The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

“Frank, tell me what this house’ll bring in a summer?” Clare’s mind is clicking merits-demerits.

  I assume he’s talking about rent and not a quick flip. “Three thousand a week. Maybe more.”

  He furrows his brow, puts a hand to his chin and rests it there—the standard gesture of contemplation, familiar to General MacArthur and Jack Benny. It is both grave and comical. Clearly it is Clare’s practiced look of public seriousness. My instant guess is we’ll never see inside #61. When clients are motivated, they don’t stand out in the road talking about the house as if it’d be a good idea to tear it down. When clients are motivated, they can’t wait to get in the door and start liking everything. I’m, of course, often wrong.

  “Boy, oh boy.” Clare shakes his head over modernity. “Three G’s.”

  “Pays your taxes and then some,” I say, breeze waffling my listing brochure and stiffening my digits.

  “So who all’s moving down to Sea-Clift now, Frank?” More standing, more staring. This is not a new question.

  “Pretty much it’s a mix, Clare,” I say. “People driven out of the Hamptons. And there’s some straight-out investment beginning. Our floor hasn’t risen as fast as the rest of the Shore. No big springboard sales yet. Topping wars haven’t gotten this far down. It’s still a one-dimensional market. That’ll change, even with rates starting to creep. A really good eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house is already hard to find.” I take a glance at my sheet, as if all this crucial data’s printed there and he should read it. I’m guessing coded chalk talk will appeal to Clare-the-small-businessman, make him think I’m not trying very hard to sell him the Doolittles’ house, but am just his reliable resource for relevant factual info to make the world seem less a sinking miasma. Which isn’t wrong.

  “I guess they’re not making any more ocean-front, are they?”

  “If they could, they would.” In fact, I know people who’d love to try: interests who’d like to “reclaim” Barnegat Bay and turn it into a Miracle Mile or a racino. “Fifty percent of us already live within fifty miles of the ocean, Clare. Ocean County’s the St. Petersburg of the East.”

  “How’s your business, Frank?” We’re side-by-side—me a half step behind—staring at silent multi-this, multi-that #61.

  “Good, Clare. It’s good. Real estate’s always good by the ocean. Inventory’s my problem. If I had a house like this every day, I’d be richer than I am.”

  Clare at this instant lets go a small, barely audible (but audible) fart, the sound of a strangled birdcall from offstage. It startles me, and I can’t help staring at its apparent point of departure, the seat of Clare’s khakis, as if blue smoke might appear. It’s the ex-Marine in Clare that makes such nonchalant emissions unremarkable (to him), while letting others know how intransigent a man he is and would be—in a love affair, in a business deal, in a divorce or a war. Possibly my reference to being rich forced an involuntary disparaging gesture from his insides.

  “Tell me this now, Frank.” Clare’s stuffed both hands in his khaki side pockets. He’s wearing brown-and-beige tu-tone suede leisure sneakers of the sort you buy at shoe outlets or off the sale rack at big-box stores and that look comfortable as all get out, though I’d never buy a pair, because they’re what doozies wear (our old term from Lonesome Pines), or else men who don’t care if they look like doozies. The Clint Eastwood look has a bit of doozie in it. Old Clint might wear a pair himself, so uncaring would he be of the world’s opinion. “What kind of climate have we got, I mean for buying a house?”

  I hear my workers up Cormorant Court begin laughing and their hammering come to a halt. “¡Hom-bre!” I hear a falsetto voice shout. “Qué flaco y feo.” One needn’t wonder. Something involving somebody’s “chilé.”

  “I’d say that’s a mixed picture, too, Clare.” He already knows everything I know, because I’ve told him, but he wants me to think he takes what we’re doing seriously—which means to me this is a waste of my time, which I in fact do take seriously. Clare came into the picture saying he was ready to buy a house sight unseen, maximize the quality-of-life remaining for his dear-stricken-betrayed-but-timeless love Estelle. Only, like most humans, when it gets down to the cold nut cutting, it’s do-re-mi his heart breaks over.

