JANUARY 1, 2001
Dear Franklin,
Call it a New Year’s resolution, since for years I’ve been busting to tell you: I hated that house. On sight. It never grew on me, either. Every morning I woke to its glib surfaces, its smart design features, its sleek horizontal contours, and actively hated it.
I grant that the Nyack area, woodsy and right on the Hudson, was a good choice. You had kindly opted for Rockland County in New York rather than somewhere in New Jersey, a state in which I’m sure there are many lovely places to live but that had a
sound
to it that would have slain me. Nyack itself was racially integrated and, to meet the eye, down-market, with the same slight dishevelment of Chatham—though unlike Chatham, its shabby, unassuming quality was an illusion, since pretty much all the new arrivals for decades had been stinking rich. Main Street eternally backed up with Audis and BMWs, its overpriced fajita joints and wine bars bursting, its dumpy outlying two-bedroom clapboards listing for 700 grand, Nyack’s one pretension was its lack of pretension. In contrast to Gladstone itself, I’m afraid, a relatively new bedroom community to the north, whose tiny town center—with fake gas street lamps, split-rail fencing, and commercial enterprises like “Ye Olde Sandwich Shoppe”—epitomized what the British call “twee.”
In fact, my heart sank when you first plowed the pickup proudly up the long, pompous drive off Palisades Parade. You’d told me nothing about the property, the better to “surprise” me. Well. I was surprised. A flat-roofed, single-storied expanse of glass and sandy brick, at a glance it resembled the headquarters of some slick, do-gooding conflict-resolution outfit with more money than it knew what to do with, where they’d give “peace prizes” to Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela.
Had we never discussed what I envisioned? You must have had some idea. My fantasy house would be old, Victorian. If it had to be big it would be high, three stories and an attic, full of nooks and crannies whose original purpose had grown obsolete—slave quarters and tackle rooms, root cellars and smokehouses, dumbwaiters and widow’s walks. A house that was falling to bits, that dripped history as it dropped slates, that cried out for fiddly Saturday repairs to its rickety balustrade, while the fragrant waft of pies cooling on counters drifted upstairs. I’d furnish it with secondhand sofas whose floral upholstery was faded and frayed, garage-sale drapes with tasseled tiebacks, ornate mahogany sideboards with speckled looking glass. Beside the porch swing, struggling geraniums would spindle out of an old tin milking pail. No one would frame our ragged quilts or auction them off as rare early American patterns worth thousands; we’d throw them on the bed and wear them out. Like wool gathering lint, the house would seem to accumulate junk of its own accord: a bicycle with worn brake shoes and a flat tire; straight-backs whose dowel rods need regluing; an old corner cabinet of good wood but painted a hideous bright blue, which I keep saying I’m going to strip down and never do.
I won’t go on, because you know
exactly
what I’m talking about. I know they’re hard to heat, I know they’re drafty. I know the septic tank would leak, the electric bills run high. I know you’d anguish that the old well in the backyard was a dangerous draw for neighborhood urchins, for I can picture this home so vividly in my mind that I can walk across its overgrown yard with my eyes closed and fall in that well myself.
Curling out of the truck onto the semicircular concrete turnaround in front of our new abode, I thought,
abode
, isn’t that the word. My ideal home was cozy and closed the world out; looking out onto the Hudson (admittedly, the view was smashing), these wide plate glass windows advertised an eternal open house. Pink pebble-fill with flagstone paths skirted its splay like one big welcome mat. The facade and central walkway were lined with stunted shrubs. No black walnut trees, no uncultivated riot of goldenrod and moss, but
shrubs
. Surrounding them? A lawn. Not even the sweet cool sort, whose fine bright shoots tempt a laze with lemonade and bees, but that springy, scratchy kind, like those green abrasive scrub pads for washing dishes.
You flung open the entrance. The foyer dribbled into a living room the size of a basketball court, and then up a couple of low stairs and there was the dining “room,” partially segmented from the kitchen with a divider to pass food through—some concoction with
sun-dried tomatoes
, no doubt. I had yet to lay eyes on one door. I panicked, thinking,
There’s nowhere to hide
.
“Tell me this isn’t dramatic,” you said.
I said honestly, “I’m dumbstruck.”
I’d have thought that a small child, let loose in a vast, unfurnished expanse of glossy wooden floors blazing in insipid sunshine would go dashing about, sliding down halls in socks, giggling and rampaging, utterly unfazed by the antiseptic wasteland—
wasteland,
Franklin—into which he had been dropped. Instead, Kevin slackened on your hand into dead weight and had to be urged to “go explore.” He plodded to the middle of the living room and sat. I’d suffered more than a few moments of alienation from my son, but just then—his eyes Little Orphan Annie O’s and dulled over like wax buildup, hands plopping on the floorboards like fish on a dock—I couldn’t have felt more akin.
“You’ve got to see the master bedroom,” you said, grabbing my hand. “The skylights are spectacular.”
“Skylights!” I said brightly.
All the angles in our massive bedroom were askew, its ceiling slanted. The effect was jangled, and the evident distrust of standard parallels and perpendiculars, like the whole building’s uneasiness with the concept of rooms, felt insecure.
“Something else, huh?”
“Something else!” At some indeterminate point in the nineties, expanses of teak would become passé. We weren’t there yet, but I had a premonition of the juncture.
You demonstrated our built-in teak laundry hamper, cleverly doubling as a bench, a cushion of smiley-face yellow strapped to its lid. You rolled back the doors of the closet on their gliding wheelies. The moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click. Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft.
You led me out the glass sliding doors to the deck. I thought, I have a
deck
. I will never shout, “I’m on the porch!” but “I’m on the
deck
.” I told myself it was only a word. Still, the platform cried out for barbecues with neighbors I did not much like. The swordfish steaks would be raw one minute, overcooked the next, and I would care.
