wanted her to put a barely artful spin on their own versions of beauty and function. Le Corbusier and Palladio hadn’t looked over Gina’s shoulder in a long time. Their cries of “Light! Space! Proportion! Harmony!” were too often drowned out by “Payroll! Budget! Schedule!”
On the Golden Gate Bridge, the wind gusted with fog so wet that Gina had to turn on her windshield wipers. But within minutes, they emerged from the envelope into blinding sunshine. She was groping in her purse for her sunglasses when her phone rang. She didn’t answer, but listened to the voicemail from a contractor trying to get a final inspection on a project.
“Bob here. We got that bitchy electrical inspector. First she wanted to know why we’d use ugly steel windows on an old house, and then she told me the architect was stupid for using a plug strip instead of putting the outlets in the backsplash—blah, blah, blah. She left without even checking out the electrical panel. She’s holding us way up, Gina. If we don’t get these inspections . . .”
Gina ended the message, and they drove on in silence. Her head began to throb.
Soon they were on the small road that wound through oaks and scrub brush, mailboxes, and garages of weathered redwood that signaled “neighborhood,” though not a soul could be seen. Eucalyptus trees drooped along the road, not from perpetual thirst, as Gina had thought the first time she’d seen them, but because that was what eucalyptus trees did.
Gina parked in a stand of trees on the north side of their two-acre property that stretched south toward a shallow valley bounded by low hills. Since their first frigid summer in San Francisco thirteen years ago, she and Paul had dreamed they would move somewhere warmer and closer to nature, with an easy commute to the city.
Paul took off his new shoes and put on his sneakers. Gina got out and opened the tailgate; Stella shot out, her short tail wagging. Under the blazing sun, Gina felt enervated as she and Paul walked toward the derelict ’60s ranch house, with its flat roof, splintered redwood siding, and cheap aluminum sliders. She tried to conjure the excitement and confidence she’d felt a year and a half ago when she’d tentatively begun a modest plan for it. Usually, when she worked on the schematics for a house, a feeling about the site, both sensory and emotional, would take over and inform her design decisions, right down to the window trim. Here, she could imagine the sun on her shoulders as she bent over a garden they would plant. The crunch of brown August grass under her sneakers as she climbed the hill to the south and the smell of ripe fruit from the lone peach tree . . . searching for toads and lizards with Esther and Ben and, after they’d gone to bed, sitting out under the stars with Paul, the air still warm and fragrant.
Yet as soon as she put hand to paper, her creative impulse froze. She couldn’t see the house. While her projects for clients zipped along, her own unimagined, undrawn house weighed on her. She hated that Esther and Ben would be missing another summer here, where they could be outdoors all day.
Standing in the heat now, the image that did come to Gina was of Ben and Esther in Maine, running down the hill to pick blackberries, barn swallows circling overhead.
Here, hawks, or some other birds of prey—Gina had not yet learned to identify them—surveyed the field below. Paul strode away from Gina, leaning to pick up some tiny piece of litter. When he reached the lilacs they’d planted near a stand of eucalyptus, he gave them the once over, turning a leaf in his hands. “Oh, no,” he said, “looks like we’re losing them.”
Gina ran to inspect the bruised leaves. “I can’t believe it! We killed them! It’s way too hot and dry here.”
When they’d gone to the nursery in early spring, the grass a lush green, the earth rich and fragrant, she’d spotted the lilacs and couldn’t help imagining the purple flowering bushes that had grown to tree size around the house in Maine. It was wrong to plant them in this parched place; early June and already the grass was straw-colored, and the dusty earth rose in clouds behind their shoes.
Paul stretched out his arms and smiled. “Maybe someday we could put in a pool. It would be great here.”
“Yes,” Gina said, trying to picture a turquoise oval sparkling in the sun. Instead, she saw the cove in Maine, breaching the dock at high tide.
Paul fetched the cooler from the car, and they sat down on the scratchy grass in front of the house and looked out over their property, as they had so many times before. The insistent banging of a lone hammer could be heard, coming from the “good side of the hill” (as the real estate agent had put it) where a thirty-thousand-square-foot Mediterranean Revival villa was under construction.
“I’m so ready to be doing this house!” Paul said. “Aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh,” Gina said.
“We just need a little something on paper that we can discuss.”
“I know.”
“Gina . . .”
She looked up at him. Goose bumps broke out on her arms.
“Are you cold?” Paul said. He stroked her arm. “The lilacs will come back. If they can make it through those brutal New England winters, they can make it here.”
She wouldn’t correct him, but he had it backward. Months of cold earth around their roots were exactly what lilacs needed to produce abundant blossoms later; this was part of their magic. The lilacs were dead.
Paul opened their cooler and handed a sandwich to Gina; they ate silently until several wasps, hungry for ham, drove them to the car.
They decided to take the coastal road home. Feeling out of sorts, Gina asked Paul to drive. In half an hour, they were back under the blanket of fog; just as the ocean came into view, the sun burned through, restoring the blue to the water. Gina squinted into the light, so white and penetrating it nearly shrieked, lending super-realist clarity to the textures of the landscape.
“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” Paul said.
Reflexively, Gina agreed because she and Paul had always agreed about what was beautiful in life. Now, she realized how foreign the Pacific still was to her. In fourteen years, she’d never navigated its windswept waters—she, who’d bailed and rigged and tacked since she was nine. Only occasionally did she swim in it; it was an exquisite temptress, too cold to touch. She knew that Paul, too, missed the time they’d spent when they were first together back east, bodysurfing at the beach and swimming in Walden Pond. The night they met, they ditched a sweltering party in Cambridge to drive to the pond for a swim. Gina had pulled her swimsuit from her glove compartment saying, “You never know when you might need one,” and Paul had laughed, delighted. They’d treaded water and talked for nearly an hour; at one point, she remembered discussing the physics of levers and jaws, subject matter where their two professions—architecture and medicine—intersected. Walden Pond had been a black, still clearing in the forest with no sign of life except the racket of peeping. The immediate connection she and Paul had felt with each other had been breathtaking.
Those years, that intimacy, felt too distant to her now. Recently, she suspected that Paul probably barely recognized the confident, spirited Gina he’d married. Challenges had always made her energy rise, her eyes shine brighter. “I’m movin’ to crazy California!” she crowed from Paul’s ’64 Mustang as they crossed into Kansas, heading away from the East Coast for good. Her entrepreneurial zeal had saved her from continuing to draw elevator cores for a corporate firm, and within a year she’d hung out her “Gina Gilbert, Architect” shingle. Moments after delivering Esther, she’d cried, “Let’s have another one right away!” Paul
