Eugene Havens

I stare at an email that is as shocking as a pointed gun. It’s a notice from the property manager. “We would like you to vacate the premises.” The owners of the rental house want to cut short my rental agreement. I don’t get it. Why would I do that? I have a valid lease that runs for another few months. I read the email again but it’s a vague thing. They avoid the word eviction. They seem to remember I don’t have to leave. If the owners of the house can’t wait another three months to kick me out, it must really be something. I sit staring at my computer, trying to understand this negative attitude, to come up with a specific situation for how it happened. I’ve barely spoken to the owners. I rented the house from a property manager. He gave me the keys. He takes the rent check. I email him about things that need looking at. It is very basic stuff.

The town is under a layer of snow. It’s February. The wind is up which would make carrying things to a U-Haul truck more unpleasant than usual. It supposes there is anywhere to go. As was explained to me about the town, the rental market is tight. It’s a game of musical chairs. If you have a place to live, you stay put. As it is, people are driving in from ten miles away on ice slick roads. Vehicle crashes are daily news. All of my belongings fill the house, including the table where I sit. It will cost a fortune to move and there’s no good alternative. I have a lease. Why would anyone suggest I break my own lease. What the hell? Why?

Maybe they want to sell the house. I reason they have a buyer. The email doesn’t say. Wouldn’t they offer a little buyout? They are simply hoping I feel unwanted and will move. I happen to know I’m the first tenant to rent the house since the owners bought it. The property manager told me about extensive renovations conducted on this farmhouse. The owners, a retired couple, bought the house from a woman who exhibited that peculiar psychological trait of hoarding. The property manager painted a picture of newspapers stacked to the ceiling, electrical outlets jammed with plugs since most of them didn’t work.  The plumbing was messed up somehow. I didn’t focus on everything the property manager said. He held me in his office in that first meeting, giving me the scope of a Lazarus-like renovation, promoting the house’s new owners as masters of the renovation game. I was eyeing the keys on his desk. It was my job to stand and listen, however, as I had already moved into the house. The property manager had refused to let me apply for the house online. I was renting ahead from the city, something my contacts told me was a smart move given the lack of local housing. You would think a property manager could be extra picky while sitting on a shortage of inventory. Instead, he asked me to move to town and straight into the house because he ran a country operation. It was within my budget. The town was out of rentals, and so, against my better judgment, I got into town on a weekend afternoon, used a key he left for me, and moved it all in.

Now I was supposed to move out. It didn’t make much sense. Only, it made some. My first meeting with the property manager was the morning after I had moved in. He was a very big guy at a desk that looked like an ironing board before his large frame. He was talkative, in full country mode, as I stood and smiled. He praised the owners’ dedication to the craft of renovation to the point where he criticized them for it. I nodded along, the sensitive listener, while wondering silently about the need for a backstory. I was signing a lease with the property manager. I had rented apartments for decades, a consequence of the creative nomad life I lived in major cities. I hoped to find an arrangement that was a cold business deal, where the rental was a transaction. It meant no shared apartments or houses, no roommates with lease control. I  found that renting was bearable when the process was simple. Renting was dicey when it came with emotional baggage unlike any other deal. If things weren’t right with your living situation, it was worse than your car breaking down. You didn’t spend a lot of hours in your car. Hopefully, you didn’t sleep in your car.  

The property manager wasn’t finished in his story about the house’s owners. It was as if he were selling me on a house I was already moved into. They overdid the house renovation, he said, making it too nice. They were kind of crazy that way. The couple spent twice as long, and spent twice as much money as was necessary. Rentals were rentals, he said. They put their heart and soul into the house, as if it were their baby. They polished the floors and added a pricey stove and oven. The average tenant would trash it all in six months. I had been there for a night. I thought it looked fine. The hardwood floors were as shiny as the freshly painted walls, and the doorways were narrow like a farmhouse you saw in a furniture catalog. The property manager said the property had been a large farm that was sold to make the neighborhood. 

For something to say, I praised white moulding around the doors and windows. There were windows everywhere. The builder had fit two windows where today there would be one. The siding was yellow, and the trim red. I didn’t mind the house. What I didn’t say: it was drafty due to all the windows. They were the single-pane kind I had experience with in New York apartments. The frames leaked in cold air pretty easily.

The property manager still wasn’t finished. The owners were friends of his, which is why he was so blunt. They had a direct style and could bully tenants without meaning to. I had to pay attention by now. I asked what he meant. He gave a story about the wife of the couple getting outraged by a tenant’s behavior. What did she do? The tenant planted flowers in a flowerbed in the front yard. The owner had designs on that plot for something else. So, she pulled up the tenant’s flowers. The property manager let me know she didn’t trespass on the tenant’s property. It would’ve been illegal. The flowers were reachable from the sidewalk.

I was at a loss. I had moved into the house at his request. The U-Haul was returned. Why was he telling me unflattering things about the owners? I clarified whether I was signing the lease with him, the property manager. Weren’t they outsourcing the house management to him? The property manager regarded me as if I hadn’t been listening, and maybe I hadn’t. They do like to be involved, he said, finally.

Did the woman get paid back for the flowers? It was the only silver lining I could imagine to save the story. The property manager didn’t answer because he was telling me about something else I didn’t catch.

He brought up something that resembled a lease. I was supposed to sign it. Instead, I asked the manager if other houses were available. He didn’t miss a beat and told me about another house I saw on his website, a million years ago when I lived in the city, or so it seemed by now. It was still available at twice the rent.

It can’t be as bad as it sounds, I thought. He couldn’t have planned all of this, asking me to move in without paperwork to be country-friendly, then springing on me a tale of the owners sounding unhinged. It had to be a mistake. I signed the paper and took the second house key. He took the deposit check. I felt uneasy.

The term of the lease was for six months. He had changed it from a year, which I distinctly remembered on the phone asking him about. He assured me I could stay as long as I liked. It was just the way they did things. I had never signed for less than a one-year lease in decades of renting. It was another weird thing.

I could stay as long as I liked, he had said. Now, three months later, he was asking me to leave. It couldn’t have been on purpose, I thought. Some people live to screw with you. Experience tells you this. But you don’t believe it. If you’re not one of those people, you look for another explanation. Why would someone spend time messing with people who rely on them for something?Would a doctor make a patient wait forty-five minutes because he could, reading a magazine while checking his watch and smiling? Would a mechanic stare at a car in his lot just to frustrate a customer? What would be the point?

What some of us might not consider, it may not be out of spite or any good reason. It’s the worst possible reason, there being none. Instead of presenting cold business deals, they’re just cold people. It was a city thing all over. I tried to see how my rental problem was better for being in the country. Wasn’t the country supposed to be kinder, gentler? The email said please and thank you.