by Meghan Daum
But such headaches were nothing compared with what had arguably become the biggest problem in our relationship: the fact that it was often nearly impossible to park on Alan’s street. So crammed was his block with multiple-family houses and apartment buildings whose parking facilities were totally incommensurate to the number of people apparently living in them that I often wondered if I should just start walking the three miles (unthinkable in L.A.). To go to his place after 6:00 p.m. was to join a caravan of anxious, slow-moving vehicles cruising for empty spaces. Oftentimes, cars would just sit there—radio blasting or the driver reclining back and talking on his cell phone—until a pedestrian appeared on the sidewalk, at which point that pedestrian would be followed to his car and the space immediately seized. Other times, large SUVs could be seen attempting to shoehorn themselves into spaces that weren’t really spaces, their bumpers tapping the surrounding vehicles until car alarms went off and irate owners stormed out of houses threatening to break knees. More than once, when I got frustrated to the point of tears trying to park, I called Alan from my cell and made him take the car and look for a space himself. Once I made an entire dinner of broiled salmon and roasted potatoes in the time it took him to park my car and walk back to his apartment.
And this is why we decided to move in together. Not because we necessarily wanted to get hitched, but because we wanted to be able to park. In the late summer of 2007, we took the first tiny steps toward combining our households. Alan moved his Persian rug into my living room, and I took the white cotton rug that had been in my living room and moved it into the bedroom. When he brought over his Turkish kilim and declared that it should go in the bedroom, I moved the white cotton rug into the kitchen. When it became evident that having a rug in the kitchen caused the table to wobble and made it impossible to pull the chairs out, I put it in a garbage bag with some of my Soft Surroundings purchases and took it to Goodwill.
The guest room, we determined, would be Alan’s “personal space.” The wrought-iron futon would be his to throw his clothes on; the closet would be entirely under his jurisdiction. So over the course of a four-day weekend during which he was climbing to the top of Mount Whitney with an equally aerobically endowed friend, I emptied the closet. This took four days because it required not just sorting through the random dusty, broken, and often unidentifiable crap I’d thrown in there—winter coats, my graduate school thesis, that same goddamned stereo equipment I’d dragged from dorm to dorm at Vassar and still haven’t thrown away because it still works and always seems too “valuable”—but also transferring much of it into the bedroom closet, which in turn demanded its own aggressive weeding out. By the end of the weekend I had seven bags of garbage, five bags of Goodwill items, and a depressing amount of items that could not be thrown away but for which there was no storage room.
And so it went with the cohabitation preparations. I would clear a few things out, Alan would bring a few things in, and, not having room for any of it, we’d cram the stuff in corners until the house attained a certain Grey Gardens–like ataxia. He put one bicycle and the box of rock-climbing gear in the back room. We argued over the TV. Mine was too small, and his was too bulky. His would protrude too much in the living room, I insisted. Besides (ever my mother’s daughter), I couldn’t stand the thought of having a TV in the living room for all to see. The TV, of course, was best hidden out of sight in the guest room, hence the wrought-iron futon, hence the absence of Victorian dollhouse wallpaper (not that he’d witnessed that particular atrocity), but now that he’d be occupying the guest room, we had no choice but to become middlebrow people with a TV in the living room.
We talked about money, about how much he’d pay in rent and how much I already paid in mortgage and whether or not he’d kick in for the cleaning lady and the gardener (yes) and the property tax and insurance (no). He asked why my monthly nut appeared to be far less than my actual monthly expenses, and when I’d say I didn’t know (although hard salami from Whole Foods can be expensive), he’d get confused and huffy and I’d get defensive and self-loathing and start worrying that I’d never again be allowed to make a dinner of salami and wine and eat it while staring at the wall listening to some female singer-songwriter warble about choosing independence over love.
