Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

by Meghan Daum

  One such place was a cabin nestled into an unpaved, largely unknown nearby street that angles off a larger street and curls around into the park. It was essentially a hovel, but the fact that it was painted red and that the online photos showed an easel and a half-finished canvas sitting outside the door made me think it was an artist’s paradise. The inside photos showed it to be essentially one big, warehouselike room with a hole cut into the ceiling into which a spiral staircase led to an attic “bedroom.” The kitchen, as it were, was a wall of counter space with just enough room for a refrigerator and a stove on either side. The bathroom looked like something the owner installed with his stoned buddies over a weekend. It was not a house but the kind of place you stumble into and sleep in when you’re lost in the woods. It was $346,000. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that if I were single and still house hunting, I would try to buy this place.

  For several months, I couldn’t get the cabin out of my mind. It’s not that I wanted it exactly. It was more that I wanted to eventually be reincarnated as the kind of person who would live and thrive in it. Thinking about the cabin sometimes made me feel as if I were cheating on Alan, but at the same time, when I looked at him, I knew he was saving me from the indignities of everything I already knew about it. Despite our inability to move forward in certain concrete ways he had a way of taking my hand and at least keeping me from going backward.

  My mother wanted me to get a bigger place, preferably with a guesthouse so she could move in. She was joking when she said the guesthouse part, of course, but, as was her tendency in matters of real estate, wanderlust threatened to override logic. Unlike my father, who had remained content in his apartment near the Tudor Hotel for nearly fifteen years and had no plans to move—or so much as rearrange one piece of furniture—my mother continued to have a roaming eye. Never mind that she was living in her best interior design effort yet. Installed now in a spacious apartment near the park on West Eighty-sixth Street, she’d waved her divine wand again. Subtle shades of gray and mauve fell into seamless concert where the ceiling met the walls. Her taste in art had evolved over the years from framed museum posters to original pieces, and she made daring use of her wall space, hanging large paintings in small spaces and letting the air breathe around smaller pieces. She kept an orchid on her kitchen windowsill at all times. Her countertop, now as always, held a row of handmade pottery mugs (a collection started in Palo Alto) that she’d long refused to keep in the cupboard (she had an enduring policy against keeping any dishes hidden away in cupboards, preferring open hutches or, if necessary, removing the cupboard doors altogether). At her desk, she kept photographs taped to the walls and the adjacent shelves (she was aesthetically opposed to small, freestanding picture frames). They showed me and my brother, her and various friends, even Rex, whom she called her “grand dog.” But her screen saver, the image that glowed into life whenever you approached the desk, was a photograph she’d taken of her living room. There were no people in it, just furniture and flowers, artwork and colors: the decorated set of her life.

  When she wasn’t talking about moving to L.A., she talked about moving to northern California, to Vermont, even back to Austin. It wasn’t that she’d soured on her apartment—like everywhere she’d lived, she loved it down to the nub by sheer force of decorating—but she didn’t feel it was her last stop. She loved saying “I live in Manhattan,” but she missed sitting in the garden. She missed having a car. She loved all those restaurants, but she couldn’t exactly afford them. She had friends, but they were often busy with work or with grandchildren—something she was unlikely to get anytime soon. (My brother, who still lived in L.A., was resolutely single, though he’d bought a house.)

  In early 2009, at the age of sixty-six, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. It was a rare, incurable cancer, and she was at an advanced stage. She began chemotherapy, though the idea was to slow the disease down, not to make it go away. This was a shock unlike anything our dyspeptic family had ever come up against. Our stiff reunion at the cancer center—the first time I can remember us all being together since that evening on West Seventy-eighth Street when my mother commenced her new life as a New Yorker—creaked under the weight of our awkwardness. We neither touched each other much nor said much. There were no tears. A few of my mother’s friends had cried when they heard the news but not us. After meeting with the doctors—if treatment went well, she could have a few years; if not, the prognosis was dire—we all went to lunch and talked about nothing in particular.

  What was there to say? It was awful and unfair. It was ghastly. My mother, whose life had been nothing if not a series of carefully conceived and vigorously implemented plans, suddenly found herself robbed of the activity she loved most: thinking about the future. Still, she surfed realtor.com.

