by Meghan Daum
A reasonable person (who at the very least would have been working with a Realtor and, were she genuinely reasonable, wouldn’t have gotten in this situation to begin with) would have bailed out right about this time. A reasonable person would have called the seller and said, “Sorry, can’t do this,” and vamoosed as fast as possible. I, however, was not scoring high on the reasonable index at that time. With less than two weeks before the close of escrow, I focused my energies not on extricating myself from this mess but rather on making it larger and more complicated.
Because so what if my enthusiasm was waning? The part-time residency plan was still in effect; I just needed to keep my eyes on the bicoastal (semi-coastal?) lifestyle prize. As if a farm in Nebraska were no different from a Greenwich Village apartment for which subletters could be secured on a moment’s notice, I’d convinced myself that I would divide my time between there and California. Since summers in Nebraska are as inhumanly hot as the winters are cold, I planned to spend the spring and fall seasons at the farm while returning to Los Angeles for November through March as well as July and August. I would need a car in both places, of course, so this plan involved a four-times-a-year drive across the plains and over the Rockies, which, I reasoned, would give me an opportunity to meditate, or at least listen to a lot of books on tape.
As crazy as everyone thought this plan was, it made brilliant sense to me at the time, not least of all because I oozed commitment phobia from every pore. And provided I could find a way to be gone as much if not more than I was there, the farmhouse would be the ultimate long-distance relationship. I wouldn’t be living in it as much as I’d be cooing to it over the phone late at night. I wouldn’t be married to it, but, rather, keeping it on the side like a backstreet lover. And true to my phantasmagoric self-image as a mysterious prairie lady who’s desired by everyone but can be possessed by no one, it was easy to tell myself that this setup, while crazy, was also authentic.
The more I doubted myself, the more “reasons” for the purchase I came up with. The farm, I told my friends and family, was an investment, “an IRA I can live in” (suddenly I was trotting out the jargon, a real wheeler-dealer). Until I could get the artists’ colony up and running, I’d rent it out to visiting professors. I would make it available as a location for movie shoots. I contacted the university and was told there was a hiring freeze. I called my friend who ran the state film office, and she told me the only movie scheduled to be shot in Nebraska that year was an independent with no location budget. I met with a rental agent, who told me that if I installed a dishwasher and a ceiling fan, she could maybe get $800 a month for it. When I mentioned that the ideal tenant would be someone who only needed it for a few months at a time, she looked at me as if I’d arrived on a nonstop flight from Jupiter. When I started asking around town if anyone knew of a handyman/overseer type of person who could look after the place during the months when I was gone—possibly for free, possibly living there when I was away and then vacating when I returned (unless I could turn the aluminum shed into guest quarters)—I got a lot of blank stares. “Didn’t you move to California?” a mechanic I knew from the blues bar shouted to me over the music during happy hour one Friday. “I thought you blew this joint forever! I can’t keep you straight.”
Funny, I could no longer keep myself straight either. I was buying a property that was so beyond my ability to physically or financially manage that I’d actually begun investigating ways to rent it out before I even owned it. I was also buying a property that I really only liked for its upstairs landing. A week or so before the close of escrow, Rex needed to go out in the middle of the night, and I, sleepless, went with him. The grounds were damp with melting snow, and the air had that dry cough texture that Midwestern air so often has in the late winter. And in that motionless, rawboned air I could hear the interstate as loudly as if I were standing on the shoulder with a flat tire.
When I imagine what it might be like to marry the wrong person, to lie in bed on your wedding night and stare at the crack in the ceiling that, in the space of twenty-four hours, has suddenly come to represent the permanent fissure you’ve installed in your own life, I imagine that acreage. Its wrongness hit me in the face like a violent gust from the north. I had to turn away; horribly, there was nowhere to turn that wasn’t facing either the aluminum shed or the jilted house itself. I closed my eyes. I stared down at the dirty snow. I was thirty-three years old. The number of houses and apartments I’d rented in my adult life far exceeded the number of boyfriends I’d had. It probably even rivaled the number of expensive shoes I’d ever owned. It was there, in the light of a waning, ragged moon and underscored by the whine of not-so-distant trailer trucks, that I came to an understanding that even a schoolgirl would have been quicker to perceive: I didn’t want to buy a house; I wanted to shop for a house. I hadn’t fallen in love with this house, merely the view from the top of its stairs.
