by Richard Ford
Penns Neck is not in fact much of a town, much less an area: a few tidy, middle-rank residential streets situated on either side of busy 571, which connects the serenely tree-studded and affluent groves of nearby Haddam with the gradually sloping, light-industrial, overpopulous coastal plain where housing is abundant and affordable but the Markhams aren’t interested. In decades past, Penns Neck would’ve boasted a spruced-up, Dutchy-Quakery village character, islanded by fertile cornfields, well-tended stone walls, maple and hickory farmsteads teeming with wildlife. Only now it’s become just one more aging bedroom community for other larger, newer bedroom communities, in spite of the fact that its housing stock has withstood modernity’s rush, leaving it with an earnest old-style-suburban appeal. There is, however, no intact town center left, only a couple of at-home antique shops, a lawn-mower repair and a gas station-deli hard by the state road. The town office (I’ve checked into this) has actually been moved to the next town down Route 1 and into a mini-mall. At the Haddam Realty Board I’ve heard the sentiment bruited that the state should unincorporate Penns Neck and drop it onto the county tax rolls, which would sweeten the rates. In the past three years I’ve sold two houses here, though both families have since departed for better jobs in upstate New York.
But in truth I’m showing the Markhams a Penns Neck house not because I think it’ll be the house they’ve waited for me to show them all along, but because what’s here is what they can afford and because I think they may be dejected enough to buy it.
Once we turn left off 571 onto narrow Friendship Lane, pass a series of intersecting residential streets to the north, ending up at Charity Street, the beating-whomping hum of Route 1 traffic fades out of earshot and the silken, seamless ambience of quiet houses all in neat, close rows amid tall trees, nice-ish shrubberies and edged lawns with morning sprinklers hissing, plus no overnight parking—all this begins to fill the space that worry likes to occupy.
The Houlihan house, at 212 Charity, is forthright and not even so little, a remodeled gable-roofed American farmhouse set back on a shaded and shrubbed double lot among some old hardwoods and younger pines, farther from the street than any of its neighbors, and also elevated enough in its siting to suggest it once meant more than it means now. It has, in fact, the nicer, larger, slightly out-of-place look of having been the “original farmhouse” when all this was nothing but cow pastures and farmland, and pheasants and unrabid foxes coursed the turnip rows and real estate meant zip. It also has a new bright-green shingled roof, a solid-looking brick front stoop, and white wooden siding a generation older but of more or less the same material as the other houses on the street, which are smaller one-storey, design-book ranches with attached pole garages and little concrete walks straight to the curb, where mailboxes are posted house after house after house.
But here—and to my complete surprise, since I see I’ve, in fact, never seen it before—here might be the house the Markhams have been hoping for; the fabled long-shot house, the one I’d never shown them, the little Cape set too far back, with too many trees, the old caretaker’s cottage from the once-grand manor now gone, a place requiring “imagination,” a place no other clients could quite “visualize,” a house with “a story” or “a ghost,” but which might have a je-ne-sais-quoi attraction for a couple as amusingly offbeat as the Markhams. (Again, such houses do exist. They’ve usually just been retrofitted into single-practice laser-gynecological clinics run by doctors with Costa Rican M.D.’s and are most often found along older, major thoroughfares and not in actual neighborhoods in towns like Penns Neck.)
Our “Lauren-Schwindell Exclusive” sign is staked out front on the sloping lawn with Julie Loukinen, the listing agent’s name, dangling from the bottom. The grass has been newly trimmed, shrubbery pruned, the driveway swept clear to the back. There are lights inside, glowing humidly in the post-storm gloom. A car, an older Merc, sits in the driveway, and the door behind the front screen is standing open (aka no central air). This could be Julie’s car, though we haven’t planned to show the house as a team, so that it probably belongs to owner Houlihan, who (I’ve arranged this with Julie) is right now supposed to be eating a late breakfast at Denny’s courtesy of me.
The Markhams sit silent, noses first in their listing sheets then to the windows. This has often been the point when Joe announces he’s seen quite enough.
“Is that it?” Phyllis says.
