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Building a future, hand in hand.
The Loft restored. Bainbridge7.jpg
We returned to find our place much as we left it, with a few unexpected improvements.
Bill and Rick watched over the place and the few farm animals we bought before the trip. But they had time on their hands and used it well. There was one dilapidated structure, larger than the barn, a few hundred yards from the house and almost hidden in the woods from us, but with a clear view of our front yard.
It looked like it had once been a large four-bay garage with a loft, three rooms, perhaps the living quarters for some chauffer. It had a fireplace, a table and what must have been a small bedroom and bath. I wondered why it was so far from the house. No visitor would park that far away. Then the thought struck me that it must have housed a collection of rare cars, probably a hobby of the recluse millionaire who lived here long ago. Maybe his wife had no interest in such a male passion and wanted them out of sight, hidden in the trees.
But there it was, empty now. The roof had leaked over the years, several windows were broken and some walls inside were water damaged, and the bottom cement floor partly rubble, making it smelly and unpleasant to visit. So we put it out of our minds, with so many other things to organize.
Just before we left our men asked us if they could fix it up into living quarters. We agreed and left them plenty of money for the project.
When we returned it was nearly done. They'd run a power line, water, retiled the roof, repaired the walls and restored the loft into what it once was, a small one bedroom unit with a sitting room and a working kitchen, stove and fridge, and a bathroom. They'd bought new furniture, painted it and put in wallboard heaters, and with the rugs and windows fixed and curtained it was quite a comfortable dwelling. Rick took the bedroom and Bill the long couch by the fireplace and new T.V.
They were just starting to improve the downstairs when we came back, ripping out the rotted walls, fixing the broken windows and turning the front garage doors into one solid wall.
The first thing they asked us as we toured the structure and admired their work was whether they could hire the heavy equipment needed to repave the bottom floor. Age had turned the cement into cracked slabs and holes, an unusable mess. They said they would need an excavator too, to level the ground before it could be smoothly repaired.
But with that done they said they could tile the floor, build some partition walls and make a larger and nicer living space than the cramped one upstairs.
We told them to give us a day to think about it. We'd never considered the idea of them staying here on a permanent basis. In fact, Rick had been driving home back to the small town each weekend to be with his wife and two children. And Bill went with him just for a break, He still had his apartment there and spent hours in bars each evening with his old buddies, drinking and watching the news, discussing world events.
That night Nancy and I discussed the idea for several hours. We both liked these two men immensely, practically needed them for the farm, and living a few hundred yards off they were invisible most of the day and always at night, hardly disturbing our privacy. They could help with the few animals and man our constantly expanding farm, at least in Nancy's head.
The next morning, we told them to go ahead, to fix it up into the finest living quarters they could, a two-bedroom unit, living room and kitchen too, a full large bathroom and closets and pantry. They had it all mapped out on paper before they even asked us.
We knew Bill had no family. He told us before and that this was the best job he'd ever had. We wanted him to stay. But even if they left, we could use it as a guest house. Then one day Rick mentioned that if the COVID returned, maybe his family could move in.
Construction on the ground floor begins. Bankrate.com building-a-garage.jpg
This was out of any equation in my head and I told them so. “Finish the house first and let’s see how things develop”. That would take months. Life in town was the same as before, except for a few empty houses, some of the old-timers passing away in the hospital in Barre, thirty miles away. I paid him plenty to support his family and I liked our weekend privacy. We would frolic in the barn sometimes, in the hay, stripping off our clothes and making love, with the plan of having a baby, while the horses calmly stared at us a few feet away, probably wondering who the animals were.
The heavy machinery drove in a few days later, along with five of our former workers. The floor was finished off, the walls were built and doors and windows installed in no time.
Nancy came up with a few small projects for them. One was clearing fifty more acres and fencing them in with barbed wire. But Bill came up with the big one.
