“So what do you want for your big birthday, Dad?” Daniel asked.
Martin’s birthday, his fiftieth, was not until the end of June, but Daniel was the son who planned ahead, who stored up thoughtful gifts to bestow upon his family members. Eric rarely remembered to write out even a homemade card.
“To renovate the whole house as soon as school ends, after your graduation,” Martin said, and Joan’s mouth dropped.
She was thinking of a trip somewhere to celebrate, to India, if she could convince Martin that vacations on Caribbean islands should be a thing of the past, that this birthday required an adventure, a challenge, an unexpressed opportunity for her finally, all these years later, to go where she wanted to go, even if it was his birthday. And if that was refused, which was likely, then a week in New York. Iger could set them up with reservations at the chic restaurants she still went to, arrange tickets for them to the off-Broadway shows she thought worth seeing. A lot of time away together, or a little, either way, they could use it.
But this—she was not expecting this. Not at all. Not ever, and not this coming summer when she was hoping to finish Words. Not this summer when both boys, at last, for the first time, would be gone: Eric at the computer camp, and Daniel, after graduation, knocking around the country with two friends, setting up their tents in national parks from coast to coast, home in time for Joan to pack him up, for the Mannings to take a road trip to deliver him to the University of Pennsylvania for swim team tryouts before school began.
Joan had been dreaming of an entirely empty house, counting on those summer months. Her own future was beginning to feel tantalizingly near. She had written another hundred pages, five new first-draft chapters, and she was getting close, she could feel it in her spine, in the electricity that sparked her fingers when she touched the finished pages, when the vibration of the typewriter keys entered her being as new words and sentences and paragraphs found their way onto paper. She was writing voluptuously.
Eric’s brows met in the middle. “What happens to my room, to my computer?” he said, and Daniel said, “I don’t get it, a new house when I’m leaving?”
“Eric, we’ll make sure everything is protected, and Daniel, this is always your home. It’s where you grew up, the place you can always come back to. It will just look entirely different. And there would be so much space. Space we’ve never had,” was what Martin said.
To Joan, he said, “I’ve really thought it through and I think it’s the perfect time. I’ve already talked to an architect. Actually, I’ve done more than that. Come with me.”
They left their half-eaten dinners on the table and followed him into the living room. He pulled a long tube from a cabinet, uncorked it, tapped out what was inside—a set of architectural plans. Three that fit on top of each other: Floor plans, section plans, exterior elevations. He spread them out on the floor.
“So this is what I’m thinking,” he said. “This is what I want as my birthday present.”
The plans showed a soaring structure of angles and space and voluminous rooms with huge windows that would flood the whitewashed place with light, bring the seasons inside, unlike the small windows the house currently sported, that palled the interior in the deadness of winter. The square footage of the new space would more than quadruple their small house, everything still on one floor. She saw perfectly planned rooms identified by names that did not adequately encapsulate what she was looking at: a massive kitchen, a formal dining room, a skylighted living room, a study, den, and library, each with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases surrounding the large floor-to-ceiling windows, the boys’ new large bedrooms had their own bathrooms, and Joan and Martin’s bedroom would be a real master, no longer the same size as their children’s, three times as large as the other large bedrooms, a huge space of their own, with an en suite bathroom, two sinks, separated shower and tub, and an interior room that housed matching walk-in closets.
Martin could not often still surprise her, but he had.
“What do you think?” he said to Joan.
She had never thought about a new house, did not need a new house, a new house would get in the way of her plans. She had bought this house and the land when Martin was still paying for his medical school education, but since then, he had taken excellent financial care of them all, the continued earnings from her books were in her own separate account, and although she selfishly wanted to douse his wish entirely, what else could she do but take a seat on the floor, put a finger on two of the walls of the proposed master bedroom overlooking their expansive property, the flower and vegetable gardens, the red maples, the elms, the pear trees, and in the distance, the knoll and the glen, and say, “Would it be possible to make those walls glass? Sliding glass doors, wall-to-wall glass?”
“Why not?” Martin said, smiling at her, grabbing her hand.
“And look at this, everyone,” he said, pointing to a spot on the plans. “This is the knoll where we used to put the Slip ’N Slide, and this is the glen where you guys used to read books, and this is what I was thinking, we put a pool in the glen at the same time we renovate the house. You can swim again, Joan, if you want to, and Daniel, you’ll always have a place to swim when you come home. Maybe we’ll make it a saltwater pool. We can keep it heated year-round, swim when it’s snowing. How great would that be?”