The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [152]
Sandy nodded sagely. “Few things do,” she said, her beaming, impossibly hale face suggesting just the opposite. “So what else can I tell you?”
Affenlight gazed through the patio door at the groomed and moonlit backyard, the lake beyond. It was a beautiful house. Big but not outlandish, as Sandy said. But why even consider it? He’d been in the quarters for eight years, had hardly felt cramped or dissatisfied. If the garbage disposal broke or there was a problem with the heat, he just called Infrastructure and they sent someone over. Here there was no Infrastructure. He’d have rooms to paint, a furnace to replace, property taxes to pay. Not to mention the fact that he owned so little furniture, not nearly enough to fill so many rooms. What kind of condition was the roof in? That was the kind of question he needed to ask Sandy, the kind of question that, if he bought a house, he’d be asking himself forever.
Hadn’t the myth of the glory of home ownership been debunked once and for all? Did he really want to trade his free time—and a formidable chunk of his savings—for a big white symbol of bourgeois propriety? Well, maybe so. And he couldn’t help thinking Pella would love the place. The entire upstairs could be hers: one room for sleeping, another for a study, the third small one for a studio, or a walk-in closet, or whatever. He himself would have plenty of space downstairs. She could take a room in the dorms too—a place where he could assume her to be when she wasn’t around, thus saving him plenty of worry and compromised sleep. She was upset with him now, and rightly so, but she’d love this place, he could feel it. Not that this was a plan to win her back.
And though it had been decades, he himself was no slouch mechanically—he’d grown up on a farm, spent years on board a ship. He wasn’t some kid who’d been raised by the internet. He could take care of a house. The Bremens maintained their yard in the familiar American style, a lush immaculate carpet, but that didn’t mean he’d have to do the same—he could dig up all that lushness and plant tomatoes, rhubarb, beans. Garlic in the fall. Hell, pumpkins. He could plant pumpkins, his favorite boyhood crop, crazy as that seemed. Who could stop him? Was there some rule that said a lawn had to be a lawn, with a prim staked garden tucked in the corner? Yes, most likely—the town of Westish probably had no lack of pointless regulations and nitpicky neighbors to enforce them. But those people would be confronted, stared down, chased off, by the grumpy Thoreauvian president with the pumpkins and the beans…
His phone trilled in his pocket. Maybe it was Pella, maybe he could convince her to come over now and look around. He smiled apologetically at Sandy, slid it out to peek at the caller ID: Owen.
“Don’t mind me,” Sandy said. “I know how in demand you are.”
But Affenlight let his voice mail absorb O’s melted-butterscotch voice. If this extempore scheme appealed to him partly as a declaration to his daughter—I’m here, I’m reliable, rely on me, I love you—it could only mean something entirely different with regard to Owen, something Affenlight wasn’t ready to formulate. Owen would be going to Japan in September, would come back to Westish for his commencement ceremony and little else. There was nothing for him in this part of the country, nothing at all. Whereas Affenlight had a college and a daughter, at least for the next four years, and then he’d be sixty-five. To buy a house would be a declaration that he could conceive of living without Owen—or at least that he was resigned to try.
Contango settled down on the pale kitchen floor inches from Affenlight’s chair, noble head on noble paws. The two of them watched as Sandy washed and peeled carrots and oranges and prepared to feed them into a juicer. “Looks like somebody’s made a friend,” she said. “Now, not to be crass, but should we talk about money?”
“I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”
She told him the list price. He whistled. “I thought the housing market collapsed.”
Sandy laughed. “You get what you pay for.”