Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (11 page)

I’m pretty sure I mean that literally. The way I recall it, one day I was moving into that house and discovering the pleasures of semi-intoxication on that lopsided porch, and the next thing I knew it was more than two and a half years later and I was still sitting there. This is not uncommon in Nebraska.

Not that a part of me wouldn’t have loved to stay on that farm—or, better yet, some other farm—forever. In braver moments, I could see myself staking my own claim on the land, wandering alone and wraithlike through some rambling, inexpensive manse. But no matter how vivid these scenarios, I eventually couldn’t shake the feeling that it was time to leave the countryside. Although I’d stuck around far longer than I’d ever imagined I would, my final verdict was that remaining on that porch, eating that cheese, would turn the best decision I’d ever made—leaving New York—into the worst one. I may have been rather glamorously tanned and windblown on that gusty, treeless terrain, but I was also always a little hungover.

But where to go? Making a life for myself inside Lincoln city limits was an option, of course. I could have found a sweet house for an even sweeter price. And by now, in addition to the impossibly nice friends with the farmhouse, I had plenty of people to pal around with in town. I went out regularly for lunch and dinner. I ran into acquaintances at the farmers’ market. I was even in a book club. But when I closed my eyes and imagined a snapshot of my future self, I just didn’t picture the state capitol building or Buzzard Billy’s Armadillo Bar and Grillo (of which I was a regular) in the background. This was sad, though sadder yet was that I had no interest in returning to New York either. Even though I half believed that my old friends were still right where I left them, huddled in bars arguing about the state of contemporary fiction and so sure I was coming back that there was actually a drink waiting for me on
the table, I couldn’t go back. I’d gone soft. I’d become too attached to the acoustics of life in an honest-to-goodness house—especially that piquant, summery sound of a wooden screen door slamming—to go back to clanking elevators and hollering building supers. Besides, the puppy had grown into an eighty-five-pound sheepdog. He couldn’t live in New York, at least not comfortably, and by then I’d realized that I couldn’t either.

My solution was Los Angeles. I know what you’re thinking. A sellout maneuver, an obvious choice, a step backward. But bear with me while I say a thing or two about the place. When you’re as predisposed as I am to wanderlust, any activity that occurs outside your own home (walking to the corner store, for instance) is an exercise in looking around and determining whether you’d rather live there than where you’re currently living. All foreign and domestic travel, all excursions around the city, all books, movies, and television shows depicting particular locations become fodder for relocation fantasies. It goes without saying that the real estate section of the newspaper is a form of pornography. So, with a few exceptions (Carbondale, Illinois; San Francisco), I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never visited a place without imagining myself permanently or at least semipermanently installed there.

That is to say, I remember at age twenty-six sitting in the unforgiving sun at my brother’s graduation from USC and thinking that with a proper hat and sunglass collection, a person could do worse than to live there. I remember being sent to Hollywood a few months later to write a magazine profile of a young woman who competed in mountain bike races with a dead piranha around her neck (why this interview was in Hollywood I can no longer remember; the biker lived in another state) and thinking how nice it was to be able to drive
around in an air-conditioned car rather than ride the stinky subway. Of course, I didn’t admit much of this at the time. Back then, I was still nursing my adolescent crush on New York, and I often made fun of L.A., decrying it as a cultural wasteland that couldn’t hold a match to the gritty wonders of, say, a certain “amazing” borscht restaurant in the East Village. I said those things because I believed that saying those things made you a real New Yorker. And like most people who protest too hard, I ended up going back on everything I’d said and embracing all that I’d disparaged.

It helped, too, that I had friends in L.A., most of whom seemed to be doing remarkably well. Lots of people from Vassar had headed west after graduation and parlayed their black-and-white, 16-millimeter student films into jobs producing reality shows. Additionally, Stephanie, my 100th Street roommate, had moved there a few years after leaving our apartment and immediately began getting noticed as a stand-up comedienne (sometimes telling jokes she’d tossed off while we were conspiring about what to do with Brad). Moreover and most shocking of all, my best friend, Alison, as unwavering a Manhattanite as I’d thought there ever was (like my father, she disliked barbecues on account of the outdoors factor), had ditched New York shortly before my departure for Nebraska to follow a boyfriend to L.A. She even finally learned to drive, though it took her nearly three years and two failed tests and she remained partial to the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus. Still, she adored L.A. She loved it, actually. Although she’d parted ways with the boyfriend a year after the move, she’d always been grateful to him for showing her, as she put it, that “it’s possible to go entire weeks without ever being either chilly or too warm.”

