by Jane Smiley
We walked around for half an hour or more. It did not occur to any of the buyers, man or woman, to ask if prices would remain the same, and I said nothing. I saw them off.
I got in my car and went straight over to Gordon’s. There were five cars in the driveway, four BMWs and a Caddy. Gordon, Betty, Bobby, and either Norton or Leslie. Norton lived in New Jersey, where he managed shore properties. Leslie was the prolific one; she had six kids and her husband was a hospital administrator at East Portsmouth Community Hospital. Through the window of Gordon’s office, I saw they were gathered around the pond in Adirondack chairs. The visitor was Leslie; four of her kids were gamboling in the pond or hanging on the rope swing. Everyone was wearing shorts and light shirts except Marcus Burns, who had on green-gray slacks and a tan sport coat.
Everyone turned as I came down the lawn and shouted friendly greetings. Gordon got up and came to meet me, his hand out to shake mine. Betty got up too, to get me a beer out of the cooler. “Hot, huh?” said Gordon. “What a day. How ya doin’, Joey?” He slapped me on the back. “See? Leslie’s got the kids here! What a crowd. Look at that little Marcy! If she isn’t the spit of our Sally, I don’t know about it.”
A tall slender eight-year-old with blond hair to her shoulders and a sassy look about her paused as she was crossing the lawn and gave me a sideways glance, then ambled on. “She does,” I said. “She does look like Sally.”
Gordon propelled me toward Betty, who exclaimed, “Look at us! We aren’t getting a thing done today! You know Marcus Burns, Joey. Joey is like a son to us,” she said to Marcus. Marcus stood up with a grin, and he, too, took my hand. I felt like I was supposed to be asking someone to marry me. Oh, yeah. Felicity. Ah, Felicity. I kissed Betty on the cheek, wondering if she had once been, or still was, as wanton as Felicity. Why not?
Bobby hadn’t come into the office today, though he’d been back at work for over a week by then, hobbling to showings with a cane. He unwrapped his ankle every morning and displayed it to me, swollen and still a little bruised, though getting better, and now he leaned forward and began to unwrap his Ace bandage. I put my hand on his shoulder. He said, “No, really, it’s interesting. There’s this bump over the outside here that just isn’t going away. I’m sure it’s broken.” He finished unwrapping his foot and dropped the bandage in the grass. “If you touch it in just the right way, and push it, it wiggles back and forth.” He did so.
“I’m telling you,” said Leslie, “you should have insisted on an X ray.”
“I did insist on an X ray, but you know I was delirious with the pain, and maybe I didn’t make sure that they X-rayed that part. I can’t remember a thing at this point. But look at this! Give me your hand.”
“Well, I’m not going to touch it. Ugh. I don’t want to touch your foot! But you should go back! Your feet are important—”
“Come on, touch it! Kiss it!” He lifted his foot toward her face.
“Mom!” called one of the kids.
How many times had I sat here like this in the last twenty years, listening to them tell one another what to do, tell me what to do, pass around the food and the beers, go into the house for more. This, right here, was Gordon’s tax problem. He gave everyone what they wanted, and after making his own deals he didn’t have enough left for the IRS. I had heard, a couple of years before, that he owed a considerable sum, let’s say more than a hundred thousand dollars, and after that I was too intimidated to ask about it again. But hadn’t Felicity said that, thanks to Marcus Burns, the tax problem was solved?
Marcus was still smiling. I said, “How’s it going with the house?”
“Lord! It’s perfect. Linda had all the furniture on the lawn for three days, walking all around each piece. The kids had to rescue some of their things under cover of night!” I laughed. He seemed so forgiving of her quirks. I said, “So you have kids. I haven’t met them.”
“Amanda and Justin. She’s ten and he’s eight.”
“How do they like the house?” I thought, only two? Who were the other dependents he had claimed?
