Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (9 page)

That story is shameful, but it’s also, in its own sad way, a field guide for the perverse machinations of my lifelong housing neuroses. As though my living quarters were a holy land that faced a constant threat of invasion or defacement, I maintained a relentless—and exhausting—posture of defensiveness. Worse, it was a defensiveness born of irrationality. What, after all, had been the harm in Brad borrowing my jacket? What level of threat, despite its resemblance to something that would cover the floor of a suburban bedroom in 1976 (come to think of it, it probably had), was that blue carpet posing
to my well-being? These are simple questions with simple answers—namely, “none” and “none”—but at the time they seemed not only unanswerable but also possibly dangerous by virtue of their very existence. I did not, in other words, feel I could live in an apartment in which those questions arose. Moreover, this was a matter not of my happiness but of my survival. At least that’s how I saw it at the time, which is to say I was bonkers.

Ironically, by the time of Brad’s departure, much of the magic of the apartment on West 100th Street was wearing off. I was by then twenty-six years old. By New York City standards, this was (and is) a perfectly acceptable age at which to be sharing an apartment (indeed, I knew forty-five-year-olds who were still writing their names on food containers in the refrigerator). And though I still loved the apartment with the kind of desperate, clinging urgency usually reserved for first-time adolescent romance, there’s no denying that it wasn’t offering as many benefits as it once had. As I grew older and the roommate turnover rate grew higher, the place felt less like a source of emotional and aesthetic ballast than a crash pad I’d mistaken for a permanent residence. Worse, as my cohabitants became younger, my “senior roommate” status began to feel less like a mark of distinction than like a big-city version of being a college student who can’t bring himself to graduate even though he’s approaching thirty.

In other words, my eye was wandering. As would be my wont for the better part of the next decade, I was having visions—all of them about housing. At any given time, I was mentally buying furniture, being the sole hostess of imaginary dinner parties, doing math equations to figure out how much rent I could afford. And whereas I’d once confined my domestic fantasies to the idea of living in the apartment with
just one
other roommate (a huge indulgence), I began to entertain decadent thoughts of living there alone. And because that was an impossible notion (the place was a hedonistic eleven hundred square feet, and though the rent had gone up only slightly from our original $1,776.76 it was still entirely too high for one person!), I soon became preoccupied with the next-best thing: finding another (smaller, cheaper) apartment.

I should step back and fill in a few more details about what else transpired during my years on West 100th Street. In addition to eating a lot of macaroni and cheese and watching a lot of MTV’s
Real World
(the first season, mind you, which seemed at the time like groundbreaking entertainment) and having enough fun to make up for the lack of fun in my college years, I was trying to get some kind of career going, preferably as a writer and preferably as the kind that gets paid for things she writes. And while I wrote very little during that time that doesn’t now make me wince with the kind of mortification you actually feel in your bloodstream, I’d be lying if I said that these weren’t arguably the most important years of my professional life. So when I look back on my twenties, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t devote
all
my energy to unfair treatment of certain roommates. For all my shenanigans—and this would include dating absurdly neurotic and egocentric men as well as spending too much time in bars pontificating about the state of contemporary fiction—I was also working my ass off. I was writing articles for women’s magazines—“Life in a Jealousy Minefield,” “Finding the Cheerleader Within,” “How to Know If You’re Grooming Too Much”—and, after rewriting them five times, getting them killed. I was sweating over book proposals—“Feminist Kitsch: How the Women’s Movement Was Hijacked by ‘Women’s Media’ and the Cult of Self-Improvement,” “Memoirs of a Commercial Girlhood: Growing
Up with a Jingle Writer Dad,” “Untitled Book About All the Ways That Generation X Is Screwed by Baby Boomers”—that never made it within ten blocks of a publisher’s office. Mostly, though, I was working many, many,
many
secretarial temp jobs—Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, the Hanna-Barbera licensing department of Time Warner Entertainment (where I was privy to several highly confidential contracts regarding the usage of the likeness of Fred Flintstone).

