Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (18 page)

Because of all this—and also because perhaps no one on earth was as predisposed to joining in on this craziness as I was—I developed a brainsickness that would last well into the following year. It’s difficult to talk about this phase without sounding hyperbolic, but the alternative—dullness born of lethargy—is worse. I know this because I had two speeds at the time: urgency and apathy. That is to say, I was either thinking and talking in such exaggerations that I didn’t seem quite sane (“I will literally
die
if I don’t find a house by June;” “that Craftsman went for $200,000 over the asking price, it’s an
apocalypse!”)
or sprawled out on the couch unable to face anything that didn’t involve searching the Multiple Listing Service.

And then there were the TV shows.
Trading Spaces, Design on a Dime, House Hunters
, and Debbie Travis’s
Facelift
. In the wake of the boom, the Home & Garden TV cable channel, which actually started back in 1994, had exploded in popularity, offering a round-the-clock infusion of house porn for wretches like me. I watched, of course. Like just about anyone
with a pulse (any woman with a pulse), I couldn’t get enough HGTV (and the competing shelter smut on Bravo and Lifetime and TLC) in 2004. I watched, even though it ultimately left me cold. Actually, it left me worse than cold. It made me feel emotionally bloated, as though I’d gorged myself on Styrofoam, as though I’d tried to eat insulation.

That’s because many of the houses looked as if they were made of Styrofoam. With rare exceptions, the programs struck me as guided tours of ordinariness, fonts of mediocre ideas disguised as “eclecticism.” Occasionally, something would strike my fancy—a casbah-inspired pergola on a Brooklyn deck, a genuinely innovative window treatment, an episode of the international edition of
House Hunters
featuring a British couple shopping for an old country manor—but for the most part the whole enterprise felt hollow, desensitizing, like literal porn. It depressed me to think about how many Realtors and contractors and decorators and even carpenters—people whose professions once existed outside the realm of media—now felt compelled to try to make it in show business. It depressed me even more that regular people would sacrifice their privacy, their dignity, and often the (entirely decent) original floor plans of their houses in the hopes that their marriages would be saved or their lives elevated by a bossy, telegenic decorator. The fact that I watched it all anyway, the fact that innocent channel surfing often resulted in three hours lost to the blandishments of wall stencils and beaded throw pillows, only added to the dueling forces of my house obsession and my growing self-disgust with that obsession. If only I’d known it was just the beginning of both.

Within twenty-four hours of being told the Silver Lake house wasn’t for sale, I’d called a Realtor and asked him to show me what was. The Realtor, a former stand-up comedian
named Michael who’d come highly recommended by a Vassar friend, informed me that I was “right on the edge of getting priced out of the market.” What that meant was that most small, two-bedroom “starter homes” in the area were going for around $500,000. I could afford up to about $400,000. If I was going to get in on the action, Michael told me as he zipped me around my desired neighborhoods in his convertible Audi TT, I needed to act fast.

For the record, Michael was not a pushy guy. Despite the fervor of the moment, no one was pressuring me to do anything, except maybe subconsciously my mother, whose hardwired real estate obsession was finding new life in my own (from three thousand miles away, she e-mailed me listings for “affordable” places in neighborhoods she didn’t realize probably had more guns than mailboxes). The mortgage broker I’d retained didn’t steer me toward a “creative financing plan,” nor did anyone try to get me to consider any house I didn’t like. For one thing, they didn’t have to; for every house for sale, there were hundreds of potential buyers. For another, I suspect there was something about my quest that was slightly perplexing and therefore vulnerable to not being taken entirely seriously.

Sure, I wasn’t the only unmarried woman in the market for a house (single women were and still are the nation’s second-largest group of first-time home buyers after married couples). I wasn’t even the only single woman in a so-called creative profession who aspired to property ownership. But in a city where the majority of “creative” people who can afford a house have made their money writing or directing or acting in television shows about psychic police detectives or movies where the romantic leads fall in love during a montage sequence featuring paddleboats and miniature golf, saying, “I’m a freelance
print journalist and I’d like a loan for $350,000” is a little bit questionable. It was not lost on me that at the time I began working with a Realtor, my professional projects consisted of a low-paying magazine essay and a novel on which I’d been for five months. When my mortgage broker asked if I had any steady paying work on the horizon, I proudly told him I’d accepted a one-semester guest professorship at an art college in the fall for $2,200. When he asked me what kind of “loan product” for what kind of property I wanted, I said all I was asking for was a plain and simple thirty-year fixed loan and a nice, nondecrepit house in an unhorrendous neighborhood for $400,000 or less.

