Magical Thinking (31 page)

There is a huge apple tree in front and just below this, an old stone wall that has mostly melted into the earth. The house is on eighty acres of pastures and woodlands. At the western edge of the yard there is even a post-and-beam barn with a bright red door, like an Elizabeth Arden spa. This barn has plumbing, a soapstone woodstove, and two bedrooms.

In other words, this is a perfect house. The ultimate escape hatch from the stress of the city, yes?

Actually, no.

This house would, in fact, triple your stress. Because you would feel the need to be accountable to it. It would be like dating royalty: a fine idea in the abstract but draining financially and emotionally.

When you shopped for furniture, you would find yourself thinking words like “honest” and “authentic,” and then nothing would ever be good enough and the one small thing that was good enough would cost you seven thousand dollars and would be fragile. No way could you ever go to Target, ever again. You would shop in places where you ran into Martha Stewart and Barbra Streisand, and they would both outbid you for everything.

In a normal house, if you have a clogged drain you call a
plumber. But in this antique New England Cape, a clogged drain would require a certified specialist and possibly even approval from the registry of historic homes.

And this, I understand now, is why the New Yorkers must sell it. It is too flawless a house to actually live in. It is a house to sit in and be photographed, not a house to sit in and eat eggs. You could absolutely never fart in this house.

In desperation I phoned a real estate agent on Nantucket. I said, “I’m just looking for a little summer shack. A writer’s shack, really, very sort of simple and crude. Doesn’t have to be on the water but close enough to walk.”

She chuckled and said, “Let me think.” And for a moment, there was silence, and then I heard her tapping on her keyboard. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think I have something here. It’s like you want, very Hemingway-ish, very rustic, and sort of iconoclastic: one bedroom, kitchen, living room, bath, eighth of an acre. Eight hundred thousand.”

It was beginning to seem that Dennis and I would be trapped in Manhattan forever, unless one of us won the Powerball lottery.

But then I got an idea. What about a log cabin? What if we bought a piece of land in the Berkshires and then bought one of those log cabins, from a kit?

The truth is, I’ve always fantasized about living in a log cabin. Maybe because I had such an unstable childhood, I deeply crave a house made of solid, ten-inch timbers. A house without drywall. A house made of solid trees that has a great, two-story fieldstone fireplace dividing the living room and the kitchen.

As it turned out, Dennis had a similar fantasy. “I’d live in a log cabin,” he said. “As long as it didn’t have animal heads on the wall.”

So I went online and discovered that one of the log-home manufacturers had a model home in Massachusetts, right in the general area where we would want to buy land and build our own home. The following Saturday, we drove there to inspect the house.

The model log home was located on a busy street, filled with fast-food restaurants and industrial park buildings. Not exactly what we’d envisioned for our dream home, but the house was there, strong and woody, and it was easy to picture it in a field or nestled in a clutch of pine trees.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” said the warm, blonde-haired woman who was standing in the center of the Great Room when we stepped inside. “My name is Joanne. How can I make your log-home dreams come true?” She was wearing a patchwork vest and a rust-colored cotton turtleneck. Around her neck was a thin gold chain with a cross.

We smiled. Dennis said, “Hi. We’re just sort of, you know, just looking. Just starting to look. This is the first time we’ve seen a log cabin.”

“Well,” she said, as she approached us, “this isn’t a log
cabin
; it’s a two-thousand-four-hundred-square-foot log home. This particular model is called the Timberdream, and it’s perfect for families who like to entertain or who have a lot of children. Feel free to take a look around,” she said, making a general sweeping gesture with her arm. “You’ll find the bedrooms upstairs, along with a loft that overlooks this Great Room. On this floor you’ll find the kitchen just over there on the other side of the fireplace. Down the hall over there is where the laundry room and pantry are located. And at the other end is a den, which is easily converted into a fourth bedroom.” Then her eyes got wider. “And downstairs,” she said, “is a finished basement.”

