by Meghan Daum
It was shades of Dani’s place all over again. How had I managed to do this to myself once more? Why was I again holding myself hostage in someone else’s chaos? Where did I get this uncanny knack for moving to places that, thanks to lack of drawer space or floor space or drinkable water, ultimately proved to be as uninhabitable as they were ostensibly desirable?
As my brother and I used to say (actually, as we still say), duh, duh, and duh. It was all so woefully obvious. When you’re more concerned about where your dog goes to the bathroom than where you go to the bathroom, the chances that you’ll sign a lease on a decent property go down considerably. I realized this one morning while sitting on the terrace, attempting to eat breakfast al fresco among a flurry of stuffing that one of the border collies had ripped from the sofa. I had a bruise on my leg that I’d incurred by walking into an elliptical trainer I hadn’t noticed because it was doubling as a clothes rack. I decided I had to move right away. I would sign a yearlong lease and not break it under any circumstances. I called the friend of the friend and told him I had to leave. He sent for his dogs. Apparently, they loved New York.
I was embarrassed to be moving again, but I felt I was making progress, mostly because the next house might as well have had my name spray painted across the front. It was a farmhouse. Right there in L.A. Granted, it didn’t look exactly like a farmhouse. If you were actually in the country, you would not point to this house and think, “That’s where the farmer and his wife sit down to Rice-A-Roni every night.” But against the backdrop of palm trees and steep hills and tattooed young people riding fixed-gear bicycles on the sidewalks, it almost looked as if it had blown in from Nebraska on the winds of a tornado. It was a 1908 Dutch Colonial with yellow clapboard siding and a slate roof, a redbrick chimney, and creaky steps leading to a wide-planked wooden stoop. When I happened to drive by this place and saw a For Rent sign on the fence, I was so afraid of someone snatching it up—never mind that it had been available for weeks—that I called the number on the sign twelve times in less than two hours.
This neighborhood was the aforementioned Silver Lake, an ultra-trendy area east of Hollywood that was still slightly funky in places. Latino families who’d lived there for generations now shared the streets with hipsters who had a fondness for converted bio-diesel Mercedeses and rockabilly hairstyles. Silver Lake is about twenty miles from the beach and in the summer can be twenty degrees warmer and considerably smoggier. But the housing prices are cheaper, and the people tend to be less proselytizing (though this is a generalization about a generalization) about things like soy and the healing powers of “body work” (I’m not talking about cars), and after my less-than-stellar experiences in Topanga and Venice, I’d decided that as much as I loved the ocean breezes I was an east sider at heart.*
When talking to non-Angelenos, I’m often tempted to explain the “east side” by saying that it is to L.A. what Brooklyn now is to New York City or Oakland to the Bay Area or Belltown to Seattle. It’s where the cool kids live, or where the gentrifiers do their gentrifying, or where rich but not obscenely rich people can pay $850,000 for a three-bedroom house as opposed to $1.3 million for a condo on the west side. But gentrification issues notwithstanding, the east side of L.A. is not Brooklyn or Oakland or Belltown. It is its own region comprised of highly individualized neighborhoods—Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Mount Washington—and sections within those neighborhoods—too many to name here—that are themselves their own things. I won’t launch into a geographical treatise here (I’d get it wrong anyway; everyone who hasn’t lived there thirty years or more gets accused of getting it wrong), but suffice it to say these are the city’s old neighborhoods. Hilly and hot and swirling with vegetation and murals and taco trucks and—in many pockets—more brown skin than white, these are the regions where populations of artists and radicals in the 1930s and 1940s morphed into heavily Latino populations in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, Silver Lake became a locus of gay culture, and Echo Park became a gangland. By the 1990s, Silver Lake was brimming with hipsters, and Echo Park was slowly beginning its rise into a “desirable” neighborhood. In 1995, a six-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian in the Angelino Heights section of Echo Park would have sold for under $100,000. Less than a decade later, its asking price would be $1 million or more. And just to put it in perspective, a few miles away on the west side (where a lot of people have never heard of or would be afraid to come to Echo Park) such a property could cost $6 million.
