Like a House on Fire, page 2
“This is who I want to be,” she told him, and he nodded like he understood, and for the first time in a long time everything seemed all right.
She got pregnant with Jude that night.
The fact that they hadn’t been trying made it feel like providence, and that was good, because Merit wasn’t sure she was supposed to have kids. Mostly she worried she wasn’t cut out for it. She wasn’t a horrible person—she’d always been kind to strangers, a conscientious houseguest and an avid recycler—but if she were honest (and she was, back then, always honest), she suspected she wasn’t selfless enough to be a truly great mother, and that’s the only kind she wanted to be. But then she got pregnant while she was still on the pill, on a day that already felt like an inflection point, and she decided not to question fate.
Cory turned the loft into a baby’s room and bought her nontoxic paints.
To be clear, he wasn’t suggesting that she try to make a career out of her art. Not that morning in the bathroom, when they sat side by side on the ledge of the tub and she finally told him how unhappy she’d been. Not later, when she was pregnant and miserable and spending sixty hours a week in a cubicle drafting toilet partitions on a computer screen. Not even when she was on maternity leave and painted Discord, the piece that got all the attention and earned her a real gallery show. Cory was supportive of her art as long as it remained a side hustle, something that made her interesting and a little quirky but didn’t affect the balance in her 401(k). It was the central unspoken tension in their marriage; the fight under the surface of every argument about something else.
It was still there now. Five years after that morning in the bathroom. Three and a half years after she quit her job without telling Cory she was going to. And six months after the owner of the gallery where she’d had her show called to say he didn’t expect to sell any more of her work, could she please come get her pieces? Except it wasn’t a fight anymore, just a knot of mutual resentment they’d become good at pretending wasn’t there. It was the real reason she’d decided to go back to architecture, but she’d never admit it. That would feel too much like defeat.
“You’re at least a little bit excited, right?” Cory asked, and frowned. Merit still hadn’t answered his question about the new job. “I hope you don’t feel like I pressured you into this.”
“Don’t be silly,” Merit said, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. “It was my idea.”
And it had been. In fact, she’d called the recruiter without even telling him, just in case she changed her mind. It wasn’t until after her first interview was set that she mentioned she was thinking about going back to work. By then she’d convinced herself that a full-time job in architecture was something she genuinely wanted for her own identity and sanity, not something she felt compelled to do because her husband liked her better when she was employed.
After dinner, Cory took his laptop up to their bedroom. Merit caved and let the boys watch TV while she loaded the dishwasher by herself. God, she hated the fucking dishwasher. The relentless cycle of loading and unloading. The greasy plates and cups that were left, night after night, on the mid-century dining table she’d found at a flea market when she was pregnant with Jude, back when she thought having nice furniture was possible for people with kids.
She caught a hint of her reflection in the window over the sink as she muttered to herself about gender inequity and poor table manners and barely recognized herself. When had she become a disgruntled thirty-seven-year-old nag who talked to herself in the kitchen while schlepping dishes to the sink? What happened to the bubbly, vivacious person she’d been in college, the girl who dropped her shoes and her bag and sometimes her bra on the floor just inside the front door and left art supplies all over the place? Cory was the neat freak, the boy with Minnesota manners, the one who knew which vacuum attachment was appropriate for the carpet and which one to use to clean the couch. He was the one who was supposed to keep them unfilthy and organized, yet he’d somehow managed to opt out of this side of himself when they had kids. Or did it start when Merit quit her job without running it by him first? Cory had always been so polite. Merit suspected that this sustained housecleaning strike was his passive-aggressive fuck you.
Well, he could get over it now. She was going back to work, with a salary that wasn’t fantastic but was apparently high enough to bring his libido roaring back. They hadn’t had sex in nearly two months, but the morning after Jane offered her the job on the spot, Cory pulled Merit into the shower with him, and they did it twice before the kids woke up. The surge of his desire was so transparent it annoyed Merit, but only mildly. So what if her husband’s hard-ons were tied to her career? The girl he’d wanted to marry was teeming with ideas and ambition. For the past several years his wife had been perfectly happy painting in her pajamas all day, sometimes without ever brushing her teeth. As she mounted him on their bed for round two that morning, still wearing her bra because she hated what breastfeeding had done to her tits, Merit wondered if she’d lost her edge.
Cory grabbed her butt and flipped her over. She’d come easily enough in the shower. It felt like a lot of work to try to go again. She moaned believably, then made a grocery list in her head.
Cory left for work, and Merit went to Union Square, where she rapidly spent eight hundred dollars she didn’t have on three new work dresses. She didn’t love the way they fit, but buying them made her feel like a professional person who would know better than to wear a stretchy striped T-shirt to a workplace. And although she would never look as fabulous as Jane in a working woman’s frock, her arms at least were toned, and her legs were tan from sitting outside on the roof deck above their building with the boys. She took them up there when she got back from shopping that afternoon. Was she really ready to go back to an office job? She’d occasionally fantasized about driving down the coast while her sons were napping and never returning, but now that she had a legitimate excuse to leave them for nine hours a day without endangering their lives, she felt like crying at the prospect of doing it.
