The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “Are you sure something exploded?” I’m speaking upward, rain needles pelting my nose and chin.

  “You can go ahead and turn right, sir!” Officer Klemak says with a big smile.

  “I hope you guys take care of yourselves.”

  “Oh, sure. Piece a cake. Just take ’er right around and have a splendid day. Get ’er home safely.”

  “That’d be nice,” I say, then ease back out onto Pleasant Valley and put the hospital behind me.

  I now have a fierce need to piss. Plus, violent crime, instead of dousing my appetite, has inflamed it to queasiness. I drive straight out 206 to the remodeled Foremost Farms Mike and I passed earlier. I park in front, hustle in for my leak (which I now do more than seems humanly possible), then find the cold case, pick out a cellophane-sealed beef ’n bean burrito, radiate it in the microwave, draw a diet Pepsi, pay the Pakistani girl in the purple sari, then hustle back to my car and consume all in three minutes with paper napkins spread over my lap and jacket front. The burrito’s been hecho a mano by the Borden Company down in Camden and is as hard as a cedar shingle, the interior as cold and pale as mucilage, and of course tastes wonderful. Although it’s 180 degrees off my prostate-recovery, tumor-suppressing Mayo diet of 20 percent animal product, 80 percent whole grains, tofu and green tea, which only monks can survive on.

  When I’m finished, I stuff my garbage in the can provided, then climb back in and turn on the local FM station, in case there’s some news about the hospital incident. And indeed a metallic backyard-radio-station sound opens up—WHAD, the “Voice of Haddam,” where I once recorded novels for the blind. Static, static, static—the rain’s a problem. “…in Trenton have been dispatched…” Static, static, static. “…an average of ten threatening…a month…been…no name pending…” Crackle, snap, poppety-pop. “…all critical-care patients…mercy…a search is under way…Chief Carnevale stated…. credible…” Static, static, static. “…more on our regular…” Ker-clunk…“Stran-gers-in-the-night, dee-dah-dee-daaah-dah…”

  Little help. But still. Hard to contemplate—a medium-anxiety, good-neighbor suburban care facility like Haddam Doctors, where the whole staff’s from Hopkins and Harvard (no one tops in his class), all sporting eight handicaps, all divorced a time or two, kids at Choate and Hotchkiss, everyone as risk-averse as concert cellists (no one does serious surgery)—hard to contemplate here being the target of a “device.” Unless somebody wanted his vasectomy reversed and couldn’t, or somebody’s tonsils grew back, or a set of twins got handed off to the wrong parents. Though these wrongs have tamer remedies than renting a U-Store-It, stockpiling chemicals and brewing up mayhem. You’d just sue, like the rest of humanity, and let the insurance companies take the hit. That’s what they’re there for.

  When I start up and defrost the windshield, it’s suddenly 1:40. I’m due for my Sponsor visit on the affluent Haddam West Side at two.

  Though as I wheel back out onto busy, rain-smacked 206 and head west, I recognize that while the willies I experienced after my funeral home visit certainly were due to a too-close brush with the Reaper (normal in all instances), they might also have been nothing more than the usual yellow caution flag, which signals that being marooned in your car on a dreary day in a cold town you once lived in, but don’t now, can be chancy. Especially if the town is this one, and especially if you’re in my state of repair. Activities may need to be curtailed.

  I actually began experiencing adverse intimations about Haddam during my last years here, close to ten years ago (I always thought I loved it). And not that a realtor’s view would ever be the standard one, since realtors both live life in a town yet also huckster that place’s very spirit essence for whopper profits. We’re always likely to be half-distracted from regular life—like a supreme court justice who resides in a place as anonymously as a postal employee but constantly processes everybody else’s life in his teeming brain so he can know how to judge it. My life in Haddam always lacked the true resident’s naïve, relief-seeking socked-in-ed-ness that makes everyday existence feel like a warm bath you relax into and never want to leave. Surveying property lines, memorizing setback restrictions, stepping off footprint limits and counting curb-cuts all work a stern warp into what might otherwise be limitless, shapeless, referenceless—and happily thoughtless—municipal life. Realtors share a basic industry with novelists, who make up importance from life-run-rampant just by choosing, changing and telling. Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist’s deal and probably not as hard to do well.

