by Richard Ford
“You can’t see it,” Phyllis says, “but it’s back there.”
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Joe says. He flashes a look back at Phyllis in her shades. A giant dump truck blows past, rocking the car on its chassis. “They have a gap in the fence where you can trade recipes.” He snorts.
“A cake with a file in it,” Phyllis says, her face unresigned. I try to catch her eye in the rearview, but can’t. “I don’t see it.”
“I goddamned see it,” Joe growls.
We sit staring for thirty more seconds, and then it’s off we go.
As a negative inducement and a double cincher, I drive us out past Mallards Landing, where everything is as it was two hours ago, only wetter. A few workmen are moving inside the half-studded homes. A crew of black men is loading wads of damp sod off a flatbed and stacking them in front of the MODEL that’s supposedly OPEN but isn’t and in fact looks like a movie façade where a fictionalized American family would someday pay the fictionalized mortgage. It puts me and, I’m sure, the Markhams in mind of the prison we just left.
“Like I was saying to Phyllis,” I say to Joe, “these are in your price window, but they’re not what you described.”
“I’d rather have AIDS than live in that junk,” Joe snarls, and doesn’t look at Phyllis, who sits in the back, peering out toward the strobing oil-storage depot and the bulldozed piles of now unsmoldering trees. Why have I come here? she is almost certainly thinking. How long a ride back is it by Vermont Transit? She could be down at the Lyndonville Farmers’ Co-op at this very moment, a clean red kerchief on her head, she and Sonja blithely but responsibly shopping for the holiday—surprise fruits for the “big fruit bowl” she’ll take to the Independence Day bash. Chinese kites would be tethered above the veggie stalls. Someone would be playing a dulcimer and singing quirky mountain tunes full up with sexual double meanings. Labs and goldens by the dozens would be scratching and lounging around, wearing colorful bandanna collars of their own. Where has that all disappeared to, she is wondering. What have I done?
Suddenly crash-boom! Somewhere miles aloft in the peaceful atmosphere, invisible to all, a war jet breaks the barrier of harmonious sound and dream, reverbs rumbling toward mountaintops and down the coastal slope. Phyllis jumps. “Oh fuck,” she says. “What was that?”
“I broke wind. Sorry,” Joe says, smirking at me, and then we say no more.
At the Sleepy Hollow, the Markhams, who have ridden the rest of the way in total motionless silence, seem now reluctant to depart my car. The scabby motel lot is empty except for their ancient borrowed Nova with its mismatched tires and moronic anesthetists’ sticker caked with Green Mountain road dirt. A small, pinkly dressed maid wearing her dark hair in a bun is flickering in and out the doorway to #7, loading a night’s soiled linen and towels into a cloth hamper and carting in stacks of fresh.
The Markhams would both rather be dead than anywhere that’s available to them, and for a heady, unwise moment I consider letting them follow me home, setting them up for a weekend of house discussion on Cleveland Street—a safe, depression-free base from which they could walk to a movie, eat a decent bluefish or manicotti dinner at the August Inn, window-shop down Seminary Street till Phyllis can’t stand not to live here, or at least nearby.
Though that is simply not in the cards, and my heart strikes two and a half sharp, admonitory beats at the very thought. Not only do I not like the idea of them rummaging around in my life’s accoutrements (which they would absolutely do, then lie about it), but since we’re not talking offer, I want them left as solitary as Siberia so they can get their options straight. They could always, of course, move themselves up to the new Sheraton or the Cabot Lodge and pay the freight. Though in its own way each of these is as dismal as the Sleepy Hollow. In my former sportswriter’s life I often sought shelter and even exotic romance in such spiritless hideaways, and often, briefly, found it. But no more. No way.
Joe has gone all the way through his list of questions left unanswered on the listing sheet, which he has spindled, then folded, his former lion’s certainty now beginning to wane. “Any chance of a lease option back there at Houlihan’s?” he says, as we all three just sit.
“No.”
“Any chance Houlihan might come off a buck fifty-five?”
“Make an offer.”
