Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “I get it,” I said, though I thought my personal take on the job probably wouldn’t be just like Rolly’s.

  And that was that. In six months old man Schwindell gorked off in the front seat of his Sedan de Ville, stopped at the light at the corner of Venetian Way and Lipizzaner Road, a man-and-wife ophthalmologist team in the car, on their way to the preclosing walkthrough at the retired New Jersey Supreme Court Justice’s house, down the street from my former home on Hoving (the deal naturally fell through). By then Roily Mounger was steaming along selling time-shares to Seattleites, most of the young people in our office had taken off for better pickings in distant area codes, and I’d passed the board and was out hawking listings.

  Though based on strict cash flow and forgetting about taxes, it was already true by then that a person could rent for half the cost of buying, and a lot of our clients were beginning to wise up. In addition—as I have ever so patiently told the Markhams, fidgeting now out in the Sleepy Hollow—housing costs were rising faster than incomes, at about 4.9 percent. Plus, plenty of other signs were bad. Employment was down. Expansion was way out of balance. Building permits were taking a nosedive. It was “what the monkey does on the other side of the stick,” Shax Murphy said. And those who had no choice or, like me, had choices but no wish to pursue them, all dug in for the long night that becomes winter.

  But truth to say, I was as happy as I expected to be. I enjoyed being on the periphery of the business community and having the chance to stay up with trends—trends I didn’t even know existed back when I was writing sports. I liked the feeling of earning a living by the sweat of my brow, even if I didn’t need the money, still don’t work that hard and don’t always earn a great deal. And I managed to achieve an even fuller appreciation of the Existence Period; began to see it as a good, permanent and adaptable strategy for meeting life’s contingencies other than head-on.

  For a brief time I took some small interest in forecast colloquia, attended the VA and FHA update meetings and a few taking-control-of-the-market seminars. I attended the state Realty Roundtable, sat in on the Fair Housing Panel down in Trenton. I delivered Christmas packages to the elderly, helped coach the T-ball team, even dressed up like a clown and rode from Haddam to New Brunswick in a circus wagon to try to spruce up the public perception of realtors as being, if not a bunch of crooks, at least a bunch of phonies and losers.

  But eventually I let most of it slide. A couple of young hotshot associates have come in since I signed on, and they’re fired up to put on clown suits to prove a point. Whereas I don’t feel like I’m trying to prove a point anymore.

  And yet I still like the sunny, paisley-through-the-maples exhilaration of exiting my car and escorting motivated clients up some new and strange walkway and right on into whatever’s waiting—an unoccupied house on a summer-warm morning when it’s chillier indoors than out, even if the house isn’t much to brag about, or even if I’ve shown it twenty-nine times and the bank’s got it on the foreclosure rolls. I enjoy going into other people’s rooms and nosing around at their things, while hoping to hear a groan of pleasure, an “Ahhh, now this, this is more like it,” or a whispered approval between a man and wife over some waterfowl design worked into the fireplace paneling, then surprisingly repeated in the bathroom tiles; or share the satisfaction over some small grace note—a downstairs-upstairs light switch that’ll save a man possible injury when he’s stumbling up to bed half sloshed, having gone to sleep on the couch watching the Knicks long after his wife has turned in because she can’t stand basketball.

  Beyond all that, since two years ago I’ve bought no new houses on Clio Street or elsewhere. I ride herd on my small hot dog empire. I write my editorials and have as always few friends outside of work. I take part in the annual Parade of Homes, standing in the entryway of our fanciest listings with a big smile on my chops. I play an occasional game of volleyball behind St. Leo’s with the co-ed teams from other businesses. And I go fishing as much as I can at the Red Man Club, where I sometimes take Sally Caldwell in violation of Rule 1 but never see other members, and where I’ve learned over time to catch a fish, to marvel a moment at its opaline beauties and then to put it back. And of course I act as parent and guardian to my two children, though they are far away now and getting farther.

