by Jane Smiley
“So,” I began, as we sat down at one of the tables. “What can I do for you?”
He blew his nose, took a bite, wiped his mouth, took a drink of water. Was he good-looking? What had she seen in him and when?
“Jerry Taylor called me from out in Plymouth Township and told me you put yourself on the agenda for the next meeting.”
“Jerry Taylor. Yeah, right. He’s the township engineer.”
“I was hoping it wouldn’t get this far.” He looked stricken. His forelock flopped forward again, so unappealing. I decided to stop noticing his hair, and said, “How many times have you seen Marcus Burns in the last year?”
“Every couple of weeks, either at Gordon and Betty’s or at our house for dinner, I suppose.”
“So what gave you hope it wouldn’t get this far?”
“Marcus Burns spouts this and spouts that, but he doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing. Without you, he wouldn’t get anywhere.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, he’s just a bullshit artist. His type comes and goes. They don’t usually do any harm, but if they get hooked up with someone who has a real plan, they’re dangerous.”
“And I’m the one with the real plan?”
“I think so, yes.” He squared his shoulders.
“Well, Hank, I’m flattered in some ways, but I’ve got to beg off on this one. I think Marcus is pretty visionary myself. He’s got a whole theory about what’s happening with this administration and the country as a whole, and how that is going to affect this area, and I think he might be right, and his vision might be profitable for me and Gordon and for this area, for that matter.”
“Felicity said you would put it off on him if I confronted you, but—”
“She did?” Then I recollected myself. “How would Felicity know?” Maybe that constituted a recovery. We stared at one another for a moment, then he said, “Well, she’s known you longer than I have. I think she would call you a friend.”
“I suppose.” My reply, I thought, was a masterpiece.
“But frankly, I’ve been with the guy, maybe more than you have, and I’ve watched him pretty carefully, and I don’t think he’s got what it takes to come up with this—to get in with Gordon so far and so fast. And through Bobby? Gordon is suspicious. It takes him a long time to warm up to people. I think I probably knew him for five years before I was convinced he remembered my name. Now he’s putting up all his best pieces of property as collateral in various schemes? I doubt it.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “You’re the one he relies on; you always have been, though you can deny it all you like. I don’t know your reasons, but I’m making my pitch to you.”
“So make it.”
He took a bite of his sandwich, set the sandwich down on his plate, chewed and swallowed, and turned the sandwich around a quarter turn. “You know what I think about Deacon.”
“Why don’t you remind me.”
“It’s overpriced and overdeveloped. In the last ten or twelve years, it’s gone from being a real small town with actual people living on Main Street to being this plastic fern-bar souvenir sort of place. I can’t even go to Deacon anymore. The traffic drives me crazy.”
“Hank, fifteen years ago, Deacon had a population with an average age of sixty and everyone any younger was planning to get out. Now it’s a growing little town. People are taking care of or improving the housing stock, for one thing, and even though some of the improvements aren’t very tasteful, others are. The town finally has some money for street repair and services, God forbid.”
“And higher assessments and a larger proportion of native residents who can’t afford to live where they have spent their whole lives. But Deacon is done. I’m just telling you about Deacon to set the stage for the next thing. I’ve given up on Deacon.”
I thought of Marcus Burns. I said, “Look, fifteen years ago people our age didn’t have any disposable income; now they do. They’re going to move to nice places like Deacon and redevelop them into the towns they want. It’s a population explosion sort of thing.”
“But you don’t have to lure them there. You don’t have to set up a beacon in the woods that says, Come here, come here.”
“And that’s what you think we’re doing?”
“Well, of course. A fancy golf course and a clubhouse, the whole idea of getting access to a famous estate.” He sniffled again. “And it’s at the wrong end of the county.”
“It’s at the end of the county where the estate is.” I suppose to a developer, or at least a Realtor, that fact was self-evident, so I said it as if it were. Hank shook his head skeptically, as if the estate weren’t where it was. I said, “It’s not wilderness, it’s farmland, and not very good farmland at that. It’s more beautiful than it is good. When the Thorpes bought the land, they didn’t buy it from prosperous, thriving, successful farmers, they bought it from people who were lucky to get rid of it, looked at from a farming point of view. What are you going to grow there? I don’t think you have a leg to stand on, Hank. You can’t say it’s wild, you can’t say it’s highly productive, you can’t say it’s likely to be a state park or anything like that, because there’s a state park only ten miles away. Jacob Thorpe is dead, the Thorpes are finished with the property and the area, and it’s time it was put to another good use.”
“The support network that would go into building and keeping up four to six hundred houses, a club, and the necessary shopping areas would be more than that end of the county could tolerate. The roads would have to be widened, there would be waste-management stress, and it has no purpose. It doesn’t grow out of the local economy, and it doesn’t make sense for the area as a whole. It’s arbitrary.” He rested his forearms on the table—pugnaciously, I thought—sat up straight, and looked right into my face.
“It’s not arbitrary. It’s where the land is. What would you do with the property?”
“Thorpe should have left it to his children. The daughter, at least, was eager to have it.”
