was the reason I had to do it.
I turned back to Dory Browne. “I’m going to buy Honeysuckle House.”
FIVE
W hen I called Paul from Manhattan that night he took the news that I’d accepted the job at Fairwick surprisingly well.
“I’ve been asking around and the school has a pretty good reputation. They have an honors program with very generous financial aid that draws some top students from around the country and the world,” he told me. I could hear his fingers tapping on his laptop keyboard in the background. He must have been Googling the college and town for hours. “And according to MapQuest it’s only three hours from the city. When I can get a job there next year it’ll be an easy commute. In the meantime it looks like the closest airport is Newark …”
He was less than thrilled when I told him I’d bought a five-bedroom Victorian house.
“I thought we were going to use that money to buy a bigger apartment in the city when I moved there,” he said, his voice sounding young and wounded. “You could have at least discussed it with me.”
I argued that we’d always agreed we should each take the job—or graduate school offer—that was best without worrying about what the other one thought.
“Yes, but a house ,” he said. “That’s so … permanent.”
“Tenure’s permanent,” I countered. “A house is …” I wanted to say that a house could be bought and sold, but I knew already that it wasn’t ever going to be easy to sell Honeysuckle House. The very thought of letting the house go already gave me a strange pang. “… it’s a vacation house. You’ll come up on weekends. We’ll spend our summers there. You’ll see, once you’re in the city full time you’ll be dying to get out of it like all good New Yorkers.”
“You should have at least talked to me first,” he said with uncharacteristic hurt. Paul was generally the most easygoing of guys; we hardly ever fought. And we didn’t now. Paul got off the phone saying he had papers to grade.
Looking for some girlfriendly support I took the subway to Brooklyn to my friend Annie’s bakery to tell her what I’d done. She’d been my best friend since high school and even though she didn’t date men herself (she had come out when we were in tenth grade) she always had good advice about them. And she’d been after me for years to ditch the long-distance relationship with Paul and go out with someone in the city.
“Sorry, Cal, I’m with Paul here,” she told me while squirting yellow icing on a row of sunflower-themed cupcakes. “You acted like a man—all high-handed. And I don’t buy all this crap about doing what’s best for each of you, damn the relationship. That just sounds like neither of you care enough about the relationship to make a sacrifice to make it work.”
I’d forgotten that since Annie had moved in with her girlfriend, Maxine, she’d gotten a bit sanctimonious about commitment.
“You think I should sacrifice my career and move out to L.A.?” I asked, nabbing one of the half-finished cupcakes. I had a sudden urge for sugar, which I blamed on all the sweets I’d consumed at the Hart Brake Inn.
“I didn’t say that. But if you both really wanted to be together you would have found a way by now, and buying a house for yourself doesn’t sound like the kind of thing a person does when she’s in love.”
Unless she’s in love with a man who appears in a dream , I thought but didn’t say.
Strangely, it was the same view that my grandmother Adelaide took when I called her up in Santa Fe (where she had retired when I graduated high school) to tell her my news. “Fairwick’s a second-tier college with a second-rate staff,” she drawled in her starchy New England voice. It was the same voice she had once used when she spoke of my mother’s decision to go to college in Scotland (“The women in our family have always gone to Radcliffe or Barnard”), my mother’s marriage to my father,
I turned back to Dory Browne. “I’m going to buy Honeysuckle House.”
FIVE
W hen I called Paul from Manhattan that night he took the news that I’d accepted the job at Fairwick surprisingly well.
“I’ve been asking around and the school has a pretty good reputation. They have an honors program with very generous financial aid that draws some top students from around the country and the world,” he told me. I could hear his fingers tapping on his laptop keyboard in the background. He must have been Googling the college and town for hours. “And according to MapQuest it’s only three hours from the city. When I can get a job there next year it’ll be an easy commute. In the meantime it looks like the closest airport is Newark …”
He was less than thrilled when I told him I’d bought a five-bedroom Victorian house.
“I thought we were going to use that money to buy a bigger apartment in the city when I moved there,” he said, his voice sounding young and wounded. “You could have at least discussed it with me.”
I argued that we’d always agreed we should each take the job—or graduate school offer—that was best without worrying about what the other one thought.
“Yes, but a house ,” he said. “That’s so … permanent.”
“Tenure’s permanent,” I countered. “A house is …” I wanted to say that a house could be bought and sold, but I knew already that it wasn’t ever going to be easy to sell Honeysuckle House. The very thought of letting the house go already gave me a strange pang. “… it’s a vacation house. You’ll come up on weekends. We’ll spend our summers there. You’ll see, once you’re in the city full time you’ll be dying to get out of it like all good New Yorkers.”
“You should have at least talked to me first,” he said with uncharacteristic hurt. Paul was generally the most easygoing of guys; we hardly ever fought. And we didn’t now. Paul got off the phone saying he had papers to grade.
Looking for some girlfriendly support I took the subway to Brooklyn to my friend Annie’s bakery to tell her what I’d done. She’d been my best friend since high school and even though she didn’t date men herself (she had come out when we were in tenth grade) she always had good advice about them. And she’d been after me for years to ditch the long-distance relationship with Paul and go out with someone in the city.
“Sorry, Cal, I’m with Paul here,” she told me while squirting yellow icing on a row of sunflower-themed cupcakes. “You acted like a man—all high-handed. And I don’t buy all this crap about doing what’s best for each of you, damn the relationship. That just sounds like neither of you care enough about the relationship to make a sacrifice to make it work.”
I’d forgotten that since Annie had moved in with her girlfriend, Maxine, she’d gotten a bit sanctimonious about commitment.
“You think I should sacrifice my career and move out to L.A.?” I asked, nabbing one of the half-finished cupcakes. I had a sudden urge for sugar, which I blamed on all the sweets I’d consumed at the Hart Brake Inn.
“I didn’t say that. But if you both really wanted to be together you would have found a way by now, and buying a house for yourself doesn’t sound like the kind of thing a person does when she’s in love.”
Unless she’s in love with a man who appears in a dream , I thought but didn’t say.
Strangely, it was the same view that my grandmother Adelaide took when I called her up in Santa Fe (where she had retired when I graduated high school) to tell her my news. “Fairwick’s a second-tier college with a second-rate staff,” she drawled in her starchy New England voice. It was the same voice she had once used when she spoke of my mother’s decision to go to college in Scotland (“The women in our family have always gone to Radcliffe or Barnard”), my mother’s marriage to my father,
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