I was driving through Savannah, Georgia, and discovered that the city was deserted, agreeably so, and so I made some inquiries and one thing led to another and I ended up buying the whole city, cheap.. Of course, the city fathers had to sign off on the deal first. They were suspicious of my motives, and asked: "Are you one of those fellows who buys up abandoned cities, remakes them into sanitized versions of their former, authentic selves, and then sells them off at a huge profit?"
"Oh, no, not me," I said, because I had heard of these men, had read about them in all the major magazines, and it gave me a little bit of revulsion, what they did to perfectly good, deserted cities like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Monterey, California, and Charleston, South Carolina, the way they hired people from the suburbs and had them move to the city and pretend to be genuine abode-dwelling Pueblo Indians or authentic downtrodden cannery workers or fourth generation Gullah basketweavers. "Not my style at all," I said to the city fathers.
"So why in the world would you want to own a whole city?" they asked.
"It's complicated," I said.
"Try us," they said. It was clear that the city fathers weren't going to finalize the sale of the city until I told them the whole story. So I sighed and told them the whole story: of how my wife had just left me and moved back to upstate New York, where her parents lived, because of certain personality conflicts which had caused us to grow apart after three years of marriage. And one of those personality conflicts that had caused us to grow apart was that I had cheated on her, once, with her best friend, and then lied about it, and my wife happened to be the kind of upstanding person who needed to be able to trust her best friend and her husband, and she was also the kind of upstanding person who hated cheaters and liars. Even so, it was an amicable breakup, so amicable that it became clear that I was losing a wonderful, singular woman who had such extremely high moral standards that, if you were a cheater and a liar, she wouldn't give you one more chance even if you begged her. It pained me to know that I would never find another woman like my wife again, and it also pained me to sit around our house in Jacksonville, Florida, which was so cramped with regret and despair that I couldn't think straight. So I decided to find a bigger place, a place like Savannah, where I could be by myself with my few worldly possessions and contemplate how I had ruined my marriage and how I might someday set things right again.
The city fathers sat there quietly and listened to my story. When I was done, they asked: "You mean you've got yourself a broken heart, don't you?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Well goddam, why didn't you just come out and say so," they said, because the city fathers were highly sympathetic toward broken hearts, themselves having been divorced by wonderful women for cheating and lying. We all got teary and agreed how difficult it was to live in the cruel, cruel world, and then we talked about the weather for a few minutes, and then the city fathers stood up, smoothed out their khaki pants, hitched up their belts, signed over the city to me, got into their Lincoln Town Cars, and drove back to their duplex condominiums and their youngish second wives on Tybee Island, just outside the city.
So that was that. I moved my stuff and myself into an enormous pink brick house off Bull Street. For a long time, I simply walked around Savannah and surveyed my new property. Even though it was run-down and mostly abandoned, it was still a very pretty city, with all its lush parks and waving palm trees and sagging wrought iron balconies and that good, rotten salt smell blowing in off the water and all that spooky, dying sunlight filtering through the Spanish moss. Yes, it was a fine Southern city I'd purchased, an excellent place to be by yourself and contemplate your broken heart and store your few worldly possessions.
