The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  While they spooned through a lobster bisque that had the consistency of pudding, the color of freshly dug clay, and the taste, principally, of black pepper—all of them but Sarah, who pushed a salad around her plate and poured herself a second glass of the leggy wine—Veronica and Phil explained how they’d first met and found themselves in business together. Sarah had asked, because whenever she’d asked Abbie, he’d waved it off with an “Oh, you know how these things are” and gone back to whatever he was doing; the suggestion that he knew but found the whole thing too boring to share was his habitual reply when he didn’t know something.

  They’d met in West Virginia. “Some motherfucker had told these rednecks that their land was worth two million bucks, and it was going to fuck up a deal.” Harrow flapped his hands and smiled. “Two million dollars! It was worth a hundred thousand, maybe, on the market. But two million was the max my buyers were willing to pay.” Harrow had the makings of a deal to erect a plaza anchored by a Wal-Mart and a Fairfield Inn near Beckley. It was a promising and simple deal, in which the owners of about a hundred acres of mostly woodland would sell to a New York–based developer, who represented Walton interests in the Northeast, of which West Virginia found itself a distant, dangling appendage. They’d already gobbled most of the acreage up, and cheaply.

  But thirty odd acres and a gaggle of recalcitrant yokel owners led by some kind of redneck mafia queen named Sherri Larimer and her pair of apparently terrifying sons stood in the way of its completion. Someone had told her to ask for millions of dollars, ten times the price they ought to get, the sort of money that, Harrow knew, would come out of his construction contract on the other end. Harrow could not abide doing business when everyone had the same information. Profit, especially in land deals, was built on information arbitrage; it was hard to dispossess people who knew what they possessed, especially when they were ignorant fucks from deep in the hollers who believed these sorts of transactions to have a kind of moral dimension. He’d tried to approach several of the landholders individually; one defection usually brought down an ad-hoc association of neighbors, but they only stared at him through their screen doors and said, “You gotta talk to Sherri.” Senator Byrd was building another goddamn highway through the wildest part of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia, and Harrow was trying to get these New York fucks to buy beside a future interchange of I-64 and I-77, not far from the New River Gorge—he’d got them to imagine that a seasonal influx of whitewater rafters and granola-eaters was going to support the Wal-Mart and an outlet mall and at least one hotel and a lot of other such nonsense.

  Veronica Mayer was sitting quietly in the back of a gang of attorneys who’d flown out from New York (and from Morgantown down to Beckley in a goddamn helicopter, if you could believe it) to represent the General Properties Group, which in turn represented—everyone knew—the Walton family. She was the youngest of them; she didn’t even look thirty yet; and although Harrow thought she looked pretty cute, he was in no position to flirt with cute lady lawyers while a deal collapsed around him. They’d been sequestered in a room for a couple of hours now. He was ranting, he knew, but these wingtipped, French-cuffed assholes were going to eat him for lunch if he didn’t play it right. Jesus goddamn Christ, he hoped one of the Larimers did something crazy. The lawyers already knew, of course, that the Larimers had upped the ask. Their evident calm on the phone the day before—“That price,” said Jerry Meegan, Esquire, “is obviously higher than we’d like, but not wholly outside of the realm of consideration”—had sent him into a panic; no one casually throwing around that kind of money for a few parcels of undeveloped property could be trusted not to fuck you over. No one who used the phrase “not wholly outside the realm of consideration” could possibly be telling the truth.

  The first time he’d met the Larimers, he’d spent five hours in a car—not counting the drive down—just trying to find the place. He kept ending up back in Beckley. Finally, when he felt certain he was getting close, he pulled over at an unbelievable gas station whose sign read FUEL, BAIT, VENISON, JERKY and asked the clerk if he knew where they lived and the clerk removed his hat very slowly and rubbed his head very slowly and drawled very slowly, “Well sure, son. You just wanna go about four looks down Sullivan Road that way and then you’ll see a sign for Split Lake Hollow Road. Now don’t take that. You’ll wanna go a little farther along. They’re up Ward Road, on your left.”