I’m not proud of any of this. On the shame index, my involvement with this property ranks just below the Brad incident. The next day, I reneged on the deal. The seller, who seemed honest and well-meaning and whose name I can no longer remember, probably because I’ve blocked it out, was so angry she could barely speak. I can still hear the ice in her voice when I told her I was backing out. I can still hear the silence that greeted my profuse apologies. I can feel the knot in my stomach as I dialed the phone and the rush of both humiliation and relief when the call was over. I lost my $300 deposit (the irony that the term for this fee was “good faith” or “earnest” money and that I had failed on both accounts wasn’t lost on me), plus, in an effort not to get sued, a few hundred dollars of legal fees to an attorney I should have hired in the first place.
With my novel less than six weeks from publication and much of the spring and summer taken up with book-related travel, I saw no reason to return to L.A. just yet. I went back to the classifieds of the Lincoln Journal Star, found a small redbrick ranch house in town, and signed a lease. I then called a moving company to take my stuff from the farmhouse to the ranch house. It was the fourth time in six months that I’d employed movers.
Twenty-four hours before I mailed the keys back to the seller, a photographer from People magazine came out and took pictures of me strolling around the prairie grass near the farmhouse. One of these photos appeared next to a review of my novel, and I’m pretty sure it was supposed to convey the idea that I actually lived on the farm. I had no fewer than twenty-five conflicting feelings about the situation; they ranged from guilt that I was being misleading about my living quarters to a secret (though also guilty) thrill in the notion that even if my friends and family knew my rural posture was more or less rigged up, the readers of People might think I really did spend my days contemplatively flouncing around my own patch of verdant badlands. Mostly, though, I felt sad. After trying so hard to transform this particular fantasy into a truth, after hurling myself halfway across the country and back in an effort to find the sweet spot between my ideal self and a self I could actually manage and maintain on a daily basis, I’d come up short again. I’d aimed for the hero’s journey and instead ended up with a farce. I’d meant for my life to resemble a vast Wyeth landscape, and instead it looked like a snapshot on Dani’s shelf. I’d wanted to be special but was turning out to be ordinary. This felt like nothing less than total surrender.
All that said, I loved that the redbrick ranch house had central air-conditioning and a dishwasher. On aesthetic principle, I was generally opposed to this type of domicile—it had awful gold-plated light fixtures throughout and pink floral wallpaper in the bathroom, and one of the two bedrooms was covered in white shag carpet—but after the disorder of Dani’s place and then the ocher-colored water of the farm it felt like a sanctuary. I set up the cast-iron bed in the carpeted bedroom—“for guests,” I told myself—and somehow never got around to assembling my wooden childhood bed in the other room, so I simply slept on the mattress on the floor, college-style. My book came out, and I spent a
bout a month traveling around the country giving readings (often to sparse crowds that appeared to have shown up primarily for the refreshments). Always with these readings, I had the feeling that the farmhouse in the novel was not one I’d invented but, rather, the lost acreage at Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. By midsummer I had returned to the ranch house. The next few months were spent happily reclined in the easy chair that is life in Lincoln—hanging out with Ex, going to meetings of my book club, finding myself tipsy by 6:30 p.m. When, one night, I found myself tipsy by 5:30, I knew it was time to leave again. I called the movers, swallowed the $800 security deposit I’d lost by breaking the lease, and prepared to set out for California again and for good.
