by Anna Martin
“Sounds good,” Chris says, and we follow her up the street.
It really is a nice area. There’s a park just a few more blocks over, just a small one but somewhere to go chill out when the weather is nice. And it’s not too far from a street of nice restaurants, coffee shops, and convenience stores. And a Chinese takeout place. These are all very important factors.
Cassie takes my hand as we walk, in between me and Jessica with Chris and Chloe behind us. I don’t mind too much. They’re catching up on some soap opera that I don’t watch. I’m lost in my own thoughts and don’t catch what Cassie is saying until I force myself to pay attention.
“Uncle Chris is gay,” Cassie tells the realtor with relish.
“Really,” Jessica says, a polite but amused expression plastered on her face.
“Cassie, shut up,” Chloe whispers furiously from behind us, but she is ignored.
“Mhmm,” Cassie says. “That means he doesn’t like girls. He likes boys instead. My mommy says that’s okay, though. You can like whoever you want to like.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes. So when I grow up, I’m going to marry a penguin.”
At this point Chris can’t hold in his laughter any longer and presses his face into my back. I can feel his shoulders shaking with silent giggles. At least he’s hiding it from Cassie, who would surely be upset if she thought he was laughing at her.
“Is there any particular reason why you think a penguin will make a good husband?” Jessica enquires, and I decide right then and there I’m going to buy a house from this woman because she’s working really bloody hard for her commission.
“Yeah,” Cassie says in the same tone of voice one would say “Duh.” “’Cause they live in Antarctica.”
“Antarctica” is a big word, and I’m more than a little impressed that she knows it, and so much about the endemic nature of the habitat of a penguin.
Fortunately at this point we reach the next house and poor Jessica is spared any further dealings with Cassie. For the moment, anyway.
From the curb, I fall in love.
Not with the man next to me—I’ve been in love with him for ages. But with the house.
It’s a classic Boston brownstone with steps up to the front door, enclosed with wrought-iron handrails. The door is painted a bright, shiny red.
“It’s a split-level condo,” Jessica is saying, and I force myself to tune in to her voice and pay attention. “This street was developed in 1890, and these houses were originally all one unit. Nearly all have now been split into two spaces. Shall we have a look inside? The apartment we’re looking at today is actually the top two floors.”
“There’s no need,” Chloe mutters as we walk up to the shiny, shiny, pretty front door. “Dad wants it already.”
She’s right, of course. That childish sense of want it, now, make it mine doesn’t diminish one bit as she leads us through a black-and-white tiled entrance hall to the second floor to the apartment door, and through that into a warm, bright, living space.
“I thought you might appreciate that this space is slightly quirky,” Jessica says. “On this level is the kitchen, bathroom, master bedroom, and an office space. Upstairs, in what was once the attic, there’s a second bedroom and a large living area.”
I want it, I want it, I want it.
“I’ll let you explore,” she says with a little wink in my direction. She pulls an iPad out of her extraordinarily large handbag and starts tapping away on it.
The apartment is decorated and furnished, although sparsely, indicating that there’s no one living here at the moment. Thick cream carpet and sage green walls lead us down to the kitchen, which is at the end of the hall directly opposite the front door. In here we find dark wood countertops and cupboards, light walls, and dark red, blue, and green glass tiles on the walls, giving the entire space a magical, bejewelled feel.
I mourn the lack of a dining area until we climb the stairs and it becomes apparent that there’s room for a large dining table and chair set to be placed at one end of the long living room while leaving plenty of space for a sofa and a couple of chairs to go at the other end. Breaking the two spaces is a huge window with a sill large enough to turn into a window seat.
Kneeling on it, I can see out onto the street below.
The others are following me around and talking amongst themselves, clearly respecting my desire to explore this place myself. When we turn to the second room in the attic, Chloe smiles.
“My room?” she asks, and I nod. “It has skylights.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah. It’s cool.”
Cassie seems to be flagging a little bit, and I’m reminded that she only just turned four years old and we’ve done a lot of dragging her around the city today. Chris picks her up again, and she rests her head on his shoulder, her thumb tucked securely in her mouth.
The office space has an entire wall of built-in, deep mahogany bookshelves that make me almost whimper with pleasure as I run my hand across them. There’s also an oddly placed door, which Jessica tells us was something the current owners had to install as a fire escape, but all I can think of is that it’s the perfect place for a cat flap.
The garden below isn’t ours (I can’t force myself to break it to Cassie just yet) and I hope the people downstairs won’t have any objection to Flea.
I want to see the master bedroom again, and we stand in the room for what feels like a long time, absorbing the space and what it has to offer.