  I try, in other words, to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear. Though it’s true that sometimes in the glide, when worries and contingencies are floating off, I sense I myself am afloat and cannot always feel the sides of where I am, nor know what to expect. So that to the musical question “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I’m not sure I’d know the answer. Although to the old taunt that says, “Get a life,” I can say, “I already have an existence, thanks.”

  And this may perfectly well constitute progress the way old man Schwindell had it in mind. His wouldn’t have been some philosopher’s enigma about human improvement over the passage of time used frugally, or an economist’s theorem about profit and loss, or the greater good for the greater number. He wanted, I believe, to hear something from me to convince him I was simply alive, and that by doing whatever I was doing—selling houses—I was extending life and my own interest in it, strengthening my tolerance for it and the tolerance of innocent, unnamed others. That was undoubtedly what made him “dean” and kept him going. He wanted me to feel a little every day—and a little would’ve been enough—like I felt the day after I speared a liner bare-handed in the right-field stands at Veterans Stadium, hot off the bat of some black avenger from Chicago, with my son and daughter present and awed to silence with admiration and astoundment for their Dad (everyone around me stood up and applauded as my hand began to swell up like a tomato). How I felt at that moment was that life would never get better than that—though later what I thought, upon calmer reflection, was that it had merely been just a damn good thing to happen, and my life wasn’t a zero. I’m certain old Otto would’ve been satisfied if I’d come in and said something along those lines: “Well, Mr. Schwindell, I don’t know very much about progress, and truthfully, since I became a realtor my life hasn’t been totally transformed; but I don’t feel like I’m in jeopardy of disappearing into thin air, and that’s about all I have to say.” He would, I’m certain, have sent me back to the field with a clap on the back and a hearty go-get-’em.

  And this in fact may be how the Existence Period helps create or at least partly stimulates the condition of honest independence: inasmuch as when you’re in it you’re visible as you are, though not necessarily very noticeable to yourself or others, and yet you maintain reason enough and courage in a time of waning urgency to go toward where your interests lie as though it mattered that you get there.

  The rain that dumped buckets on Route 1 and Penns Neck has missed Wallace Hill, so that all the hot, neat houses are shut up tight as nickels with their window units humming, the pavement already giving off wavy lines no one’s willing to tread through at eleven-thirty. Later, when I’m long gone to South Mantoloking and shade inches beyond the eaves and sycamores, all the front porches will be full, laughter and greetings crisscrossing the way as on my first drive-by. Though now everyone who’s not at work or in summer school or in jail is sitting in the TV darkness watching game shows and waiting for lunch.

  The McLeods’ house looks as it did at 8:30, though someone in the last three hours has removed my FOR RENT sign from in front of the Harrises’, and I pull to a halt there, careful not to stop in front of the McLeods’ and alert them. I climb out into the clammy heat, ditch my windbreaker and hike up onto the dry lawn and take a look around. I check down both sides of the house, behind the hydrangeas and the rose of Sharon bush and up on the tiny porch as if the sign stealers had just uprooted the thing and tossed it, which according to Everick and Wardell is what usually happens. Only it’s not here now.

  I step back out to my car, open the trunk for another sign from the several (FOR SALE, OPEN HOUSE, REDUCED, CONTRACT PENDI
NG) that’re stacked there with my box of offer sheets, along with my suitbag and fishing rods, three Frisbees, two ball mitts, baseballs and the fireworks I’ve ordered special from relatives in Florida—all important paraphernalia for my trip with Paul.

  I bring the new FOR RENT up onto the lawn, find the two holes the previous sign occupied, waggle the stiff metal legs in until they stop, and with my toe mash some grassy ground around so that everything looks as it did. Then I close up the trunk, wipe the sweat off my arms and brow, using my handkerchief, and walk straight to the McLeods’ front door, where, though I mean to ring the bell, I like a criminal step to the side and peer through the front window into the living room, where it’s murky as twilight. I can make out both McLeod kids huddled on a couch, eyes glued like zombies to the TV (little Winnie is clutching a stuffed bunny in her tiny hands). Neither one of them seems to see me, though suddenly the older one, Nelson, jerks his curly head around and stares at the window as if it were just another TV screen, and I was in the picture.

