She was already naked. She stepped into the shower with me and immediately knocked the faucet back to the center. “This water is four hundred degrees,” she said. “You’ll hard-boil this baby, right inside me.”
“I was cold,” I said.
She tested the water with her hands and then cupped her arms and caught the water against her chest. “Are you ready to head down to that auction?” she asked, wetting her hair.
“You think we should be trying to help that guy? You know, instead of trying get one over on him,” I said.
“Which guy?”
“Bang-Bang Gun Guy.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Annie said. “I mean this was your idea. You do remember that, don’t you? I did not say, ‘Steven, we should buy a foreclosure property,’ did I? I did not say that we had no need for realtors.”
“I’ve just been trying to figure out what we—never mind.” I got out of the shower and pulled a towel from the rack. This was the point of no return for Annie and me, and for Bang-Bang Gun Guy. We were soon to be changed forever.
IT WAS OVERCAST AND THREATENING at the auction, but we were not rained out. About a half dozen people appeared on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse in a ragged semicircle. They closed in on the auctioneer, Walking Dead–style, with clipboards and the classifieds folded and crammed under their arms. A few nursed steaming paper cups of coffee. Roger shot some Afrin up his nose and massaged it and said, “Watch out for that guy in the Eddie Bauer cap—he’s a real turd job.” The guy was short and trim with a gray mustache and hip-looking rectangular glasses. He was checking something on his phone, and then he slipped a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth. “You hit enough of these things you start to recognize the regulars,” Roger said. “The guy in the cap does this for fun. He made a bung-load of money as an operations and liability consultant for HMOs. He’s dangerous because he doesn’t have to be interested. He’s got the money to buy anything that comes up—speed-dials the bank as soon as he wins an auction, and he digitally signs the disclosures on the way home. They say he can close on a property in forty-eight hours, but that’s physically impossible. I call him Zorro.”
“I’m not going to even ask why,” I said.
Roger pointed at another guy with his chin. He was lanky and wore suit pants and a pair of ancient Air Jordans. “That’s the Mole Man,” Roger said. “I’ve seen him at every auction I’ve been to. He always bids once near the beginning, but he’s never bought anything. I figure he’s some schlep works at a grocery store and wants to get out of it. When the auction’s over, he disappears.”
I asked him about the guy standing next to the Mole Man. He was shaped like a package of Quaker Oats and his hair came together in a weak, gray ponytail that looked like a wad of hair you pull out of the drain.
“Never seen him. Don’t know any of the rest of these amateurs,” Roger said, casting his eye around the square. “Except for that broad. I’ve seen her at a couple storage unit auctions in the last couple of weeks.”
She looked like someone who won a beauty pageant a long time ago. Her hair was dry and thatched, probably color treated, and she wore a business suit that looked like it was tailored for someone else. “What do you call her?” I asked.
Roger shrugged. “It’s not like I put it all in a spreadsheet—pay attention.”
A man announced that the auction was officially beginning. He gave us all a rundown of the rules and procedures, which seemed to annoy everyone but me. Zorro passed on the first two properties, one of which went to the lady and the other to someone Roger did not know. The Mole Man bid exactly as Roger said he would. When they announced the Cape Cod, a wave of electricity shot through me. It felt like my mouth was full of pennies.
Roger leaned into me and whispered, “Never let them see you sweat,” at which point I began to sweat in sheets. Zorro made the starting bid, and the Mole Man followed almost immediately. Everyone else held. Roger reminded me that this was the property I was here to buy, so I gestured, and it seemed as if the entire planet had suddenly shifted its attention to me.
Zorro swung his head slowly, sized me up, then bid again. The price rose. A couple other folks bid, then astonishingly the Mole Man bid a second time. Roger nearly fainted. Zorro and the auctioneer were stunned. I had to raise my hand three times to get the auctioneer to look my way and accept my bid. After that, the Mole Man was frozen, more like Opossum Man. The lady swept in, pushing the property over two ninety, which caused Zorro to bid once more with his cell phone in hand. My belly tightened as the others bid past me. The house climbed to two ninety-five, then I snapped and bid twice in a row. Roger grabbed my arm and kept me from bidding a third time.
