Though I own my house and have made certain commitments to it, I’ve begun sneaking out and seeing other houses on Sunday afternoons. The homes I spend time with are flashier and younger than the one I live in. They put ads in the Sunday paper announcing their availability and thrusting their charms before the public. “Open 2-5,” they declare. “Great Curb Appeal! . . . Won’t Last!” And so I go out and commit house adultery. In the evening I come back to my same old house, the smells of those other houses clinging to me and the realtor’s fact sheet crammed in my back pocket.
Often I take my wife and kids along on my dirty weekends, and my kids now practically break down in tears when I announce that we’re going to see some houses. They say they don’t want to go because it’s so boring, but I think they sense that we’re cheatin’. I insist, and off we go.
You walk into an open house and you’re greeted by a realtor who makes a two-millisecond decision about whether you’re a serious prospect or just a browser. That’s another reason to take the kids, because nobody would go through the trauma of dragging kids along to an open house unless they were seriously planning to move. Either way, you get to spend the next ten minutes traipsing through someone else’s dwelling while they’re not there.
This being Washington, people try to make their homes look impressive. I visited one house where every chair in the dining room had a little Harvard logo etched on the back. I visited another that was owned by a fellow who’d apparently been invited to give a lot of high school commencement addresses. As you walked up the stairs there was a series of black and white photographs of him standing at various podiums in cap and gown, gesturing to a series of student audiences. I presume he wasn’t lecturing them on the importance of humility. Quite frequently the coffee table in the living room will be weighted down with an imposing tome, one of the volumes of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, say, or a biography of Dean Acheson. It’s as if the owner had just been sitting there contemplating the transition from a bipolar to a multipolar world when the realtor burst in and told him he had to leave because the buyers were coming. I could swear I’ve seen the same copy of the Dean Acheson biography in four different houses.
But actually, I don’t spend all my time making sociological observations on the previous owner. I spend more time fantasizing about what I could do with his house if I owned it. I’m a bit the way Reagan was when he went to Berlin. I imagine myself walking around the house declaring, “Contractor, tear down this wall!” On my first walk through I can usually imagine how much nicer the house would be if the wall between the kitchen and the dining room were gone, and the wall between the kitchen and the playroom, and so on. I’m perfectly a la mode in this taste for open spaces, because when you walk into a newly built house, there are no walls anywhere except the exterior ones. It’s just a big open cavern, and you begin to think we’re headed back to the middle ages, when people lived in castle keeps with no privacy whatsoever.
Occasionally, I’ll get consumed by house lust. This happens when I enter a house that has a kitchen and family room that open directly onto the backyard. Some people have a weakness for big master baths, I suppose, or grand porches. But I imagine myself sitting at the breakfast table finally getting a chance to read the Sunday paper while my kids frolic silently (somehow) in the backyard. I get a great hunger for the house. It’s only three or four days later that I realize it doesn’t have enough bedrooms or it’s $ 200,000 more than I can afford.
In the 1970s people had mood rings, but I can measure my own mood by how much house I think I can afford. When I’m glum and realistic, I have a certain top number in my head, but when I’m buoyant, the sky’s the limit. A home is the only important thing money can buy, I tell myself, so splurge. What is America all about but real estate? That’s what Henry Hudson was looking for. That’s what the pioneers wanted. And sometime this summer I’m actually going to buy a house. I’m going to commit. I’m going to move into one of the houses I visit, and I’m going to start tearing down walls.
DAVID BROOKS
