
made her lunge for the stair but then she realized a car on Pickering Road had backfired. She took a breath and opened the bedroom door.

To her great relief, the room had been divested of all signs of habitation and was being used for storage. Boxes and furniture filled the furnace-like space; she recognized a couch slipcovered in peony chintz from Annie and Lester's old house. She wondered if it was an accident or because of Fran's untimely death that this room had been relegated to storage. Would its disuse honor Fran or merely preserve the tragedy by remaining a metaphor for a life not fully lived?

Gina stepped around the boxes to look out the window facing east. From this high perspective, she could see that despite Annie's description of letting the plants, time, and weather inform her gardening, there was nevertheless a pleasing structure to her garden. And something else caught her eye: on the old barn, a skylight running the length of its roof. A skylight! In Whit's Point, this was such an unexpectedly modern sight it might as well have been a spaceship perched on the shingled ridge. She ran downstairs and outside to investigate.

The barn was large relative to the house and had the saggy look of a forgotten outbuilding, though its clapboards were freshly painted. The padlock that hung from the door latch was unlocked.

She pulled open the door and what came to life before her was so unexpected she nearly gasped: a soaring, bright, open space enclosed by whitewashed walls, a refinished wide board floor and an exposed beam ceiling strung with light cables. A huge wooden fan was suspended from the center truss, whirring loudly. On the walls hung several richly colored rugs: Navajo, Oaxacan, and Turkish, perhaps
souvenirs from Annie and Lester's travels. At the end of the room where Gina stood was an upright piano; next to it, Annie's violin and a music stand that held the music for a Bach concerto. A pile of music books, notebooks, envelopes of photographs and a half-full coffee cup emblazoned with a treble signature were scattered across a large unfinished pine table. In the corner nearest the door stood the ladder Gina needed and Annie's garden tools: rake and spade, a watering can, and a bucket that held a dibble, trowel, and pruning shears.

Gina froze. She felt she'd stumbled upon something intensely private—sacred, like the forts she'd built as a child. The place was the personification of Annie and Lester—tall and powerful, warm and engaging. Slowly, she moved to the center of the room where she could fully absorb the life emanating from its walls. Under the skylight the space was so luxuriously unfettered—defined only by a large worn oriental rug and a single overstuffed chair—she wanted to spread her arms and dance!

At the opposite end of the room stood metal shelving that held journals, books, stacks of letters. A laptop sat on a heavy antique desk with ornate metal drawer pulls—Lester's desk, Gina guessed. She slipped behind the Japanese screen that obscured the remainder of the room, and jumped when she spotted Lester's crutch, then Lester himself, lying flat on his back on the floor, his eyes closed. She rushed to him.

“Lester, are you hurt?”

Lester squinted up at her. His face was drained of color, his shirt soaked with perspiration. “Oh, Gina, thank goodness you're here, dear. I must have dozed off, and I'm awfully thirsty. I–I– slipped and fell. Annie hasn't come home yet?”

“No, she hasn't. How long have you been here?”

“I don't know; too long. I called for Annie but . . . oh, gosh, I just stepped on a damn piece of paper and
fwitt!
My legs flew out from
under me, and I couldn't reach my crutch. I think you'd better not move me—it's my leg or my hip.”

Gina called 911 and grabbed a cushion to put under Lester's head. She tilted a glass of water to his lips, and he drank.

“Annie?” he said into the glass.

“She'll be back later, Lester. I've called for help.”

“Where's Annie?” Lester asked as the ambulance wound its way along Pickering Road.

When Gina reminded him she was at the symphony, he said, “That's right. She'll be home after dinner.” He turned away as if to contemplate this possibility, and Gina would always remember how changed he seemed at that moment, how his confidence had seemed to wither as confusion and pain filled his face.

“What time is it then, Ginny?”

“It's three.” She turned her watch to him, and he squinted at the numbers.

“Oh, well, I meant to tell her to fill the gas tank before she left,” he said and closed his eyes.