  “I’m sorry,” Harrow said. “A few what?”

  “Well, just a few looks.”

  “A few looks.”

  “Yessir. Just a few.”

  Harrow had a personal philosophy that business success was principally the ability to tolerate the intolerable. Like most things he termed philosophy, it had little or no practical application for him. “What the hell is a look?”

  “Well shit,” the clerk said. “No reason to get nasty about it, young man. A look. You know. You look down the road”—he gestured back toward it—“and as far as you can look, that’s one look. And them Larimers, they’re a few more looks down the road.”

  The Larimers, Harrow discovered, weren’t even West Virginian. They were from Fayette County, Pennsylvania, twenty minutes over the state line from his own home in Morgantown. “Right up the road from me,” Harrow said genially. Their property, just a trailer, really, with a big wooden deck and an astonishing proliferation of surprisingly expensive vehicles, was, they told him, just their camp.

  “Like four goddamn hours up the road!” Raymond, the older of the two sons said.

  “Shut your goddamn mouth, Raymond. The adults are talking.” Sherri Larimer blew smoke toward him. He would have been in his early twenties at the time. “He’s talking about from Morgantown.” She eyed Harrow. “This here’s just our camp. Like I told you.”

  “I have to ask,” Harrow said. “Are you folks Larimers like Chet Larimer? Like the Hole-in-Gun?”

  “Finest shooting ranges, go-karts, and putt-putts in the Tri-state. That’s my husband. He don’t come down the camp much, on account of he’s on disability.” She lit a fresh cigarette and winked broadly. “Plus he don’t drink no more, cause of his diabetes. Not much point in camping if you can’t drink.”

  She offered Harrow a beer, which he accepted, and proceeded to listen credulously, he believed, as he told her that he could make her a few hundred thousand bucks, with which she could have her pick of camps.

  “What’s wrong with this one?”

  “Nothing, it’s a fine camp. But once they build that highway and interchange, it won’t be much good for hunting, will it?”

  “Hunting?” Sherri hooted. She pointed at the boys. “Ray don’t hunt, and Billy over there’s got stigmatism. He couldn’t hit the side of a barn. He ain’t bagged a deer in ten years.”

  “Well, it’ll ruin the scenery. And think about the noise.”

  “I’ll think about it. To be honest, I don’t much care for the drive down here, and we got another camp up near Fairchance anyhow.”

  “And you’ll talk to the other owners?”

  “Sure,” Larrimer said. She puffed a thin ring of smoke. “I’ll talk to them.”

  Sherri Larimer and her sons showed up at the Holiday Inn conference room—none of the law firms in Beckley had an available or big enough room—in formal clothes, the boys, as Sherri called Billy and Ray, stuffed into smooth-worn coats that pinched under their armpits and Sherri in a lacy white dress that looked like a relic from some evil wedding conducted before the opening credits of a horror film. She’d been in sweats and a Mountaineers shirt when Harrow had met her up at their property. Harrow, who had never been an accurate close observer of human self-presentation, though he believed otherwise, wrote it off as country-folk idiosyncrasy; it was all just coal miners and rural welfare. The idea that she might be putting them all on would have struck him as improbable at best. She took a pack of slender cigarettes out of her pocketbook. Billy lit one for her. “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. The lawyers reg
arded her impassively, except for Veronica, who sat a foot back from the table, as if in deference to her older male counterparts, and regarded the family across from her with a tilted head and look of polite curiosity. Sherri gestured at her with her smoke. “Nice to see yinz brought a lady.” Ray chuckled darkly. She narrowed her eyes. “Shut up, Raymond.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

  “I hate to be the only gal in the room.”

  “I love your dress, by the way,” Veronica said.

  Harrow stared at her darkly and allowed his mind to explode with a little fireworks display of select sentiments about women in business. She was going to fuck everything up if she talked down to these people, and yet everything about her expression and her bearing suggested genuine pleasure in Sherri’s getup. Sherri just said, “Thank you, young lady. It belonged to my mother.”

  “I think that lace must be handmade,” Veronica said.

