Hotel Tennessee by Helena de Bres

“The toilet is in the bedroom,” I said. “And I’m not talking en suite, I’m talking right there, next to your pillow.” 

This was last summer, when I was googling places to rent in Palo Alto for my upcoming sabbatical. It was becoming clear that if I were to keep living alone and stick to my current budget, I’d have to make certain domestic compromises. 

“But I think I can do it,” I continued. “It’s near the golf course, nice and woodsy. And it’s cute on the outside, like a bird house. For a super small bird.”

“What if you bring someone home, though?” my friend Sasha asked. “And they need to use the bathroom?”

“Bedroom,” I corrected her. 

“Right,” she said, as if she were proving a point or something.

“You know my lifestyle,” I reminded her. I haven’t dated anyone in several years: it’s like I’ve commanded a certain part of my life to stand still while the rest of me regroups. “Anyway, I guess I could put up a little screen.”

Sasha gave me the look people give me when I’m being desperate, so I began to explore other options. The most promising one came to me in the middle of the night. Maybe Tennessee Lane has a room free!

I lived in Palo Alto once before, during a postdoc twelve years ago. From 2006-8, I shared a house there with four guys and a boa constrictor named Bo. It was insanely cheap with the rent divided by five (Bo’s closet was a free space) and also because the house hadn’t been renovated since the 1970s. The two guys who’d lived there the longest were an Asian-American West Coast redo of The Odd Couple. Steve, the slacker, was a florist with a sun-kissed, spaced-out surfer vibe whose main interests were snakes and golf. Greg, the neat-freak, was a carpenter with a dry wit and a trail-running obsession, both of which helped him burn off steam when Steve left the kitchen in chaos. They were in their mid-40s but seemingly ageless, their often shirtless torsos athletic and tan, and they maintained a tense but stable orbit as the three other tenants changed identities every year or two.

I emailed Greg and he replied to say that the room next to my old bedroom was freeing up in the fall. “Omg should I do it?” I texted my sister, Julia, at 3 a.m. She, like me, was of two minds about it. A lot of water has surged under my personal bridge since the mid-2000s. Back in that house, would I be assailed by memories of my younger, innocently happy self, before my divorce, my fraught post-divorce relationship, the pre-tenure slog and a major health crisis made me weary and jaded? And though it was only just over a decade since I’d lived there, there’s a big difference between being in your 20s and being in your 40s: socially, I’d at least doubled my age. Would I catch my face in a familiar mirror and suddenly seem withered?

Then there was the issue of the mushroom in the bathroom. I discovered it there one morning in 2007 while brushing my teeth, sprouting from a crevice between the carpet and the wall. It was shitake-like, and I briefly considered plucking it and tossing it into a stir fry, just for the kicks. Greg had removed it, but it remained an invisible totem of the house’s general atmosphere of decay and stagnation. Twelve years on, it was unlikely things had improved in that department. Maybe I’d find on moving back that I was now too old for this whole scene. Or, worse, what if I found out I wasn’t? 

On the other hand, I had nothing but positive memories of life at Tennessee Lane. I loved that house, for all its infirmities. It was in a neighborhood of single-story modernist homes built in 1951, each with a shallow-sloped roof, a blank facade onto the street, an airy open-plan interior and floor-to-ceiling windows revealing a lush backyard. It screamed California at mid-century, highballs out on the patio with the neighboring matrimonial unit, one member of whom you’re secretly conducting an affair with, while the Cold War escalates and the New Deal stalls under Eisenhower. “Those were the days,” I used to think, as I caressed the grooved redwood siding of the garage. They absolutely weren’t and I knew it, but I enjoyed imagining myself as an enviably dressed martini-toting predecessor who’d thought they were. I was so enamored of that decrepit house that I experienced actual grief on leaving it to start my academic job in Massachusetts. What a surprise gift, a belated redemption, to go back! 

And the only other live option involved a toilet next to a bed. 

“Anyway, it’ll feel different!” Julia reassured me when I sent the email signing up for T Lane Take Two. “It’s been years! Can’t step in the same river twice!”

§

Shortly after moving in I discovered a post-it note on the fridge in my own handwriting, recording the number of Ricardo, the cleaner I’d hired soon after moving in the first time. The ink had faded to light purple in the Golden State sun, but the note was otherwise intact and stuck securely to the fridge at presumably the precise angle I’d placed it in 2006.

