This Is How ‘Love Story’ Became ‘The Money Pit’

It was love as instant and blinding as any in history or fiction. And like any one-sided passion, it was destined for the shoals.

The affair began in the fall of 1989, at a time of particular social anxiety. Not just mine. Everyone’s. The masses wondered: Is there a match out there for me? What will such a coupling cost? What sacrifices will be required?

These unions can be delicate. Often, they involve entire casts of outsiders--experts, advisors, consultants, clergy.

The outsiders profit when the courtships are successfully concluded. After all, no consummation, no fees. So they encouraged the lonely, the yearning: Keep looking! There’s something for everyone out there. Cast a wide net. Lower your expectations. Move to a new town if you have to!

Competition was hot. Other pursuers nipped at my heels. Would they be more attractive than I to the object of my lust? Could they offer something more?

I was stung in the heart. Relentless. Shameless. I made ridiculous offers, promises and compromises. The blandishments should have made me blush. In the end--and this is what matters--I triumphed.

I took possession with a fervor befitting a conquering queen. Mine, mine, mine. You are all mine and no one else’s.

In my haste, I had cut emotional corners. There were, I would learn too late, hidden flaws: undivulged fissures that would lead to messy ruptures, an imperfect reinvention, a corroded past that could not be concealed forever.

I’m no saint. I let things slide, should have been more attentive.

Forced by financial considerations to remain together, we live an uneasy truce. But there is no mistaking the terms of our relationship: We are enemies now, my house and I.

*

This is embarrassing: I hate my house, but I still find it physically attractive.

A 1927 Cape Cod-ish design, it was gutted and reconstructed by ambitious previous owners a decade or so ago. We bought it from a couple whose taste was blameless. The kitchen was hunter green long before Williams-Sonoma ever thought to apply the color to toasters and blenders. Dove gray walls in other rooms, burnished wood floors, marble on the fireplace, skylights galore. We found it one day as we were on our way to see a different ridiculously undersized and overpriced home on the same block during that moment of real estate insanity that made you feel that if you didn’t buy rightthissecond you’d be frozen out of home ownership forever.

As we walked down the sidewalk, I felt something wet splat on the top of my head. I looked up and there it was: our house. The pigeon poop was an omen; God was sending a signal. God wanted me to live here.

This was the sort of stupidity that reigned in the days before the market began its own pigeon poop-like descent from the stratosphere.

As it happens, what God really wanted was to teach me a lesson about listening to my mother, who swore that the market was due for a crash and that we should postpone the purchase for a few years. (Funny . . . before that I’d always thought she was in league with Satan.)

Not content with spiting me by losing a quarter of its value, the house is now trying to destroy itself.

And me.

*

Go ahead, laugh.

My house is stalking me.

The attacks come from all sides.

First, of course, the roof. We finally fixed it after the plaster in our child’s bedroom began to rain onto her bed as she slept. The damage to the floor was moderate but costly.

A couple of windows joined the hostilities, warping and buckling around the frames. The bricks on the patio grew tired of resisting tree roots and relaxed upward into a series of jagged, human-tripping hillocks.

A bathroom baseboard sprouted something brown and crunchy. Deep into the denial that accompanies any home repair that looks expensive, I pretended it wasn’t there. Months later, leaky grout in the shower was identified as the culprit. I never did identify the brown crunchy stuff, but had it been found on Mars, scientists surely would have rejoiced.

After that, the smell began. I denied again: Maybe it was a vase of flowers gone bad. Maybe a mouse had bought the big one in the chimney. But this was bigger--and stinkier--than any dead flora or fauna.

When people stopped coming over, it was time to find the source of the smell. We soon discovered that the house was floating on a sea of sewage. The tidewater rose and receded according to our flushing habits.

The plumber is at work. Holes have been dug. Pipes examined.

Doesn’t smell like sewage anymore.

Smells like money, lots and lots of money.

And revenge.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.