Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

by Meghan Daum

  Was I working during this time? Yes. Sort of, anyway. I was teaching the aforementioned graduate writing course at an art college about fifty miles north of L.A., a gig that required me to hold forth on subjects such as “narrative arc” for three hours a week, plus read a lot of student work, much of it about sexual fetishes. I also have a magazine clip or two from this period, so it appears that I hadn’t retired. But my output was minimal to say the least. Did I socialize? Again, my memory of this time is abstruse and slightly surreal, the cognitive manifestation of a finger poking through cotton at the top of an aspirin bottle, but I think I did see friends. I’m pretty sure, however, that I did so for the sole purpose of talking about my house. I know I talked about nothing other than the house in one of my meetings with film executives since my agent called afterward and said only, “I hear you changed your mind about the color of the living room.” Needless to say, I didn’t get a development deal or whatever it was I was supposedly in there to get. In fact, it was one of my last “industry meetings.” My agent—understandably, mercifully—moved on to other clients. I moved on from the cumbersome lie of pretending I was interested in anything other than the acquisition of the perfect set of wall sconces. With friends, I no longer bothered with conversational throat clearing. There was no “How are you? What have you been up to?” Just “What do you know about bathtub caulk?”

  “You’re allowed to stay on this topic for six months,” Alison told me (she of the full-service condo with the tiny terrace and the Jacuzzi tub and appliances so new that even a nuclear attack would not interrupt the spin cycle; she who didn’t know what it meant to able to smell your electricity). “You’re beginning to bore people. Maybe you should try going on a date.”

  Of course, what I knew but had not yet brought myself to fully articulate was that I was on a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week date with my house and had no room for any other relationship. Three months, four months, six months into my home ownership, and I still had a moratorium on pleasures of the flesh or even the prefatory pleasures of being taken out to dinner. In fact, this moratorium had gradually extended into a moratorium on things I’d once assumed myself incapable of not doing: working, socializing, reading.

  But there I was, not doing them. I was not, in fact, doing anything. At night (and, admittedly, for much of the day) I would sit at my desk in the rec-room-turned-loftlike space and stare at the industrial-style ceiling fan above my head until I felt I could almost rise up into it and allow the blades to cut fine slices off the top of my scalp. Other times I would lie in bed for more than an hour in the late afternoon, watching dusk float through the windows and settle into the house like a tranquilizer. Los Angeles has magic-hour lighting that literally has the effect of allowing one to see the world through a rose-tinted glass, and from my bed this display looked marvelous, even somehow culturally significant. It was as if the house demanded that I be there as a witness to its fleeting moments of beauty. And I, having increasingly nowhere to go and nothing to do, was happy to obey. This was no longer light anesthesia. This was a coma.

  If there is anything I pride myself on, it’s dental and mental hygiene. I’ve never had a cavity, nor have I ever found myself unable to cope with most of what comes up in the life of a person of my particular station. By the time I acquired my house, I’d figured out how to earn a living, how to unclog the toilet, when to rotate my car tires, when to take something to the dry cleaner. I had, back at age thirty, realized that loose-fitting tops are best paired with streamlined bottoms and vice versa (at twenty-seven I did not know this). I could cook dinner for friends (nothing haute cuisine, but passable), walk into crowded parties by myself, speak in front of large audiences, and take long international flights without drugging myself or worrying excessively about losing my passport. But the year I became a homeowner, my teeth continued to thrive while something else eroded. My grip on my own humanity was loosening. There is no way to explain it other than I seemed to be allergic to both the outside world and myself. I couldn’t stand being alone in my house and yet could not bear to be around most people. It was as if the pleasure in solitude that had once worked so well in my favor had become a foul-tasting compulsion, the toxic centerpiece of my life.

