by Richard Ford
“When I got divorced, Frank, and started trying to make pots up in East Burke, Vermont”—Joe crosses his short legs and cozies down authoritatively in his lounger—“I didn’t have the foggiest idea about what I was doing. Okay? I was out of control, actually. But things just worked out. Same when Phyllis and I got together—just slammed into each other one day. But I’m not out of control anymore.”
“Maybe you are more than you think, Joe.”
“Nope. I’m in control way too much. That’s the problem.”
“I think you’re confusing things you’re already sure about, Joe. All this has been pretty stressful on you.”
“But I’m on the verge of something here, I think. That’s the important part.”
“Of what?” I say. “I think you’re going to find this Houlihan house pretty interesting.” Houlihan is the owner of the Penns Neck property.
“I don’t mean that.” He pops both his chunky little fists on the plastic armrests. Joe may be verging on a major disorientation here—a legitimate rent in the cloth. This actually appears in textbooks: Client abruptly begins to see the world in some entirely new way he feels certain, had he only seen it earlier, would’ve directed him down a path of vastly greater happiness—only (and this, of course, is the insane part) he inexplicably senses that way’s still open to him; that the past, just this once, doesn’t operate the way it usually operates. Which is to say, irrevocably. Oddly enough, only home buyers in the low to middle range have these delusions, and for the most part all they bring about is trouble.
Joe suddenly bucks up out of his chair and goes slappety-slap through the dark little room, taking big puffs on his cigarette, looking into the bathroom, then crossing and peeping out between the curtains to where Phyllis waits in my car. He then turns like an undersized gorilla in a cage and stalks past the TV to the bathroom door, his back to me, and stares out the frosted, louvered window that reveals the dingy motel rear alley, where there’s a blue garbage lugger, full to brimming with white PVC piping, which I sense Joe finds significant. Our talk now has the flavor of a hostage situation.
“What do you think you mean, Joe?” I say, because I detect that what he’s looking for, like anybody on the skewers of dilemma, is sanction: agreement from beyond himself. A nice house he could both afford and fall in love with the instant he sees it could be a perfect sanction, a sign some community recognizes him in the only way communities ever recognize anything: financially (tactfully expressed as a matter of compatibility).
“What I mean, Bascombe,” Joe says, leaning against the door-jamb and staring pseudo-casually through the bathroom at the blue load lugger (the mirror where he’s caught himself on the can must be just behind the door), “is that the reason we haven’t bought a house in four months is that I don’t want to goddamned buy one. And the reason for that is I don’t want to get trapped in some shitty life I’ll never get out of except by dying.” Joe swivels toward me—a small, round man with hirsute butcher’s arms and a little sorcerer’s beard, who’s come to the sudden precipice of what’s left of life a little quicker than he knows how to cope with. It’s not what I was hoping for, but anyone could appreciate his predicament.
“It is a big decision, Joe,” I say, wanting to sound sympathetic. “If you buy a house, you own it. That’s for sure.”
“So are you giving up on me? Is that it?” Joe says this with a mean sneer, as if he’s observed now what a shabby piece of realty dreck I am, only interested in the ones that sell themselves. He is probably indulging in the idyll of what it’d be like to be a realtor himself, and what superior genius strategies he’d choose to get his point across to a crafty, interesting, hard-nut-to-crack guy like Joe Markham. This is another well-documented sign, but a good one: when your client begins to see things as a realtor, half the battle’s won.
My wish of course is that after today Joe will spend a sizable portion if not every minute of his twilight years in Penns Neck, NJ, and it’s even possible he believes it’ll happen, himself. My job, therefore, is to keep him on the rails—to supply sanction pro tempore, until I get him into a buy-sell agreement and cinch the rest of his life around him like a saddle on a bucking horse. Only it’s not that simple, since Joe at the moment is feeling isolated and scared through no fault of anyone but him. So that what I’m counting on is the phenomenon by which most people will feel they’re not being strong-armed if they’re simply allowed to advocate (as stupidly as they please) the position opposite the one they’re really taking. This is just another way we create the fiction that we’re in control of anything.
