Like a House on Fire

by Lauren McBrayer

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

A JULY 2022 BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK

What would you do if you found the spark that made you feel whole again?

After twelve years of marriage and two kids, Merit has begun to feel like a stranger in her own life. She loves her husband and sons, but she desperately needs something more than sippy cups and monthly sex. So, she returns to her career at Jager + Brandt, where a brilliant and beautiful Danish architect named Jane decides to overlook the “break” in Merit’s résumé and give her a shot.

Jane is a supernova—witty and dazzling and unapologetically herself—and as the two work closely together, their relationship becomes a true friendship. In Jane, Merit sees the possibility of what a woman could be. And Jane sees Merit exactly for who she is. Not the wife and mother dutifully performing the roles expected of her, but a whole person.

Their relationship quickly becomes a cornerstone in Merit’s life. And as Merit starts to open her mind to the idea of more—more of a partner, more of a match, more out of love—she begins to question: What if the love of her life isn’t the man she married. What if it’s Jane?

Release date: April 26, 2022

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter One
 
Later, they would argue about who saw the other first. As Jane would tell it, Merit was sitting in one of the ridiculous green acrylic chairs in the lobby, pretending to read a five-month-old issue of Architectural Digest with such feigned intensity that Jane stopped in the doorway of the conference room to admire the act.  Merit, meanwhile, fully aware that Jane was watching her, had, up until the precise moment her future boss stepped out of the conference room, actually been reading the magazine, savoring every elevated, multisyllabic word.  So what if it was the April issue in mid-September? Merit hadn’t read a magazine in months, not since Nash was born, maybe even longer than that. She was devouring this one, with its slick, glossy pages and its clean sans serif font, trying to channel its organized, elegant calm.

It’d been a rough night. Nash had woken up four times, and when Merit finally lost her cool and whisper-hissed in her ten-month-old’s face with as much venom as she could muster, “Mommy has an important interview tomorrow, go to sleep RIGHT NOW!!!,” her son laughed so loudly he woke up his older brother, who then demanded water and cough drops.  The morning that followed had been a shit show on every possible level (had Merit known that excessive consumption “might have a laxative effect,” she might’ve thought twice before giving a four-year-old an entire bag of sugar-free lozenges to take back to bed with him). And even though Merit had told Cory over a week ago that her big interview was that morning at nine, he’d neglected to mention that he had to be at work early and couldn’t take Jude to school. Consequently, Merit spent the entirety of her morning trying to get her sons bathed, fed, dressed, out the door and into the bird-crap-covered Subaru she meant to have washed and zero time preparing for the interview she was lucky to have gotten and really didn’t want to fuck up.

So, as luxurious as it might have felt to be sitting alone and reading a gorgeous magazine in a temperature-controlled room that didn’t smell at all like bodily fluids, Merit wasn’t relaxed. She was so tired her eyes felt like they’d been washed in bleach, and she was nervous. Partly because she needed a job more than she wanted to admit, but mostly because she’d spotted Jane in the conference room a good ten minutes before Jane came into the lobby and saw her.
(“Imagine being me in that moment,” Merit would say when they’d tell the story later. “I’m trying stay calm for my interview and I see the woman who holds my fate in her hands and she looks like her.”)

Jane’s work had been featured in all the major design magazines, so Merit had seen plenty of photos of her potential new boss leaning across ten thousand dollar dining tables in spectacularly staged homes.  But none of these images had done Jane justice. Watching her that morning, head tilted back in a laugh, blond hair falling away from her face to reveal the sharp, precise features that had seemed too severe online, Merit decided that the problem with all the photos was that Jane wasn’t smiling in any of them.  She looked striking and stylish in every shot, but not beautiful. The woman in the conference room, by contrast, was fucking gorgeous.  Warm and radiant, glowing the way that attractive women who drink enough water and sleep more than four hours at a time often do. Merit felt like a homely, dehydrated teenager in her ill-fitting black pants and stretchy striped t-shirt, which that morning had seemed like a hip fashion choice but clearly was a wild lapse in judgment. Jane Lodahl was a ravishing, adult woman (Scandinavian! From Denmark!) who probably didn’t own t-shirts. (In fact Jane possessed no fewer than two hundred of them, all white, black or grey.) 

The day of Merit’s interview, Jane was wearing a black A-line midi dress with gold buttons down the front, the kind that costs five times what you think it should and only looks good on women with tiny waists and curvy hips. Merit’s own body resembled a stretched-out unitard on a coat hanger, droopy and mostly shapeless except for the sad little sacks of skin where her tits and ass used to be.  Nothing about Jane was droopy, shapeless, or sad. At fifty-six, Jane had phenomenal tits and an enviable ass. The body of a woman who’d never had children, Merit told herself, to make herself feel better. 

