When I was first married and looking for a place to live, my father said, “Get as much house as you can, because you’re going to be in it for a lot longer than you think.”
That turned out to be not much house. The cheapest habitable structure we saw was $ 25,000 beyond our budget. It was inhabited by a divorce going through a blue period, the kind of blue period that leads men to put out cigarettes on the carpets and drop half-drunk beer cans on the floor, figuring, I’ll pick that up sometime in the next few months. There wasn’t much furniture, and what there was was sad: a work bench in the living room (Now that I’m divorced, I can work on my carpentry!), a few mattresses shoved up against the walls, streaked near the pillows with years of accumulated scalp grease. The wallpaper — of a cute, kiddie type obviously picked out when the guy had a family — was coming unhung in the upstairs bedrooms. If the interior was Balzac, the yard was Naipaul. It had “gone back to bush,” with sumac, thistles, poison ivy, and saplings growing out of the steps. But still too expensive for us.
Six months later, we got a call from the broker. Not a single person had expressed an interest in even visiting it. If we came in $ 25,000 low, we could snag it. And we did. We now had a fixer-upper. Too bad we didn’t have any up-fixing abilities. All we could do was start throwing stuff out and hire someone to clear the forest in which the house lay buried.
And we were astonished at what we saw. We had what they call in the classifieds a gorgeous home, even a stately one. The problems had all been superficial. Before his rough patch, the guy had planted six varieties of azalea (heretofore invisible behind sumac), put in new casement windows (invisible under grime), and installed new kitchen countertops (invisible under pizza boxes and months-old pots of stiff macaroni). Best of all, he’d built a porch off the dining room that was almost completely enveloped by the most beautiful cedar I had ever seen. It arced out of our neighbor’s yard at a Tower-of-Pisa angle, shrouding us in its bowed, fleecy, hovering limbs. What shelter! You could have breakfast there during a thunderstorm. What privacy! On stifling summer nights, you could read in your underpants. The sidewalk was only ten feet away, but our deck was as isolated as any Cordoban courtyard. It was like something out of Romantic poetry, a bower of bliss, an elfin grot.
The tree also shaded us from Rod, who lived in the house next door. Rod had the weird, over-fastidious, too-much-time-on-his-hands air of certain single men. “Manicured” doesn’t do justice to the state his lawn was in. Saturdays and Sundays, he’d be out working on it with what I’d swear was a vacuum cleaner. Gzheemp! Gzheemp! Gzhoo! His bushes were so squared off I assume he trimmed them with a toenail clipper.
I came home from work one night, and my wife said, “You’re going to be mad.” I walked onto my deck and my tread echoed off eight row houses now plainly visible across the street. It was an elfin grot no longer. No — it was like Mussolini’s balcony over the Piazza Venezia, naked to the world. The neighbor across the street, a retired forester, was standing, hands on hips, glaring at Rod. I looked over into Rod’s yard and there he was, standing next to a stump. (Very neatly sawed off, of course; it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d sanded it.) He looked up at me with a wimpy little smile, and said, nodding cheerily, “Oh, I cut down . . . that tree. It was dropping needles on the lawn.”
I usually reject out of hand ordinances against cutting down trees. But a few weeks later Rod did something that changed my mind: He decided to move. That puts it in a different light, doesn’t it? He demolished a living thing that had delighted a streetful of families for three generations and would have delighted it for three generations more — in order to render more pleasurable his two or three remaining lawn-vacuuming sessions.
Now there’s a realtor’s sign out front that says “F*NCY INTERIOR!” (“T*CKY!” is the more usual verdict of the curious neighbors who’ve seen the bronze golf dogs and clay figurines inside.) Rod’s house is half the size of ours and he’s asking twice what we paid. For a while I wished him nothing but ill. During open houses, I wanted to appear on my all-too-exposed deck with cigars and whiskey bottles, fire questions at my wife like 1!Ay, guapita! 1?Cuando llega el proximo embarque de cocaina?, and keep a tinny transistor radio half-tuned at full blast to the rap station.
On the other hand, if the jerk gets what he’s asking, my house will certainly be worth enough that I’ll be able to afford to replace the tree.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