Soft, blue-grey walls, white trim, more of that luscious thick carpet. No attached bathroom, but I can live with that. Another window out onto the street—it’s right below the living room upstairs.
“There’s nowhere to keep your drums,” I say, looking for the negatives now. “No off-street parking either.”
“Not high on my list of concerns,” he says. “There’s a corner of the family room where I can set up the drums. And it’s the attic so it won’t disturb the family below us.”
My dining table, I think wistfully.
“You can keep the drums in my room,” Chloe says, leaning on the door frame in a pose very reminiscent of one Chris might adopt. “Get a futon, I can sleep on that.”
“You’re not having a futon, you’re having a bed,” I say firmly.
She rolls her eyes. “Stop looking for problems, Dad,” she says. “This place is perfect. You love it. So does Chris.”
“Do you?” I ask, afraid that I’m being desperately selfish now. This is supposed to be a home we’re building together, making a family of the two of us. There’s no point in choosing somewhere we’re going to want to move out of in a few years’ time.
“If you want a proper house, we can get one,” I rush to continue, not giving him time to agree just to make me happy. “I know you wanted a house, and I’m okay with that, I really am. This is more of a bachelor pad sort of place anyway. Not a family home.”
“Do you two want kids?” Chloe asks with a note of panic in her voice.
“No,” Chris says calmly. “We want a place where you’ll be comfortable to come stay sometimes, and Cassie too, when she’s old enough. And like your dad said, somewhere where we can have a home together.”
“So?” Chloe and I say at the same time.
He laughs. “I really, honestly love it,” he says. “I love it for me, because it’s beautiful and classy and it feels like a home. And I love the way it makes you light up. So we should get it.”
“Really?” I say, and he nods.
“Really really.”
He lets me kiss him, quickly, softly, but a kiss loaded with meaning.
“Jessica,” I say as we walk out of our master bedroom as a family. “I think we’d like to put in an offer.”
Of course, nothing is as easy as that when it comes to buying houses, and unfortunately there are other people who are equally as enamoured with the gorgeous split-level apartment as we are. Rather than the days I was expecting,
it takes weeks of bartering back and forth before our offer is considered by both the bank and the seller.
There are too many complications. I have a mortgage on the flat I’ve lived in alone for the past few years and have to make sure that any rent I charge on it will cover that initial loan. All the annoyances and legal shit of being a registered landlord. And taking out a second, joint mortgage on a rather expensive second home.
But there are things that stand in our favour.
My job, for one, which leads nicely to my reputation within the academic community, for two. Chris’s occupation as a musician is slightly more problematic as it’s far less steady work, but he gets a great reference from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which helps a lot. And finally, thankfully, I have enough in my savings that the move isn’t going to hit us too hard financially.
The process of sitting down with Chris and working out exactly what we both earn and our outgoings isn’t easy. I have a child and a college education, neither of which came cheap. I was expecting for him to not have much in the way of savings, but I’m slightly humbled to find out he’s been working his cute little bubble butt off since he was sixteen years old. Apart from the expense of the motorbike, he’s been saving like crazy and has enough set by to be an equal partner in the house.
We have a few conversations with John and Lexi to find out when they’re planning on moving back to the city, and manage to plan the move to mean that there’s not too long a period of time when my flat will sit empty.
I agree to rent it to them furnished, since all they’ve really got in the way of furniture can be packed up into a camper van and trailer to be dragged up and down the country. This means shopping. Lots and lots of shopping.
There are moments when I seriously consider giving Chris, Chloe, Luisa, and Jilly a list of things we need and just sending them off on their own; surely this is a better idea than being dragged around furniture store after furniture store and trying to agree with all three of them, which is possibly the most impossible, fruitless task in the given universe. Especially since Jilly and Lu are prepared to double team against me.
With poor Mike left in charge of Cassie for the afternoon (he has plans to take her to the Boston Children’s Museum) and Carter strapped to his mother’s chest, Chris and I take them back to the apartment so we can look at it again and Lu and Jilly can see it for the first time.
Both women oooh and ahhh in all the right places, and Lu takes pictures on her camera phone in the desperate hope that this shopping trip will go better than the last one. It couldn’t possibly be any worse. Forcing myself to put the experience out of my mind, I begin to make a mental list. Apparently everyone else is doing the same thing.
“Right,” I say in my decisive, man-about-the-house voice. “Where are we going for coffee? Because I’m damned if I’m going to wander around without a purpose again looking for bloody candlesticks to go on the mantel that we don’t have and cushions to match the sofa that we haven’t bloody bought yet.”
Luisa looks amused. Chloe looks shocked. Jilly rolls her eyes.
