“Isn’t it? I really love the old houses. Especially the ones that’ve been completely updated!” She laughed. Her voice had the bright timbre of a socialite’s, slightly breathless, and she didn’t quite close her r’s. “Are you looking for something over here?”
He shrugged. “Just looking, mainly. Highland Park, University, Preston Hollow . . .” He let his voice trail off. “But it’s nice over here.”
“It’s very nice. And if you work downtown it’s a straight shot on Swiss, five minutes max.”
“I’m not sure I want to be that close to work,” he answered, which got a laugh. “I guess these walls are real plaster?”
“Real plaster. You don’t see construction like this anymore. Now, step back, just take a second and see how it does in the light. There’s a kind of glow. Plaster has a warmth you don’t get with any other material.”
Brice nodded. He did see it, he told himself, even as he was aware of wanting to think he was seeing it.
“It calms people down, I’ve noticed, that glow. Even the most hyper kids’ll come into a room like this and you can see them settle down, it’s almost like a drug.”
“Interesting. Too bad I don’t have kids.”
“But grown-ups like it too!” she cried, spinning it for a jokey sales pitch. There were voices in the foyer, new arrivals. She gestured at him as if to say, Help yourself, and headed toward the front.
He took his time touring the house. It was a rambling, wide-bodied place in the Craftsman style, built, according to the MLS fact sheet, in 1911. Five bedrooms, four full baths and two halfs, a third-floor office/media room, a solarium, finished basement, pool with Brazilian teak deck, detached two-car garage with upstairs guest quarters. Miele appliances in the kitchen, a fortune in granite countertops. The house was fully modernized, though some of the small classy touches had been retained: the dumbwaiter, the claw-foot bathtubs, the ornate cast-iron trapdoor for the basement coal chute. This was a house for a big, rambunctious, well-to-do family, and Brice conjured up a sepia-toned image of five or six lively kids clattering up and down the stairs, a staff of longtime servants who never complained, and the handsome mother moving about in long skirts, her hair pulled back in a prim Victorian bun. Cheerful father returned home in the evenings to a rowdy hue and cry from the kids, a demure yet promising kiss from the wife. He was a wise, strong, loving man who took the trolley downtown every Monday through Friday and made piles of money. The hot tub came much later, obviously.
Brice’s Camry was the only car parked out front by the time he made his way back to the dining room. Laney was packing her sales materials into her satchel-style purse. It was after five; the open house was over.
“So what do you think?” she asked brightly.
“It’s great.” His car was clearly visible through the front windows. “But probably not the right house for a single man.”
“Sure. Unless you were looking to expand someday.”
He chuckled. “Sure, someday. But I’m not in any rush.”
“No reason why you would be. But it is a lot of house for one person. Did you see the Willet window downstairs? Come on, I’ll show you,” she said, reacting to Brice’s blank look. She led him down the narrow, winding staircase off the kitchen to the basement, most of which had been converted to a walk-in wine cellar. Set high in the wall, shot through with late-afternoon sun, was a small stained-glass rendering of grapes on the vine, done in a highly idealized pastoral style.
“That’s beautiful. I guess I didn’t notice it before.”
“It has to get the light like this to really jump out. It’s Willet glass, early twentieth century, very rare. They found it through a picker in upstate New York and had it installed with the remodel.”
“Nice. Who are these people, by the way?”
“Doctors. Husband and wife.”
“And they’re selling—”
“They bought a bigger place down the street.”
“What, they have twenty kids?”
Laney smiled. He’d already told her he wasn’t interested, yet she was talking to him like she had all the time in the world. But Brice was starting to see the house in a different light. It could be the perfect house for a bachelor, if you were thinking of taking your game to the next level. With the chandeliers, the twelve-foot ceilings in the formal rooms, the grand staircase, and acres of hardwood floors, you could have some world-class parties here. What woman wouldn’t be stoked to walk into a house like this? He imagined Gatsby-style blowouts of elegance and excess, women running around the place in their underwear.
He asked about the cellar, not idly; he was learning about wine. As they made their way upstairs he quizzed her about mold, roof, foundation, HVAC. Were the sellers motivated?
Laney thought for a moment. “Fairly motivated. Tell me this: how much money do you want to spend?”
He lowballed his range. She didn’t bat an eye.
“I don’t think they’ll go for that. I’ll check, but I don’t think . . . I know of some other things I could show you. If you’re interested.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll need to get your agent involved, of course.”
“I don’t have an agent.”
“You don’t? Brice, you really need an agent. I think I should be your agent.”
He laughed. The way she stood there, so trim and poised, so tastily self-contained, sparked off a longing in him. There was a tautness about her frame, a tensile balance that seemed to hint at spring-coiled energies expertly held in check. This could be fun, he told himself. She wasn’t at all the kind of bombshell he’d grown accustomed to, but she was cute, fiercely cute, she had her own little mojo going. He had to fight the urge to ask her out right then.
“All right,” he said. “So why don’t you be my agent?”