“I’m not giving up on you, Joe,” I say, feeling a less pleasant dampness on my back now and inching forward into the room. Traffic noise is being softened by the rain. “I just go about selling houses the way I’d want one sold to me. And if I bust my ass showing you property, setting up appointments, checking out this and that till I’m purple in the face, then you suddenly back out, I’ll be ready to say you made the right decision if I believe it.”
“Do you believe it this time?” Joe is still sneering, but not quite as much. He senses we’re getting to the brassier tacks now, where I take off my realtor’s hat and let him know what’s right and what’s wrong in the larger sphere, which he can then ignore.
“I sense your reluctance pretty plainly, Joe.”
“Right,” Joe says adamantly. “If you feel like you’re tossing your life in the ter-let, why go through with it, right?”
“You’ll have plenty more opportunities before you’re finished.”
“Yup,” Joe says. I hazard another look toward Phyllis, whose mushroom head is in motionless silhouette inside my car. The glass has already fogged up from her heavy body exhalations. “These things aren’t easy,” he says, and tosses his stubby cigarette directly into the toilet he was no doubt referring to.
“If we’re not going to do this, we better get Phyllis out of the car before she suffocates in there,” I say. “I’ve got some other things to do today. I’m going away with my son for the holiday.”
“I didn’t know you had a son,” Joe says. He, of course, has never asked me one question about me in four months, which is fine, since it’s not his business.
“And a daughter. They live in Connecticut with their mother.” I smile a friendly, not-your-business smile.
“Oh yeah.”
“Let me get Phyllis,” I say. “She’ll need a little talking to by you, I think.”
“Okay, but let me just ask one thing.” Joe crosses his short arms and leans against the doorjamb, feigning even greater casualness. (Now that he’s off the hook, he has the luxury of getting back on it of his own free and misunderstood will.)
“Shoot.”
“What do you think’s going to happen to the realty market?”
“Short term? Long term?” I’m acting ready to go.
“Let’s say short.”
“Short? More of the same’s my guess. Prices are soft. Lenders are pretty retrenched. I expect it to last the summer, then rates’ll probably bump up around ten-nine or so after Labor Day. Course, if one high-priced house sells way under market, the whole structure’ll adjust overnight and we’ll all have a field day. It’s pretty much a matter of perception out there.”
Joe stares at me, trying to act as though he’s mulling this over and fitting his own vital data into some new mosaic. Though if he’s smart he’s also thinking about the cannibalistic financial forces gnashing and churning the world he’s claiming he’s about to march back into—instead of buying a house, fixing his costs onto a thirty-year note and situating his small brood behind its solid wall. “I see,” he says sagely, nodding his fuzzy little chin. “And what about the long term?”
I take another stagy peek at Phyllis, though I can’t see her now. Possibly she’s started hitchhiking down Route 1 to Baltimore.
“The long term’s less good. For you, that is. Prices’ll jump after the first of the year. Th
at’s for sure. Rates’ll spurt up. Property really doesn’t go down in the Haddam area as a whole. All boats pretty much rise on a rising whatever.” I smile at him blandly. In realty, all boats most certainly do rise on a rising whatever. But it’s still being right that makes you rich.
Joe, I’m sure, has been brooding all over again this morning about his whopper miscues—miscues about marriage, divorce, remarriage, letting Dot marry a Hell’s Commando, whether he should’ve quit teaching trig in Aliquippa, whether he should’ve joined the Marines and right now be getting out with a fat pension and qualifying for a VA loan. All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done. But Joe doesn’t want to make another whopper, since one more big one might just send him to the bottom.
Except he doesn’t know bread from butter beans about which is the fatal miscue and which is the smartest idea he ever had.
