The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “He didn’t know,” Mike said. “The idea just appealed to him. It’s why I didn’t want him to go inside.” He looked at me to say I should’ve known that, then smiled a thin, indicting smile meant not to be condescending.

  “I’m an essentialist in things,” I said. “I believe humans buy houses to live in them, or so other people will.”

  Mike didn’t attempt a reply, just looked up at the frosted clouds quickly forming. I cast a speculative eye up at the unsold green house, raised and allowing the glimpse of fenced back yards on Bimini Street. Possibly Thanksgiving wasn’t really a great day to sell a house. On a day to summon one’s blessings and try to believe in them, it might be common sense not to risk what you’re sure you have.

  Last night’s storm has widened the bay’s perimeter and shoved water up onto Bay Drive, where it exudes swampy-sweet odors of challenged septics. Yellow fluff rides in the weeds where the black-billed swans have foraged. This part of the bay shore has remained undeveloped due to seventies-era open-space ordinances mandating jungle gyms, slides and merry-go-rounds for younger, child-bearing families in the neighborhood. These apparatuses are here but now disused and grown dilapidated on the skimpy beach. A billboard announcing WE CAN DO IT IF WE TRY has been erected on the bay’s sandy-muddy shore. I’m not sure what this message means. Possibly save the bay. Or possibly that condos, apartments and shops will soon be here where there’s now a pleasant vista across the water, and that the families with kids will have to do their own math or else take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

  The two swans have moved off among the Yacht Club buoys. Bits of white Styrofoam, yellow burger wrappers and a faded red beach ball have washed in among the weeds with last night’s blow. A gentleman is working alone on his black-hulled thirty-footer, readying it for winter storage. His white-helmeted kid plays with a cat on the dock plankings. Thanksgiving now and here feels evasive, the day at pains to seem festive. It’s cold and damp. The usual band of bad air along the far, cluttered Toms River horizon has been washed away in the night. I have noted in our walk down that I am not keen to walk as fast as Mike, whose little green loafers step out lively as he talks in his businessy voice. I’m hoping not to forget his name in mid-announcement of his developer plans. I want to be upbeat and comradely—even if I don’t feel that way. We can, after all, always set aside our real feelings—which usually don’t amount to a hill of beans anyway, and may not even be genuine—and let ourselves be spontaneous and bounteous with fast-flowing vigor, just as when we’re at our certifiable best. This is the part of acceptance I welcome, since it has down-the-line consolations.

  On our walk down, Mike has said matter-of-factly that the last two nights have been a “great sufferance” to him, that he dislikes dilemmas (the middle way should preclude them), hates causing me “uncertainty,” is uncomfortable with ambition (though he’s been practicing it for a coon’s age), but has had to concede these “pressures” are a part of modern life (here in America, apparently not in Tibet) and there’s no escaping them (unless of course you can get stinking rich, after which you have no real problems). I was curious if he was fingering a pack of Marlboros in his sweater pocket and would’ve preferred to be puffing away Dick Widmark-style as he spieled all this out to me.

  I’ve begun to enjoy the lake-like bay, the clanking halyards of the remaining Yacht Club boats, the rain-cleared vista across to the populous mainland, even the distant sight of the newer homes down the shore, from the go-go nineties. There’s nothing wrong with development if the right people do the developing. At the gritty water’s edge, with the wind huskier, I can see that the WE CAN DO IT billboard has a tiny Domus Isle Realty logo at its bottom corner, an artist’s conception of a distant desert atoll with a lone red palm silhouetted. Unfortunately, though maybe only in my view, the desert-island motif calls to mind Eniwetok, not some South Sea snug-away where you’d like to buy or build your dream house, but in any case has nothing at all to do with Sea-Clift, New Jersey. I’ve met the owners, two former sports-TV execs from Gotham, a husband and wife team, and by most accounts, they’re perfectly nice and probably honest.

  Farther down Bay Drive, where it approaches the first of the newer nineties homes, a two-person survey crew has set up—a man with a tall zebra stake and a girl bent over a svelte-looking digital transit on a tripod. Something’s already afoot, out ahead of public approval and opinion. These two are working where a sign designates CABLE CROSSING. I can make out the tiny red digitalized numerals in the transit box, glowing at me each time the young surveyor girl stands up to take a sight line.

