Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  It felt like home, in other words; and if not my home, at least my kids’ home, someone’s home. Whereas since Ann’s announcement, my old place had begun to feel barny and murky, murmurous and queer, and myself strangely outdistanced as its owner—in the yard cranking away on the Lawn-Boy, or standing in my driveway, hands on hips, supervising from below the patching of a new squirrel hole under the chimney flashing. I was no longer, I felt, preserving anything for anything, even for myself, but was just going through the motions, joining life’s rough timbers end to end.

  Consequently, I got promptly over to Lauren-Schwindell and threw my hat in both rings at once: hers to buy, mine to sell. My thinking was, if lightning struck and Charley and his new bride came unglued during week one, Ann and I could forge our new beginning in her house (then later move to Maine more or less as newlyweds).

  So, before the O’Dells returned home (no annulment was pending), I’d entered a full-price cash offer on 116 Cleveland and, through a savvy intercession by old man Otto Schwindell himself, reached an extremely advantageous deal with the Theological Institute to take over my house for the purpose of converting it into the Ecumenical Center where guests like Bishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama and the head of the Icelandic Federation of Churches could hold high-level confabs about the fate of the world’s soul, and still find accommodations homey enough to slip down after midnight for a snack.

  The Institute’s Board of Overseers was, in fact, highly sensitive to my tax situation, since my house appraised out at an eye-popping million two, near the peak of the boom. Their lawyers were able to set up a healthy annuity which earns interest for me and later passes on to Paul and Clarissa, and by whose terms I in essence donated my house as an outright gift, claimed a whopper deduction and afterward received a generous “consultant’s” fee in what I think of as temporal affairs. (This tax loophole has since been closed, but too late, since what’s done’s done.)

  One bright and green August day, I simply walked out the door and down the steps of my house, leaving all my furniture except for books and nostalgic attachments (my map of Block Island, a hatch-cover table, a leather chair I liked, my marriage bed), drove over to Ann’s house on Cleveland, with all her old-new furniture sitting exactly where she’d left it, and took up residence. I was allowed to keep my old phone number.

  And truth to tell I hardly noticed the difference, so often had I lain awake nights in my old place or roamed the rooms and halls of hers when all were sleeping—searching, I suppose, for where I fit in, or where I’d gone wrong, or how I could breathe air into my ghostly self and become a recognizable if changed-for-the-better figure in their sweet lives or my own. One house is as good as another for this kind of private enterprise. And the poet was right again: “Let the wingèd Fancy roam, / Pleasure never is at home.”

  Getting going in the realty business followed as a natural offspring of selling my house and buying Ann’s. Once all was settled and I was “at home” on Cleveland Street, I started thinking again about new enterprises, about diversification and stashing my new money someplace smart. A ministorage in New Sharon, a train-station lobster house rehab, a chain of low-maintenance self-serv car washes—all rose as possibles. Though none did I immediately bite for, since I still somehow felt frozen in place, unable or unwilling or just uninspired to move into action. Without Ann and my kids nearby, I, in fact, felt as lonely and inessential and exposed as a lighthouse keeper in broad daylight.

  Unmarried men in their forties, if we don’t subside entirely into the landscape, often lose important credibility and can even attract unwholesome attention in a small, conservative community. And in Haddam, in my new circumstances, I felt I was perhaps becoming the personage I least wanted to be and, in the years since my divorce, had feared being: the suspicious bachelor, the man whose life has no mystery, the graying, slightly jowly, slightly too tanned and trim middle-ager, driving around town in a cheesy ’58 Chevy ragtop polished to a squeak, always alone on balmy summer nights, wearing a faded yellow polo shirt and green suntans, elbow over the window top, listening to progressive jazz, while smiling and pretending to have everything under control, when in fact there was nothing to control.

