Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (14 page)

What I had instead were many, many thoughts about scented candles. There among the bittersweet emanations of Dani’s bachelorette paraphernalia, I began to worry for myself. Actually, I began to feel afraid. The fear had something to do with loneliness, but it wasn’t entirely about being alone. It was
about being alone with awful furniture. It was about growing older and not letting your apartment age alongside you. Looking at Dani’s bookshelf, which sagged with diet books and dating books and meditation books and Sarah McLachlan CDs and printed programs from weddings she’d attended years earlier, I was reminded once again that there were worse things than being in your thirties and having no idea when—or if—you were going to meet the person with whom you’d settle down and invest in a decent dining table. Worse was not buying the dining table yourself. Worse was having no real books on your shelf. Worse was having a home that reflected your desperation like a distorting mirror. Dani, like so many other women, wasn’t living as much as she was waiting around.

Where was I in this? I was no Dani, that’s for sure. How did I know? For one thing, my dog was large and docile, not small and presumably yappy like the varmint that had crapped all over the patio. For another thing, my furniture was generally made of oak, not pine. Granted, it was now divided among two storage units, one in Lincoln and one in the bowels of the San Fernando Valley, where the items I’d brought to Topanga had been carted away when I defected from Bill’s guest apartment. But at least I did not own a media cabinet the size of a truck. As for the other ways in which I was not like Dani, as deeply as I could feel them, I began to wonder if, to the outside world, the two of us were virtually indistinguishable. After all, my most intimate companion was my dog. My friends were scattered all over the country, and my immediate family—I spoke on the phone to my mother every two weeks, to my father every two months, and almost never to my brother—was as disparate as ever. I did not, in other words, know what the hell I was doing with myself.

As for who did know what she was doing with herself, or at
least where she was going? That would have been Dani. Per the agreed-upon schedule, she and her terrier were coming back home in a few weeks. I had no home at all.

I could, of course, have easily found a new place to live. There were neighborhoods beyond the scrubbed and shiny stretches of Venice and Santa Monica, neighborhoods where properties—for rent and for sale—were more affordable and in many cases more interesting (if less tempered by ocean breezes) than places like Dani’s. They were east of the 405 freeway, east of Hollywood, and I was eager to explore them. But somehow I still wanted to go farther east than that. I wanted to go east of the Rockies. Despite everything I thought I knew about my own needs and proclivities, despite my desire to “be connected” (that is, not live in Topanga Canyon), I found myself wanting to go back to Nebraska. Maybe I felt strange about the idea of my novel, which took place in the made-up town of Prairie City, unleashing itself upon the world while I was living somewhere other than the prairie. Or maybe I was just exhausted from the sheer labor of navigating a new city. Chronic lostness was not a malady to be underestimated. On more outings than not, I was forced to drive with
The Thomas Guide
balanced in my lap. Exiting any given freeway ramp, I’d often turn south when I meant to go north or vice versa. Since I had come to L.A. six months earlier, my life had been reduced to an endless effort to make a U-turn.

Was it any surprise, then, that I chose that moment to take a trip back to Nebraska? Sure, there were reasons—a friend’s birthday that weekend, not to mention the Haymarket Art Walk, in which another friend was exhibiting her stained glass—but these were nothing particularly to write home about, much less fly halfway across the country for. But suddenly
my need to be there was urgent, and the punch of the plane wheels touching down on the Lincoln runway felt like a tranquilizer. I checked in to a bed-and-breakfast on a Thursday and spent a few days visiting old friends (the impossibly nice farm folks, the book club ladies, Ex and his motley associates) and haunting old haunts (the blues bar, the Armadillo Bar and Grillo, various front porches). Then on Sunday morning I met Ex for breakfast, after which we decided to take a drive out to the country. The purpose of this jaunt was twofold: I wanted to drive past the prairie shack we’d once occupied (Ex had by now moved into a $300-a-month two-bedroom apartment with a sunporch) to see whether the new tenants had let it fall into the disrepair that’s pretty much par for the course with rural rentals. I also wanted to check out a farmhouse that the
Lincoln Journal Star
had listed as on the market for $157,000. It wasn’t that I had designs on it or anything; I just wanted to take a peek.

