The Objects of Her Affection

by Sonya Cobb

  “If the house were a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old woman,” said Brian. He pulled his dust mask down around his neck.

  “Just wait until it’s sanded and varnished. It’ll come back to life.” Sophie picked up a crowbar and began prying the toothy nail strips from the perimeter of the floor, energized by thoughts of darkly gleaming planks. She wondered if she could do the refinishing herself—she loved the idea of smoothing polyurethane into the wood like a salve, slowly coaxing supple beauty out of the grain. She thought about the floors of her childhood—thin, buckled carpet, reeking of mildew and cigarette ash. In the St. Louis apartment, when she was twelve, she’d ripped out the bedroom carpet herself, but underneath there was nothing more substantial than a plywood subfloor, which she’d painted black. The landlord, Mr. Crowley, didn’t return their deposit.

  Creepy Crowley. She remembered how he used to let himself into the apartment when she was there alone, pretending he had to fix a leak or check the thermostat. He’d stand in her bedroom doorway, jiggling the keys in his pocket and sucking on his teeth while she played Atari. She always ignored him; after a while he would leave. Eventually she discovered that if she sneaked into the apartment through the bathroom window and didn’t turn on any lights, he wouldn’t come.

  Sophie struggled to pry up a stubborn nail strip, working the crowbar around its edges. She had almost no memory of her parents in that apartment. Randall must have worked at an office in St. Louis. And Maeve, of course, rarely made it home in time for dinner. She was like Brian—oblivious to the passage of time while she worked, lost in her world of wing flaps and wind tunnels. Sophie remembered eating peanut butter sandwiches in the fading gray light that slouched through the kitchen’s louvered window, never knowing exactly when to expect her parents. Normally she would have turned on the radio for company, but she didn’t want to risk attracting Mr. Crowley. She wasn’t sure if she’d felt, then, the sense of unfairness that now dogged her—that she’d wasted so many afternoons dreading the sight of Crowley’s yellowed, short-sleeved shirt in her doorway, unable to articulate the menace it contained, but feeling it nonetheless. She’d mentioned it once to Maeve, but when Maeve asked if Crowley had ever said or done anything, Sophie had to say no, and that was the end of it.

  She gathered a pile of nail strips and maneuvered them into a trash bag, trying not to tear the plastic. Then she stood staring at the floor, lost in thought. “What’s going on in there?” asked Brian, gently lifting her dust mask over her head like a bridal veil.

  Sophie laced her hands across her stomach. “Just thinking about my parents. Wondering what they’d think of this place. But I guess it wasn’t really their thing, renovating.” Randall had always picked their apartments sight unseen, from the newspaper, based on some algorithm of price per square foot and distance from Maeve’s lab. It was the most efficient approach, Sophie knew—the quickest way to get them settled into whatever new place required Maeve’s services. Maximize lift, reduce drag. Maeve designed wings for commercial aircraft, and Randall freelanced, writing about consumer electronics. Sophie just followed in their slipstream.

  “It’s going to be beautiful,” Brian said. “I’m sure they would’ve been proud.” He brought her a cold bottle of water from the cooler, then went to the corner deli to buy sandwiches. They ate on the front stoop, butcher paper spread on their knees, and Brian filled Sophie’s silence with stories about the museum. He’d bought the Milan vase, but his boss, Ted, had gone by himself to give the news to the director, and Brian was sure Ted had taken credit for the whole thing. Also, the clean out of the storage room had stalled.

  “Conservation started getting everything ready to move to off-site storage, but they started having trouble matching the pieces with their object cards. So they need Michael to go through everything and figure out the cards, but of course Michael just left on his sabbatical.” Brian gave a little laugh and shook his head.

  “So they’ll just have to wait.”

  “Yeah. Except nobody told the art handlers, who kept coming every day and loading the stuff onto object carts. I didn’t say anything ’cause it’s all silver and crystal—not my domain. But stuff shouldn’t be sitting around in limbo like that. Michael’s going to have a conniption when he gets back.”