  One morning in November, though, Roily Mounger, one of the broker-agents at Lauren-Schwindell, and the one who had walked me through my buyout with the Institute and who is a big ex-Fair-leigh Dickinson nose-tackle out of Piano, Texas, called up to advise me about some tax forms I needed to get hold of after New Year’s and to fill me in on some “investment entities” dealing with government refinance grants for a bankrupt apartment complex in Kendall Park that he was putting together with “other principals”—just in case I wanted a first crack (I didn’t). He said, however, as if in passing, that he himself was just before pulling up stakes and heading to Seattle to get involved with some lucrative commercial concepts he didn’t want to get particular about; and would I like to come over and talk to some people about coming on there as a residential specialist. My name, he said, had come up “seriously” any number of times from several different sources (why, and who, I couldn’t guess and never found out and I’m sure now it was a total lie). It was generally thought, he said, I had strong natural credentials “per se” for their line of work: which was to say I was looking to get into a new situation; I wasn’t hurting for dough (a big plus in any line of work); I knew the area, was single and had a pleasant personality. Plus, I was mature—meaning over forty—and I didn’t seem to have a lot of attachments in the community, a factor that made selling houses one hell of a lot easier.

  What did I think?

  Training, paperwork and “all that good boool dukie,” Roily said, could be plowed under right on the job while I went nights to a three-month course up at the Weiboldt Realty Training Institute in New Brunswick, after which I could take the state boards and start printing money like the rest of them.

  And the truth was, having parted with or been departed from by most everything, until I was left almost devoid of all expectation, I thought it was a reasonable idea. In those last three months I’d begun to feel that living through the consequences of my various rash acts and bad decisions had had its downsides as well as its purported rewards, and if it was possible to be at a complete loss without being miserable about it, that’s what I was. I’d started going fishing alone at the Red Man Club three afternoons a week, sometimes staying overnight in the little beaverboard cabin meant for keeping elderly members out of the rain, taking a book up with me but ultimately just lying there in the dark listening to big fish kerplunking and mosquitoes bopping the screen, while not very far away the bangety-bang of I-80 soothed the night and, out east, Gotham shone like a temple set to fire by infidels. I still registered a faint tingle of the synchronicity I’d felt when I got back from France. I was still dead set on taking the kids to Mississippi and the Pine Barrens once they were settled, and had even joined AAA and gotten color-coded maps with sidebars to various attractions down side roads (Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame was in fact one of them).

  But tiny things—things I’d never even noticed when Ann lived in Haddam and we shared responsibilities and I held down my sportswriting job—had begun to get the better of me. Some little worry, some little anything, would settle into my thinking—for instance, how was I going to get my car serviced on Tuesday but also get to the airport to sign for a Greek rug I’d ordered from Thessaloníki and had been waiting on for months and was sure some thieving airport worker would steal if I wasn’t there to lay hands on it the instant it came down the conveyer? Should I rent a car? Should I send someone? Who? And would that person even be willing to go if I could think of who he or she was, or would that person think I was an idiot? Should I call the broker in Greece and tell him to delay the shipping? Should I call the freight company and say I’d be a day late getting up there and would they please see to it the rug was kept in a safe place until my car was ready? I’d wake up right in the Red Man Club cabin, my heart booming
, or in my own new house, brooding about such things, sweating, clenching my fists, scheming how to get this plus a hundred other simple, ordinary things done, as if everything were a crisis as big as my health. Later I’d start to think about how stupid it was to carry such things around all day. I’d decide then to trust fate, go up and get it when I could or maybe never, or to forget the fucking rug and just go fishing. Though then I’d start to fear I was letting everything go, that my life was spinning crazy-out-of-azimuth, proportion and common sense flying out the window like pie plates. Then I’d realize that years later I’d look back on this period as a “bad time,” when I was “waaaay out there at the edge,” my everyday conduct as erratic and zany as a roomful of chimps, only I was the last to notice (again, one’s neighbors would be the first: “He really sort of stayed to himself a lot, though he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I wouldn’t have expected anything like this!”).