Anyway, it was now 2003. The rent on the urban farmhouse, which was in the heart of Silver Lake near an adult video store and a Catholic elementary school, was a very urban $2,000 a month. This was definitely on the high end of my price range, but the place had leaded-glass windows and a working fireplace and a built-in floor-to-ceiling china cabinet. There was a small bedroom downstairs and two more rooms upstairs. I’d have room for two of my three beds. Never mind that the kitchen was small and poorly configured with a tiny, ancient stove and no dishwasher. Never mind that you had to park on the street. Never mind that the house’s sole bathroom was right off the kitchen, a location that, should nighttime visits be necessary, would require stumbling through four separate rooms and descending a dark staircase. Never mind that if I’d spent another week or two looking at rentals, I could probably have found something better and cheaper, maybe even with a dishwasher and central air-conditioning. Patience wasn’t my racket that fall. I needed a house of my own right away.
Part of the reason, I’m embarrassed to say, is that I had a date. This was a very big deal. Lest you thought in my account of the previous few years I’ve been coyly omitting any mention of romance, I’m afraid that there was nothing to omit. I had an ongoing platonic friendship with Ex, but when it came to real boyfriends or real dates or even just flirty encounters at Trader Joe’s (why is it that even the most banal exchange at Trader Joe’s—“where’s the frozen rice?” for example—sounds as though you’re asking if someone’s an Aquarius?), my life had been nunlike for nearly two years.
Not that this bothered me significantly. Not that I’d even really much noticed. That’s because moving, like chocolate and sunshine, stirs up many of the same chemicals you ostensibly produce when you’re in love. At least it does for me. Like a new lover, a new house opens a floodgate of anticipation and trepidation and terrifying expectations fused with dreamy distractions. It’s all encompassing and crazy making. You can’t concentrate at work. You space out while driving. Granted, you’re buying curtains and dish drainers and wastebaskets instead of getting manicures and buying lingerie, but the adrenaline rush is shockingly similar: you close your eyes at night and see only your new kitchen; you meet your friends for lunch and can speak only of your closet space.
No wonder I hadn’t needed sex. I was drowning in the eros of real estate. But after five whirlwind romances with various households, the sudden opportunity to revisit the human version of a relationship was surprisingly compelling. (I also worried that I was one holiday season away from turning into one of those people who send Christmas cards with photos of their dogs.)
Hoping to prevent such a fate, I’d allowed a tall, light-haired man whose acquaintance I’d made some weeks earlier to pick me up at the house in Beachwood Canyon and take me to watch Chinese acrobats perform at the Hollywood Bowl. This went well enough—it’s hard to have a bad time under the summer night sky in the breezy folds of the Cahuenga Pass—but despite my date’s good looks and the romantic nature of the setting I’d found myself hoping he wouldn’t so much as hold my hand that night. It would have been all wrong. Not because he was all wrong for me (he was, but that would be revealed later), but because he had absolutely no idea who I was. Since I wasn’t living in my own place and, in my mind, couldn’t have possibly conveyed anything to him about my true essence, I might as well not have been there at all. It didn’t matter that I was wearing my own clothes and speaking my own thoughts and laughing my own laugh. All that mattered was t
he scene into which he stepped when I opened the door to him. All that mattered was that the furniture and artwork and kitchen supplies and the damn elliptical trainer had not been of my choosing. Two of the three dogs were not mine. The water glass I’d handed him was the product of someone else’s shopping trip to IKEA rather than my own. The result was that I felt invisible, unaccounted for, even a little nonexistent. And for those reasons alone (of course, there were others, though they seemed not worth thinking about at the time) I refused to see the tall, light-haired man again until I’d fully moved into the urban farmhouse in Silver Lake.