(It made her feel worse.)

Merit couldn’t have described the very particular sensation in her stomach as she watched Jane hop up on the slab table in the conference room, legs dangling, as the four men she was meeting with stood around awkwardly in their skinny pants and stiff shoes. Jane was always sitting on tables and leaning on counters, putting her full weight on things the same way she liked to bear down on people, as if to see what they were made of. It would take a long time for Merit, who was typically quite perceptive, to understand that Jane’s oppressive self-confidence, finely calibrated to elicit unease in others, was an affectation she’d cultivated to get ahead in a profession dominated by men.

But Merit didn’t know any of this the day she interviewed at Jager + Brandt. All she knew for certain as she followed Jane into her office that morning was that she desperately wanted this extraordinary woman to hire her. As she perched nervously on one of the many chairs clustered around Jane’s desk—not a single one acrylic; Jane didn’t oblige any of that high-design bullshit in her personal space—it occurred to Merit that she’d been so preoccupied with coming up with the right story to explain the three-and-a-half years she’d taken off from architecture to pursue fine art that she’d neglected to ask herself whether she actually wanted the job she was there to try to get.

Sitting across from Jane, she felt as if she wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.

“So you took some time off to paint,” Jane said, one eyebrow arched as she began to doodle aggressively on the copy of Merit’s resume lying on the desk. She had a slight Danish accent and a nearly imperceptible overbite, which Merit might not have noticed had she not been staring exclusively at Jane’s mouth, which was decidedly less intimidating that her eyes.

“I did,” Merit said, and was pleased at how un-defensive her voice sounded. 

Jane obviously already knew this. Merit had explained the clear gaps in her resume in the cover letter she’d fired off after three too many glasses of rosé the previous Monday night. The wine wasn’t her savviest move, but if she was going back to work, it would be on her terms.

“Unconventional” was the word she’d used in the letter, despite the fact that Cory had told her it was code for “weird” and that she should call her career path “entrepreneurial” instead. Merit didn’t see how spending three years trying to make enough art for a single gallery show could properly be called “entrepreneurial.” Plus, trying to frame her failed creative pursuit as a savvy career move made her feel desperate and pathetic, and she was neither of these things. Technically, this job was the only real possibility she had, and, yes, their mounting credit card bills demanded that she start getting a paycheck, but she had a B. Arch from Cornell and a masters from Berkeley. She had to be at least as competent as ninety percent of the architects at her level. So, if she didn’t get this particular job at this particular firm, there would be another one.  There was no need to panic yet.

“And?” Jane asked, leaning back in her chair and propping her feet up on her desk. She wrapped her dress around her legs and tucked it between her knees.  Merit wondered if she was wearing underwear. 

Merit lifted her eyes to Jane’s.  “Utter failure,” she answered. “I only sold one piece, which was barely enough to cover the gallery’s costs.”

“So here you are,” Jane said.

“Here I am.”

Jane studied her for a moment. Merit forced herself not to look away. Jane’s eyes were very blue.  Merit sensed that Jane was trying to make her uncomfortable. Instead, she felt intensely alive. 

“You have the credentials, obviously,” Jane said. “But are you any good?” She hadn’t bothered to open Merit’s portfolio.

Merit didn’t hesitate. “I wouldn’t waste your time if I weren’t.”

Jane arched an eyebrow. “And you’re sure you’re ready to come back to the grind?”

“Definitely,” Merit lied.  “I’ll always love fine art, but I’m hardwired for the faster pace of architecture and design.”  She cringed a little at this last bit. It had sounded less obnoxious in her head. 

“And I’m apparently hardwired to get fucked in the ass by incompetent middle-aged men who keep falling up,” said Jane dryly.  She crossed her ankles. “You have kids?”

Merit hesitated, in part because her mind was still stuck on the transition from ass-fucking to children, but also because she knew that a woman without kids asking another woman about her children in a prospective employment situation rarely turned out well for the one who had them.

“A girl’s allowed one lapse in judgment,” Merit heard herself say.  “Or two, in my case.”

Jane didn’t say anything, but Merit saw a hint of a smile.

She leaned forward in her chair and put her palms on Jane’s desk. She couldn’t have said what came over her.  It was unlike her to be so crass. “Please hire me, I need to get the fuck out of my house.”

Jane laughed uproariously, and Merit knew she had the job.

***

Cory, that night, was ecstatic.

