Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  “What can you see yourself living in?”

  “Beats me.”

  He looks over the top of his glasses with amused annoyance.

  I smile weakly at him. “Sorry,” I say, “but it’s true.”

  He can hardly be surprised. I told him on one of our first dates that I’ve always been ill at ease with the third dimension. Because Hal thinks in terms of things you can see or hear, he was sure I was exaggerating, despite the fact that my conversation seldom strayed from emotions and memory and relationships and the meaning of life. He even teased me about the frequency with which I had epiphanies, playing off the bossa nova song “The Girl from Ipanema” by calling me “the Girl from Epiphanema.” Still, for a long time, Hal remained unconvinced about my 3-D ineptitude. But after two decades of my balking at such inscrutable feats as lacing my shoes, giving up on fax machines and CD players, discerning no distinctions between models of cars, likening televised sports to moving wallpaper, and delaying driving until my thirties—all while he glided through the triple rings of height-length-and-depth with the grace of a bareback rider—he’s had to concede that I was right.

  Now he says, “It’s that darned third dimension again.”

  I nod, adding a pout to induce extra sympathy.

  “Then we’ll just deal with it, okay?” he says, his annoyance softening to alliance.

  “I’ll do my part,” I say, as he takes my hand. “Whatever the heck that is.”

  Our familiar imbalance now out in the open, we walk into the labyrinth, winding past bathrooms so well-appointed they look like Disney World sets, so unsullied they look like alternate realities. I want to make a joke, but this is serious business.

  Finally he stops between two displays. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s compare these sinks.”

  “One’s white, one’s gray.”

  “Right. But look. That one’s freestanding. The other’s set into a cabinet. That one has shiny fixtures, those fixtures are burnished. There’s tile, there’s marble. What do you like?”

  I look forlornly at the displays. There are too many details for me to assess, and anyway, they look like the sort of places other people live in—people like my older sister Laura, who’s decorated her Arizona house with kitschy collectibles from yard sales. Or my brother, Max, whose New Jersey house is done in stately Americana. Or the millions who watch renovation TV. I admire the knowledge those people possess, any one of whom would make a more suitable match for this thoughtful architect than I. Instead, he got a client and wife who’s never cared about owning things, and has felt at home among only two decorating styles: Whatever’s Already in Place When I Move In, and Eclectic Mementos with Good Stories Behind Them.

  “Well,” I finally offer, “I like the shiny faucets.”

  He frowns. “You do?”

  “You don’t?”

  “I like the burnished kind better.”

  Now it’s my turn to give a withering look. “Are you the architect, or the husband?”

  He grins. “I’m the husbitect.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The architect will do the work. But the husband’s not a tyrant. This is about us.”

  Relieved to hear this, I turn back to the faucets. Okay, I’m more drawn to shiny faucets, but enough to make a case out of this? It’s not like when I was looking for the love of my life and had a clear image of what I wanted down to every detail. I’ve never even thought about faucets, and it’s not as if I couldn’t live with Hal’s preference. I suppose I could take a stand just to assert myself. But that’s one of the earliest lessons I learned about love, back before kindergarten, when I was playing dress-up with Laura and she always had to be the princess, I the queen: choose your battles. And this is one of the lessons I learned about love during the years away from Hal: it’s awfully easy to invent battles when none actually exist.

  “Well, husbitect,” I say, “just tell me what you like. If I feel strongly against it, I’ll say so. But since it doesn’t matter much to me, I probably won’t.”

  He squeezes my hand. “Think of all the lawsuits that could be avoided,” he says, “if every client in the world was like you.” He makes some notes on his clipboard.

  A week later, Hal announces that he’s ready to move ahead. He’ll buy a new sink, toilet, and tub, hire an installer, and pry off the bathroom wall tile himself. Although this plan has the virtue of economy, it makes me think about all the mug handles that have been waiting a decade for glue. I ask, “Uh, honey, how much would it cost to pay someone to do the whole bathroom?” He tries to reach some contractors to get estimates. Phone tag ensues for a few weeks, then slacks off into silence.

