Songs Without Words by Ann Packer Page B

of hers this weekend, which is fine, but it’s like, I’m doing her a favor, not the other way around.”
    “That Angela,” Sarabeth said.
    “I know. Life is too short for this bullshit.”
    “Working with Angela?”
    “Caring what she does. What she thinks.”
    “That’s right,” Sarabeth said. “It’s what we think of ourselves that matters.”
    “Please shut up,” he said, but a cheerful look had appeared on his face.
    They made their way to Cedar and then to Shattuck. The rains of the last few days had stopped, and a tiny green shoot of happiness sprouted somewhere inside Sarabeth. She loved Jim, had loved him since the day she met him, in the living room of what was now her house. He had stood there handing out flyers in a way that seemed to say he was both a serious businessman and a completely approachable, funny, ironic guy playing the part of a serious businessman. He had a talent for heartfelt duplicity.
    “So there’s actually a very cool place on tour today,” he said. “Or reportedly cool. An in-the-hills contemporary with really high-end finishes and wraparound decks, and Richard Misrach’s view.”
    “Ha,” she said. “Doesn’t Richard Misrach have Richard Misrach’s view?”
    “It’s like next door or something. Just up the hill. I’m not sure.”
    “But I mean, having that view would just be having that view.”
    “Yes,” he said. “And your point is…”
    “Never mind,” she said with a giggle. She had no idea what her point was. More likely, she didn’t have one.
    On they went. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, she thought, and then: Well, maybe the second. But she was fine, she was fine; she was good.
    They arrived in Elmwood and drove past one huge house after another. Sarabeth thought of the show of Richard Misrach photographs she’d seen at the Berkeley Art Museum a few years back, a show of maybe two dozen photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from the deck of his Berkeley hills house. They’d been shot at all different times of day, over the course of a year, maybe longer, so that the color and light were astonishingly varied and evocative. Early morning shots of the bay at its palest blue, the bridge at night forming a scallop of lights. They were amazing, and as Sarabeth moved from photograph to photograph she felt herself transported, into an enchantment that was laced with something darker, awareness of the passage of time, maybe, the end of the museum visit looming and somehow signaling the end of life itself, creating an interval of grief-shadowed exaltation.
    Jim parked, and they made their way to a two-story house set way back from the sidewalk, at the end of a path that curved past a variety of ornamental grasses. At the door, a group of three was just leaving, and Sarabeth saw that it included a man she sort of had her eye on, Peter Something, though today he seemed kind of ordinary, just a guy leaving a house. A clean-cut guy in khakis.
    The listing agent was Rita Lassining, whom Jim called RL, or Realtor Lady, and she did indeed play the part very fully, never a hair out of place. Today she stood at the dining room table with her smoked salmon and her flyers, in a tobacco-brown blazer over a high-collared gold silk blouse that was like a display stand for her impeccably made-up face.
    Jim said hi to her, and she said he should make sure to look at the master suite, and he whispered to Sarabeth, when they had moved out of earshot, “That’s a signal to
not
look at something else.”
    But there was nothing to not look at. It was a beautiful house, beautifully staged. Sarabeth’s little bag of tricks seemed paltry indeed here. She recognized the hand of Bethany Chen—or rather the linen sofa of Bethany Chen, the damask curtains of Bethany Chen, the gorgeous cherry dressers of Bethany Chen. Sarabeth’s staging materials could fit in one room and in fact lived in a storage unit not much bigger than her bathroom; Bethany Chen’s