The Beginning (and the end) of the Affair

(A preliminary note: I wrote this piece as a hopeful entry in The Sunday New York Times's column on Modern Love, published each week in their Style section. My thinking was that while the piece isn't about an interpersonal relationship like most of their columns, it was about modern love and a loving relationship and I hoped The Times would find it a nice change from their usual. Apparently they didn't find it amusing and so turned me down. At least that's a charitable and ego-saving assumption. I planned the piece for this new blog but since The Times has very strict rules about their columns never having appeared anywhere in print before they publish them, I had to wait until The Times turned me down to publish here. And so for those of you who haven't read it, here it is, the first entry on my new blog, On Phil's Mind. On My Mind, a title I much preferred, was already taken.)

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It was her odd beauty that initially attracted me. Unconventional in appearance for 1975, she seemed awkwardly slipped between traditional and modern, like a comfort and a challenge all at the same time. Still I knew instinctively that our personalities would intimately intertwine and that we’d make a great pair. Cliché though it is, it’s nonetheless true that I fell in love at first sight, with

the house on Linden Green that I bought and lived in for over 35 years.

During that time, I came to appreciate her many fine qualities. She was a new house in an old, prestigious neighborhood and fronted on a small interior park, the Green, which was adorned with flowers and fruit trees, and with a sculpture, a fountain and a pond. In spring, the trees shed so many blossoms and the sidewalks were so strewn with color that my guests might imagine themselves at a pink welcome to an Indian wedding. During summer, with the windows in her bedroom open, instead of being aware of those ubiquitous metropolitan police sirens wailing away in the distance, I often fell asleep hearing the fountain, plashing quietly outside. It was like living in the country in the city. Her expansive living room, over 30 feet wide, was filled many times with friends who came for dinner or brunch and once, at a benefit for an AIDS charity, hosted, at the same time, both a mayor and a congressman. Her dining room, small and intimate and slightly secretive, painted a dark red, the color of claret, featured a ceiling-mounted lighting system that encouraged dramatic and unlimited flexibility for seducing my guests into believing that the food was special, even when it wasn’t. Presentation, after all, is everything. Her railroad kitchen, although small, had cabinets and counters down each side, accommodating preparation of the most elaborate dinners and, afterward, easily containing the resultant crowded mess. Her living room opened onto a small garden, walled and private, which challenged my horticultural creativity and gave me an opportunity to dig in the dirt, reminding me, nostalgically, of a childhood when if I weeded my mother’s garden up to a particular line, she would take me to the lake for a swim. Linden Green’s many walls provided ample backgrounds for my burgeoning art collection, dramatically lighted with an elaborate system of track and heads suspended from her ceilings. She had a full basement, with ample room for those things we always think we’re going to need but instead just gather dust year after year. She never complained. In another space, she easily accepted furnishings from my former apartment in New York, giving me an extra bedroom and sitting room for the overflow of weekend guests. Most of all, I loved her fireplace, the core of her living room in winter, a feature that warmed the hearts of many friends and invited me to just stare into it quietly, while I might hypnotically contemplate my past or future.
I felt most intimate with Linden Green when I was all alone with her. When my friends were occupied on a weekend with some social affair in which I was not included, I often planned a special solitary dinner. I’d build a fire in her fireplace and slip an appropriate CD into my stereo system, maybe Keith Jarrett’s “The Melody at Night with You,” or Bazz Norton on the piano at the Savoy. I’d make myself a martini, very dry and up, and have some stinky cheese, then an elaborate dinner with a fine wine, enjoyed in my house’s dining room, with candles and her lights, the good china and the fancy silverware. Afterward, with a Limoncello on ice, I might move through all the chairs and sofas in my house’s living room, looking critically around from all the different angles these positions provided, assuring myself that every view was lovely, that my Linden Green was happy.
Like so many of those we love, Linden Green also had some quirks. One of the under-counter lights in the kitchen insisted on going out when it was tired and then, after a small rest, coming on again. The lights in her laundry room downstairs, played fickle with me, teasing me by sometimes coming on and sometimes not, challenging me to hit the switch just right to bring them on. When a light switch in her bedroom closet failed and I decided to replace it myself, summoning unusual bravery in the face of my traditional hesitation and dislike of electrical involvement, I was successful, but put the switch in upside down. I imagined the house laughing at me each time I turned on that light until I grew automatically accustomed to pushing the switch down instead of up. The house’s front storm door had been installed (before my time) incorrectly close to the door jamb, which prevented the door from opening fully, and causing me to bump my head many times, never remembering this unfailing awkwardness in my house’s personality. In the fall, when leaves on the trees in her garden turned a glorious red and orange and yellow, the honey locust also noisily dropped so many brown and ugly seed pods that I was forced to rake them up many times, until the tree’s perpetual effort at further propagation was spent and quiet. When it snowed, because of my house’s position, my parking space behind it was never fully plowed, requiring hours of tedious shoveling to free my car. And those awful mosquitoes, so dense and hungry that I couldn’t even go through the garden to the parking lot without being bitten, raising big red lumps on my arms or hands or face that itched for days. This nasty insect’s voraciousness prevented me from spending any time in Linden Green’s garden without being slathered with bug spray, making me feel clammy and oily, and smelling like an old athletic shoe.
My partner in a former relationship once asked me if I thought we loved each other. And I said, “Yes, of course we do.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I think it’s because we get our arms around those things we don’t like about each other,” I replied.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s it. I think we love each other because of the things we don’t like about each other.”
And he was right. I grew to love Linden Green not only for her many fine qualities but also for her quirks, for those features, even those I was constantly reminded that I didn’t like, that created her distinctive personality.
Still, lately, I’d been loving Linden Green a little less each year. Arthritis in my knees had made it painful for me to go up and down her stairs so many times each day and prevented me from getting down on my knees to dig in the soil in her garden. I was no longer able to shovel snow and had to fall back on those ubiquitous, enterprising boys with shovels, urgently ringing my doorbell at such times, to ask if they could dig out my car. The quirks of my light switches began to irritate me; I just wanted them to go on, or off. A dinner alone, instead of creating intimacy with my house, seemed only lonely. It was time to give up Linden Green and move on to something new.
When the house went on the market, I felt a pang of sadness, separating from a personality with which I had grown so close, a personage I knew so intimately. When Linden Green was sold, I had a moment of remorse, like abandoning a long-time lover, saying goodbye to my past. But as the art came down from her walls, Linden Green’s personality began to fade until, filled with boxes piled high and furniture in disarray, waiting to be trucked to my new apartment, she lost her Linden Green-ness and became just another lonely house.
My new apartment, although a good deal smaller, is high above the street with lovely views of the city where I live, and because of so many windows, is filled with welcome, brilliant light. As the furniture was put in place and my art went up on the apartment’s walls, I began, if somewhat hesitantly, to feel a new affinity for the space. No stairs, no falling pods, no mosquitoes. And although my apartment’s own quirky personality has begun to assert itself – the limited storage has forced me to put things away in very odd places and I still can’t find my ice bucket or the ten foot measuring tape – I think I’m going to be in love again.

(Another note: my apologies for the spacing. Once composed, this software won't allow me to indent paragraphs, which I know makes this hard to read. I'll try to do better in the future.)