  This is when I reveal just how unideal I am as a client. “Maybe this is a sign,” I say one morning as he’s paging through issues of Architectural Record. He looks up. “A sign of what?” “A sign that we should, well, just postpone this renovation. You know, like indefinitely.” And this is where Hal reveals just how husbandly he is as an architect. “Yeah, right,” he responds, reaching for his clipboard, where he begins writing notes under columns he’s already labeled: “First Floor,” “Second Floor,” “Third.”

  I stare at him for a moment, but we both know that I’m not going to press my case. For one thing, I have too much respect for his expertise. But for another, I have recently become preoccupied with something far beyond the scale of the renovation—something I told him about last night, when we were getting into bed, and I casually mentioned that I was embarking on “my search for my life purpose.” Hal, having endured my existential crises in the past, laughed and said, “Again?” And when I got offended, he suggested that there was a more accurate way to put it: “The Search for Your Life Purpose 2.0.”

  He was right. My initial round of searching, which happened in my younger years, basically consisted of me pulling the lever over and over on the slot machine of my life, hoping for just one solid win in work, home, or love, but having all the reels keep spinning to blanks. Now, for the first time, I’m post-jackpot, and my pockets are jingling with happy stability, so I’m finally free to consider loftier goals. Not that I wish to give up writing, teaching, or speaking, nor could we survive financially if I did. But there are extraordinary second-act successes in this world, people who, after a stellar career in one field, take on noble causes—think Jimmy Carter, Bono, Bill Gates. Or lesser-known Samaritans I’ve met in my travels who, after midlife milestones like remarriage or sobriety, started making documentaries, directing early-intervention schools, running rural transit systems. I want to do something like that. Something that would be transformative for others and a fresh challenge for me—without jostling the very agreeable life I now have. Something that would, dare I say it, change the world. If only I could figure out what it is.

  “You know,” Hal says now, eyes turned to the clipboard, “your Search for Life Purpose 2.0 is well-timed.” “How’s that?” I ask. “Because I know that even though you might be anxious and tentative, you have something more important on your mind, so I’ll be able to think freely about this.”

  He makes a wry smile at me, and I do the same to him.

  And just like that, our start-small project becomes the complete renovation of our house.

  “Here’s what I’ve been thinking,” Hal says when we’re at a café a few nights later, getting him a soy mocha latte. He presses his hand to his shirt pocket, making the architect’s pledge of allegiance to find his ever-present mechanical pencil, then brings the lead to the back of a receipt.

  I observe from my usual upside-down position. “Since we want to catch the light from the south,” he says, “we need to take down the wall between the dining room and the kitchen.”

  He draws, and I do my best to make sense of his developing sketch, though, as always, his first many marks seem incoherent to me. This is probably true of everyone who lacks the ability to visualize space, though maybe it’s an even more formidable exercise for me. But over the years I�
��ve learned to be patient when he draws. Because look: within moments, he adds the stroke that gives me the perspective I’ve needed, and his lines cohere into meaning.

  He spins the receipt around. I follow him completely as he walks me through what I now understand to be a floor plan. “Here’s the western wall, the back porch along the southern wall, the three windows along the eastern alley. This jutting intrusion is the stairwell to the basement. And you know the pantry wall that separates the kitchen and dining room?”

  “There’s no pantry wall on this sketch.”

  “Right. If we take it down, the light from the south can penetrate deep into the house.”

  “It’ll be a nice big room.”

  “So you like it?”

  “From what I can tell, yes. But how can I be sure?”

  “But you think you do. That’s a start.”

  “Where are the stove and the sink?”

  “I haven’t worked that out. I want to reconfigure the whole kitchen.”

  “What about the disgusting cabinets and floor?”

