As Long As It's Perfect

by Lisa Tognola

  Sometimes I didn’t know whether our individual relationships with Luke were interfering with our marriage or improving it. Luke had recently told us he’d changed his mind about placing louver lids on the front of the house.

  My suggestion is to omit the louvers, he’d emailed.

  Wim, who was away on business at the time, had immediately sent me a private email: Funny, when I saw Luke’s email I thought it said “lovers.” I must really miss you.

  Or, I wondered, was he subconsciously worried?

  When I didn’t answer, Luke looked to Wim.

  “No comment,” Wim said.

  “I’m not a bad driver,” I said.

  Wim looked at Luke and raised an eyebrow.

  “I just think the driveway would be more comfortable for me if we widened it a bit,” I said. “Besides, the area you delineated isn’t big enough to play basketball on.”

  “Do you play a lot of basketball?” Luke asked.

  My thoughts flashed to the basketball net attached to my parents’ garage, my brother and me shooting hoops under the high canopies of waving, fragrant eucalyptus. My mother talking on the phone with her legs crossed and resting on her desk, my dad reclining on the family room sofa, watching an old war movie. It would not have occurred to either of my parents to play basketball with us. I thought of my younger self, longing for a stronger connection with my parents. But the memory also brought a sense of resoluteness—a determination both Wim and I felt to play an active role in our children’s lives.

  “I’m not looking to build a regulation-size basketball court in my driveway,” I added. “I just want a place where I can spend time with my kids.”

  Over the next few days, Wim and I spent so much time studying Luke’s revised driveway, you’d have thought we were designing the racetrack for the Indy 500. I even steered the course, pulling in and backing out over and over again until we were convinced we had a design that had just enough width and curve to satisfy all of us.

  I scheduled a meeting with Luke for early Thursday evening to discuss the new design. I’ll have to leave your house by eight to pick up my wife at physical therapy,” he said. “But I’m all yours until then.”

  When Thursday arrived, Luke, armed with a red can of spray paint, set to work once again, this time with my input. By the time we finished it was dusk—the time of night when, in a few short months, the weather would warm and bats would swoop overhead. We continued working by the headlights of my minivan, a trick I had learned from Wim, who often surveyed the progress on our house in the dark, after work.

  After Luke finished outlining the driveway, the two of us stood shivering in the cold, admiring our work. In the distance, evening was sounding—squirrels chattered, a dog barked, a train whistled on the other side of town.

  “Finally, a driveway that looks good and that I can back out of,” I said. I glanced at my watch. It was eight fifteen. The conversation had segued from house plans to weekend plans over the last hour, and it had felt so nice to be with Luke, to talk about things other than architecture—to get to know him better. Luke knew so much about Wim and me, intimate things like our bathing preferences and what size bed we slept in, yet I was only beginning to know him. He was smart, funny, suave—a lot like Wim. I wondered what his marriage was like. Is he a good listener? Does he share his feelings? Do they talk about their problems?

  Lately, when it came to my feelings, Wim and I had fallen into a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and I’d learned how to feign satisfaction. I had phoned him recently in what had become my weekly panic to tell him that, despite the eleven-foot ceiling, the beams being installed in the family room seemed to close the room in, and his response was, “You can’t keep calling me and telling me you hate things, Janie. You do this every time. We spend so much time making these decisions, and then you don’t even give the results a chance. I’m at work, and all I hear is worry and complaining from you … I just can’t deal with it anymore. You’re going to have to stop freaking out every time there’s a change.”

  I hated him for getting angry with me, but how could I blame him? He was right.

  Now, as I stood here having an intimate conversation with Luke, I asked myself if I was looking for something in him that I wasn’t getting from Wim.

  “Don’t you have to get your wife at physical therapy?” I asked suddenly.

  “Nicole!” His eyes widened. “I forgot to pick her up!”

  I could only guess he’d been as engrossed in our conversation as I had. As he pulled out of the driveway, I caught a glimpse of him looking at me in his rearview mirror.

  Mere minutes later, as Luke was racing to pick up Nicole and I was heading home to my kids, Wim was standing in the same spot Luke had recently occupied, tagging the driveway blue. There were so many lines, he was oblivious to the fact that in his efforts to make corrections, he was painting over the very lines Luke and I had just finished working so hard to perfect.

  I discovered all this on Friday morning, when I found myself staring at what had become a confusing mess of multicolored intersecting lines akin to the old Road Atlas maps I used to carry in my glove compartment, the kind I could never refold. It will be a miracle, I thought, if this driveway doesn’t come out zigzagged.

  I arrived at our meeting with Luke the next morning bleary-eyed and carrying a college-style hangover after a night out with my girlfriends, with only a fuzzy recollection of tequila shots and karaoke in Koreatown. My last memory of the evening was staggering home from the train station with my friend Nina. Before we parted ways, the two of us stood on a street corner between our houses, attesting our love for each other. I vaguely remembered saying, “I’m so lucky to have a friend like you, Nina,” and then swaying with her, our heads on each other’s shoulders and arms around each other’s waists, belting out “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

  My head was throbbing, the yard spinning. I looked around for someplace to relieve my wobbly legs, but there was no place to sit.