  I wave a little friendly wave and grin. I would like to get this over with and get going to Franks and on to Sally’s.

  Nelson continues staring at me out of the dark room’s dreamy light as though he expects me to disappear in a few more seconds. He and his sister are watching Wimbledon, and I suddenly realize that I have no business whatsoever gawking in the window and am actually running a serious risk hothead Larry will blow my head off.

  Little Nelson gazes at me until I wave again, step away from the window, move back to the door and ring the bell. Like a shot, his bare feet hit the floor and pound out of the room, heading I hope to get his lazy parents up out of bed. An interior door slams, and far, far away I hear a voice below the a/c hum, a voice I can’t make out, saying what, I’m not sure, though it’s certainly about me. I look out at the street of white, green, blue and pink frame houses with green and red roofs and neat little cemetery-plot yards—some with overgrown tomato plants along the foundation walls, others with sweet-pea vines running up side lattices and porch poles. It could be a neighborhood in the Mississippi Delta, though the local cars at the curb are all snazzy van conversions and late-model Fords and Chevys (Negroes are among the most loyal advocates of “Buy American”).

  A large elderly black woman, pushing an aluminum walker over which a yellow tea towel is draped, stumps out the screen door of the house directly across the street. When she sees me on the McLeods’ porch she stops and stares. This is Myrlene Beavers, who waved at me hospitably the first two times I cruised the block, back in 1986, when I was deciding to buy into her neighborhood. Her husband, Tom, has died within the year, and Myrlene—the Harrises tell me by letter—has gone into a decline.

  “Who you lookin’ fo’?” Myrlene shouts out at me across the street.

  “I’m just looking for Larry, Myrlene,” I shout back and wave amiably. She and Mr. Beavers were both diabetics, and Myrlene is losing the rest of her sight to milky cataracts. “It’s me, Myrlene,” I call out. “It’s Frank Bascombe.”

  “Sho’ better not be,” Myrlene says, her steely hair all tufted out in crazy stalks. “I’m tellin’ you right now.” She’s wearing a brightorange Hawaiian-print muumuu, and her ankles are swollen and bound up in bandages. I am aware she may fall slap over dead if she gets excited.

  “It’s all right, Myrlene,” I call out. “I’m just visiting Larry. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.”

  “I’m callin’ the po-lice,” Mrs. Beavers says, and goes stumping around so she can get back through her front door, the walker scraping the porch boards ahead of her.

  “No, don’t call the police,” I shout. I should jog across and let her see it’s me, that I’m not a burglar or a process server, only a rent collector—more or less the way Joe Markham said. Myrlene and I had several cordial conversations when the Harrises were still here—she from her porch, me going to and from my car. But something has happened now.

  Though just as I’m about to hustle across and stop her from calling the cops, more bare feet come thundering toward the door, which suddenly quakes with locks and bolts being keyed and thrown, then opens to reveal Nelson in the crack, sandy-curly headed and light tan skin, a little mulatto Jackie Cooper. His face is below the nail latch on the screen, and staring down on him I feel like a giant. He says nothing, just peers up at me with his small, brown, skeptical eyes. He is six, bare-chested and wearing only a pair of purple-and-gold Lakers shorts. A draft of air-conditioned air slips past my face, which again is sweating. “Advantage, Miss Navratilova,” an English woman’s bland voice says, after which spectators applaud. (It’s a replay from yesterday.)

  “Nelson, how you doin’?” I say enthusiastically. We have never spoken, and Nelson just stares up at me and blinks as if I were speaking Swahili. “Your folks home today?”

  He takes a look over his shoulder, then back at me. “Nelson, why don’t you tell your folks Mr. Bascombe’s at the front door, okay? Tell ‘em I’m just here for the rent, not to murder anybody.” This may be the wrong brand of humor for Nelson.