If only the car had broken down. If only Ex and I had gotten into a screaming match over some long-ago grievance and I’d returned to my B and B, planted myself in the parlor, and drowned my sorrows in hot chocolate and outdated issues of
Audubon
magazine. If only I hadn’t called my mother for advice and she hadn’t said, “That woodwork sounds terrific, I say go for it,” I would not have done what I did. But as it was, I did what I did and so much more. I walked into that farmhouse, beheld its gleaming maple floors, untouched vintage woodwork, built-in glass cabinetry, and kitchen that was miraculously unruined by “updates,” and started fishing for my checkbook. In less than ten minutes, I’d made a verbal offer. By the end of the afternoon, I’d made a written one. By the next day, I was in escrow. Ex should have stopped me, of course. But he didn’t. He only said, “Well, the floors
are
nice.”

The reason these things had been able to transpire so quickly was that the seller of the farmhouse, a warm, intelligent-seeming woman who (naturally) had inherited it but didn’t want it, happened to be standing in the house when I walked in and screamed “Oh my God, the floors!” with an enthusiasm unheard of in actual Nebraskans. She had not, it turned out, retained the services of a Realtor, and when I suggested that we consider doing business on our own, thereby eliminating the commission, knocking down the purchase price, and avoiding various bureaucratic headaches, she said, “That sounds fine to me.” She then accepted my offer of $150,000 (why it didn’t occur to me to try to offer less I do not know), and I made a good-faith deposit of $300. (Depending on where you live in the country, I know these numbers might look like typos. Where, you’re wondering, is the other zero? The other zero is the temperature in Nebraska five months a year.)

We then filled out some papers she’d downloaded off the Internet, signed them, and took them to a notary. The escrow period would be the standard thirty days, but I was so excited about occupying the property that I arranged to rent it from her until the closing date. I then flew back to California, packed up my stuff, and turned around and drove to Nebraska.

You may be imagining this farm as some sort of pristinely rustic spread straight out of the movie
Giant
or a Willa Cather novel or, at the very least, the Sundance catalog. Chances are you’re thinking that the place must have knocked my socks so far off my feet that they landed somewhere in Iowa. Why else would I, a mostly stable if not always entirely practical person, engage in such a rash series of moves? Did I feel somehow ordained? Did a bearded face appear in the clouds over the soybean fields on that bitter March day and telepathically
inform me that the key to personal happiness, professional fulfillment—and maybe even a spread about my novel in
People
magazine—lay in purchasing this property?

No and no. For one thing, this farm, despite its gymnasium-like floors and to-die-for woodwork, was no Northwest 207th Street and Rural Road G. Only ten minutes from downtown Lincoln, it was more like a regular house that happened to be surrounded by farmland, its only outbuildings a corroded stable and a newish aluminum shed where the farmer who leased the crop fields kept his equipment. Though the road was suitably countrified in that it was unpaved (a necessity as far as I was concerned), Interstate 80 was less than a mile away and, though I somehow hadn’t noticed during that Sunday afternoon open house, fully audible. The drone of 18-wheel trucks could, it seemed, be heard approaching from ten miles out and then trailing off ten miles into the distance. In the meantime, the heating vents were caked so thick with dust that to turn on the furnace was essentially to set off a cyclone of soot inside the house. The tap water, for its part, was an alarming shade of yellow green.

The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs, plus a living room, dining room, large kitchen, and basement. My Lincoln storage unit contained my beloved rocking chair, several boxes of books, some random straight-back chairs, a few pieces of very large, very old stereo equipment (yes, the same equipment that I’d dragged, fully hooked up, across the Vassar quad years earlier), and a number of framed art posters that my mother had bequeathed to me when she sold Jones Lane and that I’d never hung up anywhere. Even after I moved these items into the farmhouse, the place echoed like a scary underground parking lot in a movie in which some innocent girl gets stabbed while walking to her Pontiac.