“Frank, I’ve just been standing here thinking,” he says, and peers back out the dirty bathroom louvers as if he’d heard someone call his name. Joe may at this moment be close to deciding what he actually thinks. “Maybe I need a new way to look at things.”
“Maybe you ought to try looking at things across a flat plain, Joe,” I say. “I’ve always thought that looking at things from above, like you said, forced you to see all things as the same height and made decisions a lot harder. Some things are just bigger than others. Or smaller. And I think another thing too.”
“What’s that?” Joe’s brows give the appearance of knitting together. He is vigorously trying to fit my “viewpoint” metaphor into his own current predicament of homelessness.
“It really won’t hurt you to take a quick run over to this Penns Neck house. You’re already down here. Phyllis is in the car, scared to death you’re not going to look at it.”
“Frank, what do you think about me?” Joe says. At some point of dislocatedness, this is what all clients start longing to know. Though it’s almost always insincere and finally meaningless, since once their business is over they go right back to thinking you’re either a crook or a moron. Realty is not a friendly business. It only seems to be.
“Joe, I may just queer my whole deal here,” I say, “but what I think is you’ve done your best to find a house, you’ve stuck to your principles, you’ve put up with anxiety as long as you know how. You’ve acted responsibly, in other words. And if this Penns Neck house is anywhere close to what you like, I think you ought to take the plunge. Quit hanging onto the side of the pool.”
“Yeah, but you’re paid to think that, though,” Joe says, sulky again in the bathroom door. “Right?”
But I’m ready for him. “Right. And if I can get you to spend a hundred and fifty on this house, then I can quit working and move to Kitzbühel, and you can thank me by sending me a bottle of good gin at Christmas because you’re not freezing your nuts off in a barn while Sonja gets further behind in school and Phyllis files fucking divorce papers on you because you can’t make up your mind.”
“Point taken,” Joe says, moodily.
“I really don’t want to go into it any further,” I say. There’s no place further to go, of course, realty being not a very complex matter. “I’m going to take Phyllis on up to Penns Neck, Joe. And if she likes it we’ll come get you and you can make up your mind. If she doesn’t I’ll bring her back anyway. It’s a win-win proposition. In the meantime you can stay here and look at things from above.”
Joe stares at me guiltily. “Okay, I’ll just come along.” He virtually blurts this out, having apparently blundered into the sanction he was looking for: the win-win, the sanction not to be an idiot. “I’ve come all this fucking way.”
With my damp right arm I give a quick thumbs-up wave out to Phyllis, who I hope is still in the car.
Joe begins picking up change off the dresser top, stuffing a fat wallet into the tight waistband of his shorts. “I should let you and Phyllis figure this whole goddamn thing out and follow along like a goddamn pooch.”
“You’re still looking at things from above.” I smile at Joe across the dark room.
“You just see everything from the fucking middle, that’s all,” Joe says, scratching his bristly, balding head and looking around the room as though he’d forgotten something. I have no idea what he means by this and am fairly sure he couldn’t explain it either. “If I died right now, you’d go on about your business.”
“What else should I do?” I say. “I’d be sorry I hadn’t sold you a house, though. I promise you that. Because you at least could’ve died at home instead of in the Sleepy Hollow.”
“Tell it to my widow out there,” Joe Markham says, and stalks by me and out the door, leaving me to pull it shut and to get out to my car before I’m soaked to my toes. All this for the sake of what? A sale.
3
In my air-conditioned Crown Vic heading up Route 1 both Markhams sit, Joe in front, Phyllis in back, staring out at the rainy morning bustle and rush as though they were in a funeral cortege for a relative neither of them liked. Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home—when your personal clouds don’t move but hang—can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.