"Somethings been bothering me" he said. "You have all those guns and ammo in your basement. You're sitting on a powder keg if something goes wrong. Why don't you have the excavator dig you a bunker while it's here, a ways out in the woods. We can line it with cinder blocks ten feet down, buy a steel door and lock it up, and even hide it under the brush. You might even want to store some food in it, in case of some emergency".
Even as he said this my imagination, always over-vivid, pictured the explosion. We loved our mansion so much that by now we didn’t even allow them to use it while we were gone. We apologized, as they were living in two tents. They moved into a large shed beside the barn when the winter snows fell. But we kept the keys during our trip. It was our nest and we didn’t want someone else sleeping in our bed. We locked it up and left, and for that guilty feeling we gave them an extra-large amount of cash to begin work on the loft. We had more money than we knew what to do with.
I instantly agreed to this idea. Another month was spent on it because I kept expanding the thing as I saw it grow. It was now thirty feet long and twenty wide, with a staircase and large pantry and something like a living space with a table and couch and heaters, the steel door and another whole bunker for our arsenal, fifty feet away. There were snorkels and fans for ventilation, a water supply and it was three feet below ground level and perfectly hidden, a panic room of sorts.
I didn’t realize it clearly but deep in my subconsciousness there was a sense of real fear beginning to emerge. I knew my last novel ended in a rosy future for mankind. With all my heart I wished it so. But that ‘gate of horn’, that one discordant note I let fall in the last sentence of my book stuck constantly in my head.
It was the gate of false dreams which Virgil’s hero chooses when he emerges from the cave, the path he’d just taken through Hell. Virgil saw deep into human characters, our human condition, and predicted correctly, in an epic that was supposed to glorify Rome, its inevitable collapse. I knew I’d led the world into a similar illusion in the last chapters of my book, at Nancy’s suggestion. I felt uneasy while composing them and to ease that guilt, I added one last sentence, three words, suggested to me by the last words from the final triumphal scene of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov where the beggar in the crowd of cheering people prophesizes ruin, while all the others are rejoicing. It was also the inscription on a famous man’s watch, a phrase from the Bible: “The night cometh”.
My manager wanted me to delete that last sentence, saying it made no sense and didn’t fit in. It didn’t, and I insisted it stay. It was the truth.
During all this construction I extemporized to Bill and Nancy that we had to prepare for the worst in a delicate world situation. They thought I was just being over-careful when I could feel a storm was rolling in.
After the crew left Rick asked again. "When we finish this home, could my wife and two children come here to stay? I truly believe what you told us might happen, and I'm worried about their safety".
Once again, I put him off.
"Look", I said, "everything is going fine. The pandemic seems to be over. Finish the house first".
That would take a while, to paint and furnish. But if things changed for the worse, I told him I'd reconsider. We were glad to see him and Bill drive off every Friday night. Nancy and I relished perfect privacy, like two love birds.
The Summer went smoothly, the crops grew, the building nearly finished. It was a beautiful Summer. Even the news on T.V. was a joy to watch as everything prospered and improved. We only turned it on for a few minutes each evening, just to make sure the world turned as usual.
The thought occurred to me that we watched the news ten times more when the world was in crisis. I suppose when everything is going well there’s nothing to say, no drama to engage one’s attention and passions, no story to tell. The news these days was all about some child fallen down a well, or some landslide in a faraway place after heavy rains. There were no wars going on. The Pandemic, such a huge scare to everyone and such a loss of lives seemed to distract people from killing each other. Reconstruction was the order of the day. The only soldiers on TV were holding shovels.
We glided into Fall and we fell into daily routines and a complacency too dull to recount. I suppose that’s what you call ‘happiness’.
I worked with Bill most afternoons finishing the garage house. Rick and Nancy, after the farm chores, were busy driving into town to buy furniture and every little item, pots and pans, pictures for the walls, side tables for lamps, to make it a home.
