We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [72]
“Why is it,” I asked as you led me around the sculpted backyard, “that the folks who built this place sold it so soon? After constructing a house that’s clearly so—ambitious?”
“I got the impression they were sort of, going in different directions.”
“Getting a divorce.”
“Well, it’s not as if that makes the property cursed or something.”
I looked at you with curiosity. “I didn’t say it did.”
“If houses passed that sort of thing along,” you blustered, “there wouldn’t be a shack in the country safe for a happy marriage.”
Cursed? You obviously intuited that, sensible as the suburban recourse seemed on its face—big parks, fresh air, good schools—we had drifted alarmingly astray. Yet what strikes me now is not your foreboding, but your capacity to ignore it.
As for me, I had no premonitions. I was simply bewildered how I had landed, after Latvia and Equatorial Guinea, in Gladstone, New York. As if standing in the surf at Far Rockaway during a tide of raw sewage, I could barely keep my balance as our new acquisition exuded wave after wave of stark physical ugliness. Why couldn’t you see it?
Maybe because you’ve always had a proclivity for rounding up. In restaurants, if 15 percent came to $17, you’d tip with a twenty. Should we have spent a tiresome evening with new acquaintances, I’d write them off; you’d want to give them a second chance. When that Italian girl I barely knew, Marina, turned up at the loft for two nights and then your watch disappeared, I was fuming; you grew only the more convinced that you must have left it at the gym. Lunch with Brian and Louise ought to have been fun? It was fun. You seemed to be able to squint and blur off the rough edges. As you gave me the grand tour of our new property, your camp counselor hard sell contrasted with a soulful look in your eyes, a pleading to play along. You talked nonstop, as if strung out on speed, and a lacing of hysteria fatally betrayed your own suspicion that 12 Palisades Parade was no formidable architectural exploit but an ostentatious flop. Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would round it up. While a cruder name for this process is lying , one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born.
Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus. At the risk of tautology, I like people only as much as I like them. I lead an emotional life of such arithmetic precision, carried to two or three digits after the decimal, that I am even willing to allow for degrees of agreeableness in my own son. In other words, Franklin: I leave the $17.
I hope I persuaded you that I thought the house was lovely. It was the first big decision you’d ever made independently on our behalf, and I wasn’t about to pee all over it just because the prospect of living there made me want to slit my wrists. Privately I concluded that the explanation wasn’t so much your different aesthetic, or lack of one; it’s just that you were very suggestible. I hadn’t been there, whispering in your ear about dumbwaiters. In my absence, you reverted to the taste of your parents.
Or an updated version of same. Palisades Parade was trying lethally to be “with it”; the house your parents built in Gloucester, Mass., was a traditional New England saltbox. But the spare-no-expense workmanship, the innocent faith in Niceness, was unmistakable.
My enjoyment of your father’s motto, “Materials are everything,” was not entirely at his expense. Up to a point, I saw the value of people who made things, and to the highest standard: Herb and Gladys built their own house, smoked their own salmon, brewed their own beer. But I had never met two people who existed so exclusively in three dimensions. The only times I saw your father excited were over a curly maple mantle or a creamy-headed stout, and I think it was over static physical perfection that he exalted; sitting before the fire, drinking