* * *
That poise he was seeing, as it turned out, was twenty years of formal study in dance. She’d started in Dallas at the age of five, at Miss Hilda’s Dance Academy in Snider Plaza, and continued through college and beyond, spending most of her twenties in New York, “dancing and starving,” as she put it. There appeared to be no husband in the picture, past or present. She drove a small white Lexus sedan that wasn’t particularly well maintained, and had a desk and phone at the offices of Whitley-Brown Associates, a storefront operation in Lakewood that resembled a boiler room, with a dozen or so lady brokers all sharing the same space. His first time there, he parked the Aston right in front of the plate-glass window. All those women were beaming at him when he walked in, their eyes flashing, cheeks flushed—the Aston had clearly caused a stir—but Laney was cool. She offered a breezy “Hel-loooo,” and led him right back out the door to her car.
This was annoying. She ought to gush at least a little, Brice thought. At a certain point it was appropriate for a woman to acknowledge, in theory at least, all the things a wealthy man could do for her, but Laney just showed him to her Lexus and off they went, Brice thumbing through MLS fact sheets while she drove too fast and described the day’s prospects.
That first day they saw six houses. A few days later they saw six more, and by the weekend he’d lost count. This was not a woman who wasted time, he gathered. Within his stated price range of $800,000 to $900,000 she’d found an exhausting array of prospects, but after a week of noncommittal looking he sensed she was growing impatient with him. On Saturday they were stopped at a signal on Preston Road, and the moment the light turned green she gunned a left across two lanes of oncoming traffic.
“Nice,” he murmured.
“Sorry. Does my driving scare you?”
“Not really. You’ve got skills.”
She laughed. “I do?”
“Sure. You’re fast, but you aren’t reckless. You anticipate.”
“Oh, so that’s what I’m doing.”
“I bet you never get tickets.”
She laughed again. “Almost never!”
“Just to show you how safe I feel, I’m go
ing to unbuckle—”
“Stop.” She was giggling.
“I’ll just reattach it here, right here behind me so it doesn’t ping—”
“Stop!”
“There.” He straightened up in his seat.
“Brice, buckle your seat belt!”
“Why? I’m fine, I’m perfectly safe. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“You’re perfectly nuts is what you are.”
This was the way they developed with each other, a kind of razzing semiflirtation carried on at arm’s length. She did not, he suspected, take him entirely seriously. His buying power made him a serious client, but personally she wouldn’t engage on any meaningful level. They joked around. Or he joked; mostly she smiled and nodded, as if indulging him. Maybe a man of thirty-two just wasn’t that interesting to her. Not experienced enough, not tested. Perhaps he couldn’t help but come across as somewhat clueless.
None of this would have mattered if he weren’t oddly taken with her. It didn’t make any sense. She was cute, sure, she had a neat little body, and her pared-down style was a nice change from the overproduced Dallas look. Laney didn’t wear much makeup. She could knock her hair into place with one pass of her hand. Objectively speaking, he could do better—did do better, all the time. That she was so cool and private about herself was part of it, he decided. The challenge of cracking that facade, of wanting the one thing that seemed beyond your reach. He was savvy to the basic psychology of it, but the burning thing that egged him on, that had to be chemistry, pheromones.
Over time she dropped a few details about herself. She’d gone to a small liberal arts college in Vermont, but never mentioned when she’d graduated. Her parents were dead. She had a sister, a niece, and a nephew in Houston, and a condo in East Dallas, the location of which she left appropriately vague. On Saturday mornings she taught ballet to preschoolers at a studio in Preston Center, for fun, she said, just to be around dance and because she adored those little girls.
One day when they were driving down Fairfield Street, in the heart of Highland Park, she pulled up near the corner of Miramar and pointed to an empty lot.
“That’s where I grew up.”
He waited a beat. “You camped out?”
“Hush! There used to be a house. We sold it after Mom died, to a builder. I hated to do it but he made the best offer, and of course he razed it first thing. Then the economy tanked and it’s just been sitting like that for the last three years.”
“That’s lousy. The house you grew up in.”
“He swore he wasn’t going to tear it down, but I knew. They always do. Just before we closed I came over and took a bunch of pictures.”
“Is it for sale?”
“Not officially. He’s just sitting on it. I hear through the grapevine he’s waiting till he can get a million dollars for it.”
They were silent for a moment.
“You never told me you grew up rich.”
She laughed. “I didn’t!”
His head swivelled left and right. “Looks to me like we’re in the middle of Highland Park.”
“Well, it wasn’t always like this. It was middle class.” She caught his look. “Okay, nice middle class. Not like it is now—”
“Obnoxious?”
She nodded and laughed again. He wondered if she knew it would make him want her more, the idea that she’d grown up in Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhood. He was really trying with her. He watched his language, opened doors, insisted on paying when they stopped for snacks, even though she could write off the expense. He was aware that the past two years had coarsened him, but that was a stage, he told himself, a necessary period of adjustment. He was a better man than that. With time he could work himself back to the way he used to be.
* * *
In early October he and his friends chartered a 727 and flew to Tokyo for the Japanese Grand Prix. “The ultimate road trip,” they christened the adventure, which was extravagant enough to make the “Seen on the Scene” column of the Dallas Morning News, with the names of Brice and his buddies highlighted in bold.
