Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [95]
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH
D
ennis and I live in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in a large studio apartment that overlooks the new Trump development along the river. From our living room, we can peer into the two-million-dollar apartments across the street and admire the popcorn ceilings and overhead fluorescent lights that apparently come standard in every kitchen. We used to have a view of the Hudson River, but this is no longer the case. We now get a sliver of sky and a chunk of New Jersey, and that is all, which is clearly not enough for anyone. So we’ve decided that this summer, we need “a place in the country.” A place where we can go to decompress and look at trees in their natural habitat. As opposed to trees that have been reformed into particle board and placed into a Trump window frame.
So we began looking at houses in western Massachusetts. And we recently found a farmhouse from the seventeen-eighties that has been fully restored by its current owner, a New Yorker. This means all the molding has been stripped and left tastefully bare, the wide pine floors polished with European wax. In the kitchen there is a sink made of slate and the faucet is from Paris, but it’s not fancy; it’s blissfully plain in a way that only the French could manage to pull off. I’m dead certain this faucet has added twelve thousand dollars to the price of the house.
In the living room is an enormous beehive fireplace complete with Dutch oven. This fireplace is what made us want the house. This is a fireplace a person of six feet can nearly stand in. The bricks are, of course, handmade.
There is a huge apple tree in front and just below this, an old stone wall that has mostly melted into the earth. The house is on eighty acres of pastures and woodlands. At the western edge of the yard there is even a post-and-beam barn with a bright red door, like an Elizabeth Arden spa. This barn has plumbing, a soapstone woodstove, and two bedrooms.
In other words, this is a perfect house. The ultimate escape hatch from the stress of the city, yes?
Actually, no.
This house would, in fact, triple your stress. Because you would feel the need to be accountable to it. It would be like dating royalty: a fine idea in the abstract but draining financially and emotionally.
When you shopped for furniture, you would find yourself thinking words like “honest” and “authentic,” and then nothing would ever be good enough and the one small thing that was good enough would cost you seven thousand dollars and would be fragile. No way could you ever go to Target, ever again. You would shop in places where you ran into Martha Stewart and Barbra Streisand, and they would both outbid you for everything.
In a normal house, if you have a clogged drain you call a plumber. But in this antique New England Cape, a clogged drain would require a certified specialist and possibly even approval from the registry of historic homes.
And this, I understand now, is why the New Yorkers must sell it. It is too flawless a house to actually live in. It is a house to sit in and be photographed, not a house to sit in and eat eggs. You could absolutely never fart in this house.
In desperation I phoned a real estate agent on Nantucket. I said, “I’m just looking for a little summer shack. A writer’s shack, really, very sort of simple and crude. Doesn’t have to be on the water but close enough to walk.”
She chuckled and said, “Let me think.” And for a moment, there was silence, and then I heard her tapping on her keyboard. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think I have something here. It’s like you want, very Hemingway-ish, very rustic, and sort of iconoclastic: one bedroom, kitchen, living room, bath, eighth of an acre. Eight hundred thousand.”
It was beginning to seem that Dennis and I would be trapped in Manhattan forever, unless one of us won the Powerball lottery.
But then I got an idea. What about a log cabin? What if we bought a piece of land in the Berkshires and then bought one of those log cabins, from a kit?
The truth is, I’ve always fantasized about living