My own view is that the realty dreads (which is what the Markhams have, pure and simple) originate not in actual house buying, which could just as easily be one of life’s most hopeful optional experiences; or even in the fear of losing money, which is not unique to realty; but in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold. And as we come nearer the moment of closing—when the deal’s sealed and written down in a book in the courthouse—what we sense is that we’re being tucked even deeper, more anonymously, into the weave of culture, and it’s even less likely we’ll make it to Kitzbühel. What we all want, of course, is all our best options left open as long as possible; we want not to have taken any obvious turns, but also not to have misread the correct turn the way some other boy-o would. As a unique strain of anxiety, it makes for a vicious three-way split that drives us all crazy as lab rats.
If I, for instance, were to ask the Markhams, staring stonily now at rain-drenched exurbia, cartage trucks and Mercedes wagons sluicing by, spewing water right into their mute faces—ask them if they were self-conscious about leaving homespun Vermont and copping an easier, more conventional life of curbs, reliable fire protection, garbage pickup three days a week, they’d be irate. Jesus, no, they’d shout. We simply discovered we had some pretty damn unique needs that could only be met by some suburban virtues we’d never even heard aboutbefore. (Good schools, malls, curbs, adequate fire protection, etc.) I’m sure, in fact, the Markhams feel like pioneers, reclaiming the suburbs from people (like me) who’ve taken them for granted for years and given them their bad name. Though I’d be surprised if the distaste they feel about being in the wagon with everybody else isn’t teamed with the usual pioneer conservatism about not venturing too far—in this case toward a glut of too many cinemas, too-safe streets, too much garbage pickup, too-clean water—the suburban experiential ante raised to dizzier and dizzier heights.
My job—and I often succeed—is to draw them back toward a chummier feeling, make them less anxious both about the unknown and the obvious: the ways they’re like their neighbors (all insignificant) and the happy but crucial ways they’re not. When I fail at this task, when I sell a house but leave the buyers with an intact pioneer anxiety, it usually means they’ll be out and on the road again in 3.86 years instead of settling in and letting time slip past the way people (that is, the rest of us) do who have nothing that pressing on their minds.
I turn off Route 1 onto NJ 571 at Penns Neck and hand Phyllis and Joe
two fresh listing sheets so they can begin placing the Houlihan house into a neighborhood context. Neither of them has had much to say on the drive up—I assume they’re letting their early-morning emotional bruises heal in silence. Phyllis has posed one question about “the radon problem,” which she said was more serious than a lot of their Vermont neighbors would ever admit. Her blue, exophthalmic eyes grew hooded, as if radon was only one item in a Pandora’s box of North-country menace and grimness she’d grown prematurely old worrying about. Among them: asbestos in the school heating system, heavy metals in the well water, B. coli bacteria, wood smoke, hydrocarbons, rabid foxes, squirrels, voles, plus cluster flies, black ice, frozen mud—the wilderness experience up the yin-yang.
I, however, assured her radon wasn’t a big problem in central New Jersey, owing to our sandy-loamy soil, and most people I knew had had their houses “crawled” and sealed around 1981, when the last scare swept through.
Joe has had even less to say. As we neared the 571 turnoff he peered back once through his side mirror at the streaming roadway behind and asked in a mumbling voice where Penns Neck was. “It’s in the Haddam area,” I said, “but across Route I nearer the train line, which is a plus.”
He was silent for a while, then said, “I don’t want to live in an area.”
“You don’t what?” Phyllis said. She was leafing through the green-jacketed Self-Reliance I have brought along for Paul (my old, worn, individually bound copy from college).
“The Boston area, the tristate area, the New York area. Nobody ever said the Vermont area, or the Aliquippa area,” Joe said. “They just said the places.”
“Some people said the Vermont area,” Phyllis answered, flipping pages smartly.
“The D.C. area,” Joe said as a reproach. Phyllis said nothing. “Chicagoland,” Joe continued. “The Metro area. The Dallas area.”
“I guess you have to chalk it up to perception again,” I said, passing the little metal Penns Neck sign, which looked like a license plate, nearly hidden by some clumpy yew trees. “We’re in Penns Neck now,” I said, though no one answered.
