Lynne and I cannot hang wallpaper together. No worries, of course, because who hangs wallpaper any more? But if we were to, we wouldn’t.

One of would want to get the job done and then move on to the next thing, satisfied with checking another item off the to-do list. The other of us would be checking and rechecking, placing the four-foot level against the wall as each sheet was unfolded and eased into place, making sure the seam was still perfectly plumb, running the wooden roller over the seam again and again and again, until the edges of the adjoining sheets were determined to be perfectly flat and perfectly abutted, no hint of bare wall between and not the slightest overlap, sweeping brush and sponge over the face of the sheets smoothing out each and every bubble, taking tile knife and straightedge to cut top and bottom perfectly flush to ceiling and baseboard (unless of course the baseboard had first been carefully removed so as to run the wallpaper behind before carefully replacing the baseboard and happily avoiding any bottom edge at all which could curl or not precisely match the top edge of the baseboard, a step — that is first removing the baseboard — one of us would consider to be wholly unnecessary and a waste of time), and then, finally, after completing all the tasks for that one sheet, the other of us would stand back, not admiring, but inspecting, and if everything were not just so, would go back to that one sheet, pushing and pulling, rolling and adjusting, standing back and inspecting, until that one sheet were just so, or failing that, would rip down that one sheet and start over with a new piece.

Lynne and I cannot hang wallpaper together, and, God be thanked, it has been thirty years since we would have ever dreamed of doing so.