  “Fun night out on the town with your girlfriends?” Luke grinned at me.

  I grunted and plunked myself down on the asphalt, feeling embarrassed by my own uselessness.

  “Do you want to discuss the driveway with us, Janie?” Wim asked.

  I shook my head.

  Why did I come? I asked myself. But I knew. I didn’t want to miss out on seeing Luke. What’s wrong with me? I thought as I sat there on the rough cement. Why do I put Luke up on a pedestal? Yet the more I told myself not to think about him, the more I did.

  “We’ll let her rest awhile,” Wim said to Luke. I imagined Wim rolling his eyes as I heard Luke chuckle softly. The two of them stood beside me, verbally mulling over our driveway options, but my hazy brain refused to process their words.

  “Janie,” Wim said, jolting me out of my haze, “we decided to eliminate the front walkway and widen the driveway a little more. Are you okay with that?”

  I nodded, eyes closed, stomach churning. They could eliminate the walkway and the driveway, for all I cared.

  “I think I need to get her home.” Wim took my hands and pulled me up. I felt a sudden wave of nausea; I willed myself not to throw up my buttered toast.

  “Feel better,” Luke said.

  My eyes slowly shifted in his direction. “Thanks,” I said.

  I spent the rest of the day in bed with the blinds closed, my pounding head penance for my impure thoughts.

  CHAPTER 37: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

  Raymond Ave, Rye – April 2008

  At 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday, the phone rang. “Hi, it’s Betsy. I just got a call from an agent in White Plains. She has a client who wants to put in an offer today.”

  I’d been waiting for this moment for so long, I almost couldn’t believe it. I called Wim immediately to tell him the news.

  A few hours later, we fidgeted in Betsy’s office, ready for her to bring the deal home. Gail, the buyer’s agent, strode into the room wearing a pencil skirt and a strong a
ir of confidence. I glanced at Betsy, who, in her calico skirt, looked like she’d just walked off the set of Little House on the Prairie.

  Have faith, I reminded myself.

  Betsy made introductions, and Gail quickly took charge, explaining that the interested party was a young couple from New York City. She handed us personal letters that both the husband and wife had separately written expressing why they wanted to buy our house. I read the wife’s letter:

  We love your house. We knew when we walked into your home and saw the floor plan and the beautiful deck and yard that it was the house we wanted to raise our family in.

  Whether I was moved by her words or simply desperate to get rid of our house, it was all I could do not to shout, “Sold!”

  Gail handed us a buyer’s sheet, and we quickly scanned the document for the offer, my heart racing even faster than Gail’s acrylic red nail tips were tapping the table.

  It was 5 percent lower than our already-reduced price. I thought about Wim, holed up in our home office in front of his computer spreadsheet a couple of months earlier, calculating dollar for dollar our expenses against our income. “When my bonus comes at the end of March, we may be able to cover the bills until our house sells to cover the rest,” he’d told me then. How devastated he’d looked when later he’d told me his bonus had been paid almost completely in company stock. The cash he’d received had been just barely enough to keep construction from coming to a grinding halt.

  Wim and I returned home and lamented the low offer.

  The next day, another lowball offer came in. Despite the fact that Rye’s real estate market was stronger than most other regions in the nation, this new bid was off-the-charts low. My prayers for multiple offers were being answered, but they were offers we didn’t want.

  “Maybe we should cut our losses and take the house off the market,” I suggested to Wim.

  “What would that accomplish? Then we’d be stuck with two houses.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do? Gail is waiting for an answer,” I said.

  Later that day, just as I’d done for the last forty-one years whenever I needed help solving a problem, I called my dad for advice.

  I told him Wim and I were considering taking the first offer, even though it was lower than we’d wanted.

  “Take the money and run,” my dad said into the phone. But what I heard inside my head was, “We always lived within our means. You and Wim should do the same.”

  I felt that I was letting Dad down. If only I’d had more discipline, things wouldn’t have come to this. I’d wanted to please my parents by living within our means, to impress them by living in a big, beautiful house, but I’d discovered that we couldn’t do both.

  “Things are only going to get worse before they get better,” Dad said. “Your original price may have been optimistic, and this is not an optimistic housing market.”

  Though his advice sounded sensible, I couldn’t help but object. “But we’ve already reduced the price!” I cried into the receiver. I realized I sounded like a stubborn child not getting her way, but that was how I felt.

  “You’re still getting 90 percent of what you set out to get,” he reminded me, and he was right. My dad had a way of making everything sound so clear and logical.

  “They said it was a final offer. Should we try to counter anyway?”

  “You don’t want to scare them off,” he said. “I’d take it and be done with it.”

  When I hung up, I immediately called Wim. “Let’s accept the offer,” I said.

  Minutes later, Betsy had cut a deal.

  On a warm and cloudless Sunday, as the ground was finally beginning to thaw, Betsy erected an UNDER CONTRACT sign on the front lawn of our Raymond Avenue home.