Therein ensued the most elaborate set of second-date preparations in history. In the span of two weeks, I not only moved myself in but also had the entire interior of the house painted, purchased and installed thirteen white opaque window shades and/or billowing white curtains, bought a shower curtain from Target and a coffee table and two nightstands from a Moroccan-tile furniture boutique, had a dog door cut into the back door (with begrudging permission from the landlady), had a ceiling fan installed over my bed, and purchased a 1950s nickel-and-glass Czech chandelier and installed it over a late Victorian dining table I’d bought in Nebraska. Given that it was, yet again, autumn in Los Angeles and the temperature was in the nineties and the air was choked with smoke from the burning mountains, I went to Home Depot and bought one of the few window air conditioners left in stock. It must have weighed 150 pounds, yet I dragged it out of the car, up the front steps, into the house, and up the staircase with the superhuman strength with which I’d carried my futon back in college.
Miraculously, I got the air conditioner in the window without dropping it onto the patio below. Miraculously, it cooled the room, even though the house was barely insulated and the autumn sun was almost as merciless as it had been in Topanga Canyon the year before. Armed with a controlled climate, subtle yet distinctive window dressings, and a spectacular paint color scheme (the living room walls were a sharp rococo blue, which was offset by a warm beige in the dining room; the guest room, in a misstep, was a dusty pink), I then began the process of getting ready for a big night out. Which is to say I took a shower and got dressed.
In other words: no manicure, no eyebrow wax, no new pair of shoes or jeans. I didn’t know it then, but this was a major turning point in the history of my self-presentation. The appearance of my house had officially become more important than my own appearance. After decades of worrying about my hair and my thighs, I was now mainly concerned about whether a picture was crooked on the wall.
Later, of course, I’d see that part of what was happening was that the tall, light-haired man himself was considerably less interesting than the adult, urban world that a date with him represented. As I’d waited for him to pick me up at the Beachwood Canyon house for the first date, it had occurred to me that the type of date where you were fetched at your door, driven somewhere, and eventually returned home was utterly alien to my life experience. In fact, even the word “date,” as archaic and “socially constructed” as my die-hard Vassar sensibilities led me to construe it, seemed charged with the promise of my new California frontier.
That’s because until that point I’d lived in the kinds of places where dating took the form of a “meet up” that morphed into “hanging out” and then perhaps “hooking up.” I’m not, mercifully, a member of the current twenty- and early-thirty-something generation, which apparently enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy) “hooking up” with supposedly platonic friends as a way of avoiding the hassles of dating (in the early 1990s we Generation Xers preferred to hide behind flannel shirts and worry about AIDS). But during my eight-plus years in New York, nobody once showed up at my door and then took me out. In a noncar culture that simply isn’t done. You meet in a bar, in a restaurant, on a street corner, or in a subway station. I had not one but two boyfriends in New York who repeatedly insisted on meeting up on the train itself, the idea being that if we left our apartments at precisely the right moment and boarded a pre-agreed-upon car of a pre-agreed-upon subway train, we’d be on our way to that grunge show/dive bar/Film Forum screening of Das Boot in no time. The stress involved in these maneuvers was not insignificant; they also failed about as often as they worked. Let’s recall that this was before anyone really had cell phones, let alone sent SMS messages or Twittered. If you lost someone in this sort of operation, you’d have to call his answering machine from a pay phone and hope that he called from another pay phone and checked his messages. At least the era of my parents’ message-retrieving beeper had passed by then.
Maybe dating in New York is different now that the bulk of my demographic lives in Brooklyn, where it’s easier to have a car and you can conceivably double-park while you run up to retrieve your paramour from her Cobble Hill brownstone (though I kind of doubt it). But for much of my life as a young single person, a date was a thing you showed up to rather than waited for. Due to roommates and other features of soul-crushingly expensive cities (rats, roaches, bedrooms large enough for only a twin-sized bed), it was possible to have protracted sexual relationships wherein one party never saw the other’s living quarters. My last year in New York involved one such relationship and when I finally saw the guy’s apartment and noticed that he owned a copy of not only What Color Is Your Parachute? but also The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 20th-Century History, I decided to quit not just the guy (not that I needed too much convincing by then) but New York entirely. When I got to Nebraska, I had approximately one date with Ex (wherein I did not let him come to my house, because he was a complete stranger) before I essentially let him move in. As embarrassing as that is, it also turns out to be the way a lot of people “date” in Lincoln, Nebraska. Which is to say that not even circulating among the car-driving, full-sized-bed-owning echelons guarantees admission to the dating echelons.