  There’s absolutely no reason to drag out Mike’s epic new-vistas announcement and spend all day out here where it’s cold and gusty. I’m ready to get on board, whatever it is. I regret our last collaboration hasn’t been a money-maker. Averages of showings-to-sales run 12 percent, and we came close on an unpromising day. I want to get home in case Sally hasn’t called. But because Mike’s a Buddhist, he can only proceed the way he wants to proceed and not the way anybody else does, which means he often has to be humored.

  In my rising spirit, I take a cold seat on the low barn-red kids’ merry-go-round and give it a rounding push with my toe, so that Mike has to come where I am to speak his piece.

  “So’re we gonna jump into the McMansion business with our new pecorino cumpari?” I say, and give another spin around. The wrecked old contraption squalls with a metal-on-metal skweeeee-er that unfortunately nullifies my spirited opening. I’m succeeding in feeling munificent, but can’t be sure how long it’ll last.

  “Tom’s a real good guy,” Mike says gravely.

  I can’t hear that well as the merry-go-round takes my gaze past the surveyors, across the bay, past the nineties housing, then back to Mike, who’s stationed himself legs apart, arms folded like an umpire. His brow’s furrowed and he looks frustrated that I won’t be still.

  “Yep, yep, yep,” I say. “He seemed pretty solid—for a bozo developer.” Benivalle, however, also once knew my precious son Ralph—whose death I have now accepted—and thus occupies a special place in my heart’s history book. But I don’t want to piss Mike off after I’ve queered the Bagosh deal like an amateur, so I stop the merry-go-round in front of him and offer up a general smile of business forgiveness for quitting on me when I’m not feeling my best.

  “I think now’s the right time to make a change,” Mike says, seeming to widen his eyes to indicate resolution, his pupils large behind his glasses. “I think it’s time to get serious about real estate, Frank. Bush is going to win Florida, I’m sure. We’ll see a turn-around by fiscal ’01.” I don’t know why Mike has to sear his little self-important gaze into my brain just to tell me what he’s going to do.

  “You could be right.” I try to look serious back. I’d like to take another spin on the old go-round, but my ass is frozen on the boards and what I need to do is stand up. Only then I’d tower over Mike and ruin his little valedictory. I just want him to get on with it. I’ve got places to go, telephone calls to answer, children to be driven crazy by.

  “People need to stay the course, Frank,” he says. “If it isn’t broken, don’t break it, you know. Stick with old-fashioned competence. Thanksgiving’s a good time for this.” Mike uncorks a giant happy-Asian smile, as if I’d just said something I haven’t said. He’s, of course, kidnapping Thanksgiving for his own selfish commercial lusts, the same as Filene’s. “I’ve got a new person in my life,” Mike says.

  “A new what?” I suspected it.

  “A new lady friend.” He rises fractionally on the soles of his shoes. “You’ll like her.”

  “What about your wife?” And your two kids at their laptops? Don’t they get to make the transition, too? What about the soulful, clear-sighted immigrant life that delivered you to me? And old-fashioned competence not breaking what isn’t broken? “I thought you two were reconciling.”

  “No.” Mike tries to look tragic, but not too. He doesn’t want to go whe
re what he’s said gets all blurred up with what he means. A true Republican.

  But it’s okay with me. I don’t want to go there either.

  “Love-based attachments,” Mike says indistinctly enough that I don’t hear the next thing he says—lost in the breeze—something about Sheela and the kids in the Amboys, the discarded part of his history the business biographers will gloss over in the cover stories once he and Benivalle break through to developer’s paradise: “Little Big Man: Tiny Tibetan Talks Turkey to Tantalize Trenders, Trenton to Tenafly.” But who could a new squeeze be—suitable for a forty-something Himalayan in the lower echelons of the realty trade? And in New Jersey? An arranged union, like Bagosh, with a Filipina daughter grown too long in the tooth for her own kind? A monied Paraguayan military widow seeking a young “protégé”? A Tibetan teen flown in like a pizza, on a pledge he’ll care for her always? I wonder what the Dalai Lama says in The Road to the Open Heart about monogamy. Probably not much, given his own curriculum vitae.

  “So, is that all the news that’s fit to tell?” From my cold merry-go-round, I can address Mike at eye-level. His plaid cap has drifted down an inch and off to the side, so he looks once again like a pint-size mobster.

