Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (12 page)

The asking price: $120,000.

“No,” I said. “I can’t. I’m moving to California.”

“Okay,” said Ex.

“Okay,” said Linda.

On the drive back to town, I was so distracted I nearly slammed my Subaru into a cow that had wandered into the gravel road. And that made me cry. Not because I was startled. But because—I had to admit it—I loved that cow. I loved the loose gravel and the broken fence that had allowed the cow to get out and the dust all over the car and the grains of soil always in my hair. I loved the whole damn hangover that was Nebraska.

But, no. I was done. I was leaving.

Obviously, I should have flown to California. Thanks to my infusion of cash, I could have put the car on the moving truck or had it shipped out without great financial hardship. I could have swallowed my fear about putting Rex in the cargo hold of an airplane—to this day, I have vowed
never
—and whisked us both to our destination in a matter of hours rather than a matter
of endless, conversation-starved, talk-radio-addled days. But when it comes to moving, unless you’re crossing an ocean, I believed then as I do now that the only honest mode of transportation is the automobile. You need to see the highway miles unfold before you. You need to take both credit and responsibility for the distance you’re covering. You need, upon arrival, to be so tired and so hungry for anything other than gas station food that it doesn’t occur to you to be totally freaked-out about the fact that you have no phone number and no idea where the nearest supermarket is.

There are many dramas inherent to relocation via the highway: the tears triggered by a country song, the weird free fall of registering at a motel and not knowing your address, the exhilarating merger of open road and open future. But no one ever talks about those agonizing miles between your departure point and the point at which the interstate fades into a generic ribbon of asphalt. No one ever talks about the suspension of disbelief required to pull out of a driveway that is no longer yours, coast through a neighborhood that will soon no longer be home, and pass—if not for the last time ever, at least for the last time before they become symbols of nostalgia—the landmarks that, while utterly prosaic, have long been the only thing standing between disorientation and sweet familiarity. No one ever talks about the importance of staring straight ahead while making this exit. You cannot turn your head and acknowledge the park, the museum, your favorite restaurant. You cannot wonder if the person driving that red Honda you just passed is your friend from the gym. Like breaking up with a lover, you need to be as gracious as possible, but even more so you just need to walk out. You cannot play Goodnight Moon. You cannot bid farewell to the yellow house on the corner. You cannot duck inside the church and light a candle.
You cannot stop and get coffee. You can only look straight ahead and drive. You can only think about the next thing, the hello and not the goodbye, the up and onward and not the over and out.

Take it from one who did none of the above. Like an addict bargaining for one last fix, I found myself leaving the Lincoln city limits and not merging onto Interstate 80 but continuing south and then turning east (as in, the opposite direction of California) for fifteen miles or so to the farm on Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. It wasn’t even 6:00 a.m.; the sun was pushing a ridge of pink light across a gray sky, and I had on National Public Radio, though it was too early for even
Morning Edition
, which meant that the overnight host was still playing Berlioz and Wagner and, I suspected, drinking tea and doing crosswords in the dark (I knew this for a fact because I knew her; I also knew she was paid $7 an hour). The coziness of this all—plus the fact that as I came over the hill and saw the farm come into view, I felt that God himself was waiting there with my name on a sign like a limo driver at the airport—was sufficiently distracting that I almost missed the driveway and, as a result, had to slam on the brakes and peel into it in a cloud of dust.

And that’s when I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I should have left Kim’s house and gotten right on the interstate. Barring that, I should have made a U-turn the minute I hit Northwest 207th. I should have taped a picture of a palm tree on my dashboard and used it as a focal point until these spasms of stupidity passed. But there I was, at dawn, sitting in a Subaru loaded down with computer equipment and blankets and a dog, staring at a farm that I suddenly wanted almost as much as I’d ever wanted anything. I needed to save it from ruin. I was its only hope against the violence of winter—or a
buyer with the inevitable bad taste. I got out of the car and let Rex out, too. I kicked the gravel and surveyed the outbuildings, wondering which one might make the best writing studio. I was about to stroll out to the edge of the cornfield to watch the sunrise when, as though I’d touched an electrical fence that divides sanity from insanity, I commanded Rex back into the car, slammed the hatchback, threw myself behind the wheel, and pulled out even faster than I’d pulled in. I got on the nearest entrance to the interstate heading west and didn’t so much as look in the rearview mirror for half an hour. Nor did I cry for the entire two-and-a-half-day journey.

