Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (21 page)

It was a feeling I remembered from New York, when, instead of hailing a cab or taking the subway, I’d often walk thirty or forty blocks home at 1:00 a.m. In the aftertaste of the
evening, in the sallow nondarkness of the city night, I’d walk until my feet bloomed with blisters. Passing the panhandlers and the bar crawlers, the bundled-up bus waiters and the uniformed doormen, the lit-up all-night grocery marts and the locked and gated everything else, I could feel the city grazing my cheeks as though a thousand acquaintances were air kissing me at a party. My mood on these walks was always tainted with either vague disappointment or cautious, potentially foolish hope. Maybe I’d have met someone who seemed in possession of some inkling of romantic or sexual possibility, more likely not. Maybe I’d have plunged into deep, revelatory conversation with someone fascinating, more likely not. Still, in the brisk, odorous clutches of the avenues and streets such things mattered less than the physical fact of the city and my ongoing amazement that I’d actually managed to carve out a tiny nook for myself in Manhattan—however dank and costly and echoing with the laughter of richer, happier neighbors. Despite Ridgewood being only twenty miles from Manhattan, the distance between the two places—I’d said it so many times, yet somehow it was never enough—had seemed like an ocean.

And had I now crossed yet another ocean? Was the journey to California equal to or greater than the journey out of Ridgewood, away from Vassar, out of my parents’ unending flight from their own pasts? No, not really. Not at all. Sipping my wine, whistling for Rex, I stepped onto the path, where static of all varieties—the scratchy warbles of the first crickets, the rustle of the dog in the grass, the din of distant car alarms and police helicopters and those mysterious pops that are either firecrackers or gunshots—put a hot surge in the fading summer day. Climbing the hill, I experienced a brief moment of Nebraska. For a few seconds, there was nothing before me but
grass and sky. I had to catch my breath. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to test for awakeness. One step more, though, and the prairie effect was gone. Rising into view from the crest of the hill were the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, the Hollywood Hills to the west, and the low-slung skyline of Mid-Wilshire to the south-southwest. I sat down on a rock. I called Rex to me and held him close as though he were a teenage boy who’d let me wear his letterman jacket. In the fading light I spotted the Hollywood sign, surreal and cheesy and sublime. Closer in, I saw the undulating, roller-coaster streets of the neighborhood, the haphazard terraces and retaining walls of the properties, my own little house—square and flat roofed and, from certain angles, seemingly befitting of an elf—nestled in its place on my little road.

I saw all this, and it was at once a place I’d never been and a place I’d been all my life. I remember once at college having a dream wherein I was sitting on a log or a rock or some kind of beach staring into blankness, a viewless view. Having suddenly found myself holding a postcard depicting some breathtaking yet nonspecific Arcadian scene, I held it out in front of me, only to have it fuse with my real-life surroundings. It was as if art had been liberated into three-dimensional life, as if some divine force had commanded the worldly and the unworldly to become one. In an instant, by virtue of a single image I’d held in my fingers, I’d made real life join hands with idealized life.

“So what it means,” I’d told a friend the next day, “is that my reality answers to my fantasies. I mean, I totally got the feeling from this dream that my life is going to turn out exactly the way I want it. It’s like it was saying to me, ‘If you picture it, you can get it.’ It was like this incredible peace came over me. I could see the road ahead, and it was everything I want.”

To which my friend, who was one of those guys who always
accuses others of needing to plan everything out and wanting to settle down rather than have adventures said: “If that’s what you want, fine. I guess I’d just rather see where life takes me.”

This guy, having once asked me what I wanted from life (no doubt while sitting on his Indian rug listening to Yaz), declared my answer of “contentment” to be “a pity” and “a waste” and “not at all what I want,” which, apparently, was a life of “passion, excitement, and rich, fully realized moments that would add up to authentic happiness.”

(One of the many tragedies of college life is that it’s almost developmentally impossible to have the wisdom to understand that contentment, which implies some sort of sustenance over time, can be an infinitely taller order than happiness, which is often inherently fleeting. It’s also unfortunate that your average college student lacks the presence of mind to tell someone to fuck off when he spouts such bong-hit-fueled twaddle about the meaning of “passion.”)

