by Richard Ford
“Is there anything I can tell you about the house?” I have to say something to merit being here. I look down at my Nike toes and actually give the asphalt a tiny Gary Cooperish nudge.
“Oh no, my goodness,” Mr. Bagosh exults. His teeth are straight and white and uniform—top of the line, in dental terms. “Your Mike here has done his job splendidly. I could use twenty of him.”
Stood off to the side so the two of us can talk, Mike, I see, is unsmiling. Being commodified in front of me is distasteful to him and will make skinning money off this gentleman less than a hardship. I’m certain he’s reciting his Ahimsa, since he’s begun gazing up into the sky as if a passing pelican was his soul dispersing to bliss. When reason ends, anger begins. Mike’s little flat face, I think, looks weary.
“Have you even been in the house?” I say for no particular reason.
“No, no. But I really don’t—”
“Let’s just have a look,” I say. “You don’t want any surprises once it’s yours.”
“Well—” Bagosh shoots a dubious look at Mike and then over to the Lincoln, where his girlfriend, wife, daughter, granddaughter is still yakking on the phone. A hurry-the-hell-up frown wrinkles her features, as if she’s wanting lunch and to be rid of the kids. I see the dog now, a black Standard Poodle seated beside her in the driver’s seat, staring out toward Barnegat Bay, a block and a half away, where a late-staying pair of Tundra swans browses on the weedy shore. In his doggy mind, they are his future. “It’s conceivably not safe, I think,” Bagosh says, his smile gone measly. In fact, both the house and the red girdering have PELIGRO! NO ENTRADA! painted on in big, crude, no-nonsense letters. Except I know the Bolivians crawl these houses like lemurs and the whole rigamarole’s solid as a bank.
“I’m gonna have a look,” I say. “I think you should, too. It’s just good business.” I’m only doing this to put chain-store, second-family Bagosh through some hands-on experience he won’t enjoy—this, because he gloated over Mike’s subaltern status (and voted for Bush). Though it’s Mike’s fault for thinking he can sell a house to an Indian and not feel cheated. Last year, he sold a condo to a Chinese family and accepted an invitation to dinner once they moved in. I asked him how it had gone, and he answered that the little man-god no longer opposes Chinese sovereignty and that Buddhists bear exile well.
Mike projects a beetled expression and definitely does not support a trip inside the house or hauling his customer up with me. He’s worried what the place looks like—huge cracks in the ceilings, floor joists compromised by wet rot—the cold vastness of all that’s unknown but not good and therefore peligro. Only a nitwit would expose a client to the unexpected when cash is smiling at you. Despite being a Buddhist—full of human compassion for all that lives, and who views real estate as a means of helping others—when it comes to clinching deals, Mike sees clients as rolls of cash that happen to be able to talk. He is no more bothered by Bagosh’s undervaluing his essence than if Bagosh fell down and barked like a dog. To Mike—eyes blinking, hands thrust into his absurd sweater pockets—Bagosh is “Mr. Equity Takeover.” “Mr. Increased Disposable Income.” It wouldn’t matter if he was a Navajo. I’ve never felt exactly that way in fifteen years of selling houses. But I’m not an immigrant, either.
Bagosh, against his will and judgment, but shamed, has begun clambering up onto the girder behind me, bumping the back of my Nikes with his noggin and making me breathe in big burning whiffs of his English Leather. He’s taking deep grunting breaths as he ascends, and because he’s a shrimp, has to struggle up on his bare knees to reach the red girder surface.
Once onto the flat I-beam, however, it’s easy to step along past the front window, holding to the siding panels, and to walk straight to the front door opening that gives entry to the house. Bagosh keeps crowding me on the girder, breathing unevenly, a couple of times saying, “Yes, yes, all right, this is fine now,” and smiling wretchedly when I look back at him. We’re only eight feet off the ground here and wouldn’t do any damage if we did a belly flop.
