Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (17 page)

Therein ensued the most elaborate set of second-date preparations in history. In the span of two weeks, I not only moved myself in but also had the entire interior of the house painted, purchased and installed thirteen white opaque window shades and/or billowing white curtains, bought a shower curtain from Target and a coffee table and two nightstands from a Moroccan-tile furniture boutique, had a dog door cut into the back door (with begrudging permission from the landlady), had a ceiling fan installed over my bed, and purchased a 1950s nickel-and-glass Czech chandelier and installed it over a late Victorian dining table I’d bought in Nebraska. Given that it was, yet again, autumn in Los Angeles and the temperature was in the nineties and the air was choked with smoke from the burning mountains, I went to Home Depot and bought one of the few window air conditioners left in stock. It must have weighed 150 pounds, yet I dragged it out of the car, up the front steps, into the house, and up the staircase with the superhuman strength with which I’d carried my futon back in college.

Miraculously, I got the air conditioner in the window without dropping it onto the patio below. Miraculously, it cooled the room, even though the house was barely insulated and the autumn sun was almost as merciless as it had been in Topanga Canyon the year before. Armed with a controlled climate, subtle yet distinctive window dressings, and a spectacular paint color scheme (the living room walls were a sharp rococo blue, which was offset by a warm beige in the dining room; the guest room, in a misstep, was a dusty pink), I then began the process of getting ready for a big night out. Which is to say I took a shower and got dressed.

In other words: no manicure, no eyebrow wax, no new pair of shoes or jeans. I didn’t know it then, but this was a major turning point in the history of my self-presentation. The appearance of my house had officially become more important than my own appearance. After decades of worrying about my hair and my thighs, I was now mainly concerned about whether a picture was crooked on the wall.

Later, of course, I’d see that part of what was happening was that the tall, light-haired man himself was considerably less interesting than the adult, urban world that a date with him represented. As I’d waited for him to pick me up at the Beachwood Canyon house for the first date, it had occurred to me that the type of date where you were fetched at your door, driven somewhere, and eventually returned home was utterly alien to my life experience. In fact, even the word “date,” as archaic and “socially constructed” as my die-hard Vassar sensibilities led me to construe it, seemed charged with the promise of my new California frontier.

That’s because until that point I’d lived in the kinds of places where dating took the form of a “meet up” that morphed into “hanging out” and then perhaps “hooking up.” I’m not, mercifully, a member of the current twenty- and early-thirty-something generation, which apparently enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy) “hooking up” with supposedly platonic friends as a way of avoiding the hassles of dating (in the early 1990s we Generation Xers preferred to hide behind flannel shirts and worry about AIDS). But during my eight-plus years in New York, nobody once showed up at my door and then took me out. In a noncar culture that simply isn’t done. You meet in a bar, in a restaurant, on a street corner, or in a subway station. I had not one but two boyfriends in New York who repeatedly insisted on meeting up
on the train itself
, the idea being that if
we left our apartments at precisely the right moment and boarded a pre-agreed-upon car of a pre-agreed-upon subway train, we’d be on our way to that grunge show/dive bar/Film Forum screening of
Das Boot
in no time. The stress involved in these maneuvers was not insignificant; they also failed about as often as they worked. Let’s recall that this was before anyone really had cell phones, let alone sent SMS messages or Twittered. If you lost someone in this sort of operation, you’d have to call his answering machine from a pay phone and hope that he called from another pay phone and checked his messages. At least the era of my parents’ message-retrieving beeper had passed by then.

Maybe dating in New York is different now that the bulk of my demographic lives in Brooklyn, where it’s easier to have a car and you can conceivably double-park while you run up to retrieve your paramour from her Cobble Hill brownstone (though I kind of doubt it). But for much of my life as a young single person, a date was a thing you showed up to rather than waited for. Due to roommates and other features of soul-crushingly expensive cities (rats, roaches, bedrooms large enough for only a twin-sized bed), it was possible to have protracted sexual relationships wherein one party never saw the other’s living quarters. My last year in New York involved one such relationship and when I finally saw the guy’s apartment and noticed that he owned a copy of not only
What Color Is Your Parachute?
but also
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 20th-Century History
, I decided to quit not just the guy (not that I needed too much convincing by then) but New York entirely. When I got to Nebraska, I had approximately one date with Ex (wherein I did not let him come to my house, because he was a complete stranger) before I essentially let him move in. As embarrassing as that is, it also turns out to be the way a lot of
people “date” in Lincoln, Nebraska. Which is to say that not even circulating among the car-driving, full-sized-bed-owning echelons guarantees admission to the dating echelons.

But California was grown-up land. I could feel it in so many ways. Unlike the woman-child who’d traipsed through the streets of New York in clunky shoes and Kmart underwear, unlike the would-be iconoclast who struck poses in the Nebraska cornfields while trying fruitlessly to “keep it real,” I was now, for once and at last, in concert with my surroundings. And as I waited for the tall, light-haired man to arrive at the Silver Lake house for our second date, a wave of self-love washed over me. After eighteen residences in fifteen years, four of them dorm rooms, three of them crammed with other people’s furniture, the others so inappropriate in so many ways, I was finally in my own ample space with my own stuff. After fourteen roommates, one tyrannical building super, one live-in boyfriend, and two dogs that weren’t mine, I was finally the queen of my lovingly decorated castle. It was me and my furniture against the world.

Naturally, Mr. Tall, Light-Haired didn’t stand a chance. Though I dated him for five months, which was about four months and two weeks longer than I should have (he knew his way around town, and, I’ll admit, it’s perhaps a bit too easy to keep a boyfriend around just because he knows which way to turn off a freeway exit), I think I can safely say that the highlight of the relationship was the eight or so seconds it took him to walk through my front door for the first time and behold the awesomeness of my taste and self-sufficiency (and he liked the place; he really, really liked it!). In one perfect moment, the house fused my real self and my fantasy version of myself into one glorious—if unmanicured—entity. Here was a woman with azure walls and leaded-glass windows! Here was a woman
with no roommates, no shared walls, and an air conditioner! How could anyone not fall for her instantly? How could she not be irresistible to every man, woman, child, and pet who had the occasion to cross her threshold? And how, in turn, could the self-possessing effects of all this experience and all these beautiful objects and all this space not allow her to see the love and irresistibility of others?

I don’t know, but I failed to love Tall, Light-Haired nonetheless. Though I spent the ensuing months in a rather exhausting effort to convince myself that our spectacular incompatibility (despite his appealing Midwestern roots, he was a believer in astrology and—troublingly—scented candles) was really a case of my being judgmental (I was, he said, “closed off to the possibility of transformation”), what was really happening was that I was falling in love not with any person but with the idea of living alone in my very own space. When I was with him, I couldn’t wait to get home. When he was over, I secretly wanted him to leave.

Instead of being smitten with him, I was smitten with the dynamic between myself and my living quarters. I was in love with the notion of myself as a person who had agency over her physical surroundings, who had taste and the means to use it, who had enough square footage so that everything—even the mateless earrings and broken exercise equipment and not-quite-empty tubes of sunscreen that constitute the grubby detritus of every woman’s home—could be tucked away in some rightful, discreet closet or drawer. There was joy in simply inhabiting a room. The act of walking from the kitchen to the front door brought on a kind of reverie. When I was not muddling through dinners or uninspired overnights with my ill-chosen beau, I was reading the newspaper on the weathered wooden stoop with my dog by my side. When I was not
having arduous, pointless meetings with Hollywood executives about my various nonideas, I was tracing my finger down the folds of the living room curtains and staring out the window. When I wasn’t wiping the kitchen counters or attempting to write something more substantial than an e-mail, I was propping my feet up on the large desk that took up nearly an entire wall of my large office and drinking my second glass of wine while listening to Diana Krall (an upgrade from Suzanne Vega). And while I sometimes thought I wanted a lover so I could share this bliss with someone, the truth was that I just wanted a witness. I wanted someone to see my home, admire it, admire me, and then leave.

Finally, as though I realized I needed to spend more quality time with my house, I broke up with the tall, light-haired man (he was hardly surprised; in fact, I daresay he was relieved). I did this two days after my thirty-fourth birthday. I came very close to doing it
on
my thirty-fourth birthday, to simply getting up and walking out of the restaurant he’d insisted on taking me to even though I’d wanted to go elsewhere (I can’t remember the details, though I’m afraid something like “Mars in Capricorn” might have factored into his argument), but I restrained myself out of politeness. I also came close to breaking up with him the next day but did not do so because it was Valentine’s Day and I didn’t want to be vile.

