Insatiable by Gael Greene Page B

creating a warren of rooms. As we smashed down the Sheetrock, the church got smaller and smaller and more beautiful. We took out the picture window behind the altar and installed a baronial fireplace salvaged from the men’s room of the Paramount Theater on Broadway, condemned and about to be demolished. It cost us seventy-five dollars. Don built shutter frames and I stretched red-and-white workman’s bandannas across them to let in light through the bathroom window. I dipped rattan in tea to make it look aged and covered the sink cupboard with it, framing the seams with bamboo that I antiqued with a blowtorch to match the Victorian bamboo hat rack that held towels. Don mitered the corners, marveling at the crude miracle of an old miter box and the saw that came with it. Every drawer in the house was lined with something—vinyl, gingham, book-binding paper, felt. Was there some Freudian implication? I glued lining into every box and drawer in sight.
    “Look at this, darling,” I said, showing him a small article in the
Woodstock Times.
“You can buy twenty-five trees for ten dollars from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. We can fill in the spaces between trees on our hill and one day the church will be invisible from the road. . . . Won’t it be wonderful to be hidden by pines?”
    Did we need to borrow a truck to bring our saplings home from the post office? No. They came in a tiny package, not much bigger than a rolled-up rubber bathtub mat. The tiniest seedlings.
    “We’ll be dead by the time these twigs are trees,” Don said, wanting to toss them in the garbage.
    But we planted them. Half of them died. And the rest of them grew. By the time the marriage was dead, the church was indeed invisible from the road.
    Don always deferred to me, sweating in the heat, getting splashed and burned as he stood on a tall, rickety ladder, stripping the woodwork with some toxic liquid . . . storing up the suppressed rage I would only later discover. He worked all week, out of place, he felt, at the
Times
and spent his weekends trying to be a handyman in a ripped shirt while I mixed wallpaper glue to dress the entrance with marbled book paper from Italy. Wasn’t it fun? Why spend money to hire workmen when you can do it yourself? I was blindly caught up in my fantasy of the exquisite little church on top of the hill.
    And with its eight-dollar potting-shed table stripped and stained, the needlepoint dining chairs, the massive stone fireplace, the turn-of-the-century stained-glass windows, and the custom-made kitchen with its handmade copper range hood, it was a showpiece.
House & Garden
came to photograph the two of us in the open kitchen and get my recipe for mushroom-cream cheese strudel and cold tomato-sour cream soup.
    One Saturday, the gifted photographer John Dominis and reporter Anne Hollander came up to photograph our place for a
Life
magazine feature on churches transformed into other uses. They were on their way that afternoon to the Woodstock Festival, which had been forced to move to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel because Woodstock’s town council had refused a permit. They invited us to come along.
    “It’s supposed to rain,” I said. “And I hear traffic is backed up for miles.”
    “But
Life
has a trailer with air conditioning, a bathroom, and ice cubes,” Anne said.
    What was the matter with us? We said thanks but we’d pass. I cannot remember why. I think we were both pleased with our prescience when we saw the photos of mud-wallowing bodies. What was happening to us? We’d promised to be children together forever, loving, spontaneous. How had we gotten so stodgy?
    Then, on a freelance assignment in Los Angeles, I let the unthinkable happen. Half a bottle of red wine, two desserts in that dimly-lighted Hollywood restaurant. I was nervous. He was too good-looking, my friend’s ex-husband, wonderful Irish face, blue eyes, and a romantic shock of thick black hair. It could only have