Laney didn’t see it. Or pretended not to have seen it. On their next outing she asked where he’d gone, and he gave her the basics: Private jet. Japan. The final race of the Grand Prix season. Parties. Lots of parties. She could fill in the rest for herself.
“Sounds exciting,” she said mildly.
Brice tried not to be irritated. “And you, what’ve you been doing?”
“Working!” she cried.
“The whole time?”
“The whole time. I told you, realtors never take a day off. When everybody else is off, that’s our busiest time. And when everybody’s at work, we’re working too.”
“Come on, there must be some time . . . Christmas. What about Christmas?”
“Okay,” she allowed. “I admit, I’ve never worked on Christmas Day.”
“How long do you think you can keep this up?”
“Excuse me?”
“This kind of pace, how long can you do it? It just seems like you’d burn out sooner or later.”
“Well, I don’t know, Brice, I guess I can do it as long as it takes. Till I win the lottery, how about that?”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure,” she replied in a droll voice, “I like it fine. I like it better in the months when I’ve sold a few houses.” She was gently mocking him, he realized. The conversation had gotten away from him. He regrouped.
“Well,” he said, “I missed you, over in Japan. I missed our house-hunting trips together.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.”
“And I missed your driving.”
She laughed. “Nobody’s ever said that before!”
It was Saturday, a warm Indian summer afternoon. She was wearing a skirt, pumps, a lightweight jersey top with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her casual sexiness setting off a jangling in his gut. When she unlocked the door of the first house and let them in, the atmospherics gave him a titillatory rush. The strange house, the two of them alone, her cool efficiency with the keys—it all had the feeling of an affair, that sexed-up charge of sneaking around.
“You like it?”
He realized he was grinning at her. Sure, he said. Seems nice. In fact it was just another over-the-top builder’s special, seven thousand square feet of architectural bombast. She showed him several more in the same style, and they finished the afternoon at a ’60s modern in Highland Park West, a dark place with a cheap-looking mansard roof, skinny windows facing the street, and a master bathroom tiled entirely in black. The master bedroom got them both sniggering, its floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls and antiqued Roman columns modeled on a strip club owner’s idea of class. Their walk-through ended at the backyard pool. The yard was enclosed by a high double-slatted fence, reinforced by a hedge of ten-foot high ligustrum.
“Very private,” Laney deadpanned. She directed Brice’s attention to the lagoonlike pool. “Look, they painted the guanite black, to hold the heat.” She knelt by the side and swished her hand through the water. “Feel.”
Brice knelt beside her. He flinched when his hand touched the water, its blood-warmth faintly repulsive, mismatched to the day. It was moving toward evening, and the air had already taken on a chill.
“So.” Laney stood. “What do you think?”
“It’s okay. I don’t know. It just seems . . .”
“What?”
“Well, kind of shabby. Off. A step or two below what you’ve been showing me.”
“There’s a reason for that. For what you want, your price range, we’ve seen about everything that’s on the market right now. We’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.”
“Okay.”
When he didn’t say more, she spoke briskly, motioning him to the nearby chaise lounges. “Let’s sit. We need to talk.”
He couldn’t help smiling. He had a notion of what was about to come. They sat.
“Have you seen anything you�
�re seriously interested in? As in, something you’d like to make an offer on.”
“Maybe. You’ve shown me a lot of nice—”
She raised her hand. “Stop it, stop being so polite. Is there anything that stands out in your mind, okay? If you had to make an offer right now, is there one you would pick?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if I went back and looked through all the material . . .”
She was shaking her head. “No, unh-unh. I want you to tell me what it is you’re looking for. What exactly do you want, Brice, that’s what I’m asking.”
“Just what I said when we started out. Something nice, in the Park Cities, Preston Hollow—”
“No, I’m talking about the big picture, okay? What do you want in your life? What do you want out of your life?”
“Oh.” He chuckled, but she wasn’t smiling. He flailed for a moment, then got himself together. “I want the same things everybody else wants, I guess. A family. A nice house. You know, just a decent, normal life.”
“You want a family. And a house.”
“I do.”
“A house I can help you with, but you’ve got to work with me here, buddy. Give me some reaction, something to go on. We’ve looked at fifty-six houses so far—is there anything in that bunch you really like?”
“Well, I liked a lot of them. But not enough to make an offer, I guess.”
She sighed, looked away.
“The house on Swiss, I liked that. Where we met. That house had, I don’t know, character. I guess you could say I could see myself living there.”
“That’s a lot of house for a single guy. You said so yourself.”
“Hey,” he smiled and held out his hands as if pleading, beseeching, “I didn’t say I was gonna stay single the rest of my life!” She laughed. They were flirting, it seemed. It was finally out in the open. Brice felt incredibly happy.
“Really.”
“Really.”
“You’ve never said anything about it before.”
“Well, I am now. You wanna have dinner?” He pitched it half as a joke, a zingy one-liner. She laughed loudly, appreciatively. “And I think that house would be a great investment,” he added.
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