by Jane Smiley
There were four cars parked by the door. I parked next to them, walked up the steps, and knocked. I looked good, tan slacks and a white shirt. It was rather cool, so I had put on a jacket. The butler smiled and seemed nice when he opened the door. He showed me once again into the library. After a minute or two, Mrs. Thorpe came in. She was wearing a black dress and looked exhausted. She was immediately followed by two men and three women. She said to them, “This is that man, Mr. Dartford, who was hounding Jacob.”
I kept smiling. I felt good.
She said to me, “Mr. Dartford, these are some people who are helping me. This is my sister, Mrs. Lambert. This is one of the lawyers. His name is Calvin Visser.” She sighed.
I shook Visser’s hand; I didn’t recognize him. I guessed he was from out of town, New York, maybe. He said, “How can Mrs. Thorpe help you? You know we are getting ready for Mr. Thorpe’s memorial service.” He looked stern. “This is a very inappropriate—”
I kept smiling. It wasn’t hard; I knew above all things just how inappropriate it was. I pressed ahead. “This shouldn’t take more than a moment. As the purchase agreement expires today and the buyers are extremely eager, I felt I simply had to come out here and speak to Mrs. Thorpe about it for just a moment. Mr. Thorpe—”
“Was it your office where Jacob hit that wall?” asked Visser.
“Well, sir, he didn’t hit a wall, as far as I know. He hit a picket fence, but yes, that’s where he had the accident on Thursday. I was extremely sorry he had to endure that.” I was looking right at Visser, but I could see the others out of the corner of my eye, staring at me. I said, “I was with Mr. Thorpe for at least an hour before he was taken to the hospital. He was lucid the whole time. Very alert.” Why hadn’t I, I thought, had him sign the papers then? There was a long silence. I kept smiling, but not insensitively—just a pleasant, neutral smile.
Visser said, “Dolores? What about selling this property? You don’t have to.”
I said, “No, Mrs. Thorpe, you don’t. I was clear with you about that when I was here on Thursday, and now more than ever the choice is yours.”
“Do you know,” she said, “we had the most wonderful fox hunts across this property. Our huntsman, Rodney Lawton, was from England. He was from Leicestershire. I rode sidesaddle, just the way they do there. Rodney built the most beautiful fences, all brush, very forgiving. And then we would come in for breakfast. I enjoyed that very much. That was the best part of my life. I rode even when I was pregnant, the way they do in England; you know they are very bold there. Sometimes we hunted four days a week.”
I said, “I’ve seen the hounds’ kennels, Mrs. Thorpe. They’re very nicely done.”
“Of course, we’ll never do that again. Jacob sold all the horses this summer, or sent them to Kentucky. He sent the racehorses to Kentucky.”
I exchanged a glance with Mr. Visser. One of the visitors was staring at the books on the shelves. Mrs. Thorpe’s sister was staring at Mrs. Thorpe. I said, “I’m sure you have wonderful memories of this place, ma’am.”
She looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled and said, “Not really.” It was an interesting moment. I had been thinking of her as an old lady, someone to be humored and cajoled, but maybe not.
The sister said, in a distinct Texas accent, “My land, Dolores, get rid of the place. This is a white elephant. Buyers for white elephants don’t come along every day.”
She glanced at me, amused, and I said, “That’s true too, Mrs. Thorpe. At least as a general sort of rule.” Everyone, including Visser, smiled or gave a little heh-heh sort of chuckle. The sister spoke up again. She said, “It’s right out of Citizen Kane, Dolores. You know, at the end when they’re throwing all his junk on the fire, all his collections and everything? Darlin’, you’re better off walking away from it, I’m telling you.”
Visser said, “I don’t think you should do anything too hastily, Dolores. A little caution is in order.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Calvin,” said the sister.
Mrs. Thorpe looked from one to the other, then at me. I said, “Personally, I am a cautious person, Mrs. Thorpe.”