“I’m so proud of you, babe,” he said, prying the cork out of a bottle of red wine. “You’re back in the game!” 

“What game?” Jude asked. Merit was wondering the same thing herself. 

“Mommy got a job,” Cory told him. “She’s going back to work.” He slid Merit’s glass across the counter.

“I’m going back to work in architecture,” Merit corrected. “I was always working.” 

“And now you won’t be doing it for free.” Cory grinned mischievously and raised his glass. “To Mommy!”

Merit felt like punching her smiling husband in the face.

“To Mommy!” Jude echoed, milk sloshing out of his metal cup.  A few weeks before, Merit had purged her kitchen of plastic in a frantic attempt to convince herself she still existed.  Replacing everything was a completely unnecessary expense, but the woman she’d always understood herself to be cared far too much about the planet, cytotoxicity, and aesthetic design to serve her children milk in fogged plastic drinkware.  Sure, the stainless steel tumblers she’d replaced them with were much too heavy and made a horrible clanging sound when they were dropped, but their presence in her kitchen asserted that she was still there, that she hadn’t lost her entire identity in motherhood.  She wondered now if her decision to go back to an office job that would require a daily shower and eye liner was a variation on the same theme. 

Merit resisted the urge to wipe up the spilled milk. The table was covered in water spots anyway.  She took a long sip of wine.

“How’re you feeling about it?” Cory asked, heaping cacio e pepe onto her plate. Despite her husband still not knowing the difference between being funny and being insensitive when it came to her career, he’d brought home her favorite dish from her favorite Italian place, and he’d called in the take-out order all by himself. On the whole, Merit was feeling great.

But Cory was asking about her new job, and her feelings about that were much harder to pin down.

The truth was, she’d never really wanted to be an architect. She’d picked it as a major because she was afraid she’d never make it as a painter, and she told herself that designing houses was creative enough. She threw herself into it at first.  It was nice to not think about the future anymore, to be carried along by the momentum of a well-worn path. The decisions just sort of made themselves.

In a way, architecture had led her to Cory. When they met in a GRE prep class their senior year at Cornell, he was an ambitious environmental engineering major who thought grad school in California would help him get into tech.  She needed a master’s degree and zero chance of snow.  Berkeley was on both their lists.  They both got in.  They both went. They moved in together the summer after their first year. 

“Do you think we’re moving too fast?” she asked him over beer and cheap noodles the night they signed the lease.

“Nope.” He was unequivocal and calm and that had been the end of it. 

The next day, he showed up at their apartment with a sack of oil paints and a poem that Merit was pretty sure he’d ripped out of a campus library book. She asked him to read it aloud to her, and he did, stammering uncharacteristically in a few places, his cheeks pink with his awareness of it, which seemed to Merit like the purest expression of love.

the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it

It was an odd little poem about a woman hanging a wind chime, but Cory seemed moved by it, and Merit was moved by him, by his conviction that they were meant for each other, and his recognition that even though she hadn’t painted since college, oil paints were still the surest salve for her fear. He got down on one knee after that, and she said yes before he could even get the question out.  Of course she wanted to marry him.  He was smart and handsome and made her laugh when she was stressed out.  It didn’t occur to her to expect more out of love than that. She put the box of paints in a closet and resolved to be a really good wife.

They graduated the following summer and got married that fall. By then they both had jobs in the city, so they traded their tiny apartment in Berkeley for a loft they couldn’t afford in San Francisco, where they commenced living as they imagined young, debt-laden urban newlyweds should. They worked long hours for bosses they didn’t like and went out every night with people they barely knew and drank overpriced coffee every morning to fight the hangovers they swore they’d never have again and always did. Her parents said they were praying for her. Her college roommate told her she was living the dream.

But, as the years passed, it stopped being fun. Merit wasn’t sleeping as well, and her stomach hurt a lot of the time.  She missed painting. She hated her job. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she woke up short of breath. What was she actually doing with her life? When she’d left home at eighteen, her only goal was escape; she’d wanted to get as far from her conservative parents and their suffocating worldview and the humidity of Northwest Florida as she possibly could. Twelve years later, she wondered what she’d been running to.

She started seeing a therapist, who told her she should meditate and get back into art. So one Sunday morning, hungover and shaky, she pulled out the oils Cory had given her and painted for the first time since college. When Cory woke up and found her in the bathroom, a canvas propped up on the shower ledge, she was crying with relief.

“This is who I want to be,” she told him, and he nodded like he understood, and for the first time in a long time everything seemed alright.

She got pregnant with Jude that night.