by Meghan Daum
That’s not to say I didn’t experience my share of coyotes and deer and other predictable representatives from the California animal kingdom (in my time there I’d see owls and a tarantula, though never a mountain lion). It’s just that the threat of fire (barbecues and outdoor smoking were federal offenses) and, especially in the upper reaches of the canyon, the sense that anywhere you might want to go felt immeasurably far away—the road from the coast to the village area of the canyon was nine miles of steep, cliff-hugging switchbacks; the road from the village to my hilltop apartment was another five miles up a narrow, flood-prone pass—brought a heightened drama to minor events. On my second day in the apartment, I stood on the balcony and watched a helicopter bank around the mountain from the south and draw closer and closer until the bushes began shaking and dust rose from the ground in cloudbursts, and eventually it brushed over me and, astonishingly, landed in the yard of the large stucco English-manor-style house across the street. Since this yard was also often used as a riding ring, a great deal of hay and soil and horse manure whirled into a cyclone as the helicopter touched down. From the driveway, where I’d run for a better vantage point, I saw a woman emerge from the house. She was clutching a baby. A paramedic jumped out of the helicopter—its blades were still rotating; its giant metal body made the nearby Land Rover look like a toy—and ducked his way through the debris until he caught her elbow and guided them both in. Within seconds the thing was in the air again, the shrubs were oscillating, and the dust had formed a curtain down the center of the road. The helicopter murmured out of the canyon until, like a fly let out of a window, it was a black dot and then nothing at all.
I remember being shaken up by this scene. I assumed the baby was unconscious. I was afraid it might even be dead. I found myself imagining the scene inside that helicopter: a desperate, hysterical mother shouting above the noise, an EMT who knew it was too late, an infant gone blue.
A few days later, I met a woman who lived a few houses up the road.
“Oh, that!” she said. “The baby just fell off the bed and was stunned for a minute. Once you call 911, they’re required to come out. And since all our evacs are airlifts—well… that’s just the deal here. The baby was back to normal by the time they arrived, but I guess she took her in to be looked at. Can’t hurt, right?”
So this was my new home: a land where babies were carried off in helicopters and the sun seemed so close to the earth you could almost hear it buzzing like a fluorescent light. As for the residents, I’d see them in the general store (which smelled fine to me), wearing yoga pants and giant shawls as they pawed through bins of overpriced fennel. But because of the sleepy, home-oriented culture of canyon life, I never really met any of them. Despite some efforts to wiggle my way into things by driving halfway down the mountain to the coffee shop on Sunday mornings and looking up from my newspaper every four seconds to determine if anyone had walked in who seemed worth talking to (though what does “worth talking to” mean, and, moreover, what good has ever come from sitting in a coffee shop by yourself?), I barely spoke to anyone during my first month in the canyon.
That sort of went for my landlord, too, who I’ll call Bill. Though he was well-meaning and distinctly uncreepy (an anomaly, apparently, in single male proprietors of rentable guest apartments in the canyon), he also did not always seem entirely human. A sales rep for a drug company, he’d built the house and adjacent garage/guest unit with insurance money from his original (and ostensibly more modest) house, which had been destroyed in a fire a decade earlier. This must have been quite a settlement, because the new house called to mind a cross between an Ian Schrager hotel and the Getty Center. An austere, modernist slab of limestone and glass, the place was imposing if rather understated on the outside and spotless on the inside. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, since he clearly didn’t need the money, he rented out two rooms in the house as well as the above-the-garage apartment, though I rarely saw my fellow tenants. In the living room, the mahogany-colored floors gleamed as though covered with a thick layer of nail polish. The kitchen, which contained no traces of food, was lined with granite countertops on which nothing but a shiny black coffeemaker and a toaster—both immaculate enough to suggest lack of use—sat like items in a furniture store display.