Apparently, I was asking way too much. For all of Michael’s supposed comic talents (he had, he told me, actually made money as a stand-up), there was really nothing humorous about our excursions. Though he did his best to lighten the mood—“you could stage a production of
Noises Off
in here,” he said of a begrimed shack that had about six more doors than it should have—the quality of the inventory in my price range was so lacking that levity seemed as out of reach as a decent house. Michael took me to see broken bungalows that were sliding down hills, ranch houses whose kitchens and bathrooms must have been designed by children, and at least one place that suggested Ted Kaczynski had kept a second home near a needle-strewn underpass of the Hollywood Freeway. We looked at houses that would have required me to pay $3,000—an amount that was both annoyingly large and criminally small—to relocate the large Latino families living inside them, which was, for me, a deal breaker. In many cases, when I say “looked,” I mean “drove by,” since, at the time, if a property was occupied by renters, you could not actually go inside until you’d made an offer and had it accepted (in other words,
filled out the paperwork and handed over earnest money in the $30,000 range). We were occasionally able to get around this by peeking in the windows or just pushing a decaying door open, like cops on one of those TV dramas created by people who could afford better houses. Often there were no tenants at all, merely doleful evidence of their prior existence—dirty plastic kids’ toys, empty one-liter Pepsi bottles, tubs of Spackle pried open and then abandoned as though the house had looked in the face of whoever thought he could patch up the holes and just laughed.

“This is starting to make me lose my will to live,” I said to Michael one afternoon as we climbed (he in his Italian shoes, me in my flip-flops) over a chicken-wire fence in an “up and coming” neighborhood.

“I’m just respecting your price point,” he said. “If you want, we can see some properties that represent more of a stretch for you, but I don’t want you to end up disappointed.”

This is the classic Realtor trick, of course. At least in a brisk market. They show you crappy stuff that makes you want to blow your brains out, and then, after you’ve lowered your standards to roughly the level of the earth’s crust, they start ratcheting you back up again. In fairness to Michael, whom I’d grown fond of despite the guided tours of hell he called house hunting, I’m sure he was, indeed, respecting my price point. But I don’t think he was surprised when, after touring an open house whose listing agent was legally required to hand out flyers explaining that there was a psychiatric hospital
less than two hundred feet away
—“maybe you could just live
in
the hospital,” Michael suggested—I clenched my jaw and said, “Okay, maybe I can go up to $420,000.”

The week we started looking at nicer properties also happened to be a week that my mother came to visit. Naturally,
she was elated by our schedule of activities. She’d visited me a handful of times over the course of my various moves, but she’d never had so much fun as now. Clearly, she’d missed her calling as a Realtor, maybe even as a used-car salesman. While touring open houses on a Sunday afternoon, she didn’t hesitate to make decorating and furniture layout suggestions for houses that were $100,000 or $200,000 more than I could afford. “Oh Meghan, this is your house!” she exclaimed as we entered a pristinely restored three-bedroom Craftsman in the neighborhood that had become my first choice, the hills of Echo Park, which lay just east of Silver Lake. “You could put your desk right here! And look at this yard! Rex will love it!” The house was listed at $627,000. It eventually sold for $779,000.

Other houses my mother declared perfect for me were a hillside contemporary for $889,000, another Craftsman with a smaller yard but a built-in breakfast table and benches for $603,999, and a Victorian bungalow with a picket fence and restored woodwork and wainscoting in the kitchen for $527,000. The Victorian really got to me, so much so that I still think about it today. It was a unique, adorable house—not unlike the Silver Lake place, though more logically laid out—in a not altogether safe neighborhood. Low-rent apartment buildings interspersed themselves between small wooden clapboard or Spanish stucco houses, some well kept, some not. The area was a known crime zone, and although you’d think that would have been enough to put me off, the house struck me as a big valentine made of wood and slate and glass. If I closed my eyes, it seemed literally heart shaped. I wanted to hug it.

