by Jane Smiley
I had never kissed Felicity, not on the lips. How amazing was that? What an oversight! Now I poured kisses into her, and her lips, which were perfectly warm and cushiony, found a place just inside the circle of my own and nested there. We kissed and kissed. I could feel the palm of her hand glowing against the back of my neck, her fingers pushed up into my hair. My hands were somewhere—the small of her back, her cheek. And I could feel my cock pressing against her belly through our clothes, coats and all. But really there was only kissing, the dark house we made by pressing the portals of our lips together, so spacious and fascinating a place that our whole selves could go right in there and live.
Of course the kissing melted into something else, but there was no desire as I had formerly known it: that is, no imagination of anything to come, just a sensation of joined movement. The condo was cold. We kept our clothes on and pressed ourselves into each other. I was aware of her size—not that she was big or small but that she was new—new shape, new weight against me, new fragrance. It was exciting. I found my way through the layers of her clothes and my clothes to her skin, which goose-pimpled in the cool air, and so we slid under the comforters and then I slipped inside her, still kissing, always kissing. I heard her crying out and cried out myself. It was the cries that seemed to make me come, not the other way around.
The room was dark. I turned on a light. Felicity said, “Joey Stratford! I recognize you!” Then she embraced me around the chest and laid her head there, so I couldn’t see her face.
She was laughing so merrily I started to feel remote and dizzy from it all. Finally I said, “Well, Felicity, you have just given me the surprise of my life.”
“Didn’t you think I was capable of such a thing?”
“I still don’t. My assumptions haven’t quite caught up with reality here.”
“Oh, Joey.”
“That’s what you said to start all this, as I remember. You whispered ‘Oh, Joey’ in my ear.”
“Wasn’t I bold? I was so bold. Bold as brass, my mother would say.”
“What would your mother say?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever find out, Joey.”
“Okay.”
I had never made love to Sally—we were too young—but I had kissed her over and over, especially gentle kisses on her face, planted like a delicate grid over her cheeks and forehead and lips. When I kissed her lips, she didn’t kiss me back, but let me explore her quiet lips with my own. She said it made her feel as if she were something precious. After she died, I got out an old photograph of her and kissed it in the same way, to make myself feel that she had been loved, loved by me as best I could. Now it happened that Felicity kissed me in just that way, carefully, setting one small kiss right next to another, and when she came to my lips, I lay still while she worked over their contours and then down my neck. When she was done, she sighed and lay back quietly. Her hand stroked my arm, up and down. She was bold indeed. She touched me without shyness or embarrassment, or what you might call a sense of proprietorship. I had never felt anything like it. She sighed again.
I said, “Are you okay?”
“Right as rain.” We were silent and still. Her hand came up and pushed her thick dark hair out of her face. She spoke softly and sleepily. “What time is it?”
“After two.”
“Oh, not that late.”
I laughed at this very Baldwin sort of reply.
“What do you have to eat around here?”
Ten minutes later, Felicity was wrapped in my bathrobe, frying up cheeseburgers in the kitchen. I was sitting by the breakfast bar in my jeans and a T-shirt, watching her. She did it just the way a woman with a husband and two teenage sons would, slapping the meat around almost unconsciously, peppering it but not salting it, toasting the bread I had scrounged up in lieu of buns, finding onions and tomatoes and lettuce. She said, “I could eat both of these after that. You know, I always thought it was so strange that people would go to sleep after sex. I always want to get up and at least eat a good meal. Going to the grocery store. Now that’s a very sexy thing to do after you’ve been getting it on. All the food looks so appetizing.” She flipped the burgers and hummed a little tune, took the second batch of toast out of the toaster. She said, “So, now tell me why you asked if your condo was burning down? That was such a funny line, Joey. You are so funny.” She pressed the burgers with the spatula.
“Just a come-on. It popped into my mind.”
“Pure genius.” She smiled.
She put the burgers on a couple of plates, arranging the vegetables in neat rings, looked in the pantry and found some potato chips, did it all efficiently and gracefully.