  Sophie had heard the stories about Michael’s fits of rage, usually provoked by mislabeled objects or misinformed art handlers. Ted, who was supposedly Michael’s boss, was known to take sick days during Michael’s more prolonged rampages. But Brian refused to be intimidated by his colleague, knowing that the majority of Michael’s fury was born of impotence. He’d never come close to actually getting anyone fired.

  “Where are they putting all the carts in the meantime?”

  “They crammed them into our offices because they have to be locked up at night, and they don’t all fit in the storage room. Don’t be surprised if you hear I’ve been found dead under a pile of candelabras.”

  “So what’s going to happen to it all?”

  “I’m sure it’s going to stay that way until Michael gets back. Conservation’s washed their hands of it, and anyway, they’re working twenty-four seven on the Dalí show now. Lord knows I don’t have time to deal with it.”

  This was classic Brian: placidly observing the chaos around him, unmoved by any urge to intervene. It wasn’t coldness, necessarily, or even arrogance. It was simply an ability to remain engrossed in his own work, letting others wring their hands over everything else.

  This suited Sophie’s temperament perfectly, of course—but she worried that over time their tendencies were becoming more exaggerated, her yin swelling along with his yang. She’d seen this in older couples, like Brian’s parents. His mother had always been talkative, his father reticent. But in their later years her chattiness metastasized into a nonstop monologue, while Brian’s father lapsed into complete silence.

  That was the risk, she supposed, in marrying the person who let you be your fullest self. No other man had been completely comfortable with Sophie’s insistence on picking up the check and carrying her own groceries, or her habit of disappearing on long road trips without telling anyone where she was going. With Brian she was free to continue living as an unfettered twelve-year-old with a ten-speed, no curfew, no dinner cooling on the kitchen counter, no one calling the hospitals when she didn’t make it home before dark. Even on their honeymoon in France, she’d spent the first day and a half teaching herself to drive stick because she refused to let Brian be the sole driver of the rental car. “I need to know I can get away,” she’d joked, and he’d laughed, and let her drive the whole time, translating signs for her, reading maps, pointing out Gothic architecture. It was almost impossible to get the cranky Peugeot into reverse, but eventually she succeeded. “Now you can get away,” Brian had said with a slow smile as she backed out of the parking lot of the Château de Sully-sur-Loire. She’d always assumed it was his way of holding on to her, this insistence on letting go.

  And then her babies were born and pulled everything inside out. Instead of needing to know she could get away, Sophie needed very badly to know that she wouldn’t. But that’s what the house was for, wasn’t it? Putting down roots. Making promises she had no choice but to keep.

  She folded her butcher paper into a square and smoothed it flat. Their babysitting hours were slipping away, and her breasts were beginning to ache, but they sat a little longer, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. They watched the mailman shove piles of catalogs into slapping mail slots, and listened to the idling thrum of delivery trucks on the avenue. They waved to the old woman across the street who kept stealing peeks from behind a lace curtain. It was a rare moment unhooked from nap schedules and tantrum management; it could almost, Sophie reflected, be a moment lifted from their life before children. But this time she felt the weight of appreciation, and the creeping prickle of guilt.

  “Back to work,” she said, putting her hand o
n Brian’s shoulder and heaving herself to her feet.

  ***

  The block was lined with jack-o’-lanterns by the time Sophie and Brian finally brought the kids to see the house for the first time. It felt strange, after months of stepping over chunks of plaster and rusty nails, to carry their children across the threshold and set them down on the gleaming wood floor. Sunlight poured through the freshly cleaned front windows, illuminating the butter-yellow walls that were were, for a splendid moment, free of crayon marks, handprints, and fire-truck-shaped dents. The trim, stripped to its youthful profile and painted white, outlined each feature like glossy meringue icing, and the chestnut banister stretched upward through the house like a strand of pulled caramel. Elliot pointed at the living room’s new pendant lights, hooting appreciatively. Meanwhile, Lucy marched straight to the locked door of the powder room. “We don’t go in there, honey,” Sophie said. “It’s not finished yet.” They didn’t have enough money to renovate the small bathroom, and the floor was in danger of collapsing, so for now it was off-limits.