  “Of course it is,” Larimer said, “and I thank you for noticing.” She puffed at the rest of them.

  “Well, now that that’s out of the way,” mumbled one of the attorneys.

  Ray chuckled again.

  “Shut up, Raymond.”

  Jerry Meegan, the lead negotiator for the property group, said a hundred thousand and Sherri countered with two million. He looked at her with a mix of disdain and admiration. “I can see we’re a ways apart,” he said.

  She mirrored his look with a precision that took him slightly aback, then glanced at Harrow and gave a theatrical wink designed for the whole room to see. “Thing is,” she said, “I spoke to my fellow homeowners. Some of them were eager to sell. But I said to them, I said that yinz are holding out on us.”

  Meegan smoothed a hand across the remnants of his hair and said a hundred and fifty thousand, and Sherri countered with two million. They progressed in this fashion, with the bald, vampire-pale, elegantly reptilian attorney moving incrementally toward the figure that Sherri Larimer repeated fixedly like a magical incantation, never once without a lit cigarette. At seven hundred and fifty thousand, he said he’d need to caucus with his colleagues.

  “Yinz need to what?” said Raymond.

  “Shut your goddamn mouth, Ray,” she snapped, slapping her hand on the table. “I’ll bust your eggs, boy.” She sighed and lit a smoke. “I’m sorry,” she told Meegan. “Yinz want to step out, or should we?”

  In the hall, Meegan turned his impenetrable black eyes on Harrow and said, “Phillip, it seems to me that you have underrepresented the recalcitrance of this particular party.”

  “Well shit, Jerry, you said, and I quote, that two mil was ‘not wholly outside the realm of consideration.’”

  “Not wholly,” said Meegan. “Still, we rather expected that as an initial bargaining position, not some idée fixe.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Harrow.

  “Perhaps if we approach another owner,” said one of the interchangeable male lawyers.

  “Phillip?” Meegan looked down his nose.

  Harrow considered lying, then thought better of it. “She’d probably drown anyone who talked to you in the lake.”

  “Really?” said the lawyer.

  “It’s an expression,” said Harrow without knowing precisely what he meant. There was, at least, no lake.

  “I’m going to make a call to Arkansas,” said Meegan. He adjusted a cuff. “Please excuse me.”

  “Mr. Harrow,” said Veronica—almost, he thought, shyly. “You wouldn’t happen to have spotted a ladies room?”

  “Sure,” Harrow answered. “Sure. It’s back by the reception.”

  “Would you show me? I’m sorry. Who designs these places, right? I’m all turned around.”

  So Harrow walked her back toward the lobby, wondering how you could get all turned around in a hallway with one left turn, thinking women, until in the lobby she turned and faced Harrow with the same look of gentle interest that she’d shown for Sherri Larimer’s dress and said, “Mr. Harrow, you seem like a man who likes to make money.”

  “Sure I like to make money. Who doesn’t like money?”

  “Not everyone cares about money qua money. Jerry Meegan, for example, cares about fucking people over. That he’s made money doing it is incidental and not really a major part of his enjoyment of it. In any event, I have a proposition for you.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s why we’re out here.”

  “Yes and no. I really do have to piss.” (This, Harrow would later reflect, was the moment when he felt the first throb of sexual attraction for her, the way she said it so nonchalantly: piss.) “But you know, two birds.”

  “Okay.” Harrow crossed his arms over his broad belly. He was wearing a polo shirt; he felt that polos and khakis occupied just the right position on the spectrum between big city lawyers and these redneck lunatics. “Shoot,” he said.

  “This deal,” Veronica told him, “is fucked seven ways to next Tuesday.”

