Gwen, in Green

“If the terms are favorable,” said the lawyer, “we might come down to five hundred.”

“How about cash at three hundred?” the real estate man asked. “That’s our first, last and firm offer. Take it or get stuck with a swamp cut off from the roads by a radio­active hot water canal.”

They took it. George whistled as he tried to crowd the amount into the small allotted space on the check. Sixty-­ one thousand twenty dollars and no cents. Gwen felt weak. She had worried about money most of her life. To her, writing a check for the amount of the new M.G. was pure extravagance. Now George was laying out over sixty thousand dollars for a swamp cut off from the roads by a hot water radioactive canal. Whee, she thought.

“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.