  They took the children to the second floor to see their bedrooms. Lucy stood uncertainly in the middle of her pale blue room, gazing up at the windows filled with sunny yellow leaves. She peeked into the shallow closet where people had once hung their clothes on hooks, and where, Sophie imagined, Lucy would someday hide her diary, or a Judy Blume book, or worse. Lucy looked up at her mother with a worried expression, and finally asked, hesitantly, if she was going to sleep on the floor. Sophie laughed and picked her up, carrying her around the room and helping her imagine her new big-girl bed against this wall, a wardrobe over here, a table and chair in this corner, some shelves. Later, posters and headphones and a mirror. Slumber parties and heartbreak, rock anthems and rage. A place where Lucy could be alone but not lonely. A place where, Sophie half hoped, a mother might be occasionally resented, but never longed for.

  Elliot’s room was smaller, and Sophie worried that this inequity would somehow become nourishment for a lifetime of low expectations. But Brian had assured her that Elliot would never suffer from his sister’s grasping need for rank and privilege. As an only child Sophie generally deferred to Brian on sibling issues, but she also wondered anxiously if it was already too late, and that Elliot’s noncompetitiveness was due to a nascent understanding that he just couldn’t win.

  Up another flight of stairs, under the roof, Sophie and Brian’s room had a view of the northern sky through the upper branches of the ginkgo tree. Sophie had chosen a soft taupe for the walls, a color that seemed compatible with deep, uninterrupted sleep. She knew it would be months—possibly years—before that dream would be realized. But this tranquil aerie felt full of promise.

  Sophie took charge of the move, marshalling tape, Sharpies, and the best kind of cardboard boxes—double walled; taped or stapled but never glued. The sound of packing tape being pulled, shrieking, from the dispenser was as familiar as her children’s voices. It brought back memories of another set of boxes, labels written, crossed out, written again. A set that had followed her from Seattle to Saint Louis, from Chicago to Bethesda, then to Los Angeles and, briefly, Montreal.

  Sophie and Brian moved quickly—racing between the apartment and house in a borrowed truck while a babysitter watched the kids—and unpacked slowly, at night, after the kids were in bed. This was Sophie’s favorite part: finding a satisfying spot for every lamp and picture frame, filling the living room’s built-in bookshelves, nudging furniture this way and that, arranging, organizing, claiming every corner and cabinet. She sank fully into the house’s embrace, the way she had once melted into Brian, back when they were young and well rested. At night she dreamed that the house was alive, its furnace whooshing blood through its veins, radiators sighing and moaning, the smooth plaster walls warming to her touch.

  She knew it was crazy to be in love with a house, but that was exactly how it felt—the dazed disbelief slowly blossoming into cautious joy. The obsessive circling of the mind back to the object of its fascination, again and again, accompanied by a private, shuddering jolt of adrenaline. How could she explain it? It was exactly how she’d felt when she and Brian had first started dating seriously, when she finally let herself stay the night, when she finally shed her casual, playing-the-field bravado and submitted to another person’s caring attentions in a way that felt simultaneously alien and normal. Brian was her first; she’d never even known what it meant—“falling in love”—until she found herself plummeting into that vacuum of utter vulnerability. And then, before long, the falling had turned into floating, and over the years it had eased into a gentle sway, holding her like a hammock, exactly the way she liked to be held, yielding yet secure, not too tight, not too loose.

  So here she was again, letting herself fall in love—that strange, plunging feeling—only this time it was with a house, and it wasn’t scary, because while people could abandon or hurt her, a house, she was pretty sure, could not.

