Devil House(6)

Driving, she asked me a little about myself: my work, where I’d gone to school, if I had any children. But at lunch, seated in the outside patio of a Panera by a strip mall, she began to dig a little deeper. “Are you looking at any other houses while you’re here?”

“Actually, no,” I said. I looked up from my food; I didn’t want to seem evasive. “Just the one.”

“We have a number of really nice properties,” she said. “There’s neighborhoods in town that are quieter but not really much pricier. Two of them I could show you after lunch, if you wanted.”

“I leave later this afternoon,” I said. This wasn’t true; my reservation at the La Quinta was good until eleven the following day. Still.

“That’s fast!” she said. “Do you mind if I ask…”

She waited for me to make eye contact.

“Many of our clients are first-time buyers, and a house like that is often perfect for them. But I have several places in newer neighborhoods, places with a little more elbow room.”

Elbow room: she was young, and worked in a small market, but she was as good as or better than any high-end agent selling converted condos in Pacific Heights.

“It’s specifically this house I’m interested in,” I said.

“I know how that is,” she said, brilliantly, I thought: There was no way she wasn’t wondering what was wrong with me, why I’d want to get a place almost visibly destined for demolition. I suspected, faintly, that she was sounding me out for motives. People here had reason to be suspicious of outsiders. “But if you can find the time, at least look at this one other one. It’s less than a mile from here. It just went on the market. Super-cute. Newer, and a little nicer.”

I looked at my watch, which was strictly a performative gesture: my time was my own. “I can be a little flexible, I think,” I said. There wasn’t any need for me to seem busier than I was. I’m not sure what impression I was trying to make by tacitly suggesting I had a to-do list for the rest of the afternoon, but I did it anyway. You get used to this kind of talk in my line of work.



* * *



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.