  “Money’s cheap down here, Clare,” I say, “and the mortgage people have got some interesting product enhancements to shift weight toward the back end—for a price, of course. Like I said, our inventory’s down, which tends to firm up values. Most sales go for asking. You read the technology sector’s ready to cycle down. Rates’ll probably squirt up after Christmas. You’d hate to buy at the top with no short-term resale potential, but you can’t take your cue from the wind, I guess. We saw a forty percent price increase in two years. I don’t tell clients to go with their hearts, Clare. I don’t know much about hearts.”

  Clare gazes at me, brown eyes squinted near-to-closing. I’ve probably said too much and strayed over into sensitive territory by referring to the heart. This sleepy-eyed look is a recognition and a warning. Though I’ve found that in business, a quick veer into the soft tissue of the personal can confuse things in a good way. Clare, after all, has given me a giant earful—probably he does everyone. He’s just suddenly gotten leery about forging an unwanted connection with me. But ditto. I like Clare, but I want him to spend his money and feel good about giving part of it to me.

  “Can I show you something, Frank?” Clare peers down at his doozie tu-tones as if they were doing his thinking for him.

  “Absolutely.”

  “It won’t take a minute.” He’s already moving—in a bit of a slinking, pelvis-forward gait—along the driveway toward the back of the Doolittles’, between it and the next-door neighbor’s, a dull two-storey A-frame that’s boarded for the winter and has a dead look: basement windows blocked with pink Styrofoam, plants covered with miniature wooden A-frames of their own, the basement door masked with ply-board screwed into the foundation. Winter gales are expected.

  “I took a walk around here while I was waiting,” Clare’s saying as he walks, but in a more intimate voice, as if he doesn’t want the wrong people hearing this. I’m following, my listing materials stuffed in my windbreaker pocket. The Doolittles’ house, I can see, is in need of upkeep. The side basement door is weathered and grayed, the veneer shredded at the bottom. A scimitar of glass has dropped out of a basement window and shattered on the concrete footing. Something metal is whapping in the wind above the soffits—a loose TV cable or a gutter strap—though I can’t see anything. I wonder if the solar panels even work. The house could do with a new owner and some knowledgeable attention. The Doolittles, who’re plastic surgeons in joint practice, have been spending their discretionary income elsewhere. Though they may soon have less of it.

  Clare leads around to the “front” of the house, between the windowed concrete basement wall and the ten-foot sand dune that’s covered with dry, sparse-sprouted sea rocket from the summer. The dune—which is natural and therefore inviolable—is what keeps the house from having a full ocean view from the living room, and probably what’s retarded its sale since September. I’ve put into the brochure that “imagination” (money) could be dedicated to the living room level (moving it to the third floor) and “open up spectacular vistas.”

  “Okay, look at this down here.” Clare, almost whispering, bends over, hands on his knees to designate what he means me to see. “See that?” His voice has grown grave.

  I move in beside him, kneel by his knee on the gravelly foundation border and stare right where he’s pointing at an outward-curving section of pale gray concrete that’s visible beneath the sill and the footing. It is one of the deep-driven piers to which the well-named Doolittles’ house is anchored and made fast so that at times of climatological stress the whole schmeer isn’t washed or blown or seismically destabilized and propelled straight out to sea like an ark.

  “See that?” Clare says, breathing out a captured breath. He gets down on both knees b
eside me like a scientist and brings his face right to the concrete pillar as if he means to smell it, then puts his index finger to the curved surface.

  “What is it?” I say. I see nothing, though I’m assuming there is something and it can’t be good.

  “These piers are poured far away from here, Frank,” Clare says as if in confidence. “Sometimes Canada. Sometimes upstate. The Binghamton area.” He employs his finger to scratch at the transparent lacquer painted on the pier’s exterior. “If you pour your forms too early in the spring, or if you pour them when the humidity’s extremely high…well, you know what happens.” Clare’s creased face turns to me—we’re very close here—and smiles a closed-mouth gotcha smile.

  “What?”

