Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘What did you expect?’ he said, scratching at his neck. He’d just finished writing a huge grant application, and he’d developed eczema from the stress. ‘What difference does it make whether the stuff’s in a warehouse in Natick or in a basement in Whately? If you’d listened to me in the first place …’

I told him what I’d been thinking in the car. ‘I’m going to renovate it,’ I said. ‘Fix the whole thing up, decorate it, and then furnish it with the stuff in the crates.’

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s great. Then what?’

‘Then I’ll see what I feel like,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll turn the house into a shop like Uncle Owen’s. Maybe I’ll sell it. I’ll see.’

Walter hardly spoke to me for a month. He was writing about food chains, coprophages, nitrogen-fixing bacteria; he’d hung the walls of his office with scribbled flowcharts and food webs that were screaming to be redrawn. When I went to him for some plumbing advice he looked meaningfully at the walls and refused to help me.

‘ I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How would I know these things? Eileen and you have always taken care of whatever broke.’

‘But this is interesting,’ I told him, turning the pages of a home-repair handbook. ‘Remember when you first started teaching me biology, and I was so excited? This is just as interesting. We could learn it together.’

‘You’re ruining your life,’ he said. ‘First you drop out of school. Now you won’t help with my book. Before you know it, you’ll have blown everything your uncle left you and you’ll have nothing to show for it.’

I was hurt by Walter’s lack of interest — as he, I suppose, was hurt by mine — but I went ahead with the renovation anyway. At a small dinner at the Faculty Club, I overheard two women I’d always avoided discussing shingles, and when I asked them if they knew a good roofer they looked at me with sudden interest. We pulled our chairs together and talked about slate and cedar shakes, detabbing, nails, cements. They gave me a name, the roofer came; the roofer suggested a man who could refinish floors. The floor man knew a good painter. The painter knew a good electrician. The electrician knew a plumber and a mason and a carpenter, and by the following winter, after nine months of delays and reversals and small disasters, the house was almost done. It stood clean and sturdy and functional, the oak floors smooth and bright again, the moldings and woodwork refinished, the roof and chimney tight. The outside was white with black shutters and trim, the way it had been a hundred years ago. When spring came, and I had only the interior walls to refinish, I started bringing up Uncle Owen’s things.

As I unwrapped and uncrated the objects, bringing up treasures one by one, I was amazed again by Uncle Owen’s eye. Lacquer tables, black and silky; gilt mirrors carved like bamboo. Twelve fret-back Georgian dining-room chairs. A bronze Japanese wind god, cases of blue-and-white export ware, carved cinnabar floor screens, red-lacquer panels inset with hardstone and jade. A Japanese folding screen with a flock of sparrows and leafy twigs scattered on gold foil, a pair of Victorian slipper chairs, an eighteenth-century marquetry chest. An umbrella stand painted with dragons and scrolling flowers. A celadon lamp with an ivory silk shade, more and more. I bought books and read about what I had and learned the vocabulary: urn finials. Scroll-carved chamfered corners. Plinth bases, dentil-molded cornices, trellis-diaper borders. Names I learned as easily as I’d once learned the names of birds and fish.

At night I came home and tried to explain this all to Walter, but I couldn’t interest him. I sat in one chair, flipping through the latest issue of Antiques and Collectibles Guide and murmuring magic words to myself. Cloisonné. Coromandel lacquer. Underglaze. Across the table from me, Walter wrote about the forests of the southern Appalachians. ‘Food webs are enormously complex there,’ he said. ‘The black bear, at the top, rips up trees and logs and digs out honeycomb and eats acorns and berries and drops seeds in his scat that spread the vegetation.’

‘Balloon-back side chairs,’ I said. ‘Would you look at these?’

‘Nurse logs,’ Walter replied.

We spoke in different languages and couldn’t seem to translate for each other; we lived like well-bred roommates. I worked, he worked, we cut deals on separate phones; he spent a few evenings a week in the lab and I spent a few at my house. When we crawled into bed at night we were tired but satisfied, and we had things to tell each other and excuses — reasonable, adult excuses — when our lovemaking didn’t go well or didn’t go at all. We were tired, we said. We were getting older. Our bodies were altering. And after a while it hardly mattered that we wore pajamas to bed and hugged in ways that brought only innocuous body parts together. Our bodies took care of themselves. Sleep made us strangers to each other, and when I woke sometimes, trembling and hot, from nightmares in which my new house burned and collapsed into a steaming cellar, I could often stroke my unconscious husband into surprising life.

Once in a while I stopped to wonder what this was, to worry about what happens to couples who carry on when there’s nothing left between them but a piece of paper and routine, but I pushed those thoughts aside and concentrated on finishing the house. I had nothing to furnish a kitchen or a bedroom or a bath, but I had Tabrizes and Sultanabads and Herizes and Agras, enough to strew across every room. I had vases and pitchers and platters to set in every niche and windowsill. I still didn’t know what I meant to do with the house, but I painted the dining-room walls lacquer red and put pale-green grass-cloth in the living room.

About then, in early May, the realtors started dropping by. Women, mostly, in low heels and tailored skirts and jackets and quiet blouses. They knocked at the door and then walked in, cards in their outstretched hands, and as the rooms fell into place, the right chain on the right rugs, the right tables crowned with the right lamps and jars, they went from saying, ‘Oh — I just dropped in because I was curious,’ to ‘Oh. Would you be interested in selling?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said at first. ‘These were my great-uncle’s things.’

‘Not the things,’ the realtors said. ‘The house. It’d show so well with all your lovely things in it, and you’ve done such a great job …’

But I wasn’t done, I wasn’t ready to let it go. I was lost in the language of things, so entranced by what I’d done that I’d suddenly realized I could do this as a career. I could do to other houses what I’d done to this: renovate, rehabilitate, make something out of nothing. I took books out of the library and pored over them, and only when I felt that I’d learned enough did I let the most persistent of the realtors sell the house. She sold it for three times what I’d paid for it, more than enough to cover the commission and the cost of the repairs with plenty left over, and that was how I began my career, how I became a small success. I plowed the money from that first house into several other properties, painting and fixing and sprucing them up and then strewing them with Uncle Owen’s treasures, which seemed to induce a pleased hypnosis in prospective buyers. I did over houses in Amherst and South Hadley and Leverett, learning to translate my real desires into wood and cloth and paint, and I stopped only when Walter fell into a new project that captured me.

Walter had a colleague named Tyler Robertson, who was studying the migration routes of monarch butterflies; we were at a party at Tyler’s house when I first heard Walter’s idea. I wasn’t paying attention at first: all Walter’s scholarly friends had a passionate interest in good investments, and I’d become quite popular since I’d learned to talk about tax credits and property values. A mammalogist was asking me about the potential of an old farmhouse in Conway when I overheard Walter say to a group of students, ‘I’ve been thinking about something we could all work on together. A team project, like the one at the Quabbin.’