The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  Arthur wasn’t handsome, but he had a look that drew Diana to him. His eyes were the greenish-slate color of old hard courts. This was what Diana remembered. Other than his eyes, the details of Arthur’s face had become less clear as the years passed. Diana couldn’t remember the particular shape of his nose. At UT, during that first year when they were together, Diana fell asleep every night by imagining his face beside her, watching her as she drifted off. Even after they’d broken up, she kept imagining this. Even when they hadn’t spoken in months. One night, after a year or so, she realized that she couldn’t remember his face anymore. She couldn’t sleep. She spent the whole night feeling as though she were falling, slowly, off a steep precipice.

  But if she closed her eyes, here in this house where they spent so much time, she could feel the shape of his jaw in her hand.

  Something scurried somewhere off in the darkness. She opened her eyes again. She was getting accustomed to the dark. She could make out the wide cement panels on the floor, the wood slats of the inside wall, the gambrel ceiling with its cedar beams. Above her was the loft, encircling three walls of the house, the place where she and Arthur had accumulated the trappings of a bedroom. She brought books; he brought an air mattress and a heap of blankets that smelled like mothballs. She brought a space heater; he brought wooden whiskey crates to use as furniture. For two years they kept a secret world up there. It was the only thing about her life that no one knew. When, after her freshman year of college, in the filtered light of the loft, Arthur asked her to marry him, it seemed completely natural. In the secret world of the carriage house, they’d been living together a long time, alone in their private universe. He bought her a slim gold ring with money from the construction job he’d worked all year. She slipped it on, and in the surge of excitement that followed the gesture, she bit his hand so hard she left a red semicircle on the web between his index finger and his thumb.

  As soon as she stepped out onto the lawn wearing the ring on her wedding finger, she became aware that there would be problems. Though William knew that Diana and Arthur were dating, he was confident that Di would move on in college. Because of this, he could temper his disapproval. If asked about Arthur, he’d say, “He has no direction.” Or, more thoughtfully, “It’s not his fault, he can’t help the family he has. But he has no sense of his consequence.” Her mother wouldn’t care: she and Arthur had spent time together in the garden, and he had helped plant her bulbs. Oddly, it had seemed like the two of them got along in a way Diana couldn’t entirely understand. She’d watched them from the stone bench by the pond, their white hands darting in and out of the soil. She’d been curious about the easy way they knelt together side by side. Even before her diagnosis, Margaux seemed lost when it came to advising her children. She had ceded this ground to William long before she got sick. No, the more important thing was that William wouldn’t approve. His disapprobation would be compounded by the issue of Elizabeth’s pending marriage to Mark. After college, Elizabeth had moved out to L.A., and when she came back for Thanksgiving, she announced that she was engaged to a successful character actor who lived in Los Feliz. It took William a couple of days to recover from the shock. They’d never even met him, and William hadn’t been asked for his blessing. He had to mentally redefine the engagement as a move that was good for her career. “Things are different out there in L.A.,” he said to Diana, trying to arrange his surprise into a useful system. He sliced the air into vertical segments with his hand. “Your sister has always been smart. I’m sure what she’s doing is good for her career.” By the time Arthur gave Diana the ring, Elizabeth was three months pregnant with Caroline, and William was struggling to understand how children had become a part of Elizabeth’s plan. Diana felt his disappointment, thick and awful because he was always so proud of his girls.

  That was what she was thinking about as she walked across the lawn with Arthur’s ring on her finger. William had only just wrapped his head around the idea of Elizabeth’s marriage, and now his middle girl had gotten engaged before she was twenty. There was no pride, Diana told herself, in breaking your father’s heart. He had given them so much; she would not add to his disappointment. She took the ring off before she reached the patio and put it in the pocket of her jeans. When she walked through the kitchen door, William looked up from his paper and asked how physical therapy had gone. She kissed him on the cheek before going up to her room, where she put the ring on a chain that she could wear around her neck, hidden under her clothes.

  Only a week later, Margaux announced that she’d been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was only forty-seven at the time. Precisely forty-seven, because it was her birthday when she told them. Izzy had planned a party, with Japanese lanterns and angel food cake. Adelia was there, new to Breacon but already a regular presence in the house. On the night of the party, she exuded a fever of gratitude for having been invited. At the head of the table, Margaux wore a pink crown cut out of construction paper. She made the announcement with a placid expression, right before she blew out the candles that Izzy had arranged on her cake. There was an enchanted glow to the whole suspended moment. Margaux in her pink paper crown, the girls, William, and bright-faced Adelia. They all hovered at the cusp of something, and even as the announcement unfolded, Diana somehow imagined Margaux was going to give them good news.

