Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (27 page)

Alan is a problem solver. His almost compulsive need to find solutions darted around our conversations until we were not so much decorating as working a Rubik’s Cube that had suddenly disguised itself as a house. We moved shelves, rotated the rug, and reconfigured chairs. We bought used credenzas from Craigslist and new credenzas from IKEA and stuffed them with electronics equipment and extra blankets and dog toys and anything bereft of a rightful place, which in this house was just about everything except the stove.

On the fourth week of sofa talks, Alan arrived at the answer.

“I will saw my sofa in half,” he said.

He measured the wall and the doorway (of course he measured the doorway). Then he went home and measured his sofa and declared that it would fit in my house if it was one-third shorter than its current length. Then he went on the Internet and Googled “furniture alteration” and (true) “sofa shortening.” And when I said I would not let his sofa in my house at any length because it was (a) no longer its original off-white color but rather, thanks to food stains and sweat stains and a million newspapers piled on it at all times, something a catalog might describe as “darkened dishwater” and (b) far too gargantuan in width and depth for a reduction of length to make any difference whatsoever, Alan told me not to be
so closed minded and insensitive. I then told him not to be so completely retarded. I told him that his sofa, even if operated on by some mythical maestro of sofa surgeons and transformed into a seamless, scar-free, shorter version of itself, would look stupid and terrible and ruin
everything
. I was not being closed minded, I said, but speaking from experience, from painful, putrid, candle-and dog-shit-scented experience (and here my voice was rising in panic as I recalled the shadow cast by the media cabinet in Dani’s cottage in Venice), and that this experience taught me that there was
nothing
worse than having furniture that’s too big for your house. Not even your house catching on fire was worse. Not even falling asleep on the beach and having ants crawl in your nose and into your brain would be worse. And because this sofa was the first real piece of furniture Alan had ever bought, because he’d had it custom made when he’d lived in New York and had his first real job, and because he’d then shipped it to Mexico City and then later to L.A., and because the sofa had cost him $2,750, which he could prove to me because he still had the receipt because unlike me he kept all his receipts, because unlike me he knew the value of things and didn’t just want to replace everything all the time, Alan became enraged and I became enraged and the evening dissolved into an echo chamber of accusations and denials and, in odd moments, valid points. I noted that he still hadn’t given his landlord a thirty-day moving-out notice. He pointed out that aside from emptying the guest room closet, I had done nothing to make him feel “welcome” in my home. And, incidentally, he hated the futon. Always had. The feel of velvet against his skin repelled him, he said. (Ditto for velour and suede; I should know this about him.)

The next morning we decided—calmly and without a trace
of anger or blame—that we wouldn’t move in together just yet. We would wait until we’d been a couple for longer (like, say, three years) and had a more solid commitment and could possibly buy a bigger house. I said I thought that was an excellent idea. I reiterated that the house really was a one-person house. I mean, look at it! I said. No garage, no basement, only three tiny closets, and one of them contains the washer and dryer and water heater and filing cabinet and office supplies and CDs. Where would his stuff go? Alan was by now a competitive road cyclist. He had three bikes, all of which were very expensive and handcrafted and couldn’t have been kept in a garage or basement even if I’d had a garage or a basement. No fair to those bikes! I said. Let’s wait!

“I feel really good about this,” I said.

“Me too,” he said.

That night, Alan drove home to his apartment after work and spent one hour and five minutes looking for a parking space. He moved into my house a month later.

He moved in, but not before I’d investigated other options. In the quest to find a workable transition from nohabitation to cohabitation, no stone was unturned, no scenario unimagined, no Internet photo unclicked. Whereas in most areas of life (such as exercise or cooking… any other area of life really) procrastination is my default setting, I’m happy to drop everything and do what needs to be done when real estate is the issue or problem at hand. And amid this quandary, it crossed my mind that renting might be the thing that needed to be done.

“If I could get, say, $2,100 in rent for this house,” I posited out loud, “that would leave us free to rent something way nicer and bigger for, say, $3,500. Which means we’d each be paying
$1,750, which is less than my mortgage now, which means I’d have enough left over to pay property taxes and repairs and everything else.”

“But you still have to pay your monthly mortgage, which is $2,054,” said Mr. Show-Off Math Genius. “You’re getting rent money but it has to go to the mortgage.”

“Oh… right.”

Again, let’s understand something about addiction. It can go dormant, it can retract back underneath its shell, but it’s always just below the surface. It’s always waiting for a trigger. In my case, all I need is for someone to say, “I read that Whoozitville is the hot, up-and-coming neighborhood these days,” and, before I know it, I’m upended again. And that is what started to happen. I needed a fix. As ultimately uninterested as I was at that point in moving out of the house on Escalada Terrace and as much as I couldn’t stand the thought of another year of nohabitation, the notion of having to share my place with someone—even someone as beloved as Alan—knocked me sufficiently off course that I returned to my old habits. I went back on realtor.com and Craigslist and the MLS Web site. I pictured us in a sprawling mid-century modern with a workroom for his bikes and a separate office for me. I pictured us in a voluptuous Craftsman reading our individual newspapers in front of a stone fireplace. Mostly, I just pictured us someplace bigger, someplace with closets, someplace not quite so steeped in the colic of my efforts at self-definition. In other words, someplace
ours
.

And so my loyalty to Escalada Terrace was tested. As had been the case during my previous tour of real estate voyeurism/enslavement, it wasn’t just the possibility—however remote—of the “perfect” house that ignited my cravings. It was the reminder that one’s own house wasn’t the only house in the
world, that pledging yourself to one piece of property doesn’t mean you’ll never know the embrace of another. This, of course, was the reasoning that had allowed me to buy the house, despite my lack of total infatuation with it, in the first place. And now, clicking through duplexes and bungalows and (when I got bored of the L.A. listings and expanded my reach across Topanga and Malibu and up the coast all the way to Oregon) A-frames and cabins and yurts, the manic birr of those old shopping days returned. I wanted to live on another block, in another part of town, in New York, in Paris, on the moon. Some of these places I wanted to inhabit with Alan (“journalist couple relocates to space station; follow them on Twitter”), while others cried out for a cloistered, possibly chain-smoking existence in a rented attic with a stove-top espresso maker and a view of the Seine.

As before, this form of virtual window-shopping was exhausting, even frightening. Like a man taken to a strip club the night before his wedding, I experienced the houses as both objects of terror and objects of salvation. Lotharios made of wood and stone and Tyvek weatherizing wrap, the houses conjured a furious, emotional seesaw of possibilities and improbabilities and visions of lives unlived, roads untaken, lawns unmowed, rooms uninhabited—at least by me.

But what about spaces undeveloped? There was always the garage, of course. I hadn’t forgotten my grand guesthouse plan. It was a long-range plan, a plan I had no designs on implementing unless I happened to find $80,000 hidden inside the crawl space above my bedroom closet. But maybe it wouldn’t be that much, I now thought. Or maybe I could take out a loan. Maybe I could build the guesthouse, and Alan could keep his stuff in it—or even kind of live in it on days when we
were tired of each other. At the very least, maybe he could keep his bicycles in the garage; it would, after all, be no ordinary garage but state-of-the-art.

I called a contractor. I took him through the upper yard, into the lower yard, and down the stairs. I told him the bones of the garage were there but it just needed a little updating.

“Minimum $100,000,” he said. “I’ve rarely seen such a disaster. You need an engineer. You need soil reports. You need an architect. You need several months of construction.”

“What if it was just the garage but not the guesthouse?” I asked.

“What guesthouse?” he asked.

I called another contractor.

“Minimum $200,000,” he said.

I don’t know why, but I called yet another one. The rule of thumb with estimates is that you get three and take the middle one. Somehow I felt compelled to do this, even though I wasn’t going to be embarking on this project anytime in the current millennium.

“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars,” said the third contractor. “And by the way, the retaining wall next to your house is unsafe and not up to code. I’d recommend doing that first. Probably for around $60,000.”

