BACK AT THE MOTEL, I sketched in my tiny notebook: the entryway, the home-improvement-store ceiling fan in the living room, the fresh tile above the counters. I also thought about the other house, the one we’d walked through after lunch: how it was nicer, just as she’d said. It was maybe forty years old, built in the hacienda style, with a freestanding garage original to the property: blue ARCO oil cans on its wooden shelves indicated that it held more history than much of the town that had long since outgrown its quaint modesty. According to market wisdom, the chief present virtue of the former porn store under the freeway was that it had been completely refurbished, inside and out; past that, there wasn’t much to say about it. The nicer house was the sort of space people like me usually imagine themselves living in.
I told her I’d call her by the end of the week, another needless feint. I could as easily have stated my business and asked her to draw up a contract. But it would have been cheating, I thought. The proper procedure involves several needless steps.
So I waited two days after I got home, and then I wrote her at the email on her business card. She still had an AOL address. I hadn’t thought we were that far outside the city. Most of my friends wouldn’t have been caught dead.
But you couldn’t have gotten a closet in San Francisco for what New Visions wanted for the whole of the Main Street house, anyway. From ceiling to floor, front yard to sidewalk, and including the modest backyard that ended at an ugly, awkward stretch of cyclone fencing, over which you could see some overgrown asphalt that had once been a parking lot. Had I been able to get to it before they put in all that new tile, it would have been even cheaper; I haggled anyway. You never know if you don’t ask.
As I discovered going over the paperwork in subsequent months, I’d probably still bid high. Prior to the renovation, it had been officially standing empty since 1986. Nobody had lived inside Devil House since forever.
3.
IT’S GOOD TO BE TIDY—not good like virtuous; I don’t hold any medieval ideas about our outer selves reflecting the inner ones. I’ve lived with slobs, they were fine people, and I don’t really mind other people’s clutter. Messy people are like astronauts or long-distance truckers to me: I’m curious about how their lives feel. Not curious enough to try out their habits and live like they do—when I inhabit a place, the extent of my immersion usually ends at my skin—but curious enough to spend a little time in their lairs if the opportunity presents itself.
But I’ve always kept my own surroundings clean. I throw things away when I’m done with them; if I think there might still be some use left in them, I take them to the Goodwill. My mother used to tease me about this: “Hide the antiques, Chandler’s home”—but keepsakes are just memory-prompts, and you don’t really need them if you have a good memory. Mine is excellent.
So leaving San Francisco was, for me, an opportunity to set aside the few things I couldn’t be without for longer than a day or two, and to dispose of whatever else was left. From a single bookshelf in my bedroom, I kept the essentials: a dictionary, some anatomy textbooks, a few outdated but still useful forensic reference manuals. The rest I bagged up and took over to Moe’s in Berkeley, who had a booksto-prisoners program. From the kitchen cabinets, I selected a couple of wineglasses and coffee cups, stuffing them with leaves from the same newspapers I’d used to double-wrap my plates; I boxed the cookware and the silverware separately, and that was that, except for the furniture.
My friend André, who, like me, had moved to San Francisco after graduating from Cal Poly, helped load up the U-Haul. There was nothing really wrong with my futon, so I folded that and tied it with a bungee cord; I’d had my writing desk, a real antique, since college, so it had to go on the truck, too. Its exact vintage was a mystery; but it had to’ve belonged to a newspaperman back in the forties or fifties—an editor, maybe. Great blotches of India ink Rorschached its surface, and several deep grooves scarred its grain, probably inflicted in haste or anger by some unknown hand wielding a letter opener.
It weighed a ton. “Do they not have Office Depot in Milpitas?” André asked me, grimacing as we maneuvered it down the narrow stairway that led from my old apartment to the street.
“Sentimental value,” I grunted.
“You’re a cheap bastard,” he said, followed by, “Fuck!” as the desk mashed his finger against the banister.
“Well, that’s true, too,” I said. “Flip it up onto the side?”
“Might as well,” he said. There wasn’t really enough room in the entryway for maneuvering; it was an irritating game of inches, and it seemed to take forever. But when we finally emerged on the sidewalk to find the smallest available vehicle in the whole U-Haul fleet parked and waiting for us at the curb, it felt momentous. The place I’d lived in for an age was no one’s place now. What traces there were of me still in it would never be parsed by anyone: Twin half-moon grooves in the floor because I’d thought I could drag the futon in its frame over to a less sunny spot without anybody’s help. A deep chip in the porcelain of the kitchen sink from when I dropped an antique champagne bucket into it after signing away the movie rights for Omens. A smudge on the bedroom wall that an ex-girlfriend put there on purpose late one Saturday night, applying lipstick to the heel of her hand and dragging it across the paint: “In case you need something to remember me by,” she’d said. After the cleaning crew came, there’d be no trace of that memory left in the world.
* * *
THERE WAS SO MUCH PAPERWORK. I was a first-time home buyer; everybody working billable hours was very happy to see me. We walked through the property with an assessor, we sat on facing sides of cheap tables in banking offices, we read through reams of fine print on legal-sized paper. I got preapproved. It seemed like a lot of work for a small brick building whose ultimate fate was clear to everybody involved; maybe it would change hands another time or two before somebody knocked it down and opened up a Mattress Firm, but such exchanges were stalling tactics. The writing was on the wall.
We were scheduled to close Monday, but I drove down early Friday afternoon. All my things were in shrink-wrap on pallets or secured to the floor of the truck; even my pillow was in there. For an idle moment I considered getting a cheap sleeping bag and pitching camp in the grassy side yard of the house; I wouldn’t be the first to seek shade in the shadow of the freeway, I knew. There were some narrative possibilities in the idea, I thought: but I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. So I booked myself into the La Quinta, fifteen minutes by car from the place I’d move into as soon as I collected the keys.