We bought our house in Demarest from Mariel Hemingway in 1988.  At the time, it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life.  It was sort of a grayish, bluish saltbox cottagey type thing set deep in the woods and there was an enormous 200 year old maple tree right smack in the middle of the lawn. The house has been redone since then, but a babbling brook still runs along the right side of our property where an enormous tree house used to sit, overlooking the water.  Inside the rooms were tiny with low ceilings, exposed beams and lopsided floors.  There was a rounded, little Hobbit door that lead to the kitchen from the family room and a black, pot bellied stove in the breakfast room that could heat the whole downstairs in a pinch.  The house was charming and impractical– exactly what we wanted and needed at the time.

When the realtor walked us through the first time, I loved seeing the glossy black and white photos of Mariel and her family all over the house, and it thrilled me that her dog had infested the entire house with fleas. The house was, of course, ridiculously overpriced because of the fame factor, which made the decision very difficult.

“We’ll take it!” I said, scratching myself as the real estate agent showed us the decaying detached garage.  There was something so romantic about being bitten by the fleas of a dog that was owned by Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter, it became impossible for me to control myself.

“You’re not supposed to yell, ‘We’ll take it!’ Dan whispered to me on the way back to the car. “The idea is to negotiate based on the house’s flaws. For instance the fact that the house was built on an angle.”

“True, but Mariel had to have been bitten by at least one of the same fleas who bit me, which means her DNA is now in my bloodstream.  I’m practically getting a blood transfusion from a recent descendent of possibly the greatest American fiction writer who ever lived. If we buy this house, I could be the next Ernest Hemingway.”

   

   At the closing, I was covered in welts from having visited the house so many times.

    “I think we should seriously start thinking about getting a pest control company in here,” Dan said, while watching the eruptions on my face scab over as I unpacked my dishes on moving day.

    “Are you kidding?  And ruin my chances?”

   “But you look terrifying.”

    “That’s the price every writer pays, honey. We all look like this eventually, for one reason or another,” I explained.

    “But some of those bites look infected. There’s going to be permanent scarring.”

   “All the more reason to believe my ship is about to come in.”

   “Don’t you think you’d be better off taking a writing course or something?”

   “What for?” I said, oozing.

  A mere twenty years later and poof!  I’m an author. 

   Sometimes I wonder if Mariel understood the connection between her grandfather and the way talent just seemed to drop in her lap in the same way I understood how it happened to me.  I mean surely she couldn’t have taken all the credit for her performance in “Manhattan” any more than I take full credit for writing “Miss Understanding.” Clearly we were both imbued with the spirit of Hemingway.

  I saw “Manhattan” on TV last night, by the way; that’s what brought all this up.  Aside from the part when Woody was breaking up with Mariel and she had to fake crying and say, “Leave me alone,” –twice– she was very good.  And she was only a teenager in that movie.  Imagine being like seventeen or eighteen, or whatever she was, and Woody Allen tells you that you’re going to have to make out with him in the next scene, and you can’t laugh once the whole time? I hope she realized talent like that can’t be learned.  It has to be inbred, or bitten into you. 

  Eventually, we did have to call someone in to take care of the infestation as my face was becoming unrecognizable and I was losing quite a bit of blood.

But sometimes I wonder if we acted a little too soon.  If I had held out just a little longer, perhaps I could have written something more along the lines of “The Old Man and The Sea” instead of “She’s Got Issues.”

Two more bites, three tops, and who knows?

As for Mariel, I don’t think she does much acting anymore.  But she certainly left her mark on me.