My friends, who approved of our relationship far more enthusiastically than they had any of my past ones, mostly told me to sally forth, to work it out, to not let a good guy fall away because of anxieties over salami. A few looked me straight in the eye and said, “He’ll never marry you if you let him move in; your name from now on will be Free Milk. There will be no purchasing of cows.” I found this troubling, though perhaps not quite as much as I found it ever so slightly relieving. Still, most people insisted it was absolutely the right thing, that the house was plenty big for both of us—after living in New York, how could I possibly see a freestanding house as too small?—that I was plenty old enough to make the right decision. Someone even suggested to me that cohabitation was a “greener” lifestyle choice than the apparently planet-raping scourges of nohabitation. Granted, my father worried out loud that I was giving up my freedom and my solitude, that this surrender to bourgeois convention could bite me in the ass in any number of life-busting ways. “What if he wants to watch TV while you want to read?” he asked, genuine panic rising in his voice. My mother, however, was charmed by Alan and elated that I’d found someone with health insurance (even though I wouldn’t be partaking of it). She offered to buy us a flat-screen TV if we moved in together. I’m not sure she caught the part about it being in the living room.
So we agreed to a fresh start on the TV front. Alan sold his to a friend, and I donated mine, which was five years old and now apparently worth less than a package of batteries, to Goodwill. Too proud to remind my mother about her offer, we purchased our own high-definition flat screen for $800, only to discover that the high-def signal only worked about half the time.
Then came the sofa discussion. My sofa, an elegant gray love seat I’d purchased when I moved into the Silver Lake house, was too short for the six-foot three-inch Alan. When he lay on it, everything from his knees down hung off the edge. His sofa, on the other hand, was long and large and bursting with overstuffed cushions and would have been entirely out of proportion with my living room. But he adored this sofa. Somehow he loved it as if it were a pet, as if it were his own giant, inanimate version of Rex. But these affections, to me, were beside the point. There was, for starters, the problem of the untenable layout of the room. As much as we squabbled over the benefits and limitations of our particular sofas, the fact was that the positions of the front door, the windows, the faux fireplace, and the heat register really allowed no place for any sofa. This was a living room that cried out for beanbag chairs or Japanese-style mats, not real furniture. The sofa I already had barely worked as it was. Perhaps, I suggested, we should have no sofa at all. And maybe we should return the TV while we were at it.
Alan is a problem solver. His almost compulsive need to find solutions darted around our conversations until we were not so much decorating as working a Rubik’s Cube that had suddenly disguised itself as a house. We moved shelves, rotated the rug, and reconfigured chairs. We bought used credenzas from Craigslist and new credenzas from IKEA and stuffed them with electronics equipment and extra blankets and dog toys and anything bereft of a rightful place, which in this house was just about everything except the stove.
On the fourth week of sofa talks, Alan arrived at the answer.
“I will saw my sofa in half,” he said.
He measured the wall and the doorway (of course he measured the doorway). Then he went home and measured his sofa and declared that it would fit in my house if it was one-third shorter than its current length. Then he went on the Internet and Googled “furniture alteration” and (true) “sofa shortening.” And when I said I would not let his sofa in my house at any length because it was (a) no longer its original off-white color but rather, thanks to food stains and sw
eat stains and a million newspapers piled on it at all times, something a catalog might describe as “darkened dishwater” and (b) far too gargantuan in width and depth for a reduction of length to make any difference whatsoever, Alan told me not to be so closed minded and insensitive. I then told him not to be so completely retarded. I told him that his sofa, even if operated on by some mythical maestro of sofa surgeons and transformed into a seamless, scar-free, shorter version of itself, would look stupid and terrible and ruin everything. I was not being closed minded, I said, but speaking from experience, from painful, putrid, candle-and dog-shit-scented experience (and here my voice was rising in panic as I recalled the shadow cast by the media cabinet in Dani’s cottage in Venice), and that this experience taught me that there was nothing worse than having furniture that’s too big for your house. Not even your house catching on fire was worse. Not even falling asleep on the beach and having ants crawl in your nose and into your brain would be worse. And because this sofa was the first real piece of furniture Alan had ever bought, because he’d had it custom made when he’d lived in New York and had his first real job, and because he’d then shipped it to Mexico City and then later to L.A., and because the sofa had cost him $2,750, which he could prove to me because he still had the receipt because unlike me he kept all his receipts, because unlike me he knew the value of things and didn’t just want to replace everything all the time, Alan became enraged and I became enraged and the evening dissolved into an echo chamber of accusations and denials and, in odd moments, valid points. I noted that he still hadn’t given his landlord a thirty-day moving-out notice. He pointed out that aside from emptying the guest room closet, I had done nothing to make him feel “welcome” in my home. And, incidentally, he hated the futon. Always had. The feel of velvet against his skin repelled him, he said. (Ditto for velour and suede; I should know this about him.)