  “Type in zip code 10965,” she said to me over the phone after I’d gone home. “There’s an Eichler house. I’m sure it needs work, but I’ve always wanted one.”

  She told me she knew it was silly to think about moving at a time like this—like a good Midwesterner, she tended to refer to her cancer as “my situation”—but that looking at real estate, at least photographs of real estate, made her feel better. She clicked through images of houses in Westchester County and on Cape Cod, of fisherman’s cottages in Maine, of other apartments in Manhattan. She bought a new sofa from Crate and Barrel and an expensive piece of art. She thought about redoing her kitchen. She wanted marble countertops and a checker board floor. If the results of her next CAT scan were promising, she told me, she’d price out these renovations. She was prepared to pay for them herself even though the apartment was a rental.

  I flew to New York to be with her when the results came back. When we learned that the chemo was working—for now, anyway—we went directly from the cancer center to Home Depot. By now, my mother had lost most of her hair and was wearing a wig. Her eyelashes were so thinned out that her eyes watered constantly. Still, she had the kitchen dimensions drawn out in her notepad. She showed them to the man in the countertop department and the woman in the floor department, her tissue perpetually dabbing her face as though she’d won a new kitchen on a game show and couldn’t contain her emotion. The total cost including installation: $5,919. She said she would think about it. She was suddenly very tired—two excursions in one day were now usually more than she could do—but that she would seriously consider it.

  “I’m not sure I want to die in this apartment,” she said to me later. We were sitting on her new sofa. The late afternoon light was pressing angled lines against her mauve wall. “It just doesn’t feel like home.”

  For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors. I can’t say I don’t still often have those thoughts. But if there’s anything that now separates me from the person who haphazardly signed all those inspection reports back in 2004, it’s the knowledge that a house can be as fragile as life itself. You’d think it would be stronger, since it can stand in one spot for centuries while generations of humans run through its rooms, grow up, move out, and eventually die. But a house is an inherently limited entity. It can’t do everything, or even most things. It cannot give you a personality. It cannot bring you love. It cannot cure loneliness. It can provide comfort, safety, a sense of pride—that much I know. But after forty years of thinking that my ideal self was waiting for me on the other side of a door I hadn’t yet had a chance to open, I’m beginning to see that there’s more to life than moving. For instance, just being alive.

  My mother’s chemo didn’t work for long. By mid-September, she was in the hospital, the treatment suspended, the doctors “reevaluating.” By early October, she was officially dying. It was a surreal autumn, sweet and awful both, at once a jubilation and a cataclysm. That Labor Day weekend, in a moment of unprecedented optimism, Alan and I had decided to get married (he made a genuine propo
sal and I replied with a genuine yes; how ordinary we were; more surprising yet, what unforeseen elation lay in such ordinariness!) and within weeks it was obvious that the major gift of this wedding would not be money or dishes or a bread maker but the gift we’d give to my mother. We would give her a wedding. Soon and in New York. Not later in California. We would get married in her presence—“I don’t care how long I have to wait for your wedding,” she’d always said, “I just want to be there”—and because this required notable concessions to our plans (such as they were), the weird, beautiful, terrible truth was that our marriage, or at least our wedding, was as much a recognition of her impending death (and in turn an homage to her life) as a celebration of our commitment.

  I wanted, of course, to get married on the hill on Escalada Terrace. I wanted Rex to be there and our friends and neighbors to be there, and I wanted to wait until April when the grass grew tall and prairielike and the late-afternoon sun washed the city in purple-gold light. But it wasn’t to be. For a million reasons it wasn’t to be, and I’m still grateful to whatever force rose up from within me and kept me from being inconsolably disappointed, or, odder still, terribly disappointed at all. A few nights before we said our vows, I dreamed that my dress was not the off-white beaded charmeuse I’d purchased in a California vintage boutique but a long red shift with a black cape. In the dream I would look in the mirror and see not a bride but the grim reaper with a bouquet of roses and an updo. I would study my face in this mirror, note that my eyes and mouth were still my own, and tell myself that even though this wasn’t the dress I had imagined, even though the dress was shapeless and frightening and red, I could have a perfectly fine wedding while wearing it. Later I would wake up and wonder if this was the most literal dream I’d had since the dream of the $127-a-month house behind the iron fence all those years ago.

