The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  I make a stop by my office to pick up the Surf Road keys. Inside, it’s shadowy and dank, my and Mike’s desktops empty of important documents. Mike’s computer (I don’t own one) beams out his smiling picture of himself and the Dalai Lama, which coldly illuminates his Gipper portrait and his prayer flags on the wall. The office has a stinging balsam scent (mingled with a pizza odor through the wall) from the one time Mike burned incense in the john—which I put a stop to. The house keys, with white tags, are on the key rack. I have a quick piss in our bare-bones bathroom. Though when I come out, I see through the window that a car’s stopped out front by my Suburban, a tan Lincoln Town Car with garish gold trim and New York plates. Since it’s too early for a Chicago-style pizza, these are doubtless showcase shoppers eye-balling the house snapshots in the window. They’ll be scared off when they see me, sensing I might drag them in and bore them to death. But not today. I frown out at the car—I can’t see who’s inside, but no one climbs out—then I go back in the bathroom, close the door, stand and wait thirty seconds. And when I come out, as if by magic the space is empty, the Lincoln gone, the morning, or what’s left of it, returned to my uses.

  The client for my Surf Road showing is a welding contractor down from Parsippany, Mr. Clare Suddruth, with whom I’ve already done critical real estate spadework the past three weeks, which means I’ve driven him around Sea-Clift, Ortley Beach, Seaside Heights, etc., on what I think of as a lay-of-the-land tour, during which the client gets to see everything for sale in his price range, endures no pressure from me, begins to think of me as his friend, since I’m spending all this time with nothing promised, comes after a while to gab about his life—his failures, treacheries, joys—lets me stand him some lunches, senses we’re cut out of the same rough fustian and share many core values (the economy, Vietnam, the need to buy American though the Japs build a better product, the Millennium non-event and how much we’d hate to be young now). We probably don’t agree about the current election hijacking, but probably do see eye-to-eye about what constitutes a good house and how most buyers are better off setting aside their original price targets in favor of stretching their pocketbooks, getting beyond the next dollar threshold—where the houses you really want are as plentiful as hoe handles—and doing a little temporary belt-tightening while the economy’s ebb and flow keeps your boat on course and steaming ahead.

  If this seems like bait-and-switch hucksterism, or just old-fashioned grinning, bamboozling faithlessness, let me assure you it’s not. All any client ever has to say is, “All right, Bascombe, how you see this really isn’t how I see it. I want to stay inside, not outside, my price window, exactly like I said when I sat down at your desk.” If that’s your story, I’m ready to sell you what you want—if I have it. All the rest—the considered, heartfelt exchange of views, the finding of common ground, the beginning of true (if ephemeral) comradeship based on time spent inside a stuffy automobile—all that I’d do with the Terminix guy. A person has only to know his mind about things, which isn’t as usual as it seems. I view my role as residential agent as having a lay therapist’s fiduciary responsibility (not so different from being a Sponsor). And that responsibility is to leave the client better than I found him—or her. Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway. Most client contacts never even eventuate in a sale and, like most human exposures, end in one encounter. Which isn’t to say that the road toward a house sale is a road without benefit or issue. A couple of the best friends I’ve made in the real estate business are people I never sold a house to and who, by the end of our time together, I didn’t want to sell a house to (though I still would’ve). It is another, if unheralded, version of the perfect real estate experience: Everyone does his part, but no house changes hands. If there weren’t, now and then, such positive outside-the-envelope transactions, I’d be the first to say the business wouldn’t be worth the time of day.

  I swing off Ocean Avenue at the closed-for-the-season Custom Condom Shoppe (“We build ’em to your specs”) and motor down toward the beach along the narrow gravel lane of facing, identical white and pastel summer “chalets,” of which there must be twenty in this row, with ten identical parallel lanes stacked neighborhood-like to the north and south, each named for a New Jersey shorebird—Sandpiper, Common Tern, Plover (I’m driving down Cormorant Court). Here is where most of our weekly renters—Memorial Day to Columbus Day—spend their happy family vacations, cheek-to-cheek with hundreds of other souls opting for the same little vernal joys. At several of these (all empty now), more pre-winter fix-up is humming along—hip roofs being patched, swollen screen doors planed, brick foundation piers regrouted after years of salt air. Three of these chalet developments lie in the Boro of Sea-Clift, where I own ten units and, with Mike’s help, manage thirty more. These summer chalets and their more primitive ancestors have been an attractive, affordable feature of beach life on south Barnegat Neck since the thirties. Five-hundred-square-foot interiors, two tiny bedrooms, a simple bath, beaverboard walls, a Pullman kitchen, no yard, grass, shrubbery, no AC or TV, electric wall heaters and stove, yard-sale decor, no parking except in front, no privacy from the next chalet ten feet away, crude plumbing, tinted, iron-rich water, occasional gas and sulfur fumes from an unspecified source—and you can’t drive vacationers away. A certain precinct in the American soul will put up with anything—other people’s screaming kids, exotic smells, unsavory neighbors, unsocialized pets, high rents (I get $750 a week), car traffic, foot traffic, unsound construction, yard seepage—just to be and be able to brag to the in-laws back in Parma that they were “a three-minute walk to the beach.” Which every unit is.