  When I look back on 2004, I see a downward curve that appears to reach its nadir somewhere around August, just a month after I bought the house. It then gives the impression of remaining steady until well into December until, like a plane in an imperceptible spiral dive, it reveals itself to have been plummeting steadily the whole time. That is to say, even when I thought I was getting better or at least staying the same, I was actually getting worse. As bad as I felt around Labor Day, when I’d be in a supermarket and suddenly feel such an urgent need to get home and lie on the bed, Thanksgiving was worse than I even perceived it at the time. Having eschewed all invitations in favor of quiet quality time alone at the house, I’d convinced myself that I was elated and proud to be cooking a box of Stove Top stuffing and eating it while actually sitting at the kitchen table rather than standing over the sink. How civilized I was! (There was that word again; it haunted me.) How peaceful and empowered and possessed of such comfort in my own skin it was as if I were wearing pajamas. As it happened, I actually was wearing pajamas.

  What was happening here, really? Was this simply a homeowner’s version of postpartum depression? Was I suffering the inevitable disappointment of getting what you wish for? I think I might have suspected as much at the time, but now I wonder if my malaise had to do with something slightly different. I wonder if it was not the uprooting that had thrown me off balance but, rather, the disorienting effects of staying put. This was, after all, the first time in nearly three years that I hadn’t been actively trying to move. If life in the Silver Lake farmhouse had been marked by intense decorating followed by intense house hunting, if life before then had been a lurching migration from broken lease to sublet to doomed farm purchase to another broken lease to a dogsit, life on Escalada Terrace must have seemed frighteningly static at first, even suffocating. Over the years, transience had become my default setting. If I wasn’t moving, I was making plans to move. And now that those hobbies had been taken away, now that looking and thinking about real estate qualified more as a sick indulgence than as a survival mechanism, I found myself stripped not only of a pastime but also of a purpose. I quite literally did not know what to do with myself.

  How does one pull out of such a spiral dive? The short answer: by running out of money to the point where you have no choice but to go back to work. I’ll have you know this: I got a temp job. I got a gig writing catalog copy for an international diet food company. Instead of meeting with producers in Hollywood, I started getting in the car every morning at eight and driving to an office building I accessed with a key card I wore around my neck. I then sat at a desk until 6:00 p.m. every night, typing out things like “Jan feels great and has tons of energy, but results may vary” and showing them to an editor who would give me back notes like “sounds too breezy.” Maybe the workplace was so depressing that I couldn’t help but feel less depressed at home. Maybe, in the true spirit of my Midwestern roots, I was simply better off toiling away in mindless if income-generating drudgery than staring at my wall waiting for inspiration to descend from above like a sudden leak. In any case, I got better, though I can’t give you the long answer as to why. The long answer is something I’ll probably never be able to articulate, because I’ll probably never have it. The long answer, I suspect, is inexpressible because it never really comes. Like growing up or honestly falling in or out of love, the journey to sane from not entirely sane traverses an invisible plain. You can no more know how or when you got better than know how or when you came unglued in the first place.

  I do have one strong suspicion, though. I think my bathroom floor might actually have cured me. By now it was early 2005. I still hadn’t gone on a date or anything, but my hair had gone back to blond, and it was not quite as short. The condition
and decor of the house, though not perfect, were decent. One night while brushing my teeth before bedtime, I noticed that a tiny, hexagon-shaped piece of porcelain tile was peeking up from a missing corner of the cheap and hideous baby blue vinyl tile. Though I’d seen this porcelain before, somehow I’d never registered it as the porcelain, the original hexagonal porcelain tile from 1928 that, in my imagination and (I knew for a fact; over the years I’d become as sure of this as I was of my own name) in many people’s imaginations, represents not just tile or floor covering but an entire life philosophy, an entire aesthetic system, an entire way of—there is no other way to put it—being okay in the world.