  Now, of course, in 1988, driving into sunny Haddam with better hopes for the day squirreling around my belly, I know the source of that devilment. I’d paid handsome dues to the brotherhood of consolidated mistake-makers, and having survived as well as I had, I wanted my goddamned benefits: I wanted everything to go my way and to be happy all the time, and I was wild it wouldn’t work out like that. I wanted the Greek rug delivery not to interfere with getting my windshield washer pump replaced. I wanted the fact that I had left France and Catherine Flaherty and come home in the best spirit of enterprise and good works to still somehow reward me in big numbers. I wanted the fact that my wife had managed to divorce me again and worse, and even divorce my kids from me, to become a fact of life I got smoothly used to and made the most of. I wanted a lot of things, in other words (these are just samples). And I’m not in fact sure all this didn’t constitute another “kind of major crisis,” though it may also be how you feel when you survive one.

  But what I wanted more than anything was to quit being deviled so I could have a chance for the rest, and it occurred to me once I’d listened to Roily Mounger’s idea that I might try out a new thought (since I wasn’t making any other headway): I might just take seriously his list of my “qualifications” and let them lead me toward the unexpected—instead of going on worrying about how happy I was all the time—after which worries and contingencies might glide away like leaves on a slack tide, and I might find myself, if not in the warp of many highly dramatic events, reckless furies and rocketing joie de vivre, still as close to day-to-day happy as I could be. This code of conduct, of course, is the most self-preserving and salubrious tenet of the Existence Period and makes real estate its ideal occupation.

  I told Roily Mounger I’d give his suggestion some serious thought, even though I said the idea pretty much came out of left field. He said there was no hurry to make a decision about becoming a realtor, that down at their office everyone had gotten there by different routes and timetables, and there were no two alike. He himself, he said, had been a supermarket developer and before that a policy strategist for a Libertarian state senate candidate. One person had a Ph.D. in American literature; another had left a seat on the Exchange; a third was a dentist! They all worked as independents but acted in concert whenever possible, which gave everybody a damn good feeling. Everybody had made a “ton of money” in the last few years and expected to make a ton more before the big correction came (“the whole industry” knew it was coming). From his point of view, which he admitted favored the commercial side, all you needed to do to wake up rich was “get with your money people, put some key factors and some financing on the table,” locate some unimproved parcels your group can handle the debt service and taxes on for twelve to eighteen months, then once the time’s up sell out the whole trunkload to some Johnny-come-lately Arabs or Japs and start cashing in your chips. “Let your money people run the risk gauntlet,” Roily said. “You just sit tight in the middle seat and take your commissions.” (You could always, of course, “participate” yourself, and he admitted he had. But the exposure could be substantial.)

  To figure all this out took me no time at all. If everybody came at it from all angles, I thought maybe I could find one of my own to work—relying on the concept that you don’t sell a house to someone, you sell a life (this had so far been my experience). In this way I could still pursue my original plan to do for others while looking after Number One, which seemed a good aspiration as I entered a part of life when I’d decided to expect less, hope for modest improvements and be willing to split the difference.

  I went down to the office in three days and got introduced around to everybody—a crew of souls who seemed like people you wouldn’t mind working out of the same office with. A short, bunchy-necked, thick-waisted dyke in a business suit and wing tips, named Peg, with Buick-bumper breasts, braces on her teeth and hair bleached silver (she was the Ph.D.). There was a tall, salt-and-pepper, blue-blazer Harvard grad in his late fifties—this was Shax Murphy, who’s since bought the agency and who’d retired out of some brokerage firm and still owned a house in Vinalhaven. He had his long, gray-flanneled legs stretched out in the aisle between desks, one big shiny cordovan oxford on top of the other, his face red as a western sunset from years of gentlemanly drinking, and I took to him instantly because when I shook his hand he had just put down a dog-eared copy of Paterson, which made me think he probably had life in pretty much the right perspective. “You just need to remember the three most important words in the ‘relaty budnus,’ Frank, and you’ll do fine in this shop,” he said, jiggering his heavy brows up and down mock seriously. ‘Locution, locution, locution.’” He sniffed loudly through his big ruby nose, rolled his eyes and went right back to reading.