“When can Houlihan vacate?”
“Minimum time. He has cancer.”
“Would you negotiate the commission down to four percent?”
(This comes as no surprise.) “No.”
“What’s the bank renting money for these days?”
(Again.) “Ten-four on a thirty-year fixed, plus a point, plus an application fee.”
We skirl down through everything Joe can dredge up. I have turned the a/c vent into my face until I almost decide again to let them move into my house. Except, forty-five showings is the statistical point of no return, and the Markhams have today gone to forty-six. Clients, after this point, frequently don’t buy a house but shove off to other locales, or else do something nutty like take a freighter to Bahrain or climb the Matterhorn. Plus, I might have a hard time getting them to leave. (In truth, I’m ready to cut the Markhams loose, let them set off toward a fresh start in the Amboys.)
Though of course they might just as well say, “Okay. Let’s just get the sonofabitch bought and quit niggly-pigglying around. We’re in for the full boat. Let’s get an offer sheet filled out.” I’ve got a boxful in my trunk. “Here’s five grand. We’re moving into the Sheraton Tara. You get your sorry ass back over to Houlihan’s, tell him to get his bags packed for Tucson or go fuck himself, because one fifty’s all we’re offering because that’s all we’ve got. Take an hour to decide.”
People do that. Houses get sold on the spot; checks get written, escrow accounts opened, moving companies called from windy pay phones outside Hojo’s. It makes my job one hell of a lot easier. Though when it happens that way it’s usually rich Texans or maxillary surgeons or political operatives fired for financial misdealings and looking for a place to hide out until they can be players again. Rarely does it happen with potters and their pudgy paper-making wives who wander back to civilization from piddly-ass Vermont with emaciated wallets and not a clue about what makes the world go around but plenty of opinions about how it ought to.
Joe sits in the front seat grinding his molars, breathing audibly and staring out at the foreign national swamping out their soiled room with a mop and a bottle of Pine-Sol. Phyllis, in her Marginalia shades, sits thinking—what? It’s anybody’s guess. There’s no question left to ask, no worry to express, no resolve or ultimatum worth enunciating. They’ve reached the point where nothing’s left to do but act. Or not.
But by God, Joe doesn’t like it even in spite of loving the house, and sits inventorying his brain for something more to say, some barrier to erect. Likely it will have to do with “seeing from above” again, or wanting to make some great discovery.
“Maybe we should think about renting,” Phyllis says vacantly. I have her in my mirror, keeping to herself like a bereaved widow. She has been staring at the hubcap bazaar next door, where no one’s visible in the rain-soaked yard, though the hubcaps sparkle and clank in the breeze. She may be seeing something as a metaphor for something else.
Unexpectedly, though, she sits forward and lays a consolidating mitt on Joe’s bare, hairy shoulder, which causes him to jump like he’d been stabbed. Though he quickly detects this as a gesture of solidarity and tenderness, and lumpily reaches round and grubs her hand with his. All patrols and units are now being called in. A unified response is imminent. It is the bedrock gesture of marriage, something I have somehow missed out on, and rue.
“Most of your better rentals turn up when the Institute term ends and people leave. That was last month,” I say. “You didn’t like anything then.”
“Is there anything we might get into temporarily?” Joe says, limply holding Phyllis’s plu
mp fingers as though she were laid out beside him in a hospital bed.
“I’ve got a place I own,” I say. “It might not be what you want.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Joe and Phyllis say in suspicious unison.
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” I say. “It happens to be in a black neighborhood.”
“Oh Je-sus. Here we go,” Joe says, as if this was a long-foreseeable and finally sprung trap. “That’s all I need. Spooks. Thanks for nothin’.” He shakes his head in disgust.
“That’s not how we look at things in Haddam, Joe,” I say coolly. “That’s not how I practice realty.”
“Well, good for you,” he says, seething but still holding Phyllis’s hand, probably tighter than she likes. “You don’t live there,” he fumes. “And you don’t have kids.”
