The Objects of Her Affection

by Sonya Cobb

  “Excuse me?” One of the purple-gloved women had emerged from the storage room and was frowning at Sophie. Sophie flushed and returned the candlestick to the cart. “Are you with someone?” the woman asked.

  “Brian Porter,” Sophie said. “I was just—sorry. I like silver. I mean, not this silver, of course. Although, this silver is very nice, I just mean—” She shook her head. “I’m leaving now.” She turned and hurried down the hall to find Marjorie, careful not to bump into anything on her way.

  Three

  Twenty-two twenty-four Hickory was a brick row house on a hill, in a neighborhood that climbed slowly away from downtown: just far enough to allow young families to afford three or four bedrooms and a tiny patio, just close enough to smell the breath of the city. Ginkgo trees lined both sides of the street, alternating with lampposts neatly papered with sidewalk sale announcements (“baby clothes, toys, jogging strollers”). The pavement swirled with pink and purple sidewalk chalk. In window boxes, the houses held out prim bouquets of pansies, sweet potato vines, and the season’s first begonias and geraniums.

  Brian walked over from the museum on his lunch break to meet Sophie, Steve, and Gary, the diminutive inspector from ProValue, in front of the house. Sophie watched her husband recall the dented aluminum awning, the crumbling brick, the squeaky, paint-scabbed storm door. He hadn’t been to the house since their first visit with Steve; she’d already been back three times.

  “Look at the ginkgo,” she said, taking his arm. The tree stretched tall and svelte, its branches starting at second-story height. Delicately splayed leaves hung thick along the length of each swooning branch and waved slowly in the slight breeze, like a thousand green fans.

  “It’s probably going to drop those foul-smelling berries all over our sidewalk,” Brian said, looking up.

  “That’s a male ginkgo,” said Gary from inside his ProValue cap. “No fruit.” Sophie gazed into the tree’s spreading height, pondering the idea of a male tree. Gary tucked his aluminum-clad clipboard under his arm and motioned for Steve to precede him up the steps and through the protesting door.

  Inside, a thin shaft of light penetrated the heavy front drapes, illuminating a dense haze of dust floating among the doily-draped furniture. The brown flocked wallpaper, dark red wall-to-wall carpet, and acoustical tile drop ceiling stank of cigarettes and cats. Over the yellowed marble mantel, Jesus stared down at them through drops of blood.

  “Well,” said Steve, stepping carefully over a dark stain in the carpet, “it really is a great space. You don’t usually get a living room this large in Philadelphia. And a formal dining room!”

  Sophie tapped one of the walls, listening to the hollow crunch of paint and wallpaper ready to be picked and peeled away. She lifted a corner of carpet and brushed away some crumbs of foam padding; underneath, she found a yellow newspaper with strange writing. Russian? Ukrainian? She lifted the dusty paper away.

  “Nice,” Gary said, his flashlight illuminating the gray floorboards. “Quarter-sawn oak. That grain’ll come up beautifully when you sand.”

  “Or we could recarpet,” offered Brian. “Until we can afford, you know, to refinish.”

  “Quarter-sawn oak?” Sophie squeezed Brian’s upper arm. “I don’t even know what that is, but I don’t think you can cover it up.”

  She pulled him into the dining room, which was crowded with heavy furniture and cabbage rose wallpaper. “Thanksgiving,” she said, holding out her arms.

  “We don’t have a table,” Brian said.

  “We’ll get one. Do you remember the kitchen?” She led him through a pair of swinging doors. Greasy brown cabinets lined one salmon-colored wall; the other sides of the square room were furnished with a jumble of tables and open shelves. “Not too much cabinetry to pull out. It’s a blank slate. Think of the counter space.” Sophie peered through the yellow glass of the back door. “We could put a double door back here, to the patio, and eat outside in the summer.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Okay, maybe it’s a little hot right now. But in the spring.” She continued staring at the yellow-tinted yard.

