by Meghan Daum
“Really?” I said. “Surely there’s a way!”
They box stepped around it for a few minutes. We moved the table. We moved the refrigerator. They turned the futon sideways and upright and upside down.
“Not gonna happen,” the other wildebeest said. “Didn’t you measure it when you bought it?”
“Of course I measured inside the room,” I said. “I measured to see if it would fit against the wall.”
Meghan Daum, an unmarried woman. Meghan Daum, an unmarried woman.
“Well, it don’t fit,” said the first wildebeest, taking a cigarette out of his pocket even though he was still balancing the hulking, clanking metal frame on its side with one hand. “There’s no way it’ll go in.”
They left the futon on its side in the kitchen, leaning against the doorway. I paid them the $100—they hadn’t finished the job, but they didn’t seem like the types to argue with—and they walked out of the house and sputtered down Escalada Terrace in their van, the sound of heavy-metal music streaming behind them like exhaust. Inside, the futon stood nearly seven feet tall with the extra inches of its enormous iron armrests. It looked down at me like a menacing machine in some rancid factory; it mocked me with its wheezing springs and terrifying hinges. I stared back at it. I looked at my new floor and my new painted guest room and thought about Alan. I could have called him, I suppose. I could have waited for him to come over the next day and, upon ushering him into the kitchen, ratcheted my voice up an octave and said, “So, uh, wanna help me with this?”
But no. I would not do that. I would not ruin the big reveal. Furthermore, I would not relinquish autonomy over my house to a guy who might not even be my boyfriend yet, a guy who seemed interested enough in me but who any day could get a reporting assignment in Papua New Guinea and decide to just move there and live in a tree house with a supermodel turned Médecins sans Frontières doctor. No! I was not going to let that happen. Not after all the house and I had been through together. I changed out of my Soft Surroundings outfit and into a T-shirt, shorts, and (for lack of steel-toed boots) running shoes. This was going to be a long night.
I’m still not quite sure how I got that thing inside the guest room. To this day, I remain convinced that the dimensions of the doorway are smaller than those of the futon. But I can tell you it took seven hours of pushing, pulling, sliding, scraping, hoisting, cursing, and screaming (with several breaks in between to eat and/or throw tantrums) until finally, miraculously, possibly even mathematically impossibly, it was in there. And after I somehow managed to lower all eight hundred pounds off its side and onto four legs without breaking my fingers or sending it crashing through the floor, I felt more triumphant than I had since the evening of the porcelain tile excavation. Once again, I was filthy, bloodied, and drenched. Once again, I’d spent an entire evening doing an incredibly prosaic task in the most arduous way possible. But it was done, the goal achieved. Buoyed by the adrenaline of victory, I lay down on the futon and fell into an incandescent sleep.
Did I dream? I’d like to say so. I’d like to say I dreamed of an extra room or of a house that was free to someone deserving, a house not free in monetary terms but free in spirit, with its doors and windows open and no sharp edges between inside and outside, no secret passwords for entry, no layers of pedigreed lineage required for cosigning. But I’m pretty sure I just passed out and spent the night as lifeless and brain-dead as a bag of granite. When I awoke, my back and shoulders felt as if they’d been slammed into the hood of a car. My big toe was blackened. The newly painted doorframe was gashed on one side. Stumbling into the kitchen, I beheld the gleaming wood floors, the cheery yellow walls, the sylvan anti-burnish of the cabinets. All together, this enterprise, including the futon delivery, had cost me nearly $4,000.
The newspaper thumped against the walkway. I ambled outside, barely dressed—a regular habit since the only neighbors within eyeshot were late risers (or so I chose to believe). Streaks of morning light were unfolding over the hill across the street. The purple martins were warbling from the lemon tree. A scrawny dog—no, a coyote—swaggered right up the street, stealthy and coy as a gangster, and headed back to its den in the creases of the hill. This is a great house, I thought to myself. With or without the new kitchen floors, with or without the futon, this was not a house without considerable virtues. This was a house of integrity and character, a modest house but also, in its own way, a commanding one. It deserved to be met on its own terms. It had needed some improving, but it also deserved its share of uncomplicated, unprodding, unintervening affection. I owed it—and somehow I was only realizing this now—at least that much. I owed it my love, not just my scrutiny.