To anyone who’s considering a move to Southern California, know this: unless you’re relocating from Phoenix or Taos or Reno—in other words, from one desert to another—autumn is not the time to answer Hollywood’s call. The “perfect” weather is counted among the region’s chief commodities. But every year we pay a tariff called September and October. This is the season of fires, of the Santa Ana winds, of ash-choked skies and mercilessly hot, still nights and public radio commentators making endless references to the Raymond Chandler line about meek little wives feeling the edge of a carving knife and studying their husbands’ necks. There weren’t a lot of fires that first year I was in L.A.—there would be plenty of time for that—but even during that relatively tame fall I was aware of the nearness of a certain unavoidable doom. It wasn’t just the threat, infinitesimal yet omnipresent, of a mountain lion bounding from the rocks when I was walking the dog, or of the whole earth being swallowed within seconds by an 8.6 quake. It was the way things that are supposed to be slow, such as erosion, seemed to happen before your eyes. Within hours in California, a hillside can be burned, a road washed out, a house
loosened from its foundation and clinging to a slope by only its pipes. And that first autumn, as I waited like a fool for some semblance of October crispness, I don’t know what was more unbearable: the fact that the air was so hot that the front doorknob burned my hand or the fact that fall catalogs, with their delicious sweaters and scarves and wool dresses, continued to arrive in the mailbox even though I couldn’t possibly order any of it because it was ninety-five degrees on Halloween.

Even after two months in Topanga, even as the days grew short, the over-the-garage apartment, which was totally bereft of shade, baked in the sun like a clay ashtray made by a schoolchild and permanently forgotten in an art-room kiln. To be above the tree line in the Santa Monica Mountains means that you’re often quite literally above the clouds. As though you’re in a hot, shadeless heaven—or on an airplane going nowhere—the clouds form a silvery layer beneath you that blocks the view of the land and seems to stop the ocean breezes in their tracks.

The houses, too, are oversized and new and made from materials—glass and sandstone and limestone—from which unforgiving sunlight seems to ricochet and blind passersby. Unlike the rustic A-frames and serene post-and-beams of the lower and mid-canyon, where it was not only cooler but also dark and leafy and oddly redolent of the smell of either tomato soup or marijuana, the peak of the canyon felt craggy and exposed and stripped of natural life.

That’s not to say I didn’t experience my share of coyotes and deer and other predictable representatives from the California animal kingdom (in my time there I’d see owls and a tarantula, though never a mountain lion). It’s just that the threat of fire (barbecues and outdoor smoking were federal offenses) and, especially in the upper reaches of the canyon, the sense that
anywhere you might want to go felt immeasurably far away—the road from the coast to the village area of the canyon was nine miles of steep, cliff-hugging switchbacks; the road from the village to my hilltop apartment was another five miles up a narrow, flood-prone pass—brought a heightened drama to minor events. On my second day in the apartment, I stood on the balcony and watched a helicopter bank around the mountain from the south and draw closer and closer until the bushes began shaking and dust rose from the ground in cloudbursts, and eventually it brushed over me and, astonishingly, landed in the yard of the large stucco English-manor-style house across the street. Since this yard was also often used as a riding ring, a great deal of hay and soil and horse manure whirled into a cyclone as the helicopter touched down. From the driveway, where I’d run for a better vantage point, I saw a woman emerge from the house. She was clutching a baby. A paramedic jumped out of the helicopter—its blades were still rotating; its giant metal body made the nearby Land Rover look like a toy—and ducked his way through the debris until he caught her elbow and guided them both in. Within seconds the thing was in the air again, the shrubs were oscillating, and the dust had formed a curtain down the center of the road. The helicopter murmured out of the canyon until, like a fly let out of a window, it was a black dot and then nothing at all.

I remember being shaken up by this scene. I assumed the baby was unconscious. I was afraid it might even be dead. I found myself imagining the scene inside that helicopter: a desperate, hysterical mother shouting above the noise, an EMT who knew it was too late, an infant gone blue.