She sighed once and then brightened, as if out of long habit, and then said, “Do you have the papers with you?”
“I do.”
“And the check?”
“I do, but the check would go into my firm’s account, to be distributed to you at closing, which would take place, if you want to stick with the original plan, in about seven weeks.”
“Marjorie is right. I think so. I feel better already. There are so many details now.”
I took the papers out of my briefcase.
CHAPTER
10
THE FIRST SET of townhouses in Phase Four approached completion, and for a while the three couples who had signed up at the lower prices were the only buyers. But I didn’t think about it. I continued to advertise, emphasizing now one detail (brick walks and steps), now another (beautiful windows, blooming gardens), and suddenly, just before the first three couples were about to move in, I had all sorts of interest. I was over there every day or so, showing units. It didn’t hurt that the Rebarcaks, the DiGenovas, and the Monahans were seen to move in—modest but pleasant-looking families, good neighbors, smiling. Of course, new potential buyers had no idea that the Rebarcaks and the DiGenovas and the Monahans had made the deals of a lifetime. I got offers and down payments on four other units in the space of three days, and Gordon came out two days later to see how things were shaping up. He buttonholed me the moment he stepped out of his car. He looked ebullient but smooth, his plentiful hair slicked back in a way my father would have found very suspicious. I was glad to see him.
“Look at this,” he said. “It looks great. What a difference! It could’ve looked like 1949, but it looks like 1989!” We had changed the flowers in the beds; now it was marigolds and nasturtiums. The big trees over in Phase One were beginning to turn, too.
“It’s luxurious, that’s for sure,” I said.
“People have a taste for that. You know what?”
“What?”
“People don’t know their place anymore. That used to be a virtue, you know, knowing your place. That’s why I never thought I fit in around here. I didn’t know my place, and in fact, I’ll tell you, Betty and I sometimes wondered what our place was, until I found a few guys like myself—you know, with some bad habits.” He poked my arm and laughed.
I said, “Betty doesn’t have any bad habits.”
“She’s got me, doesn’t she? If she still had the social pretensions she’d been born to, that would be bad habit enough, but lucky for me, social pretension ain’t in her. One time when the girls were little, some woman asked her over to the country club—you know, over there in Blue Haven—and all those women made up to her that day: oh, she was new in town and weren’t those girls so pretty, and why was Felicity’s hair so dark when the others were blond—they were towheaded then. Anyway, you can’t resist Betty, and they were all after her to join the country club, and then I guess they went home and discovered who Gordon Baldwin was from their husbands, and that was the end of that; so we dug the pond out back and put up the rope swing and all, and the kids had much more fun every summer than they ever would have at the country club; and they had plenty of friends too, which you will certainly remember—”
“I do.”
“And anyway, one day I asked Betty if she felt out of her natural element, you know, and she said, “This is my natural element. Shade is my natural element,” and she laughed that way she has. She has no regrets, I’m amazed to tell you.”
“I’m sure of that, Gordon.”
“Ah, well, she could have some if she would. But look at this place. This is a place where folks who’ve watched a lot of TV feel comfortable.”
I laughed.
“No, I’m telling you. That’s what Marcus says, and Marcus has it right. Now, I don’t know where he gets it. I watch him sometimes, and I know he’s j
ust another mick; I don’t care about the Italian shoes and the shirts and the car. Erin go bragh and all, a mick doesn’t make anything of doing a little damage, a head butt in a bar fight or a knife in the ribs. But anyway, this place has got me going. I never trusted a mick, and I’m not sure I trust Marcus, but he knows what people want to pay for, and he knows it in a way I’ve never seen before, so I give him what he wants every time, waiting to see what the next thing he wants will be.”
“I’ve had five buyers in the last five days.”
“Just wait.” Then he gave me both a poke in the ribs and a slap on the back. Then he said, “What will we get from this deal? A quarter million or something like that?”