She let herself wallow in nostalgia as she watched them play in the sandbox she’d bought off Craigslist at the start of the summer, when it was clear she wouldn’t sell any more of her art and she was trying on the idea of being a full-time mom. She’d told herself it was a relief not to be striving anymore, that she didn’t need a splashy career, that building towers out of Legos was the most satisfying activity on Earth. Some days she believed this. Most days it took effort not to stand in the center of her living room and scream.
Not that she blamed her children for how things had turned out with her art. But it certainly hadn’t helped that she’d been sleep-deprived and hormonal as she tried to speed-paint fifteen large-format canvases for her first and only gallery show, without any childcare because Cory insisted they couldn’t afford it with only one salary coming in. Her pieces weren’t awful, but they weren’t particularly good, either. She didn’t disagree with the sole critic who’d bothered to give her a review. He’d called them “proficient but sterile.” It described how she’d felt as she painted them.
So, yes, she was ready to go back to architecture, to straight lines and graph paper and the chance to do something she was less likely to fail at while not worrying whether they would be able to pay their rent. She was even more ready for her husband to stop sighing heavily every time he walked in the door and found her sitting unproductively on the couch. Still, she had a pit in her stomach, the pang that always accompanied the last day of any vacation, even the shitty ones. Mostly, she hated finality, and her decision to go back to work full-time felt like something she could never undo.
She put the boys down for a nap and tried on her new dresses again. Standing in front of her full-length mirror in the blue one, she wondered why she’d bought it. She wasn’t a dress person. She looked better in pants.
What she should’ve gotten were groceries. She didn’t have anything to make for dinner, and they were out of the vanilla coffee creamer Cory liked.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
JANE: Hi.
Then:
JANE: I neglected to cover a crucial topic in your interview. It bears on my decision to hire you.
Merit frowned and picked up her phone. She wrote back with three question marks but then deleted all but one.
MERIT: yes?
She waited. The three gray dots appeared. She imagined Jane on the other end, effortlessly put together, feet up on her oversize desk.
The text popped up.
JANE: dear god please tell me you drink.
two
JANE TOOK HER to lunch on her first day, to a trendy restaurant down the street from their office. The sidewalk patio was packed with attractive millennials in denim and white sneakers having conversations that involved a lot of aggressive smiling. Merit felt ridiculous in her new work dress, in no small part because her new boss was wearing skintight shredded jeans, a black T-shirt, and steel-toed stiletto boots. Apparently, the frock Jane had worn for Merit’s interview had been a one-off, on loan from a stylist for a magazine shoot at a house in Nob Hill later that afternoon. Except when forced to pose for aspirational photographs in six-million-dollar homes, Jane exclusively wore jeans.
(Merit regretted ripping the tags off her new dress. Could she somehow reattach them and take the hideous thing back?)
Despite the crowd at the restaurant, the hostess signaled for them as soon as they walked in and took them to a corner table out back.
“The scene’s a bit obnoxious, but the food’s pretty good,” Jane said as they sat. “And there’s zero chance of running into Lars or Erik here, which is the real win.”
“What are they like?” Merit asked. She was dying for more intel. All she knew about the two men who owned the company that now employed her was what she’d managed to find online; namely, their ages (forty-six and forty-seven), their origin story (they met in business school at Stanford), and their reputation for being “disruptors” in the very niche world of historic preservation design. She’d also learned that despite the fact that their last names were painted in oversize letters on the side of the warehouse they’d bought to house their new architecture firm, neither Lars nor Erik was a licensed architect. That’s what they’d hired Jane for, to be the architect of record on every permit application they filed with the city.
“Peter Pan and his middle-aged golden retriever,” replied Jane. “It’ll be obvious from your first conversation with them which one is which.”
“Is it weird that I got this job without meeting them?” Merit asked.
Jane shrugged. “Who cares? Lars said specifically that I should bring someone onto my team, and I didn’t want to give him the impression that he had any say over who I chose.”
“So they could meet me and decide to fire me,” Merit mused. She was oddly elated by this. Not so much at the prospect of being fired but at the subtle rebellion of her hiring.
“They could,” Jane said. “But they wouldn’t. You’re too attractive.”
Merit nearly laughed at the absurdity of this.
“So they like the tired-mom look?”
“Oh, stop,” Jane said, rolling her eyes. “Nothing about you says tired mum.”
“You asked about my kids within the first five minutes of meeting me!”
“I only guessed you had them because you seemed like the type of person who would.”
“What type of person is that?” Merit asked. She was suddenly acutely aware of her nipples. She’d stopped breastfeeding Nash when she first made the decision to go back to work, but she was still producing random bursts of milk. A pins-and-needles sensation erupted in both breasts. It didn’t escape her that she’d just answered her own question. The type of person who lactates at the first mention of kids.
Merit saw Jane’s eyes flick from Merit’s face to her chest, and she knew without looking that one of the breast pads she’d shoved in her very ill-fitting bra that morning had migrated to her armpit and she was leaking through her new dress. So much for taking it back.