Something wrested my emotions on my last night in town. I remember that I’d gone out to dinner with Ex. And then we ended up stopping by a house where there was a party. I can’t recall exactly what we were doing there. I think Ex might have been picking up or dropping off something from whoever lived in the house, though in retrospect that makes no sense because in that case we would have been invited. In any case, I didn’t go into the party, but sat in the car in the driveway for five or so minutes as Ex dashed inside. The house was a large 1920s-era American Foursquare not unlike my childhood house on Jones Lane, and though the bulk of the party was going on in the backyard, enough people were dribbling out to the front porch and around to the side yard that I could see the general mix. It was kids—mainly youngish teenagers—and adults alike, and I wondered if this was a graduation party, though it was August and really too late in the summer for that sort of thing. Decked out in sandals and khaki shorts and Barenaked Ladies concert T-shirts and sundresses, men and women in their forties and fifties drank beer and gesticulated largely and stuffed chips into their mouths and leaned against porch railings and patted the dog’s head. A few of them I knew from my book club: Patty and Deb, their husbands, Phil and whatever-his-name-was. They smiled easily and laughed even easier, and—this was the thing that got me somehow—their children ran underfoot and ducked around them and asked them questions and endured hair tousling and appeared to be laughing at some of the same jokes and were simultaneously part of and separate from the adult world in a way that I don’t think I’d ever seen before coming to Nebraska (maybe it had existed in Austin, but then again maybe it hadn’t) and, at that point, was convinced I’d never see anywhere else.
Years later—even as little as one year later—I’d realize that this sort of scene (though it was perhaps less a scene than a mood) was available in all kinds of places among all kinds of people. It is, after all, more common than uncommon for regular folks to behave in regular, authentic ways. And while I wasn’t even sure that this mood—if that was the word for it—was real or had anything to do with whatever sum I’d arrived at by watching and adding up the random pieces of humanity on the porch that night, I was suddenly seized by a heartbreaking hypothesis. If I was going to live not just among friends but also among like-minded “peers,” I reasoned, I would have to give up the visceral pleasures of drinking beer on front porches. I would have to set up shop someplace less cozy, someplace where you couldn’t hear the crickets chirping, someplace where there were no wooden screen doors clattering their way through the summers. If I was going to be in “civilization” (which in this case I was defining as the world in which going to work meant doing something of national relevance and keys could not intentionally be left in car ignitions overnight as they sometimes were in Lincoln), I was going to have to give up hearty laughter on porches. If I was going to live in civilization (and it dawned on me now that I was referring to the very venue my father had pronounced “not quite civilized” so many years earlier), I’d have to give up civilized people. And it was such a devastating notion that it nearly left me breathless, even though I was sitting perfectly still in an unmoving car.
Of course, my logical side knew that my definition of “civilization” was totally ass backward. Civilization (unless you were resigning to the ultimate cliché and talking strictly about sushi and avant-garde theater) was not New York or L.A. or whatever teeny-weeny handful of “world class” cities I associated with not throwing your life away. Civilization was not synonymous with standing a very real chance of encountering a celebrity at Starbucks. It was in the eye of the beholder. It was what you made it. It was—like the view from the top of the stairs in the unpurchased farmhouse or the sound of the elevator lurching down its shaft in my beloved building on West 100th Street—the visceral essence of the parts of your home you hold most dear.
But returning home to the ranch house, which was now empty save those mawkish light fixtures, I found myself in the basement sobbing so hard over the clothes dryer that I literally could not stand up. It was a worse display than even the one I’d unleashed in Topanga after learning I wasn’t getting Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. There were heaving sobs, jaw spasms, gag reflexes. Back then, I’d merely been denied the prize behind door number one. Now the game was over. And unlike back then, when I hadn’t known exactly why I was coming so unglued, I knew exactly what this meltdown was about. It was a bitter pill I could taste even through the hard rain pouring from my face. It was the dirty truth about my relentless search for “domestic integrity.” It was this awful fact: you cannot pursue authenticity at the same time you are pursuing fabulousness. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be the down-home farm girl and the queen of lower Fifth Avenue at the same time. You cannot be Maggie O’Connell (the floatplane-piloting, pixie-haircut-sporting, flannel-shirt-wearing cutie from Northern Exposure) and also Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. You cannot be Dorothy Parker and also Willa Cather. To attempt to be both of these things is to be not only neither but in fact nothing.