“When they all sell, the gross might be as much as 2.6 million. I don’t know what your profit is going to be with these . . .”
“What about you?” Gordon said.
“Well, I always plan for four, four and a half percent.” That was going to be a hundred grand or so.
“Here’s one thing Marcus is saying that I believe—we roll it all over into the company—”
“What company?”
“Salt Key Development Corporation.”
“Yeah.”
“And there’s that tax advantage.”
“You mean that tax advantage of having no income while you’re on their mind, so to speak?”
Gordon grinned and nodded. Then he said, “I could have made a big mistake here.”
“I guess.”
That was the first I’d heard about Salt Key Corporation.
I didn’t have to wait long. Pretty soon, I was able to advertise that the final few units were selling and this was the last chance to get into one of the “prettiest, most elegant complexes in the area, a ready-made neighborhood, and easy living to boot.”
I showed the Sloans one of the hill houses, up on Praed Circle, a brick Colonial with a nice backyard but not much of a view. Those owners were doing what they had been assigned to do by the layout of the whole development—they were moving into one of the townhouses, something “smaller, more exquisite, easy to take care of, but sacrificing no amenities.” The Sloans had now been looking for almost a year, and the Praed Circle house was like many houses they had looked at and passed up. Nevertheless, they were enthusiastic, no doubt partly because they got to see it and make an offer on it before it actually went on the market. As we walked through it, Mrs. Sloan kept saying, “This one won’t last a day. Not in this market and this neighborhood. It’s so obviously just right.”
I had unearthed the jewel at last. We went back to my office. Mr. Sloan kept smiling and saying, “Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot.” We got the listing sheet we had already filled in out of the file drawer. I said, “I don’t want to get your hopes up, but some houses are selling above the asking price.” We drank coffee in my office. There were some cookies Bobby had brought in that morning, and we each ate one. We laughed a couple of times about houses we had looked at in the last year: Remember that one with the bomb shelter and all the old canned food on the shelves? Remember that one where the guy had three boa constrictors in his bedroom? Human eccentricity. Here they had landed, safely in the brick Colonial mainstream, looking forward to that center-island kitchen and that screened-in veranda. They finished signing all the papers and I walked them to the door of my office and saw them off. As she got into the car, it came into my mind that I would like to have a strand of her red hair, to bury by the doorstep to the office as a good-luck charm, some little thing to sustain and nourish the great period I was having right then. I went back to where she had been sitting and looked around, on her chair and on the floor. A hair from that head would be unmistakable—red and about twelve inches long, floating somewhere. But I didn’t find one.
I was feeling very good when I got to the Viceroy that night. I stood at the end of the bar next to Bobby and Fern, who sat there playing trictrac for drinks, and surveyed the room. The fact was, I knew nearly everyone there, at least by sight or at only one remove. I had sold houses to several of them, sold houses for several others, gotten new clients for some of the contractors or lawyers. Right then I could see myself in the not-too-distant future, living the Realtor’s dream, which is no office time, no open houses, no beating the bushes for buyers or sellers, just answering the phone and making calls, knowing the local housing stock and the locals themselves so well that anyone would automatically dial my number if there was a transaction to be made. That didn’t mean I knew what I would do with my time—somehow my rather unappealing condo didn’t fit into the fantasy—but on the other hand, among all those houses flowing back and forth, there would surely be just the one for me.
Bobby won a drink from Fern and went down the bar to get it, and I said, “Did you ever find your cat?”
“I sure did,” said Fern. I was in such a good mood that I noticed how interesting she was—sturdy and solid but with the manner of an emphatic fourteen-year-old. Yes, they were well suited. She glanced toward Bobby, who was standing near the bartender. “But I never got him back. I see him from time to time, though.”
“How come?”
“He’s around. But he’s wild now—or, rather, feral. There was this opening, but I missed it. Once they’ve established a territory, then they’re just as likely to keep themselves on their own. I bet you didn’t know there’s a whole cat society out there. I mean, right around here. That’s where I’ve been doing my work. But there are cat societies everywhere.”