Bill’s chief companion was his dog, which roamed the hills of the canyon all day and sometimes all night. A Texan (not the Austin kind but the small-town, ranchy kind) of indeterminate age—I put him in his late fifties, but what did I know?—he made occasional reference to an ex-girlfriend but otherwise seemed to have few friends or acquaintances. I assumed that was the reason he had tenants, though his behavior was so frosty I often wondered if he had some kind of Asperger’s-like social disorder. He did complicated mathematical calculations to determine how many kilowatt hours of electricity I’d used and presented me with annotated bills. The only laundry area on the premises was inside his house next to the kitchen, and upon my moving in, he proclaimed that until he could trust me enough to give me a key, I’d have to do my laundry only during the day on weekends, when he was home. (One day, weeks later, he knocked on my door and said, verbatim, “I now trust you. Here is a key.”)
Bill wasn’t in any way an unkind man, just an extraordinarily awkward one. He was also, at least as far as I could tell, extraordinarily sad. In the evenings, as I stood on the balcony of my apartment and watched the sun drop into the gray mirror of the Pacific Ocean, I often glimpsed Bill through his kitchen window. Every night, he’d sit down on a stool at his kitchen counter and eat his dinner with a glass of red wine. What was most striking about this was not only the old-fashioned elegance of the meals—they always appeared to be something like chicken cordon bleu or roast beef with carrots (and not the microwavable kind either)—but also the fact that he ate while staring straight ahead. From my vantage point on the balcony, I saw neither reading material nor the blue glow of a television set. And as I stood there, sometimes drinking black tea if I was going to attempt to motivate myself to leave the mountaintop for the evening, sometimes drinking wine if I needed to let myself off the hook, I often wondered if geographical beauty made loneliness that much more lonely. Was it better to eat dinner alone facing that view? Was it better to silently chew your roast beef while watching the shadows descend onto the cliffs and the sun drop into the sea? Or was eating alone best suited to a double-wide trailer or a moldy studio apartment with a view of a parking lot?
The times I noticed, Bill ate facing away from his windows. So maybe there’s your answer.
For my part, I ate facing the computer. And to my great distress, I was using the computer not to write my screenplay or even a new book but to surf the Internet and look at pictures of real estate. I looked at places for sale and for rent. I looked in L.A. and New York and even places I’d never been. I looked at mansions and shacks, studio apartments and penthouses. I looked, of course, at farms in Nebraska. And then I started having the extra-room dream again. As before, the property lines of my life stretched far beyond the place I actually lived. They drew themselves around imaginary houses—bigger houses, zany houses, houses without floors—and taunted me in my sleep. Within days, the extra-room dream expanded to include extra barns, extra cornfields, extra horizons, extra oceans. And though I tried to focus on the present, my mind couldn’t keep from snapping back to the farm on Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. Within a month of arriving in Topanga, I found myself calling Linda.
“I think I want to make an offer on that place,” I told her.
“Okay,” she said. This was delivered in precisely the same tone—simultaneously neutral and chirpy—she’d used a month earlier when I’d declared I was permanently leaving Nebraska.
My details on what happened next are fuzzy. I recall that there was quite a bit of faxing back and forth. Since I did not have a fax machine in the apartment and the “business center” at the Topanga general store was apparently operated by someone on a permanent vacation, I found mys
elf driving to a Mail Boxes Etc. some eighteen miles away in the San Fernando Valley to make the bid. Meanwhile, the farm, which was unoccupied, seemed suddenly to be both for sale and not for sale. There was also some confusion as to who the actual owner was. Such murkiness is not uncommon in rural real estate transactions. Often the person selling the property is doing so on behalf of an aging parent, and even more often that parent is disappointed that his or her offspring is not keeping the place and farming the land himself or herself, a dynamic that sets up a teeter-tottering climate of guilt and resentment and therefore causes a house to be simultaneously on and off the market.
But in the case of Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G, I’m almost certain what was happening was that the sellers were cognizant of the one factor in this equation I’d chosen to ignore, namely that I was wholly incapable of managing a farm and would likely not save it from winter’s ruin but rather hasten its journey there. How could they possibly have thought differently? This was a tiny rural community in which the median home price was about $50,000 and there were hardly any unmarried people, let alone single women with Little House on the Prairie fixations. And now, after having the place on the market so long that they’d nearly forgotten about it, the sellers were being told that a thirty-two-year-old woman who’d once lived in New York City but was now living on a mountaintop in Los Angeles wanted to buy it with money she’d earned from writing a book. Moreover, this woman planned to live there on a part-time basis.