I said teasingly, “Thanks for the burgers, Mom,” and put my arm around her. What I was really doing was getting inside that force field of honest pleasure again. Then Felicity got up, went over to the cupboard, and rummaged around. She came back with Tabasco sauce, sprinkled it all over her burger, and set it down. “Want some?”
“I don’t need any of my own. I can feel yours inside my nose.”
“Those Tabasco-sauce people own something called a salt dome.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a geological formation where there’s a big pool of oil deep in the ground, then there’s a cap of salt over it. You can extract both, I guess. Tabasco sauce is just a sideline business with them. Their real fortune is in oil. Daddy always said that if any of us ever ran into a McIlhenny, marry him or her quick. But we didn’t.” She finished her burger, not without looking at it appreciatively, then ate her chips, licked her fingers, and sat back. Now was the moment to ask her what we were doing, what it meant, what she thought about it, what was next. Instead, I ate my own hamburger. I was not entirely motivated by uneasiness, or fatigue, or even indecision. Right in there with those heavy hesitant feelings was something lighter and more expansive. Along with my knowledge of all the things that could go wrong here, there was a caroling inner voice that kept repeating, What could possibly go wrong?
I cleaned up the plates, and we went back to bed. It was bright day when we woke up. While I was rolling over, just beginning to appreciate the sunshine, Felicity bounded out of bed, pushing her hair out of her face. She was smiling and stretching, saying, “Oh, Joey, that was nice. Thank you. I feel much better,” and I was wondering in what way she had felt bad, and then she took a big deep breath, sat on the bed, kissed me in a sisterly way on the cheek, and said, “I have a million things to do before Hank gets home.” I was listening for any sign in her voice of fear or regret, but there was none. She got into her clothes. She was very boyish in her way, casual but confident about putting on this and stepping into that. She had slim hips, a small potbelly, and small breasts, long arms and a long neck. Her body was sexy in the same way that the whole experience had been sexy—a fluid combination of maternal, girlish, and boyish, not like anything I’d known before.
I said, “You know, Felicity, this sounds strange, but I think you’re the only mother I’ve ever slept with. Some of them went on to be mothers, of course.”
“We’ll have to talk about that sometime, Joey. That’s a very bad sign with regard to your level of maturity.”
“Do you think so?”
She kissed me again. “No. Good-bye. I’m leaving.” On the way out the door, she said, “By the way, Daddy seems to have solved that tax problem he’s been having. Thank you thank you.” She blew me a kiss and was out the door.
CHAPTER
3
ON MONDAY, Bobby presented me with an offer from Marcus Burns for Gottfried Nuelle’s most expensive house. It was a full-price offer, but there was one contingency: that Gottfried would fence the road frontage with something appealing, like split rails. It was a smart contingency. The property would look better for it. If Gottfried had done it in the first place, the house might have sold more quickly and for more money. But it was a contingency that would drive Gottfried crazy, implying, in his view, that the property was less
than perfect. When I went over to Maple Glen to present the offer, I was careful. I clapped him on the back. I was extremely enthusiastic. I exclaimed that it was a full-price offer with an early closing, only one small contingency.
Gottfried, who was feeding electrical wire into a hole while someone two rooms away pulled it, shouted, “Stop! Wait a minute! Now.” He looked at me for the first time. “What contingency?”
“Split-rail fence along the road frontage.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then shouted, “Dale! Get in here!”
Dale, the young kid who did all the moldings, entered from the kitchen. Gottfried said, “That Maple Glen Road house. Split-rail fencing along the road.”
Dale shook his head.
“No,” said Gottfried.
Dale went out of the room.
I said, “What do you mean, no?”
“No split-rail fencing. It’s an aesthetic abomination.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a Queen Anne. Now, in this part of the country, the vogue for Queen Anne houses was in the late Victorian period, say 1890s. You didn’t do split rail in those days. Split rail was more rustic, a pioneer thing.”