  Once she finished talking, she closed her eyes and leaned forward to blow out the candles. Her long hair dipped so close to the flames that Diana imagined her head engulfed in a fiery halo. Izzy stuck her knife through one of the paper lanterns. Ever so slowly, it sighed and collapsed. “Are they sure?” William asked. Through lingering smoke, Margaux nodded. “Oh, Margaux,” Adelia said, and Izzy stood up and punctured every other lantern on the chain. They deflated slowly. “I should go upstairs,” Margaux said. “I’m sorry to have ruined the party.” And then she left, and Izzy ran off somewhere, and the rest of the family, including Adelia, picked up the tinselly mess left in her wake.

  After they all moved into the kitchen, Diana watched William washing the silverware, and she could see that he was perplexed but not upset. It was comforting, in one sense, to have a concrete medical excuse for the many ways that Margaux had left them all behind. It was good to know that they weren’t imagining the ebbing they’d felt for years. At the same time, Diana experienced a quickening of the fear that had been building in her throughout the year, while she was injured and anxious about her tennis career. In Texas, far away from William and Arthur and the town where she’d been a great champion, Diana felt the boundaries of herself beginning to blur. There were other athletes at UT more impressive than she. She could not define herself as the most athletic girl in her class. She was sidelined after her injury, and without matches to prove herself, she had little else of substance to produce. She struggled with sleeplessness, and only during Arthur’s visits, when she fell asleep anchored to his physical closeness, did she feel rested enough to imagine a comeback. Since returning to Breacon for summer vacation, she’d felt infinitely surer about herself. But Margaux’s announcement made her worry again about something lurking in her genes. A short-windedness. As she dried the silverware that William passed her, Diana remembered those sleepless nights at UT, listening to doors slamming shut throughout the recesses of the athletes’ dorm, and she felt as though a destroyer angel had swept past at some point and marked her forehead with its thumb.

  The announcement offered new proof for the things that Diana had started suspecting existed in herself. Afterward, aspects of her daily life in Breacon came to stand as proof of the propensity for early decline. Even the carriage house, with Arthur, started to seem like evidence of a Mom-ish desire to shrink off into dark recesses, leaving a former, more successful self behind. It was these doubts that caused her to tell Elizabeth about the engagement. Elizabeth told William; William told Adelia. Elizabeth’s disapproval wouldn’t have bothered Diana much, as she was clearly preoccupied with h
er own romantic drama. Even William’s disapproval, Diana could have handled. There were techniques she could have used to avoid breaking his heart. She could have promised him that she would wait until she’d finished with school. She could have assured him that it would not affect her tennis, and she could have proven that to him on court. But the talk with Adelia shifted something in her.

  In a short period of time, Diana had come to cherish her relationship with Adelia, this woman who had come back to her childhood home, single, with a successful career at a law firm downtown. She swept into Breacon just as Margaux was getting more distant, and she attached herself to the Adairs—to William and Diana in particular—with an enthusiasm that felt like a life raft. William admired her; by extension, Diana hoped to impress her. In a short time, Di came to want to please Adelia almost as much as she had always hoped to make her father proud.

  “Di, I know I’m not your mother,” Adelia said after she found out. “And I know I have no right to talk to you about these things. But I have some experience with marriage. I’ve been through it twice. When I was young, all women did was get married. It was the only ambition we were given.” But Adelia was an athlete. She dreamed of playing in Wimbledon. She was college champion. And when she was twenty, in her senior year, because everyone around her was getting married and she thought she was running out of time, she married her husband and dropped out of school. Every night for a year she made him a different dinner out of The Joy of Cooking, and then one night, over a fallen soufflé, she started to cry. She wanted to become something. He never understood. He couldn’t imagine that, in marrying him, she had not become the thing she dreamed of, that every day she spent in his house, she was moving farther away from herself. That she had finally come so far, she feared she would never get back to the person she’d hoped to become. After the first divorce, she returned to school, but it was too late for her tennis career. Billie Jean King was winning Wimbledon. Adelia might never have gotten quite so good as that, but she regretted her whole life not having given it more of a try. “You have so much potential,” Adelia told Diana. “I couldn’t bear to see you lose that.”

  They were sitting at the same glass table on the patio where Margaux had made her announcement. Beyond them, the sound of the pond, trickling. And beyond that, the rows of Margaux’s garden, meticulous and opulent. And then Adelia said the thing that most clinched Diana’s mind. “I say this for the sake of Arthur, too. If you marry him now, your life will be settled. That’s a wonderful feeling. Safe. But it wouldn’t be fair to him. To ask him to settle before he’s had a chance to dream of the person he’d like to become. He’s working construction, but he should be more. He must want more than that for himself.” “He’s going to own a restaurant,” Di murmured without meeting Adelia’s eye. “That’s exactly what I mean,” Adelia agreed, although from the sound of her voice, it was clear that she wasn’t certain that owning a restaurant was a big enough ambition for the man Diana would marry. “A bigger ambition, like owning a restaurant, or whatever else he decides on. He needs time to pursue that on his own. If you get married, he’ll have everything he wants. But now is the time for him to want more.” She gave Diana a moment to contemplate the possibilities she’d take from Arthur if she were to marry him now. When Adelia spoke again, she leaned forward as if sharing a secret from her life that no one else could know. “And Di, listen, if you two are meant to be, you’ll end up back together in the end.”