They rejected my offer of $99,999.
Undeterred, I countered with $110,000. In truth, “countered” may not be the right word here. I’m not sure the sellers responded to my original offer with an actual number; it may have been something closer to a no. But from my makeshift workstation in that cubelike apartment, I developed a relationship to my desktop calculator that was almost stalkerlike in its intensity. Now that I’d been thwarted, I wanted the farm even more, in no small part because I remained convinced that whoever bought it would assault it with carpet and wallpaper and granite kitchen islands from Home Depot and that it was up to me—the caped crusader of good design, the preservationist of the prairie—to save it from this fate. I still, however, had no plans to live there year-round, a consideration that made my price point a significantly more complicated equation. I needed, in other words, to be able to pay for an apartment in L.A., plus afford the mortgage on the farm, plus pay whatever it would cost to hire someone to take care of the farm when I wasn’t there (and let’s face it, even when I was), plus whatever it would cost to travel back and forth between California and Nebraska. Having absolutely no idea what any of this would cost, I’d find myself losing focus on the numbers on the calculator and instead drifting into a fantasy wherein I’d be strolling through the prairie grass that surrounded the house, the wind blowing my suddenly long and improbably lustrous hair behind me and whispering “owner.”
The seller refused the $110,000 offer. I came back with $120,000. Considering that this was the asking price, I figured we were done.
“They’ve accepted another offer,” Linda told me.
“What?” I shrieked. “For how much? From whom?”
“A hundred and ten thousand dollars,” she said. “They sold it to a friend.”
No doubt I spent several minutes sputtering about how unfair this was and insisting that it couldn’t possibly be legal and what the hell were they thinking and what kind of people would accept an offer that’s less than what someone else was willing to pay, especially someone who’d be putting at least 20 percent down and who (and I’d told Linda to impress upon them my love for early-twentieth-century American antiques) would restore the place to its original turn-of-the-century rustic splendor rather than install the wall-to-wall bedroom carpet and Jenn-Air-equipped, faux-marble-tiled kitchen that this “friend” (no doubt the proud owner of a NASCAR driver-of-the-month wall calendar) probably had up his or her crappy poly-blend sleeve. No doubt I asked if there was any way to save the situation. Couldn’t they be made to reconsider? Wasn’t there a way to supply some sort of additional proof of my wonderfulness? Did they know I had a novel coming out?
No doubt Linda was kind and conciliatory and told me there were lots of farmhouses out there and that she’d keep looking for me. And while, thinking back on it, I’m not sure I really ranted out loud about NASCAR calendars, not to her anyway, the truth is that I don’t really remember what I said. The truth is that when I heard this news, I was swept up in a tidal wave of despair that, oddly enough, I can still only compare to the singular pain of being dumped in high school by my first boyfriend. As is nearly always the case with first “loves,” the heartache was as profound as it was unwarranted, and as I contemplated the loss of Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G, all I could think was that I was experiencing a level of devastation that I assumed I’d long ago inoculated myself against as though it were chicken pox.
But there it was again, as raw and as wretched as it had been the first time. Like all events that feel tragic despite clearly being nontragic, losing the farm engendered a pain that was only intensified by the knowledge that I shouldn’t have been nearly as upset as I was. But even in the midst of it, I knew the wound wasn’t existential so much as it was (embarrassingly, prosaically) personal. It was irksome enough that the sellers had accepted an offer that was $10,000 less than mine (not a small amount in rural Nebraska) and therefore rejected not just my money but, quite literally, me as a person (in their view, I was the unsuitable owner: What myopia! What obtuseness! Perhaps there was even sexism at work). The real anguish, however, came from the fact that I could no longer soothe my loneliness by clinging to the fantasy of the farm. As though Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G had been a life raft in the vast, disorienting sea of my new life in California, I’d clung to its more fantastical qualities for the better part of two months. Suddenly disabused of them, I felt naked and miserable and robbed of my dream. Worse, I felt robbed of the person I’d desperately wanted to be. That person, I’d come to realize in a short period of time, was not the sort who lived over a pharmaceutical salesman’s garage in the moneyed, parched crevices of the Santa Monica Mountains. She was the sort who made her own way, who staked her own claim. The problem was that I no longer had any idea where that claim should be.