  We decided we’d have a small wedding on December 5, a date that seemed crisp and buoyant, like a Martini glass chilled in the freezer or an icicle on a leaf. But my mother’s condition worsened—she wanted to find the perfect venue but couldn’t quite summon the energy to leave her apartment; she wanted to contact caterers but couldn’t always dial the phone properly—and the date became November 21, then November 14, then November 7. In the end, it was October 25, a lustrous and mild day sandwiched between two rainy and cold ones, a day that came up so fast that we had no rings and Alison had to pick up the dress from the tailor, put it in a garment bag, and hand it off to Alan on his way to the airport, where he caught a red-eye to JFK, took a taxi to my mother’s apartment, and went with me to the city clerk’s office to apply for a marriage license. Forty-eight hours later we walked into Central Park—my brother pushed my mother in a wheelchair, my father and Alan’s family held chuppah poles, dozens of bystanders took photos with their cell phones and clenched their Starbucks coffees in their teeth as they applauded—and got married beneath an elm tree. My mother, who on leaving the hospital had gone through a brief phase of wanting desperately to have the entire wedding in her apartment (she had envisioned lush hors d’oeuvre spreads, candlelight dancing against the nighttime windowpanes, a New York Times wedding announcement that mentioned her art collection) and was heartbroken to finally admit it was impossible, still managed to host a gathering before the ceremony. There, at the top of the steps leading to her sunken living room, flanked by her ceramic vases and wearing jewelry from the Museum of Modern Art gift shop, she welcomed the guests and presented me with my flowers (at my insistence, tulips from the Korean grocer), the stems of which she’d wrapped in a ziplock bag to keep from dripping on my dress. This would be the last time I’d ever see her in a skirt. This would be the last time she ever set wineglasses down on a table, the last time she stood before a painting and straightened it ever so slightly against the wall. She never embarked on the kitchen renovation.

  I once said, in the early days of writing these pages, “Over my dead body will this book end with a wedding.” Yet here we are, with a wedding and with death, though death also seems like an unimaginative conclusion, and as I write this, my mother is still alive. There are wedding photos taped to the wall by her bed and a dizzying medication schedule and a woman from Trinidad who splits pills and opens plastic containers of applesauce and doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the Franz Kline print near the piano. Back in Los Angeles, a bland, blissful city that now feels eclipsed by New York and the way our family crisis seems to ooze from every building like the smell of commercial clothes dryers emanating from basement windows, the house on Escalada Terrace lies in waiting. It waits for me to come home. It waits for us to get our act together and remove the clutter. It waits to be sold. Which it will be. We will sell the house. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Maybe not this year, but next year. Because the house is not our house, it’s my house. It may be my home but it’s not really our home. Sure, Alan and I go through the motions. We live inside its walls, under its roof, over its foundation. We open and close the doors. We water the grass. We take out the trash. But do we really live here?

  When I think back on the places I’ve lived, I now wonder this: I wonder if the real measure of “home” is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you’ve never really lived there until you’ve thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their insight, generosity, and patience, the author would like to thank Robin Desser and Sarah Rothbard at Knopf, Tina Bennett and Svetlana Katz at Janklow & Nesbit, Susan Brenneman and Nick Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Alan Zarembo.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth and the novel The Quality of Life Report, a New York Times Notable Book. Her column on political, cultural, and social affairs appears weekly in the Los Angeles Times and is distributed nationally through the McClatchy news service. She has contributed to public radio’s Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life, and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2010 by Meghan Daum

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Daum, Meghan, [date]

  Life would be perfect if I lived in that house / Meghan Daum.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi Book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59360-3

  1. Daum, Meghan, 1970—Homes and haunts. 2. Real estate business—Humor. I. Title.

  PS3604.A93Z46 2010

  814′.6—dc22 2009037002

  Out of concern for the privacy of individuals depicted here, the author has changed the names of certain individuals, as well as some of the addresses and certain identifying details about individuals and houses, such as exact home prices.

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