Maybe I should sell the house, I thought. Not that I wanted to, not really, not at all. But one weekend, when Alan was out of town with two of his three bikes competing in a race that required him to ride insane distances at insane elevations, I sat at my desk eating my salami and realized how much I missed him. I was terrified of letting him move in, but, I now realized, I was also terrified of him not moving in. Moreover, I wanted him to move in not just for parking-related reasons but
because—and, as revelations go, this was so simple as to be embarrassing—I wanted to be near him. If not constantly, at least more often than not. Why was I clinging to my house as if it were the only thing that made me worthy of love? Why was I lording over it so zealously, stopping people at the door as though I were some numskull nightclub bouncer? Why was I holding it out in front of me like a shield?

Maybe I should sell the house, I thought. Maybe I should just free myself from it—even at no profit—and rent a whole new place with Alan. Not only would a rental be a clean slate, a neutral space in which our lives could commingle without the baggage of someone’s life already having been there, but it would undoubtedly be larger and nicer than what we were currently working with. That was the solution, I decided. I would join Alan among the ranks of the smug renters. If things didn’t work out, at least I would have sold my house before the market got
really
bad (and this was coming; every five minutes on CNBC they were announcing that the housing apocalypse was nigh). If things did work out, maybe we’d buy a new house in a year or two.

I called Michael, the Realtor. He was happy I finally had a boyfriend. He said he’d come over and tell me what I needed to do with my house if I wanted to sell it. It was now August 2007. Zillow believed my house was worth no more than $503,000. Michael didn’t try to influence me one way or the other, but he did say that if I was worried about the market that year, I’d be considerably more worried the following year. He also said that in order to make it “attractive” to potential buyers, I’d need to do the following:

• Replace the windows in the kitchen, living room, and bedroom
  

• Repaint the entire back room, as the white was looking “dirty”
  

• Repaint the bedroom, as the mint green was “a bit of a personal choice”
  

• Replace the doorknobs so that they don’t fall off in your hand
  

• Lay down fresh sod in the backyard because the grass is brown from the dog peeing on it
  

• Define the back room as either an office, a dining room, an exercise room, or a laundry room but not all four at once, because that can confuse the buyer and give him or her an unconscious perception of disorder
  

• Redo the kitchen cabinets, which look a little “shabbier” than “chic”
  

• Install mirror in faux fireplace and assemble candles on the floor; gives a chic and festive look and creates the illusion of a working fireplace (idea I saw on
  Trading Spaces:
  optional)
  

Michael did, however, like the yellow walls in the kitchen.

I decided not to sell the house. Instead, for the next week, I reverted to my plan of renting it out and then moving with Alan into another, bigger rental. I tried to get my math straight this time. If we could find something for $2,500 a month, we could swing it. But considering I was hoping to rent my own house for that amount, how did I expect to find something bigger and better for the same? Maybe we could venture into an “up and coming” neighborhood, I thought. Maybe I was being
too pessimistic about the potential rent value of my house. Maybe someone would come along who absolutely loved blue walls and distressed wood cabinets and was willing to pay above market for them. Maybe I’d be walking Rex in the park one day and happen upon an old carriage house. Maybe the caretaker would emerge from the house at the precise moment I was passing by and hang up a For Rent sign. Maybe the caretaker would explain to me that the house was very special, that he’d lived there for years but could no longer manage the stairs. Maybe he’d tell me that the rent was normally $3,000 but given that I had such a nice dog and seemed like such a nice person—such a
deserving
person—he’d rent it to me for $1,500.

I mentioned none of these machinations to Alan.

What lay at the root of the addiction into which I’d relapsed? How had I managed to take my supreme good fortune (and, based on my track record, finding the love of a good, smart, sane man was nothing if not stupendously supreme good fortune) and convert it into a housing crisis? At the time, I would have said it was all a matter of not having enough space, of there being insufficient room for the sofa, the TV, the bikes. But now I know it was plain fear: fear of entrapment, of becoming needy, of cutting off my options. One of the chief lessons of growing up of course is recognizing that choosing one path usually necessitates forgoing another. And while even back then I was generally able to cope with the numerous opportunities that were no longer available to me—a career as a neurosurgeon, musical prodigy–hood, being a virgin bride—somehow real estate remained a vessel of hope. As long as there was a new house on the horizon, I had a shot at redemption, transformation, or at least new and better paint colors. If
I could live everywhere, I reasoned unreasonably, maybe I could live forever.