  “There’s an order to all this, and getting the overall design comes way before appliances and flooring. But eventually I’ll probably design new cabinets and research new floors. I’m getting ideas for a new study for you, too.”

  “You are? A whole new study?”

  He flips the receipt over. “It’s a cool idea,” he says as he draws.

  I resume my gaze, waiting again as the differences between our minds become apparent, then, with a single jot of his pencil, disappear.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “You like it?”

  I look at the paper again, marveling at how it takes only one small notation to create a whole shift in perspective. “Are you kidding?” I say. “It’s beautiful.” I look up at him and he’s beaming.

  Around this time I begin to experience something I never imagined might happen.

  I grasp this at about two a.m. one night, when Hal rustles in bed beside me and then gets up to go to his music studio to put his latest ideas on paper. He’s been doing this for weeks now, so, as usual, I mumble, “Come back soon,” and try to go back to sleep.

  But by the time his feet mount the stairs to the third floor, I know that once again I, too, will remain awake, and I realize that every night, as Hal’s thoughts have unfolded from room to room in the house that is and reshaped themselves into the house that has yet to be, my thoughts have rolled backward in time, leaving the life I now live to visit the times I left behind. I don’t know why this is happening, just that the first few nights my thoughts were about the journey of reconnection I began when I was riding buses with Beth, and then, the next several nights, about the journey of forgiveness I began after my mother’s disappearance. Lately, though, my thoughts have flowed toward the errors I made in those first years with Hal—and I finally see what’s been linking all these nights together. It is love I’ve been thinking about, in all its messy permutations, and my long struggle, one person after another, to understand what love is.

  How hard I once focused, I now let myself recall, on the ways that Hal and I differed. He spoke slowly. My words came out like a ticker-tape machine. He had a handful of friends who he saw less and less over time, I had a cast of thousands who multiplied by the day. On the rare occasions when he exercised, he did yoga. I worked out every day—power-walking, aerobics, weight-training—anything but yoga. He stayed up late and slept late; I went to bed early and rose at dawn. He drank coffee; I, tea. He liked summer; I, winter.

  None of these differences truly irked me, but that could not be said of the effort he put into composing music on his guitar. This would seem to be less a difference than similarity, since I devoted so much energy to writing. But Hal’s compositions were influenced by such nonmainstream performers as Captain Beefheart, Ornette Cole-man, Gong, and obscure psychedelic bands, and my listening preferences were the Beatles, National Public Radio, and silence. Also, he drifted from one half-finished piece to the next. I’d sit at my desk, losing my concentration as his snippets drifted into my study—and I’d steam. Why create atonal music when he was equally fond of melody? How could this man live with himself if he didn’t finish things? And, the big one: if we have such fundamental disparities, how could this be true love?

  True love—that was the crux of the matter. The couples at college who were so in sync, they’d dance for hours at parties with their eyes closed. John and Yoko, who shared dreams of peace and iconoclasm. Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall—celluloid lovers with witty repartee. As for my true love? I knew just who he was. An unwritten but very exacting list.

  It was a list of my own tastes and traits (well, the good ones), as well as specific physical attributes, and early in my love life, one boyfriend had even satisfied most of it, assuming I overlooked his determination to never love me. Yet I believed, as did friends still prospecting for their own soul mates, that a perfect fit merely awaited discovery. In fact, large swaths of my conversations with friends were given over to analyzing why we’d failed thus far. So even though I met Hal under circumstances that were so against-all-odds, so miraculous, that in a movie he’d have to be my true love, even though his looks were strikingly aligned with my fantasy, even though all my friends thought him a man of fine character, and even though he made me feel cherished, inspired my imagination, and accepted my weaknesses, a few checks were missing on my list. Therefore, how could he possibly be The One?