Was it my imagination, or did she look at my crotch when she said this? Did she look at both of our crotches? Was she thinking,
Gay guys . . . basement . . . leather straps suspended from the ceiling . . .

“Thanks,” I said and moved away from her, heading to the kitchen.

“Wow,” Dennis said. “This is amazing.”

And it was amazing. The kitchen gleamed with what I can
only imagine must have been a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the finest appliances. A Wolf range, a Subzero refrigerator with glass doors, a hammered-copper hood over the range.

“I think this kitchen costs more than what we could spend on a whole house,” Dennis said.

Joanne appeared behind us. “With our kits, you have options. You have flexibility. You can choose to create a dream kitchen, like this one. Or you can opt for a more moderate arrangement. Standard with each of our kits are solid hardwood cabinets, an electric range, refrigerator, and microwave oven. But as you can see, you are free to customize your home any way you like.”

We explored the rest of the house, feeling most intoxicated when we reached the mud room. “Imagine having our own washer and dryer and not having to give our laundry to the laundry wench,” I said. The laundry wench worked in the lobby of our building. She had her own room where she collected everybody’s laundry, sent it off to be washed and damaged, then gave it back to you, folded, at the end of the day. Years of handling Upper West Siders’ eighty-five-dollar bras had made her bitter.

“I like the fireplace,” Dennis said, admiring the two-story fieldstone fireplace exactly as we’d imagined it.

“That,” Joanne said, “is an amazing fireplace. But you should keep in mind that a fireplace such as this one will add about sixty thousand dollars to the price of the home.”

Here, I paused. If the fireplace added sixty thousand dollars, how much more would my special features add?

Because there was no way I was living in a log cabin in the woods unless the entire basement was a large panic room. I would have to have two-foot-thick concrete walls throughout. Broadband Internet access. A vault door that was both blast and chemical agent proof. I would need a basement that could sustain us for at least a month. In addition, whatever house we built in the woods would need to be secured by a fourteen-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding the property. The fence would need to be electrified.

I voiced some of my concerns to Joanne, but she only absently fondled the cross around her neck and said, “I’m not sure I even understand what sort of house you’re talking about. Because that doesn’t seem like a house. That seems like some sort of military compound, and we certainly do not sell military compounds.”

Back in the car Dennis said, “Where did that come from?”

“What?” I said.

“That panic room and electrified-fence stuff.”

“Oh. Well, you know. If we’re gonna live in the country, we have to be safe.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Dennis said. “You can have a little pen in the backyard with an electrified fence around it.”

This made me happy. Dennis always looked after me, indulged me, spoiled me rotten, like meat in the sun.

“Okay,” I said and leaned over the seat to kiss him.

Back home in New York, we went through the book that Joanne gave us. The book contained two hundred log-home plans, along with prices. I thought it was fantastic that you could just pick a house out of this catalogue and then . . . have it built! Like ordering a sandwich from Subway.

Dennis, ever practical, suggested that we order more catalogues from more log-home companies. This is smart, as I would have simply picked a floor plan out of this book and then placed my order. But Dennis is not a take-what-you-can-get-and-be-glad-you-got-it sort of guy.

I went online and visited the websites for as many log-home companies as I could find. Then I sent away for their brochures.

And for the next week, we spent our free time looking at floor plans, an activity that proved to be entirely overwhelming. To make matters even worse, all the floor plans could be combined, mixed, and matched. So you could have the master bedroom you like from the Eagle’s Nest together with that great in-law suite from the Montana. Then, if you wanted, you could steal the loft from the Pine Crest but use the loft railings from the Dusty Rose.

The process made me increasingly more anxious, and my obsessive-compulsive disorder went into overdrive. I began to twitch frequently, wash my hands every half hour, and adjust my glasses constantly. I took an extra ten milligrams of Lexapro to keep my symptoms in check.