  “Do you really think they can just open up a supporting wall like that—”

  “Let’s look upstairs.” She turned away from Brian and headed back toward the front of the house. She climbed the carpeted stairs, running her fingers along the carved balusters made vague by layers of paint. She could picture Lucy and Elliot peering through them, spying on a grown-up party below.

  The front bedroom had two large windows; Sophie pushed the water-stained curtains aside and looked into the branches of the gently swaying ginkgo. “This will be Lucy’s room,” she said. And it would be Lucy’s in every sense, she thought, without someone else’s thumbtack holes in the walls, someone else’s stickers on the light-switch plate. The room would change over the years, growing up along with its inhabitant, but it would never be packed up and left behind.

  Brian had stopped just inside the door and was prodding a makeshift closet built with wood paneling, which bowed inward when he pressed on it. “See how easy that would be to tear out?” said Sophie. “We could do it ourselves. We’ll use wardrobes, the way they do in Europe.” She crossed into the adjoining bedroom. “This is Elliot’s room, I think. It’s smaller, but not by too much. Crib. Changing table. Nursing chair.”

  “Water damage.” Brian poked at a bulge in the plaster. Paint was flaking off the wall in potato-chip-sized curls. Sophie pulled him to the window, which looked over a concrete patch piled with rusted trash cans.

  “Look out there. The kids could have a sandbox,” she said. “A few potted plants? A grill? Think about it.”

  And he seemed to be, until he tilted his head back and she realized he wasn’t looking out the window, but at it. He plucked a shard of paint from the frame and sniffed it tentatively.

  “Just try, okay? Put that down. Can you try to see this the way I’m seeing it?” Sophie pressed her hand over her belly, fingers splayed. “I know I shouldn’t have done this without you. I should have waited.” She took a deep breath. “I just wish you could see all the potential I see here.” She stared into his face, smooth and pale, his brow tranquil, his eyes barely able to summon the energy required to be an actual color. The sole hint of feeling, perceptible only to Sophie (and perhaps, if she had been alive to see it, his mother), was a slight stiffening of his nostrils.

  “It’s not too late,” she said, more gently now. “We can still walk away. I can go downstairs right now and tell Steve. All we’d lose is the deposit.” She felt a tiny flicker of nervousness, but she knew that the combined weight of the house, the paperwork, the insurance, the inspector, the real estate agents, the grateful sellers, and her own excitement would require too much energy for Brian to dislodge on his own.

  He looked down and toed a hole in the carpet. “It scares me.” He looked at her. “Financially. I can’t help but think we’re being a little reckless with this. I want you to be happy, you know I do. But this scares me.”

  “Okay.” Sophie waited a beat. “Okay. Do you want me to—”

  “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Okay. We can call it off.” She stared at him; he didn’t flinch. “Just know that I believe in this, Brian. I believe I can get enough work, I can make enough, I can get a good payment plan. Steve said he knows a guy—he said we qualify, no problem. We’re good to go.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. Brian, this house, I wish I could explain it to you. It’s just meant to be ours. I feel like it wants us as much as we want it. And living here…it will make me so happy. Everything will work out. I’ll make sure it does.”

  Brian leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Show me where your office will be.”

  She held out her arm. “Right this way.” It was a relief to settle into their familiar dance step—Sophie deciding,
Brian acquiescing. Perhaps the dance mostly worked to her advantage, but she knew they both heard the music. She led him down the hall to the large rear bedroom. Two cobwebbed windows faced west; one, broken, faced south. A trio of fat flies loitered in the center of the hot room. “I figure an L-shaped workstation over here, with all my monitors on it, and maybe a mini station in that corner.” She paused, mentally organizing her bookshelves. In their apartment, her workspace was a sticky corner of the kitchen table, with a few laptops balanced on chairs. Here, in a room like this, she knew—she was sure—work would be efficient. Professional. Abundant. “See?” she said, seeing the backup arrays, the CPUs, the neat stacks of project briefs. She’d never had a real home office before. The thought filled her with eagerness to reclaim her career—to push it to new heights, to pursue new satisfactions. She looked over at Brian, who was examining a brown stain on the ceiling. She knew he was thinking like a curator, cataloging condition problems and losses. It was, after all, his job to look to the past, to understand what something once had been, to lament what it had become. But when it came to real life outside the museum, this struck Sophie as a waste of time. It was more realistic—more inspiring—to look forward, to the attractively hazy possibility of what could be.

