The pool was another example. Because we moved in during the winter, we didn’t pay that much attention to it at first. Had we bothered to dip our fingers in, we’d have discovered that it was not merely heated but was saltwater. It was a full six weeks before we really even ­noticed the pool house. Full bathroom, full kitchen, shiny new Viking range, and a fridge stuffed with 24 bottles of champagne. For a few weeks I felt that all of this was excessive. Then one day I became aware of the inconvenience of having to walk, dripping wet, from the pool back into the main house. This is what you need a pool house for—so you can make the transition from water to dry land without the trouble of walking the whole 15 yards back into the house and climbing a long flight of stairs to the giant dressing room. From that moment on, it seemed to me terribly inconvenient to not have a pool house. How on earth did people with pools, but no special house adjacent to them, cope?

The problems posed by the mansion were different from the problems posed by most other houses. How to locate loved ones, for instance. There’s been no room inside any home I’d ever lived in from which, if I yelled at the top of my lungs, I couldn’t be heard in every other room. The mansion required a new approach to human communications. Standing inside the mansion and screaming at the top of your lungs, you knew for certain that your voice wasn’t reaching at least half the house. If you wanted to find someone, you could run around the house, but that took ages and presupposed that the other person was not similarly wandering in the void. A trek up the Himalayan staircases quickly became the subject of an elaborate cost-benefit analysis. How badly do I really want to find my six-year-old daughter? How much does my one-year-old son’s diaper really need to be changed? After a while, it seemed only natural to my wife to begin with the assumption that her husband could not be found. Even when she knew for a fact that I was somewhere in the house, she’d begin her search with a phone call. She’d call my cell when I was two flights up and she’d call my cell when I was a room away. One afternoon she called my cell 20 minutes after I had come home with our three children and had gone looking for her to take them off my hands.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m in the house taking care of the kids,” I said, a little indignantly.

“Well, you can’t be watching them very closely,” she said, “because I’m in the house taking care of the kids.”

Even though you couldn’t find anybody, all sorts of people could find you. People stumbled into other people’s spaces and terrified them. The house was so vast that the sound waves that normally precede the arrival of a living creature got lost. And so while there was, in theory, a great deal of privacy, there was, in practice, none. The mansion came with a gardener, a pool man, a caretaker, and a housekeeper. Any one of these people might turn up anyplace, anytime. The housekeeper, a sweet woman, came twice a week. She developed a habit of turning up over my right shoulder without warning and, as I stared helplessly at my computer screen, booming, “How’s that book of yours coming along??!!!”

“Ah!” I’d yell, and leap out of my chair.

“Always writing, writing, writing!” she’d say with a laugh. (Writing in the mansion never ceased to be inherently comical.)

Money was another problem. It was suddenly going out faster than it was coming in. When I’d finally gotten around to asking the real estate agent what the mansion cost to rent, she’d said—in the most offhand tone, as if it were the least important thing about the house—“I’ll have to see, but I think it’s around 13.” Thirteen. The extra digits are just assumed. One reason is that no one can bring themselves to actually utter the sentence: “Your rent will be $13,000 a month.”

Thirteen thousand dollars a month is not the rent I was raised to pay. When I let it slip to my mother what I’d be paying, she just said, “Oh, Michael,” in exactly the same tone she’d have used if I’d informed her that I’d just run over the neighbor with a truck or been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Thirteen thousand dollars a month might be a record rent in New Orleans, but it was really just the ante.