“They like it. Justin came up to me the first night, after he looked around, and said, ‘Hey, Dad. When are the owners coming back?’ Then, when I told him this was really our house, he stayed up till two A.M. just staring around the room.” He laughed at his own story. “They’ve met these kids too. Things are great around here.”
“If you mean around here, this very place, then you’re right.” We grinned at one another, two lucky guys who’d managed to get in the door. After a moment, I began. “I had a couple of my buyers out at Glamorgan Close this morning—”
“Looks good, doesn’t it?” He sat back expansively in his chair.
“To my mind, it looks too—”
“To tell you the truth, I’m glad I came around before they’d gone too far. I was able to persuade Gordon that he needed to spruce the place up a little.”
“That’s what I—”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“Out in L.A., where I was over Christmas, there’s this new thing, the teardown. That’s when they pay full price for a house on a lot and then tear the house down and build new. Perfectly good houses, too. So I said to Gordon when he showed me around out there, Don’t waste your time building future teardowns. People are more picky these days.”
“You have previous real estate experience?”
“None whatsoever! I’ve been working for the IRS since college.”
He leaned forward and looked around, then shook his head. “I’m telling you, this is the eighties. Experience doesn’t count anymore. It’s just a drag on you, because if you make decisions according to your experience, you will have no idea what is happening in this country.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I quit my job last fall. I only waited that long because Linda wanted me to. I was ready to quit the day after the election.”
“You were?”
“Yeah. That’s what I was doing out in L.A. I went around the country, just reconnoitering. I went to L.A. and San Francisco and Denver and Phoenix and Chicago and New Orleans and K.C. and Seattle and here, interviewing for investment jobs but mostly listening rather than talking, and I’m telling you”—he shook his head in amazement—“Gordon and I have talked about this.”
Gordon appeared behind him. He said, “What’s up, you guys?”
I said, “Well, I’m afraid my presolds are going to be priced out of Glamorgan’s Phase Four.” I tried not to let this sound annoyed but rather conversational, as if I were merely concerned.
“How come?” said Gordon.
“Well, Larry told me about the masonry and the tile and the wooden windows from Iowa, and—what else? let’s see—oh, the—”
“Working fireplaces?” said Marcus Burns.
“I guess we didn’t get that far.”
“How did we price those places?”
“Forty-nine-nine and seventy-nine-nine.”
“I thought it was sixty-nine-nine and ninety-nine-nine.”
“It is now,” I said. “Even with that you’ll be lucky to get out of there with a profit.”
“You sure I said those low prices?”
“I sent you the brochure I had made up and all the ads I put in the paper. Didn’t you get it?”
“Yeah, I got it. Maybe I didn’t look at it.”
“Gordon! I went ahead and presold three places because I thought everything was agreed here.”
“I’ve been a little distracted—”
I stood up, better to get his attention and, maybe, to get a little out of Marcus Burns’s earshot. I lowered my voice and moved a little ways off. Gordon followed me. I said, “You can’t sell a townhouse for a hundred grand, Gordon. People who want to spend a hundred grand want to live by themselves, with a yard and a garage and all. A hundred grand just looks bad. Six figures. Where’s the pool and the butler? This isn’t L.A., Gordon.”
“Who are your presolds?”
> “A machinist and a high school math teacher. And a retired couple, the Rebarcaks. That’s another thing. Even the houses up on the hill aren’t going for a hundred grand, and they’ve got four bedrooms.” Gordon looked at Marcus Burns, who came over, I thought eagerly, to join us.
“They haven’t gone for a hundred grand in the past, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Gordon, these kinds of buyers are nervous—”
“Mind if I put a word in?” said Marcus Burns in a pleasant voice.
“’Course not,” said Gordon.
“Joe, think about your educational role here. You say these kinds of buyers are nervous. They are nervous because they don’t know what’s going on and they feel intimidated, but that’s where you come in. Really now, can they go wrong here?”
“Well, you can never go wrong buying real estate, but—”
“Right, so your job is to give them true information. Of course they have expectations about what you get for a hundred grand. My wife had expectations about what she should get for two-fifty. But this day and age, they’re getting something extra—it isn’t really visible, but if they stop to think about it, they know it’s there. Who have you sold houses to in the last couple of months?”