She had a point. Los Angeles is nothing if not the geographical
equivalent of Baby Bear’s porridge: not too cold, not too hot, but, rather, a study in the unsung pleasures of lukewarm. I won’t lie: conspicuous intellectualism is not L.A.’s racket. When Midwestern kids get on that proverbial Greyhound bus and head for one of the coasts the way my parents should have long ago, the brainy ones tend to go east and the good-looking, not-so-brainy ones tend to go west. You see them strolling, mouths agape, down Hollywood Boulevard or waitressing at Marie Callender’s: blue-eyed high-school quarterbacks who were told they should try modeling but will be back home selling cars within six months; corn-fed Iowa kids who were the stars of their school musicals but just might end up in porn. I’m generalizing, of course. There are a million exceptions; this is only half the story. L.A. has more than its share of art-house pontificators, of pallid bibliophiles, of math types. It has major universities and major museums and quite a lot of independent bookstores. But it doesn’t wear erudition on its sleeve. Unlike New York, it doesn’t mind if you haven’t read Mann. It values a nice backyard over the prospect of being neighbors with Thomas Pynchon. Moreover, unlike San Francisco, it doesn’t purport to be “evolved.” The people of L.A. are honest about themselves and their city. They know it’s flawed; they know there’s at least one asshole for every decent person; they don’t waste their breath telling outsiders how great it is. If San Franciscans are evangelical about their city, always spreading the gospel of its goat cheese and its tolerance and the way the fog descends upon its holy bridge in chiaroscuric rapture, Angelinos are Jewish about theirs. Either you’re among the chosen or you’re not. Either you get why it’s good to live in L.A. or you don’t.

There was great appeal in this. Even having never lived there, I recognized the nonpreciousness of L.A. and was
drawn to it. So after five years of telling Alison I’d consider moving once I got everything else out of my system, I finally acquiesced. It wasn’t hard, really. Not only could I twist the decision around in my mind to make it seem in keeping with the
Little House on the Prairie
motif—they traveled west, after all—but it so happened that for the first time in my life, I had some actual money.

I’d had, as they say in the corporate world, a “liquidity event.” I’d sold the novel about the girl who moves to a fictional Midwestern town. To my shock, I’d sold it for enough money that even after I paid off my $80,000 of debt and replaced my twelve-year-old Toyota with a new Subaru station wagon, I had a considerable amount left over. And therein my struggles around deciding where to live began to work in tandem with struggles around deciding whether and where to buy a house. Thus began phase two of my obsession with housing: the nonhypothetical phase.

One characteristic of the nonhypothetical phase is that, thanks to a combination of crippling indecision and my newfound financial cushion, I spent the next two years changing addresses almost as often as I changed the oil in my car. That is to say, as nonhypothetical as things could have been (that is, I could have bought a house right away and been done with things), I was actually living a pretty theoretical existence. Or at least a transient one. As a result, the chronology gets complicated. I’m going to try to lay this out as simply as possible, but if you’re still confused, don’t feel too bad. I didn’t know where I was half the time either.

I had not gone directly to L.A. from the little house on ten acres. Having extricated myself from the relationship with the artist/landscaper/aging slacker in the predictably messy way, I took Rex and went to live with my friend Kimberly in Lincoln.
She owned a well-appointed Cape Cod house in a posh neighborhood near the country club. She was also in the process of deciding whether to remarry her ex-husband, who lived near Los Angeles, so she was only there about half the time.