I was drunk on the hill. I was not thinking about the conversation about contentment or even the postcard dream. I wasn’t thinking about much, since I’d now consumed almost an entire bottle of wine and was instead watching Rex sliver through the grass like a jungle animal, a vision that made me slaphappy until, minutes later, I was suddenly melancholy to the point of tears. It was my first day—my first hours, in fact—as a homeowner, as an evolved human, as a woman who lived not in a sublet or in a condo with wicker and candles but in a real house. And here I was, with a bank loan of $333,701 and an equity line of credit for $71,000 sitting inebriated in an overgrown field trying to hold my imaginary postcard up to the vista before me and see if they fused. Was this the right stop on the road that would give me everything? Was there contentment to be found in these hills, on this street, in that
house? Ah yes, I said nearly out loud. This is it! I have it all, I have it all, I have it all!

How did I know this? I didn’t, of course. But I do remember that in the midst of this booze-soaked reverie, as I tried to ignore the fact that my legs were getting chewed by some form of menacing no-see-um in the grass and that coyotes—those marauders I’d bragged about in an effort to sound tough—were no doubt watching me from the brush, I allowed myself to drift into the wish that I weren’t alone. Though I wanted to be alone at that moment, though I wouldn’t have invited anyone up to that hill that night even if I was wearing his ring on my finger, I found myself wondering if I’d ever have a ring on my finger and, if so, how that might or might not change the conditions of the road that gave me everything. Had the house effectively nailed me to one spot on the earth? Would it ward off potential life partners? Or, as per my thinking during the time of crazed house hunting, would it put my best and most authentic self into such high relief that the bad ones would skulk off in fear and the right one would emerge like a card in a magic trick? In other words, did the house look sexy on me? And would I, given my gladly celibate state, ever feel sexy in it?

Unanswerable questions all. Especially when you’re dizzy and itchy and your dog is eating coyote dung and you’re afraid you’re going to trip on a root and break your ankle and have to shout for help, which would be a really bad way to meet the neighbors. Still, as night settled in and Rex, now leashed, pulled me along the path back to the house, a surprising decision came to me. It was surprising not only because it was fully out of the realm of any decision I was making at the time but also because it’s not really the kind of thing a person decides. It’s the sort of thing you
want
maybe, perhaps even the sort of
thing you strongly hope to implement. But that wasn’t good enough. There on that hill, in my thirty-fourth year, in my sixth hour of home ownership, I decided that if I ever got married—and that was an
if
and not a
when
—it would be on that hill.

Until I actually signed those escrow papers, the house had been less a visual entity than a contractual one. The first and only time I’d seen it, the day I made my offer, I’d spent maybe five minutes inside the place before zooming down the street with Michael in his Audi TT so we could start the paperwork in his office. Barred from going inside again until I actually took ownership, I’d driven by it a few times with friends and, since it was unoccupied, poked around in the yard and peered in the windows. But even though the yard had continued to be mowed and the hedges trimmed, the house seemed only half there, its pulse faint, its breathing shallow. It also looked smaller every time I went back, though in the catapulting market no one questioned the wisdom of dropping $450,000 on it. The smallest improvements, not to mention the mere passing of weeks, would cause no end of appreciation.

“Here,” a friend said, picking up an ugly plastic doormat and depositing it in the trash bin behind the house. “You’ve just increased the value by $5,000.”

Upon moving in, though, I found that the key word was “underwhelming.” Following a lazy, artless floor plan reminiscent of a New York City railroad apartment, one room more or less led to the next. The front door opened (abruptly, absent any kind of foyer) into the living room, which led to the kitchen, which led to what was and is the main attraction, a large (by this place’s standards) sunporch with vaulted, beamed ceilings, a woodstove, and windows on three sides. Whereas the house itself was built in 1928, this room had been
added in 1983 and apparently not redecorated since. The walls and ceilings, which were made from cheap, pulpy wood, were stained dark brown in the vein of faux-wood paneling. A section of what appeared to be redbrick wall behind the fireplace was actually fake brick face, and the entire floor was covered with a brown woolly carpet.