  Everyone else in the office at that time—two or three young realtor associates and the dentist—has left since the ’86 slide began to seem like a long fall-off. All of them were people without solid stakes in town or capital to back them up, and they quickly scattered back out of sight—to vet school at Michigan State, back home to New Hampshire, one in the Navy, and of course Clair Devane, who came later and met an unhappy end.

  Old man Schwindell accorded me only the briefest, most cursory of interviews. He was an old, palely grim, wispy-haired, flaking-skinned little tyrant in an out-of-season seersucker suit and whom I’d seen in town for years, knew nothing about and viewed as a curio—though it was he who’d done the behind-the-scenes knitting of my deal with the Institute. He was also the “dean” of New Jersey realtors and had thirty plaques on his office wall saying as much, along with framed photos of himself with movie stars and generals and prizefighters he’d sold homes to. No longer officially active, he held forth in the back office, hunched behind a cluttered old glass-topped desk with his coat always on, smoking Pall Malls.

  “Do you believe in progress, Bascombe?” Old man Schwindell squinted his almost hueless blue eyes up at me. He had a big mustache yellowed by eight million Pall Malls, and his grizzled hair was thick on the sides and growing out his ears but was thin on top and falling out in clusters. He suddenly groped behind himself without looking, clutched at the clear plastic hose attached to a big oxygen cylinder on wheels, yanked it and strapped a little elastic band around his head so that a tiny clear nozzle fit up into his nose and fed him air. “You know that’s our motto,” he gasped, routing his eyes down to monkey with his lifeline.

  “That’s what Rolly’s told me,” I said. Roily had never mentioned word one about progress, had talked only about risk gauntlets, capital gains taxes and exposure, all of which he was dead against.

  “I’m not going to ask you about it now. Don’t worry,” old man Schwindell said, not entirely satisfied with his flow, straining around to twist a green knob on the cylinder and succeeding only in getting half a good breath. “When you’ve been around here and know something,” he said with difficulty, “FU ask you to tell me your definition of progress. And if you give me the wrong answer, FU get rid of you on the spot.” He swiveled back around and gave me a mean little ocher-tooth
ed leer, his air apparatus getting in the way of his mouth, though his breathing was going much more smoothly, so that he might’ve felt like he wasn’t about to die that very minute. “How’s that? Is that fair?”

  “I think that’s fair,” I said. “I’ll try to give you a good answer.”

  “Don’t give me a good answer. Give me the right answer!” he shouted. “Nobody should graduate the sixth grade without an idea of what progress is all about. Don’t you think so?”

  “I agree completely,” I said, and I did, though mine had been suffering some setbacks.

  “Then you’re good enough to start. You don’t have to be any good anyway. Realty sells itself in this town. Or it used to.” He started fiddling more furiously with his breathing tubes, trying to get the holes to line up better with his old hairy nostrils. And my interview was over, though I stood there for almost another minute before I recognized he wasn’t going to say anything else, so that I just eventually let myself out.

  And for all practical purposes I was on my sweet way after that. Roily Mounger took me to lunch at The Two Lawyers. I’d have a “break-in period,” he told me, of about three months, when I’d be on salary (no insurance or benefits). Everybody would chip in and rotate me around the office, see to it I learned the MLS hardware and the office lingo. I’d go on “beaucoup” house showings and closings and inspections and realty caravans, “just to get to know whatever,” all this while I was going to class at my own expense—“three hundred bucks más o menos.” At the end of the course I’d take the state exam at the La Quinta in Trenton, then “jump right in on the commission side and start root-hoggin’.”

  “I wish I could tell you there was one goddamn hard thing about any of this, Frank,” Roily said in amazement. “But”—and he shook his jowly, buzz-cut head—“if it was so goddamned hard why would I be doing it? Hard work’s what the other asshole does.” And with that he cut a big bracking fart right into his Naugahyde chair and looked all around at the other lunchers, grinning like a farm boy. “You know, your soul’s not supposed to be in this,” he said. “This is realty. Reality’s something else—that’s when you’re born and you die. This is the in-between stuff here.”