But there’s a nice new view to take in from here, one I’m happy to have and that makes the whole climb-up worthwhile, no matter what we discover inside. Getting a new view—even of Timbuktu Street—is never a waste of time. From here the community is briefly revisioned: Mike Mahoney down in the street, looking skeptically up at us; our three cars; Bagosh’s little closeted brood, all now watching us—the wife at the window, smiling a smile of disapproval. The view stresses the good uniformity of the houses, with their little crushed-marble front yards of differing hues (grassy green, a pink, two or more oceany blues). Few have real trees, only miniature Scotch pines and skimpy oak saplings. None have political placards (meaning the Republicans have won), though several still have their SAVE TIMBUKTU FROM EVIL DEVELOPERS!!! protests. Some yards have boats stored and others feature white statuary of Ole Neptune leaning on his trident—purchasable off the back of trucks on Route 35. No house has nothing, though the effect is to re-enforce sameness: three windows (some with decorative crime bars), center door, no garage, fifty-by-a-hundred-foot lots the original way the (not yet evil) developer designed it. A housing concept which permits no one ever to feel he was meant to be here, and so is happy to be, and happier yet to pack up and go when the spirit moves him or her—unlike Haddam, which operates on the Forever Concept but is really no different.
Up the street toward Ocean Avenue, where the 5-K racers have disappeared and the carillon tower at the RC chapel is just visible, some owners are out busying. A man and his son are erecting an Xmas tree in a front yard, where the MIA flag flies on its pole below the Italian tricolor. A man and wife team is painting their front door red and green for Yuletide. Across at 117, in the skimpy back yard, a wrestling ring’s been put up and two shirtless teens are throwing each other around, springing off the ropes, taking goofy falls, throwing mock punches, knee lifts and flying mares, laughing and growling and moaning in fun. Number 117, I see, is for sale with my competitor Domus Isle Realty and looks fixed up and spruced for purchase. To the west, the bay stretches out toward the scrim of Toms River far beyond the white Yacht Club mooring markers set in rows. A few late-season sailors are out on the water, seizing the holiday and the land breeze for a last go.
“Ahhhh, yes, now. This is very fine now, isn’t it?” Bagosh is close to my shoulder, taking the view, and has actually fastened ahold of my arm. This may be as far above ground as he’s been without walls around him. His English Leather is happily beginning to dissipate in the breeze. His womanish knees have smudges from clambering onto the girder. We’re outside the vacant front doorway, at a level where the sill comes to my waist. Mike, at street level, is frowning at the bay. He is envisioning better events than these.
“We have to go inside still,” I say. “You have to inspect your house.” This is purely punitive. I’ve, of course, already been in the house when it was attached to the ground and I was selling it to the Morris County Stevicks following the departure of the previous owners, the Hausmanns. Though climbing up and in constitutes a pint-size good adventure I didn’t expect and is much more rewarding than fighting with my son.
“I’ll certainly inspect it when these moving chaps finish,” Bagosh says, and widens his onyx eyes in a gesture of objection that seems to agree.
“You’ll own it by then,” I say, and start pulling myself over the metal sill strip that’s half-worked out of its screw holes and a good place to get a nasty cut.
“Yes. Well—” Bagosh casts a fevered frown down at his luxury barge, clearly wishing to be driving it away. He coughs, then laughs a little squealy laugh as I reach down from the doorway and haul him up into the house that will soon be his.
But if it’s good to see the familiar world from a sudden new elevation, it may not be to see inside a house on girders, detached from the sacred ground that makes it what it is—a place of safety and assurance. This is what Mike was trying to make me understand by saying nothing.
; Down on the street, temps must be low forties, but inside here it’s ten degrees colder, and still and dank as a coal scuttle and echoey and eerily lit. It’s different from what I thought—without being sure what I thought. The soggy-floored living room-dining room combo (you enter directly—no foyer, no nothing) is tiny but cavernous. The stained pink walls, old green shag and picture-frame ghosts make it feel not like a room but a shell waiting for a tornado to sweep it into the past. Leaking gas and backed-up toilets stiffen the cold internal air. If I was Bagosh, I’d get in my Town Car and not stop till I saw the lights of snowy Buffalo. Good sense is its own reward. I may be losing my touch.
“O-kay! Well. Yes, yes yes. This is fine,” Bagosh says jauntily. We’re both too big for the cramped, emptied living room, our footfalls loud as thunder.