That evening Alan came over. “Finally!” I said, as if to imply his nonvisitation hadn’t been at my behest, as if to imply he just hadn’t bothered until now (he saw through this, no doubt, but graciously went along with it). I gave him the twelve-second tour. I feigned nonchalance about the kitchen floors and the farmhouse cabinets and the guest room and the velvet and wrought-iron futon. I led him through the back room with the polished concrete floors and the whitewashed walls and the nickel-plated ceiling fans, through the French doors, and out to the backyard.
I brought him a beer. I made some kind of mediocre dinner—spaghetti or rosemary chicken or defrosted salmon wrapped in foil—and we ate outside on the patio furniture I’d purchased from Craigslist a year earlier. We trod lightly into talk about the demons of our parents and the oddness of our siblings and the various calamities of our previous relationships—the things people talk about on the eighth or ninth date, the things they save until there’s a modicum of safety. And as I led him through the yard to show him the view from over the fence, as I explained the particular nighttime wonder of the twinkling, terraced houses and the strangely comforting searchlights of police helicopters and the fact that occasionally an owl would fly down from the park and sit on a branch like a watchman, Alan stopped beneath the orange tree. Plucking a ripe one, he began peeling it, the rind shaving off into a perfect ribbon.
“This is a great house,” he said.
SEVEN
In 2006, the year I met Alan and two years after I’d bought the house on Escalada Terrace, something called Zillow came along. Zillow is a Web site that calculates the estimated value of your home (there’s that word again, “home”—as if something essentially abstract could be measured by some kind of computerized algorithm). The idea is that it tells you how much your property is worth based on recent sales figures for comparable properties. This is called the Zillow “Zestimate.” Of course, the Zestimate is famously misleading, because it has no way of knowing how much money has been invested in the place by way of French doors and nickel-plated ceiling fans and cabinets purposely designed to look old and worn, but everyone knows that by now. These days I loathe Zillow, but back in 2006 I kind of liked it because it suggested my house was worth more than what I’d paid for it.
What I hated about Zillow, though, was that it told me stuff about my neighbors that, despite my natural nosiness, I really didn’t want to know. Namely, it told me what they paid for their houses, which, if they’d bought before 2004, was usually much, much less than what I’d paid. I resented having this information because it sent me back to my envy-laced days in New York, where apartments were measured not by what you did with them or even in them but by how little you paid in comparison to what they were worth. This was an awful feeling, but still, I couldn’t stop Zillowing people, especially those older and more established than I was. I looked up the houses of my editors at the L.A. Times, of the local politician who lived around the corner, of a tiny handful of celebrities whose addresses I happened to know. This was an absurd waste of time, but I was not the only person doing it. A wealthy, ostensibly extremely busy woman with whom I had brief professional dealings admitted to also doing it. When we met for the first and only time, we made small talk for a few minutes until she let it slip that she knew what neighborhood I lived i
n.
“How did you know that?” I asked.
“I Zillowed you,” she said without apology. Then she made a pouty face, the kind of face a mean girl in junior high might make while pointing out that the price tag was still on your dress and it said $7.99.
“Good for you, though,” she added. “Having your own place.”
By 2007, even the schadenfreudeic aspects of the home valuation game were starting to be less fun. The credit crisis was revving up its engines and preparing for takeoff. Foreclosures dotted the landscape. According to Zillow, my house was now worth just slightly more than what I’d paid for it. The next year, it would be worth exactly what I’d paid for it, and the year after that it would be worth considerably less.
