Kendall had never expected to be as rich as his parents, but he’d never imagined that he would earn so little or that it would bother him so much. After five years working for Great Experiment, he and his wife, Stephanie, had saved just enough money to buy a big fixer-upper in Oak Park, without being able to fix it up.
Shabby living conditions wouldn’t have bothered Kendall in the old days. He’d liked the converted barns and underheated garage apartments Stephanie and he had lived in before they were married, and he liked the just appreciably nicer apartments in questionable neighborhoods they lived in after they were married. His sense of their marriage as countercultural, an artistic alliance committed to the support of vinyl records and Midwestern literary quarterlies, had persisted even after Max and Eleanor were born. Hadn’t the Brazilian hammock as diaper table been an inspired idea? And the poster of Beck gazing down over the crib, covering the hole in the wall?
Kendall had never wanted to live like his parents. That had been the whole idea, the lofty rationale behind the snow-globe collection and the flea-market eyewear. But as the children got older, Kendall began to compare their childhood unfavorably with his own, and to feel guilty.
From the street, as he approached under the dark, dripping trees, his house looked impressive enough. The lawn was ample. Two stone urns flanked the front steps, leading up to a wide porch. Except for paint peeling under the eaves, the exterior looked fine. It was with the interior that the trouble began. In fact, the trouble began with the word itself: interior. Stephanie liked to use it. The design magazines she consulted were full of it. One was even called it: Interiors. But Kendall had his doubts as to whether their home achieved an authentic state of interiority. For instance, the outside was always breaking in. Rain leaked through the master-bathroom ceiling. The sewers flooded up through the basement drain.
Across the street, a Range Rover was double-parked, its tailpipe fuming. As he passed, Kendall gave the person at the wheel a dirty look. He expected a businessman or a stylish suburban wife. But sitting in the front seat was a frumpy, middle-aged woman, wearing a Wisconsin sweatshirt, talking on her cell phone.
Kendall’s hatred of SUVs didn’t keep him from knowing the base price of a Range Rover: $75,000. From the official Range Rover website, where a husband up late at night could build his own vehicle, Kendall also knew that choosing the “Luxury Package” (preferably cashmere upholstery with navy piping and burled-walnut dash) brought the price tag up to $82,000. This was an unthinkable, a soul-crushing sum. And yet, pulling into the driveway next to Kendall’s was another Range Rover, this belonging to his neighbor Bill Ferret. Bill did something relating to software; he devised it, or marketed it. At a backyard barbecue the previous summer, Kendall had listened with a serious face as Bill explained his profession. Kendall specialized in a serious face. This was the face he’d trained on his high school and college teachers from his seat in the first row: the ever-alert, A-student face. Still, despite his apparent attentiveness, Kendall didn’t remember what Bill had told him about his job. There was a software company in Canada named Waxman, and Bill had shares in Waxman, or Waxman had shares in Bill’s company, Duplicate, and either Waxman or Duplicate was thinking of “going public,” which apparently was a good thing to do, except that Bill had just started a third software company, Triplicate, and so Waxman, or Duplicate, or maybe both, had forced him to sign a “noncompete,” which would last a year.
Munching his hamburger, Kendall had understood that this was how people spoke, out in the world—in the real world he himself lived in, though, paradoxically, had yet to enter. In this real world, there were things like custom software and ownership percentages and Machiavellian corporate struggles, all of which resulted in the ability to drive a heartbreakingly beautiful forest-green Range Rover up your own paved drive.
Maybe Kendall wasn’t so smart.
He went up his front walk and into the house, where he found Stephanie in the kitchen, next to the open, glowing stove. She’d dumped the day’s mail on the kitchen counter and was flipping through an architecture magazine. Kendall came up behind her and kissed the back of her neck.
“Don’t get mad,” Stephanie said. “The oven’s only been on a few minutes.”
“I’m not mad. I’m never mad.”
Stephanie chose not to dispute this. She was a small, fine-boned woman who worked for a gallery of contemporary photography. She wore her hair in the same comp-lit pageboy she’d had the day they met, twenty-two years earlier, in an H.D. seminar. Since turning forty Stephanie had begun asking Kendall if she was getting too old to dress the way she did. But he answered truthfully that in her curated, secondhand outfits—the long parti-colored leather jacket or the drum majorette’s skirt or the white fake fur Russian hat—she looked as great as ever.
The photos in the magazine Stephanie was looking at involved urban renovations. On one page a brick town house had had its back end blown out to make room for a boxy addition of glass; another showed a brownstone that had been gutted and now looked as bright and airy inside as a Soho loft. That was the ideal: to remain dutiful to a preservationist ethos while not depriving yourself of modern creature comforts. The handsome, affluent families who owned these houses were often pictured in carefree moments, eating breakfast or entertaining, their lives seemingly perfected by design solutions that made even turning on a light switch or running a bath a fulfilling, harmonious experience.
Kendall held his head next to Stephanie’s as they looked at the photos. Then he said, “Where are the kids?”
“Max is at Sam’s. Eleanor says it’s too cold here, so she’s sleeping over at Olivia’s.”
“You know what?” Kendall said. “Screw it. Let’s just crank the heat.”
“We shouldn’t. Last month’s bill was crazy.”
“Keeping the oven open isn’t any better.”
“I know. It’s freezing in here, though.”
Kendall turned around to face the windows over the sink. When he leaned forward, he could feel cold air blowing through the panes. Actual currents.
“Piasecki said something interesting to me today.”
“Who?”
“Piasecki. The accountant. From work. He said it’s unbelievable that Jimmy doesn’t give me health insurance.”
“I’ve told you that.”
“Well, Piasecki agrees with you.”
Stephanie closed the magazine. Then she closed the oven door and turned off the gas. “We pay Blue Cross six thousand dollars per year. In three years, that’s a new kitchen right there.”
“Or we could spend it on heat,” Kendall said. “And then our kids wouldn’t abandon us. They would still love us.”
“They still love you. Don’t worry. They’ll be back in the spring.”