But if the road to becoming a professional writer felt like the main artery of my life, my preoccupation with housing functioned as blood itself. Sure, there were periods during which my desire for nice real estate graciously stepped aside to make room for some more pressing desire—like spending meaningful evenings listening to Lou Reed in the dark with some new paramour—but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most of my emotional energy and even some inexplicable measure of sexual energy were tied up in thinking about places where I could live. And if you’ll pardon the expression, this produced excruciating cases of blue balls. As though lofts in TriBeCa existed solely for the purposes of taunting me from the luxury real estate pages of
The New York Times Magazine
, I sometimes found it difficult to read the Sunday paper without writhing in envy. As though majestic prewar apartment buildings were attractive people at a party who were at once close enough to touch and, for real or imaginary reasons, devastatingly out of reach, I was not capable of walking by certain edifices on Riverside Drive or Central Park West without feeling the ache of rejection.

And that is how I came to be the president of my own personal academy of domestic desire, the overseer of a pantheon of architectural structures and corresponding price tags that led to the most adolescent form of existential inquiry: Where
should I live? Why can’t I afford to live where I want to live? How come
where
I live is so tied up in
why
I live? More than a decade later, I still haven’t answered those questions, but I’ve packed enough boxes and filled out enough change-of-address forms to know that with real estate, as with romance, the thrill is quite often in the chase. During the last year that I lived on West 100th Street, I spent more weekends than not looking at apartments that I couldn’t really afford, wandering through furniture stores whose goods were well beyond my means (there was at least one incident of hyperventilation at ABC Carpet & Home), and desperately trying to think of what I could do to earn enough money to afford at least six hundred square feet of my very own.

This period marked the beginning of what I now think of as phase one of my full-blown real estate obsession: the hypothetical phase. It was hypothetical because my excitement levels around real estate—either the kind you buy or the kind you rent—ran in inverse proportion to my ability to afford it. I was hardly alone in this, of course. I’ve always said: you haven’t lived in New York City until you’ve thrown up out the window of a taxi or wanted to put a bullet in your head because you’re so envious of someone else’s square footage (life in a jealousy minefield, indeed). But part of what made the hypothetical phase so wrenching was the way my mind would often become ensnarled in certain concepts having to do with merit. I did not have my fantasy apartment, I rationalized, because I had not yet done anything to deserve it. I hadn’t written the book, secured the prestigious magazine contract, or had an article optioned for a movie. And since I was frequently convinced that my professional ambitions were destined to be thwarted no matter how hard I worked or how many book signings I attended in the hopes of meeting some editor who would find
me terribly witty and demand to see my prose immediately, the scarcity complex that surrounded my work life soon extended its reach to my feelings about real estate. Afraid I’d never have anything, I lusted after everything.

That’s when the dreams began. Almost every night, images of houses and apartments would glide through my head like impish little angels. There were fine penthouses, sun-drenched “classic sixes” on the Upper West Side, and cozy downtown studios with kitchenettes and loft beds. There were cavernous, empty brownstones that echoed with the promise of furnishings to come. There were awful tenements with rats on the counters and junkies in the stairway. In some dreams I was an active participant: I’d be a new occupant who’d lost the key, a would-be renter whose hands would freeze while trying to write a check, a maid for whom the dust wouldn’t disappear. In others, the living spaces would just float across my brain like clouds, baiting me with their improbable grandeur or unbearable grimness, leaving me crushed—or relieved—when I awoke to find myself in the same cluttered room in the same crowded apartment in which I’d fallen asleep.

There were also, of course, “extra room” dreams. They’re a staple of real estate dreams, and unlike dreams about unknown spaces I have more of them as I get older. In these dreams I’m walking through my home—either my actual home or some random floor plan my subconscious has labeled “home”—and suddenly stumble upon a new room, sometimes even an entirely new wing. Like the feeling one gets upon finding a wad of cash in an old coat pocket, there’s both an elation and a pang of guilt in these dreams. No sooner have I marveled at my discovery and pondered all its exhilarating possibilities than I am overcome with shame at my poor observational skills. How could I have lived here all this time and not
noticed this room? How dare I have griped about my cramped quarters when all this square footage was right under my nose.