I walk through the kitchen door to a tiny room of brown-and-gold curling synthetic tiles, where there’s no stove, no refrigerator, no dishwasher. All have been ripped out, leaving only their unpainted footprints, the rusted green sink and all the metal cabinets standing open and uncleaned inside. There’s a strong cold scent in here of Pine-Sol, but nothing looks like it’s been scrubbed in two hundred years. Police enter rooms like this every day and find cadavers liquefying into the linoleum. It didn’t look like this when I showed it to the Stevicks.
Bagosh is heading down the murky hall that separates the two small bedrooms and ends in the bath—the classic American starter-home design. “Okay, this is fine,” I hear him say. I’m sure he’s frozen in his shorts. The Hausmanns lived in these rooms twenty years, raised two kids; Chet Hausmann worked for Ocean County Parks and Lou-Lou was an LPN in Forked River. Life worked fine. They were normal-size people, with normal-size longings. They bought, they saved, they accrued, they envied, they thrived and enjoyed life right through the Clinton administration. The kids left for other lives (though Chet “the Jet” Jr.’s currently in rehab #2). They grew restless for Dade County, where Lou-Lou’s parents live. Things seemed to be changing here—though they weren’t. So they left. Nothing out of the ordinary, except it’s hard to see how it could’ve happened inside these four walls, or, if it did, how things could look like this four months later. Empty houses go downhill fast. I should have been more vigilant.
I have a look out the kitchen window into the ditched-up and vacant back yard, and the square, fenced back yards of Bimini Street. Several houses there are closed and boarded for the season, though some have dogs chained up and clothes on the line. Up on Ocean Avenue, the noon carillon at Our Lady has begun chiming “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant—” Then the wail of a farther-off siren signals the hour. Sirens are rare in Sea-Clift in the off-season, though routine in summer.
“O-kay!” I hear Bagosh say conclusively. It’s time to leave. I’ve said not a word since forcing us to come in here.
And then there’s a loud, violent, scrabbling, struggling commotion down the hall, where Bagosh is carrying out his unwilling presale inspection. “Oh my Gawd,” I hear him shout in a horrified voice. Then bangety, bangety, bang-bang. The sound of a man falling. I’m moving, without bidding myself to move, across the mud-caked floor of the back family room, with its water-clouded picture window overlooking the wrecked back yard. It’s less than twenty feet to the hallway entrance and another twelve down the passage. It’s possible Bagosh has come upon the overdosed Chet, Jr., is all I can think. Then “Ahhhhh,” I hear poor Bagosh shout again. “My Gawd, oh my Gawd.” I still can’t see him, though unexpectedly I’m faced with me, reflected in the mirror on the dark bathroom medicine chest at the end of the hallway. I look terrified.
“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” I call out. Though why would he be all right and be howling?
Then out from the right bedroom, where I take it Bagosh is and has hit the floor, a good-size bushy-tailed red fox comes shooting into the hallway. “Ahhh,” Bagosh is wailing, “my-Gawd, my-Gawd.” The fox stops, paws splayed, and fixes its eyes on me, hugely blocking the path of escape. Its eyes are dark bullets aimed at my forehead. Though it doesn’t pause long, but turns and re-enters the room where Bagosh is, provoking another death wail (possibly he’s being ripped into now and will have to undergo painful rabies shots). Immediately, the fox comes rocketing back out the bedroom door, claws scrabbling powerfully to gain purchase. For an instant, its spectral, riotous eyes consider the other tiny bedroom—the kids’ room. But without another moment’s indecision, the fox fires off straight toward me, so that I stagger back and to the left and pitch through the arched doorway into the living room and right off my feet onto the filthy green shag, where I land just as the fox explodes after me through the door, claws out and scrabbling right across my block-M chest, so that I catch a gulp of its feral rank asshole as it springs off, straight across to the metal threshold and out into the clean cold air of Timbuktu, where, for all I know, Mike may believe the fox is me, translated by this house of spirits into my next incarnation on earth. Frank Fox.
15
When the Bagoshes’ taillamps have made the turn up onto Ocean Avenue and disappeared ceremoniously into the post noon-time, holiday-emptied streets, Mike and I have ourselves a side-by-side amble down to the bay shore, malodorous and sudsed from last night’s storm.
