kind of info on the fact sheet.”
The next house is perched on the side of the canyon. No, that’s not quite true. It is, in fact, falling into the canyon. I notice, but don’t mention, the fact that the outside foundation walls are cracked and patched. Inside, the house is alarmingly empty; the cool settled air seems proof that it’s been vacant for some time.
Marge consults her fact sheet. Yes, the house has been on the market about six months. The price has been reduced twice. But—she glances at us—perhaps we noticed the foundation …
“Yes,” I say. “Hopeless.”
“Damn,” Ivy says.
We look at two more houses; both have spectacular views and architectural distinction. But one is a bankruptcy sale and the other is a divorce house. By now I’m starting to pick up the scent: it’s a compound of petty carelessness and strenuous neglect, as though the owners had decamped in a hurry, angry at the rooms themselves.
To cheer ourselves up, the three of us have lunch in a sunny Broadway restaurant. It seems extraordinary that we can sit here and see mountains that are miles away; the thought that we will soon be able to live within sight of these mountains fills us with optimism. We order a little wine and linger in the sunlight. Vancouver is going to be an adventure. We’re going to be happy here. Marge Little, feeling expansive, tells us about her three children and about the problem she has keeping her weight down. “Marge Large they’ll be calling me soon,” she says. It’s an old joke, we sense, and the telling of it makes us feel we’re old friends. She got into the business, she says, because she loves houses. And she has an instinct for matching houses with people. “So don’t be discouraged,” she tells us. “We’ll find the perfect place this afternoon.”
We drive through narrow city streets to a house where a famous movie idol grew up. His mother still lives in the house, a spry, slightly senile lady in her eighties. The tiny house—we quickly see it is far too small for us—is crowded with photographs of the famous son. He beams at us from the hallway, from the dining room, from the bedroom bureau.
“Oh, he’s a good boy. Comes home every two or three years,” his mother tells us, her large teeth shining in a diminished face. “And once I went down there, all the way down to Hollywood, on an airplane. He paid my way, sent me a ticket. I saw his swimming pool. They all have swimming pools. He has a cook, a man who does all the meals, so I didn’t have to lift a finger for a whole week. What an experience, like a queen. I have some pictures someplace I could show you—”
“That would be wonderful,” Marge Little says, “but”—she glances at her watch—“I’m afraid we have another appointment.”
“—I saw those pictures just the other day. Now where—? I think they’re in this drawer somewhere. Here, I knew it. Take a look at this. Isn’t that something? That’s his swimming pool. Kidney-shaped. He’s got another one now, even bigger.”
“Beautiful,” Ivy says.
“And here he is when he was little. See this? He’d be about nine there. We took a trip east. That’s him and his dad standing by Niagara Falls. Here’s another—”
“We really have to—”
“A good boy. I’ll say that for him. Didn’t give any trouble. Sometimes I see his movies on the TV and I can’t believe the things he does, with women and so on. I have to pinch myself and say it’s only pretend—”
“I think—”
“I’m going into this senior-citizen place. They’ve got a nice TV lounge, big screen, bigger than this little bitty one, color too. I always—”
“Sad,” Ivy says, when we escape at last and get into the car.
“The house or the mother?” I ask her.
“Both.”
“At least it’s not a D.H.” (This has become our shorthand expression for divorce house.)
“Wait’ll you see the next place,” Marge Little says, swinging into traffic. “The next place is fabulous.”
Fabulous, yes. But far too big. After that, in a fit of desperation, we look at a condo. “I’m not quite ready for this,” I have to admit.
“No garden,” Ivy says in a numb voice. She looks weary, and we decide to call it a day.
The ad in the newspaper reads: WELL-LOVED FAMILY HOME. And Ivy and Marge Little and I are there, knocking on the door, at nine-thirty in the morning.
“Come in, come in,” calls a young woman in faded jeans. She has a young child on one hip and another—they must be twins—by the hand. Sunlight pours in the front window and there is freshly baked bread cooling on the kitchen counter.
But the house is a disaster, a rabbit warren of narrow hallways and dark corners. The kitchen window is only feet away from a low brick building where bodywork is being done on imported sports cars. The stairs are uneven. The bedroom floors slope, and the paint is peeling off the bathroom ceiling.
“It just kills us to leave this place,” the young woman says. She’s following us through the rooms, pointing with unmistakable sorrow at the wall where they were planning to put up shelving, at the hardwood floors they were thinking of sanding. Out of the blue, they got news of a transfer.
Ironically, they’re going to Toronto, and in a week’s time they’ll be there doing what we’re doing, looking for a house they can love. “But we just know we’ll never find a place like this,” she tells us with a sad shake of her head. “Not in a million zillion years.”
After that we lose track of the number of houses. The day bends and blurs; square footage, zoning regulations, mortgage schedules, double-car garages, cedar siding only two years old—was that the place near that little park? No, that was the one on that little crescent off Arbutus. Remember? The one without the basement.
Darkness is falling as Marge Little drives us back to our hotel. We are passing hundreds—it seems like thousands—of houses, and we see lamps being turned on, curtains being closed. Friendly smoke rises from substantial chimneys. Here and there, where the curtains are left open, we can see people sitting down to dinner. Passing one house, I see a woman in a window, leaning over with a match in her hand, lighting a pair of candles. Ivy sees it too, and I’m sure she’s feeling as I am, a little resentful that everyone but us seems to have a roof overhead.
“Tomorrow for sure,” Marge calls cheerily. (Tomorrow is our last day. Both of us have to be home on Monday.)
“I suppose we could always rent for a year.” Ivy says this with low enthusiasm.
“Or,” I say, “we could make another trip in a month or so. Maybe there’ll be more on the market.”
“Isn’t it funny? The first house we saw, remember? In a way, it was the most promising place we’ve seen.”
“The one with the view from the dining room? With the broken light in the bathroom?”
“It might not look bad with a new fixture. Or even a skylight.”
“Wasn’t that a divorce house?” I ask Ivy.
“Yes,”