Chris grabs hold of my sweater and pulls me to him for a hard kiss.
I’m entertained enough to flick my hand at the girls in a vague shoo motion as I let him kiss me. He hums against my lips and pulls away, only to kiss my cheek with a loud smack.
“Love it when you’re all commanding,” he says in a low voice.
“Let’s just go home and have sex,” I whisper once I’m sure the girls, my daughter in particular, have left the room. “They don’t need us there. They definitely don’t want us there. And they can probably do a better job than we can anyway.”
“Nope.” Chris kisses me quickly on the lips and takes my hand to drag me from the room. “Come on, we’re gay men. Interior design is supposed to be something we’re good at.”
I forgive myself for not believing him.
Chapter 17
There isn’t a lot to do in the way of decorating since the new apartment has been so well kept by the previous owners, but once the sale has completed and the place is officially ours, I decide I want to repaint my office. When we first visited, one wall was a deep, rich orange, which was nice, but I want something more relaxing for the space. And apparently Chris has agreed to help Chloe redecorate her room “however she wants.” This decision has been made entirely without my knowledge or prior approval, and by the time I find out about it, I can’t say no without looking like the bad guy.
I have visions of lurid pink and purple swirling in my head as Chris takes her down to the hardware store to go buy paint. While they’re gone, I slap warm, coffee-coloured paint on the walls in my office and sulk.
When my phone rings, I seriously consider not answering it. I know that it’s Chris because he has his own ringtone. He seems to be the only one who doesn’t know this, since he’s never next to my phone when he’s the one calling it.
“Hello?”
I’m such a loser.
“Hey, Rob. Do you know how to hang wallpaper?”
I have visions of ’60s psychedelic swirls.
“No. Sorry.”
“Ah, well. No worries. See you in a bit.” He hangs up. My heart sinks further for my beautiful, beautiful apartment. It’s okay, I tell myself. We can just keep the door closed up there. No one need ever know.
When they return, I’m resigned to the horrific.
And am forced to eat humble pie when Chloe shows me tins of cream and gold paint.
“It looks nice,” I say, trying to keep the surprise from my voice and failing.
“Thanks,” she says, flushed and excited. “Chris said that I could paint the walls a different colour to the windowsill and stuff. I’m going to get matching linens for the bed, too.”
“Did he, now,” I mutter darkly. “Go on and change and we can get started.”
She grins and bounds up the stairs. Thankfully, since the room is white already, there’s no need for base coats or anything like that. I raise an eyebrow at Chris once she’s out of earshot.
“Oh, you owe me one,” he says. “You owe me an hour-long rim job while I eat ice cream and watch Gossip Girl with no sarcasm.”
“At the same time?”
“Fuck, yeah. I can multitask.”
He rummages through the bags and extracts the other cans of paint, rollers, brushes, and trays. “We went through pretty much the entire spectrum of girlish, nauseating colour schemes. I’m serious, at one point she wanted to paint the ceiling blue with white fluffy clouds on it.”
“Jesus.”
“Damn straight. There’s no fucking way I’m having white fluffy clouds in my house. Then we moved on to wallpaper, and she wanted this gold brocade shit because it was ‘elegant’, so I jumped on that and talked her into the gold paint.”
“An hour-long rim job? Sure you can last that long?”
He’s laughing as he pulls me down into a messy kiss. “I love you.”
“Love you too, you silly bugger.”
The new furniture arrives in dribs and drabs, meaning one or the other of us is constantly speeding across town to let the delivery guys in. We end up dumping most things in the living room on the top floor, because it’s easier to get the bigger things up there to begin with and take them back downstairs after rather than having it all on the first level and having to haul it up the stairs.
When our official “moving day” comes, it’s something of an anti-climax, since we’ve been doing so much stuff in the apartment already. Nearly all of our clothes, the pieces of kitchen equipment we’re keeping, and my books and DVDs and photographs have all been taken across town in the back of my car. The last few things that we’ve been living with are easily packed into a couple of suitcases. Then it’s just Flea in his carry box (which he hates), and it’s time to say goodbye.
Which is ridiculous, when I think about it, because it’s not like I won’t still get to see the place. My name is still on the deeds, and I’ll probably be the one called
out to fix the blocked sink or whatever. But this was the place where I fell in love.
The making love “one last time” in our bed starts sweetly, tasting all the memories behind us of doing the same thing so many times before. Then Chris slaps me on the arse and forces me to fuck him hard, and that’s better, somehow.
Lexi and John arrive right on schedule while Chris and I sit out on the front step waiting for them. Laughing, Chris surges to his feet and runs to greet them with warm hugs, and I realise that it’s been a good few months since he last saw his closest friends.