The ambulance flew over the Whit's Point Bridge. As Gina watched Lester's chest rise and fall with his heavy breathing, her own chest tightened against her racing heart. What if Lester had had a stroke or a heart attack? Perhaps if she hadn't been so all-consumed with this house business, she would have found him sooner!

The paramedic finished examining him and sat down, looking relieved. “No major breaks at least—we'll see what the X-rays tell us.”

Lester said, “I just need some Advil and a good stiff drink.”

Gina couldn't remember ever having been at the Riversport hospital, a fact that seemed strange to her now. She'd been in boarding school when her mother had had a hysterectomy, in California
when her father had had his bypass. She'd always imagined her local hospital would be a sorry, outdated version of the cold and sterile medical centers in San Francisco. But Riversport looked more like a Marriott Hotel, with carpeting instead of linoleum, potted plants everywhere, landscapes by local artists on the walls, even a plate of oatmeal cookies on the admittance desk. There were only four others in the waiting room, one a mother holding a young child. Nurses and doctors passing through the ER lobby actually smiled and said hello.

Gina sat next to Lester's gurney furiously filling out forms with the information Lester gave her.

“Ginny, you're a dear,” Lester said when she'd finished with the forms.

Gina felt undeserving of his appreciation, but there was such sweetness in his voice she impulsively took his hand. It was large and sticky in hers. “Let's hope they can see you quickly. Can I get you anything?”

Lester asked for more water, and when he finished drinking, he took a deep breath. “Oh dear . . . you know, I'm a little rattled. I can't remember where, exactly, you said Annie was going. The symphony was it? Goodness. I think I need a little nap. Ayuh—that's what I need.”

While Lester slept, Gina turned on her cell phone and a text from Allison leapt onto the screen:
Any thoughts re: playhouse?
Gina thought of Annie and Lester's studio overflowing with character, and all the other secret places in her life, real and imagined.
I think you should let the kids design it and help build it,
she texted back.
They'll be so much happier with the results!

She called the Maine Symphony office in Portland and asked them to try to track down Annie. Then she left a message for Paul, telling him about Lester's fall.

A nurse came over to take Lester's pulse. “I'm afraid we're unusually busy with a couple of critical cases,” she said, turning to Gina. Her face was kind and so wide that her ears seemed to disappear. “You might want to get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. Your father may have a wait.”

Gina let the mistake go. Thinking Lester might be hungry since he'd gone without lunch, she bought him a sandwich and some iced tea. He was still asleep when she returned, and she picked up a copy of
Dream House
magazine from the table next to her.
Make your home your dream-come-true,
the cover said.
House, home
—real-estate agents and journalists used the two words interchangeably even though one was concrete, or wood or brick as the case may be, and the other abstract, subjective. The magazine was repellent; the houses sprawled almost pornographically across its pages. A gaudy sunset shot from across a lighted infinity pool; a room jammed with African artifacts and hide-covered furniture; a garage full of vintage cars; and a media room stacked floor to ceiling with equipment. The rooms had been composed by a stylist, then composed again through the lens of the photographer—they were compositions of compositions that provided no sense of the houses' spaces, of architecture.
Dream houses?
No room here for dreams.

Gina dropped the magazine on the table. The truth was, the professional magazines stacked in her office didn't do much better. They published
art
houses—not for the approval of consumers but for that of architects—commissioned by people whose primary motivation was to own an award-winning house. Sometimes the carte blanche they gave their architects resulted in a building that was architecturally extraordinary
and
an efficient and comfortable dwelling. But often, awards were given to projects that were low-functioning and proud of it; while their inhabitants publicly pronounced their
architects
brilliant,
in private, they cursed the flat roof that didn't drain, the clanging metal stair, the skylight over the bed that cut short their sleep.

It was challenging to strike the right balance, and Gina had made her share of mistakes; with time, she'd learned to recognize which projects would inevitably compromise her aesthetic—occasionally resulting in her not taking one on—and when her vision would seriously impede utility. The Stones had given her tremendous freedom with their house, and she hoped it would showcase her artistry while also realizing their visions and needs.

As if summoned, her phone vibrated in her pocket; she pulled it out to find Jeffrey Stone's number striped across her screensaver photo of Esther and Ben.