“This note has been on the fridge for twice as long as my marriage lasted,” I texted Julia, a little breathless. “Like what the hell kind of adhesive is that?”

I touched it, in uneasy wonder. A donkey-shaped piñata, a plush California quail and an autographed photo of a famous golfer were likewise positioned exactly as they had been on top of the bookshelf in the living room. I recognized each member of the random assortment of cracked plates and chipped glasses in the kitchen, and even the many carpet stains in the hallway nestled into familiar niches in my brain. As I lay in bed at night, one thin fiberglass wall from my previous quarters, I heard, once again, the mournful sound of the Caltrain as it sped down the nearby tracks.

If the house had barely changed in appearance since my departure, the same was apparently true of me. I left my room one October afternoon to find a strange man in the hallway. He had tatty overalls and long grey hair, a general Bob-in-Twin-Peaks look.

“Helena, you’re back!” he exclaimed. “Do you remember me? It’s Jeff.”

“Right! Of course!” I lied.

“I always thought we could be friends,” Jeff said. “You were sort of dreamy, artistic like me, and you had that weird boyfriend.” 

That weird boyfriend was now my ex-husband, but who was Jeff? As he told me about his post-retirement plan to create a hydroponic nursery for exotic plants with an attached beer garden and sculpture park, some neglected neurons began to refire. He was the scattered landlady’s scattered handyman, who appeared unannounced every few months to ineptly “fix” things, to Greg’s professional derision.

“I’ve missed you!” Jeff said, “We should hang out some time!” 

“Yes!” I chirped, scuttling out to recover in my car.

Later, I peered at myself in the bathroom mirror. I’ve always looked young, and in dim lighting I could pull off 28, just like back then I could pull off 18. I arguably now look more like my actual age a decade ago than I did at the time. By returning to the scene, I noted to myself, I’d righted a temporal discrepancy, tied up a cosmic loose end. 

Viewed from another angle, I’d stalled.

California’s eternal promise is novelty, progress, reinvention: depending on the era, you go there to discover gold, get discovered or discover yourself. But California is also the land of arresting sameness: bland sunshine every day, identical suburban tract houses, one palm tree looking like another and another and another, down the endless freeway ad infinitum. I knew that, but still, I hadn’t anticipated this degree of stasis, especially in the heart of Silicon Valley. I was in a time warp, clearly, but in which decade had I landed? Though the house looked like it had in 2008, it certainly didn’t look like 2008 in there. Instead it was a blend of the 50s and 70s (the latter being the decade in which Barry-Gibb-quiffed Steve got personally stuck.) The backyard, for its part, resembled an archaeological dig, due to the broken vases from Steve’s florist shop that were scattered around it, half-buried, like ancient relics. Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood remained squarely mid-twentieth-century. As the fall progressed I began taking evening walks in the adjacent development from the same era, whose streets are curled into three interlocking sets of concentric circles. Sometimes I took along a gin and tonic and allowed my mind to sink into lulling disorientation as the sun sank its own way down the palms—same houses, same streets, going round and round, with no obvious beginning or end.

§

In late November I flew to LA to get some air and celebrate what was officially my 41st birthday. I hadn’t spent much time there before and fell in love with it instantly. “I feel so at home here!” I texted everyone. “I’m so energized! Last night I drove to the ocean and walked into it at midnight in my faux leather pants, singing happy birthday to myself!”

“I’m glad you’re having a great time,” Sasha texted back. “But if you’re having a mental breakdown you should say so. It’s hard to tell the difference from here.”

I wasn’t—or was I? The next day, the owner of a Silver Lake vintage store I’d heard about said to me “Nice to see you again!” The same evening a Los Feliz bartender noted, on handing over the menu, “You know how this works, you’ve been here before.” (I hadn’t). The next morning a Santa Monica server greeted me at brunch like a long-lost friend. 

Wait, have I been here before? I wondered, jittery, as my Bloody Mary kicked in. Do I live in LA now? Or, will I, like, in the future?

“Maybe you should come back to Massachusetts,” Sasha suggested.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said. Then there was the cat.

§

One of the best things about T Lane Take One was that it delivered me the first cat I’d had since I was a kid. She jumped in my window and, after some half-hearted attempts to find her owner, I adopted her. Violet was extremely beautiful, with a lush tabby coat and striking green eyes, and also very ungrateful. My love for her was boundless but unreciprocated, and she ended up re-adopting herself as my weird boyfriend / husband / ex-husband’s cat, arguably just to spite me. I lost her in the divorce and by the time I made it back to Tennessee Lane it’d been seven years since I’d seen her.