“I do have kids,” I say. “And I’d happily live there with them if I didn’t already live someplace else.” I give Joe a hard, iron-browed frown meant to say that beyond what he already doesn’t know about, the world he left behind in nineteen seventy-whatever is an empty crater, and he’ll get no sympathy here if it turns out he doesn’t like the present.
“What you got, some shotgun shacks you collect rent on every Saturday morning?” Joe says this in a mealy, nasty way. “My old man ran that scam in Aliquippa. He ran it with Chinamen. He carried a pistol in his belt where they could see it. I used to sit in the car.”
“I don’t have a pistol,” I say. “I’m just doing you a favor by mentioning it.”
“Thanks. Forget about it.”
“We could go look at it,” Phyllis says, squeezing Joe’s hairy knuckles, which he’s balled up now into a menacing little fist.
“In a million years, maybe. But only maybe.” Joe yanks up the door latch, letting hot Route 1 whoosh in.
“The Houlihan house is worth thinking about,” I say to the car seat Joe is vacating, giving a sidelong look to Phyllis in the back.
“You realty guys,” Joe says from outside, where I can just see his ball-packer shorts. “You’re always nosing after the fucking sale.” He then just stalks off in the direction of the cleaning woman, who’s standing beside her laundry hamper and his very room, looking at Joe as if he were a strange sight (which he is).
“Joe’s not a good compromiser,” Phyllis says lamely. “He may be having dosage problems too.”
“He’s free to do whatever he wants, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I know,” Phyllis says. “You’re very patient with us. I’m sorry we’re so much trouble.” She pats me on my shoulder, just the way she did asshole Joe. A victory pat. I don’t much appreciate it.
“It’s my job,” I say.
“We’ll be in touch with you, Frank,” Phyllis says, struggling to exit her door to the hot morning heading toward eleven.
“That’s just great, Phyllis,” I say. “Call me at the office and leave a message. I’ll be in Connecticut with my son. I don’t get to spend that much time with him. We can do pretty much everything on the phone if there’s anything to talk about.”
“We’re trying, Frank,” Phyllis says, blinking pathetically at the idea of my son who’s an epileptic, but not wanting to mention it. “We’re really trying here.”
“I can tell,” I lie, and turn and give her a contrite smile, which for some reason drives her right out of the doorway and across the hot little crumbling motel lot in search of her unlikely husband.
Inow find myself in a whir to get back into town, and so split the breeze over the steamy pavement up Route 1, retaking King George Road for the directest route to Seminary Street. I have more of the day returned to me than I’d expected, and I mean to put it to use by making a second stop by the McLeods’, before driving out to Franks on Route 31, then heading straight down to South Mantoloking for some earlier than usual quality time with Sally, plus dinner.
I’d hoped, of course, to be back in the office, running the numbers on an offer or already delivering same to Ted Houlihan, hustling to get various balls rolling—calling a contractor for a structural inspection, getting the earnest money deposited, vetting the termite contract, dialing up Fox McKinney at Garden State Savings for a fast track through to the mortgage board. There’s absolutely nothing an owner likes better than a quick, firm reply to his sell decision. Philosophically, as Ted said, it indicates the world is more or less the way we best feature it. (Most of what we unhappily hear back from the world being: “Boy, we’re back-ordered on that one, it’ll take six weeks;” or, “I thought they quit making those gizmos in ’58;” or, “You’ll have to have that part milled special, and the only guy who does it is on a walking trip through Swaziland. Take a vacation, we’ll call you.”) And yet if an agent can pry loose a well-conceived offer on an entirely new listing, the likelihood of clear sailing all the way to closing is geometrically increased by the simple weight of seller satisfaction, confidence, a feeling of corroboration and a sense of immanent meaning. Real closure in other words.