Sally will have called by now. Paul will have answered and could possibly have blurted things I don’t want her to know (my illness, for one). Though Clarissa will be home, and the two of them can have a sister-brother parsing talk about my “condition,” my upcoming Mayo trip, etc., etc. Possibly Clarissa could also talk to Sally, fill in some gaps, welcome her back on my behalf, no recriminations required. As is often the case, one view is that life is as fucked up as ground chuck and not worth fooling with. But there’s another view available to most of us even without becoming a Buddhist: that with an adjustment or two (Sally moving home to me, for instance), life could perhaps be fine again. No need for a miracle cancer cure. No need for Ann Dykstra to vaporize off the earth. No need for Clarissa to marry a former-NFL-great-become-pediatric-oncologist. No need for Paul to dedicate himself to scaling corporate Hallmark (new wardrobe concepts, a computerized prosthesis for his sugar pie). I can’t say if this view is the soul of acceptance. But in all important ways, it is the Next Level for me and I am in it and still taking breath regularly.
Mike and I trek stonily down toward the bay’s ragged edge. He, it seems, has a proposition for me. The not-good outcome of the Bagosh deal, he believes, only underscores the wisdom and importance of his plan, as well as the “time being right” for me. There’s a bravura opportunity for “everybody,” should I take him seriously, which I do. I’m always more at home with chance and transition than with the steady course, since the steady course leads quickly, I’ve found, to the rim of the earth.
The Bagoshes, not surprisingly, couldn’t get away from us fast enough. Bagosh emerged uninjured from his ordeal—a small tear in his linens, a scuffed wrist (no chance of a bite), his hair disfigured. But the sight of the fleeing fox incited the big poodle, Crackers, to a primordial in-car carnivore rage, so that the kids got deep scratches, broke their computer games and eventually had to pile out on the street, letting Crackers give pursuit out of sight. (He came back on his own.) Mrs. Bagosh, if that’s who the Madonna-faced woman was, didn’t leave the front seat, never lowered her window, did nothing more than say nothing to anyone, including her husband, a silence lasting up to Ocean Avenue, I suspected, but no longer.
Bagosh himself couldn’t have been nicer to me or to Mike. Mike couldn’t have been nicer. And neither could I, since I was responsible for everything. Bagosh said he would “definitely” buy the house on Monday. He and his family, however, had Thanksgiving reservations in Cape May that night, planned to travel up to Bivalve to see the snow geese wintering ground, then on to Greenwich, Hancocks Bridge and around to the Walt Whitman house in Camden before driving home weary but happy on Sunday, back to Buffalo, where there’s now ten feet of snow. He’d be calling. The story made
him happy to tell. And even though Mike knew Bagosh had at that moment a choker wad of greenbacks in his shorts pocket and could’ve counted out big bills while I executed a quit-claim deed on my Suburban hood, he seemed jolly about money he would never see. He actually took off his sports-car cap, revealed his bristly dome, rubbed his scalp and joked with Bagosh about what a dog’s breakfast the Bills were making of the regular season, but that with luck a new O.J. would come along in the draft—a possibility that made them both laugh like Polacks. They are both Americans and acted like nothing else.
When the Bagoshes were all loaded in and maneuvering the big Lincoln around on Timbuktu, Mike stood beside me, hands thrust in his sweater pockets. “Wrong views result in a lack of protection, with no place to take refuge,” he announced solemnly. I took this to mean I’d fucked up, but it didn’t matter, because he had more significant things in mind.
“I loused this up,” I said. “I apologize.”
“It’s good to almost sell a house,” he said, already upbeat. The Bagosh children were waving at us from inside their warm, plush car (unquestionably at the command of their father). The little girl—wispy, sloe-eyed, with a decorative red dot on her forehead—held up Crackers’ paw so he could wave, too. Mike and I both waved and smiled our good-byes to dog, money and all as the Lincoln, its left taillight blinking at the intersection, rumbled out of sight forever.
“I’d rather have their money than their friendship,” I said. I noticed that I’d ripped my 501s somewhere in the house. My second fall of the day, third in two days. A general slippage. “Did he say what he thought he wanted the house for?”