Psychoanalysts and others who have an interest in dream interpretation (such as girlfriends sitting around with you at a wine bar) will tell you that the extra-room dream signifies a desire for new opportunities. I once stumbled upon a Web site called Dream Doctor, which said such a dream is common in women “who have sacrificed personal hobbies and passions like painting, music, desire to own a small business for the responsibility of parenting.” I don’t really buy that, since in a dozen years of having that dream, I haven’t been tempted to make any sacrifices in order to become a parent and, besides, I know plenty of men who’ve had the extra-room dream, too. But I do wonder sometimes if this dream crops up out of some perverse force of goodwill. It is, after all, a dream about abundance. It’s about being able to stretch out, about being surprised by the size of your own footprint. And although once, in my thirties, I awoke from an extra-room dream with an unwavering certainty that my unconscious mind had just commanded me to extricate myself from a relationship that was on a slow crawl toward nowhere (there was, quite literally, too much room between me and the man in question; we were a house so oversized that love could only get lost wandering the hallways), I’ve generally kept it in my psyche’s positive column.

But that’s because no number of extra-room dreams or “if only you lived here” or “thank God you don’t live there” dreams can pack quite the neurotic punch of a dream I had during that last year on West 100th Street. In this dream, I am informed that a stunningly gorgeous stand-alone house is available for immediate occupancy. The house, which is spacious without being unmanageably large and appears to be the
architectural love child of a California Craftsman and a Japanese pagoda, is in the middle of Manhattan and also in the middle of some sort of pastoral wonderland. Trees and grass and flowering bushes surround it. Petals from cherry blossom trees, not exactly a prominent botanical presence in New York City, dapple the driveway and the front steps like snowflakes. No other houses are near it. In fact, no people are near it. The park is encircled by an iron fence, and the gate to that fence is locked. It looks like Gramercy Park, except it’s about ten times the size.

The rent is $127 a month.

Who gets this house? Someone “deserving.” Someone “accomplished.” Someone “extremely successful and interesting.” In the dream, as the criteria for occupying this piece of paradise are explained to me (who’s doing the explaining? Surely the same mythic beast that kept my parents in southern Illinois too long and later evilly coerced them into moving to Ridgewood because they “weren’t ready” for New York), I can feel my blood pressure rising past the Manhattan skyline itself. A gust carrying hundreds of cherry blossoms hurls toward me, and after that the self-doubt rains down like locusts. Am I deserving? Am I interesting? What about “extremely” interesting? Who are these judges, and what can I do to convince them how much I deserve this house? Who is my competition, and what have they achieved that I have not? What can I do to get this one break? How completely and utterly fantastic would my life be if lightning struck and I was given this one extraordinary gift?

Et cetera.

There is nothing more to say, clearly. Indeed, there was nothing even to say back when I had the dream. At that time, I
woke up, scribbled its major plot points into a notebook, and stared at the page until all I could do was shake my head and smile. Later that year, upon finding a not perfect but entirely decent rent-stabilized one-bedroom sublet (possibly not entirely legal) on West Eighty-sixth Street, I said goodbye to West 100th Street. This wasn’t as sad a parting as I’d feared. I didn’t love the new neighborhood, that’s for sure (though it was a mere fourteen blocks south of 100th Street, it seemed a whole other world, one involving numerous paint-your-own-ceramics studios). But the apartment, despite its minuscule kitchen and unremarkable bathroom (no stained-glass window, but there were porcelain hexagonal tiles), was a genuine one-bedroom unit in a solid old building with a part-time doorman. The rent was $1,054 a month, an amount I could almost manage. And though I could have stayed on West 100th with one roommate and paid slightly less than $1,054, the novelty of living alone seemed worth the extra expense. For the first time in my life, I even hired real movers.