A few days later, I met a woman who lived a few houses up the road.

“Oh, that!” she said. “The baby just fell off the bed and was
stunned for a minute. Once you call 911, they’re required to come out. And since all our evacs are airlifts—well… that’s just the deal here. The baby was back to normal by the time they arrived, but I guess she took her in to be looked at. Can’t hurt, right?”

So this was my new home: a land where babies were carried off in helicopters and the sun seemed so close to the earth you could almost hear it buzzing like a fluorescent light. As for the residents, I’d see them in the general store (which smelled fine to me), wearing yoga pants and giant shawls as they pawed through bins of overpriced fennel. But because of the sleepy, home-oriented culture of canyon life, I never really met any of them. Despite some efforts to wiggle my way into things by driving halfway down the mountain to the coffee shop on Sunday mornings and looking up from my newspaper every four seconds to determine if anyone had walked in who seemed worth talking to (though what does “worth talking to” mean, and, moreover, what good has ever come from sitting in a coffee shop by yourself?), I barely spoke to anyone during my first month in the canyon.

That sort of went for my landlord, too, who I’ll call Bill. Though he was well-meaning and distinctly uncreepy (an anomaly, apparently, in single male proprietors of rentable guest apartments in the canyon), he also did not always seem entirely human. A sales rep for a drug company, he’d built the house and adjacent garage/guest unit with insurance money from his original (and ostensibly more modest) house, which had been destroyed in a fire a decade earlier. This must have been quite a settlement, because the new house called to mind a cross between an Ian Schrager hotel and the Getty Center. An austere, modernist slab of limestone and glass, the
place was imposing if rather understated on the outside and spotless on the inside. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, since he clearly didn’t need the money, he rented out two rooms in the house as well as the above-the-garage apartment, though I rarely saw my fellow tenants. In the living room, the mahogany-colored floors gleamed as though covered with a thick layer of nail polish. The kitchen, which contained no traces of food, was lined with granite countertops on which nothing but a shiny black coffeemaker and a toaster—both immaculate enough to suggest lack of use—sat like items in a furniture store display.

Bill’s chief companion was his dog, which roamed the hills of the canyon all day and sometimes all night. A Texan (not the Austin kind but the small-town, ranchy kind) of indeterminate age—I put him in his late fifties, but what did I know?—he made occasional reference to an ex-girlfriend but otherwise seemed to have few friends or acquaintances. I assumed that was the reason he had tenants, though his behavior was so frosty I often wondered if he had some kind of Asperger’s-like social disorder. He did complicated mathematical calculations to determine how many kilowatt hours of electricity I’d used and presented me with annotated bills. The only laundry area on the premises was inside his house next to the kitchen, and upon my moving in, he proclaimed that until he could trust me enough to give me a key, I’d have to do my laundry only during the day on weekends, when he was home. (One day, weeks later, he knocked on my door and said, verbatim, “I now trust you. Here is a key.”)

Bill wasn’t in any way an unkind man, just an extraordinarily awkward one. He was also, at least as far as I could tell, extraordinarily sad. In the evenings, as I stood on the balcony
of my apartment and watched the sun drop into the gray mirror of the Pacific Ocean, I often glimpsed Bill through his kitchen window. Every night, he’d sit down on a stool at his kitchen counter and eat his dinner with a glass of red wine. What was most striking about this was not only the old-fashioned elegance of the meals—they always appeared to be something like chicken cordon bleu or roast beef with carrots (and not the microwavable kind either)—but also the fact that he ate while staring straight ahead. From my vantage point on the balcony, I saw neither reading material nor the blue glow of a television set. And as I stood there, sometimes drinking black tea if I was going to attempt to motivate myself to leave the mountaintop for the evening, sometimes drinking wine if I needed to let myself off the hook, I often wondered if geographical beauty made loneliness that much more lonely. Was it better to eat dinner alone facing that view? Was it better to silently chew your roast beef while watching the shadows descend onto the cliffs and the sun drop into the sea? Or was eating alone best suited to a double-wide trailer or a moldy studio apartment with a view of a parking lot?