  By 1991, the year before I left and the year my son Paul Bascombe graduated from HHS and headed off to Indiana to begin studies in Puppet Arts Management (he’d mastered ventriloquism, did a hundred zany voices, told jokes and had already staged several bizarre but sophisticated puppet shows for his classmates), by then Haddam—a town where I’d felt genuine residence and that’d been the mise-enscène for my life’s most solemn adult experiences—had entered a new, strange and discordant phase in its town annals.

  In the first place, real estate went nuts, and realtors even nuttier. Expectations left all breathable atmosphere behind. Over-pricing, under-bidding, sticker shock, good-faith negotiation, price reduction, high-end flux were all banished from the vocabulary. Topping-price wars, cutthroat bidding, forced compliance, broken lease and realty shenanigans took their place. The grimmest, barely habitable shotgun houses in the previously marginal Negro neighborhoods became prime, then untouchable in an afternoon. Wallace Hill, where I sold my rental houses to Everick Lewis, was designated a Heritage Neighborhood, which guaranteed all the black folks had to leave because of taxes (many fled down south, though they’d been born in Haddam). Agents sold their own homes out from under their own families and moved spouses, dogs and kids to condos in Hightstown and Millstone. New college graduates passed up med and divinity school and buyers bought million-dollar houses from twenty-one-year-olds straight out of Princeton and Columbia with degrees in history and physics and who barely had their driver’s licenses.

  In ’93, after I’d left, yearly price increases had hit 45 percent, there was no affordable housing anywhere and buyers were paying full boat for tear-downs and recyclables and in some instances were burning houses to the ground. Some Haddam companies (not Lauren-Schwindell) required out-of-town clients to submit their AmEx number and authorize thousand-dollar debits just to be shown a house. Though by Christmas, there was nothing to show anyway, not even a vacant lot.

  The end came personally for me at the convergence of three completely different (and unusual) events. One Saturday afternoon I was at my desk, typing an offer sheet on a property situated on the rear grounds of the former seminary director’s residence, down the street from where I myself once lived on Hoving. The building was nothing but a rotting, ruined beaverboard shack that had once been the Basque gardener’s storage shed for toxic herbicides, caustic drain openers, banned termite and Asian beetle eradicators, and would’ve alerted the state’s environmental police except in Haddam, no inspection’s required. As I filled out the green blanks on my computer, occasionally staring longingly out the front window at traffic-choked Seminary Street, I began—because of the property I was selling and the preposterous price it was commanding—to muse that a malign force seemed to be in full control of every bit of real property on the seaboard, and possibly farther away. Possibly everywhere.

  This force, I began to understand, was holding property hostage and away from the very people who wanted and often badly needed it and, in any case, had a right to expect to own it. And this force, I realized, was the economy. And the practical effect of this force—on me, Frank Bascombe, age forty-five, of ordinary, unexalted and, up to then, realizable aspirations—was to render everything too goddamn expensive. So much so that selling even one more house in Haddam—and especially the gardener’s toxic hovel, on whose site was planned a big-windowed, one-man live-in studio for a sculptor who mostly lived in Gotham and was
willing to pay 500K—was going to be demoralizing as hell.

  What I was thinking, of course, as cars edged thickly past the Lauren-Schwindell window and passengers stared warily in at me at my desk, knowing I was totaling figures that would give them a heart attack—what I was thinking was real estate heresy. I would get burned at the real estate stake by my agent colleagues (especially the twenty-one-year-olds) if they knew about it. What we were supposed to do if we had qualms—and surely some did—was douse them. On the spot. Take a deep breath, go wash your face, lease a new Z-car, buy a condo in Snowmass, learn to fly your own Beech Bonanza, maybe take instruction in violin making. But ship as much fresh money as possible to the Caymans, then spend the rest of the time putting your feet up on your desk and chortling about how work’s for the other ranks.