The next morning we decided—calmly and without a trace of anger or blame—that we wouldn’t move in together just yet. We would wait until we’d been a couple for longer (like, say, three years) and had a more solid commitment and could possibly buy a bigger house. I said I thought that was an excellent idea. I reiterated that the house really was a one-person house. I mean, look at it! I said. No garage, no basement, only three tiny closets, and one of them contains the washer and dryer and water heater and filing cabinet and office supplies and CDs. Where would his stuff go? Alan was by now a competitive road cyclist. He had three bikes, all of which were very expensive and handcrafted and couldn’t have been kept in a garage or basement even if I’d had a garage or a basement. No fair to those bikes! I said. Let’s wait!
“I feel really good about this,” I said.
“Me too,” he said.
That night, Alan drove home to his apartment after work and spent one hour and five minutes looking for a parking space. He moved into my house a month later.
He moved in, but not before I’d investigated other options. In the quest to find a workable transition from nohabitation to cohabitation, no stone was unturned, no scenario unimagined, no Internet photo unclicked. Whereas in most areas of life (such as exercise or cooking… any other area of life really) procrastination is my default setting, I’m happy to drop everything and do what needs to be done when real estate is the issue or problem at hand. And amid this quandary, it crossed my mind that renting might be the thing that needed to be done.
“If I could get, say, $2,100 in rent for this house,” I posited out loud, “that would leave us free to rent something way nicer and bigger for, say, $3,500. Which means we’d each be paying $1,750, which is less than my mortgage now, which means I’d have enough left over to pay property taxes and repairs and everything else.”
“But you still have to pay your monthly mortgage, which is $2,054,” said Mr. Show-Off Math Genius. “You’re getting rent money but it has to go to the mortgage.”
“Oh… right.”
Again, let’s understand something about addiction. It can go dormant, it can retract back underneath its shell, but it’s always just below the surface. It’s always waiting for a trigger. In my case, all I need is for someone to say, “I read that Whoozitville is the hot, up-and-coming neighborhood these days,” and, before I know it, I’m upended again. And that is what started to happen. I needed a fix. As ultimately uninterested as I was at that point in moving out of the house on Escalada Terrace and as much as I couldn’t stand the thought of another year of nohabitation, the notion of having to share my place with someone—even someone as beloved as Alan—knocked me sufficiently off course that I returned to my old habits. I went back on realtor.com and Craigslist and the MLS Web site. I pictured us in a sprawling mid-century modern with a workroom for his bikes and a separate office for me. I pictured us in a voluptuous Craftsman reading our individual newspapers in front of a stone fireplace. Mostly, I just pictured us someplace bigger, someplace with closets, someplace not quite so steeped in the colic of my efforts at self-definition. In other words, someplace ours.