You’d think by age thirty-four a person would have figured out that there’s nothing humane about dumping someone on February 15 rather than on February 14. You’d think that after thirty-four years of having a February 13 birthday, I would have realized that if I’m not particularly enthused about the person I’m dating, it’s best to dispatch with him by Martin Luther King Day. You’d think these things, but somehow for me that year any wisdom I’d acquired over time had taken a sabbatical
and sent a tenebrous inertia in its place. If I was apathetic about dumping Tall, Light-Haired, I was equally apathetic in other areas, too. In fact, unless it involved home decor, home improvement, or thinking about and looking at other houses, I wasn’t much up for it.

Preposterously, I had spent the holiday season and early part of the year consumed with the hypothetical notion of renovating the Silver Lake house (surely walls could be knocked down, the kitchen expanded, a bathroom added). I’d rationalized the fixation by making secret plans to buy the property, even though it wasn’t for sale. When the plans became so evolved that I actually called my landlady and asked if she’d entertain an offer, her response—that she wouldn’t consider anything less than $1 million—managed to send me into convulsions. I don’t remember much about this time in my life, but I do remember crying so hard about my inability to buy the Silver Lake house that my jaw ached the next day. Worse, I woke up to what at the time felt like the saddest scene in the world: a beautiful house that suddenly seems unbeautiful because the person living in it doesn’t own it and never will. As though I’d been transported back to the apartment on West 100th Street, which had similarly delighted me until it became clear that I’d never live there without roommates, the Silver Lake house now felt like a way station, the architectural equivalent of a lover you take until you can find someone to actually love. Realizing that my affections for it ran in inverse proportion to my ability to hire a contractor and alter it, I decided it was time to move on. Now, however, the move would be final. I would stop being a house slut. I would stop living in houses and leaving them. I would buy something and stay there. Preferably immediately and preferably forever.

·  ·  ·

It was, by now, 2004. We were not at the apogee of the market, but we were getting there. The way I’ve always imagined it is this: if the real estate bubble were a distended piece of chewing gum in the mouth of a teenage girl, it would have been about the size of a lemon at that point—formidable but not out of control. By early 2005 the bubble would have covered her nose and eyes, and by the end of that year it would have been as big as her head. By 2007 it would have deflated slightly, and by 2008 it would have popped and been all over her face. By 2009 she’d have choked and died on the gum, but let’s not go there now.

Instead, let’s remember 2004. Money was everywhere: talk of it, displays of it, envy of those who had it, and pity for those who didn’t. In the spring of 2004, you could find a thirty-year fixed interest rate of 5 percent. Adjustable-rate loans were, of course, practically falling off trucks—not just shiny, new expensive trucks but old, beat-up trucks, garbage trucks, even. People were paying $600,000 or $700,000 for properties that, four years earlier, would have been worth $200,000. People were taking out low-interest loans for $700,000, buying houses for $550,000, and using the difference to buy Range Rovers and vacations in Anguilla.

As high as the housing prices were, everyone knew they were only going to get higher. People who already owned knew their asset values were only going up, and people who didn’t own but wanted to knew their chances of getting into the market were only going down. Terrified of getting left behind, first-time buyers grabbed on to those prices as though clinging to an aircraft carrying refugees out of the jungle. For my part, I was sure that if I didn’t get in quickly, I wouldn’t get in at all. In Los Angeles, dilapidated hovels in sketchy neighborhoods were garnering multiple offers within hours of being listed.
Adjustable mortgages and record-low interest rates aside, “middle class” houses (those with three bedrooms) were now available only to the rich. Moreover, as though the nation’s major religions had coalesced into a single doctrine and formed a cult of real estate, no one seemed able or willing to speak of any other subject. If there were major news events going on, I cannot recall them now. If there was anyone from any walk of life who did not appear to have some kind of stake in this gamble, I didn’t know the person. My hairdresser, various yoga teachers, and of course my dental hygienist: they all seemed engaged in a constant stream of chatter about granite countertops or closing costs, loans or reverse mortgages or termite inspections.