“Well, you. And a couple of guys bought an old place in Deacon.”
“Outsiders?”
“Yeah, and they’ve got a friend.” They were grinning as they watched the sun come up in my head.
Gordon said, “Look around you, Joe! Who wouldn’t want to live here? Name me another place anywhere up and down the East Coast that is like these two counties we got here. What happened in the twenties? The railroad ran southeast from Portsmouth to Lawrence Valley, and that was what got built up. The area north and west of Portsmouth, especially these three valleys, got left out. So it’s scenic and natural and there’s deer and bobcats and badgers and even a bear or two up in the hills, and that’s what people want now. They want to come down from New York and get that. How long does it take to get from Manhattan to the Hamptons?”
“Three hours,” said Marcus. “Four to Montauk.”
“There you have it,” said Gordon. “You tell those presolds they are sitting on a gold mine.”
“Second-home people don’t want townhouses—”
“You don’t think? How about when I put in the pool and the tennis courts? The garden plots? People don’t all want leaky old farmhouses for the weekend, or farmers’ markets and a long drive into town. Some of them just want a place kind of like a hotel that is appreciating while they’re enjoying it.” Gordon rocked back on his heels, thoroughly happy with this argument.
“You heard of a time-share?” said Marcus.
“I’m sure that’s related to a teardown,” I said.
“That’s where you buy a condo for a certain number of weeks per year. They do it in Florida. What if we sold each townhouse to ten or twelve different buyers for twenty thousand apiece. They could amortize that, pay a hundred and eighty bucks per month—tax deductible, mind you—and have a month in the country every year.”
“A month like February, for example?”
“Well, you have to work out the kinks, and I’m not saying that’s the plan with Phase Four, but I’m telling you, house owning isn’t like it ever was before in the history of the world. Inflation killed the old world, and the population explosion is remaking it!”
“He’s right,” said Gordon. “You listen. He makes perfect sense.”
“Just saying that the townhouses turn out to be something like that, who’s your lender?”
“Blue Valley Federal Savings and Portsmouth Savings, to begin with,” offered Marcus. I looked at him. He looked eager, open, and interested. He had certainly gotten the jump on me, that was for sure. I said, “That’s okay. I mean, it’s good. But what about my presolds? I guarantee they aren’t going to qualify for the higher prices.”
“So what?” said Gordon. “It’s good to have people in there. Give them the prices you talked about, and we’ll phase in the new prices. They’ll be happy they got such a good deal.”
“You can say that again.”
I had promised to meet the Sloans at a house they had driven past and wanted to see, way out past Roaring Falls on Nicknock Road, a house I had never seen but which had a famous history. It had been built in the twenties by a movie star. Supposedly she had held great parties there, and movie stars and gangsters would come to hide out, so far away and unfindable was it. The owner had died in California in the forties, and the house had stood empty while her son and her housekeeper fought over it, and then the son had died in the middle of the dispute, by crashing his single-engine plane. The housekeeper, alleged to have caused his death by means of a ritual curse, had lived there until the mid-sixties, followed by her daughter, who had recently, according to the listing agent, died. She—the listing agent—said, “Well, whatever you think, you’ve got to see this place. You have just got to see it.”
“Magnificent?” I asked.
“Not quite.”
“White elephant?”
“Not quite. Just go see it.”
“Won’t last long at these prices?”
“Joe, it’s indescribable. Just go see it.”
I had never heard the Sloans this excited, and when I got there and parked behind their car and had my first look at the house, I thought they had gone crazy.