Darling, I know I sound ungrateful. You’d searched very hard, taking on the job of finding us a home with all the seriousness of location scouting for Gillette. I’m better familiar with the real estate scarcity in the area now, so I trust that every other available property you looked at was plain hideous. Which this place was not. The builders had spared no expense. (Woe to those who
spare no expense
. I should know, since these are the travelers who scorn AWAP for holidays in “foreign” countries so comfortable that they qualify as near-death experiences.) The woods were precious—if in more than one sense—the taps gold-plated. The previous owners had commissioned it to their own exacting specifications. You had bought us some other family’s Dream Home.
I could see it. Our industrious couple works their way up from shoddy rentals to a series of nothing-special split-levels, until at last: an inheritance, a market upswing, a promotion. Finally they can afford to construct from the ground up
the house of their heart’s desire
. The couple pores over blueprints, weighing where to hide every closet, how to segue gracefully between the living area and the den (“With a DOOR!” I want to scream, but it is too late for my stodgy advice). All those innovative angles look so dynamic on paper. Even shrubs are rather adorable a quarter of an inch high.
But I have a theory about Dream Homes. Not for nothing does “folly” mean both
foolhardy mistake
and
costly ornamental building
. Because I’ve never seen a Dream Home that works. Like ours, some of them
almost
work, though unqualified disasters are equally common. Part of the problem is that regardless of how much money you lavish on oak baseboards, an unhistoried house is invariably cheap in another dimension. Otherwise, the trouble seems rooted in the nature of beauty itself, a surprisingly elusive quality and rarely one you can buy outright. It flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by
accident
. On my travels, I became a devotee of found art: a shaft of light on a dilapidated 1914 gun factory, an abandoned billboard whose layers have worn into a beguiling pentimento collage of Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, and Burma Shave, cut-rate pensions whose faded cushions perfectly match, in that unplanned way, the fluttering sun-blanched curtains.
Confoundingly then, this Gladstone Xanadu, beam by beam, would have materialized into a soul-destroying disappointment. Had the builders cut corners, an arrogant architect taken liberties with those painstaking plans? No, no. Down to the torturously blank kitchen cabinets, the visionary designs had been followed to the letter. That mausoleum on Palisades Parade came out precisely as its creators intended, and
that’s
what made it so depressing.
To be fair, the gap between most people’s capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean. So all evidence to the contrary, the original owners may have had pretty good taste; more’s the pity if they did. Certainly the fact that those two built a horror show was no proof against my theory that they knew very well that they’d constructed a horror show, too. I was further convinced that neither husband nor wife ever let on to the other what a downer this vapid atrocity turned out to be, that they each braved out the pretense that it was the house of their prayers, while at the same time separately scheming, from the day they moved in, to get out.
You said yourself the place was only three years old.
Three years old?
It would have taken that long to build! Who goes to that much trouble only to leave? Maybe Mr. Homeowner was transferred to Cincinnati, though in that case he accepted the job. What else would drive him out that clunky front door besides revulsion for his own creation? Who could live day after day with the deficiency of his own imagination made solid as brick?
“Why is it,” I asked as you led me around the sculpted backyard, “that the folks who built this place sold it so soon? After constructing a house that’s clearly so—ambitious?”
“I got the impression they were sort of, going in different directions.”
“Getting a divorce.”
“Well, it’s not as if that makes the property cursed or something.”
I looked at you with curiosity. “I didn’t say it did.”
“If houses passed that sort of thing along,” you blustered, “there wouldn’t be a shack in the country safe for a happy marriage.”
Cursed?
You obviously intuited that, sensible as the suburban recourse seemed on its face—big parks, fresh air, good schools—we had drifted alarmingly astray. Yet what strikes me now is not your foreboding, but your capacity to ignore it.
As for me, I had no premonitions. I was simply bewildered how I had landed, after Latvia and Equatorial Guinea, in Gladstone, New York. As if standing in the surf at Far Rockaway during a tide of raw sewage, I could barely keep my balance as our new acquisition exuded wave after wave of stark physical ugliness.
Why couldn’t you see it?
Maybe because you’ve always had a proclivity for
rounding up
. In restaurants, if 15 percent came to $17, you’d tip with a twenty. Should we have spent a tiresome evening with new acquaintances, I’d write them off; you’d want to give them a second chance. When that Italian girl I barely knew, Marina, turned up at the loft for two nights and then your watch disappeared, I was fuming; you grew only the more convinced that you must have left it at the gym. Lunch with Brian and Louise ought to have been fun? It was fun. You seemed to be able to squint and blur off the rough edges. As you gave me the grand tour of our new property, your camp counselor hard sell contrasted with a soulful look in your eyes, a pleading to play along. You talked nonstop, as if strung out on speed, and a lacing of hysteria fatally betrayed your own suspicion that 12 Palisades Parade was no formidable architectural exploit but an ostentatious flop. Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would
round it up
. While a cruder name for this process is
lying
, one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced
rounding up
on Kevin from the day he was born.
Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus. At the risk of tautology, I like people only as much as I like them. I lead an emotional life of such arithmetic precision, carried to two or three digits after the decimal, that I am even willing to allow for degrees of agreeableness in my own son. In other words, Franklin: I leave the $17.
I hope I persuaded you that I thought the house was lovely. It was the first big decision you’d ever made independently on our behalf, and I wasn’t about to pee all over it just because the prospect of living there made me want to slit my wrists. Privately I concluded that the explanation wasn’t so much your different aesthetic, or lack of one; it’s just that you were very suggestible. I hadn’t been there, whispering in your ear about dumbwaiters. In my absence, you reverted to the taste of your parents.