It needed work. Of course it did; could I have loved it otherwise? The plumbing, evidently, was iffy, and the garage
appeared rather corroded. There was no backyard, and the tract of grass inside the picket fence was far too close to the street to represent any kind of sanctuary. Still, I stewed over the place for a week (an eternity in that market), weighing the wainscoting against the plumbing, the restored woodwork against the bad garage, the stained-glass window in the second-floor garret versus the fact that, according to a lengthy article in the alternative weekly newspaper, local hoodlums had been responsible for several drive-by shootings and a car bomb last year. I then remembered that the place was $527,000 and therefore $107,000 beyond my budget. When I broke the news to my mother, the car bomb detail softened the blow considerably.

“When you find the right house you’ll know it,” she said.

She was right. I did always know when I found the right house, but thanks to my new practice of shopping above my means, I could never afford it. I found a two-bedroom Mediterranean with a detached office that was right for me, a storybook cottage in the hills above Silver Lake Reservoir that was right for me, and, most shatteringly, a rustic, bohemian Craftsman–cum–hunter’s cabin with skylights, sleeping lofts, and a pool that, with about $300,000 worth of foundation work, would have been more right for me than my very own skin. Unfortunately, all of these properties turned out to be right for people with about twice as much money to spend as I had.

True scholarship requires obsession, baseless fixation, an absorption with the kinds of minutiae that, to the average person, holds about as much interest as varieties of chimney soot. Given the consumerist, manic, solipsistic nature of this pursuit, there are of course countless Internet enablers to choose from. Not
just Craigslist, but also realtor.com, MLS.com, ziprealty.com, redfin.com, and my own imaginary start-up icantevengetup togotothebathroombecausethenexthousemightbeit.com. I looked at realtor.com so frequently it appeared on my computer browser if I so much as typed the letter
r
, my old standbys like radiodiaries.com and rollingstone.com fading into the background like a pet forgotten because of a new baby. Quickly exhausting the listings in my immediate vicinity, I eventually became expert on home values elsewhere, taking a curious solace in my discovery that a three-bedroom, two-bathroom Craftsman back in Lincoln was merely $110,000 and, even though I have no connection to the place, a similar house in Portland, Oregon, could be had for $340,000. Maybe I liked knowing that should the Southern California housing market ultimately elude me, I could always go someplace where prices were on a human scale. Maybe I also liked the reminder that as “basic” a right of passage as buying a home was supposed to be, some regions were more basic than others. In most moments, I knew it wasn’t just a house I was after but, rather, proof of my existence. The house was not just a house but also an I.D. badge for adulthood, for
personhood
even. It was the only thing that would make me desirable, credible, even human.

I was quite a treat to be around during this period. Not only was I unable to carry on a conversation about anything other than brokers’ fees and pocket listings, but I had inadvertently entered something of a second latency period. This is not to be confused with my mini-latency period of a few years earlier, when I’d literally been moving around too much to think about dating. This time, I had opportunities to date but no interest in taking advantage of them. I didn’t even want to have sex. The reasons for this were probably manifold and best left to a psychiatrist,
but as far as I was concerned, I was saving myself for home ownership. I mean that quite literally. I did not want to get into a relationship or even go on a date until I owned property. I did not want a man crossing my threshold, drinking my tap water, or even parking at my curb until that threshold, tap water, and curb were in some way legally registered in my name. I did not even want to meet a potential romantic partner until I could look him in the eye from my bar stool and say, without apology or drama, “I own a house.”

In honor of this vow of delayed gratification, I kept myself looking and feeling about as sexy as your average meter maid. My hair, though always short, was entirely too short and, thanks to a misguided effort to come across as “feisty,” an unfortunate shade of red (make that shades, since the red had a way of quickly turning pinkish and then orange). There was a bloated, phlegmatic quality to my physical being. I was doughy and epicene and also strangely hyper. Anyone who encountered me during this period found himself face-to-face with a sort of asexual monomaniac. Though I could stumble through polite, non-housing-related conversation for twenty to thirty minutes, any opportunity I sensed to change the subject to down payments and appraisal fees would be seized like the second-to-last piece of shrimp on a cocktail platter. To anyone who would listen, I nattered on about the houses for sale that I hated, the houses not for sale that I coveted, the envy aroused by those who bought ten years earlier during the slump, the smugness of sellers, the desperation of buyers, the calamity of it all.