My House; My Stalker, Myself

For most of us, buying a house is about reconciling the life you envision with the life you have. We all carry around in our heads little movie reels of the scenes we imagine ourselves playing out in some ideal future—the birth of a child or the celebration of a big promotion, a reunion of family members long estranged. Shopping for a home is like searching for just the right Hollywood set, the place that most closely resembles the scenery in our minds. The more houses you see, however, the more concessions to reality you are forced to make, until at last you are holding on to that one indispensable thing, that singular feature of your next home that is more integral than any other to the pictures that play in your head. This is the part of your imagined life that you're just not willing to let go.

When my wife, Ellen, and I set out to buy our first home together, we quickly found, as I suppose most couples do, that our ideal lives had been scripted to different sets. More than anything else, I wanted space. After years of writing for newspapers and magazines, always waking up to the specter of one pressing deadline or another, I had this strange notion that a sprawling house -- the kind of place where you couldn't always see from one end to the other -- would somehow depressurize my life and allow me to breathe again. Ellen, on the other hand, had fled the disconnectedness of Southern California, and for her, a neighborhood of Eastern urbanity was all that really mattered. She seemed willing to live in a two-room box of corrugated tin, so long as she could walk to Whole Foods.

My wife got more of what she wanted, falling instantly in love with a center-hall colonial on a corner lot three blocks from the subway and American University. The house had a decent amount of space, but it was something of a catastrophe. It needed new wiring and plumbing and heating and cooling. The majestic bay windows out front were rotting through. Half the house slumped downhill. The ancient kitchen with the peeling linoleum smelled of an open sardine can we found in back of a cabinet; I declared the whole room a hazardous zone and ordered an evacuation. Implicit in my agreeing to buy the place -- ''It has good bones,'' Ellen said, as if we had taken up taxidermy -- was that I could have it more or less rebuilt, within our financial limits, so as to create a home that more closely fitted my own domestic self-image.

I immediately brought in our handyman, whom I'll call Ed, and asked him to get to work. Ed had been in our lives for a few years now. He was an aging, potbellied gambler with bad knees and a rakish white pompadour, an old-school rogue who had drywalled his way across the country once or twice. Ed walked around the empty, dilapidated house, shaking his head and saying, over and over: ''I don't know. Boy, I don't know.'' Undeterred, I went out and got him tiles and toilets and a silo's worth of brushed-nickel hinges. I wrote checks as if they were Post-it Notes.
I work at home, and so every afternoon I would emerge from my office for a few minutes to sit around chatting with Ed and his crew. I enjoyed watching the house become something closer to what I hoped it would be. And then I realized I wasn't the only one watching.

I don't remember the first time I noticed her, exactly. But I remember that she drove a dark blue sedan, a late '90s model Civic or Corolla, with a few dings in it. She was blond, but otherwise hard to make out from a distance of 50 feet or so. At first, she would slow down as she neared the house, rolling gently past my office window. Then she would creep past both bay windows and the sunroom at the other end of the house, accelerating as she turned the corner and fading out of view. Soon, as she got bolder, she would actually stop and idle in front of my office, craning her neck and peering in to where I sat. As the weeks wore on, this became her daily routine. I came to expect her.

Did I know this woman? I reached into the recesses of my oft-distracted brain, but I was pretty sure I did not. At first, I would simply stare back at her until she drove away. Then I started waving, not in a happy, enthusiastic manner but more in an ''I think I need a restraining order'' sort of way. Eventually, I would drop what I was doing and go to the window, leering back at her, sometimes raising my arms in an exaggerated shrug, as if to say, ''Is there a problem?'' She squinted in my general direction but seemed to look through me, as if I were an apparition she couldn't see. Few things are more pitiable, I thought, than a stalker with failing eyesight.

I took down her license plate number and paid for an online search, but it turned up nothing. It was as if she didn't exist -- which was pretty much what Ellen and our friends seemed to suspect anyway. When I described this woman and her constant lurking outside our house, they looked at me with tolerant half smiles, as if to suggest that my ego had now reached such proportions that I assumed that every casual passer-by on our quiet street was fixated on me. This struck me, in turn, as mildly insulting. Why couldn't some woman be unnaturally obsessed with me? Was that really so hard to believe?