  After that talk, Diana spent the rest of the summer meeting Arthur in the carriage house, pressing her face against the slope of his pale shoulders. He knew she was wearing the ring hidden, but he never pressed her about it. He must have trusted that she was only taking her time. Without telling him the truth, she clung to her final days with him, watching shadows pass across his half-hidden eyes. Treasuring the secrets of their private life in the loft. In the last week of the summer, she told him they needed to fulfill their promise before they could end up together.

  “I don’t know what you mean. What is this ‘promise’? We promised to get married. What other kind of promise do you mean?”

  Diana’s confidence faltered. “I just mean there are things we should accomplish before we end up together.”

  “We will accomplish things. I’m not worried about it.”

  “But we should accomplish things for ourselves before we’ve settled down.” She could feel her logic becoming less clear, but she remembered the certainty in Adelia’s voice.

  Arthur watched her stumbling. “Do you want to date other people?” he asked.

  Diana hadn’t even considered that. “No, Arthur, it’s just I have this feeling that we’re both becoming different versions of ourselves, and we have to finish that before we marry each other.”

  “What is this different version you want to be?”

  “I don’t really know,” Diana said. She was getting flustered. “I want to win the NCAAs. I want to do well in school. I want to be an architect or a politician.”

  “An architect or a politician?” he repeated, and Diana felt his scorn.

  “Arthur,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to become, but I want to become something before we settle down.”

  And so, with Adelia’s advice echoing in her ears, Diana continued holding on to the familiar shape of his body, aching from head to toe. Finally, exhausted, she told him goodbye, left the ring in his palm, and walked back over the lawn to the house.

  The next day she went back to Texas, to the flat, glassy heat of the tennis courts in August. She stood there, alone on the bare expanse of exposed concrete, under the full stands, and only then did she know how much she’d given up. Sleeping got harder. She tried to date other boys, but no one was as good as Arthur. Her knee never fully recovered, or at least that was what she told herself, because something changed about her game. She couldn’t perform as she once had. Tennis was no longer simple. It was an effort that involved her entire body and her entire mind. It became exhausting. She had a bad season, and the next year a new recruit from Florida assumed her spot at number one.

  And she lost Arthur for good. He wouldn’t return her calls. There was no “for now” in his mind. His mind had comprehended the concept of forever and didn’t adjust itself back to the level of now. He spent another year working construction, then went out west somewhere for school. She heard he was paying his own way by working in a restaurant, and she tried to call him to offer congratulations—she had never done something so independent or self-directed in her whole small life—but his number had changed.

  Now he was here, only a yard behind her, so close that the feel of his jaw in her hand had returned. He was here, and the span of time when Adelia had been so sure Diana would find herself had passed, and there had been no flowering of her potential. She had faded, and that was all. She was pursuing a discipline that didn’t make her father proud, and she wasn’t pursuing it well. For Diana Adair—class president, acer of math and science APs, class pet of the shop teacher with his sawdusty mustache and his missing thumb—architecture school ought to have been a breeze. But she applied three times and was rejected twice. After she was finally accepted, only she, of all her cohort, failed to graduate on time. She left her flawed blueprints on the bus rather than have to defend them. Diana had practiced the art of failure and no longer remembered what it was like to be the successful girl she was when she gave Arthur back his ring.

  Tomorrow she would see him. At twenty-seven, she wasn’t as pretty as she was when he met her at seventeen. He had become everything he hoped, and she couldn’t remember how her confident seventeen-year-old self once talked. Restless, Diana stood up. She tested the second step with her foot. She placed half her weight on it, then all. It shifted beneath her. It wouldn’t be safe to try. They’d had a ladder when they slept up there; even then the stairs weren’t safe. She backed down to the floor and considered those sagging stairs. If only she could
climb back up to the loft. She wondered whether anything remained up there: the space heater, a blanket, some books. She had no idea. She’d stayed away from the carriage because Arthur wouldn’t talk to her. Without him, she hadn’t wanted to spend time inside.

  And now it was going to be demolished unless Adelia’s wild scheme to move it could work. The desire to succeed in the relocation flooded her. She did not want to lose this place. If they could get it onto the Adair property, a renovation could work. She could even help. The structure could be saved, the materials preserved. The idea animated her. She walked out of the carriage house and circled it once. Tomorrow she would talk to the contractors. There were things she could do. Encouraged, she walked back through the garden into the house and climbed the stairs. On the second floor, before she turned in to her bedroom, she caught sight of Adelia walking out of the bathroom. Her hair was tousled, and she was wearing a floor-length white nightgown. The sight of her startled Diana. Adelia was generally so composed. She wore sweater sets and capri pants. There were always earrings in her ears and clips in her neat blond bob. To see her in a nightgown like that, blurry-visioned without her contacts, was somehow upsetting.