Like a House on Fire - Softcover

McBrayer, Lauren

 
9780593331842: Like a House on Fire
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593331842 ISBN 13: 9780593331842
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A Belletrist Book Club Pick

What would you do if you found the spark that made you feel whole again?

After twelve years of marriage and two kids, Merit has begun to feel like a stranger in her own life. She loves her husband and sons, but she desperately needs something more than sippy cups and monthly sex. So, she returns to her career at Jager + Brandt, where a brilliant and beautiful Danish architect named Jane decides to overlook the “break” in Merit’s résumé and give her a shot.

Jane is a supernova—witty and dazzling and unapologetically herself—and as the two work closely together, their relationship becomes a true friendship. In Jane, Merit sees the possibility of what a woman could be. And Jane sees Merit exactly for who she is. Not the wife and mother dutifully performing the roles expected of her, but a whole person.

Their relationship quickly becomes a cornerstone in Merit’s life. And as Merit starts to open her mind to the idea of more—more of a partner, more of a match, more out of love—she begins to question: What if the love of her life isn’t the man she married. What if it’s Jane?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lauren McBrayer is a graduate of Yale with a law degree from UC Berkeley. A working mom of three, she is the head of business affairs for an entertainment company in Los Angeles. Like a House on Fire is her adult debut.   

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
 
Later, they would argue about who saw the other first. As Jane would tell it, Merit was sitting in one of the ridiculous green acrylic chairs in the lobby, pretending to read a five-month-old issue of Architectural Digest with such feigned intensity that Jane stopped in the doorway of the conference room to admire the act.  Merit, meanwhile, fully aware that Jane was watching her, had, up until the precise moment her future boss stepped out of the conference room, actually been reading the magazine, savoring every elevated, multisyllabic word.  So what if it was the April issue in mid-September? Merit hadn’t read a magazine in months, not since Nash was born, maybe even longer than that. She was devouring this one, with its slick, glossy pages and its clean sans serif font, trying to channel its organized, elegant calm.

It’d been a rough night. Nash had woken up four times, and when Merit finally lost her cool and whisper-hissed in her ten-month-old’s face with as much venom as she could muster, “Mommy has an important interview tomorrow, go to sleep RIGHT NOW!!!,” her son laughed so loudly he woke up his older brother, who then demanded water and cough drops.  The morning that followed had been a shit show on every possible level (had Merit known that excessive consumption “might have a laxative effect,” she might’ve thought twice before giving a four-year-old an entire bag of sugar-free lozenges to take back to bed with him). And even though Merit had told Cory over a week ago that her big interview was that morning at nine, he’d neglected to mention that he had to be at work early and couldn’t take Jude to school. Consequently, Merit spent the entirety of her morning trying to get her sons bathed, fed, dressed, out the door and into the bird-crap-covered Subaru she meant to have washed and zero time preparing for the interview she was lucky to have gotten and really didn’t want to fuck up.

So, as luxurious as it might have felt to be sitting alone and reading a gorgeous magazine in a temperature-controlled room that didn’t smell at all like bodily fluids, Merit wasn’t relaxed. She was so tired her eyes felt like they’d been washed in bleach, and she was nervous. Partly because she needed a job more than she wanted to admit, but mostly because she’d spotted Jane in the conference room a good ten minutes before Jane came into the lobby and saw her.
(“Imagine being me in that moment,” Merit would say when they’d tell the story later. “I’m trying stay calm for my interview and I see the woman who holds my fate in her hands and she looks like her.”)

Jane’s work had been featured in all the major design magazines, so Merit had seen plenty of photos of her potential new boss leaning across ten thousand dollar dining tables in spectacularly staged homes.  But none of these images had done Jane justice. Watching her that morning, head tilted back in a laugh, blond hair falling away from her face to reveal the sharp, precise features that had seemed too severe online, Merit decided that the problem with all the photos was that Jane wasn’t smiling in any of them.  She looked striking and stylish in every shot, but not beautiful. The woman in the conference room, by contrast, was fucking gorgeous.  Warm and radiant, glowing the way that attractive women who drink enough water and sleep more than four hours at a time often do. Merit felt like a homely, dehydrated teenager in her ill-fitting black pants and stretchy striped t-shirt, which that morning had seemed like a hip fashion choice but clearly was a wild lapse in judgment. Jane Lodahl was a ravishing, adult woman (Scandinavian! From Denmark!) who probably didn’t own t-shirts. (In fact Jane possessed no fewer than two hundred of them, all white, black or grey.) 

The day of Merit’s interview, Jane was wearing a black A-line midi dress with gold buttons down the front, the kind that costs five times what you think it should and only looks good on women with tiny waists and curvy hips. Merit’s own body resembled a stretched-out unitard on a coat hanger, droopy and mostly shapeless except for the sad little sacks of skin where her tits and ass used to be.  Nothing about Jane was droopy, shapeless, or sad. At fifty-six, Jane had phenomenal tits and an enviable ass. The body of a woman who’d never had children, Merit told herself, to make herself feel better. 

(It made her feel worse.)

Merit couldn’t have described the very particular sensation in her stomach as she watched Jane hop up on the slab table in the conference room, legs dangling, as the four men she was meeting with stood around awkwardly in their skinny pants and stiff shoes. Jane was always sitting on tables and leaning on counters, putting her full weight on things the same way she liked to bear down on people, as if to see what they were made of. It would take a long time for Merit, who was typically quite perceptive, to understand that Jane’s oppressive self-confidence, finely calibrated to elicit unease in others, was an affectation she’d cultivated to get ahead in a profession dominated by men.

But Merit didn’t know any of this the day she interviewed at Jager + Brandt. All she knew for certain as she followed Jane into her office that morning was that she desperately wanted this extraordinary woman to hire her. As she perched nervously on one of the many chairs clustered around Jane’s desk—not a single one acrylic; Jane didn’t oblige any of that high-design bullshit in her personal space—it occurred to Merit that she’d been so preoccupied with coming up with the right story to explain the three-and-a-half years she’d taken off from architecture to pursue fine art that she’d neglected to ask herself whether she actually wanted the job she was there to try to get.

Sitting across from Jane, she felt as if she wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.

“So you took some time off to paint,” Jane said, one eyebrow arched as she began to doodle aggressively on the copy of Merit’s resume lying on the desk. She had a slight Danish accent and a nearly imperceptible overbite, which Merit might not have noticed had she not been staring exclusively at Jane’s mouth, which was decidedly less intimidating that her eyes.

“I did,” Merit said, and was pleased at how un-defensive her voice sounded. 

Jane obviously already knew this. Merit had explained the clear gaps in her resume in the cover letter she’d fired off after three too many glasses of rosé the previous Monday night. The wine wasn’t her savviest move, but if she was going back to work, it would be on her terms.

“Unconventional” was the word she’d used in the letter, despite the fact that Cory had told her it was code for “weird” and that she should call her career path “entrepreneurial” instead. Merit didn’t see how spending three years trying to make enough art for a single gallery show could properly be called “entrepreneurial.” Plus, trying to frame her failed creative pursuit as a savvy career move made her feel desperate and pathetic, and she was neither of these things. Technically, this job was the only real possibility she had, and, yes, their mounting credit card bills demanded that she start getting a paycheck, but she had a B. Arch from Cornell and a masters from Berkeley. She had to be at least as competent as ninety percent of the architects at her level. So, if she didn’t get this particular job at...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593331842
ISBN 13 
9780593331842
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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