What I didn’t know was that he stopped by his house on one of these trips and Nancy met his wife and children, a seven-year-old boy and a beautiful daughter a year younger. She fell in love with them at first sight and from then on, that stop became regular.
She brought them treats with every visit. The woman, named Jane, delighted her equally, they had similar personalities and tastes. They even looked alike. They became the best of friends and talked for hours over tea, fondling and playing with the delighted children, who now thought they had two mothers.
Two happy women with two children Masterfile 853-05523416 © F1Online.
I wondered at these eight hour long pilgrimages to buy a simple fixture or piece of trim, a four hour journey at most with the road so much improved with use. The next day it would be some other little item. But she'd return with Rick at nightfall, always happy and ready to cook and eat with me and go to bed early, and I followed.
We more than talked a great deal about having a child, now that the world seemed back to normal. I agreed with all my heart and body. It would cement our bond forever and complete us. We tried all that Spring, Summer and Fall, having sex every night. But she didn't get pregnant. The old doctor in town told her she was perfectly fit and I began to think it might be me, something from my past New York follies. I put that off as it redoubled our efforts at making a child, which I rather enjoyed.
After he examined me that Fall, finding nothing wrong, he referred us both to a young doctor in the city of Barre, a specialist. He took blood and DNA samples along with a host of other tests over three days. He knew Nancy, often working beside her in the hospital and was delighted to meet me, congratulating me on my books and Nancy too, for managing to get out of that place when it was so hectic.
He was more than thorough in his attempt to solve our problem. He tried every avenue, every test, called labs all over and had a complete gene analysis done on both of us. His name was Jim, and now, finally, after three years of frantic overwork, he had time on his hands. He gave us his complete attention and more than that as we sat and talked in his office for hours, drinking coffee, often about things having nothing to do with medicine. He just wanted to hear about my past and how I came to write the books.
We received the results in the mail, using Rick's address. The tests showed nothing wrong, except for one rare gene anomaly we both shared, which he said in a very long letter might be the problem, though science didn't know anything more about it except that the few who had it seemed to be immune to the pandemic. He said not one in ten thousand shared it.
That same day, as we read the letter in Jane’s kitchen, the children sitting in Jane and Nancy’s laps, Rick asked if his family could visit and see the almost finished garage house which he’d been talking about to his wife every weekend as it progressed. Their own place was a small, old, stucco two bedroom, smelling of mildew. It was all they could afford to rent after starting a family so young.
They were high school sweethearts and married at eighteen. Jane was already pregnant. Rick was saving up all the money he made lately to rent something nicer. They apologized as I came in and said they were sorry for the squalor, as if I’d never known poverty, my own shabby cottage, smaller and worse than theirs for many years. But they had no idea of my beginnings, thinking of me only as the millionaire, the famous ‘prophet’.
The ironic thing was that those impoverished years were the happiest days of my life, even comparing them to the extreme bliss and good fortune I now enjoyed. I don’t want to diminish the joy of love with a woman but there is something that trumps that in the consciousness of being twenty three, alone and free from all the strings of the world, detached, a happy Robinson Crusoe with a world to build. Those are our ‘glory days’. Every miserable life has a few.
When Nancy broke my revery and replied she’d be delighted to have them visit, I knew their move was a done deal.
I guessed it when Nancy leapt from her chair to kiss me when I agreed. They came the next morning and stayed the full day, getting a tour of our place, the barn and animals, the finished apartment with its shiny new furnishings. Nancy did the honors of the tour and after a few nights of sex bribery and the last final additions to the place, they moved in.
The two women were almost in tears hugging each other, while us men unloaded their few belongings. The children were chasing the chickens, screaming with joy. I left the others to unpack and settle in.
