Property

The ad should have said, For rent, six-room hovel. Quarter-filled Mrs Butterworth’s bottle in living room, sandy sheets throughout, lingering smell.

Or, Wanted: gullible tenant for small house, must possess appreciation for chipped pottery, mid-1960s abstract silk-screened canvases, mouse-nibbled books on Georgia O’Keeffe.

Or, Available June 1 – shithole.

Instead, the posting on the website called the house at 55 Bayberry Street old and characterful and sunny, furnished, charming, on a quiet street not far from the college and not far from the ocean. Large porch; separate artist’s studio. Not bad for the young married couple, then, Stony Badower and Pamela Graff, he thirty-nine, red-headed, soft-bellied, long-limbed and beaky, a rare and possibly extinct waterbird; she blonde and soft and hot-headed and German and sentimental. She looked like the plump-cheeked naughty heroine of a German children’s book having just sawed off her own braids with a knife. Her expression dared you to teach her a lesson. Like many sentimentalists, she was estranged from her family. Stony had never met them.

‘America,’ she said that month. ‘All right. Your turn. Show me America.’ For the three years of their courtship and marriage they’d moved every few months. Berlin, Paris, Galway, near Odense, near Edinburgh, Rome, and now a converted stone barn in Normandy that on cold days smelled of cowpats and on hot days like the lost crayons of tourist children. Soon enough it would be summer and the barn would be colossally expensive and filled with English people. Now it was time for Maine, where Stony had accepted a two-year job, cataloguing a collection of 1960s underground publications: things printed on rice paper and Popsicle sticks and cocktail napkins. It fell to him to find the next place to live.