“It’s our sign,” I say, turning in the driveway and pulling up halfway. Rain has stopped now. Beyond the old Merc, at the end of the drive behind the house, a detached wooden garage is visible, plus an enticing angle-slice of green from the shaded back yard. No crime bars are on any windows or doors.
“What’s the heating?” Joe—veteran Vermonter—says, squinting out the windshield, his listing sheet in his lap.
“Circulating hot water, electric baseboards in the den,” I say verbatim from the same sheet.
“How old?”
“Nineteen twenty-four. Not in the floodplain, and the side lot’s buildable if you ever want to sell or add on.”
Joe casts a dark frown of ecological betrayal at me, as if the very idea of parceling off vacant lots was a crime of rain-forest-type gravity which no one should even be allowed to conceptualize. (He himself would more than conceptualize it if he ever needed the money, or were getting divorced. I of course conceptualize it all the time.)
“It has a nice front yard,” I say. “Shade’s your hidden asset.”
“What kind of trees?” Joe says, scowling and concentrating on the side yard.
“Let’s see,” I say, leaning and looking out past his thick, hairmatte chest. “One’s a copper beech. That one’s a split-leaf maple, I’d say. One’s a sugar maple—which you should like. There’s a red oak. And one may be a ginkgo. It’s a good mix soilwise.”
“Ginkgoes stink,” Joe says, fixed in his seat, as is Phyllis, neither one offering to get out. “What’s it border on the back side?”
“We’ll need to look at that,” I say, though of course I know.
“Is that the owner?” Phyllis says, looking out.
A figure has come to the door and is rubbernecking from behind the shadowy screen: a man—not large—in a shirt and tie with no jacket. I’m not sure he even sees us.
“We’ll just have to find that out,” I say, hoping not, but easing the car a notch farther up the drive before shutting it off and immediately opening my door to the summer heat.
Once out, Phyllis steams right up the walk, moving with the same wobble-gaited unwieldiness as before, toes slightly out, arms working, intent on loving as much as possible before Joe can weigh in with the bad news.
Joe, though, in his silver shorts, flip-flops and pathetic muscle shirt, hangs back with me, then stops stock-still on the walk to survey the lawn, the street and the neighboring houses, which are Fifties constructions and cheaper, but with fewer maintenance worries and more modest, less burdensome lawns. The Houlihans’ is in fact the nicest house on the street, which can become a scratchy price issue with an experienced buyer but probably will not be today.
I have grabbed my clipboard and put on my red nylon windbreaker from the back seat. The jacket has the Lauren-Schwindell Societas Progressioni Commissa crest on the breast and a big white stenciled REALTOR across the back, like an FBI agent’s. I’m wearing it today in spite of the heat and humidity to get a point across to the Markhams: I’m not their friend; it’s business, not a hobby; there’s something at issue. Time’s a-wastin’.
“It ain’t Vermont, is it?” Joe muses as we stand side by side in the last drippy moments of the morning’s wet weather. This is exactly what he’s said at similar moments outside any number of other houses in the last four months, though he probably doesn’t remember. And what he means is: Well, fuck this. If you can’t show me Vermont, then why the hell are you showing me a goddamned thing? After which, often before Phyllis has even made it to the front door, we’ve turned a
round and left. This is why Phyllis caught fire to get inside. I, however, am frankly glad just to get Joe out of the car and this far, no matter what his objections might later be.
“It’s New Jersey, Joe,” I say as always. “And it’s pretty nice, too. You got tired of Vermont.”
Which has usually prompted Joe to say ruefully, “Yeah, and what a stupid fuck I am.” Only this time he says “Yeah” and looks at me soulfully, his little flat brown irises gone flatter, as if some essential lambency has droozled out and he has faced certain facts.
“That’s not a net loss,” I say, zipping my jacket halfway up and feeling my toes, damp from standing in the rain back at the Sleepy Hollow. “You don’t have to buy this house.” Which is a hell of a thing for a realtor to say, instead of: “You goddamn do have to buy it. It’s God’s patent will that you buy it. He’ll be furious at you if you don’t. Your wife’ll leave you and take your daughter to Garden Grove and enroll her in an Assembly of God school, and you’ll never see her again if you don’t buy this son of a bitch by lunchtime.” Yet what I go on airily to say is: “You can always head back to Island Pond tonight and be there in time to watch the crows come home to roost.”