Of course, these were not my botherations or vexations, not the problems of a responsible thirty-year fixed-mortgage holder like myself. To soothe myself, I kept rationalizations in my pockets like Life Savers. I also tried my best only to have real-estate-related conversations with people who also owned and were therefore in the same leaky boat. The world, of course, has always in many ways been divided between renters and owners, between those who’ve committed and those who haven’t, between those who care what shape their foundation is in and those who don’t. But by 2007, that divide had new and different contours; the tables were rapidly turning. Renters regarded owners—at least those of more recent vintage—as cautionary tales. Owners saw renters as smug beneficiaries of their own childishness and risk adversity. Thus, many discussions about our houses and their attendant mortgages tended to devolve into desperate, self-directed pep talks. Hence the following statements, many of which I have repeated no fewer than two hundred times between 2007 and the present day.
“So maybe buying in 2004 wasn’t a great idea, but we all do things on our own timetables. Nothing could have stopped me—and at least I didn’t buy in 2006.”
“At least I’m not upside down.” (My loan is not in excess of what the house is worth.)
“It’s not like I was a short-term investor. The plan was to stay on Escalada Terrace forever, or at least for a long, long time. Maybe even forever. By the time I’m eighty, surely the house will have appreciated.”
The reason homeowners should only say these things to fellow homeowners is that the fellow owners will respond appropriately, which, in a word, is this: “Totally.” (As in, “You’re totally not a short-term investor; you’re totally not upside down; you totally did the right thing in buying your house.”)
Say these things to a renter and he is apt to tell you a “really crazy story” about how he approached the landlord about lowering the rent because of the tough economic times and the landlord “totally said yes! How crazy is that?”
To my surprise as well as to his, Alan and I were still together six months after we met in the L.A. Times lobby. Before we knew it, we’d been together for twelve months, then sixteen. Unlike some of my past relationships, which sometimes seemed more like performances than relationships, Alan and I were managing to coexist without artifice. We did things for each other. He came up with column ideas for me and looked after Rex when I went out of town (he developed a gushing, jubilant love for Rex). I helped him train for the Boston Marathon by sleeping for six weeks in an oxygen-deprivation tent he’d installed over his bed that was designed to improve lung capacity. I’m laughing as I type this. Sleeping in an oxygen-deprivation tent is the kind of thing you (at least I) only do at the beginning of a relationship. Six months later, I would have said, “I’ll see you when your experiment’s over.” Today I wouldn’t let such an apparatus through the front door. But in the winter of 2007 I did this without complaint, and in the spring of 2007 I flew to Boston and watched Alan finish the race in the wind and freezing rain (in three hours and eight minutes; hooray for oxygen deprivation).
But all was not perfect. Consider the following questions, which I found myself pondering at length during this time: When did the definition of “being in a relationship” begin to translate to “always realizing I forgot to pack my other shoe”? Has it been since the late 1960s (or whenever the sexual revolution supposedly began, which no one ever seems to agree on) that adult couples who are “going steady” have seen their lives reduced to commutes between apartments? How come the wedding announcements in The New York Times never state what has to be the truth at least 40 percent of the time, that “the couple, who met at the Shark Bar on Amsterdam Avenue, dated for two years until they decided to marry because the lack of counter space in each other’s bathrooms caused contact lens cases to fall in toilets one too many times”? How come no term has been coined for the particular feeling of dishevelment that results from going directly to work from your boyfriend/girlfriend’s house, a rumpled outfit (hastily chosen and incompletely assembled the evening before) accompanying rumpled tresses (naturally you forgot your hair product) and a nagging anxiety that, back at home, your freezer door has been slightly ajar for twenty-four hours?
