Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the years after the fire, Joan became someone who celebrated Christmas.
She, who’d secretly thought the holiday a wasteful spectacle before, now approached the weeks after Thanksgiving with zeal.
She hung lights. She purchased a big balsam fir, nearly to the ceiling, and then in later years added miniature pines she openly referred to as the Christmas babies.
She shopped year-round for ornaments. Each time Joan and Bill had traveled, he’d purchased an ornament.
All those pieces of glass and porcelain from Munich and Tokyo and Vienna had been lost in the fire.
Joan and the children were living in a townhome now, one of fifty-six identical structures in the closest multi-unit zoned housing near JJS (it wasn’t that near).
Joan thought it indicative of the local real estate bubble that all fifty-six units were occupied, because they were designed in a crazy way.
The homes were extremely skinny and tall, as if a regular townhouse had been pressed between two hands, and a bathroom directly faced the entrance on each level.
The garage was on the first floor, and you lived on the second and third floors.
There were many young families in the complex.
The mothers carried their strollers up and down the stairs.
Starting in early December, Joan hung lights in nearly every corner of the townhouse, on all three floors. Coming home after school, Jamie and Lee thought it was like entering an enormous lit shoebox tilted on its side.
“You’re going overboard,” Misty told Joan one year. She was not staying over, as they no longer had space for guests, except for a futon in the living room which Misty found unacceptable.
“Lee and Jamie like it,” Joan said without turning. Jamie had brought home a nutcracker from woodshop, which she was trying to display in a way that didn’t make it look too lonely.
“You need to get back to a nicer place. Aren’t you rebuilding?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not? It’s been what, five years?”
“I’m fine for now.” In the months following the fire, Joan had been unable to stomach the idea of rebuilding Falling House.
She didn’t even like to visit, as the sight of the razed lot hurt her heart.
The insurance payment was sitting in an account, earning negligible interest, and for some reason, Joan—the sort to scrutinize each utility and credit card bill in detail—simply threw away the bank statements unopened in their envelopes when they arrived each month.
Misty shrugged. “It’s all right to be in the in-between.”
“Yes.” Joan liked this term, the in-between. “That’s exactly where I am.”
“Right, so.” Misty straightened. “Who cares if you’re in this weird house. Your damn mansion got burned down! You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about, living here.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” Joan said, startled.
“Sure, sure.”
“No, really.” Joan felt strongly that Misty should know this, that she wasn’t embarrassed.
Or rather: Joan was embarrassed, but not for the reasons Misty believed: she was embarrassed because she had once been married, and lived in a grand house, and believed she’d figured life out—no, not just figured it out, excelled at it—only for her husband to pass away and her home to be destroyed.
A year after Bill died, Joan had gone to Lotus Garden.
She’d thought it unlikely that Sam Wu, the owner, might still be around, but when she walked in there he was, in his yellow button-down and black slacks, and when she said she used to work there, he neither affirmed nor denied recalling her.
“You want a job?” he repeated. “Doing what?”
“I was a hostess,” she said.
He squinted at her a long moment. “You would not be reliable,” he pronounced, upon which Joan believed she might just combust from shame, right on the spot.
For it was true that even with Bill gone Joan lived a life of privilege; she had a roof over her head and enough to feed herself and her children.
She had no real incentive to work at a place like Lotus Garden—nothing, that is, but her own desire to feel needed.
All this Sam Wu could decipher within seconds of their meeting.
Joan adjusted the nutcracker and placed a sprig of holly in its arms. “I invited Juliet and Theo to Christmas dinner,” she said. The extended Lauder holiday gatherings had tapered and then ceased after Bill’s passing; Joan sometimes spoke to Bridget on the phone, although rarely.
“Oh, great,” Misty said. “The terrible two. I hope this place doesn’t end up in cinders.” (Misty always made casual reference to Theo burning the house down, as if it were a fact accepted by all.) “When are they coming?”
“They aren’t.” Theo never responded to her invitations, whereas Juliet seemed to possess some special ability to call and have it go straight to the answering machine.
Once she had sent a card: Best wishes , she’d written, beneath her letterpressed initials.
After Bill’s death, Juliet had returned to medical school.
She was busy with residency, she said. She’d probably be busy for a long time.
There was that toy Jamie and Lee had made one winter.
What was the name? Planet Infinity, Joan recalled, their mantra being that it would fulfill their infinite desires, though in reality Jamie and Lee had often been unhappy while playing.
The children had built and demolished and rebuilt and argued until usually Joan had to step in.
“I’m supposed to feel happy on Planet Infinity,” Lee cried after an argument, brought about after she dented one of Jamie’s model cars.
In revenge Jamie had knocked down a section of the structure, the plastic unicorns and firemen tumbling to the floor.
“That’s why we made it. So everyone can be happy. ”
“Sometimes that’s just not possible,” Joan had said, recalling her own dream as a child, the little world of the Satisfaction Café, which even as a fantasy had never reached anywhere near the dizzying heights of what her own children imagined for themselves.
“Sometimes it’s good enough to be content. ”
Joan didn’t know if Juliet and Theo were happy now; at times she wasn’t even sure about Lee and Jamie. But she did hope they were at least accepting and not bitter about their place in life.
“Why do you keep inviting the twins?” Misty asked.
“Bill would have liked it,” Joan said. She knew he really would have. Just as he wouldn’t have been surprised that Theo and Juliet didn’t come.