As the weeks passed, everyone in the orbit of my daily life found himself dragged into this drama. I would be leaning back in my swivel chair, talking to my editor about something on the news, when suddenly I would exclaim: ''She's back! I'm waving at her right now!'' When Ellen and I and our best friends would get together on weekends, the four of us would sit around inventing cinematic theories. Maybe she had once lived in the house and had buried something valuable under the floorboards of my office. Maybe her mother had been the maid here when she was a small child and she was haunted by some awful secret. Or maybe she felt wronged by something I'd written and was steeling herself for revenge.

Ellen suggested that maybe the woman had been hoping to buy the house before we did and now she just couldn't get it out of her head. I told her this made some sense. It seemed to me that anyone who had wanted to buy this house would certainly have to have been unhinged to begin with.

It was an unseasonably warm day in late fall, months after we had moved in, when I just happened to look up from my computer and see her, once again, idling outside. She seemed now to have got entirely too comfortable. Rather than roll by the house, she had come to a complete stop. I found myself overcome with a kind of fury. What had I done to this woman? What business did she have here? As these indignant thoughts occurred to me, I became aware that I was no longer in my house. Almost unconsciously, I had made my way out onto the modest front lawn, where I watched her car slowly begin to turn the corner and drive away. And then I thought, Not today.

Years ago I shattered a knee, and now I run with all the grace of a man on stilts. I can only imagine what this woman must have thought when she glanced into the rearview mirror to see me, in shorts and a T-shirt, hobbling determinedly after her car, my bare feet slapping the pavement, my arm waving frantically in the air. She slammed on the brakes, perhaps out of disbelief, and rolled down the window. We came, at last, face to face.

She was probably in her early 40s, surprisingly attractive, with the kind of closed, taut expression that radiated midlife disappointment. ''Excuse me,'' I said, unfailingly polite, ''but I've been living in that house there for a while now, and I can't help noticing that you keep driving by and looking through the windows. Can you tell me why?''

I expected that she would immediately deny this accusation, if only for pride's sake. But instead she said, ''It has nothing to do with you.''

''It's my house!'' I cried.

''It's a public street,'' she replied. ''I can drive by if I want.''

''I'm pretty sure that you don't have the right to stop in front of a private house every day and spy on someone through the windows.'' Actually, I was pretty sure she did.

''I don't even know you,'' she said dismissively. ''I'm not interested in you at all.''

''Then what are you interested in?''

''It's personal,'' she said. ''I don't want to talk about it.''

I considered this for a moment. ''Would you like to come in?'' I asked. ''Is there anything I can help you find?'' A vision of the floorboards flashed through my head.

''No,'' she replied calmly, turning away from me and staring out the windshield. ''I won't bother you anymore,'' she said, and then she left me standing in the street.

Hours later, while brushing my teeth before bed, some slow-turning gear in my head suddenly clicked into place. ''Of course,'' I said out loud. The next day, I dug up her license plate number on an old scrap of paper and walked into the basement where Ed and his Spanish-speaking carpenters were finding creative new ways to make me poor.

''O.K., you guys,'' I said, staring directly at Ed, ''does anyone know a blue sedan with these Maryland plates?''

Ed shook his head blankly. As I turned to leave the room, however, he looked up and asked, ''What did you say that number was?''
I recited it again.

He seemed to turn this information over in his mind for a long moment. ''Boy, I don't know,'' he said finally, without meeting my eye, and went back to work.

I never learned that woman's name, and I never saw her again. Perhaps it really was the embarrassment of our encounter that made her stop driving by. Perhaps she lies awake somewhere, even now, wishing she could get her hands on whatever secret sits undiscovered in the frozen ground four feet below my office. I doubt it, though. I'm pretty sure Ed took care of the situation. More than likely, it wasn't me or the house that she had been stalking all that time; it was Ed.

To my surprise, I found myself thinking about our stalker as time went on. We had more in common, that woman and I, than I might have guessed. Every afternoon, for a time, she had felt pulled, even though she surely knew better, toward our little street, probably because she thought that the meaningful life she imagined for herself was waiting, elusively, somewhere behind the walls of my gutted house. This was something I could understand.