I’d like to say that I finally picked myself up and made peace with my surroundings, which really should have been visually spectacular enough to counteract whatever dip was occurring in my serotonin levels. I’d like to say that I buckled down and threw myself into the screenplay or started a new novel or even wrote a magazine article or two. Obviously, the happy ending to this story would be that I met some impossibly sexy glass-blower (who was both a real artist and commercially successful) and moved with him into a luxury yurt. However, this was not to be. As I’d so often done in the wake of my torpor at Vassar, I spent my time not reading or writing or helping those less fortunate but riding the miserable pendulum that swings between the impulse to try to make things work and the impulse to escape.
I began taking yoga classes at the Topanga yoga studio (the community might not have had a fax machine, but you better believe it had yoga). On Friday nights, when there was live music at the local bar and grill, I drove halfway down the mountain and planted myself on a bar stool. In neither of these settings did anyone talk to me. Even after I’d attended yoga no fewer than ten times and forced myself to go to the bar no fewer than five times (not including two lamentable dinners alone there while pretending to read a magazine), I still hadn’t met anyone who could have come close to being described as an acquaintance. Even Rex, who spent his days running around the property like a wild thing, seemed keener to hole up in Bill’s house in the evenings than in the apartment. Later I would learn that this was because Bill was wooing him with canned dog food (I only fed him dry), but at the time it only added to my suspicion that I’d become an invisible, perhaps even silent and odorless person. At stop signs I took an extra pau
se before proceeding. Did other cars even see me? Was it possible that in trying to blend into my surroundings I’d somehow erased myself?
Four months after arriving in Topanga, I decided I had to move. Determined to leave the canyon but still unwilling to commit to a lease longer than a few months, I sublet a cottage apartment a few blocks from the beach in Venice. The woman living there, a late-twenty-something named Dani, needed to return to the East Coast for a few months to take care of her mother, who was sick with cancer. The place was furnished, which meant I’d need to put my bed and my other large items into yet another storage unit. But I was by then so desperate to live someplace where running out for milk did not necessarily feel like crossing the Donner Pass—plus Alison lived nearby—that I overlooked the fact that the cottage smelled vaguely like kitty litter.
Amid copious apologies for the inconvenience I was causing, I told Bill that I was moving.
“I won’t miss you, but I’ll miss Rex,” he said.
A few days before Christmas of that year, I moved into Dani’s cottage in Venice.
I need at this juncture to say a few things about single women and furniture. You know the self-loathing impulse that causes women who hate their bodies to buy oversized, overly trendy, and cheap clothing? You know that tortured promise we make to ourselves in the dressing room of Target that this will be the last time we buy an ugly skirt for $12 because we’re planning to lose weight and then we’ll invest in a real wardrobe? Multiply that phenomenon by twenty and you have the tragedy of the single woman who won’t buy decent furniture because she’s waiting until she gets married.
Often this woman’s furniture is made of wicker (not including the ubiquitous halogen torchiere lamp); other times it’s composed of lightly stained pine of the sort that’s frequently used for futon frames and collapsible bookshelves. As with the Target skirt, the bad furniture is almost always provisional. As soon as true love—and a corresponding mortgage—are reeled in, the wicker and pine will be traded in for items from proper furniture retailers. In the meantime, however, the only things for which the single woman will willingly overpay are scented candles. She will have loads of them: fat and thin, pear scented and vanilla scented and “rain” scented, in every imaginable color and shape. The reason she has these is that she believes they will make men want her. She believes that if a guy she likes is in her apartment—even if he’s not attracted to her in the least—the singular act of touching a lit match to a slab of wax that smells vaguely like Febreze will alter the chemistry of the encounter in her favor. It will make him lust for her, then fall in love with and marry her.