  Of course, another civic point of view—the Dollars For Doers Strike Council—would love to see every chalet bulldozed and the three ten-acre parcels turned into an outlet mall or a parking structure. But complicated, restrictive covenants unique to Sea-Clift require every chalet owner to agree before the whole acreage can be transferred. And many owners are among our oldest Sea-Clift pioneers, who came as children and never forgot the fun they had and couldn’t wait to own a chalet, or six, themselves and start making their retirement nut off the renters—the people they had once been. Most of the people I manage for are absentees, the sons and daughters of those pioneers, and now live in Connecticut and Michigan and would pawn their MBA’s before they’d sign away “Dad’s cottage.” (None of them, of course, would spend two minutes inside any of these sad little shanties themselves, which is when I get in the picture, and am happy to be.)

  These days, I do my best to upgrade the ten chalets I own, plus all the ones I can talk my owners into sprucing up. Occasionally I let a struggling writer in need of quiet space to finish his Moby-Dick, or some poor frail in retirement from love, stay through the winter in return for indoor repairs (these guests never stay long due to the very seclusion they think they want). Looked at differently, these chalets would be a perfect place for a homicide.

  Three Honduran fix-up crews (all legal, all my employees) are at work as I drive down Cormorant Court. From the roof of #11, one of these men (José, Pepe, Esteban—I’m not sure which), suited up in knee pads and roped to a standpipe, replacing shingles, rises to his feet on the steep green asphalt roof-pitch and into the clean, cold November sky, leans crazily against his restraint line and performs a sweeping hats-off Walter Raleigh-type bow right out into space, a big amigo grin on his wispy-mustachioed face. I give back an embarrassed wave, since I’m not comfortable being Don Francisco to my employees. The other workers break into laughing and jeering calls that he (or I) is a puta and beneath contempt.

  Clare Suddruth is already out front of the fancy beach house he thinks he might like to buy. Surf Road is a sandy lane starting at the ocean end of Cormorant Court and running south
a quarter-mile. If it were extended, which it never will be due to the same shoreline ordinances that infuriate the Feensters, it would run into and become Poincinet Road a mile farther on.

  Clare stands hands-in-pockets in the brisk autumn breeze. He’s dressed in a short zippered khaki work jacket and khaki trousers that announce his station as a working stiff who’s made good in a rough-and-tumble world. The house Clare’s interested in is—in design and residential spirit—not so different from my own and was built during the blue-sky development era of the late seventies, before laws got serious and curtailed construction, driving prices into deep space. In my personal view, 61 Surf Road is not the house a man like Clare should think of, so of course he is thinking of it—a lesson we realtors ignore at our peril. Number 61 is a mostly-vertical, isosceles-angled, many-windowed, many sky-lighted, grayed redwood post-and-beam, with older solar panels and inside an open plan of not two, not three, but six separate “living levels,” representing the architect’s concern for interior diversity and cheap spatial mystery. More than it’s right for Clare, it’s perfect for a young sitcom writer with discretionary scratch and who wants to work from home. Asking’s a million nine.

  How the house “shows,” and what the client sees from the curb—if there was a curb—are only two mute, segmented, retractable brown garage doors facing the road, two skimpy windows on the “back,” and an unlocatable front door, through which you go right up to a “great room” where the good life commences. I don’t much like the place since it broadcasts bland domiciliary arrogance, typical of the period. The house either has no front because no one’s welcome; or else because everything important faces the sea and it’s not your house anyway, why should you be interested?

  Clare’s a tall, bony, loose-kneed sixty-five-year-old, a bristle-haired Gyrine Viet vet with a thin, tanned jawline, creased Clint Eastwood features and the seductive voice of a late-night jazz DJ. In my view, he’d be more at home in a built-out Greek revival or a rambling California split-level. “Thornton Wilders,” we call these in our trade, and we don’t have any down here. Spring Lake and Brielle are your tickets for that dream.

  But Clare’s recent life’s saga—I’ve heard all about it—has led him down new paths in search of new objectives. In that way, he is much like me.

  Clare’s standing beside my Realty-Wise sign—red block letters on a white field plus the phone number, no www, no virtual tours, no talking houses, just reliable people leading other people toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness. Clare turns and faces the house as I drive up, as if to allow that he’s been waiting but time doesn’t mean much to him. He’s driven down in one of his company’s silver panel trucks, which sits in the driveway, ONLY CONNECT WELDING painted in flowing blue script. His schoolteacher wife dreamed it up, Clare told me. “Something out of a book.” Though Clare’s no mutton-fisted underachiever who married up. He won a Silver Star with a gallantry garnish in Nam, came out a major and did the EE route at Stevens Tech. He and Estelle bought a house and had two quick kids in the seventies, while Clare was on the upward track with Raytheon. But then out of the blue, he decided the laddered life was a rat-race and took over his dad’s welding business in Troy Hills and changed its name to something he and Estelle liked. Clare’s what we call a “senior boomer,” someone who’s done the course creditably, set aside substantial savings, gotten his kids set up at a safe distance, experienced appreciation in the dollar value of his family home (mortgage retired), and now wants a nicer life before he gets too decrepit to take out the garbage. What these clients generally decide to buy varies from a freestanding condo (we have few in Sea-Clift), to a weekend home near the water (these we have aplenty), to a “houseboat on the Seine”—aka something you park at a marina. Or else they choose a real honest-to-God house like this one Clare’s staring up at: Turn the key, dial up the Jacuzzi. The owners, the Doolittles—currently in Boca Grande—detected the tech-market slowdown in September, were ready to shift assets into municipals and conceivably gold and are just waiting to back their money out. So far, no takers.

