by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
At night in the hotel room, we watched the Little League World Series. The Danny Almonte controversy raged. How old, really, was the pitcher for the Rolando Paulino All-Stars, the pride of the Bronx? Fourteen or twelve? All sides of the controversy launched their own investigations. Little League dads who happened to be lawyers issued sharply worded statements. Gumshoes were hired to track down the birth certificate. We watched Danny strike out 16 batters in his victory over Oceanside, California, who couldn’t get anywhere near the ball. We were transfixed. He did look big and overpowering on the mound. It was all so compelling, and so charmingly, dizzyingly, unbelievably irrelevant. Danny Almonte was the last news story that caught my attention before the planes hit the towers. It was on September 1, 2001, that the New York Times reported Danny’s actual age as fourteen; the country reeled at the news. Expressions “of disappointment, anger and frustration came from President Bush, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Little League officials, and others who spoke of the team’s pain and of lessons about honesty in sports,” wrote the paper. An editorial on September 2 reminded us that “the opportunity offered by sports must never be allowed to void all the other opportunities children should be eligible to encounter as they grow up. In a literal sense, Danny Almonte has been defrauded by his father, Felipe de Jesús Almonte. That is the real crime, not the attempt to pass his son off as a 12-year-old.”
What an affluent and carefree country that we could spend time agonizing about such things. No wonder we were the envy of the world. Who wouldn’t want to be an American, in our Levis and our Ralph Lauren flannel shirts, the sparkling taste of Pepsi dancing on our tongues?
I wonder if any generation is lucky enough to be spared the trauma of the epochal, life-changing event? My mother talked about two: Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK. She remembered both moments in detail, and often noted that she was doing the same thing when she heard about both events: ironing. I couldn’t appreciate the lightning-bolt devastation wrought by both events. They seemed part of the general churning of recorded history. Most news seemed to me distant and small, like scenes viewed through a telescope held the wrong way around. A few events stood out a little to me: Nixon’s resignation, the Oklahoma City bombing, the first World Trade Center attack in 1993—but even that was a byword for incompetence: six people dead and thousands helped out of the towers with nothing more than dirty faces. The newspapers were always full of stuff, but really nothing much ever changed.
Who can write about September 11? Is there anything more heartrending, nearly a decade later, than the image of those doomed souls at the top of the North Tower, clinging to the broken windows, waving towels? The memory is haunting, pitiable, sick-making. I drove home that day through the cornfields, which I imagined as stretching from sea to shining sea, and marveled at the empty blue sky: not a single plane was flying. I don’t know why I found this so hard to comprehend, but I did. Two days later, an already wild-eyed friend made even crazier-seeming by the attack folded a $20 bill into the shape of an airplane and bid me behold—there were the smoking towers, there was the broken Pentagon. He was very upset, but I found his little origami stunt heartening. The American distraction factory was still operating on three shifts. Our compulsion to focus on the silliest aspect of any news story was intact. America would survive. I watched the news, and grieved, but never quite realized how quickly life, and the world, can change. I experienced the terror of the moment, but it didn’t frighten me to my essence—it didn’t scare me enough to keep me in my little safe house, biding my time. The planes could hit the tower—unthinkable!—just the way markets could drop, General Motors could go bankrupt, Bear Stearns could fail.
For someone so involved with literature, I missed one of the great themes of September 11: that life does not just churn and pulsate but sometimes tears and cannot be repaired; life can change irrevocably in the blink of an eye. Actions can have consequences. A man was capable of making a mistake that lasted a lifetime.
In the summer of 2002, our real estate agent, aware that we were ready to leave the Bavarian cottage, told us that she had a house that we really needed to see. It was beautiful. We would appreciate it. It wasn’t even on the market yet. Would we care for a peek before the signs were hammered into the lawn?
I was flattered by the attention. I felt truly a part of the community. After September 11 I had the feeling shared by virtually every red-blooded male in America: that because I had not been in New York City on that day, that because I had not been called to trudge into the towers on a doomed rescue mission, that because I was not a fireman, that because I was alive and unscathed, I was not truly a man. I had not participated directly in September 11 or its aftermath, and no one was asking my opinion of its implications, either. I was a failed artist, a mute inglorious pundit, the author of one unpublished and several abandoned novels. I had by that time given up on a life in the world of literature. Playing in the field of real estate signaled an alternate form of legitimacy for me. Finally, I was entering the middle class. I found myself thinking a lot about hardwood floors and updated wiring and what went into the selection of a general contractor. General contractor. I liked saying those words. I liked knowing what they meant. I immersed my self in The Field Guide to American Houses. I may not have been able to publish my writing, but it seemed within my grasp to house my family in a half-timbered Arts and Crafts or a spindled Queen Anne. Suddenly, a finished attic seemed the key to personal happiness. I grew rather obsessed with Internet mortgage calculators, which told me always we could afford the houses we were looking at and now seem as rigged as a fairground game: “Swing the Hammer, Ring the Bell, Buy the House!” Our attention focused on a romantic just-stately-enough three-bedroom home a block or so from the center of our village, a symbol of an earlier era of American prosperity. We muted the television so as not to be distracted by the new violent world order and asked our real estate agent, who seemed to be with us all the time, like an unmarried aunt who had come to stay for good, if we should go ahead with the deal. She said yes. We understood her economic interest in the purchase, of course, but in those heady times, everyone’s economic interests seemed miraculously intertwined, and all for the good. Yes, the price was steep, but didn’t we stand to make a nice profit on the Bavarian cottage? This new house seemed to be increasing in value as the three of us stood on the porch jawing about it. Our plan was the same as everyone else’s: buy the wonderful house, be very happy and prosperous, live a life out of Norman Rockwell, and then, once the children went off to college, sell it at a dizzying profit.
