Face Value

A house imagines a lift.

Yesterday, we met with Kenny, a contractor who will probably renovate our house. We gathered at the big Williams Lumber up here to look at materials. The renovations will mostly be exterior. We’ll redo the deck, the roof, the siding, the gutters, etc. Two issues came up quickly. One was ease of maintenance. The other was how long the materials would last. Later, back home, Richard and I had a little fight about how I talk at these meetings. As if my choices are the only ones that count. He’s entirely right, and I don’t care. This is an unpleasant aspect of my personality. Sue me.

I must tell you, though, Richard and I have been talking about things we want to change about the house since we bought it, four and a half years ago. It’s not as if we haven’t had a hundred fights leading up to our time with Kenny. We have had exactly 100 fights, and until yesterday I thought I had lost all of them. Never mind what the fights are about. A fight is not about what it’s about. It never is. A fight is a boulder that has sat patiently for 10,000 years on the side of a mountain and suddenly decides to move twenty yards. Who even knew it was alive?

The Williams smelled of every kind of wood. It smelled of nature wanting to give us shelter. Is shelter what we’re after? It’s a funny word. Do I want shelter? Perhaps I do. I have never before owned a house. Richard has owned several houses. He knows what they want and how to play in them. This year, he became a US citizen in order to vote. He says if he outlives me, he’ll probably go back to England, although he doesn’t want to live in England. Last summer, we had the asphalt drive ripped out and replaced with gravel. This year, it’s the exterior of the house.

How are things going to go better with us? They are not! We are going to fight and go on, and there will be things—there already are things—about which I will say, “Sure, fine, whatever you want.” These are things Richard cares about more than I do. Such as what makes a house work so it won’t kill you. The septic system. The heating and cooling. The insulation. The safety of the well water. I don’t want to talk about these things. Sometimes, I want to be a cat falling from a height onto a pillow.

I have not before thought I lived some place other than in my body. My body plus a love that turned out to be limited in time. My body is no longer the thing I take into the world and say, “Hi, everyone, tell me what you think is going on.” This morning I said to Richard, “You look good. You still have that confidence. So would I if I looked like a knife in a cool combination of charcoal colored clothes. You have the hair, and the figure, and the glasses.” He said, “I think we look the same.” This is an example of how love distorts.

I said to Kenny, “There’s nothing wrong with the materials of our house except they’re ugly. This job is entirely about beauty.” He nodded. He was tall and wearing a baseball cap and cargo shorts. When I lived at home with my parents, my mother chose the furniture in my room. Honestly, I don’t remember chosing a thing. It was like living in a hotel. I didn’t even have to make the bed. At 17, when I left for college, wherever I lived from then on I built a nest. Even at an artist residency, in a room I would use only for a few weeks or a few months, I moved the furniture, pinned up art, made arrangements of things I found. It was so I could look around, breathe, and begin to think.

I said to Kenny, “If we work together, we have to be happy, and you have to be happy with us. It has to go both ways.” He smiled. He didn’t do the thing men in the building business up here often do, which is to suggest that your idea is no good and here is a better idea. When this happens, you can hear a door slam in my heart. It’s the look on my face. Or the man will talk to Richard over my head. Kenny was all, “Okay, the mahogany is too brown for the deck. I hear you. We’ll go with the cedar.”

He didn’t even shrug when he told his friend in the office we were replacing a Trex deck—the kind that needs no repairs ever because it’s not made of wood—with wood. About the issue of a thing being long-lasting, I said to Kenny, “We will disintegrate before the deck and the siding need replacing.” About the issue of maintenance, I said, “We’re not looking to avoid work.”

These are attitudes that go against the grain, as it were, Richard later explained to me. He said, “People our age are expected to be weary and to want less bother in their lives. They’re sitting on rockers on their Trex decks. People our age are expected to leave their house to their children. That’s why they might want materials that last.”

Every time I hear the phrase, “These materials will last you for thirty years,” I laugh. Then I think, in thirty years I will be 107 and Richard will be 103, and we will be having the same fight about the house being cold. We will be having the same fight if we are still at the end of some supply chain or other. Here we are, secluded and also weirdly visible, if you pull back the camera and look at us from a satellite, the way an app Kenny uses can measure our house and allow him to calculate costs.

In thirty years, Richard and I will be birds that nest in the little port holes on the underside of our giant solar unit. Birds that are undisturbed by the motion of the unit as it follows the sun and at night flattens out and comes to rest. These birds have learned to take the ride every day. I will be saying to Richard, “Sure, order the most expensive kit there is to test the water. I don’t care how much it costs.” I will not be saying this with irony. Then, as now, I will want him to be happy. 

Biz

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Louise Bourgeois

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