I looked around and everyone was scribbling on their lists. Roger said, “It’s outside the margins now, man. You have to hold. They’re going to start backing off.” Which was dead-on. Zorro pocketed his phone and started reading his newspaper again. The Mole Man just left. There was one more bid; Roger let me counter it, and then suddenly, miraculously, the auctioneer pointed at me and said, “Sold.” In my head, I heard him say, Sold to the liberal Democrat who’s no longer certain he made the right move, and then I noticed Roger was massaging my shoulders and congratulating me. I smiled and tried to get him to stop.
There was a brief pause in the commotion, a gap in the traffic on the street behind us coupled with an intermission in the deal sealing. I noticed the suspension of things, I turned slowly away from the building and the small crowd toward the street, and leaning against the front fender of Roger’s truck was that strange man from the house. He was wearing a gray jacket with what my father used to call a barracuda collar. He was staring right at me. I looked away a couple of times, but when I looked back, he lifted an obscenely large cigar to his throat and looked like he was puffing on it—he exhaled smoke, but I never saw him doing anything but planting the cigar on his neck. I grabbed Roger, and tried to show him, but when I finally got Roger’s attention, the old guy was gone.
“He probably wanted to see what was going on,” Roger said. “Sometimes they want to try and jam up the bidding. It never works.”
I sort of shrugged it off and rode the avalanche. Within the next half hour, I signed so many papers, one right on top of the other, I thought my arm would fall off. Without Roger recapping the whole affair while we were on our way to car, I would have had no idea of what happened at all.
I texted Annie this: We got it.
She replied: Squeal!!!How much?
I wrote: Within budget.
She sent the house emoji with a tree.
If we only knew then what we know now, she would have followed that with the little shrieking man, like the one in the painting.
BUYING THE HOUSE WAS MY contribution. From then on, it was Annie’s show. Overnight she gained a set of qualities television news show pundits often call “presidential.” She began by winnowing our possessions, creating piles of boxes of things we were keeping just because we had paid for them once. We were forbidden to look in these boxes, and every morning for a week we would take one or two of them with us to school and leave them at the processing dock of the Goodwill as we drove home. She priced and reserved a rental truck, called a posse, promised them pizza and beer. She scrutinized each bit of paper generated by the sale and filed them in a milk crate decked out with hanging files. For a while I was useful as a kind of errand boy, but eventually she did not need me for that.
Roger called it the nesting instinct, told me not to worry. “It’s a primal thing,” he said. “The caveman didn’t need a nest or even want one, really. That just let his enemies know where to find him. It was the cavewoman who invented agriculture and got everyone to stop schlepping around and move in somewhere. Caveman fought that. Once he was grounded, he came back with horses and wheels and boats. He tried to show her what she was missing, but she wasn’t convinced. She said, ‘What I want is wallpaper. You need to go get some wallpaper or you can’t have sex with me.’
” Roger took a racquet ball out of his pocket and bounced it once on the cafeteria floor then repocketed it and made a beeline for some boys who were throwing sandwich crusts at a new kid.
I was dumbfounded and felt a little exposed there in the lunchroom. Roger moved in swiftly and chastised the food-throwing kids and literally pulled the boy, an eleven-year-old math genius named Darren Chin, over to the offending table in his folding chair. And while Roger was brokering the apology, I realized that his theories were completely ad hoc and almost completely contradictory. How did it come to pass that a man who buys and sells homes could think that the last thing in this world a man would want is a home? I started to lose my footing in the world. How did things get so turned around? Not owning property impinges on liberty. Owning too much has the same effect. Man does not ultimately want a home; he wants to be free, riding through New Mexico on a couple of choppers. But man is a landowner, his home is his castle. He fills it with guns and defends it. He putters around it. He mows its lawn. And now I am going to be in hock up to my elbows for something Roger says I do not want.
