“Don’t worry,” George said. “We’ll have it all paid for. The house will be paid for. Our taxes will be low, because we’ll be assessed for undeveloped land. We won’t have to touch the rest of the money once we’re established. I’ll make enough working part-time to live on. We don’t have any expensive habits like shooting heroin or wearing French originals.”
“I might like to wear French originals,” she said.
“Look, honey, if that’s what you want I’ll tear up the check.”
“If you’re laying out too much in a lump, young fella,” said the real estate man, “I’d be willing to take some of the waterfront off your hands.”
“What do you want?” George asked, being very, very serious.
“You know, silly,” she said. “I want what you want.”
“Not here in front of the nice man,” he grinned.
Crazy, delightfully crazy, and so damned pretty she could charge herself up just by looking at that shock of stubborn, wild blond hair.
Then there was the architect’s fee. And bulldozers to cut a road which wouldn’t tear up the new M.G. And the sound of heavy equipment twenty-four hours a day. The power company was attacking the canal from both ends, eating the woodland on the inland side in vast gulps, and sending a huge, floating drag line to the ocean side to start cutting a trench through the dunes, chewing up into the land, exposing the dead and water-logged roots of an ancient cypress forest. Bulldozers. Drag lines. Earth movers. Whoom. Crash. Creak. Rumble.
“I’m going to watch it go up stick by stick,” George said. “How would you like to buy a mobile home and put it next to the clear pond, and that way we’ll be there to supervise every nail?”
In the end, he compromised. They rented a small, dark, damp little house built of cement block and cheap, varnished interior paneling. It was a gloomy dungeon and they spent as little time in it as possible. They saw every movie which came to Ocean City and the nearby, larger town. They took short trips to the Outer Banks, to the mountains, to Charleston. The money spent in this manner seemed insignificant when compared with the weekly bills for material and labor as the contractor began work on the dream house on Possum Creek.
When the time came, Gwen actually enjoyed shopping for appliances, light fixtures, carpeting, and all the little goodies which were going into the dream house. She found a magnificent old chandelier in a junk shop. George rewired it. She spent long, dusty, hot, exciting days prowling antique shops, bought marbled-topped furniture, good, sturdy chairs made in 1948, much more comfortable than anything on the market in the new furniture stores. And cheaper, even when reupholstered in good quality crushed velvet.
“Look,” George said, “if you’re gonna make the house look like a Victorian harem, let’s have a red rug.”
If George wanted a red rug, George got a red rug. She built the big, glass-fronted room around it, and made the walls gleaming white, the fireplace antique brick, the furniture warm in velvet and gold and rich blue.
“Gaudy,” she said, “but sort of nice.”
“I can hardly wait to try out the rug,” George said, grinning his teasing, sensual grin.
Watching a large house being constructed is, in many ways, a frustrating experience. At first, when there is just the foundation, it looks as if one has miscalculated and has decided to build too small. Then, with the floor studs in place and the sub-flooring down, making the house a huge platform, it begins to look large enough to land helicopters. It shrinks when the wall studs go up, and becomes dark and gloomy when the roof and walls are in place. During all this time, the progress is daily. A trip upstate brought surprises on returning, for the workmen would have done something fantastic like closing in the whole airy structure with black weatherboard. The brick and stone work went rapidly, too, and then things slowed to a frustrating crawl as the interior finish began.
But one can get to know a house during construction. George and Gwen had a routine. Breakfast, when they waked naturally, a drive to the house site to see who was working, a day spent in idle, happy activity, and then a trip back through the woodlands in the late evening, with the sun low and the second-growth denseness becoming dark and forbidding. They’d walk through the house and discuss progress. George would walk around it, admiring it. As it took shape, he was more than pleased.
It was an attractive house. Long, low, it had multiple roof lines, lots of glass, stone for accent, brick for color, and stained wood for texture. The bedroom end of the house snuggled next to the sandy shore of the clear pond. George was endlessly anxious to see the balcony added, but the contractor saved it for last.
It was growing chill. The rented house had poor heat, just baseboard electric units which, when turned on, promptly blew a fuse. Fortunately, the weather held. November was a glory, nights cool and making for good cuddling in bed, but the days were pure Indian Summer. The rains were less frequent than usual, allowing for fulltime work. Gwen began moving her furniture in in early December. The rural electric cooperative had run a line along the old right of way; a line had once extended up the point to the burned house, which had stood just a few hundred yards away from the new building. The house was heated now. It was lighted. It was cozy and huge and empty, and one evening, before the moving began, while there was nothing in the house but huge expanses of red carpet, George gathered fat pine kindling and wood and built a fire. “I christen thee George’s House of Lust,” he grinned, bumping beers with Gwen before attacking her playfully and rolling her in front of the roaring fire on the thick, red carpet. She fought playfully, but gave in, her feeling for him overflowing. At first, she was uncomfortable, felt the old shame and dirt as he exposed her, growing more intense, but still growling playfully as he removed her slacks and panties, undid her bra, pushed it up under her neck.
The floor was hard. She kept thinking that someone would walk up. Every light in the house was on. There were large expanses of glass. She kept turning her head to look at the black glass and the darkness beyond and didn’t achieve. George did. Then he prowled, bare, over the house, drinking beer and admiring the barren beauty of the rooms. She envied him. He was the original model for a happy fellow, no worries, no hang-ups, just a heart very easily made glad. Since she had the same things, plus George himself, why couldn’t she loosen up, enjoy his ribald, happy sex, and forget everything but the new house, George, and her luck?
George didn’t want any lawn to mow. The contractor sent in a crew, picked up the building debris, smoothed the earth, and left it natural. Falling leaves covered the bare areas, making it look as if the house had been there not just weeks but years. And George had his balcony. It was built on two pre-stressed concrete pillars which had been sunk into the very edge of the clear pond. The balcony extended out some twenty feet, riding on huge cypress beams. It was six feet above the water and reached to the quickly shelving depths of the pond. It made an excellent diving platform. Below it, to shore up the bank of the pond, there was a brick patio on a concrete slab with an outdoor grill.
In the house there were two bedrooms, one of them behind the balcony and huge, the other suitable for guests and, in the future, for a nursery. There were three baths, one in each bedroom and one in the big playroom, which housed a pool table, a ping-pong table, a dart game, a poker table, and a stereo set for parties. There was a large room for George’s personal use, and a room with northern glass exposure which was, temporarily, a TV room, but which could be converted into a studio if Gwen ever got serious enough about her hobby of painting to want such a work area. There was a combination kitchen-dining room, separated by dark, beautifully rubbed cabinets, and a very large main room with its glass wall looking toward the marsh, which was visible only through chinks in the solid growth of trees. Then there were storage areas, an appliance room, a closed garage, and cypress decks off the front.