  ***

  “Don’t leave me,” Sophie whispered as Brian draped his jacket over his arm. She was lying on her side within a complicated arrangement of pillows, Elliot propped against her breast.

  “Sorry,” Brian said, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead. His tie brushed Elliot’s cheek, but Elliot kept his eyes closed, comfortably suspended between sleep and milk. “Milan awaits.”

  “To hell with Milan. I want to stay in bed.”

  “I know. But just wait till you see this vase in person…”

  “I don’t need to. I know it’s spectacular. Go. You’ll be amazing.”

  “Thanks,” Brian whispered. “Do you need anything? Want me to put out Lucy’s cereal?”

  “You’re sweet. We’re fine. I hope you get your vase.”

  “I hope you get your mortgage. Sorry I couldn’t be there.”

  Sophie closed her eyes. Steve had set up the meeting with his buddy Ron at AmeriLoan a week ago, and now Brian couldn’t come. One of his committee members had come through with purchase funds at the last possible minute, and now he had to spend his morning on the phone, waiting to bid on the majolica vase that would fill an “egregious gap” in the museum’s collection.

  Sophie propped herself on one elbow and carefully eased herself over Elliot’s body to the other side, rearranging pillows and lifting his head to her other breast. She should probably reschedule the AmeriLoan meeting. Brian had urged her not to, but now she wondered if she was just reinforcing his financial helplessness—his inability to remember passwords, his refusal to figure out online banking. She also suspected that he was further distancing himself from the matter of the house. Which was fine; the truth was that Sophie didn’t want him anywhere near their finances, with his shoe box filing system, his dresser drawer full of receipts and crumpled paycheck stubs. It was probably safer to just add the mortgage to her neatly arranged bin of responsibilities, and let Brian focus on what he did best: curating ceramics.

  Sophie lowered Elliot into his crib, then shuffled into Lucy’s room to usher her through her morning routine. She was actually looking forward to the meeting at AmeriLoan. The sitter was coming in an hour, which would give her some time to shower and dress. Maybe she’d even blow-dry her hair for a change. Then, after the meeting, there was always the possibility of lunch. Out. Alone.

  But nine o’clock came, and the sitter, a Penn sophomore on summer vacation, did not. Sophie tried to rouse her by phone, by text. She left a voice mail, trying to walk the line between stern employer and sympathetic friend, but just ended up sounding frantic. Finally she had to make a choice: take the kids to her meeting, or cancel the meeting and take them to the playground.

  “Put on your shoes,” she told Lucy. “We’re going to buy a house.”

  ***

  The meeting went as poorly as possible by parenting standards, and surprisingly well by any other measure. Elliot was awake and angry the whole time, refusing the car seat, straining against the baby carrier, consenting only to be bounced, at a precise angle and rhythm, in Sophie’s arms while she paced in front of Ron’s desk. Meanwhile, Lucy cheerfully raised and lowered the venetian blinds in the front window while singing a tuneless, syncopated dirge.

  “The bottom line,” explained Sophie, raising her voice over the slapping of the blinds, “is that we need our savings for the renovations, so we can’t do much of a down payment. But I’m worried about going too high on our monthly payments, because my work is kind of unpredictable.”

  Ron paged through the paperwork she’d brought, jiggling the oversized watch that slipped around his wrist. “You freelance, am I right?”

  “Yes. If you look at my returns from before 2003, you’ll see how well I was doing before kids. I plan to get back to that level…soon. Once I have a real office to work in. Lucy, put that back on the shelf.”

  “Okay, no problem. Any chance Brian’s getting a raise sometime soon?”

  “Oh, God, I doubt it. Museums these days…”

  “Gotcha. Well, hey, that’s okay.” Sophie felt absurdly grateful to Ron for his unflappable cheeriness, despite the chaos unfolding in front of his desk.