When he got back, I quizzed Roger on this and he said, “Au contraire, Stevie. Just because a man does not have a primal need for a home does not mean that he doesn’t want one. Caveman didn’t want one particular cave—a cave’s a good thing, but he was fine with any cave, could be this cave, could be a different one down the road. He didn’t know any better. Once the cavewoman got him to understand that sometimes all the caves are already occupied, our guy realized that when you find an empty one that meets your needs, you might as well keep dibs on it, since she’s going to keep nagging you for one anyway. That’s where you get your possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
I told Roger I thought he was making it up as he went along. He just said, “Think about it. Once man got into the home business, he took it over. Started building castles and fortresses and garages—everything he needs. It took women thousands of years to get sewing rooms. The battle of the sexes, my friend, is the battle of the home. Man brokers the deal, then woman takes over. She gets inside, and he gets the lawn, the garage, a den, a man cave. You see: we’re back to caves, baby.” Roger took out his ball again and rapidly squeezed it five or six times. “Put it this way. How many women did you see at that auction?”
“One,” I said.
“There you go.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Think about it, Stevie.” Roger leaned forward in an awkward and uncomfortable way that made it clear he was serious.
“You call me that to piss me off, right?”
Roger squinted at me and then smiled, slightly.
“You’re probably right,” I said. The bell rang and Roger started barking at the kids. Even though I was exhausted and halfway hoped that this would be the end of our struggles, I knew things were going to get worse.
THE MECHANICS OF THE CLOSING went smoothly. Everyone met at the title company and signed about seven thousand sheets of paper. The only person who was not there was that old guy who defaulted. I do not know why I expected him, but I did. I spent a bunch of time gearing up for the encounter, but of course he was not there. Some guy my age represented the bank. He wore the kind of cheap suit that made him look like he just got married. Annie nudged me while the kid made jokes about football and people suing McDonald’s because their food is fatty. But in the middle of it all, this kid slipped in a side comment about how in a market like this one they used to be able to bundle the foreclosures together and pass them on to a broker. This time, though, they didn’t because they had a “weird feeling” (he actually made the quotation marks in the air) about the owner, a guy named Condit. He gave some people at the bank the impression that he might be a loose cannon.
Annie grabbed my hand when he said that, and I doodled a picture of a bull’s-eye on a piece of scratch paper and then “x”ed it out. She punched me in the arm. In hindsight, that was perhaps a brash gesture.
After the closing, we were a little too excited to think much about any one thing, and we sort of forgot what that kid from the bank said about this Condit person (Bang-Bang Gun Guy) until a few days later when we were trying to defuse some of our buyer’s anxiety with a trip to Home Zone.
It was going to take a couple of days for things to clear escrow, and Annie was going bats packing, so we decided to look at home things. For some reason I felt an overwhelming desire to shop for tools. Annie was hungry for swatches.
It was strangely delicious to walk through the oversized sliding doors of the Home Zone as a homeowner (or a homeowner-to-be). I’m usually the kind of person who avoids shopping, not because I don’t like buying things, I just don’t like the way most retail operations are designed to attract the attentions of a human called “the median man.” And the pressure to be impressed by mediocre design and piped-in, hopefully-hip-but-ultimately-flaccid pop music is overwhelming. But the Home Zone, even though it is a chain and worthy of contempt for that fact alone, is above all a big box full of things you will need at some point if you own a home. There are no amenities, because you are not supposed to linger. That would be beside the point. The Home Zone shopper is not a shopper. He is a procurer. He has something else to do besides spend money. He is a setter of tile, a painter of walls, an installer of light fixtures, a builder of patios. The Home Zone says to anyone who walks through its doors, You must change your life, and you can.
I like that message.
Annie got a cart, and we began to wander through the aisles. I picked up a hammer and set it into the basket. “We’re going to need one of these now,” I said, and Annie smiled.
“You’re going to have to learn how to use it,” she said.