As I walked away from all this bustle, as soon as I was past the barn and out of sight and noise, I felt an inner satisfaction, at a deed well done. I saw its benefits. Nancy would have a close new friend and the children to play with. The four of them could manage the farm without me. I'd have more time to read now. I went straight to my study that afternoon, sat at the desk, contemplating finishing my half-written novel, of a couple deeply in love, separated by a war and reunited finally after years of searching. A nostalgia set in and now I realized that I missed that sedentary life.
Eight months of the barn and manure, milking cows, or sawdust in my face from cutting studs and hammering countless nails with Bill, I knew that was a healthy change while it lasted. I was now in perfect shape. Nancy had even convinced me to stop smoking and throw some valuable cartons out, those in my desk drawer, those she knew about.
But I still had boxes of cartons stashed in our bunker and another large stash of pipe tobacco and several pipes in a secret compartment of my desk. I lit one up now and savored the flavor. I always felt, besides the calming effects, that it helped me think, put me in the mood for the contemplation of deep subjects. The next thing I did was turn on the espresso machine behind me for an afternoon cup. Nancy had regulated my coffee drinking to breakfasts only, saying more than one cup was bad for me, just like a nurse. I still loved her for that deep, caring attention, but there’s only so much advice a man can take from a woman before it backlashes, especially in matters of habits I enjoyed. And no woman should get between a man and his expresso.
‘Health be damned’ I thought, I was too healthy. And for an intellectual like me, that wasn’t conducive to writing.
If you look at the lives and pictures of all the great writers, none of them were in Olympian health and shape. Most were riddled with health problems, many of their own making. Balzac drank thirty cups of coffee a day. Leopardi made himself a hunchback by seventeen after ten years of being bent over books, reading fourteen hours a day. There were countless more examples leafing through my head. And I’d rather be one of them than some fit farmer, a mirror image of ‘American Gothic’ in thirty years, completely bald, standing beside Nancy with my pitchfork.
The more I thought about these last months, the more I disliked farm work. I was a poor horseman, always falling behind Nancy on our equestrian tours around the lot. I didn't mind looking at the horses in the pasture, from a distance. But I had no desire to bail hay or brush them in their stinking pens. I always felt one might kick me or bite my hand as I offered an apple. Nancy tried to train me to handle them, but I was a disinterested, wayward, delinquent student.
She saw this and gave up. "Not everyone's meant for riding", she told me, the last time I had another fall.
And what was that? For all her health advice I could have broken my neck. How does lung cancer thirty years down the line rank against that? Take your pick.
I was meant to be a philosopher, to watch life from afar, pipe in hand, meditating the beautiful forms of the horses, just like Leonardo De Vinci, admiring their graceful motions, one of nature’s masterpieces, but certainly not riding one.
Nancy had coerced me to try a farmer's life with sex. I needed that outdoor change after so many rushed books. It was relief for an overtaxed mind and sitting at my desk all day long. Nancy was my fascination, and our differences as male and female was a truth to the anecdote that opposites attract. The French saying: ‘vive la différence’ which no book could ever quite explain, meant love was a magnet of two opposites. For us it meant a lifetime of talk and intimacy, a full life in every way, in love with our differences.
I trusted her so much I knew she’d accept this return to my old self, as she had so much joy with everything right now, the farm and Jane, the joyful presence of happy, sometimes noisy kids and the prospects of our own child and a wonderful future stretching off into infinity.
She seemed a little shocked when she first stepped in and saw me with a pipe and an expresso at my desk, mid-afternoon. But I sat her down and told her everything I’d thought about and decided lately. She listened closely and accepted it, laughing at the part about me grooming the children into scholars.
I told her I might try, starting with Miranda, the little girl, saying she was the youngest with the most pliant and delightful mind. She laughed again but told me she would love to see that. She said she loved me and admired book knowledge more than ever. She even said she liked the smell of my pipe tobacco much more than cigarettes. It had a fragrance to it. I had a faint suspicion that was a lie, but she got up, came over, and gave me in hug, which ended all conversation then and there. We had all the time in the world and money that would last forever.
Too bad it didn't last.