  Four

  2006

  Wherever there were children, there were Music for Me franchises, so naturally there was one right around the corner from the new house. Sophie took the kids to Music for Me twice a week—an experience that, on the spectrum of parental obligations, fell somewhere between the three a.m. feeding and the episiotomy. The parents (mostly mothers, with one or two bearded stay-at-home dads thrown into the mix) would sit in a circle on the floor, singing songs, clapping hands, and shaking maracas with strenuous glee while the babies dozed and the toddlers wandered off to investigate the room’s light switches and door hinges. The teacher, a deeply dimpled young woman in a bright yellow vest with a ponytail on the very top of her head, sang everything. “Registration is now open for the next session,” she would croon. “We take MasterCard and Visa, fa la la.” Sophie couldn’t look at her while she was doing this; it was too embarrassing.

  Sophie spent the majority of the classes in a state of acute discomfort, counting the minutes until the ordeal would end. But Lucy seemed to like it, and sometimes Elliot waved his fists in a way that looked vaguely rhythmic, so Sophie continued taking them, knowing how important music was to their developing brains, and wishing someone had done the same for her so that she wouldn’t have so much trouble hitting the notes in “Good Morning, Farmer George.”

  It also turned out to be a good way to meet other parents in the neighborhood. She met Amy there, and her melancholy daughter, Mathilda, who would follow Lucy around with a look of wonderment on her face. Amy was a social worker embroiled in local politics, and her husband, Keith, was an architect who dressed the part, from his old-school Pumas to his black-framed, ostentatiously nerdy glasses. They invited Sophie and Brian to dinners with other families in the neighborhood, and introduced them to a new way of socializing: the noisy playdate with cocktails, plain pasta at the kids’ table, braised lamb shanks for the adults, gossip continually interrupted by shrieks, demands, and tantrums. Eventually somebody would put on a DVD in the playroom, and the kids would get quiet while the adults, moving on to dessert wine, got louder.

  Brian was the star of these dinners, with his tales of auctions and collectors, of treasures found in attics and fakes found in museums. Their new friends pressed him for details about the millionaires on his committee, basking in the borrowed glow of the cable magnate, the football team owner’s wife, the newspaper scion. Sophie appreciated those stories as social capital, but she knew they had nothing to do with Brian’s actual work—what pulled him to his office early each morning, what made him forget to eat lunch or return Sophie’s calls. It was the objects: the glaze, luster, relief, and reserve…it was the masterful brushstrokes consigned to brittle time capsules, which managed, through some miracle, to stay intact through wars and fires and ocean crossings. Brian was helplessly, embarrassingly in love with ceramics. He didn’t bring that up at parties.

  People didn’t understand Sophie’s work, mistaking her for a web designer and running out of question
s once she explained that she worked strictly on the back end. She didn’t mind; she had no interest in talking about her job outside her circle of colleagues. There was too much explaining, too much baffled admiration. Brian’s job was firmly rooted in the material world, but her work had no shadow, no heft, and she found she could make a conversation evaporate with the mere mention of ASP.NET data binding or dynamic validation controls.

  Besides, thinking about her work had begun to produce small twists of anxiety in her stomach. Things were not picking up the way they were supposed to. Sophie had long learned not to try to see around corners; the trick to the freelance life was to accept the inscrutability of the future and wait patiently for the job that would, inevitably, come along. But she’d only had a few small jobs since the summer, and it was becoming increasingly clear that during her brief maternity leave, most of her clients had managed to forget about her.

  So while Lucy was in preschool and Elliot napped, Sophie filled her time reading web dev blogs and emailing friends in the business. She called her old clients, letting them know she had “bandwidth,” even though she knew somehow that this would make things worse. Clients wanted the busy freelancers, the ones who took too long to call them back, the ones who negotiated with aloofness. She’d been one of the busy ones, before having children, and had seen how busyness always spiraled into hecticness. Now she saw that it worked the other way as well. Slowness spiraled into nothingness. It was hard not to feel like the lonely girl on the edge of the dance floor; she knew she shouldn’t take it personally. It was just a matter of learning the latest software, getting to know the new project managers, letting her old friends know she was working again. It would happen eventually.