We looked at ceiling fans, chandeliers, low-voltage light strips, cabinets, hollow-core doors, brass house numbers, range tops, European-style front-loader washing machines, stainless-steel-clad refrigerators, venetian blinds, mini-blinds, and louvers. Eventually we drifted to the paint center, which was, oddly, at the center of the store, like a hearth or navel.
“We haven’t even seen the inside,” I said.
“Don’t you want to just look?” Annie said.
“Sure.”
Annie began pulling paint swatches from the rack, fanning them in her hand like a cardsharp.
Then we heard this voice. It was robotic, buzzing, guttural.
“I’D GET YOU A SMALL CAN FIRST.”
Annie threw the swatches into the air and we both spun around. It was Bang-Bang Gun Guy. The old guy who defaulted. Condit. And he was standing behind us in canvas boat shoes and navy blue coveralls that were open at the neck. A small flesh-colored disk with a plastic button at the center was affixed to the loose skin of his throat, and he carried what looked like a small lightsaber in one hand. He lifted the device to his throat and spoke again.
“LIGHT CHANGES A LOT IN THAT HOUSE. WOULDN’T PAINT NOTHING WITHOUT TEST PATCHES.”
Condit’s neck was thin, and his head seemed fitted to it. His chin was broad and asymmetrical, a light-gray stubble foresting his jaw and cheeks. The weight of his eyebrows and the flinty determination of his eyes were anything but avuncular. He looked like the kind of man who could kill you with a picnic knife.
Annie retrieved her paint swatches and then subtly swung the cart so the long end of the basket separated Condit from her belly. I glanced into his cart and found three rolls of duct tape, two one-hundred-foot bundles of nylon cord, some iron strapping, a roll of clear plastic sheeting, and a hooked utility knife. He also had a package of dead bolts. When he saw me looking, he jerked Annie’s cart and surveyed it.
“HAMMER?” he said through the device, then he nodded and lifted the hammer up violently. “SMOOTH FACE. FIBERGLASS HANDLE. YOU CAN DO A LOT OF THINGS TO …” Then he mumbled, “… WITH A HAMMER LIKE THAT.” Condit dropped the hammer in the cart and leaned forward, narrowing his eyes. “SO, YOU’VE GOT PLANS,” he said, then paused to let some discomfort in his face pass. “FOR MY HOUSE?”
Indignantly, Annie said, “Of course we do.”
“OF COURSE YOU DO. OF COURSE YOU DO,” Condit parroted, arching his brows. “BUT YOU AIN’T EVEN SEEN IT YET, EXCEPT WHEN YOU WAS PEEPING. HOW DO YOU KNOW SHE AIN’T GUSSIED UP ALREADY? OR HAUNTED. OR DRENCHED IN BLOOD AND BRAINS.”
“You know what,” Annie said, taking out her phone. “I’m video taping this. And then I’m sending it to the police.”
Condit reached into the cart and picked up the hammer again. “I BET IT WOULD ONLY TAKE ONE SWING.”
I stepped in at this point. “All right, all right. You’re upset. I get it. But this is in escrow now. It’s out of our hands. Getting violent won’t help anything.”
Condit slowly lifted the hammer to his throat, then realized his mistake and brought up the vocalizer. “LET’S RUN AN EXPERIMENT,” he said, then dropped the hammer again and pocketed his device. He made as if to leave but did not.
Annie backed slowly away with the cart between us and Condit. Then she left the cart altogether and headed toward the customer service desk, leaving the two of us alone in the aisle. Condit set his basket on the floor and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coveralls. I rattled my watch and scrubbed a finger under my nose as some guy with two gallons of primer excused himself and walked slantwise between us.
“YOU’RE CARPETBAGGERS,” Condit belched, this time without the gizmo. He sounded like a talking dog. “RUN ME OUT?” He croaked, brushing his thighs with the palms of his hands. “YOU GONNA RUN. ME. OUT?”
“Listen, friend,” I said. “My wife and I didn’t go through the trouble of buying a house just to spite you. You’re not that central to our lives. We were just buying a house we could afford,” I said, feeling a kind of rush as I spoke.
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