Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (26 page)

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 these 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.

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.