The House in the Middle of the Block

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. 

—Frank Lloyd Wright 

 I.

          
          I stand at the sink sorting blueberries, tossing the soft ones into the compost pail habitually.
          We cannot keep the house.
          I am fertilizing someone else's garden.
          The idea seems obscene.
         After we've left, I swear never to drive by.          

II.

          Houses are the physical manifestation of our dreams, partners whose high traffic areas and familiar kitchen window views have grown as invisible, and as profoundly comforting, as a spouse. The rooms are half public facade, half private chamber—stylish but cluttered, the mail always sitting out on the table, the pendulum clock on the mantle catching the light. Daily, we are exasperated and privileged, embarrassed and proud. Guiltily, contentedly, dishes pile up.

          The intervals heal like cuts, and I cannot even remember coming here from a train of leaky apartments that stretches back decades. Then, I owned nothing but roaches and shoes.
          In this house I rocked onto my side like a peach softening in sunlight, always happiest when absorbed in some artsy pursuit—I filled the place with clarinets. On Saturday mornings I sat at the piano, still in my robe, my torso weaving to a gigue. I arranged my books top to bottom, Chaucer to Brookner. My kitchen knifes were fin de siecle Sabatier. Even the smoke-stained portrait of my mother wore a capitulated smile. She felt at home.
          At night, with an open book on my chest, I looked around my sea-colored bedroom—the giant drum lampshades, dust-heavy bark-cloth curtains, and the army of ceiling planks Gary nailed, one by one—and reckoned, morbidly, but not unhappily, that here were the last objects I'd gaze on before death. 
          Once I decorate, I never change my mind. 

III.

         Tyler and her team of two swarthy guys showed up right on time. I was expecting a breezy, smug gay guy. I had to ask "Is one of you Tyler?" The young black woman, who reminded me of Jessye Norman, looked kindly but somewhat incredulously at me and shook my hand.

          The guys lifted my mother's coffin-heavy bureau and flipped it like a canoe before taking it down the narrow, L-shaped flight of stairs. Thus it left me, still with her cigarette butt stains and lithosphere of hair spray. The reflection in the tall mirror was her art, a leopard face in its best years, fully knowledgeable of its own beauty, dependent upon it.
          I almost said to its new owner "Wait! I have a photo of me 10 years old sitting next to the night stand!" but I didn't. I thought I'd get upset when these pieces from the earliest phase of my life—a bright watercolor sketch tinged around the edges with domestic violence—were carried away, but I didn't.
          Fully into my fifties, I've entered that stage where reticence seems not only the wisest but also the chicest choice: no more black jeans with torn holes at the knees—such casual openness is unbecoming. I am, now, the generation that coddled and encouraged me in my drawing and painting at 25. I am the pencil caricatures I drew of them.
          After the hatchback pulled away I went upstairs and looked at the two pictures—one with a candy apple red metal frame, the other chartreuse—orphaned on the wall where the mirror had been. I took them down.
          Time to redecorate.

IV.

          One day, after hours on realtor.com, I suddenly thought to myself, almost speaking it aloud, Houses are all the same. Yet how unlike myself, it seemed, to make such a declaration. I used to say with some pride that I'd make a terrible Buddhist: I celebrated Western individuality—especially my own.

          Nevertheless a door simply leads into another room. Fussed over, remodeled, then abandoned, there is a kitchen with a window above the sink. At the top of a flight of stairs are bedrooms whose open doors surround the hall like a school of feeding koi. Closed cabinets hide like shy children in the walls of dining rooms. A porch sags at the front or back with a few chairs that will never be used. And always there is a place of neglect—a tiny laundry room, or an attic—that seems to have suffered under the owner's occupation: a bruise, a spot without a view. Negotiating the lavender and boxwood, a mailman comes and goes.

          In the last analysis, a house is as practical an arrangement as a job—or a marriage. It's what one brings to it beyond the business of living that creates the shadows and light—a nervous self-consciousness, the artist's inward glance, a dreamy striving beyond functionality, a slight perverseness of observing oneself in situ amidst mantels and dormers and shuffling down sweetly painted hallways splattered with photographs.