Clearly, it will be years before we step foot inside our own log cabin. It will take at least five years to choose a plan. Then another three or four to decide on the finishing options. And of course before we can do any of this, we must first choose a piece of property. And I can’t even imagine how this will happen. Once you find your property, you have to have it checked for radon, leveled, electric and water brought in. Honestly, I don’t know how anybody builds anything. If I had been in charge of developing the modern world, we would all still be living in caves. We wouldn’t even have fire yet.

So for now, we make do with our own view of the Trump apartments. When I get a craving for Nature, I turn on the Discovery Channel and watch bear-attack survivors recount their horror and show us the results of their reconstructive surgery.

My friend Suzanne in California gave me some advice that her own therapist gave to her: “Tend to your inner garden,” he said.

This seems wise to me. I will stop obsessing over log cabins and weekend houses. I will instead focus on my inner garden. Around which is my own personal electrified fence.

U
P THE
E
SCALATOR

 

 

 

I
’m through the revolving door, and instantly, profoundly, the air is different. Washed with chemicals and mercury vapor light, scented in such a specific way that I would know the name of this store if blindfolded, hog-tied, and instructed to sniff the air. I’m in Kmart in Manhattan’s East Village. It’s a new store, their first in New York City. Yet it smells exactly like the Kmart in Hadley, Massachusetts, that I remember from childhood. I glance around and see, am comforted to see, that this Kmart looks identical to every other. There has been no concession made to Manhattan’s refined tastes. The floor is not raw concrete, stainless steel, or anything remotely groovy. It is pale beige tile.

The only difference between this Kmart and every other is that this one is vertical. Three stories. And the escalator is broken, so
I have to walk up. I climb three of these tall, steel steps and feel tired and heavy. I look up and see that I am still very far from the top. Why is this so much harder than climbing a normal flight of stairs? It’s like each foot is a frozen Butterball turkey.

I think it’s because of
expectations
.

Your brain sees the escalator and tells your body it can relax, make progress while leaning. It’s like a little vacation from walking. But then you get there, and the escalator is broken, and the disappointment starts sinking from your chest, gathering mass along the way until it hits your feet, where it congeals and leaves you with twenty-pound heels.

And it seems pathetic that the escalator is out of order, a sign of failure. How hard can it be to keep an escalator working? All it has to do is go around and around, like a hamster on a wheel. It’s not a ventilator in Lenox Hill hospital. People have to hire attorneys and appear before judges just to get one of those turned off.

I wouldn’t even have to walk up this broken escalator if I were wheelchair-bound. I could have rung a bell on the ground floor, and an elevator would have come, along with a minimum-wage employee with averted eyes. I would be an excellent quadriplegic, not at all like those awful, independent cripples who are always talking about how
abled
they are. I would sit in my wheelchair, and I would moan and shake my head “no” as though in excruciating pain, until somebody came to assist me, possibly even carrying a beverage. I believe a person must use whatever it is they have. I, myself, am an emotional cripple, certainly. Raised without school or normal parents, I do not know how to mix with others. In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to “pass” for a normal person but being clocked every time.

I do not belong in Kmart.

Or, if I am here, I should be here ironically. “I’m in Kmart. Wink, wink. Where are the Toughskin jeans?” But I am not here ironically; I am here sincerely.

I need an iron.

I am thinking about my need for an iron as I climb the escalator stairs. I am halfway to the top and briefly I consider turning around and walking back down the steps and going to another store. But this cannot happen. I am being pressed forward by doughy shoppers holding family-sized boxes of Rice Chex and flimsy Kathy Ireland coordinates, which are impossible to imagine on any person with a full set of chromosomes. These grim, fleshy shoppers stomping up, on, forward into their Kmart futures. They add weight to my feet. And they confuse me, because these are not people I normally see on the streets of Manhattan, certainly not the East Village. Where are the pierced eyebrows? The tattoos? Where are the buff gay guys with manicured facial hair and neatly trimmed chests? These people are like ordinary people one might find in Idaho or Kentucky. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with this, it’s odd to see them here. It is as if Kmart has bussed in their own shoppers along with their own air.