An idyllic compromise

When my wife and I bought our house in Santa Monica Canyon, we had been living apart since our marriage three years previously. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other -- quite to the contrary, we enjoyed spending time with each other more than with any other person -- but the complications of changing schools and neighborhood friends for our two teenage sons from previous marriages made it easier to continue to live in our own homes.

We developed a new lifestyle, which we dubbed “Married But Dating,” that entailed our spending only weekends under the same roof. This piquant arrangement aroused not only the curiosity and interest of our friends but also a certain amount of envy on the part of those who were married and not dating anymore.

This dual-residence lifestyle, though, is not cheap: If two can live as cheaply as one, they can also live two times as expensively. Moreover, as our lives grew more and more entangled, we began to miss each other during the week and would compensate by spending a great deal of time on the telephone talking about things that we could have discussed over dinner. So when my son went off to college, we decided it was finally time to live together.

The decision of where to live together, however, was another matter. She had lived in Santa Monica for many years, and I was a Hollywood Hills person. I had resolved never to live any place where there were sidewalks, and she didn’t want to live any place where there weren’t. We needed somehow to meld Santa Monica and the Hollywood Hills.

Which is how we wound up in Santa Monica Canyon, a neighborhood that is neither in the city of Santa Monica nor a real canyon and has very small sidewalks. It is essentially an indentation between Brentwood and the Pacific Ocean that most people don’t even know is there. You can drive right by it on San Vicente or on Pacific Coast Highway without seeing it below you.

When the Realtor drove us up to the house, we did our best not to blanch. The house lacked, as she said, curb appeal. The inside was not a whole lot more appealing -- wall-to-wall carpets, low ceilings, exotic wallpaper. As I was already pivoting to return to the car, my wife said, with the kind of tender foresight with which one looks at a mangy dog and decides to love him, “I can make this house beautiful.” And so we went directly from “Married But Dating” to “Renovation Hell.”

This would be an ambitious remodel, what we call in the writing business “a Page 1 rewrite.” With her film director’s eye, my wife reconceived the house. We put in skylights, installed hardwood floors and new windows. Thanks to the help of a very capable designer-contractor, we survived the interminable months between closing and moving in with our marriage intact.

The February day we moved was rainy; the traffic was bad, and the movers were late. It was already dark when they started carrying our furniture into the new house. We couldn’t get the California king mattress up the stairs and wound up hoisting it over a balcony like a piano. But by 10 that night we were camped out among our belongings eating takeout, together at last under the same roof.

The first night in a new house you hear unfamiliar sounds that you will soon incorporate into the white noise of your life. What I heard that rainy February night, besides the occasional creaking of new and different timbers settling, was a sound I hadn’t slept with since I lived on the coast of West Africa many years ago -- the rhythmic thumping of the surf as it crashes onto the shore. It is both the loudest and quietest sound you will ever hear, and it waxes and wanes according to the tides, the direction of the wind and the amount of humidity in the air.

The morning was damp and grey, as all coastal mornings are, the seeping in of the day over the ocean instead of the sunlight bleeding in like a gathering stain. We took a walk to the beach, seven minutes away, and looked back toward the city we had left like a couple of refugees on the last boat out of Lisbon in 1940. We had left L.A. We were in another country.

Originally developed in 1888 as a subdivision called Santa Monica Heights, the canyon has a history of attracting artists, musicians and writers. The period between the two World Wars was its salad days when a number of European expatriates, such as Christopher Isherwood and Salka Viertel, owned houses there and held regular salons attended by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Oscar Levant and Igor Stravinsky.

Nowadays we have a smattering of minor celebrities who keep a low profile. They run the gamut from the writer-creator of one of cable TV’s most successful series, to a leading character actor (who seems to be in every third movie you see these days), to Beaver Cleaver’s mom, to one of the most prolific directors of X-rated movies in the business.

The major drawback of living in such a desirable part of the city is that people choose to renovate rather than move. And so there are dumpsters everywhere. Just when one remodel finishes, another one pops up to take its place. The street we live on, a small street with a dozen houses, has never been without a dumpster since we moved in five years ago. They are part of the flora and fauna, and you learn to incorporate them the way you learn to incorporate the sound of the ocean, the dampness and the lack of dry heat in the sum- mer.

If Santa Monica is a microclimate, then the canyon is a micro-microclimate. We have a pool in our yard that we rarely swim in because the weather is almost never hot enough to make the pool inviting. Every summer, some time around the end of July, we decide that we’ve got to go in the pool. Whether we want to or not. We can’t let an entire summer go by without swimming in our pool. And so we do an obligatory 10 minutes paddling around and we feel better.

We are thinking of filling in our swimming pool and converting it into a vegetable garden. Then we could put a dumpster out in front of our house. It would make us feel that we were doing our part for the community. After all, it’s been five years since we renovated. People are already starting to talk.