The order here is breathtaking: lined up on the counter, beside a gleaming coffee-shop-grade coffee machine, a full array of syrups, and biscuits stacked artfully in matching glass jars, like a sweet shop, stormy swirls of Carrara marble running behind it all. If this is what his current house looks like, I can’t imagine what his renovation will end up looking like.
We slink along the skirting, careful to avoid detection as we skip up the three steps into the hallway and safely out of the homeowner’s view.
The hallway’s wooden floorboards look recently laid, their finish Scandinavian in style. On the antique wooden hall table, tall, lollipop-type dried flowers rest in a rough-hewn ceramic vase, beside that a large vine-tomato-scented candle from a well-known Spanish designer, and next to it a small stack of mail.
By the front door, six sparsely populated hallway hooks holdonly one,distinctly male, coat and an umbrella.
I stop the video and lean in to the screen.
One coat?
I know it’s summer, but one coat is a little odd. No wife’s coat. And now that I think about it, no pram clogging up this whole beautiful aesthetic.Where is his family?
Is he divorced, too?
They’re probably just out—that would explain the absence of people, coats, and pram. They’re probably just out.
I press play again.
The stairs leading up into the house are unencumbered with shoes, or wet-wipe packets, the banisters free of draped sunhats and hastily whipped-off pram blankets. Instead, it looks recently hoovered, a chic jute runner tidily leading up into the rest of his quiet house.
An odd feeling comes over me. I don’t think they are out. I don’t think Matt has a wife, or a baby.
But I saw his baby.Didn’t I?
I draw back as we look up to see a chandelier of origami birds dangling: the birds, like crystals, jostle slightly in the warm breeze blowing in from the open back door.
The fixtures in here are intricate, beautiful, and expensive, almost like in a trendy hotel lobby rather than the home of a young parent. Matt’s house is not what I imagined, at all.
Instead of the newborn bomb site I expected—what I remember heart-achingly from my friends’ early-parenting days, with their puree-smeared upholstery, unexpected and uncategorizable mess, the used plates of half-eaten toast, and babyproofed furniture—I am greeted by one of the most immaculate homes I have ever seen.
I recall friends, who had been stylish and on top of life pre-baby, forced unwillingly into a chaotic world of mess and uncertainty.
We enter the sitting room. It is white: white walls, white rug, and a white sofa.
I pause the video again and stare at it.
There’s not a stain on it. And the whole white room is spotless.
This is not a baby’s house. It can’t be. Who is this man, andwhosebaby did he have?
I restart the video.
We approach a low glass coffee table that sits, like an island, at the white rug’s center. Blue rises and rubs his chin on the glass table’s angled edge. Books are stacked artfully on the table’s surface. The glass is clear and unsmudged, the books in mint condition.
The table’s angled edges are lethal and at exact baby height. Sharp edges are everywhere in this room, everywhere in this house.
We glide farther into the room. It is sparsely minimal, no toys, knickknacks, signs of any other people living here.
There’s a chance Matt and his partner might have bought all this sharp, white furniture pre-baby, but how long pre-baby? Because the house looks newly decorated. I try to remember what Matt told me, but I realize he didn’t really tell me much; I just enjoyed his charm and the ease of the conversation.
I scrub farther forward; we trot double speed up his jute-lined stairs and peep into a bedroom.
There is no one there: a window open, the breeze ruffling the blind, a desk with the standard large Mac desktop. It is a home office: on its walls hang large, framed photographs of architectural buildings that loom down at us.
I scrub forward, my curiosity piqued to the point of irritation. My frown deepens: another spare room. A bed, neatly made, a chair, a bedside table, and lamp. Nothing else.
I scrub again, as we zip up another flight of stairs, to the final, and largest, bedroom.