“I’m going to run to the restroom,” Merit said quickly. She slid an arm across her body and felt wetness against her wrist.
“Shall I order for you?” Jane asked, keeping her eyes averted.
“I’ll have the tuna melt,” Merit heard herself say, even though she was quite certain she had never ordered a tuna melt in her life. She hurried toward the bathroom, arms folded across her chest.
Fortunately, the bathroom had a hand dryer. Unfortunately, it was mounted at waist level, forcing Merit to crouch over it awkwardly with her nipple jammed into the narrow opening. Though “jammed” was a stretch. After sputtering out half a tablespoon of milk, her left boob had resumed its normal postpartum shape, which resembled an overripe peach dangling in worn-out pantyhose. It slid right in.
This is why there is gender pay disparity, Merit thought as her breast was pelted with air.
Jane was absorbed in her phone when Merit got back to the table.
“Everything okay?” she asked, glancing up as Merit sat.
“Yep!” Merit felt an urge to say something scandalous, if only to distance herself from the lactating woman in the dorky work dress who’d just aerated her nipple in a bathroom hand dryer. She chewed on her lip and waited for Jane to finish her text instead.
“We have a pitch tomorrow morning,” Jane said finally, setting her phone on the table.
An exuberant fuck yeah! flew through Merit’s head. She felt mildly maniacal and immediately blamed her hormones. “What’s the project?” she asked in a civilized voice.
“A house in Sausalito,” Jane replied. “A neighbor of mine, actually. The woman who owned it died last year and now her granddaughter wants to gut it.”
“You live in Sausalito?”
“Second home.” Jane grimaced. “Which makes me sound awfully bougie, doesn’t it?”
“I think wanting a second home is bougie,” Merit replied. “Actually having one just makes you rich.”
Jane laughed. Merit felt a jolt of pleasure.
“I bought it before I got married,” Jane explained. “And I would’ve stayed there, but my husband decided that Sausalito was a ‘suburban cesspool.’ So, we bought a condo on the bougiest of bougie streets in the Marina, and I cry myself to sleep every night instead.”
“What does he do?” Merit asked.
“Owns a restaurant. Yours?”
“Engineer,” Merit said. “He works in tech.”
Jane nodded, like this fit. Merit supposed it did.
“So you’re coming with me tomorrow,” Jane said then. “To the pitch.”
Merit appreciated that it wasn’t a question. “Does it matter that I don’t know anything about the project?” she asked.
“I’ll send you the proposal when we get back to the office,” Jane said with a wave of her hand. “But it doesn’t matter, you won’t have to speak. I just need your trustworthy face.”
“Again with my appearance,” Merit joked. “I thought you hired me for my skill.”
Jane smiled indulgently. “Honey, I’m an architect. Everything is an aesthetic choice.”
The waiter arrived with their food. Jane had ordered a very civilized steak salad. Merit stared at her tuna melt with deep remorse. The cheddar was aggressively orange and only half melted. The sandwich as a whole was awkward and messy, which made Merit herself feel awkward and messy.
This sandwich is not a metaphor, she told herself.
She lifted it gingerly toward her mouth. A hunk of tuna plopped down on her plate.
She set the sandwich down and picked up her knife and fork.
“So the pitch should be fun,” Jane said, slicing her steak.
“Will you wear jeans?” Merit asked.
“Most definitely.”
“So . . . should I wear jeans?”
“You can wear whatever you want.” Jane stabbed a piece of meat with her fork. “But if I were you, I’d go with a different bra.”
“Noted,” Merit said, and felt her cheeks flush.
“Not that I don’t love a leaky tit,” Jane added, smiling. “Especially over lunch.”
* * *
MERIT SPENT THE afternoon going through Jane’s proposal. It was artfully done, but basic. There weren’t any animations in the slides, which Merit thought was a missed opportunity. She popped into Jane’s office to tell her this and offered to add some in.
Jane arched a brow. “You know how to do that?”
“Well, yeah,” Merit replied. “It’s kind of the reason people use presentation software in the first place? Otherwise you could just build this as a PDF.”
“How old are you?” Jane demanded.
Merit smiled. “Younger than I look.”
Jane leaned back in her chair and put her feet on her desk. “Ugh, Tony is always offering to ‘jazz up’ my presentations. He thinks they’re boring, too!” Tony was Jane’s assistant, an architecture student at California College of the Arts. He wore bifocals and had a tattoo of a cactus on his biceps, and he only spoke when spoken to. Merit hadn’t determined whether this was by direction or choice. Merit’s offer letter had said that she’d have “access to an assistant,” but she’d never had an assistant at her old firm, and Jane seemed very territorial over Tony, so Merit had already decided to answer her own phone.
“Tony!” Jane was yelling at the hallway. Ten seconds later, Tony appeared in her doorway.
“What’s up?” Tony asked nervously.
“Merit agrees with you that my presentations are dull.”
Tony looked horrified. “I never said they were dull.”
