Because the design of the house can seem convoluted or hard to imagine in descriptions, here are some quick floor plans for their town house. If I find a picture of what I think this looks like from the outside, I will attach it, but for now these will have to suffice.

First floor

Second Floor (Jasmine’s room)

Third Floor (Thomas’ Room)

Top Floor (Bernard)

That’s it! Use your imagination for furniture, since even I don’t know how to fill an apartment with stuff beyond books yet. Seriously, shopping for furniture can be exhausting and expensive, but it looks strange without filling a house up.

One thing that I want to mention about housing, though, is pay close attention to the ways in which they obtained the house. Thomas makes mention of having a very low mortgage payment and he talks about the signs that he sees on the lot that talk of no down payment. In the timeline, I said that this all takes place during 2006. This was done because I wanted gay marriage to not be legal yet, but also because of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that happened in the states (and that trickled everywhere). Those of you not from the states, here is a hilarious video that describes what exactly happened with this:

Basically: people on Wall-Street gambled with money that wasn’t theirs, got rich, and then the bottom fell out of everything and a lot of people lost their entire savings. People who thought they were going to get a good rate on their mortgage, ended up having their payments go sky-high after a year or two, and then the bank foreclosed on their house. The government ended up bailing out the big businesses to avoid another recession like the 1930s, but the money did not trickle down and those people on the lower level still lost their houses, jobs, and savings. This is where movements like Occupy Wall Street came from (this went on from 2008-2012 in the aftermath, while most of the houses were sold and holes started to appear in the system around 2006). Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story is also about this and I would recommend that film for people who are not savvy with economics. Even I’m not that good with it and I’ve been trying to understand this for a few months; I’ve probably left out a lot of details here, but this is what I know and remember.

I learned about this after I finished writing the first draft, and it thrilled me. It meant that the political climate of the story could reflect “real life” issues and I began to put in more details, like the signs Thomas sees. I also added this in with Marc’s job, too. I wanted him to work at one of those big investment banks like AIG or Bernie Macs. I don’t name what one because I don’t know enough about that yet and it wouldn’t really matter per se, because the big meltdown happens in 2008 and these characters are just in 2006 now.

To answer the question that is probably lurking: no, they will not lose their house in this story. Marc does not lose his job and there is no real economic impact that is visible from this sub-prime fiasco in this story. But I think this is very important to consider. The major thing I wanted to convey with this story is that the two of them are no longer containing their relationship. They have a third person involved now and a baby on the way. Not only that, the apartment is gone (another thing that forces them out of the comfort zone and privacy from before) and now they need to buy a house. Things are becoming more serious, and although Thomas is fairly carefree about it (at least so far), I loved the fact that they are actually buying a house in one of the most economically frail times. The mortgages that were released during this period were ridiculous and ended up exploding later on. Although I do insinuate that Jasmine is figuring it out, and she may have found a loophole to avoid this pitfall, Thomas and Bernard are oblivious.

This was another one of the ways that I wanted to highlight the fact that they are both very new at all of this. Although they can mime adult-like behaviour pretty well, there is always going to be something else beyond them and beyond their control. A financial crisis like this should not have happened, and in order to really understand the repercussions of something like this, you need to go with the personal side. This is why Moore is melodramatic in Capitalism: A Love Story and Sicko, and why Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath. It is very easy to lose sight of people in economics. Although the implications of this financial meltdown does not reach this narrative, it is still a really important issue that lurks in the background and I want to stress here.