Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (25 page)

This futon, naturally, would be different. It would be different because I was fifteen years older than I’d been back in those days and the ramifications of the thing were entirely different.
How did I know this? For one thing, I found one that barely even looked like a futon. Far removed from those faux-Scandinavian, mass-produced, slatted pine benches you see in a million advertisements in
The Village Voice
, this futon actually sort of looked like an antique. In fact, with its wrought-iron frame and dark purple velvet-covered cushion it looked vaguely Moroccan, a Moroccan antique! It would match the mosaic coffee table and bed stands (not that any of those things fit in the guest room). It would do the job of a futon without reducing the house to Dani-caliber shoddiness. No scented candles would be casting a sorry glow on this futon. Hell, no one would even know it was a futon. People would think I’d bought it for $10,000 in one of the furniture showrooms on La Brea Avenue.

At least this was my assumption as I drove to get it. The place I was driving to was not a furniture showroom or even an antiques store but rather the Hollywood apartment of someone named Margaret who was selling it on Craigslist. Based on the photos, I’d assumed it was such a coveted piece that it might be snatched up before I could complete the seven-mile drive from Escalada Terrace. “Don’t sell it to anyone else!” I’d spastically typed to Margaret in an e-mail. “I’m coming over immediately. Leaving right now! This futon was made for me to lie on.”

The futon, it turned out, was made for a large bag of granite to lie on. Six feet long, two and a half feet deep with arms and legs like pylons, it was a mighty, if not exactly Moroccan, piece. Margaret, who had to be out of her apartment the next day because she’d broken up with her live-in boyfriend and couldn’t pay the rent, didn’t exactly remember how to open it into a bed but promised it was possible and that there were no sandwiches inside. Though I wasn’t as in love with the real
thing as I’d been with the pictures, it still seemed well above average as far as futons were concerned, so I wrote her a check for $250. Then I went home and got back on Craigslist to find a man with a van who’d pick it up at Margaret’s and deliver it to me for an additional $100. The transaction seemed costly and cumbersome, especially for a piece of used furniture, but as a frequent Craigslist shopper I was used to this, and, besides, I was so eager to finally invite my new maybe-boyfriend into my newly improved house that I didn’t care if there was a sandwich in the mattress. I just wanted to open the front door for Alan and show him something that might make him feel like staying awhile.

The delivery guys came right on time. Like all man-with-van guys on Craigslist, they both looked like a cross between a homeless meth addict and a wildebeest. They banged and scraped the thing up the walkway through the front door and into the living room, where they paused and mopped their brows and stunk like Drum tobacco and, like anyone who’d ever delivered anything to Escalada Terrace, cursed about the steepness of the street. Then they picked it up again, inched it into the kitchen door, and turned toward the guest room door.

“Right in there will be fine,” I said. I was wearing one of the ballet tops from Soft Surroundings—the taupe one—and sandals and a long skirt and standing next to my distressed wood cabinets drinking a glass of lemonade. In just a matter of minutes, my tableau would be complete.

“It ain’t gonna fit in there,” said one wildebeest. “The door is too narrow. It won’t make the corner.”

“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.

I
n 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 in.

“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.”)