The four months that I lived in this house were more than a little surreal. Shortly after selling the novel, I also had a movie deal, and I eventually went out to L.A. to meet with the producers and to convince them to let me write the screenplay. I recognize that that’s quite possibly one of the most obnoxious sentences ever written but—spoiler alert—this meeting basically amounted to the pinnacle of my Hollywood career. Mostly, this trip was a housing reconnaissance mission. Alison, who lived near the beach in Venice, announced that she’d found the perfect spot for me: Topanga Canyon. This was a magical place, she said (it would be magical for me, anyway; personally she thought the whole place kind of smelled like feet), a hippie–cum–trust funder–cum–wannabe–cowboy enclave in the Santa Monica Mountains, nine miles up a mountain pass off the coast. There were log cabins and tepees as well as eco-friendly/solar-paneled/sustainable/generator-runs-completely-off-of-hemp multimillion-dollar estates. There were writers and artists and corporate lawyers and probably glassblowers who lived in yurts. Moreover, there was land. So much land, in fact, that not only could I probably continue to fan the flame of my farm-girl persona but I’d have to watch out for mountain lions while I was at it. She knew this much because she’d eaten lunch at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, a $30-per-plate vegetarian organic eatery surrounded by sagebrush and Buddha statues just off Topanga’s main road, and, having taken a drive through the winding hills afterward, pronounced it, in her inimitable style, “nowhere I’d want to live but just weird enough for you.”

Beguiled by the promise of tepees and maybe even artist/landscapers who weren’t aging slackers, I spent the remainder of my trip searching Craigslist for rentals in Topanga Canyon. By the time my plane back to Nebraska took off from LAX, I was holding two separate and shiny keys to my new life. Not only had I fooled the movie producers into giving me a screenwriting deal, but I had a lease on a guest apartment over the garage of a multimillion-dollar house so high in the hills it overlooked thirty miles of coastline. I was set to move in a month.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Kim was returning to her ex-husband and selling her house. Since she was also headed for the L.A. area, I could piggyback some of my furniture on her moving truck. The rest of my things (during my time in Nebraska I’d acquired a rather startling amount of early-twentieth-century American furniture) would remain in a storage unit in Lincoln until I had a bigger place someday and could send for them. For the first time in a long time, everything seemed on track.

Then I met Linda the Realtor. She was representing the couple that had bought Kim’s house. And since Kim was still in California most of the time, I often found myself chatting with her while she was sitting in the living room waiting on the inspection or attending to some other piece of business. I don’t know if it was trepidation about my imminent move or procrastination on the screenplay, but for some reason I began talking to her about how much I’d loved living in the little farmhouse with the lopsided porch (since moving back to town, I’d missed it more than I’d anticipated) and how in many ways I still dreamed of having a big farmhouse. I didn’t necessarily see this as a full-time kind of thing, I explained, more of a vacation-house kind of situation. And because Linda needed
clients and commissions as much as any Realtor, she did what any decent businesswoman would do. She showed me listings for farms.

You need to understand that I was no stranger to the allure of acreage for sale (“acreage” is the preferred local term for out-of-town land that isn’t necessarily a working farm). During my years with the artist/landscaper/aging slacker (who was now my mostly amicable ex), we were as enthusiastic about the idea of buying a farm as my mother had been about Sunday open houses. Never mind that we had no money for one. Never mind that many of the ones we looked at weren’t even for sale but just abandoned, tornado-ravaged wooden frames that we imagined ourselves acquiring for nothing and restoring to habitability. I knew from these excursions that the vast majority of out-of-town homesteads were appalling. If they were new, they were usually prefab monstrosities with garages bigger than the houses themselves. More heartbreakingly, if they were old, they’d been raped by “improvements” like dropped ceilings, wall-to-wall carpet, and aluminum siding. It was rare to see something halfway appealing and almost unheard of to see something genuinely exciting.

Hence the saga of the house at Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. I’m not sure if I stumbled across the place when I was out driving around with Ex, which we were still apt to do for fun, or if it was on Linda’s list of places to show me. In any case, the day I walked inside it was the day my California plans began, if not exactly fading away, losing significant muscle tone. I was ready to head west. I truly was. But as I stood in the driveway with Ex and with Linda, who’d had to rustle up the key from some faraway small-town listing agent, I felt my convictions slipping out from under me. The place bore an uncanny (read: scary and bizarre) resemblance to the
farm I’d invented in my novel. That is to say, it was a rambling, creaking, quite-possibly-not-going-to-make-it-through-another-winter two-story clapboard house with five bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and (to my delight) a mudroom with wide-planked floors, wainscoting, and windows (weather-beaten, naturally) on three sides. It sat on about fifteen acres and had several outbuildings, including a smokehouse, a stable, and a handful of red wooden barns in various states of dilapidation. One more winter unoccupied and the place might have been on the way to ruin. Rolling hills of soybeans and corn undulated in every direction. On the roof of the largest barn, a weather vane spiked the boundless blue sky.