The Stager: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

her some solace to be made happy by the things that money can buy. (The ability to find happiness in the acquisition of consumer goods, or in fashion, or in spa weekends, or in mindless television, is seriously underrated and unfairly mocked and I think ought really to be more widely celebrated as evidence of a person’s ability to experience happiness at all. (Whereas I had once thought it an indication that I possessed a certain shallowness because of the degree of pleasure I took in my putting green and the new set of golf clubs I purchased to celebrate its installation, I have since come to believe that it is a sign of strength. Better to be satisfied by what you can get, rather than striving always for the unattainable and intangible. To be able to move from thing to thing and continue to find new pleasure, over and over and over, in the unwrapping of cellophane, or the snipping off of price tags, is a gift. The high from the new elliptical machine lasted three long months, the flat-screen TV—the largest on offer at Best Buy—nearly half a year. The thrill from the authentic Wassily chair I found on eBay might still be with me had Bella not hated the thing so much. Even the fact that it had once belonged to three-time Wimbledon champ Boris Yablonsky failed to impress her. At least she was more supportive of my search for the perfect cup of morning coffee, which gave me purpose for a long while. Even Bella had to admit that she’d enjoyed the rich brew that percolated from the handcrafted coffeemaker from the Netherlands I’d purchased after months of research. At sixteen hundred dollars, it was admittedly a bit of a splurge, and complicated to use (Bella said it looked like a mousetrap), and after a while it became a chore to have to special-order the filters from Holland, so I was not as upset as I might—or should—have been when the electrical wiring went kaput, possibly the result of having to run it through a converter to transform it to 110 volts. (I was somewhat relieved because by then I had discovered a new Starbucks in our neighborhood and was drinking my way through every variety of coffee on offer, inventing, in some cases, combinations of shots and flavors, like mixing Blonde Roast with Tazo passion-fruit tea, that the baristas said had never even occurred to them.))))
    With a tiny video camera lent to her by the estate agent, Bella had shown me the faucets on the porcelain farmhouse sink of our new home, had ignited the burners on the stove, had even given me a virtual tour of the shelf space in the laundry and utility rooms. She’d gone outside and filmed the grounds, such as they were—this was a far more urban environment than we were used to, having lived in suburbia for the last eight years with a pool and putting green in our own backyard. She’d filmed the stone rabbit that stood sentry in front of the house, and, hoping to get a smile out of Elsa, she’d draped her scarf around its neck and done a silly voice-over in a high-pitched, pretend-rabbit voice. Elsa’s reaction had been a little frosty, and it’s true that the two of us might have cut Bella a little more slack. Lord knows the woman was trying hard!
    Bella considers the existence of this silly stone rabbit a sign, although, as an empiricist, she is probably aware that she was in search of a sign, or of anything that would allow her to get the house hunt over with. After all, at some basic level, one charming, ivy-covered recently renovated English Tudor in a fancy upscale North London neighborhood is as good as the next, is it not? And who can blame her? She is under tremendous stress—not that Bella ever really feels stress, since she is one of those wonder women you read about in magazines, the kind who pumped breast milk while writing prize-winning articles on deadline, who managed, once, to get from a conference in Tokyo to Elsa’s field-hockey game in some remote Maryland suburb just in time, who shepherded her mother