  Except everyone’s entitled to some glimmering sense of right in his (or her) own heart. And part of that sense of right—for real estate agents anyway—involves not just what something ought to cost (here we’re always wrong) but what something can cost in a world still usable by human beings. Every time I heard myself pronounce the asking price of anything on the market in Haddam, I’d begun to feel first a sick, emptied-out, semi-nauseated feeling, and then an impulse to break into maniac laughter right in a client’s startled face as he sat across my desk in his pressed jeans, Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense of spiritual clamor meant to me that right was being violated, and that my sense of usefulness at being what I’d been being was exhausted. It was a surprise, but it was also a big relief. It was like the experience of the sportsman who’s shot ducks in the marsh all his life but one day, standing up to his ass in freezing water, with the sky silvered and dark specks on the horizon beginning to take avian shape, realizes he’s killed enough ducks for one lifetime.

  The second way I knew I’d reached the end of my rope in Haddam was simpler, though more garish and immediately life-diverting.

  During the summer of 1991—when the daffy elder Bush was still ruffling his own duck feathers in the aftermath of Desert Storm—a home sale, on tiny Quarry Street, opposite St. Leo the Great Catholic Church, culminated in a SWAT-team extraction when the owner-occupant refused to vacate the house he’d signed papers and already closed on. The man ran right out of the lawyer’s office, back across neighbors’ front lawns to his erstwhile family home, where he took a position in an attic dormer window and, using a varmint rifle, held off Haddam police, two hostage-negotiators and a priest from St. Leo’s for thirty-six hours before giving in, being led defiantly out the door in front of the same neighbors and the new owners, then riding off in chains to the state hospital in Trenton.

  No one was hurt. But the reason for the behavior was the seller’s discovery that his house had appreciated 18 percent between offer-acceptance and the lawyers’ closing, which made the thought of all that lost money and the smirking ridicule from the neighbors, who were holding on for another season, just too much to bear. For weeks afterward, tension and threat hung over the town. Two new police officers were added. Threat sensitivity courses were made mandatory in our office, and a “conflict resolution half point” was added to closing costs when a bank approved super balloon notes to first-time buyers purchasing from sellers with greater than ten years’ longevity.

  Nothing, however, prepared anyone for the outlandish worst. A trucking magnate of Lebanese extraction made a full-price offer on a rambling, walled monstrosity far out on Quaker Road, owned by the reclusive grandson of a south Jersey frozen-potpie magnate, who’d turned up his nose at the family business to become a competitive stamp collector. The house was a great weed-clogged Second Empire mishmash with a rotted roof, sagging floor joists, scaling paint, disintegrating masonry and cellar dampness due to being in the floodplain. It wasn’t even a candidate to be torn down, since regulations prohibited replacement. When I took the realtors’ cavalcade tour, I couldn’t find one timber or sill that wasn’t corrupted by something. Everybody who showed it presented it as uninhabitable. The land, we felt, was a write-off to some rich tree-hugger conservationist who’d turn it into “wetlands” and make himself feel virtuous.

  The trucking magnate, however, wanted to come in with a big improvement budget, rebuild everything up to code, restore the house to mint condition, plus add a lot of exotic fantasy landscaping and even let tame animals roam the grounds for the grandkids.

  But when he submitted his full-price bid, saw it accepted, put three-quarters down as earnest money, the hermetic owner, Mr. Windbourne, decided to take the house off the market for a rethink, then a week later listed it again with a 20 percent increase in asking and had five new full-price offers by noon of the first day—two of which he accepted. The trucking guy, Mr. Habbibi, who was known in the Paterson area as a patient man who didn’t mind using muscle when it was needed, naturally protested all this double-dealing, though none of it was illegal. He drove out to the Windbourne house in an agitated state but still in hopes of bettering the new offers and resuscitating his deal. Windbourne—wan, gaunt and blinking from long hours in the dark staring at stamps—came to the front door and said that the fantasy landscaping and tame animals sounded to him more suited to towns like Dallas or Birmingham, not Haddam. He laughed at Habbibi and closed the door in his face. Habbibi then drove to a marine supply in Sayreville (this is the strangest part, because Habbibi didn’t own a boat), bought two marine flare pistols and two flares, drove back to Quaker Road, confronted Windbourne at his door and offered him the deal they’d already agreed to, plus 20 percent. When Windbourne again laughed at him, informed him this was America and that Habbibi had “loser’s remorse,” Habbibi went back out to his car, got his flare pistols, stood out in the yard of what he’d hoped would be his dream oasis, shouted Windbourne’s name and shot him when he answered the door a third time. After which, Habbibi got back in his car, turned on the radio and waited for the police to show up.

