Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

by Meghan Daum

  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.

  And as drawn as I was to the idea of buying real estate, the rush was often more intense when it came to rentals. It doesn’t take a genius to see why. A rental is the housing equivalent of, if not a one-night stand, the kind of relationship where introductions are made to friends but not to parents. It’s a B-plus kind of situation, comfortably adequate, maybe even all the better for its distance from any possibility of perfection. To live in a rental is to wake up every morning believing that your life hasn’t started yet. It is to spend months or years or even decades nursing the belief that things are going to get better, that the Big Trade-Up is yet to come. As much as I wanted to actually purchase real estate, as many Sunday afternoons as I spent skulking around open houses, nothing remained as (theoretically) intoxicating as the possibility of trying out a new rental. The notion of a new neighborhood with its attendant new supermarket and new dry cleaner and new route to the airport is as enticing as a good kiss after a mediocre date. It was all about possibility without commitment, fresh starts that would invariably end.

  On the other hand, I had a good career, a good man, and a good house. The dramatic posturing around indecision and “loving my freedom” was wearing thin. It was time to grow up. Besides, I loved the house on Escalada Terrace. I loved the palm tree in the front yard and the patio table in the backyard and the hill across the street and the coyotes that sauntered around driveways in broad daylight. Why not share it with someone? My house, after all, was as much a piece of my metaphorical heart as were the actual pieces of my actual heart. What was the big deal about keeping a couple of bicycles and some rock-climbing gear in the back room near my desk?

  • • •

  I took a photo of the wrought-iron futon and put it on Craigslist, describing it as “a truly unique piece” and asking $200. A week later, when no one bit, I lowered the price to $175. A week later, $100. Two different people wrote and said they’d buy it for $75. I told them to come right over, but they never did. Three days before Alan had to be out of his apartment, I modified the ad to say I’d give the futon away for free to whoever came and got it in the next forty-eight hours. When the forty-eight hours passed, I asked Marta, the cleaning lady, if she wanted it or knew of anyone who might. She did not. Then I offered it to Fernando, the gardener. Despite being from Mexico, Fernando had a voice and an accent that made him a dead ringer for that old Saturday Night Live character, the Italian priest Father Guido Sarducci.

  I showed him the futon. I explained that it was difficult to get through the door but that it could be done. I told him it was a nice, unique piece.

  “I do not a’want it,” Fernando said.

  “Really?” I said, recalling, almost mortifyingly, the toil—once seemingly Herculean, now clearly fatuous—of getting it through the door not even two years earlier.

  “But maybe I can find someone who does.”

  Fernando went outside and got his assistant, who was clearing bougainvillea petals off the patio with a leaf blower. They came back in and, with great difficulty and a very near miss with the Restoration Hardware pendant light fixture on the kitchen ceiling, moved the futon frame into the front yard.

  “I will come a’later today with the bigger truck,” Fernando said. “I have’a an idea of where to take it.”

  He did not come later that day or the next day or the next day. The futon sat in the yard like an iron sculpture on some kind of hippie commune. Meanwhile, the purple velvet cushion sat on the floor of the otherwise empty guest room. Along with the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling fan, you’d have thought it was a room in a Thai brothel—or the backdrop in an American Apparel ad.

  Finally, on the third day, Fernando came back with the truck.

  “Did you find someone who wants it?” I asked. “Because, you know, it’s a nice… uh, piece.”

  “Don’t a’worry, I’ll take it,” Fernando said. He smiled as if he felt sorry for me. He smiled as if he pitied me for having such bad judgment and bad taste. And together we lifted the frame into the truck, and then we dragged the mattress outside, the sidewalk scraping grooves into the velvet, the grass burrowing into those grooves. It was clear the futon was going to no one. It was clear it was headed to Goodwill, if not the dump. Fernando got into his truck and drove down the hill. I watched the futon bouncing in the truck bed as it faded into the distance, first five feet, then ten feet, then the distance of the whole street and around the corner, and then gone forever. And in that moment I promised myself that this would be the last futon of my life. I promised myself that I would sooner sleep on the floor or never again host an overnight guest than resort to buying another futon. From that point on I would be a grown-up. Or at least sleep like one.