I indulged this grief for twenty minutes or so. Then I took my clothes out of the dryer and went upstairs. And the next morning I got in the car and drove west. This time without detours.
FOUR
For six weeks, I lived in a two-story Spanish Colonial in the foothills of Beachwood Canyon, just below the Hollywood sign. I was dogsitting. The plan was to look after two border collies until their owner, a friend of a friend who was working in New York, “sent for” them (this conjured the nonsensical but nonetheless disturbing image of packing the dogs into steamer trunks), after which Rex and I would have the place to ourselves. This was supposed to happen within a few weeks of my arrival, which is why I was paying $1,450 a month rent, an amount that was too high considering the dog care duties and too low considering the size and location of the house. Perhaps as such, the dogs were never sent for, and I continued to pay rent anyway. I was supposed to be writing articles or thinking up ideas for screenplays or television pilots. But because I found it nearly physically impossible to walk three dogs simultaneously, I often went on three or four separate walks a day, which cut into my writing time significantly.
Speaking of dogs, I’m obliged here to give a little shout-out to Rex. He had grown up to be a large, yaklike creature, and he was unequivocally my favorite thing in the world. I’d had pets growing up, but they all were cats (in keeping with my parents’ relentless musical motif, two consecutive orange tabbies had been named for Bach’s Magnificat—Niffy One and Niffy Two) and were of course aloof and subtle and noninteractive in the ways cats often are. But having a dog was a whole other story. Having a dog was like having a child that was at once fearfully mature (can be left alone for hours at a time) and entirely feebleminded (notably low IQ). And though I had little interest in an actual child of my own, I loved Rex as if he were precisely that. Just three years old, he’d logged thousands of miles in the back of the car and lived at seven different addresses. Throughout this, he never peed indoors, never wandered off, never so much as chewed on a rug. Docile to the extreme and a nonbarker (at twelve weeks old, he’d barked nonstop for an entire day and then given it up entirely), he was a canine Zen master. He was a calming force among all people and even most other dogs. He could lower your bloo
d pressure simply by leaning against your leg. And for these reasons—not to mention the fact that I was the kind of person for whom loving a dog was infinitely easier than loving a human—I had not for one second entertained the thought of not taking him along on my moves.
I had, however, occasionally allowed myself to think about how many more housing options would have been available to me sans pet, especially sans long-haired, slobbering, eighty-five-pound pet. Today as back then, one of the wonders of Los Angeles is that housing, though terrifyingly expensive to buy (somehow, even when the housing market sank into the San Andreas Fault, this remained largely the case), is relatively affordable to rent, at least by the New York City standards to which I still compared just about everything. If you can let go of the idea of living near the beach, you can find a two-bedroom Spanish Colonial–style apartment with arched doorways, a dishwasher, and off-street parking for about what you might pay for a room in a Brooklyn share. If you have a few dollars to rub together, you can rent yourself a sleek mid-century pad in Santa Monica or a stark industrial loft downtown. But if you have a large dog, it doesn’t matter how much money you do or do not have. You need a house with a yard. The yard needs to be fenced. The neighborhood needs to be relatively pedestrian-friendly since it’s nice to be able to walk the dog without butting up against a freeway or a crack house. Moreover, you need a landlord who isn’t going to look at an eighty-five-pound yak/dog and tell you he’d rent to a group of unsupervised high-school boys before letting that beast walk on his newly refinished floors. In other words, you have to rent from other dog people. And dog people tend to have dog properties.
Ergo the Beachwood Canyon house. It was, in many respects, a delight: a three-bedroom, three-bath Mediterranean villa with Mexican tile and screened French doors and bougainvillea bushes arcing around the iron gates. It was also exploding with debris: dog poop on the patio, dog hair on every piece of furniture, and all manner of dog- and human-related clutter on every possible surface. At night, the border collies ascended and descended the stairs as though they were training for a boxing match. During the day, they flung themselves in and out of the dog door until I had no choice but to close it, which caused them to whine like toddlers. Rex just stood there and stared at them blankly, the canine equivalent to shaking your head in pity.