Consequently, it’s a good strategy to set the Markhams adrift as I just did, let them wheeze around in their clunker Nova, brooding about all the houses in all the neighborhoods they’ve sneered at, then crawl back for a nap in the Sleepy Hollow—one in which they doze off in daylight but awake startled, disoriented and demoralized after dark, lying side by side, staring at the greasy motel walls, listening to the traffic drum past, everyone but them bound for cozy seaside holiday arrangements where youthful, happy, perfect-toothed loved ones wave greetings from lighted porches and doorways, holding big pitchers of cold gin. (I myself hope shortly to be arriving for just such a welcome—to be a cheerful, eagerly awaited addition to the general store of holiday fun, having a million laughs, feeling the world’s woe rise off me someplace where the Markhams can’t reach me. Possibly bright and early tomorrow there’ll either be a frantic call from Joe wanting to slam a bid in by noon, or else no call—confoundment having taken over and driven them back to Vermont and public assistance—in which case I’ll be rid of them. Win-win again.)
It’s perfectly evident that the Markhams haven’t looked in life’s mirror in a while—forget about Joe’s surprise look this morning. Vermont’s spiritual mandate, after all, is that you don’t look at your-selfy but spend years gazing at everything else as penetratingly as possible in the conviction that everything out there more or less stands for you, and everything’s pretty damn great because you are. (Emerson has some different opinions about this.) Only, with home buying as your goal, there’s no real getting around a certain self-viewing.
Right about now, unless I miss my guess, Joe and Phyllis are lying just as I pictured them, stiff as planks, side by side, fully clothed on their narrow bed, staring up into the dim, flyspeck ceiling with all the lights off, realizing as silent as corpses that they can’t help seeing themselves. They are the lonely, haunted people soon to be seen standing in a driveway or sitting on a couch or a cramped patio chair (wherever they land next), peering disconcertedly into a TV camera while being interviewed by the six o’clock news not merely as average Americans but as people caught in the real estate crunch, indistinct members of an indistinct class they don’t want to be members of—the frustrated, the ones on the bubble, the ones who suffer, those forced to live anonymous and glum on short cul-de-sac streets named after the builder’s daughter or her grade-school friends.
And the only thing that’ll save them is to figure out a way to think about themselves and most everything else differently; formulate fresh understandings based on the faith that for new fires to kindle, old ones have to be dashed; and based less on isolating, boneheaded obstinance and more, for instance, on the wish to make each other happy without neutralizing the private self—which was why they showed up in New Jersey in the first place instead of staying in the mountains and becoming smug casualties of their own idiotic miscues.
With the Markhams, of course, it’s hard to believe they’ll work it out. A year from now Joe would be the fir
st person to kick back at a summer solstice party in some neighbor’s new-mown hay meadow, sipping homemade lager and grazing a hand-fired plate full of vegetarian lasagna—naked kids a-frolic in the twilight, the smell of compost, the sound of a brook and a gas generator in the background—and hold forth on the subject of change and how anybody’s a coward who can’t do it: a philosophy naturally honed on his and Phyllis’s own life experiences (which include divorce, inadequate parenting practices, adultery, self-importance, and spatial dislocation).
Though it’s change that’s driving him crackers now. The Markhams say they won’t compromise on their ideal. But they aren’t compromising! They can’t afford their ideal. And not buying what you can’t afford’s not a compromise; it’s reality speaking English. To get anywhere you have to learn to speak the same language back.
And yet they may find hidden strengths: their fumbling, lurching Sistine Chapel touch across the car seat was a promising signal, but it’s one they’ll need to elaborate over the weekend, when they’re on their own. And inasmuch as I’m not in possession of their check, on their own’s where they’ll be—sweating it but also, I hope, commencing the process of self-seeing as a sacred initiation to a fuller later life.
4
It might be of some interest to say how I came to be a Residential Specialist, distant as it is from my prior vocations of failed short-story writer and sports journalist. A good liver would be a man or woman who’d distilled all of life that’s important down to a few inter-related principles and events, which are easy to explain in fifteen minutes and don’t require a lot of perplexed pauses and apologies for this or that being hard to understand exactly if you weren’t there. (Finally, almost nobody else is ever able to “be there,” and in many cases it’s too bad you have to be.) And it is in this streamlined, distilled sense that it’s possible to say my former wife’s getting remarried and moving to Connecticut is what brought me to where I am.