  And I did. Alan had an expensive Tempur-Pedic mattress and a crummy bed, and I had my expensive, handmade cherrywood bed and a crummy mattress. Harmony, for once. We move
d his mattress into the bedroom and dragged mine out to the yard. I called the sanitation department to come and get it. In the twenty-four hours between the time that the mattress was placed in the yard and when it was collected by the sanitation department’s bulky-item curbside collection service, a Google Earth satellite photo was taken of the house, capturing the mattress in perfect detail. For the next several years, the photo associated with just about every Internet image of my house would show a mattress in the yard.

  When I think back on the period during which Alan was moving into my house, I see it as a three-month version of trying to get that wrought-iron futon through the guest room door. Though as a former New Yorker I still find it obscene to complain about lack of space when one lives in a bona fide house with an upper and a lower yard, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which our joining of households resembled the stuffing of two dozen clowns into a Yugo. And as much as I’d like to say that we eventually pulled it together and pruned the place down into a clean, well-lit sanctuary, the truth is that we didn’t and haven’t. The process of learning how to live with each other was really a process of learning how to live with each other’s stuff and, when necessary, discarding it in favor of new stuff.

  That said, we were not people in possession of a tremendous amount of stuff. I was not the woman with forty bottles of face cream on the bathroom counter and sixty pairs of shoes organized by color in the closet. He was not the guy with a sprawling, table-mounted electric train set or a sports car that required its own heated garage. As a longtime home-office worker, I did have an enormous amount of folders and ink cartridges and jumbo packs of Post-its and errant papers that I was perpetually unable to either file away or discard. (I’ll also admit to a minor obsession with handmade gift wrapping paper, which I kept, along with assorted ribbons and cards and colored tissue paper, in an enormous, perpetually overflowing shopping bag in the office supply/washer dryer/water heater closet.) As a resolute and sometimes fanatical athlete, Alan did have more sports equipment than I ever imagined would be found under my roof. But in the relative scheme of things, we were more ascetic than acquisitional. We had one TV, one window air conditioner, one bathroom, and essentially one bedroom. We tried not to bring a new book in the house without finding a way to gently dispose of an old one. When I got Alan a giant exercise ball for his birthday, we incorporated it into the seating.

  The way we broke through the impasse regarding the sofa was this: First, Alan sold his beloved sofa to the neighbors across the street. “That way I can go visit it,” he said. “It’s not like I’ve totally given it up.” Second, we purchased (from IKEA, naturally) a dark leather chaise called the Kramfors. The idea was that it was sufficiently low-slung so as not to overpower the room and also that it could be placed several inches away from the wall, thereby avoiding the heat register. Backless, armless, and not even four feet long, it was straight out of a psychoanalyst’s office as depicted in a New Yorker cartoon. It was also about as comfortable as a bench seat in an old station wagon. Both of us could sit on it if we were willing to sit up straight, but it was impossible for two people to lie on it at the same time. Whenever Rex climbed up and tried to stretch out on the thing, he often slid off and landed on the heat register. Buying this chaise was not the most brilliant stroke, though the thing did at least look nice.

  Much else about the house did not look as nice. Almost every surface of every shelf and table and counter was covered with bills or receipts or magazines or plastic drink bottles for Alan’s bikes or vitamin bottles or clothing catalogs. Every bookshelf was double stacked, every closet packed floor to ceiling, every inch of cabinet space jammed so tightly with boxes of cereal, pasta, and vacuum-sealed soup that you had to pry items out using your entire arm, which often caused the shelf to wobble and knock everything onto the counter or even the floor. If any piece of furniture had space underneath it, we’d shove stuff into that space. Folded-up rugs and plastic garbage bags containing bulky comforters and extra pillows collected dust beneath the bed. Bicycle tools and boxes of Alan’s files and receipts—those treasured receipts!—were shoved underneath the dining table. Under my desk lay a huge plastic container shipped to me by my mother when she moved out of New Jersey and into Manhattan, and its contents were veritable advertisements for stuff you don’t know what to do with if you have no storage: Christmas ornaments, high-school yearbooks, junior-high-school report cards, programs from various concerts and recitals, a tenth-grade English paper on The Rise of Silas Lapham on which I’d received an A minus. At any given time, piles of laundry sat on the dining table, which we used for eating a handful of times in the first year, then gave up on altogether.