  “No. I want to buy you out.” His now invisible eyes go grim as death. Then again his mouth cracks a big smile, as if what he’s just said was absolutely hilarious. Which it isn’t.

  My own mouth opens to speak, but no words are ready.

  “I’ve tamed myself,” Mike says, jubilant. A lone passing duck quacks one quack high in the misty sky, as if all the creatures agree, yes, he’s tamed himself.

  “From what?” I manage. “I didn’t know you needed taming. I thought you were rounding up your courage.”

  “They’re the same.” He, as usual, gets instantly giddy at talk like this—word riddles. “There’s some unhappiness never to be as rich as J. Paul Getty.” Another of Mike’s earthly deities. “Filthy rich,” he adds buoyantly. “But I can make money, too. Helping people this way can make money.”

  He means helping them out of their cash. There’s a reason these people don’t get cancer in their countries. And there’s a reason we do. We make things too complicated.

  “I believe you want to think about this proposal,” he says. His tough little hands are clasped priest-like. He likes being the presenter of a proposal. Believe, want, think—these are words used in new ways.

  “I don’t want to sell you my business,” I say. “I like my business. You go develop McMansions for proctologists.”

  “Yes,” he says, meaning no. “But if I make a good business proposal and pay you a lot of money, you can transfer ownership, and everything will stay the same.”

  “Everything’s already the same. It ain’t broke. Due to old-fashioned competence. Mine.”

  “I knew you’d say this,” Mike says happily. For the first time since I’ve known him, he’s talking like the departed Mr. Bagosh, with whom he shares, after all, a stronger regional bond than he shares with me. “I think we should agree, though. I’ve thought about this a great deal. It’ll give you time to travel.”

  Travel is code for my compromised health status, which Mike is officially sensitive to, and means in Mike’s enlightened view—Buddhist crappolio—that I “need” to ready myself for the final conjugation by taking a voyage on the Queen Mary or the Love Boat. He’s “helping” me, in other words, by helping me out of business. “I’ve got time to travel,” I say. “Why don’t we not talk about this anymore. Okay?” I attempt a faint smile that feels unwelcome to my cold cheeks. Munificence is gone. I don’t like being strong-armed or felt sorry for.

  “Yes! Okay!” Mike exults. “This is just what I thought. I’m satisfied.” It’s all about him, his confidence level, his satisfaction. I’m as good as out of work, a cat in need of herding.

  “Me, too. Good. But I’m not going to sell you Realty-Wise.” I give my sore knees a try at prizing me up off the butt-froze planks. I hold onto the curved hang-on bar that wants to glide away and spill me over. Mike semi-casually secures a light grip on my sweatshirt sleeve. But I’m up and feel fine. The bay breeze cools my neck. My eyes feel like they’ve both just freshly opened all the way. Down Bay Drive, the boy-girl surveyors are walking side-by-side toward a yellow pickup parked farther along the curve, where houses are. One holds the collapsed tripod, the other the striped pole.

  “So, you’re not going into business with what’s his name?” I say gruffly.

  Mike dusts his little hands together as if dirt was on them. He’s pretending we didn’t have the conversation we just had, and that he feels good about something else. It’s possible he’ll never bring this subject up again. Intention is the same as action to these guys. “No,” he says, pseudo-sadly.

  “That’s probably smart. I didn’t want to say that before.”

  “I think so.” He gives his little Black Watch cap a straightening as we begin walking back to the cars.

  Mike is pleased by my rebuff of his unfriendly takeover try. He knows I know it’s nothing more than what I did with old man Barber Featherstone and how the world always works. Plus, he’s smart. He knows he’s succumbed to the little leap into the normal limbo of life. That he’s facing down the big fear of “Is this it?” by agreeing “Yes, this is.” He also knows I might sell him Realty-Wise after all, possibly even very soon, and that he can then start video-taping virtual tours, building Web-based rental connections, adding a new Arabic-speaking female associate, change the company name to Own It…TODAY!.com, subscribe to recondite business studies from Michigan State and concentrate more on lifestyle purchasing than essentialist residential clientele. In two to twelve years, when he’ll be my age now, he’ll be farting through silk. One hardly knows how or when or by what subtle mechanics the old values give way to new. It just happens.