  “I can see you’ve got some years in your field, that’s awesome. Technology is where it’s at, right?”

  “Lucy! Can you stop with the blinds? Please?”

  “Tell you what. I’ve got an interesting new product here that seems perfect for you guys. Well, not totally new. It’s been around since the eighties, but folks like you didn’t always have access to it. It’s called an option ARM.” Ron leaned back and gently patted the crest of his gelled hair.

  “Option arm?”

  “Go as low as you want on the down payment—one percent? Two percent? Up to you. Then every month, you decide what to pay. There’s a minimum payment, of course, or you can choose the whole interest-only payment, or the full PITI.”

  Sophie switched Elliot to her other arm, provoking a fresh wail. She resumed bouncing. “Okay…”

  “For a freelancer like you? Perfect. Gives you a chance to get back on your feet after—well! Obviously, you’re on your feet quite a bit.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “But you catch my drift. Anyway. Here’s just a back-of-the-envelope look at your minimum monthly payment, if you put one percent down, no points.” He pushed his legal pad across the desk and showed her a number.

  “Really?”

  “Great, right? These rates are insane right now…it’s such a great time to buy.”

  Sophie extracted a lock of her hair from Elliot’s sweaty grasp. “I didn’t know, I mean, the calculator we used online made it sound like this house would be more of a stretch. Especially with the renovations…”

  Ron shook his head. “Those calculators don’t have all the angles. They can’t…massage. That’s what I do. I’m a massager. Whaddaya call it—a massoose. I’m a massoose.”

  “Wow. Okay, well, let me show this to Brian and we’ll—”

  Ron grimaced. “This rate won’t be around for long. If I were you, I’d get the application in now. Just submit it, then talk to your hubby. At least that way we lock in the rate. You change your mind, fine. We’ll work it out.”

  “I’m not committing to anything?”

  “Nah, you’re good. Just get these papers in, and when you’re approved you can pull the trigger.”

  Elliot arched backward in Sophie’s arms, and almost succeeded in getting himself dropped. “Okay, okay,” Sophie gasped, her lower back a tangle of pain. “You’re the expert.”

  “Trust me. You’ll be happy you locked this in.”

  And afterward, a
s she sat at Johnny Rockets, Lucy coloring her menu and Elliot finally dozing in the car seat beside her, Sophie realized that she was, as a matter of fact, happy. All around her the great apparatus was in motion; gears were turning smoothly, slick with silicone and ball bearings. The mechanism was fantastically complicated but breathtakingly silent, gently conveying an entire generation to new heights of prosperity and comfort. And now here was a trio of mini cheeseburgers being delivered on a red tray, no pickles for Lucy, fries, a smiley face painted in ketchup on a paper plate. As they bit into the pillowy buns, the jukebox started playing “Last Dance,” and suddenly the waitstaff dropped everything to shimmy and lip-synch along with Donna Summer’s soaring voice. Twirling, grinning, dapper in bow ties and soda jerk hats, the waitresses and busboys looked as buoyant as root beer floats. It was early; Sophie, Lucy, and Elliot were the only ones in the restaurant. It was a show just for them, and Lucy clapped along and laughed: delighted, appreciative, but not the least bit surprised.

  ***

  Brian pointed out, quite rightly, that they could probably hire two guys to pull up the carpet for less money than they were paying the babysitter. But Sophie wanted to be the first one to tear into the wrapping and finally see what the house was made of. She didn’t mention that she was also planning to take a crack at the drop ceiling, and maybe the wallpaper, if they had time.

  It was hot, filthy work. They started in the master bedroom, on the third floor, where the summer heat pooled under the roof. They tore the carpet away from its tacks with a shuddering jerk, releasing plumes of dust into the air, then sliced it into manageable pieces with utility knives and heaved the rolls into the rented Dumpster out front, along with the padding and Ukrainian newspapers. “I feel like we’re waxing the house’s legs,” Sophie said as they caught their breath, surveying the smooth, grayish floor in Lucy’s room.