So I went out and bought more stuff. Not just any stuff, but farm stuff. A wood kitchen table painted bottle green. A long schoolteacher’s desk. A set of yellow ceramic bowls. It so happened that I was the rightful owner of not just my handmade queen-sized cherrywood bed, which was now in storage in California, but also two additional antique beds: a carved maple three-quarter I’d slept in throughout childhood and adolescence that had been passed down along my father’s side of the family; and a cast-iron full-size that, via a set of bizarre and possibly journalistically unethical circumstances, had been shipped to me gratis when I wrote a magazine article about the female obsession with finding the perfect bed. Both of these beds had been in my mother’s attic in New Jersey. As a housewarming present she shipped them out to the farm, where I found myself in the extraordinary position of deciding into which two of the five bedrooms I should install them. Having chosen the larger, front-facing upstairs bedroom as my office, I put the cast-iron bed in the other front room and the maple bed in a back room that faced the cornfields (and, distressingly, the aluminum shed) to the south. I made them up with linens I’d picked up at Bed Bath & Beyond and spent alternate nights in each. I was like a lonely, crazy princess in a vast, echoing castle. By day, I scoured antiques shops and waited for various Culligan technicians to come out and test and retest the water. By night, I lay in one of my two beds, wincing at the sound of the interstate and wondering how much it would cost to rent a place in Los Angeles and travel back and forth between the generic paradise of the West and the paradise—at once so addictive and so disappointing—I’d constructed out of Nebraska.

That, after all, was the idea. As had been the case with the ill-fated Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G, my plan
was to use the farm as a sort of low-rent vacation home, the idea being that I’d be on vacation at least as often as I was not on vacation and, even then, it wouldn’t technically be vacation since I’d be engaged in very serious writing or reading or interior decorating. In fact, my ultimate plan for Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G had been to turn it into an artists’ colony. Thanks to its outbuildings, which could have been converted into painting studios and little writing huts with relatively little work, I’d allowed myself to concoct an elaborate scenario wherein I was the proprietor of one of the greatest—or at least most picturesque in a minimalist way—creative work centers west of the Mississippi. From Manhattan coke snorters to studio art majors from the University of Nebraska, every stripe of writer and painter and choreographer would convene at my farm for hours of uninterrupted work by day and scintillating repartee by night. So popular would the enterprise become that I’d eventually be able to hire someone to manage it year-round, leaving me free to drift in and out from my L.A. base like a legendary actor in an occasionally recurring sitcom role. In the meantime, of course, I’d be tax-exempt because I’d be running a nonprofit organization. I’d also probably get written up in a
New York Times
arts feature that would show me presiding over a candlelit gazebo supper and describe me as the George Plimpton of the prairie.

Gallingly, however, this farm was not suitable for an artists’ colony. Not only were there too few outbuildings; the grounds were unremarkable, the number of acres paltry to the point of being yardlike, and any sense of exotic remoteness undone by the fact that a development of split-level houses was going up at warp speed less than a mile down the road. So, having come to terms with the property’s exterior limitations, I tried to focus on its inner beauty. There was, for instance, something incredibly
gorgeous and satisfying about the way the upstairs landing was almost a room unto itself. To reach the top of the stairs, which made a graceful, lanky turn at a leaded-glass window, was to come upon the kind of space that seemed to encapsulate everything I loved about farms, about the Midwest, about life itself. No fewer than two hundred square feet, the landing had walls that were painted a shade of pink so pale it was almost as if early morning light were perpetually casting itself on the thick plaster and thicker woodwork. A built-in linen closet with heavy drawers, tarnished brass handles, and a cabinet latch that clicked shut with that perfect alto timbre known almost exclusively to early-twentieth-century-era door hardware took up most of one wall. The floors, of course, were the same glassy wood that covered the rest of the house.

What excited me most about the landing, though, was the marrow of all that it meant to be—and to have—a landing. The fact that a space large enough to be a room was actually not a room but a portal to other rooms, the fact that not two or three but
four
other rooms jutted out from this mother ship to form magical worlds filled with the promise of nighttime reading and snug, windy nights under patchwork quilts—that was nothing short of delectable. Why was I so stirred? To this day, I can’t quite say. Maybe it was all those years in New York City apartments with their entrails-shaped hallways and sorry excuses for “rooms;” maybe it was the collective claustrophobia of the prairie shack and then the apartment in Topanga and then Dani’s hamster cage of a cottage. Maybe my small living spaces had induced a sort of psychological cramping; maybe my acquisition of this farm was not a deliberate act but an involuntary reflex, a yawn and stretch writ large.