I’m inventing the term right now: “nohabitation.” The precursor to cohabitation (and, in fairness, also to breaking up), it’s what causes a lot of couples to abandon their efforts at maintaining separate quarters—and the autonomy, self-respect, and “healthy boundaries” supposedly entailed therein—and join households. Sometimes, of course, marriage is officially on the horizon. And sometimes one person loses a job, and the couple can no longer afford two rents. But almost as often, I’ve noticed, permanent commitment has been merely hinted at rather than discussed out loud. In couples past the roommates/entry-level-job/futon-on-the-floor stage, this can be pretty heedless. After all, decent apartments and maybe even biological clocks are ostensibly in the mix. But when the alternative is nohabitation, a broken lease and a lost security deposit are sometimes small prices to pay. That’s because despite sounding like a misnomer, despite the ways in which you might think a better term would be “bi-habitation,” nohabitation actually plays out very much as it sounds. After a year or more, that exhausting volley between “my place or yours” becomes a tyranny. You may think you’re living in two places, but you’re actually living nowhere.
Alan and I nohabitated for a year and a half. Though I felt my house to be infinitely more comfortable and inviting than his apartment, I tried to be fair and spend as much time at his place as he did at mine. But as though the house were a living thing capable of feeling abandoned, I hated being away from it. I felt nervous, even guilty about leaving it alone overnight. In some of my sillier—which is not to say disingenuous—moments, I imagined the house springing to mischievous life while I was away. I imagined the cracked floor joists and rusted plumbing parts ruthlessly mocking me for being in such denial about their existence. I imagined the curtains anthropomorphizing into lissome goblins that would open the cupboards and steal the cereal.
Alan, by his own admission—maybe even as a point of pride—had certain challenges in the commitment department. He wasn’t comfortable referring to me as his “girlfriend” until after we’d been together at least four months. He also had a habit of saying things like “I’d like to move to China/I want a cabin in Montana/Why not buy a house in Pasadena?/I’d definitely go on a years-long space mission if given the opportunity” within the same three-minute span of time. In retrospect, I can see that I was actually comforted by this. Not one to lose at my own game, I unfurled the flag of my own neuroses and hoisted it up even higher. “I’m buying a farm in Nebraska within the next six years,” I’d say. Other favorite topics included my desire to spend at least three months of every year at an artists’ colony (until I could get my own up and running on the Nebraska farm), my vow never, ever to sacrifice things like charm and original woodwork for things like safe neighborhoods and good school districts, and, above all, my unyielding belief that my house was a one-person house—make that a one-person-plus-one-dog house—and that making it into a two-person house would be a very bad idea.
But after fourteen months of nohabitation, we began to alternate between th
ese topics and the topic of moving in together. It was wasteful, after all, for him to pay rent while I was making a mortgage payment every month. It was a bit ridiculous to be getting five daily newspapers between us and paying two sets of utility bills and letting too much produce spoil in the fridge because we hadn’t gotten around to using it in time. Still, I believe we were both somewhat surprised by the emergence of this issue. Not in an uncharted-waters kind of way, but in a déjà vu–ish kind of way. We’d both lived with people before (and it didn’t escape my notice that the house I’d shared with Ex in Nebraska was just as small as the house on Escalada Terrace). We’d both expressed that these cohabitations had been good, useful, decidedly nonregrettable experiences but that if we were to do it again, it would not be without a relatively sincere intention to marry the fellow cohabitant.
“I wouldn’t move in with someone again unless the wedding was already being planned,” Alan said one evening in late 2006. We were half sitting, half lying on my living room sofa, which was entirely too short for him, reading two separate copies of the same New York Times.
“Oh God, me neither,” I said. “And even then, I don’t know. Don’t some married people live separately?”
He might have thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t.
Still, by the summer of 2007 we were surveying the rooms and closets of my house, wondering if there was space for Alan’s books and wetsuits and surfboards among my books and gazillion file folders and all those unfortunate, oversized Soft Surroundings clothes. None of this, of course, was because we were one “save the date” card away from matrimony. It was because, despite living just slightly more than three miles from each other, we were buckling under the strain of nohabitation. I was sick of the perpetual tower of dirty dishes in his sink; he was sick of there being no room in my closets for his work clothes.