Page 9 of Ted's Temerity
It’s an awkward attempt, but the blinding smile it earns me tells me that the sentiment is appreciated anyway.
“I hope so,” Ted says, and the smile melts into something a little more sensual. “I think we’ll be good for each other in a lot of ways.”
I’m pretty much convinced that we will, too.
* * *
“I’m sorry, I thought you said you were taking me to yourhouse,” I blurt with what is probably a slack-jawed, wide-eyed look on my face as Ted pulls his car into the driveway of something I’d otherwise describe as a McMansion. “This,” I gesture towards the stately building, “is not a ‘house’, Ted.” I use my fingers as quotation marks while I emphasize how badly his blasé description failed him. “This is a mansion.”
It actually takes my breath away to look up at it as the car crawls through the gate towards it. The pretty dappled brickwork is complemented by pristine arch-shaped windows trimmed in white. It’s only two stories, but the building sprawls sideways, with at least eight windows that I can count on the ground floor and six on the ‘smaller’ floor on top of it. Ted presses a button on the little remote attached to his sun visor and the white double garage door on the right side of the home begins to rise slowly.
Finally responding to my reaction to his not-so-humble abode, my date chuckles. “It’s not a mansion. It’s just a large house.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” I insist as he directs the car into the spare space in his garage, next to a gleaming Harley Davidson motorcycle. It looks like a cruiser? Honestly, I know nothing about the things. I eye the black and chrome beast with additional surprise before shaking my head. “I wasn’t expecting that, either.”
“Oh, the bike?” He shrugs. “Let’s call that a midlife crisis.”
“You don’t ride it much?”
Shutting off the car, Ted unbuckles his belt and sighs. “Not as often as I thought I would.”
I could throw statistics at him about how dangerous it is to ride them, but I save my breath. He doesn’t strike me as the type to make risky decisions on the road, and there’s no way to control other road users. I could just as easily be mowed down at a crosswalk as his bike could be hit by an inattentive driver. Instead, I make a vague noise of commiseration and then allow him to guide me through the internal door from the garage into a comically large laundry, with a long marble bench running the length of the space on one side, and gleaming appliances and a massive laundry tub on the other.
“Your laundry is bigger than my bathroom and kitchen combined,” I mutter with only a little exaggeration.
He calls me out on it, his tone amused. “That sounds like hyperbole to me.”
Before I can dig my heels in and argue that it’s really not, he takes my hand and pulls me forward. We exit the laundry into a wide hallway-like space, then pass his kitchen (which, I tease, has to be at least twice the size of my bedroom) and an open plan living-dining area.
The floors throughout are gleaming dark timber, but the walls are off-white, and the counters are all topped with the same light-colored marble as those in the laundry. In the kitchen, the cupboards are the same off-white as the walls, beveled like the garage door. The furniture across all the rooms is all white as well, which contrasts spectacularly with the dark timber flooring, making the whole place feel even bigger and brighter.
Overall, it’s a fabulous mix of modern and classic design, and I feel both comfortable and wholly out of place.
“There’s also a formal lounge and formal dining room down here,” Ted says as he continues to give me the tour, oblivious to my growing unease at the juxtaposition between his world and mine, “and a small office. Upstairs,” we’ve stopped in the main foyer, heralded by a massive double door painted white and a grand staircase carpeted in off-white, with wrought-iron banisters curling up towards the second floor, “there are four bedrooms. Two of those are proper suites -the master and the guest- and the other two standard. Those two share a bathroom.” He smiles at me. “The one closest to the master is the playroom.”
“This is…” Too much. Too ostentatious. Too insane to even imagine. “Wow.”
I knew that, as a senior partner at law firm which, according to Google, is a pretty successful and sought-after one at that, Ted wasn’t exactly lower-middle class like me, but this level of wealth makes me uncomfortable.
I mean, I’m a performer. From when I left home at eighteen and into my early twenties, I was literally a starving artist, one missed paycheck away from homelessness. Things got better when I started booking contracts to tour as a backup dancer, but I still had to watch my spending. Then, after injuring myself, even with the generous medical insurance I was thankfully covered with, I lost most of my savings and am only just now starting from scratch again.
I was exaggerating about the comparative size of my apartment to his laundry, but now as I slowly do a three-hundred and sixty degree turn to take in my surroundings, the contrast seems even more absurd.
Something of my discomfort must show on my face because Ted’s expression morphs into concern. That’s becoming a pattern with us already, and I can’t help but feel that maybe it’s a sign that pursuing a relationship with him isn’t a good idea after all.
Before he can question me, I blurt, “I’m sorry. Your home is gorgeous. It’s just…” I exhale. “Intimidating?”
His handsome face flickers with disappointment and something that looks almost like regret before he schools it into something more sheepish and lighthearted. He scratches the back of his neck and gestures wildly around us. “It needed a lot of work when I bought it, and I did much of that myself. It was a project. I like to keep myself busy.”
The last sentence has weight behind it that I can’t interpret, but I look around again, trying to gauge just what kind of manual labor he’s put into it. As much as I don’t try to stereotype, I highly doubt he made any structural changes himself. Or electrical or plumbing. Unless he counts hiring people to do it for him as doing it himself? But he’s not like that. Or, at least, he hasn’t come off that way in the week I’ve known him.
As if reading my mind, Ted starts pointing at the walls, “I tore off the old, peeling wallpaper and painted it all myself.” He pauses, then rolls his eyes with a playful air. “Alright, sometimes the guys came over to help. Anyway,” he points to the floors, “some moron had tiled over the hardwood, so pulling them up, then sanding, staining, lacquering and polishing the floors happened, too. Then there was a lot of minor stuff, just little repairs here and there, and I got contractors in to redo the kitchen, laundry and bathrooms, and the re-carpeting. It took almost a year to get it looking this way.”
“Wow,” this time when I say the word, it’s with more awe than abject horror. “That’s…intense.”
“Like I said, I like to keep busy.”
I want to probe into that, but there’s a guardedness to him that prevents me from doing so. I figure we all have our hang-ups and baggage, and it’s probably not the sort of thing to be delving into on a first date. Or would this be our second, if you count the wedding?
