Free The Four Temperaments by Yona Zeldis McDonough Page B

herself, with no help from him or anyone—the walls of the 118th Street apartment where they still lived. She bought new sheets, pillows, a comforter and towels, mostly in pale shades of ivory, wheat or celadon. She dabbled with ideas for renovations—using river stones to re-cover the bathroom floor, or refacing the kitchen cabinets with hammered aluminum, while her mother urged that they move somewhere else entirely. And then the offer came from the firm in San Francisco. So leaving most of their furniture and other household possessions behind, they headed out west.
    Gabriel had
never been to San Francisco before, but when he got there, he was immediately captivated by the lyrical way the streets careened and ascended, the views of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge cropping up at odd moments, when he least expected them. He and Penelope moved into a large apartment on the top floor of an elegant, expensive 1930s apartment house in Pacific Heights, thanks to the sizable inheritance she had received when they married.
    The building was made of limestone, with intricate metal Art Deco detailing at the top and base. There were steel casement windows that swung out, into the open, unfettered sky. The only thing he didn't like was the persistent rush of traffic from the street below; after living in New York, and on the ground floor besides, he wouldn't have guessed that it would have bothered him so much. Still, he considered the apartment an enviable piece of good fortune and, for a while, it seemed that Penelope felt the same way.
    She resumed her decorating schemes, this time on an even grander scale: the walls were hung with textured Japanese rice paper; the floors sanded and bleached a color as pale as the moon. Furniture arrived, ordered from decorator showrooms, and was arranged, rearranged and then shrouded in linen slipcovers of a dozen shades of white. After a while, all the pale tones began to irritate Gabriel.
    â€œI'm tired of all this white. Can't we have some other colors in here?” he asked her peevishly one night, after she had brought home a bunch of ivory silk brocade pillows and arranged them, with careful artlessness, on the couches and chairs. The discarded paper and shopping bags littered the floor until she scooped them up in her arms.
    â€œWhite
is
a color,” Penelope explained patiently, as if to a child. “Why does it bother you so much?” Gabriel had to stop to consider that.
    â€œIt's not that I don't like white,” he said, trying to be tactful. “I think we need some contrasts, that's all. Some stronger visual interest. Instead of all this uniformity.” He felt as if he were talking to a resistant, shortsighted client.
    â€œI don't like contrasts,” Penelope said. “They make me, I don't know, nervous.” Gabriel looked at her clutching the wrappings to her chest, the intensity of her expression a little unsettling.
    â€œWell, I certainly don't want you to feel nervous,” he said, backing down. A few times lately, he had seen Penelope dissolve into pools of luxuriant and sorrowful tears when she felt something he said had wounded her. He had no desire to experience another of these episodes at that moment.
    And so it continued. Sheer white drapes that lined the windows; thin, white bone china plates and saucers and cups to fill the cabinets in the kitchen. Gabriel began to feel the need to wear sunglasses inside the apartment, but said nothing. Instead, he went off to work in the cool, damp mornings, and without mentioning it to Penelope, ordered a crimson rug and several tall, faceted blue glass vases for his office.
    Then, all at once, the decorating stopped, replaced by the kind of listlessness he had never seen in her before. This, as it turned out, was even more worrisome than her obsessive activity. “Do you think we should buy some furniture for the terrace? If you can wait until Saturday, I'll go with you,” said Gabriel