“A, he didn’t, and B, that’s what she says now, but why didn’t she persuade him at the time?”
“He didn’t like her husband, is what I heard. I think it’s a tragedy. The whole issue could have just lain dormant for another generation, and that end of the county would have been able to find its own purpose.”
I finished my sandwich, folded up the paper it had been wrapped in, and took a last swig of my Coke. I truly didn’t want there to be hard feelings between myself and Felicity’s husband. I pushed my chair back and smiled in a friendly way. Finally, I said, “It’s not always clear what the highest and best use for any piece of property is. This one has been beautifully cultivated for fifty years or more. There’s a nice garden and beautiful buildings and pastures and lawns. I could make the case that in order for it to be kept in cultivation—kept up, even, given its size—more than one family has to contribute to its maintenance. It’s like when Sherry and I were in England a few years back. Those estates that the nobility were able to use two hundred years ago their descendants now have to turn into hotels and amusement parks or give them to the government to maintain as museums.”
Hank shook his head.
What did I learn about Felicity from watching him? At that moment, I thought, the property could come and go, the scheme could come and go, the billions could do what they pleased, if only I could figure out how her exuberant and affectionate soul had come to be joined with this stubborn and slightly uncouth guy, how she had gotten caught in what she called the “frat house.” I sat back and grinned a big friendly grin, heaved a “well-that’s-that” sigh and said, “So, if you’re heading home, say hi to Felicity for me. I guess Clark is back in college, huh?”
Hank looked at his watch. “Actually, he and Jason went for a day of skiing. I guess they’ll be back late tonight. Then he goes. I’ve got to be in Portsmouth at two. I have three meetings this afternoon. What with all the snow, there’s a lot of stuff we need to catch up on.” He shrugged
. “I’ve got to admit, I get a little cabin fever this time of year. That helicopter rescue was kind of fun, though of course we ought to charge them for the helicopter time, since if they’d been prepared. . . . Well. State services cost money. We’re always begging for such little bits of money. Anyway.” He pushed himself back from the table.
From the window of my office, I watched Hank turn east toward Portsmouth and then jumped in my car and drove immediately in the opposite direction, toward their house. I did not call ahead. Whoever was there or not there, I would deal with it. I was a Realtor. At any time of the day or night, I could be driving down any road in the county on perfectly legitimate business.
Felicity’s road looked especially scenic. The leafless dark branches of the encroaching trees opened upward toward the bright sky, and the plowed snow along either side of the blacktop was as clean and billowy as clouds. Sunshine poured down. Red barn here. Green barn there. Two furry ponies eating hay by the side of the road.
Felicity’s house looked peaceful, dappled with moving patches of light. The front porch was gently subsiding away from the house. I hadn’t noticed that in the summer. One car was parked in the driveway, her car, the BMW. The driveway was not meticulously shoveled, the way my parents’ was and the way my office was. Bluish tire marks snaked over areas of flattened snow. I opened my car door, but then I just sat there for a moment, hoping her face would appear in the window and she would wave me inside. It did not. I got up out of the car and closed the door. I went to the front, stood on the porch, used the knocker, and pushed the doorbell. No answer. Then I used my knuckles. Quiet. I went off the porch, traipsed through the snow, went to the back door, knocked, peered in. Chairs were pushed back from the table. One pair of boots stood by the stove, and another had been pushed under the table. There was a plate on the table, and a fork on the plate. At the exact moment I was thinking that maybe there was a side to Felicity that I didn’t want to see, a side that contrasted to her beautiful free side but that was inextricably linked to it, I heard her voice in my ear, saying, “What are you doing?”
I jumped. “Looking for you.”
“I was in the barn.” She was cocooned in a navy blue goose-down coat, her hair hidden under the torpedolike hood and her hands in her pockets. I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed her on the forehead, but I could tell she wasn’t happy to see me. I said, “Hank said he was going to be in Portsmouth all afternoon, so I seized the moment.”
“Hi.” She softened a little and smiled at last. After a moment, she turned her face up and kissed me, but her hands were still in her pockets. She said, “How was your lunch?”
“We agreed to disagree. Who do you agree with?”
She looked at me for a long moment and then softened a little more, reaching up and kissing me again. She said, “Not you, dear.”
“You don’t think we should develop the farm?”
“Now that you ask, no.”
“Oh.” I almost asked why not, but I didn’t. I knew why not. They were married. They talked about things. They had opinions together and shared interests. I couldn’t keep myself from looking around—stoop, door, driveway, car, the white bulk of the house looming over us, property (an acre or two? more?) spreading around us. This was not what I had been looking forward to. I said, “I’ve been missing you.”
She shook her head.
I tried again. “May I do some pictures? I have a camera in the car.”
She stared at me, then said, “The house is a mess. I don’t want you to go in there.”