  “I don’t know that it’s fucked,” Harrow protested, although his gut fled toward his always-troublesome bowels at the thought of it. This was not a make-or-break deal for him; part of success was charting a smooth upward trend through a mess of ups and downs, but still, it might represent several million in revenue, with a good margin, too, as these new box stores were little more than piles of cinder block and fluorescent lighting. In a state with few environmental regulations, the earthworks needed for site prep were fast, dirty, and cheap. He could easily be looking at a million in profit. He ran a slim operation, subcontracted almost everything, maintained only one small office in Morgantown and had only a few full-time employees: an engineer, a draftsman, an old, laid-off mine foreman who served as his liaison with tradespeople, and a grim and librarianish real estate agent named Edith—a young woman stuck with an old woman’s name, a failed academic of some kind who’d tried to sell houses but hated the platitudinous interactions and came to him for the promise of uninterrupted office work and a steady salary. A million dollars in profit. It was 1985. He could afford the lost opportunity, but still he felt the loss palpably looming in front of him, unavoidable as a sudden deer on a dark, narrow road in the middle of the night.

  “You know it is,” Veronica replied simply.

  “Jerry said he’d contemplate two mil.”

  “Jerry would contemplate killing his own mother. Quote: ‘all outcomes are reasonable in the abstract.’ But he’s not going to go to two, and even if he does, Sherri is going to decide that she needs three.”

  Harrow laughed at her; he laughed in such a way as to make sure that she knew he was laughing at her. “Young lady,” he said, “you seem very smart, and I’m sure you’re a very good lawyer back in New York.” (He sucked his cheeks for a second. He was very pleased with the way he pronounced New York: with the familiar derision of a person who can afford to disdain the grimy atavism of that city which, because it’s populated with so many refugees of the provinces, is quite often the most provincial place in America.) “But,” he said, “I know these people. These people are my people. Well, more or less. And they’re not going to walk away from that kind of money.”

  She was disconcertingly unperturbed. She smiled at him revealing rows of capped, Wall-Street teeth. She said, “No, obviously not. But I mean, I think we both know who told them it was worth that much to begin with? Anyway, they can make a lot more leasing it.”

  “First of all, that’s total bullshit. Leasing it? The whole goddamn project is a boondoggle!” He shouldn’t have said that to this woman, so he barreled ahead, hoping she wouldn’t notice. “The tenants are going to last a year if they ever move in. And the rest of the property is already sold. She can’t just lease it. And by the way, if you’re implying that I—”

  She waved her hand. “No, Mr. Harrow. I told them.”

  “You?”

  “You’re surprised.”

  “Yes. Goddamnit! First of all, why would you do any such thing? And second of all, h
ow the hell would you even know . . . I mean, how would you, without me, even get in contact . . .”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s funny. I actually first came out to open our Pittsburgh office. And I was having a drink one night at this little bar called Partners, and I met this very nice woman, about my age, who was up from Morgantown for the weekend. She worked in real estate, it turned out.”

  Harrow’s arms fell. He felt his pits go damp and his small intestines, or something down there, jerk agonizingly. “Edith?” he said. “But she wouldn’t—”

  “We’ve been seeing each other, actually, for almost six months now.”

  “Seeing each other. Jesus fucking—”

  “Mr. Harrow,” Veronica said. “Phil. They’re going to wonder where we are. What do you say?”

  “What do I say,” Phil said, neither quite a question nor quite not a question.

  “It’s not a boondoggle, Phil. This company, I’m telling you. In twenty years, Sears will be out of business, but there will be one of these fuckers at every crossroads in America. Which is exactly what I told Sherri Larimer.”

  And the one thing you could say about Phillip Harrow, the Construction King of Morgantown, West Virginia, whatever else bad you might say about him, whatever aspersions you might cast on his character, was that he never let something as small as his own prejudice get in the way of a good deal. So what? This lawyer was a dyke who’d seduced his apparently dyke secretary and screwed his multimillion-dollar deal as part of some longer con whose overall contours he could just barely sense as he stood there stupidly in the plasticine-colored lobby of that godawful hillbilly Holiday Inn. She was playing him, playing her own employers, playing the Larimers possibly, even though he thought—and surely she must have noticed too—that they carried with them the appalling possibility of violence, who did not, he thought, seem like the sort of people you ought to fuck with. But then again, as someone had once told him—he forgot who, where, when, or what it had been in regard to—life was not a dress rehearsal. “All right,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”