Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (13 page)

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 myself 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 pause 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.

Dani had her share of candles. She also had a lot of pine furniture. An enormous media cabinet, carved with a floral design and bursting with heavy, overstuffed drawers, dwarfed the living room wall. A sofa blocked a window. The queen-sized bed with its tower of pillows and oddly protruding dust ruffle left only a small strip of walkable space in the bedroom. The aforementioned kitty litter smell, I soon determined, was actually
the result of poop from Dani’s Yorkshire terrier that had never been picked up off the concrete patio. I was paying $1,600 a month for a three-month lease.

And I was elated to be back in action—or at least within walking distance of a pizza parlor. As odorous and as crowded as Dani’s apartment remained even after a series of strenuous cleaning and reorganization efforts, I felt as invigorated as I’d been when I finally left Vassar for good. Alison lived just a few blocks away, and we went to yoga classes together and threw catty dinner parties at her condo. I explored corners of the region—Silver Lake, Palos Verdes, Long Beach—that from a Topanga perspective had seemed outrageously far away but in fact adhered to the standard L.A. travel time metric: twenty-five minutes without traffic, two-plus hours with.

I even finally glued my butt to Dani’s wicker desk chair and wrote the screenplay. Miraculously, it did not suck. I know it didn’t suck because the agent and the producer both pronounced it “the best effort from a first-time screenwriter I’d ever seen” and declared that I was going to have “a big career” in Hollywood. Translated from film industry b.s. into English, that means “doesn’t suck.” I got sent on a meeting or two, which is what you do in the entertainment business when you want to sell someone an idea. The meetings were productive in that I learned the best driving routes to Beverly Hills and got to walk around on studio lots but rather pathetic for one glaring reason: I had no ideas, for sale or otherwise. I had no sitcom idea, no romantic comedy idea, no reality show concept.