Bobby took his beer, spilling it a little, and headed back toward our end of the bar. He got to us. He set the beer down. He had been out of the office that day. Now he put his hand on his jaw. Fern said, “You should go home and go to bed.”
“But when I lie down, it’s worse. The whole side of my head throbs.”
“You had root canal a week ago,” she said. “You need to get something stronger or an X ray or something.”
“He said if the pain wasn’t gone by yesterday morning, he would take another picture.”
“But the pain wasn’t gone by yesterday.”
“Well, I’ll go tomorrow.” He drank some of his beer, but not enthusiastically—he took it in his mouth and swirled it around, then swallowed it with a gulp. Most of the time with Bobby, I didn’t think about how he ran his life, but sometimes I found it unbelievable.
Just then I felt a fleeting pressure against the middle of my back and Felicity stepped up to the bar beside me. It gave me a jolt, all over my skin, as if I were being delicately electrocuted.
Over the summer, our friendship had achieved a balanced ebb and flow that I considered about perfect. It throve on secrecy and contingency. When she wasn’t around, I thought about her almost abstractly, as an event that might or might not happen at any given moment but not actually a part of my ongoing life. When I was with her, all our dates seemed to string themselves together into a train of pure pleasure, and everything else I did seemed beside the point. It didn’t matter—in fact, it was preferable—that our dates had nothing to do with the state of my own desires. Any wish or even longing I might have to see her produced no results; sometimes when she showed up it was actually inconvenient, but frustrated longing and inconvenience both ended the same way, in pleasure and delight. I was subject to a spell, I thought, and to investigate it would be to break it. I came to enjoy the secrecy especially. I would be standing in the checkout line at the supermarket, and the couple behind me would be discussing which movies they might see that evening, and there would be such an agreed-upon expectedness to their exchanges that at first they would depress me but then I would remember my Felicity secret and feel delivered from the ennui and the public quality of marriage. What it seemed to me that I knew that the whole world didn’t know was a novel and unusual way to live that had no disadvantages, once you discounted longing and frustration—or, rather, balanced those feelings against unpredictable enjoyment.
Sometime in August, I had run into Sherry. I was not happy to do so, and I have to
say that she caught my lack of enthusiasm. The smile disappeared from her face, leaving no trace, and I remembered how she could go from smiling to displeasure in no time at all. I said, “So, how are you?” But I didn’t want her to answer. Having spent all that time with her, having made that life with her, suddenly seemed more than anything tedious, and not even because it was with her but because it was marriage. She said, “Fine. The restaurant business is very demanding.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“It’s not just cooking. If it were just cooking, that would be one thing. That would be art. But all the other stuff is overwhelming. People don’t realize that. They think it’s just cooking.”
“I think I always—”
“It’s easy to burn out. What are you doing?”
“I’m renewing my driver’s license. I have an appointment.” I stepped past her. And, I had thought, I have a secret, and you may look hard at my face and wonder all you want but I will not tell it to you.
At any rate, I didn’t have to see Felicity or even know it was she in order to buzz in her presence. My skin prickled with it. She said, “Here’s Joey. How are you?” She gave me a sisterly kiss on the cheek and slipped her hand quickly into and out of mine.
Bobby said, “Did Mom give you that codeine to bring me?”
“Yes.” She opened her handbag and took out a pill bottle, which she set on the bar. Fern reached across me and picked it up. She said, “You’ve had too much beer for that right now. Maybe later.”
“There’s something in there,” said Bobby. “You know, Marcus said that sometimes when they are doing a root canal, the tip of the drill breaks off and gets stuck, and unless the guy takes an X ray before he closes it up, he won’t realize it, and then they have to extract the tooth with some kind of major operation, and this was an upper tooth, so the infection can go right up into your sinuses, and then—”