Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic Page B

same as everyone else’s: buy the wonderful house, be very happy and prosperous, live a life out of Norman Rockwell, and then, once the children went off to college, sell it at a dizzying profit.
    We loved the house. We loved its solidity, its large bedrooms, the fresh-looking apple-green tiles in the kitchen, the set of bowed windows in the dining room. We loved the tidy garage and the family room and the fourth bedroom, which would serve as an office. We loved the ornate scrollwork on the radiators, and the comforting way they hissed. We picked up one corner of the rug and gasped with pleasure at the grandiloquence of the hardwood floors. How happy could we be here? I was happy as things stood; the thought of an additional layer of happiness, like a sprinkling of sugar atop an already delicious pie, was intoxicating.
    The house was expensive. Two years earlier I would have laughed at the price. How could I possibly afford that? But the parameters of real estate are an ever-shifting business, with no place of solid footing—like a pit of quicksand, if you’ll forgive a too-handy simile. I sometimes regretted having sold my river-view apartment; apartments in the building were now fetching close to a million dollars. Why couldn’t I just have paid that little mortgage every month? I could have paid it with the change I lost in the sofa. But it somehow doesn’t work that way.
    This house cost a lot more than the Bavarian cottage. But everything, in those heady days, still seemed possible.
    â€œThat’s a big nut every month,” said my wife warily.
    A few wispy cirrus clouds of doubt streamed across our sunny blue sky. Was it really a good idea to start a new 30-year mortgage in our midforties? We’d have to meet that big monthly nut until we were in our seventies . . . No. We would sell the house at a nice profit before that. No doubt. No doubt. What would we get? That all depended, I said with great self-importance and a distinct lack of foresight, on what the market was doing when we opted to sell. The world of real estate was expanding, like the aftermath of an economic Big Bang, and I could not imagine the inevitable contraction. Real estate saws trilled faintly in my ears, like a Beach Boys song sounding distantly from a radio at the seashore. “Location, location, location!” Oh yes, my village was lovely. Twin church spires! Quaint firehouses! A beautiful little jewel of a library! (I loved to look through the cupola atop its roof and imagine the bit of blue sky was a little slice of the infinite.) “Real estate never decreases in value.” No sir. It never did, it never had, it never would. And I didn’t think of myself as greedy. If my house merely retained its value, that would be fine. “Better to have the worst house in a great neighborhood than vice versa.” Yes. And my new house wouldn’t even be the worst. It was solidly in the middle. “If you’re choosing between taking vacations and having a nice house, buy the house, because having a great house is like being on perpetual vacation.”
    Who thinks up this stuff?
    We had the house inspected. We knew an inspector whom we trusted and respected, but owing to a series of misunderstandings, we didn’t get him but another inspector who worked for the same franchise. She was tall, immaculately groomed. Her shirt with her name in script on the pocket and her work pants were crisp and creased. She had never owned a house. She was thinking about buying a place. My wife and I must have started a little. She showed us her credentials, her residence inspector postsecondary certification plus her residence inspection protocol, a score or more checklists in green binders, which we would receive a copy of. “I’ve done hundreds of these things,” she told us in blasé fashion.
    Perhaps I am too ruled by prejudice, but I know what I want in a residence inspector. I want a man who’s