  The guest room was no longer called a guest room, as it no longer housed a guest. But given its inexorable dismalness, I imagine that Alan sometimes wished he were. In the beginning, thinking he’d get a desk for it, we made several trips to IKEA and debated the merits of the Johan versus the Vika Amon versus the Expedit. Abandoning the desk idea, he decided to get an imitation Eames chair called the Poäng, in which he planned to recline with his laptop and do important work while I was doing my important work at my desk in the back room. As it turned out, Alan would do this approximately two times before the chair became the official repository for clothes for which there was no drawer or closet space.

  Still, it was a nice chair, if an utterly commonplace one in the post-IKEA world—the neighbors came over and said, “Oh, the Poäng!”—and something about having it in the house was gratifying despite its being barely recognizable beneath the clothes. The lines were clean and minimal, the exact inverse of the house itself. And the few times Alan sat in it, reading The Economist under the framed photographs of Rwandan prisoners that he’d hung on the wall to make the place feel like his own, I’d imagine him as an older man, a man with gray hair and knobby hands and reading glasses exercising his God-given right to sit in his reclining chair. And then I’d hope to God we wouldn’t still be living on Escalada Terrace when we got to be that old.

  One Sunday afternoon in the spring of 2008, I dragged Alan to an open house in a nearby historic neighborhood. He wasn’t usually keen to make these excursions, but since I had so few other hobbies, he tolerated them the way someone might tolerate a partner’s ceramic-figurine collection. We stepped inside the house, and it was a knockout. Jaw-dropping, mind-numbing, totally our thing (our names might as well have been spray painted across the front, albeit in very expensive paint). A perfectly preserved Craftsman with a massive stone fireplace, four bedrooms, a finished attic, and (magically, almost Narnia-like) two staircases, the house seemed to go on forever; it was an extra-room dream that wasn’t a dream. The price was $889,999. This number was staggeringly high, but since at least it wasn’t $1 million, we allowed ourselves to stay and talk with the Realtor for nearly an hour. We talked about the house for days afterward. We wondered how much the seller would come down on the price (it was, after all, 2008). The house had its own personal Web site, and we went to it and ogled the photos and sent the link to friends. For a few days, we shared something precious: the dream of space—not just adequate space, but excessive space. In my mind, I moved us into the house. I decorated it. I decided which of those four bedrooms would be my office and which would be a proper guest room. I thought of the people who would come to stay. I imagined my mother walking through the door and saying, “Meghan, this is your house!”

  Of course, we didn’t buy it. For a million reasons we didn’t even seriously consider buying it. For one thing, it was $889,999. For another, despite its interior splendors, its outdoor features were seriously lacking. There was almost no yard, it was surrounded by apartment buildings, and the neighborhood, while “historic,” was known for its crime problems. There was also the minor, mostly unspoken issue of our commitment level. Though our cohabitation had eased into an amicable, affectionate, and apparently sustainable lifestyle, we rarely talked of marriage. This was partly because we were genuinely afraid t
o and partly because, since neither of us was particularly gung ho about having kids, we didn’t really need to.

  Some of our paralysis, though, also came from being crammed into a tiny house that we really could not leave. The clutter and crowdedness made us angry at each other, which in turn made us question our compatibility, which in turn made us not want to take steps toward a formal commitment. When I suggested this to a psychoanalyst I know, she suggested the problem might have metaphorical, “unconscious” dimensions. She thought the crowding I felt was emotional rather than literally spatial. She thought my desire for a bigger house was actually a desire for more space in the relationship. Normally, I was game for this kind of analysis, but in this instance she was dead wrong. It wasn’t as interesting as that. The cigar was just a cigar. The problems with our relationship could be measured in square footage, not unmet childhood needs.

  “I invite you to come see the house for yourself,” I said. “You will see what I mean. Dr. Freud himself wouldn’t try to get Freudian with this one.”

  Occasionally I’d see houses for sale that were ridiculous. I’d see oddly shaped bungalows or Gothic, dilapidated Victorians or shacks that had been embellished with enough bohemian details—a cow’s skull over the doorway, a toilet turned into a flowerpot in the yard—to momentarily trick me into finding some kind of appeal in them. Always, I’d think that these were the sorts of houses I’d look at and seriously think about purchasing if I was still single. These were the sorts of places—like farms in Nebraska and lonely one-room apartments on mountaintops—that made me feel like the rustic, bohemian girl I have apparently not turned out to be. They were the sorts of places that would unquestionably be a disaster if I actually bought them, though that didn’t stop me, during the first few years living with Alan, from playing the whole scenario out in my mind.