At ten o’clock, she sat on the toilet lid and tilted her laptop screen so that Jeff and Mitzi hopefully wouldn’t see the tank.
When they were connected, Jeff’s face appeared against their kitchen cabinets; next to him, Mitzi had her cell phone pressed to her ear.
“How are you holding up?” Jeff asked, gesturing to Mitzi to get off the phone.
“Ma, I’ll call you back,” Mitzi said. “I’m just starting a meeting with my architect. Okay. I will, I will. I love you, too.”
Mitzi hung up and leaned into the screen, the symmetrical curves of her hair rocking against her cheeks.
“I’m okay, I think,” Gina said. “It’s been a rough week.”
“You poor thing,” Mitzi said. “Thanks so much for agreeing to talk today.” Thin and high-strung, she was dressed in an orange workout top and a Giants baseball cap. Her phone chimed with a text and when she picked it up to look at it, Jeff said, “Mitzi, put it away! That’s rude.”
Mitzi stuck out her tongue at Jeff and winked at Gina. “Is it true what they say—that remodeling destroys marriages?” She laughed as if such a thing could never happen to her.
Gina cringed, wondering if she’d be able to rise to the occasion this morning of being the Stones’ architect, a position she’d been navigating for over a year. The Stones had moved from St. Louis and bought a fifteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion in San Francisco that sat on a hill of solid rock, one-hundred-twenty feet back from the street. When Gina first toured the house, she’d been awed by its audacious expenditure of space, the colossal volumes that seemed to presume inhabitants who themselves were larger-than-life and had a royal-sized entitlement to earth and air. The walls of the main rooms were lined with low wainscots and pierced with mean little windows—like the eyes of a behemoth. Worn from neglect, the house was clunky and visually busy, with a tortuous floor plan.
A tear-down, Gina had thought to herself. She’d wished away the thick, stucco walls and in their place, imagined planes of light—perhaps a double-height living room—that celebrated the large and luxuriant yard, filled with sun and tall trees. She wasted no time in making her proposal to Mitzi and Jeff. Without missing a beat, Jeff had said, “I want that.” Mitzi had been harder to convince, explaining that she associated the house’s imitative European style with classiness. Gina’s solution—to retain the façade while completely recreating the house behind—would satisfy both Mitzi’s vision and San Francisco’s codes enforcing the preservation of potentially historic buildings.
And now Mitzi clapped her hands, rattling her gold and jade bracelet every time Gina pointed out a detail that defied tradition; she cooed about the “architectural statement” they were going to make to the world—or at least, to Pacific Heights. Besides the façade, she remained committed only to the size of the original house. “We want a home where everyone can visit. Plus, we want to have four bedrooms for our kids,” she’d explained.
So far, there were no children; Mitzi had confided to Gina last month that they’d been trying to get pregnant for three years.
“Gina,” Mitzi said, reaching for something. She held a page of a magazine up to the screen. “I thought this was a great idea—a gift-wrapping room. When you think about it, we women spend half our time wrapping presents, you know? Could we make something like that?”
“Why not?” Gina said. “You have the space.”
“Fabulous!” Mitzi beamed. “I am just so excited about this house! I was wondering, do people with nice homes in San Francisco ever name them? We’ve been to Jeff’s client’s place in the Hamptons—one of those big, shingled houses with a huge porch and a widow’s walk? On the east coast, a lot of homes have names. His is called ‘Firefly House.’ Isn’t that romantic?”
“Mitzi,” Jeff patted her hand. “Gina knows all about houses with names; she’s an Ivy League-educated east-coaster.” Jeff, a Harvard Business School alumnus, grinned at Gina with an air of fraternity.
“Oh, yeah!” Mitzi said. “Maine. Did the house you grew up in have a name?”
Gina glanced at the original claw-foot tub with its jerry-rigged shower, the peeling ceiling paint, and the cracked black-and-white linoleum. “No,” she said. “No name.”
Mitzi’s phone rang. “Ma,” she said into the phone, “I’m still in my meeting. No, September’s no good. Okay, thanks—you’re too adorable. Love you.” She hung up. “My mother!” she complained. “But she’s like my best friend.” She caught herself, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, Gina, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking . . .”
“No worries,” Gina said, feeling a vacancy inside more cavernous than Mitzi could possibly imagine: the missing of her mother that she’d experienced long before her mother had died.
An awkward silence followed. “Can we talk about bathrooms?” Jeff finally asked. “I really think a house with this many bedrooms deserves five baths.”
Gina counted to ten in her head and recited her mantra: “needs expand to meet the budget available.” Aloud she said, “No problem. Let’s see.” She shifted her laptop so she could stretch the roll of tracing paper over the drawing, and with her pen quickly reconfigured the second-floor laundry room and closets to accommodate another bathroom. She wondered: How would Mitzi and Jeff feel, shuffling around those rooms, if having children didn’t work out? Five bathrooms, two dishwashers, and an au pair apartment didn’t have fertility powers. She held up the drawing for them to see.
“Gina, where are you, anyway?” Mitzi said, leaning toward the screen. “Are you, like, in a bathroom?”
Gina stood and quickly rearranged her laptop. “Oh, yeah. It’s the only place in the house that gets a good connection.”
Jeff smiled, baring his over-bleached teeth. “It looks quaint,” he said. Gina was relieved that they seemed reluctant to ask where, exactly, she was staying.
“Okay. Great,” Jeff said, looking at his watch. “We’ve got the baths. Thank you for indulging us.” He flashed his smile again. “What I love about architects,” he said, his voice suddenly silky, “is that you ask, ‘What can we do—what is the dream?’ instead of, ‘What needs to be done?’”
After more than an hour of talking with the Stones, Gina closed her laptop and sat for a moment, soaking in the sunlight pouring through the bathroom’s high, east-facing windows. No amount of space, of marble or fancy plumbing fixtures, she thought, could match the luxury of beginning the day in a sun-drenched room.
She stepped down the stairs, put on her fleece jacket, and walked out of the house with her suitcase. She locked the front door, her hand unsteady as the bolt thunked into place. Turning over the key with its twenty-year-old paper tag in her hand, she had the thought that she should do something ceremonious with it. She set her suitcase on the porch, ran down the hill to the cove, and with a dramatic sweep of her arm, hurled the key; when the water swallowed it, she immediately regretted her impulsiveness.
She climbed back up the steep hill to the narrow band of level lawn that had been their patio. “The view!” she remembered Kit exclaiming yesterday. Indeed, it was a celebrity view, having appeared on the covers of magazines and calendars as captured by her father’s camera. Unlike the breathtakingly wide, uninterrupted ocean of the West Coast, this panorama offered places for the eye to rest on its way to the horizon: the shimmering, horseshoe-shaped cove rimmed by tall, straight spruces, two tiny islands, a changing cast of picturesque boats, the lighthouse marking the harbor’s outer edge. Many a painter had set up her easel in the yard, but Gina and her family had always agreed that simply sitting and watching as the landscape changed from moment to moment was a creative activity in itself.
All of her adult life, every year on arrival here, Gina had dashed from the car to stand in this spot, embracing the smells and scenery of her childhood, her parents’ ecstatic welcome and summery moods.