Joe is not susceptible to other people’s witticisms and looks up at me strangely (I’m a few inches taller than he is, though he’s a little bullock). He clearly starts to say one thing in one tone of voice (sarcastic, without doubt), then just lets it go and stares out at the unpretentious row of hip-roofed, frame-with-brick-facade houses (some with crime bars), all built when he was a teenager, and where now, across Charity Street at 213, a young, shockingly red-haired woman—brighter red even than Phyllis’s—is pushing a big black-plastic garbage-can-on-wheels to the curb for the last pickup before the 4th.
The woman is obviously a young mom, in blue jeans cut off midthigh, sockless tennies and a blue work shirt sloppily but calculatedly cinched in a Marilyn Monroe knot just below her breasts. When she squares her plastic can up beside her mailbox, she looks at us and waves a cheery, careless wave that means she knows who we are—new-neighbor candidates, more lively maybe than the current owner.
I wave back, but Joe doesn’t. Possibly he is thinking about seeing things across a flat plain.
“I was just thinking as we were driving over here …,” he says, watching young Marilyn flounce back up the driveway and disappear into an empty carport. A door closes, a screen slams. “… that wherever you took us today was going to be where I was going to live for the rest of my life.” (I was right.) “A decision almost entirely in other people’s hands. And that in fact my judgment’s no good anymore.” (Joe hasn’t tumbled to my telling him he didn’t have to buy this place.) “I don’t know what the hell’s the right thing anymore. All I do is hold out as long as I can in hopes the really fucked-up choices will start to look fucked up, and I’ll be saved at least that much. You know what I mean?”
“I guess so.” I can hear Phyllis yakking inside, introducing herself to whoever was at the front door—not, I still hope, Houlihan himself. I would like to get inside, but I can’t leave Joe here under the dripping oaks in a brown study whose net yield might be double-decker despair and a botched chance at an offer.
Across in 213, the redhead we’ve watched suddenly whips open the draw drapes in a far-end bedroom window. I see only her head, but she is watching us brazenly. Joe is still lost in his bad-judgment funk.
“The other day Phyl and Sonja were off in Craftsbury,” he says, somberly, “and I got on the phone and called a woman I used to know. Just called her up. Out in Boise. I had a little—really a not so little—thing with her after my first marriage went south. Just before that happened, actually. She’s a potter too. Makes finished-looking stuff she sells to Nordstrom’s. And after we’d talked a while, just past events and whatnot, she said she had to get off the phone and wanted to know my number. But when I told her she laughed. She said, ‘God, Joe, there were a whole lot of pay-phone numbers for you in my book, but none of the M’s are you now.’” Joe stuffs his little hands up under his damp armpits and ponders this, staring in the direction of 213.
“She didn’t mean anything by that,” I say, still wanting to get a move on. Phyllis has not gone much farther than inside the door yet. I can hear her sing-songy voice exclaiming that everything in sight’s the nicest she ever saw. “You probably ended it on a good note way back then, didn’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have called her.”
“Oh, absolutely.” Joe’s little goatee works first this way and then that, as if he is double-checking his memory on all counts. “No blood let. Ever. But I really thought she’d call me later to say we needed to get together—which I was willing to do, to be honest. This house-buying business pushes you to extremes.” Willing-wife-deceiver Joe looks at me importantly.
“Right,” I say.
“But she never called. At least I never knew if she did.” He nods, still staring across at 213, which is painted a not very bright green on the wood above the brick and has a faded red front door no one ever uses. The bedroom curtain zips closed. Joe hasn’t been paying attention there. Some somnolent quality in the moment or the place or the misty rain or the distant rumble of Route 1 has rendered him unexpectedly capable of thinking a whole thought through.
“I don’t think it’s that meaningful, though, Joe,” I say.
