Mount Pleasant by Don Gillmor Page B

don’t deserve this house. You know what anextra fifty grand is over the life of a mortgage, Harry? Two grand a year, six bucks a day. A cup of coffee. But one of those bidders, maybe two, they don’t mind a little blood. We only get one shot at it, Harry. Do you deserve this house?”
    As it turned out, he didn’t get just the one shot. He and Gladys stayed up most of the night, discussing it without really coming to a decision either of them was comfortable with. So they bid high because they had come this far and the thought of dragging themselves through this again was too dispiriting. That initial blood-chilling bid of $511,500 was close to another bid, Del said. So close the agents felt the only fair way was to have the two competing parties go back and put in a second, higher offer—a process, Harry dimly noted, that would benefit both agents.
    “This is poker, Harry.” Del said. “This is you sitting on your new deck eight years from now, telling your friends how you couldn’t afford to buy it if was listed now. The way to stop bidding is to close. You go in hard and send that bastard home, Harry. Or next week, you are going to be going through this same shit again.”
    They went with $522,000. It seemed excruciatingly high. It meant a load of debt he hadn’t remotely anticipated. But they had their house.
    The first headline arrived a month later: “Cracks in the Foundation?” Within a week, a second: “Unreal Estate.” Then they were a fixture: “The Last Bidding War?”; “The Bubble Has Burst!”; “A Pox on All Your Houses.”
    Within a year Harry’s house was worth approximately $360,000. The furnace that was manufactured by the J. Grantham Co. in 1951 chose a December evening to quietly expire. The pipes were, indeed, lead. The electrical system, a knob and tube network of fire hazards placed cunningly in the uninsulatedwalls, had to be replaced in order for them to get insurance. In their second summer, the basement flooded, 18 inches of act-of-god water that ruined the contents of their storage room. They lived with his mother for a tension-filled week while termite poison was drilled into the foundation by a gap-toothed teenager.
    Later, they took out a second mortgage to renovate the second-floor bathroom. Then, five years ago, they hired an architect to redesign the kitchen. Gladys had found him, a German named Fassblut, with dramatic glasses and close-cropped silver hair, who sprawled on their couch, ignoring the coffee Gladys set in front of him, pretending to listen to their needs.
    “One of the things we desperately need is more storage space,” Gladys said. “I know there’s too much … junk, and I’ll be getting rid of some of it, but now, as you can see—”
    “Cooking is the desire for salvation,” Fassblut said in his slight Germanic accent. “An attempt to fill the empty space with sacrifice.”
    “And a larger counter. I think I’d like the counter to be a focus.”
    “You must have confidence in the negative space. The void left by God is a gift that settles into convention. And we must reject this.”
    “Mary Oglethorpe had glass panels on her cabinets,” Gladys said, talking to both Fassblut and Harry now. “A hint of green in the glass. It was very clean-looking.”
    “The deconstructing of the boundary,” Fassblut said, getting up and approaching their kitchen—its eighties-era peeling maple veneer and off-brand appliances, “is only a temporary refuge. Look here,” he said, his hand cutting the air near the drying rack. “Here we have an exodus from the mythology of appetite. The emphasis, always, is on the materiality of truth,which comes, of course, in many guises. Is this an impression, or is this the fabric? Every kitchen is an argument with itself, yes?”
    The oddest thing about Fassblut was his hold over Gladys. A pragmatist in most things, she held on to the notion of his genius for a surprising stretch. She had looked at hundreds of