          A forgettable life, like any other's, and heartrendingly genuine.

V.

          An honest-to-God movie was made here. You can buy or stream it on Amazon. The director came with huge boxes that looked like old steamer trunks. They were lights that he situated with precision throughout these tiny rooms and even outside in the driveway, pointed into the dining room window as I sat mumbling, just a bit beyond what I could remember, about my mother and brother.

          Over two long days of a Labor Day weekend I was filmed upstairs talking about my brother's paintings and even playing my piano, but the segment that touches my vanity the most is one in which I am simply sitting at the piano and watching them set up, warily, engulfed in an awkward, interior moment. How could the director see, in all the footage that was never used, that this was a defining shot?

          I suppose the new owners will never know Hollywood stopped by. Should I leave a copy of the DVD? Would they recognize the rooms?

VI.

          Our house is in the middle of the block. It's one of a group of seven more or less identical bungalows built around 1917, connected to the poles and wires on the narrow street like trolleys. The front porches show the effects of the two world wars and lean each one more to the left or right, their rotting balustrades loosening, here and there, like bad teeth. But they are cared for, some more than others. 

          Ours suffered most under the previous owners, and the city had to mandate they paint and clear the high grass. Nothing was maintained. The quarter rounds were ripped from the baseboards to accommodate wall-to-wall carpeting, the elaborate walnut-stained trim was sloppily painted up to the window units but not behind them, and fussy vinyl wallpaper the color of veins was parting at the seams. The pocket doors were pushed into the walls and painted over. When we pulled them out, we found Christmas cards from the 1920s stuffed into the space behind.

          I first came here in the summer of 1994, after work. Gary had given me the address and we were to meet at the house, but on the way I had a bizarre encounter at the subway downtown with a man in a motorized wheelchair. He was navigating down the ramp from the elevator and I picked up my pace to avoid him; nevertheless, he clipped my leg, somehow, and I became enraged. It hurt so much that I called after him. When I got no response I started running after his sporty chair, yelling that he had hurt me. He just kept motoring. I followed him for a block, then gave up, shaking with nervous anger. In this state of mind I arrived at my future home.

          When we entered, a woman wearing a T-shirt that said Jesus was sitting on a small sofa in an adjacent room, watching TV. The realtor asked her what heating system the house used, and she shrugged her shoulders and replied, in a French accent, that she didn't know. It seemed like we blew through in half an hour. I thought it seemed small and stuffy. Gary's offer was accepted.

          Our first night in the house, after removing the owner's dirty dishes from the sink (she had beat a hasty retreat to France, defaulting on a substantial loan), we split a bottle of wine and ripped up all the carpeting.
          With the moon pouring into the curtainless windows, we made love on a mattress in the front bedroom.

VII.

          We will move to another state. Each day, some new finer point of that sea change presents itself to my consciousness like an air bubble rising to the surface of water, then breaking.

          I will have to get another piano tuner. But, I have the best in the world. 

          Best in the world, too, is the groomer of my Scottish terrier; my veterinarian who makes house calls and stays for ham and cabbage; my dentist and his largess with nitrous oxide; our jolly accountant; and the urbane optician with their espresso machines, glittering white leather waiting area, and youthful, ambitious-looking clientele.

          There will be no subway where I am going. No Ethiopian food trucks, specialty shops, arboretums, botanical gardens, wood-oven pizza places, wine bars, sex clubs, or national art galleries.

          I have lived in the city since I was 21. I am a product of the second-hand shops, used book stores, and dance bars I habituated. I knew the night and, when I was younger, held it to be the only excuse for getting through the day.

          As the decades passed I withdrew from its prurient element but never from the public spaces—bicycle trails, canal towpaths, estate gardens, and river fords—that lay like a narrow, emerald bracelet top to bottom through the center of the city.

          I will have to content myself with the seashore (if I get my driver's license) and most likely a yard bigger than this one, giving for once a healthy distance from our neighbors. 

          And we are going to where the blueberries are grown. 

          I shall pick up my work where I left off.