“They aren’t insistent about the split rail, they just want a fence. If there’s a style that would—”
“They thought split rail; that’s what they saw there.”
“I don’t know that, Gottfried. I can’t remember how the idea of split rail came up, actually. What sort of fence would you put up there?”
“I wouldn’t put a fence up there. I didn’t put a fence up there, so if I didn’t, I wouldn’t.”
“It’s a full-price offer. The house has been on the market since the first of September.”
“I’m going to move in there myself.”
“You don’t want to do that, Gottfried. That way lies bankruptcy. That’s what you always tell me.”
“No fence.”
“How about a hedge?”
He looked at me, leading me to believe that a hedge was unspeakable. I glanced around the room. Gottfried was putting in flooring, which was wide pine boards of random lengths, nice and knotty. One of the knots caught my eye—it looked exactly like the head of a bird with a long beak and a wary eye. He said, “It pains me to say this, but have you noticed the way that slope on Maple Glen Road curves up from the road there? It’s a beautiful thing. It always reminds me of a woman’s ass. I laid sod there, you know that? Because I didn’t want to wait to have that nice feeling that I got when I approached that house from the west. I’m a cheapskate, but I didn’t want to wait for the grass to grow.” Gottfried’s favorite wrong idea about himself was that he was a cheapskate.
I said, “You know, I’ve sold seventeen houses for you over the years. Every one, I’ve had to pry it out of your hands even though you were bitching at me for months that the carrying costs were killing you.”
“A guy who wants to put a fence around the swell of a woman’s buttock doesn’t deserve to live there.”
“He loves the house. It’s the only house he wants. He thinks it’s perfect.”
“Perfect for what, entertaining? Showing off? I guarantee you, this guy’s an egomaniac. Mark my words.”
“You haven’t met the guy, Gottfried.”
He turned on me suddenly and shouted, “You want to make this sale? You put up the fence. I don’t ever want to see that house again, though. Out of your commission, a Goddamned white board fence, clean and straightforward, no split rails. I won’t pay for it, and I won’t build it, and I won’t even look at it, but I’ll sell the house at full price to this bozo because the bank’s got me by the balls! Do you know what my life is like? I worry every night about carrying costs, and then you take some guy out there and bingo, you got fifteen grand that comes right out of my pocket! What are you coming around to me for, asking me about this shit? Dale!”
“Then you’ll take the offer?”
“You build the fence and I’ll take the Goddamned offer!”
I went over to the worktable and laid out the papers. They were already flagged for signatures, flagged in yellow, though they might as well have been flagged in red. I handed Gottfried a pen. He managed to sign the papers without tearing through them, but I knew he would rant around for the rest of the morning. Fortunately, Dale, the only guy working with him that day, was impervious.
When I first met him, Gottfried was a shop teacher at the middle school, building houses on the weekends. When I listed his first house, he was amazed and gratified to have made it to the selling stage; he was utterly polite with me, almost obsequious. But that vanished when he met the buyers. They did not meet his standards; no buyers ever had. But he had made a fortune, his houses were famous, magazines took pictures of them, commercials were filmed in them. I was his only listing agent. Sometimes we socialized, and once, over a beer, he had loosened up and told me that when his family was escaping the Huguenot purges in France, they had changed their name to Nuelle because Nuelle meant nothing or no one. He’d looked at me and said, “Think about that, Joe. Think about running off to North Dakota or somewhere and changing your name to ‘Joe Nobody.’” For whatever reason, after he told me that, I didn’t take his rants personally anymore. Nevertheless, I was more than relieved to flee with the signed purchase agreement in my hand.