We loved the house. We loved its solidity, its large bedrooms, the fresh-looking apple-green tiles in the kitchen, the set of bowed windows in the dining room. We loved the tidy garage and the family room and the fourth bedroom, which would serve as an office. We loved the ornate scrollwork on the radiators, and the comforting way they hissed. We picked up one corner of the rug and gasped with pleasure at the grandiloquence of the hardwood floors. How happy could we be here? I was happy as things stood; the thought of an additional layer of happiness, like a sprinkling of sugar atop an already delicious pie, was intoxicating.
The house was expensive. Two years earlier I would have laughed at the price. How could I possibly afford that? But the parameters of real estate are an ever-shifting business, with no place of solid footing—like a pit of quicksand, if you’ll forgive a too-handy simile. I sometimes regretted having sold my river-view apartment; apartments in the building were now fetching close to a million dollars. Why couldn’t I just have paid that little mortgage every month? I could have paid it with the change I lost in the sofa. But it somehow doesn’t work that way.
This house cost a lot more than the Bavarian cottage. But everything, in those heady days, still seemed possible.
“That’s a big nut every month,” said my wife warily.
A few wispy cirrus clouds of doubt streamed across our sunny blue sky. Was it really a good idea to start a new 30-year mortgag
e in our midforties? We’d have to meet that big monthly nut until we were in our seventies … No. We would sell the house at a nice profit before that. No doubt. No doubt. What would we get? That all depended, I said with great self-importance and a distinct lack of foresight, on what the market was doing when we opted to sell. The world of real estate was expanding, like the aftermath of an economic Big Bang, and I could not imagine the inevitable contraction. Real estate saws trilled faintly in my ears, like a Beach Boys song sounding distantly from a radio at the seashore. “Location, location, location!” Oh yes, my village was lovely. Twin church spires! Quaint firehouses! A beautiful little jewel of a library! (I loved to look through the cupola atop its roof and imagine the bit of blue sky was a little slice of the infinite.) “Real estate never decreases in value.” No sir. It never did, it never had, it never would. And I didn’t think of myself as greedy. If my house merely retained its value, that would be fine. “Better to have the worst house in a great neighborhood than vice versa.” Yes. And my new house wouldn’t even be the worst. It was solidly in the middle. “If you’re choosing between taking vacations and having a nice house, buy the house, because having a great house is like being on perpetual vacation.”
Who thinks up this stuff?
We had the house inspected. We knew an inspector whom we trusted and respected, but owing to a series of misunderstandings, we didn’t get him but another inspector who worked for the same franchise. She was tall, immaculately groomed. Her shirt with her name in script on the pocket and her work pants were crisp and creased. She had never owned a house. She was thinking about buying a place. My wife and I must have started a little. She showed us her credentials, her residence inspector postsecondary certification plus her residence inspection protocol, a score or more checklists in green binders, which we would receive a copy of. “I’ve done hundreds of these things,” she told us in blasé fashion.
Perhaps I am too ruled by prejudice, but I know what I want in a residence inspector. I want a man who’s been living in houses and fooling around with them all his life. If he’s short and squat and smokes, all to the good. I want someone who can stand in an entrance hallway, pressing his hands mystically to both walls, and feel in an instant the vital signs of the house, checklists be hanged. I want someone who doesn’t tick off individual areas of inspection but sees the holistic connection between the loose drain grate in the basement and the faulty exhaust vent on the roof and the relationship of function to the secondary and tertiary issues: indecisive thermostats, weak-willed toilets, overeager circuit breakers.
We thought of waiting for our own inspector but there was no time. The project had taken on a life and momentum of its own, which is always dangerous. It did seem to us, and to the realtor, the sellers, and all the attorneys involved that if we didn’t have that inspection on that day, the deal would fall through. We were terrified that someone would jump in and snatch the house away from us. Isn’t that absurd? We imagined all manner of people carrying attaché cases full of cash, waiting to muscle us out. Of course, that was not the case. In all the time we have lived here, no one has knocked on our door with an attaché case, begging to be allowed to buy the house—not even before the housing market collapsed in 2008.
My wife had the first inkling that this was all a mistake. It came to her in the night, as though she had been ravished by an incubus of insight. When I awoke, she was pale, drawn, wide-eyed with terror. She said she hadn’t slept. This was all, she said, a horrible mistake. What were we thinking?