  Only during the six years of our breakup did I start wondering if my idea of love was just a teensy bit askew. Actually, as I lay on the air mattress in the attic where I lived our first year apart, I came to feel horrified with myself. Look, I started saying to myself, even more insistently than Hal had in the bath and kitchen store. Look at what’s right in front of you. Suddenly my mind defogged. The couples I’d known in college had all gone down in flames. Yoko threw John out of the house for years. Movie couples often resulted from matches made in adultery. As for friends who’d championed soul mates, only those who’d chucked their own lists had become well-partnered—either to the steady spouse they’d finally come to hold dear, or to even-tempered true-blues they’d have never noticed in the past.

  I hadn’t wanted a man. I’d wanted a mirage.

  Ashamed at having duped myself for my entire life, terrified that I was already thirty-six, and feeling too guilty and played-out to ask Hal to resume, I decided that if I was ever going to have a relationship again, I had to approach love as an apprentice. Only this time, rather than rely on Romeos and Juliets I saw purely from afar, I’d look at happy couples I knew firsthand.

  Initially, I looked to my parents, seeking enlightenment from the original source. Although they’d failed to achieve a lasting pas de deux with each other, they’d created rewarding marriages with other partners. But how? I rarely saw my mother, who lived in Florida with her third husband, Gordon, and I was feeling too foolish to ask them about love over the phone. Though I adored visiting my father and his second wife, Theresa, who lived a few hours from me, I felt even more tentative querying them. So at first my apprenticeship yielded no insights.

  Over the next few years, though, seeing that I had friends in satisfying partnerships, I grew bolder. When one told me that his wife was less talkative than he, I asked how he could stand it. “When she doesn’t feel like talking,” he said, “I just enjoy my own thoughts.” Another mentioned that her long-term girlfriend lacked the charisma of previous partners. I asked if this was hard. She sighed. “I’m so done with drama.” A third friend, married to a woman raised in Central America, learned Spanish and bought a vacation home in her country. “If you embrace another person,” he told me, “your life doubles.”

  But the big breakthrough happened on a simple phone call. I was speaking with a friend, Harriet, who was still devoted to her husband, Vic, of forty years, as was he to her. In the background I heard piano music. I knew Vic owned many recordings of jazz greats, so I asked Harriet, “Who’s
Vic playing?” She said, “That is Vic. He’s taken piano lessons for years.” I’d never known this, and I asked, “Do you like what he plays?” She laughed. “I like jazz okay, but he’s terrible.” I gasped. Then I asked, “Doesn’t that bother you?” “Why should it?” she said. “It makes him happy. That’s what matters to me.”

  Her words provided the missing line in the sketch. Of course. My chatterbox mother didn’t garden all day like quiet Gordon, nor did he read mysteries at night like she did, but they gave each other the regard to indulge in their pursuits—and personalities. Unlike my brilliant father, the equally brainy Theresa didn’t spend her days reading the New York Times, preferring literary novels. But they encouraged each other’s differences while relishing their similarities. I brought this up one day when I was on the buses with Beth. Her long-term boyfriend, Jesse, was as passionate about riding his bicycle as she was about riding buses, leading me to ask, “You don’t mind that he does something you don’t do?” She looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Why should I care?” she said. “Thiz way I see him enough—and not too much.”

  So when Hal reached for my hand on the third floor of his house and I fully embraced the second incarnation of our relationship, I decided to adopt Harriet’s perspective. The effect was instant. No longer did I judge Hal’s enthusiasms by whether I shared them or had them on my list, but by whether, in his opinion, they made his life more worth living. How quickly my life doubled then. How easily we got along. All I had to do was open myself to asymmetry.

  If I could walk the path of my thoughts tonight and enter my old study and see my younger self sitting in judgment of her boyfriend’s music, I would pull up a chair. Trust me, I’d tell her, the certainties that you hold about another person, and yourself, can change. One day years from now, Hal won’t talk as slowly anymore and you won’t talk as fast. You’ll like summer, he, power-walking. Though you’re now the metaphysical one, guess who’ll become Buddhist? Why make such a big deal over differences? What do you think love really is?