I got back to the office, planning to give Bobby the papers right away before Gottfried Nuelle could find me and recant, but Bobby was nowhere to be found. I put the agreement on his desk and hand-printed a note saying, Get this to the buyer asap, before the seller changes his mind. When the phone rang, I was tempted not to pick it up, but I did anyway. If you are a Realtor, you have to answer the phone; that’s the first rule of business. It was Gordon Baldwin, not Gottfried. That put me in a better mood right there. Gordon was my main builder over the years, and his market was much different from Gottfried Nuelle’s. Gordon bought farms. He had been buying farms for twenty-five years. He had a farm-buying pickup truck, an old International Harvester with what sounded like a tractor engine under the hood. He also had farm-buying clothes, not quite overalls and a straw hat but almost. He also had a farm-buying lingo. One of his many connections would tell him that some farmer was getting old and didn’t have any farming children, or that some kids who lived in Portsmouth had inherited the family farm, and he would get on the proper costume and go talk to whoever was in a state of landowning flux. Often enough he would come back home with an oral agreement to buy, and then I would follow up on the deal with the paperwork. By the late seventies, Gordon had quite a few farms, amounting to several hundred acres in all, some of them contiguous, some of them close to town, some of them way out in the middle of nowhere. Those were the farms where he kept his cattle. One piece of property, some 120 acres, was a development about ten miles from West Portsmouth that Gordon had been building on at least since I got into his business. It was called Glamorgan Close. My father thought this name was ridiculous; the acreage was open, almost flat at the front, rolling more steeply toward the back. My father never tired of pointing out that, on the one hand, a close was a stabling area, and, on the other hand, there was nothing “close” about Glamorgan Close and nothing Glamorgany, either, since there wasn’t a Scot anywhere in the vicinity.
Glamorgan Close had had several phases. Phase One, near the highway to Portsmouth, had inexpensive three-bedroom houses with small front yards, large backyards, and three styles, the Maryland, the Virginia, and the South Carolina, which had a larger front porch, labeled in the brochure as “the veranda.” These houses, which were on straight streets (Kinloch Avenue, Glengarry Avenue, Kirkpatrick Avenue), were a quarter mile from the elementary school Gordon had talked the county into and a mile from the Kroger’s shopping center. Phase One was a big success. Behind Phase One was Phase Two: Stuart Way, Robertson Way, and Ivanhoe Way. Phase Two featured three-bedroom houses also, but with two and a half baths and a bonus room. Phase Two styles, the Sonoma, the Mendocino, and the Santa
Rosa, had somewhat larger rooms than the Phase One styles, lots of wood and beams, decks off the back, and a little bit of a view. The ideal couple who moved with their first two toddlers into the Virginia would find themselves, ten years later, entertaining junior high schoolers in the bonus room of the Sonoma, the deck of which could easily support a hot tub. If the couple did extremely well and maintained the integrity of their assets by not divorcing, Gordon was ready for them with Phase Three, the Greenwich, the Hastings, and the Ardsley: four bedrooms, four baths, master suites with sitting rooms, screened-in verandas, center-island kitchens, and mother-in-law apartments. These properties (Blacklock Circle, Praed Circle, Tartan Circle) were larger and had better views than those in the other two phases and, in fact, looked down on the other two, but at this point the ideal couple was expected to finance the down payment of their eldest child and his or her spouse in one of the Phase One houses, which now had mature landscaping and the individuality born of age and idiosyncratic property ownership.
This was Gordon’s vision of life, even if he didn’t say so—you made your way and populated your vicinity with your offspring, who then dropped the grandchildren off at your house whenever they felt like it. Phase Three was essentially complete now, some twenty years after groundbreaking for Phase One. There was still some land, though not much, and Gordon was going to start Phase Four when he could get around to it. Glamorgan Close was not Gordon’s only development, but it was the one that had established him in the Portsmouth area. Selling houses in Glamorgan Close was as simple as putting a notice in the paper that one was available. They were reasonably priced, well-enough built, and perfect examples of my basic belief about housing and the corollary, that what people really like is a simple canvas to fiddle around with. Gottfried Nuelle couldn’t stand anyone to fiddle with his houses, but Gordon relied upon his buyers to transform the uniformity of his developments. Gordon had some ideas about Phase Four, and he wanted to talk to me about them.
