The Lees grew out their hair dye and went about gray-headed, sold the clothes the Kerchevals had bought them, swapped the bright silks and swishy skirts for secondhand jeans of the type that are usually sold to men and white T-shirts or the cream-colored jumpers that were consistently the cheapest available in charity shops. When Margot goes through a romantic drought nowadays she asks Harriet if she should go back to dressing like that. They both remember how often Margot got asked out during that period. By people she enjoyed too—it was something to do with charges they didn’t emit and others that they did. Twice Margot brought a lover home and Harriet thought they might be considering something long term. Twice Harriet had the simultaneously intriguing and excruciating experience of watching two people having sex without touching, or even moving, apart from a few uncontrollable and quickly suppressed gasps. Intriguing would’ve outweighed excruciating if one of the people involved hadn’t been her own mother . . . and wasn’t this a sort of inversion of the non-physical cage fights Margot and Simon had dragged each other into right in front of their daughter? Both potentially long-term involvements stalled; Harriet never found out from which end, but she cherished the boozy picnic each visitor brought along with them. Flaky bread, the creamiest of cheeses, roasted pheasant breast, and tall bottles of wine that waxed flamingo-necked the drunker Harriet got.
But those were the two brief holidays her mother was able to find the time and inclination for. The rest of the time Margot was on her way to work, at work, on her way back from work or asleep. It wasn’t her clothes that drew in the amorous response to her person—Margot Lee had an eidolic beauty in those days, her gaze downcast as she tended to what flickered within, the drowsy, drowsy beating of a heart that knows how few its needs are. One of Margot’s jobs required her to think on her feet—a coalition of independent café owners paid her a monthly wage to stand outside selected Starbucks locations and “discreetly discourage potential customers from going in” (methods not specified). Of Margot’s other four jobs, the most notable was probably the agency-facilitated one. Applicants were put through a few shrewdly anonymous checks for trustworthiness before they were approved for employment. (Margot submitted her CV and was told, three weeks later, that she’d passed both interview stages. Who interviewed me, and when?! Answer came there none.)
The job itself was waiting for deliveries at people’s houses. You arrived as the customer was leaving, and there was no popping in and out of the house before the parcel(s) had been signed for, as you weren’t left with any house keys. And Margot Lee didn’t just sit around watching TV while she was waiting; she did any washing up that was lying around and rearranged furniture so that the rooms looked better. To say that is to simplify what Margot does; her talents lie in the psychotherapeutic realm. Nowadays she gets magazine write-ups describing her as an “architect of the emotion of living spaces,” and though she wishes there was a less off-putting way to say it, she does own up to a structural approach to what she does. Once, as she paced around waiting for a package in a living room that made her dizzy whenever she approached the center of its floor, she fell to thinking of a way to either close off that whirlwind center or reset its level. Window-shopping had been good that week. She’d seen a folding screen . . . filigreed clouds hurried along across its cutwork sky, and it stood on little legs . . . Margot picked up her credit card. The shop she had in mind didn’t have a website, so she phoned them and placed an order for delivery. Since the shop was just down the street, the screen arrived before the package she was waiting for. She positioned the screen, left the package in front of it (or behind it, depending on your vantage point), and moved on to her next waiting session. That evening the Waiting Agency called her to say that the customer was VERY EXCITED, wanted to know exactly what Margot had done to make the room so comfortable she felt as if she’d been born in it, and so on. She wanted to know how much she owed Margot. Margot quoted the price she’d paid for the screen and the customer phoned her back directly to ask her to take away the screen.
That’s silly money. But maybe . . . if you have time . . . do you think you find some less expensive things that have . . . how to say it . . . similar force?
And with that Margot was on her way toward what she most wanted to do. Being able to work for herself was part for it, but she would have worked for anyone who allowed her free rein over the construction of images that dwelled in your own image, entering through the eye and enveloping all your other senses. A jazz lover Margot was seeing for a while lent her Dorothy Ashby’s entire discography and said she wanted to live inside Dorothy Ashby’s harp; in between her other jobs she clothed the jazz lover’s home in shades of blue, each shade exalted in its temperature and texture.
The Margot Lee effect is one of visceral familiarity. Harriet thinks of the time a farmstead girl put on every piece of clothing and every accessory she’d been told to and walked along the corridors of a ritzy hotel as if she knew everybody in it and they knew her. Translated to physical space this means that any element in a room that seems to turn to you and say: Oh, it’s you . . . welcome home is probably an element that Margot’s dug up. You might not be immediately bowled over by the effect—even now there are suspicions that she’s overrated—but if Harriet’s mother has really worked a place over, then you know it when you try to make a definitive exit but keep going back for things you’ve left in there. Upon collecting a glove from a window seat and realizing that that was her final excuse to go back to that particular room, Harriet found herself gripping the door lintel before she went out. There were tears in her eyes—she was leaving a place of joy, a place that was confiding and confidential, and for what? Some cold, dark forest full of dead ends. She asked her mother if she’d always been able to do this.
Margot said: Oh no—I learned while you were gone and it seemed more and more likely that instead of you coming back we were both going to go even farther away.
She’d wanted to be able to fix things up nicely for the two of them wherever they went, so the tinkering began . . . sending away for catalogs and pairing this with that in her head as if money were no object . . . then going down a level to the next best pairings, and the next . . . and she practiced.
Unexpected complications arose once Margot was finally able to work for herself. The power to make things cozy attracted dubious admirers and repelled those she most wished to support. She worked on her tact; she had to when turning away fiery types who could sink her business if they threw enough of a tantrum, but some conversations were unavoidable. One fellow’s refusal to take no for an answer was adversely affecting the rest of her work—calls were missed and delayed while she tried to get this non-client off the phone, and eventually he got the explanation he’d asked for. Margot told him it wasn’t the budget (he’d said he could increase it) or the fee she’d be paid (he’d said he could increase that too) or the timing (he’d said he could wait until her schedule cleared up). Harriet listened in on the final phone call, recording it just in case the man made a threat, but Margot’s voice was more audible than her caller’s was. Pushed beyond tact, Margot told her caller what the real problem was. She told him she couldn’t think of anything more sad or less interesting than putting her heart and mind into making him feel secure. How on earth could she make someone who believed there are too many foreigners in his country feel secure? She told her caller that replicating the inside of a dustbin would be much more interesting and fulfilling for her than replicating the inside of an airtight safe. Her caller mostly spluttered, and then all of a sudden—Hello? Hello? Oh, he’s gone—
Even as she burned bridges with some VIPs, Margot Lee struggled to get beyond preliminary phone calls with others—the directors of women’s shelters, halfway houses, and other outreach organizations, people who could give her work that would improve her work. Namedropping the Kerchevals didn’t wash with them at all, and even if she was offering to work for free, all materials included, and there was no time to consider such services as Margot seemed to be offering: You’d like to come in and rearrange some cushions? We can do that ourselves.