  CHAPTER 38: ROMANCING THE STONE

  Hartford, CT – April 2008

  For our sixteenth wedding anniversary, we left the kids with a babysitter and drove the ninety miles to Connecticut to complete our quest for the elusive Calacatta Gold. With our house under contract, we were feeling flush; the pending sale allowed us to resume the business of perfecting our dream house.

  Gino led us through the warehouse, down a wide corridor and past the vast array of stone. I surveyed the slabs and identified them in my mind: granite, slate, travertine. After months of tedious research, I had not only learned the difference between soapstone and limestone; I could also tell you the country where it was quarried, its texture and grain pattern, and whether it absorbed tomato sauce.

  My pulse quickened with each step as we steered closer to what I hoped would become the long-awaited surface for our kitchen island.

  “Sorry, the lot you saw online last week was already sold,” Gino said. “But I think you’re going to like what I’m about to show you.”

  He didn’t know that I’d been searching for months, or that in my quest for the perfect slab, I’d exhausted New York’s resources and broadened my scope to out-of-state dealers.

  By the time we reached the marble section, my heart was pounding a mile a minute. I let Wim and Gino converse while I gazed at the various colors and textures before me, awed and inspired by the natural wonders of the earth.

  “Why has the price of Calacatta Gold shot through the roof?” I heard Wim ask Gino. It was a question I, too, had. I moved in closer, struggling to hear the answer over the din of the hydraulic machinery workers were using to move the heavy hunks of stone out of crates and onto vertical slab racks.

  “It’s become very popular,” he said. “Granite was the boom. Now people have gotten tired of it, and the marble has been flying off the shelves. But there are restrictions on how much land can be quarried. It’s supply and demand.”

  I was reminded of our house hunt on Lexington Avenue two years back and how the lack of availability of homes had made us want more than ever to live on that street. Classic scenario: when we can’t have something, we want it more.

  I followed close on Gino’s heels, distracted by my surroundings. He stopped abruptly, and we nearly collided. “That’s it.” He gestured toward a marble slab marked “Hold.”

  The sight my eyes beheld was divine: a field of dreamy white marble streaked with light gray swirls. Tiny dark spots bespeckled the cloudy swirls like stars in the night. It was just like the marble I’d seen in the pages of my home magazines, the counters that even Wim had fallen in love with. I could have gazed at it all day, but we were here to make a decision. I stopped swooning and started scanning the surface for blemishes. I glanced at Wim with a hopeful look. He raised his eyebrows; his way of communicating that the slab showed promise.

  “Can we see the others?” I asked Gino.

  With a commanding two-fingered whistle, he signaled a forklift operator, who quickly motored over. Gino climbed behind the wheel and maneuvered the swing boom, clamping and lifting one end of the slab. I stood rooted, my breathing shallow, as the slab rose up, reminding me of hurricane footage where huge objects like cars and trains were suddenly—freakishly—lifted into the air. I stepped back, afraid of being within the “fall shadow” of the slab.

  Gino moved the forklift back and forth until he had shifted the slab far enough to the side to expose the one behind it.

  “This one looks good!” I said.

  Gino continued to maneuver the forklift boom, deftly moving slabs as if they were LEGO blocks, until we had selected three perfect slabs to create our kitchen island and bathroom countertops with.

  “You must be a great parallel parker,” I remarked as Gino came off the forklift.

  “Well, I usually drive that.” He nodded toward a tricked-out motorcycle in the nearby corner of the warehouse.

  Wim moved toward the bike as if gripped by an external force. He pointed to a marble disk capping the muffler; it was engraved with initials, like a fine piece of jewelry. “Did you do that?”

  “Yep, it’s one of a kind,” Gino answered.

  I grabbed Wim’s hand and pulled him away from the motorcycle. “We shoul
d settle up.”

  As we waited for Gino to write up the paperwork in his office, I thought back to the early years of our marriage, when Wim used to buy me expensive jewelry on special occasions—a diamond-encrusted heart in honor of our tenth anniversary, diamond stud earrings for my thirtieth birthday—gifts most women would kill for. I would throw my arms around him, thank him profusely, and then spend the rest of the day silently grieving over the money that could have been used toward a down payment on a bigger house.

  Now, we were about to make a substantial investment in rare stone for the house I’d dreamt of back then, yet I felt slightly disappointed. I had wanted these Calacatta Gold slabs more than anything.

  But maybe, deep down, I wanted something more.

  CHAPTER 39: WHAT IF? WHAT IF? WHAT IF?

  Raymond Ave, Rye – April 2008

  Rather than wallow in disappointment, I wallowed in worry, because what concerned me more was all the things that still could go wrong with our pending sale. Though a contract agreement had been signed, we were still awaiting home inspection, and I had started remembering nightmare inspections I’d seen on This Old House: failing roofs, wet basements, a tire jack being used for structural support in a crawlspace. I kept turning them over and over in my mind.

  “The inspector found an oil tank in the middle of our backyard,” I said to Wim one morning as we got dressed. “He told me it would cost up to twenty thousand dollars to dig it up!”

  “It was a dream, Janie. The inspection will go fine,” Wim assured me.