  “They crack. They crack right away,” Clare says darkly. He has a pale sliver of pinkish scar right along the border of his Brillo-pad hairline. A vicious war wound, possibly, or else something discretionary from his second marriage. “If your manufacturer isn’t too scrupulous he doesn’t notice,” Clare says. “And if he’s unscrupulous he notices but then has this silicone sealer painted on and sells it to you anyway. And if your home builder or your GC isn’t paying attention, or if he’s been paid not to pay attention or if his foreman happens to be of a certain nationality, then these piers get installed without anybody saying anything. And when the work gets inspected, this kind of defect—and it is a serious defect and oughta show up—it might be possible for it not to get noticed, if you get my drift. Then your house gets built, and it stands up real well for about fifteen years. But because it’s on the ocean, salt and moisture go to work on it. And suddenly—though it isn’t sudden, of course—Hurricane Frank blows up, a high tide comes in, the force of the water turns savage and Bob’s your uncle.” Clare turns his gaze back to the pier, where we’re crouched like cavemen behind the musty quicklime–smelling Doolittle house, which is built, I see, on much worse than shifting sand. It’s built on shitty pilings. “These piers, Frank. I mean”—Clare pinches his nose with distaste and home-owner pity, pressing his lips together—“I can see cracks here, and this is just the four to five inches showing. These people have real problems, unless you know a sucker who’ll buy it sight unseen or get an inspector who needs a seeing-eye dog.”

  Clare’s breath in these close quarters is milky stale-coffee breath and makes me realize I’m freezing and wishing I was two hundred miles from here.

  “It’s a problem. Okay.” I stare at the innocent-looking little curve of gray pier surface, seeing nothing amiss. The thought that Clare’s full of shit and that this is a softening-up ploy for a low-ball offer naturally occurs to me, as does the idea that since I can’t see the crack, I don’t have to bear the guilty knowledge that adheres to it. A thin file of stalwart ants is scuttering around the dusty foundation, taking in the air before the long subterranean winter.

  “A problem. Definitely,” Clare says solemnly. “I was raised in a tract home, Frank. I’ve seen bad workmanship all my life.” He and I are straggling to our feet. I hear youthful boy-and-girl voices from the beach, beyond the dune bunker.

  “What can you do about a problem like that, Clare?” I dust off my knees, stuffing the listing sheet farther down in my pocket, since it won’t be needed. I experienced a brief stab of panic when Clare revealed the cracked pier, as if this house is mine and I’m who’s in deep shit. Only now, a little airy-headed from bending down, then standing up too fast, I feel pure exhilaration and a thrumming sense of well-being that this is not my house, that my builder was a board-certified UVa architect, not some shade-tree spec builder (like Tommy Benivalle, Mike’s best friend) with a clipboard and some plan-book blueprints, and who’s in cahoots with the cement trade, the Teamsters, the building inspectors and city hall. Your typical developer, Jersey to Oregon. “I’m fine.” These murmured words for some reason escape my lips. “I’m just fine.”

  “Okay, there’s things you can do,” Clare’s saying. “They’re not cheap.” He’s looking closely at me, into my eyes, his fingers pinching up a welt of nylon on my windbreaker sleeve. “You all right, old boy?”

  I hear this. I also hear again the sound of youthful boy-girl voices beyond the dune. They emerge from a single source, which is the cold wind. “You look a little green, my friend,” Clare’s friendly voice says. I’m experiencing another episode. Conceivably it’s only a deferred result of my floor struggle with Bob Butts last night. Yet for a man who hates to hope, my state of health is not as reliable as I’d hoped.

  “Stood up too fast,” I say, my cheeks cold and rubbery, scalp crawly, my fingers tingling.

  “Chemicals,” Clare says. “No telling what the hell they spray back here. The same thing’s in sarin gas is in d-Con, I hear.”

  “I guess.” I’m fuzzy, just keeping myself upright.

  “Let’s grab some O2,” Clare says, and with his bony left fist begins hauling me roughly up the dune, my shoes sinking in sand, my balance a bit pitched forward, my neck breaking a sweat. “Maybe you got vertigo,” Clare says as he guys me up toward the top, his long legs doing the work for my two. “Men our age get that. It goes away.”

  “How old are you?” I say, being dragged.

  “Sixty-seven.”

  “I’m fifty-five.” I feel ninety-five.

  “Good grief.”

  “What’s the matter?” Sand’s in my shoes and feels cool. His doozie loafers must be loaded, too.

  “I must look a lot younger than I am.”

  “I was thinking you did,” I say.