But California was grown-up land. I could feel it in so many ways. Unlike the woman-child who’d traipsed through the streets of New York in clunky shoes and Kmart underwear, unlike the would-be iconoclast who struck poses in the Nebraska cornfields while trying fruitlessly to “keep it real,” I was now, for once and at last, in concert with my surroundings. And as I waited for the tall, light-haired man to arrive at the Silver Lake house for our second date, a wave of self-love washed over me. After eighteen residences in fifteen years, four of them dorm rooms, three of them crammed with other people’s furniture, the others so inappropriate in so many ways, I was finally in my own ample space with my own stuff. After fourteen roommates, one tyrannical building super, one live-in boyfriend, and two dogs that weren’t mine, I was finally the queen of my lovingly decorated castle. It was me and my furniture against the world.
Naturally, Mr. Tall, Light-Haired didn’t stand a chance. Though I dated him for five months, which was about four months and two weeks longer than I should have (he knew his way around town, and, I’ll admit, it’s perhaps a bit too easy to keep a boyfriend around just because he knows which way to turn off a freeway exit), I think I can safely say that the highlight of the relationship was the eight or so seconds it took him to walk through my front door for the first time and behold the awesomeness of my taste and self-sufficiency (and he liked the place; he really, really liked it!). In one perfect moment, the house fused my real self and my fantasy version of myself into one glorious—if unmanicured—entity. Here was a woman with azure walls and leaded-glass windows! Here was a woman with no roommates, no shared walls, and an air conditioner! How could anyone not fall for her instantly? How could she not be irresistible to every man, woman, child, and pet who had the occasion to cross her threshold? And how, in turn, could the self-possessing effects of all this experience and all these beautiful objects and all this space not allow her to see the love and irresistibility of others?
I don’t know, but I failed to love Tall, Light-Haired nonetheless. Though I spent the ensuing months in a rather exhausting effort to convince myself that our spectacular incompatibility (despite his appealing Midwestern roots, he was a believer in
astrology and—troublingly—scented candles) was really a case of my being judgmental (I was, he said, “closed off to the possibility of transformation”), what was really happening was that I was falling in love not with any person but with the idea of living alone in my very own space. When I was with him, I couldn’t wait to get home. When he was over, I secretly wanted him to leave.
Instead of being smitten with him, I was smitten with the dynamic between myself and my living quarters. I was in love with the notion of myself as a person who had agency over her physical surroundings, who had taste and the means to use it, who had enough square footage so that everything—even the mateless earrings and broken exercise equipment and not-quite-empty tubes of sunscreen that constitute the grubby detritus of every woman’s home—could be tucked away in some rightful, discreet closet or drawer. There was joy in simply inhabiting a room. The act of walking from the kitchen to the front door brought on a kind of reverie. When I was not muddling through dinners or uninspired overnights with my ill-chosen beau, I was reading the newspaper on the weathered wooden stoop with my dog by my side. When I was not having arduous, pointless meetings with Hollywood executives about my various nonideas, I was tracing my finger down the folds of the living room curtains and staring out the window. When I wasn’t wiping the kitchen counters or attempting to write something more substantial than an e-mail, I was propping my feet up on the large desk that took up nearly an entire wall of my large office and drinking my second glass of wine while listening to Diana Krall (an upgrade from Suzanne Vega). And while I sometimes thought I wanted a lover so I could share this bliss with someone, the truth was that I just wanted a witness. I wanted someone to see my home, admire it, admire me, and then leave.