  How had I not noticed it before? I think I had but subconsciously assumed it was a lost cause. I’m pretty sure I’d thought that underneath that baby blue layer of Landlord’s Delight lay the shards of the house’s most delicate bones. I’d figured the tiles were broken and that coming face-to-face with the senseless damage would serve only to press further down on the bruise that had become my only mood. But that evening—and it was late, nearly eleven; well past my bedtime—I took a butter knife and set about prying up the vinyl tile as though a miner were trapped beneath it. And to my amazement, in tiny fragments and, occasionally, in large, fist-sized sections, the stuff peeled off the floor, revealing inch after inch of perfectly intact white porcelain tiles. A filthy layer of impossibly sticky adhesive covered every inch, of course, and my pants ripped at the knees and my shoes stuck to the floor and, by the third hour, my clothes were soaked with sweat and my nails were broken and my hands were bleeding and my right thumb was virtually paralyzed from gripping the knife so hard.

  By 3:00 a.m. I had a new bathroom floor. Because this floor was composed of original porcelain hexagonal tile, I had a new life. Or maybe it was just the opposite. Maybe I had my old life back. The tiles that had captured my imagination so many years ago—in the music copyist’s apartment (and I hadn’t even seen them there, hadn’t even known what they were; I’d merely intuited their presence and subconsciously identified them as my own personal meme), in the apartment on 100th Street, in the apartment on Eighty-sixth Street—had formed the path that led me, finally, to this home of my own. In unearthing them, perhaps I had unearthed missing pieces of myself, the pieces that had been lost along all the moves like wayward china or that box of random, uncategorizable items (extra keys, silk flowers, a twelve-roll pack of paper towels) that inevitably never makes it from point A to point B. And now here they were. And here I was, perhaps finally greater than, or at least equal to, the sum of the parts I’d strewn across the country over all the moves. Here I was, finally unpacking my stuff with no intention of repacking it. And as though I’d been reintroduced to a favorite song that the years had erased from my brain, my spirits lurched back into their sockets. My house had almost ruined me until it pulled me, like a piece of driftwood, back to the rock-ribbed shore.

  SIX

  Time passed. It’s an obvious thing to say, but sometimes it’s the only thing to say. Finally, my house and I made peace. I quit picking at it, and it quit sprouting leaks and emitting strange buzzing noises. That is to say, I paid people to fix the leaks and stop the buzzing noises and finally got busy with other things. My days, dull as ever, were at least not sacrificed to catatonia. I went to my temp job at the diet food company, I went to yoga, I went home and did not watch Trading Spaces or House Hunters or Design on a Dime but read the newspaper—and sometimes actual books—instead. Eventually, I began writing occasional arts and entertainment articles for the Los Angeles Times (admittedly, one was about a design show called Monster House), and when presented with the opportunity to try out for a position as a weekly columnist on the opinion page, I stayed up late at night after the temp job and wrote as if my life depended on it.

  Actually, it was my house that depended on it. The mortgage payment was $2,054 per month. This did not include payments on the equity line of credit I’d run up with all the floor refinishing and electrical panel replacing and painting. I couldn’t get by on diet food money alone. And then the L.A. Times gave me the column. I was now going to write something every week that really had nothing to do with real estate or home decor (not that I didn’t sneak it in whenever possible). Instead, I wrote about what I called “social politics,” about the intersection of hard news and pop culture, about abortion rights and gay marriage and Madonna and Ann Coulter and fires in Malibu. This wasn’t a full-time job, and it didn’t pay enough to keep my whole ship afloat, but it did allow me to quit the diet food company so I could take on other freelance assignments and devote my whole work schedule to writing. And like a stalker who finally begins to lose interest in the object of his obsession, I began to think about things other than real estate and whether the green walls in the bedroom were still not the right shade of green. Sure, there were half-assed renovations I still wanted to do in, for instance, the kitchen. But I put them out of my mind. Instead of thinking about home improvements every day, I thought about them every week, then maybe twice a month. I began to get a life. And then—because apparently that’s how these things work—I met a man neither puerile nor psychologically unstable.