The rest of the house was pretty standard stuff. Off the living room (again, no hallways; this was corridor-free living) was a small bedroom, and off the kitchen was a smaller one. A small bathroom adjoined them. The kitchen had cheap fake-marble adhesive tile that was sloppily laid over old linoleum that had been sloppily laid over subflooring. The bathroom had not-quite-as-cheap-but-still-awful baby blue tile. The walls, aside from the barklike rec-room-style walls in the back room, were either painted a white that had faded to a sallow, corpselike gray or covered with dark floral wallpaper that, when I looked closely, I realized would have been best suited to a Victorian dollhouse, specifically the plastic kind I remember seeing in the Sears catalog in the mid-1970s.

And then there was the garage. I realize that this is the kind of statement that makes people think women are not equipped to own property other than full-service condos, but I’ll just come out and say it: I didn’t really look at the garage right away because I was afraid to. But let’s understand something: many a grown man was also afraid of this structure (a weirdly endearing macho man who I know owns a gun refused to even approach it; another man told me he wouldn’t go near it without a life insurance policy). What wusses, I thought, though undoubtedly they just thought I was a moron and a sucker. The garage couldn’t be seen from the street or even from the house itself. The only way to see it was to go beyond the fence that encloses the “upper” backyard and descend a narrow,
crumbling staircase that drops down from the “lower” backyard like scary basement steps. (How was it that a house approximately the size of a Chevy Suburban came to have such aristocratic trappings as an “upper” and a “lower” yard? I suspected soil erosion was at least partly to thank.) The stairs were a disaster in their own right; if a major earthquake were to strike when a person was on or near them, the likelihood of being crushed was high. The garage itself, while not without its first-century-European–esque charms, could have conceivably collapsed if a heavy truck rolled by.

The garage was also no longer technically a garage but several tons of concrete carved into a precarious, roofless shell. After the disposal of the ugly doormat, this was my first home improvement. The property had been sold in as-is condition, not least of all because the garage, which was presumably built in 1928 or shortly thereafter, had been completely caved in for decades. Somewhere along the line, the slabs of broken concrete from the roof had even bisected a Volkswagen bus parked inside. Signs reading Danger and No Trespassing were nailed to what remained of a rotted wood fence, and the “drive way,” a scabrous stretch of asphalt jutting from a narrow alley, was dusted with the decaying remains of cigarette butts and fast-food containers. At least that’s what things looked like when I peeked back there for the first and only time. After I hired a crew of illegal workers to haul the bus and rubble away, what emerged was a sort of hipster homage to both soil erosion and urban decay.

But I had big plans for it. With the proper excavation and construction, it could be rebuilt, and a guesthouse could be added on top. The garage could be new and state-of-the-art and equipped with Peg-Board and shelves and a workbench and room for two cars. And the guesthouse would really be a
writing studio with skylights and a sleeping loft and a bathroom and a kitchenette and vast expanses of walls on which enormous pieces of abstract art would hang. Most days, I’d work there uninterrupted (again, everything completed in this space would be prize-worthy), but when guests visited, I’d move my operation inside the house, which would be fine, too. Because they’d be the kinds of guests with busy schedules, they’d be gone much of the day having lunch and attending meetings. But later they’d come back to my place and freshen up in the guesthouse, and by then I’d be finished working, and we’d drink gin and tonics on the patio and then eat dinner under the lemon tree.

For now, though, the walls were crumbling and covered with faded graffiti. I knew enough not to park my car there, but it wasn’t as if it had nothing going for it. Actually, it seemed reminiscent of a backdrop in the Anthropologie clothing catalog and therefore kind of sexy—at least in the way an undergraduate art student might appreciate. With a ridiculous, cocky pride that no condo dweller or turnkey property owner would ever know, I lured friends (those who would go, anyway) down the steps and into the garage as though it were a secret garden.

“It’s like ancient Rome!” someone said (a kindred spirit, also an art director).