  I would like not to peek in farther. It’s, after all, my house, and I have a right to see in under extraordinary circumstances. But Nelson and Winnie may be home by themselves, and I wouldn’t want to be inside alone with them. I have the sensation from behind me of Myrlene Beavers yelling inside her house: an unidentified white man is trying to break into Larry McLeod’s private home in broad daylight. “Nelson,” I say, sweating through my shirt and feeling unexpectedly trapped, “why don’t you let me lean inside and call your Dad? Okay?” I offer him a big persuasive nod, then pull back the screen door, which surprisingly isn’t latched, and push my face into the cool, swimming air. “Larry,” I say fairly loudly into the dark room. “I’m just here for the rent.” Winnie, clutching her stuffed rabbit, seems asleep. The TV’s showing the deep greens of the All England Club.

  Nelson looks straight up at me still (I’m leaning directly over him), then turns and goes and reseats himself on the couch by his sister, whose eyes open slowly, then close.

  “Larry!” I call in again. “Are you in here?” Larry’s big pistol is absent from the table, which may mean, of course, he has it in his possession.

  I hear what sounds like a drawer opening and shutting in a back room; then a door slams. What would a panel of eight blacks and four whites—a jury of my peers—say if because of wishing to collect my rent I turned out to be a pre-holiday homicide statistic? I’m sure I’d be found at fault.

  I step back from the door and turn a wary look over at the Beavers’ house. Myrlene’s orange muumuu is swimming like a mirage behind the screen, where she’s watching me.

  “It’s all right, Myrlene,” I say at nothing, which causes the muumuu specter to recede into the shadows.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I turn quickly, and Betty McLeod is behind the screen, which she is this instant latching. She looks out at me with an unwelcoming frown. She’s wearing a quilted pink housecoat and holding its scalloped collar closed with her skinny papery fingers.

  “Nothing’s the matter” I say, shaking my head in a way that probably makes me look deranged. “I think Mrs. Beavers just called the cops on me. I’m just trying to collect the rent.” I’d like to look amused about it, but I’m not.

  “Larry isn’t here. He’ll be home tonight, so you’ll have to come back.” Betty says this as though I’d been yelling in her face.

  “Okay,” I say, and smile mirthlessly. “Just tell him I came by like every other month. And the rent’s due.”

  “He’ll pay you,” she says in a sour voice.

  “That’s great, then.” Far back in the house, I hear a toilet flushing, water slackly then more vigorously touring the new pipes I had installed less than a year ago and paid a pretty penny for. Larry has no doubt just waked up, had his long morning piss and is holing up in the bathroom until I’m dispensed with.

  Betty McLeod blinks at me defian
tly as we both listen to the water trickle. She is a sallow, pointy-faced little Grinnell grad, off the farm near Minnetonka, who married Larry while she was doing a social work M.A. at Columbia and he was working himself through trade school at some uptown community college. He’d been a Green Beret and was searching for a way out of the city hell (all this I learned from the Harrises). Betty’s Zion Lutheran parents naturally had a conniption when she and Larry came home their first Christmas with baby Nelson in a bassinet, though they’ve reportedly recovered. But since moving to Haddam, the McLeods have lived an increasingly reclusive life, with Betty staying inside all the time, Larry going off to his night job at the mobile-home factory and the kids being their only outward signs. It’s not so different from many people’s lives.

  In truth I don’t much like Betty McLeod, despite wanting to rent the house to her and Larry because I think they’re probably courageous. To my notice she’s always worn a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It’s the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing. The McLeods are also, I’m afraid, the kind of family who could someday go paranoid and barricade themselves in their (my) house, issue confused manifestos, fire shots at the police and eventually torch everything, killing all within. (This, of course, is no reason to evict them.)

  “Well,” I say, moving back to the top step as if to leave, “I hope everything’s A-okay around the house.” Betty looks at me reproachfully. Though just then her eyes leave mine, move to the side, and I turn around to see one of our new black-and-white police cruisers stopping behind my car. Two uniformed officers are inside. One—the passenger—is talking into a two-way radio.