  Haddam house prices dropped 8 percent in one day (though that lasted less than a week). Habbibi was also trucked off to the loony bin. Windbourne’s relatives drove up from Vineland and completed the sale to one of the other buyers. Realtors started carrying concealed weapons and hiring bodyguards, and the realty board passed an advisory to raise commissions from 6 to 7 percent.

  At about this time, I was experiencing the first airy intimations of the Permanent Period filtering through my nostrils like a sweet bouquet of new life promised. Things had also gotten to a put-up-or-leave stage with Sally Caldwell. Selling houses in Haddam had evolved to a point at which I couldn’t recognize my personal motives for even doing it. And on the waft of that bouquet and by the simple force of puzzlement, I decided it was time to get out of town.

  But before I left (it took me to the sultry days of that election summer to get my affairs untangled), I noticed something about Haddam. It was similar to how the stolid but studious Schmeling saw something about the mute, indefatigable, but reachable Louis—in my case, something maybe only a realtor could see. The town felt different to me—as a place. A place where, after all, I’d dwelled, whose sundry homes and mansions I’d visited, wandered through, admired, marveled at and sold, whose inhabitants I’d stood long beside, listened to and observed with interest and sympathy, whose streets I’d driven, taxes paid, elections heeded, rules followed, whose story I’d told and burnished for nearly half my life. All these engraved acts of residence I’d dutifully committed, with staying-on as my theme. Only I didn’t like it anymore.

  The devil is in the details, of course, even the details of our affections. We’d, by then, earned a new area code—cold, unmemorable 908 supplanting likable time-softened old 609. New blue laws had been set up to keep pleasure in check. Traffic was deranging—spending thirty minutes to go less than a mile made everyone reappraise the entire concept of mobility and of how important it could ever be to get anywhere. Seminary Street had become the preferred home-office address for every species of organization whose mission was to help groups who
didn’t know they comprised a group become one: the black twins consortium; support entities for people who’d lost all their body hair; the families of victims of school-yard bullying; the Life After Kappa Kappa Gamma Association. Boro government had turned all-female and become mean as vipers. Regulations and ordinances spewed out of the council chamber, and litigation was on everyone’s lips. A new sign ordinance forbade FOR SALE signs on lawns, since they sowed seeds of anxiety and a fear of impermanence in citizens not yet moving out—this was rescinded. Empty storefronts were outlawed per se so that owners forced to sell had to seem to stay in business. An ordinance even required that Halloween be “positive”—no more ghosts or Satans, no more flaming bags of feces left on porches. Instead, kids went out dressed as EMS drivers, priests and librarians.

  Meanwhile, new human waves were coming, commuting into Haddam instead of out to Gotham and Philly. A small homeless population sprouted up. Dental appointments averaged thirteen months’ advance booking. And residents I’d meet on the street, citizens I’d known for a generation and sold homes to, now refused to meet my eyes, just set their gaze at my hairline and kept trudging, as if we’d all become the quirky, invisible “older” town fixtures we’d encountered when we ouselves had arrived decades ago.

  Haddam, in these devil’s details, stopped being a quiet and happy suburb, stopped being subordinate to any other place and became a place to itself, only without having a fixed municipal substance. It became a town of others, for others. You could say it lacked a soul, which would explain why somebody thinks it needs an interpretive center and why it seems like a good idea to celebrate a village past. The present is here, but you can’t feel its weight in your hand.

  Back in the days when I got into the realty business, we used to laugh about homogeneity: buying it, selling it, promoting it, eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It seemed good—in the way that everyone in the state having the same color license plate was good (though now that’s different, too). And since the benefits of fitting in were manifest and densely woven through, homogenizing seemed like a sort of inverse pioneering. But by 1992, even homogeneity had gotten homogenized. Something had hardened in Haddam, so that having a decent house on a safe street, with like-minded neighbors and can’t-miss equity growth—a home as a natural extension of what was wanted from life, a sort of minor-league Manifest Destiny—all that now seemed to piss people off, instead of making them ecstatic (which is how I expected people to feel when I sold them a house: happy). The redemptive theme in the civic drama had been lost. And realty itself—stage manager to that drama—had stopped signaling our faith in the future, our determination not to give in to dread, our blitheness in the face of life’s epochal slowdown.