  Tommy Benivalle taught me some invaluable—” Mike’s maundering on as we trudge at my slower pace back up Timbuktu. Ahead, his new-values silver Infiniti and my broke-window, old-values, essentialist Suburban sit end to end in front of 118, perched sturdily up on its girders. “Only a fool—” Mike rattles on. I’m not interested. I was his mentor and am now his adversary—which probably mean the same thing, too. I admire him but don’t particularly like him today, or the fresh legions he commands. How much life do I have to accept? Does it all come in one day?

  “So, are you putting on a big holiday feed bag with your new squeeze?” I say this just to be rude. We stand mid-street, looking exactly like what we are—a pair of realtors. Mike’s eyes move toward my Suburban. The duct-taped back window may be a worrisome sign that he needs to hurry up with his business proposal, get the deal nailed down before the mental-health boys show up. There was the puzzling scene at the August on Tuesday. I could be discovered tomorrow sitting silently in the office, “just thinking.” He could be forced to negotiate with Paul.

  “She’s got her big place up in Spring Lake. The kids come. They’re Jewish. It’s a big scene.” Mike nods a sage “not my kind of thing” nod. He’s gone back to talking like a Jerseyite.

  But I knew it! A dowager, a late-model divorcée like Marguerite. She’s adopted “little Mike-a-la,” who’s giving her “investment counsel” over and above his unspecified services of a consensual nature. The kids, Jake, a Columbia professor, Ben, a fabric artist on Vinal-haven, and one daughter, Rachel, who lives alone in Montecito and can’t seem to get started. They all keep the zany parent on a frugal budget so she can’t ruin their retirements with her funny enthusiasms. Mike’s “interesting,” a minority, resembles the Dalai Lama—plus, who cares, if he makes “Gram” happy and keeps her away from ballroom dancing. At least he’s not a Mexican.

  “Do they let you carve the turkey and serve?” I don’t try to suppress a smirk, which he hates but won’t show. He knows what he’s up to and doesn’t care if I know. It’s business, not a love-based attachment.

  “I’ll just drop by late,” he says, and frowns, not at me, but
at how he’ll pass the night. He is, as we all are, taking his solaces as they come. “I have the business proposal already written up.” He produces a white Realty-Wise business envelope from his sweater pocket, rolled up with the listing sheets for 118. This he proffers like a summons, bowing slightly. I’m not sure Tibetans even bow. It may be something he picked up. Though I, the defendant, accept it and bow back (which I can’t seem to prevent myself from doing) before folding it and stuffing it in my Levi’s back pocket like junk mail.

  “I’ll read this someday. Not today.”

  “That’s splendid.” He is elated again. It pleases him to conduct business in the street, in the elements, far from the ancestral cradle. To Mike, this is a sign of progress: the old lessons from the life left behind still viable here in New Jersey.

  “Am I going to see you again?” My hand’s on my cold door handle. “I don’t know what you’re doing. I thought you were moving your base of operations over to Mullica Road. You’re a mystery wrapped in a small enigma.”

  “Oh, no.” His smile—all intersecting angles—radiates behind his specs. He’s risen onto his little toes again, Horatio Alger-style. “I work for you. Until you work for me. Everything’s the same. I love you. I keep you in my prayers.”

  I’m fearful he may hug, kiss, high-five or double-hander me. Two male hugs in one morning is a lot. Men don’t have to do that all the time, even though it doesn’t mean we’re not sensitive. I open the car door and stiffly get myself inside before the inescapable happens. I shut the door and lock it. Mike’s left standing out on Timbuktu in his black sweater with its fake-fur collar and his little Black Watch cap. He’s speaking something. I can hear the buzz of his voice, but not the sense, through the window. I don’t care what he’s saying. It’s not about me. I get the motor started and begin to mouth words he’ll “understand” through the window glass. “Abba-dabba, dabba-dabba, dabba-dabba-dabba, dabba-dabba,” I say, then smile, wave, bow in my car seat. He says something back and looks triumphant. He gives me the thumbs-up sign and nods his head proudly. “Abba dabba, dabba, dabba-dabba,” I say back and smile. He nods his head again, then steps back, effects a small wave, laughs heartily. And that is it. I’m off.