An attraction of returning to T Lane had been that it would allow me to foster a pet, which my landlord in Boston didn’t permit. I forgot about this idea for a while, but in early spring it kicked back in and I signed up for an orientation at the local shelter. I was asked to choose between three needy homeless cats, a vicious exercise that made me panic. I blindly selected the middle one. It wasn’t till several days later that I realized she looked exactly like Violet. Yellow rather than green eyes, that was it.

Jasmine settled into T Lane instantly, as if, say, she’d lived there before. She made the same thump that Violet had when executing her abrupt entry through my bedroom window, Cosmo Kramer-style. She made the same crunching sounds eating the same food from the same store under the same roof. She was, like Violet, named after a flower, because the shelter had called her “Jazzy” and I’d had to urgently upgrade that. Half the time I simply called her Violet because it was the path of least resistance. I adopted her, Boston landlord be damned.

I was contemplating getting Jasmine/Violet an engraved identification tag of the kind her predecessor had worn, but I was taking a while to get around to it. Six weeks after she moved in, I found myself idly examining the bookshelf in the living room while my rice cooked. Huh! I remarked. A cat collar! It was a lovely light blue, the best color, with a pink heart-shaped metal tag attached. Greg had mentioned a previous tenant’s cat, Wayne, but this seemed a bit girly for that reportedly hyper-masc beast. I flipped the tag over to check its inscription.

VIOLET

it read, of course, followed by my current phone number. It was a little rusty after twelve years but otherwise precisely fit my specifications. I felt queasy, slightly dizzy, whiplashed. I sniffed it warily and traced its letters with my finger, as if visually impaired. By the time the rice was ready, I’d fastened it around Jasmine’s neck.

§

“What is time?” my sister asked recently over the phone from New Zealand. She’s not the philosophical twin, so this was out of character, but then we’re all asking that question now. Six months into my re-residency at Tennessee Lane, the pandemic erupted and, like everyone, the guys and I were asked to shelter at home. Without the schedule and variety imposed by the standard working week and its evening and weekend entertainments, each day began to seem like every other. With an ever-lengthening quarantine period, and no idea when it would end, both the past and future became increasingly abstract. Some noted the weirdness, the vertigo, of being trapped in an endless present. But these days even the present seems somehow unreal, doubtful, negotiable.

A month after the quarantine began, we had an all-roommate dinner at the house. Brad remarked on how a bamboo forest seemed to have sprung up overnight on the lawn, due to the gardener’s absence and, you know, nature coming back, and time being meaningless. Then we got to talking about past residents. “A lot of people have stayed here for years,” Greg said, “but no one’s ever come back before.” He looked at me with a kind of awe. 

Increasingly it feels more like never having left. There was some confusion about this a few years ago, I now recall. I was on a vacation in Berlin when my phone lit up with the name of the T Lane landlady. She ranted preemptively for five solid minutes about an imminent rent increase.

“Okay Joan,” I eventually managed to insert, “But I haven’t lived there for four years.”

She hung up swiftly, embarrassed. But maybe she was onto something, like the post-it note and the cat collar. Maybe all those difficult years in between Take One and Take Two were the dream, and this strange period its opposite. Or maybe, as I sometimes feel, this limbo in heaven has a more sinister aspect. Anyone who’s read their ancient mythology knows you’re not supposed to look back. My return to my own personal paradise smacks of hubris or folly—maybe even cowardice, a sublimated retreat to the womb. Perhaps, I wonder foggily in the early hours, the gods have rewarded me with a plague.

The college I teach at recently announced that it would likely be moving to online instruction for the next academic year. Theoretically, I could stay at Tennessee Lane for another entire year, or two or three or—who knows?

Last Thursday or Tuesday or whatever, when I got into my car for my once-weekly masked-and-gloved grocery run, I turned on the radio. “You can check out any time you like,” it crooned, “but you can never leave.” I looked out the window toward the house. Such a lovely place, I thought. Really, what a lovely place.

Helena de Bres writes creative nonfiction and teaches philosophy at Wellesley. Her creative writing has appeared in The Point, Aeon, The New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Rumpus and her book Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir will be published by The University of Chicago Press in 2021.