  The other characteristic on Clare’s buyer’s profile is that three years ago—by his own candid recounting (as usual)—he fell in love with somebody who wasn’t exactly his wife, but was, in fact, a fresh hire at the welding company—someone named Bitsy or Betsy or Bootsy. Not surprisingly, big domestic disruptions followed. The kids chose sides. Several loyal employees quit in disgust when “things” came out in the open. Welding damn near ceased. Clare and Estelle acted civilly (“She was the easy part”). A sad divorce ensued. A marriage to the younger Bitsy, Betsy, Bootsy hastily followed—a new life that never felt right from the instant they got to St. Lucia. A semi-turbulent year passed. A young wife grew restive—“Just like the goddamn Eagles song,” Clare said. Betsy/Bitsy cut off all her hair, threw her nice new clothes away, decided to go back to school, figured out she wanted to become an archaeologist and study Meso-American something or other. Somehow she’d discovered she was brilliant, got herself admitted to the University of Chicago and left New Jersey with the intention of morphing her and Clare’s spring-fall union into something rare, adaptable, unusual and modern—that he could pay for.

  Only, at the end of year one, Estelle learned she had multiple sclerosis (she’d moved to Port Jervis to her sister’s), news that galvanized Clare into seeing the fog lift, regaining his senses, divorcing his young student wife. (“A big check gets written, but who cares?”) He moved Estelle back down to Parsippany and began devoting every resource and minute to her and her happiness, stunned that he’d never fully realized how lucky he was just to know someone like her. And with time now precious, there was none of it he cared to dick around with. (As heartening and sui generis as Clare’s story sounds, in the real estate profession it’s not that unusual.)

  Which is when Sea-Clift came into play, since Estelle had vacationed here as a child and always adored it and hoped…. Nothing now was too good for her. Plus, in Clare’s estimation our little townlette was probably a place the two of them would die in before the world fucked it up. (He may be wrong.) I’ve driven him past thirty houses in three weeks. Many seemed “interesting and possible.” Most didn’t. Number 61 was the only one that halfway caught his fancy, since the inside was already fitted with a nursing home’s worth of shiny disabled apparatus, including—despite all the levels—a mahogany side-stair elevator for the coming dark days of disambulation. Clare told me that if he likes it when he sees it, he’ll buy it as is and give it to Estelle—who’s currently holding her own, with intermittent symptoms—as a one-year re-wedding/Thanksgiving present. It makes a pretty story.

  “Dry as my Uncle Chester’s bones out here, Frank,” Clare says in his parched but sonorous voice, extending me a leathery hand. Clare has the odd habit of giving me his left hand to shake. Something about severed tendons from a “helo” crash causing acute pain, etc., etc. I always feel awkward about which hand to extend, but it’s over fast. Though he has a vise grip even with his “off” hand, which fires up my own Bob Butts injuries from last night.

  Clare produces his steady, eyes-creased smile that projects impersonal pleasure, then crosses his arms and turns to look again at 61 Surf Road. I’m about to say—but don’t—that the worst droughts are the ones where we occasionally get a little rain, like yesterday, so that nobody really takes the whole drought idea seriously, then you end up ignoring the aquifer until disaster looms. But Clare’s thinking about this house, which is a good sign. The color listing brochure I’m holding is ready to be proffered before we go in.

  Down Surf Road (like my road, there are only five houses), a bearded young man in yellow rubber coveralls is scrubbing the sides of a white fiberglass fishing boat that’s up on a trailer, using an extended aluminum hose brush—a blue BUSH-CHENEY sign stuck up in his weedy little yard. From back up Cormorant Court I hear the sharp shree-scree of a saber saw whanging through board filaments, followed by the satisfying bops of hammers hitting nai
ls in rapid succession. My unexpected jefe presence has set my Hondurans into motion. Though it’s only a game. Soon they’ll be climbing down for their pre-lunch marijuana break, after which the day will go quickly.

  The cold seaside air out here has a fishy and piney sniff to it, which feels hopeful in spite of the unpredictable November sky. My Thanksgiving worries have now scattered like seabirds. A squad of pigeons wheels above, as far beyond a jet contrail—high, high, high—heads out to sea toward Europe. I am rightly placed here, doing the thing I apparently do best—grounded, my duties conferring a pleasant, self-actualizing invisibility—the self as perfect instrument.