New Essay: The Unbearable Halfness Of Being (Part 2)
Not knowing where to live is the defining feature of my life
This is part 2 of the essay I posted on Monday. The whole “drop this in two parts” thing seemed like a good idea until I realized that picking up right where I left off made for a strange opening. So I backed up a couple of paragraphs and started from there, but it still won’t make sense unless you read the first part.
In July I went back to New York for a visit. My subtenants were in Europe and were happy to let me stay in the apartment if I deducted the days from their rent. For three days I sat at my desk and looked at the view. On the weekend, I drove upstate with a friend and looked around the countryside to see if perhaps that was a place I might want to live. For all my indecisiveness, I knew one thing for certain: I could never again live in a New York City apartment with a dog, at least not my particular dog or at least not until he was geriatric and no longer interested in walking more than 10 feet at a time. But maybe I could live upstate and visit the apartment occasionally, especially if I could keep my subtenants.
One of my biggest deficits as a person, aside from not being able to ski, is that I’ve never been able to bring myself to like upstate New York the way you’re supposed to. As I tooled around the Catskills, all I could think was that the aperture of the region was too small. The tree canopies were too low, the hills too gentle, the sunsets kind of meh. Maybe it’s my age-related myopia, but I appreciate how the hulking topography of the West enlarges the world’s font size. I like the big mountains and the big ocean and the wide freeways and normal-size Trader Joe’s.
I went onto Craigslist and typed “large fenced-in yard” in the sublet section of every city and state in America where the weather wasn’t oppressively hot. This led to several correspondences with scam artists purporting to own rental property in Flagstaff, Arizona; Burlington, Vermont; and even, inevitably, upstate New York. While keeping an eye on private listservs and specialized sites geared to academics on sabbatical, I took to googling random search terms that probably offer as good a glimpse into my psychology as you’re likely to find.
Sublet large yard fenced pet-friendly
Flexible lease dog okay hardwood floors
Sublet farm fence dog central air
Then one day, while checking for updates on one of the referral-only listservs, I spotted it: an art-filled, tastefully designed converted barn in rural, midcoast Maine on 12 acres, two of them fenced-in for dogs. I messaged the owner and she wrote back right away. She and her husband were artists with a soft spot for big dogs. They spent winters in a warmer climate and loved renting their house to other creative people, especially ones with big dogs. We exchanged several messages and she checked with the costume designer I’d be subletting from, who said I was a perfect tenant. The situation was perfect, perfect, perfect other than a few minor inconveniences.