  His name was Alan. I liked the name. It reminded me of the 1970s somehow, also of upper West End Avenue in New York. A bearded guy wearing a corduroy jacket over a turtleneck, reading Dissent as he waited for a Broadway bus circa 1975, could have been named Alan. But this one was young. One year younger than I am, in fact. He was also mysterious, weird, tall, long eyelashed, wry, a goofball. He was a science reporter at the paper. We met in the lobby, where we were both waiting to meet up with a small group of writers and editors going out for dim sum in Chinatown. It turned out we lived near each other—he was a few miles away in Silver Lake, very near my old rental place—and had once even lived near each other in New York (I on West Eighty-sixth, he on West Ninetieth). But that’s not the point. The point is that within five minutes of starting to talk to him, I recognized something so familiar it was almost as if I were catching a whiff of some beloved, comforting scent from long ago.

  What I was smelling was pure impermanence, the pheromonal emanations of a man on the move. This guy was the epitome of a flight risk, an advertisement for not calling after the third date, or the first. A former expatriate in several countries and pretty clearly a settle-down-a-phobe of the highest order, he had a relocation history that made my moves look like merely rolling around a lot in bed. He’d lived in Uganda and Rwanda, in New York, Mexico City, and Palo Alto, and in a portable ice hut, he claimed, in Washington State. He spoke English and Spanish and some Swahili. He’d done the kind of moving where you show up in a foreign land with a duffel bag and some friend of a friend’s phone number scribbled on a napkin and the kind where your company packs you up and flies you out and sets you up in a gated house with a maid and a secretary. He was a pro.

  Unlike mine, Alan’s transience seemed born more out of curiosity—and sometimes genuine professional necessity—than out of neurotic compulsion. He’d grown up in one house—a comfortable, upper-middle-class split-level in a solid, wholesome rust-belt city—and had parents who were no more interested in moving than they would have been in the state of contemporary fiction if such a thing had ever crossed their minds. In other words, he was both a citizen of the world and a homegrown American boy. He was the human equivalent of a farmstead in the middle of a major city. And, in a refreshing change of pace from much of the last few years, when he asked me out, I was actually intrigued.

  My house must have sensed competition. Less than an hour before my first date with Alan, a Saturday brunch in Silver Lake, I stepped out of the shower and found that the water would not turn off. Though the faucet knob itself turned (360 degrees in fact, like an owl rotating its head), the water flow was unaffected by this action and was gushing into the bathtub at something resembling six gallons per minute. That in and of itself may have posed more of an environmental hazard than a potential structural calamity if not for
the fact that the bathtub drain was about 95 percent stopped up. The water produced by a five-minute shower usually took about an hour and a half to empty out of the tub. I’m embarrassed to say that this had been going on for the entire time I’d been in the house (nearly two years), and despite my attempts to remedy the problem with Drano and with wire coat hangers and, at one point early on, by enlisting the help of the handyman who’d had internal bleeding, it remained unfixed.

  So there I was forty minutes before my date: the water hurling forth and rising menacingly toward the surface, the faucet handle broken, and no idea how to turn the water main off. I realize these are the anecdotes out of which escrow papers that say “——, an unmarried woman,” are born. I know being a single female homeowner who doesn’t know how to turn off the water main in her own home is tantamount to being a sexually active teenager who believes you can’t get pregnant on a Thursday. I remember smiling and condescendingly shaking my head when Kim, back in Lincoln, recounted the story of buying her house and then having to call her father, who lived in a town fifty miles away, because she couldn’t figure out how to open her garage door. I no longer shake my head at that story, at least not condescendingly. In fact, whenever I think of that story now, I think, “How lucky that she had a garage.”

  But back to the water main. I called the Department of Water and Power and got a recording. The bathtub was now just inches from overflowing, so I got a bucket and started scooping water into the toilet. Finally, with ten minutes until the date, I called the cell number Alan had given me.