The house was made of, or at least faced with, limestone and set against a west-facing hillside. The road switched back twice as it approached the façade, and the place must have had twenty windows, all trimmed with red curved tiles, facing in the direction of the setting sun. There were two floors, the first floor jutting out beyond the second. The second floor had three balconies and a high roofline that peaked above the central one. There was a fourth balcony set into this peak. The hillside rose behind the peak of the roof. It was of no particular style—Spanish in the use of red tile but not really Spanish. More like what provincial movie people in the nineteen-twenties thought would look romantic. The approach was so steep that if the Sloans’ children had bikes or roller skates, they would have to be discarded before they moved in.
The other Realtor had dropped the key by my office, so I joined the Sloans and we climbed the front steps and let ourselves in. It was, of course, late afternoon, and the westering sun made a glorious show across the floors and against the walls of the front rooms, a large living room and dining room, with a smaller paneled library tucked in off the living room. Behind the dining room was a breakfast room with a tall window facing south over the valley. The kitchen had old-fashioned appliances and several pantries, but it was pleasant too. Woodwork was everywhere, the sort you really couldn’t find any longer, from virgin trees, in this case oak and, it looked like, beech. There were carpets, probably laid in the fifties, but we lifted up a couple of corners and saw good floors. Mrs. Sloan kept saying, “What style is this house? It looks Bavarian, or something, but feels Italian.” In the kitchen, there were red tile accents. In the dining room, there were heavy dark ceiling beams. I looked out the breakfast-room window. To the south, there was a nice garden, though a little overgrown. I was charmed, I admit I was; it was just the sort of house heirs would squabble over. Unfortunately, it was not the sort of house I could imagine people living in.
But the Sloans were infatuated. They ran their fingers over the woodwork; they looked out every window. Their usual whispering and bickering fell silent. He said, “This is some view.” We climbed the staircase.
The listing sheet said there were five bedrooms and two bathrooms on the second and third floors. These rooms were not quite as appealing as the first-floor rooms. The bathrooms were twenties originals—small white hexagonal tiles, claw-footed bathtubs, white towel racks, minimal storage. But the Sloans thought they were charming. Mrs. Sloan said, “You know, I always liked those tiles. They aren’t slippery. Lots of little edges for traction.” The bedrooms were inconveniently large and empty-seeming, meant
to be filled with lots of heavy furniture, but Mrs. Sloan said, “This has a very European feel. Remember when we were in Tuscany? That is what this feels like.”
She went to the French door that led to the balcony and turned the handle. It came off in her hand. I said, “The house is not represented as being in good repair.”
“We know that,” said Mr. Sloan. “A handle is nothing.” This was the man who had been put off by tuck-pointing and older appliances. I felt my eyebrows lift. They opened the door and went out together onto the balcony. I looked up for some reason. There on the ceiling, swimming like large amorphous sea creatures, was a school of water stains. I went back and looked into the bathroom. The ceiling was not only stained, it was buckling and sagging in the northeast corner. I went to the other three bedrooms and glanced in the doors. The back bedrooms were okay, but the other front bedroom had the same extensive damage.
The Sloans reentered from the balcony. Mr. Sloan was, if possible, more delighted than Mrs. Sloan. He exclaimed, “I just can’t get over this view! I can’t imagine coming home from work every night to this! It seems too good to be true.”
I said, “What sort of commute would this be for you?”
“Twenty minutes, tops. This place seems out of the way, but from South Cookborough, where my office is, it isn’t that much farther than where we live now, if you take Lansing Road.”
“Look up,” I said.
They looked up.
“What’s that?” said Mrs. Sloan.
“Water stains,” said Mr. Sloan.
“They seem too extensive for water stains,” said Mrs. Sloan. Their conversation was idle.
He said, “Let’s go upstairs and have a look.” I followed them up the third-floor staircase, which was rather steep but nicely built of dark oak. The third floor consisted of one large room to the south, the balcony outside the west wall, and a pretty arched window in the south wall.
I said, “Look up.” They looked up. In this room, the water stains on the ceiling had merged at the south end into serious deterioration—crumbling, buckling, discolored plaster. They didn’t say anything, just looked up and then looked at me. I opened the balcony door and went out, carefully, not quite sure the balcony was structurally safe.