“And I don’t even care a goddamned thing about this woman,” he says. “If she’d called me and said she was flying out to Burlington and wanted to meet me in a Holiday Inn and fuck me to death, I’d have most likely begged off.” Joe is not aware he has contradicted himself inside of a minute.
“Maybe she just figured that out and decided to let it go herself. Saved you the trouble.”
“But I’m just struck about my judgment,” Joe says sadly. “I was sure she’d call. That’s all. It was something she did, not something I did, or was even right about. Everything happened without me. Just like what’s going on here.”
“Maybe you’ll like this house,” I say lamely. The big front picture-window curtain at 213 now goes slashing back, and young red-haired Marilyn is standing in the middle, fixing us with what seems to me from here to be an accusing frown, as if whatever she took us for was making her mad enough to flash us the evil eye.
“You must’ve had this happen.” Joe looks toward me but not at me, in fact, looks right straight back over my left shoulder, which is his usual and most comfortable mode of address. “We’re the same age. You’ve been divorced. Had lots of women.”
“We need to go on inside, Joe,” I say. Though I am sympathetic. Not trusting your judgment—and, worse, knowing you shouldn’t trust it for some damn substantial reasons—can be one of the major causes and also one of the least tolerable ongoing features of the Existence Period, one you have to fine-tune out by the use of caution. “But let me just try to say this to you.” I cross my hands in front of my fly, holding my clipboard down there like an insurance adjuster. “When I got divorced, I was sure things had all happened to me and that I hadn’t really acted and was probably a coward and at least an asshole. Who knows if I was right? But I made one promise to myself, and that was that I’d never complain about my life, and just go on and try to do my best, mistakes and all, since there’s only so much anybody can do to make things come out right, judgment or no judgment. And I’ve kept my promise. And I don’t think you’re the kind of guy to fashion a life by avoiding mistakes. You make choices and live with them, even if you don’t feel like you’ve chosen a damn thing.” Joe may think, and I hope he does, that I’ve paid him a compliment of the rarest kind for being untranslatable.
His little bristle-mouth again makes a characteristic 0, which he is totally oblivious to, his eyes going narrow as razor cuts. “Sounds like you’re telling me to shut up.”
“I just want us to have a look at this house so you and Phyllis can think about what you want to do. And I don’t want you to worry about making a mistake before you even ha
ve a chance to make one.
Joe shakes his head, sneers, then sighs—a habit I intensely dislike, and for that reason I hope he buys the Houlihan house and discovers an eyelash too late that it’s sitting over a sinkhole. “My profs at Duquesne always said I overintellectualized too much.” He sneers again.
“That’s what I was trying to suggest,” I say, just as the flame-haired woman in 213 whisks across the picture-window space, north to south, totally in the buff, a big protuberant pair of white breasts leading the way, her arms out Isadora Duncan style, her good, muscular legs leaping and striding like a painting on an antique urn. “Wow, look at that,” I say. Joe, though, has shaken his head again over what a brainy guy he is, chuckled and ambled on off, and is already mounting the steps of what might be his last home on earth. Though what he’s just missed is a neighbor’s neighborly way of letting the prospective buyer know what he’s getting into out here, and frankly it’s a sight that causes my estimation of Penns Neck to go up and off the charts. It has mystery and the unexpected as its hidden assets—much better than shade—and Joe, had he seen it, might also have seen where his own interests lay and known exactly what to do.
Stepping inside the little arched front foyer, I can hear Phyllis far in the back already having an important-sounding conversation about gypsy moths, and about what her recent experience has been in Vermont. She is having this, I feel sure, with Ted Houlihan, who shouldn’t be here haunting his own house, badgering the shit out of my clients, satisfying himself they’re the kind of “solid” (meaning white) folks he’ll be comfortable passing his precious fee simple on to.
All the table lamps have been turned on. The floors are shiny, ashtrays cleaned, radiator tops dusted, floor moldings scrubbed, doorknobs polished. A welcome waxy smell deodorizes all—a sound selling strategy for creating the illusion that nobody actually lives here.