“Let’s go somewhere.” I unsnapped the two snaps on her hood and pushed it back a little, so that I could see her hair. She didn’t stop me, but then she pulled it forward again. We kept looking at each other, until finally I accepted that I had done just the wrong thing. In other circumstances, with someone else, I would have said, I love you, because it seemed to me that I did, but hadn’t she told me love was a technical term for her, reserved for others? And if I told her I loved her and she didn’t reply, would I not do something very odd, like start to cry? It seemed like I would. I suddenly felt very sad, as if I might start to cry anyway, and so I gave her a little kiss on the forehead and turned and went down the steps to my car and got in and drove away, and while I was retreating down that road, I thought that this wasn’t the way that I had thought we would go forward after our trip to New York, but after all, it was the most logical, so logical there was really nothing to say about it.
I tried to reach her the next day, and then there was another storm, and then it was Monday, the day before the sketch plan was due, and the engineer and I were working feverishly on it. In the morning I was to take it to Marcus and Gordon for their comments, and then I needed to get it duplicated and in to Vida by five. Axel Tinker, the engineer, was an old friend of Gordon’s and was doing me another in a long line of favors—the first favor had been going out there on Saturday, even though the snow was knee-deep, and snowshoeing around for three hours trying to put what little you could see together with a detailed site plan of the property. The second favor had been working for a few hours on Sunday. The third favor had been not yet even mentioning his fee. Now he was well into the fourth favor—working after hours—when the phone rang. “David Pollock here,” said the voice when I answered.
“Hey! I thought you guys were snowed in up in New York.”
“Someone wants to see you.”
I glanced at Axel, who had known Felicity since she was a child and certainly had attended her wedding and knew to whom she was and was not married. I said, “I’m working late on—” But I knew where her loyalties lay. I interrupted myself. “How late?”
He turned away from the phone to mumble something and came back to me. “Curfew is at ten tonight. A certain someone is on the alert, though not for anything in particular. But my guest is watching her step these days.”
“Gotcha.” It was seven. We had planned on working all evening. Now Axel was looking at me. I said, “I’ll see.”
“We’ll put a candle in the window, darling.”
“Right.” I hung up. I said to Axel, “Something’s come up.”
Just because Axel was accommodating didn’t mean he was not irritable. He gave me a sixty-year-old-man look, but I braved it and was motivated to say, “Two more hours ought to about do it anyway, don’t you think? It’s just a sketch plan.”
“I like to do things right.”
“I know you do. That’s why Gordon relies on you.”
“He does.”
There was a silence. I sighed. I said, “Well, we’ll see where we are at nine.”
“I told you, you’re not asking for enough. You’re not preparing them, and they’re going to be put off by later surprises. You’ve got to put some houses on the plan, around the fairways of the golf course and on this long hillside here, where they’ve got the view. And the treatment plant needs to go in too, at least a small one. You can add on to those in a modular way. Here’s a spot by the creek that’s kind of out of the way.”
“I don’t know that they’re going to go for lots of houses right now. I’m afraid of too much density.”
“Well, the zoning out there is for two-acre lots. Do that and put more in later.”
I looked at my watch. Axel said, “We can put this off a month. That’s fine by me.”
And so I didn’t see her that night, because I was intimidated by Axel. I sat there with Axel Tinker until after eleven, watching nine o’clock come and go and feeling it as a certain kind of inevitable pain whose source had been there from the beginning. My father would have had all sorts of expressions for it: chickens coming home to roost, getting what you deserve, making your bed and lying in it, maybe this will be a lesson to you. We talked about the sketch plan; we added in this and that; I arranged to take the plan over to Marcus and Gordon the next day and discuss it with them and then find Axel and put in changes, if need be. And when we closed the office and Axel said, “Well, I think we’ve
done a good job here,” I nodded and thanked him and shook his hand, but the fact was he cared more than I did. I got into my car, I think it is safe to say, a different person from the one I had been when I arrived at the office that afternoon.
CHAPTER
16
ON THE DAY of the meeting, Gottfried Nuelle called me and said that he wanted to go with me that night. I said, “What?”
“Don’t you what me. I’m already fit to be tied that you didn’t tell me you bought the Thorpe place. I’ve been looking at that property for twenty years. I saw it go on the market, and I saw the price they put on it, and I was waiting.”
“What were you waiting for, Gottfried?”
“Well, I was waiting for the goddamned price to go down, what do you think I was waiting for? I’m not an idiot.”
“So, just out of curiosity and without offending you, I would like to know how you know about the planning commission agenda.”
“Vida’s husband is my wife’s cousin Buck.”
“Vida.”
“The woman who put you on the agenda, Stratford. What’s the matter with you?”
“We’ve got lots of people going already.”
“Good, then I won’t have to sit near that asshole.”
“Which asshole is that, Gottfried?”
“The one you sold my beautiful house to.”
“Marcus.”
“Him. Yeah. You fix it up so I don’t have to sit next to him, and I’ll go with you. I won’t say a word.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it, Gottfried.”
“Watch me.” He hung up.
I didn’t see a way out of this, given the fact that I had two houses of Gottfried’s listed and I had spent a lot of money advertising both of them. I also didn’t see that I absolutely had to get out of it. Gottfried was an interested bystander, he had been building upscale houses for a long time, and maybe he would have something to say or offer that would be of value. Gordon didn’t actually like Gottfried, few did, but he respected him and he was a more-the-merrier sort of guy anyway.