I dismissed her fears. I thought she was just being alarmist. But my wife is a woman of blinding intelligence; I should have listened to her. But oh, the tangles of a marriage! I judged our very ability to vault ahead in the real estate world as prima facie evidence that we should; I dismissed my wife’s impulses toward caution as mere, well, caution. It may not have been a sophisticated analysis, but I thought she was being a chicken. Our dynamic was of the fairly standard male/female variety, but of course we put our own spin on it.
I made us press onward. Everything, I was sure, would turn out for the best. My wife disagreed strongly. She was ready to cut our losses and run. But my mix of Candide-like optimism and bullheadedness eventually prevailed. I called for calm and rationality. I was determined that we adhere to our plan. I refused to be pushed around by circumstance. Looking back today at all the trouble we had with this relatively straightforward decision, I sometimes wonder: how would we have coped together during times of historical crisis? Imagine us in our Pompeiian villa in AD 79. “Tremors? We’re always having tremors,” I can picture myself superciliously telling my wife. “I hardly think a few flakes of ash are going to hurt us. Let’s see how the new fresco is coming along.” Or on the Titanic. She’d have done fine in Lifeboat #1; me, I would have been happy to stay behind.
This is the male psyche. We won’t be bullied. Our backs go up. We dig in our heels. We can be obstinate to the point of willful blindness. We are not prone to introspection. This cluster of traits, though sometimes productive, leading to things like the invention of the steam turbine, can also invite poor decision making. And in the wake of disaster, when the scaffoldings have collapsed around our ears, still we will not admit error. Instead, we palliate our womenfolk, who saw it all coming, and put the best face on things. I imagine Adam and Eve leaving the garden in their new animal skins. “All right, let’s just move on,” Adam buzzes in Eve’s ear. “So your childbearing pangs will be great. So the ground is cursed, and we can look forward now only to thorn and thistle? Get used to it … Or rather, think of the possibilities!”
As the day of the closing drew near, the karma turned more and more sour. My wife was normally the paperwork person, but she abandoned it all in despair, and I now faced increased dealings with people like our lawyer, who I didn’t think was filing our forms in a timely fashion. I found myself in the odd position of pressuring him to move forward with a deal for which even I was losing enthusiasm. My daily existence had taken on the skewed logic of a too-vivid dream. I seemed to be moving through molasses. I felt, too, a blossoming sense of paranoia: my beautiful little village seemed populated by predators who would ensnare me in bad deals, swindle me, take from me what meager fortune I had amassed.
Never before had I felt more an outsider. The real estate agent, my attorney, the seller’s attorney, the building inspector, and county clerks and the tax assessor—how could I have gotten mixed up with the lot of them? They all went to school together. Christ, they were probably all related, by blood and by marriage. Their faces, peering at me at the closing, all seemed to look alike. I was sure that none were in debt, that none had ever gotten himself in a hole for such a big mortgage. Their money, I imagined feverishly, came from the hard work of their serious rural forebears, who sold bushels of corn and baskets of eggs and cans of milk and then were shrewd enough to sell the farms to developers, who marketed overpriced McMansions to citified suckers who could scarcely afford them.
I’ve seen plenty of movies and TV shows in which young marrieds take possession of new houses. They always seem happy: filled with hope, brimming with plans, nervous in a good way, giggly. My own vision of things is darker. I think of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo finally buying that house in Connecticut after all those years renting—she, livid and thick of frame, and he, puffy with drink—and I think: it’s a good thing the series is in its last season, for surely now these two weary middle-aged mortgagees will kill each other. John Payne and Maureen O’Hara in Miracle on 34th Street find Santa’s cane in the new house, and I think that soon the misery will commence. Little Natalie Wood, up in her dormered bedroom, just might hear, at night, the sound of grown-ups arguing.
We took possession of our new house on a gray midwinter’s afternoon. Our team of moving men trooped in and out of the front door with boxes and furniture, and if I squinted and looked at them a certain way it seemed they were actually moving us out of the house, not in, like one of those optical illusions where the sp
inning statue changes direction, and I found myself sort of relieved for a moment. But then, of course, reality would intrude, harsher than ever.
The house had seemed rather stately when we looked at it; now it just seemed dark. Gloomy. All the furniture from the Bavarian cottage didn’t come close to filling the rooms. We would buy more, I thought, and then the parade of expenses began. I had budgeted for a new roof—even our tyro home inspector could see that we needed one of those—but in her inexperience she had missed an underlying problem, and I thus learned more than I ever wanted to, at an enormous cost, about the need to have one’s soffits rebuilt, and the always-intriguing interplay between soffit and fascia.
When we owned the Bavarian cottage, I never gave a thought to the national economy. But now, I died a little death with each plunge in the stock market.
I pined hopelessly for the past.
The world seemed to be sinking into anarchy. I couldn’t watch the World Trade Center stuff anymore. I felt deafened by the din of terror and misery.