  “Who knows how old anybody is, Frank?” We’re now at the top. Lavender flat-surfaced ocean stretches beyond the wide high-tide beach. A smudge of gray-brown crud hangs at the horizon. Breeze seems to stream straight through my ears and gives me a shiver. For late November, I’m again dressed way too lightly. (I believed I’d be inside.) “I look at twenty-five-year-olds and somebody tells me they’re fifteen,” Clare natters on. “I look at thirty-five-year-olds who look fifty. I give up.”

  “Me, too.” I’m already feeling a bit replenished, my heart quivering from our quick ascent.

  Thirty yards out onto the beach and taking no notice of our appearance—legionnaires topping a rise—a group of teens, eight or nine of them, is occupied by a spirited volleyball game, the white orb rising slowly into the sky, one side shouting, “Mine!” “Set, seeeet-it!” “Bridget-Bridget! Yours!” The boys are tall, swimmer-lanky and blond; the girls semi-beautiful, tanned, rugged, strong-thighed. All are in shorts, sweaters, sweatshirts and are barefoot. These are the local kids, gone away to Choate and Milton, who’ve left home behind as lowly townie-ville but are back now, dazzlingly, with their old friends—the privileged few, enjoying the holidays as Yale and Dartmouth early-admissions dates grow near. Too bad my kids aren’t that age instead of “grown.” Possibly I could do my part better now. Though possibly not.

  “You back in working order?” Clare pretends to be observing the volleyballers, who go on paying us no attention. We are the invisibles—like their parents.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “Vertigo,” Clare says again, and gives his long over-large ear a stiff grinding with the heel of his hand. Clare clearly likes the prospect from up here. It’s the view one would get from a “reimagined” floor three of the big-but-compromised Doolittle house behind us. Maybe his mind will change. Maybe cracked piers aren’t so troublesome. Things change with perspective.

  “You’re from California, you don’t count,” a girl volleyballer says breezily into the breeze.

  “I count,” a boy answers. “I absolutely count. Ro-tate, ro-tate.”

  “Could you entertain a quasi-philosophical question, Frank?” Clare’s now squatted atop the dune and has scooped up a handful of sand, as though assaying it, sampling its texture.

  “Well—”

  “Pertains to real estate. Don’t worry. It’s not about my sex life. Or yours. That’s not philosophical, is it? That’s Greek tragedy.”

&nbs
p; “Not always.” I am on the alert for some heart-to-heart I lack the stomach for.

  Clare half closes his creased submariner’s eye at the brown horizon murk then spits down into the sand he’s just released. “Do you imagine, Frank, that anything could happen in this country to make normal just not be possible?” He continues facing away, facing east, as if addressing an analyst seated behind him. “I actually tend to think nothing of that nature can really happen. Too many checks and balances. We’ve all of us manufactured reality so well, we’re so solid in our views, that nothing can really change. You know? Drop a bomb, we bounce back. What hurts us makes us stronger. D’you believe that?” Clare lowers his strong chin, then cranks his skeptical gaze up at me, wanting an answer in kind. His kind. His kind of stagy seriousness. Semper Fi, Hué ’n Tet, the never-say-die Khe Sanh firebase of ’67 seriousness. All the things I missed in my rather easy youth.

  “I don’t, Clare.”

  “No. Course not. Me, either,” he says. “But I want to believe it. And that’s what scares the shit right out of me. And don’t think they’re not sitting over there in those other countries that hate us licking their chops at what they see us doing over here, fucking around trying to decide which of these dopes to make President. You think these people here”—a toss of the Clare Suddruth head toward crumbling 61 Surf Road—“have foundation problems? We’ve got foundation problems. It’s not that we can’t see the woods for the trees, we can’t see the woods or the fuckin’ trees.” Clare expels through his schnoz a breath heavy and poignant, something a Clydesdale might do.

  “What does it have to do with real estate?”

  “It’s where I enter the picture, Frank,” Clare says. “The circuit my mind runs on. I want to make Estelle’s last years happy. I think a house on the ocean’s the right thing. Then I start thinking about New Jersey being a prime target for some nut with a dirty bomb or whatever. And, of course, I know death’s a pretty simple business. I’ve seen it. I don’t fear it. And I know Estelle’s gonna probably see it before I do. So I go on looking at these houses as if a catastrophe—or death—can’t really happen, right up until, like now, I recognize it can. And it shocks me. Really. Makes me feel paralyzed.”