And so my loyalty to Escalada Terrace was tested. As had been the case during my previous tour of real estate voyeurism/enslavement, it wasn’t just the possibility—however remote—of the “perfect” house that ignited my cravings. It was the reminder that one’s own house wasn’t the only house in the world, that pledging yourself to one piece of property doesn’t mean you’ll never know the embrace of another. This, of course, was the reasoning that had allowed me to buy the house, despite my lack of total infatuation with it, in the first place. And now, clicking through duplexes and bungalows and (when I got bored of the L.A. listings and expanded my reach across Topanga and Malibu and up the coast all the way to Oregon) A-frames and cabins and yurts, the manic birr of those old shopping days returned. I wanted to live on another block, in another part of town, in New York, in Paris, on the moon. Some of these places I wanted to inhabit with Alan (“journalist couple relocates to space station; follow them on Twitter”), while others cried out for a cloistered, possibly chain-smoking existence in a rented attic with a stove-top espresso maker and a view of the Seine.
As before, this form of virtual window-shopping was exhausting, even frightening. Like a man taken to a strip club the night before his wedding, I experienced the houses as both objects of terror and objects of salvation. Lotharios made of wood and stone and Tyvek weatherizing wrap, the houses conjured a furious, emotional seesaw of possibilities and improbabilities and visions of lives unlived, roads untaken, lawns unmowed, rooms uninhabited—at least by me.
But what about spaces undeveloped? There was always the garage, of course. I hadn’t forgotten my grand guesthouse plan. It was a long-range plan, a plan I had no designs on implementing unless I happened to find $80,000 hidden inside the crawl space above my bedroom closet. But maybe it wouldn’t be that much, I now thought. Or maybe I could take out a loan. Maybe I could build the guesthouse, and Alan could keep his stuff in it—or even kind of live in it on days when we were tired of each other. At the very least, maybe he could keep his bicycles in the garage; it would, after all, be no ordinary garage but state-of-the-art.
I called a contractor. I took him through the upper yard, into the lower yard, and down the stairs. I told him the bones of the garage were there but it just needed a little updating.
“Minimum $100,000,” he said. “I’ve rarely seen such a disaster. You need an engineer. You need soil reports. You need an architect. You need several months of construction.”
“What if it was just the garage but not the guesthouse?” I asked.
“What guesthouse?” he asked.
I called another contractor.
“Minimum $200,000,” he said.
I don’t know why, but I called yet another one. The rule of thumb with estimates is that you get three and take the middle one. Somehow I felt compelled to do this, even though I wasn’t going to be embarking on this project anytime in the current millennium.
“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars,”
said the third contractor. “And by the way, the retaining wall next to your house is unsafe and not up to code. I’d recommend doing that first. Probably for around $60,000.”
Maybe I should sell the house, I thought. Not that I wanted to, not really, not at all. But one weekend, when Alan was out of town with two of his three bikes competing in a race that required him to ride insane distances at insane elevations, I sat at my desk eating my salami and realized how much I missed him. I was terrified of letting him move in, but, I now realized, I was also terrified of him not moving in. Moreover, I wanted him to move in not just for parking-related reasons but because—and, as revelations go, this was so simple as to be embarrassing—I wanted to be near him. If not constantly, at least more often than not. Why was I clinging to my house as if it were the only thing that made me worthy of love? Why was I lording over it so zealously, stopping people at the door as though I were some numskull nightclub bouncer? Why was I holding it out in front of me like a shield?
Maybe I should sell the house, I thought. Maybe I should just free myself from it—even at no profit—and rent a whole new place with Alan. Not only would a rental be a clean slate, a neutral space in which our lives could commingle without the baggage of someone’s life already having been there, but it would undoubtedly be larger and nicer than what we were currently working with. That was the solution, I decided. I would join Alan among the ranks of the smug renters. If things didn’t work out, at least I would have sold my house before the market got really bad (and this was coming; every five minutes on CNBC they were announcing that the housing apocalypse was nigh). If things did work out, maybe we’d buy a new house in a year or two.
I called Michael, the Realtor. He was happy I finally had a boyfriend. He said he’d come over and tell me what I needed to do with my house if I wanted to sell it. It was now August 2007. Zillow believed my house was worth no more than $503,000. Michael didn’t try to influence me one way or the other, but he did say that if I was worried about the market that year, I’d be considerably more worried the following year. He also said that in order to make it “attractive” to potential buyers, I’d need to do the following: