“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 have 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.
S
tepping 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.
Joe, without even offering to greet the owner, goes right into his inspection modality, which he conducts with a brusque and speechless air of military thoroughness. In his smushed-pecker shorts, he takes a quick turn through the living room, which contains mint-condition Fifties couches, sturdy upholstered wing chairs, polished end tables, a sky-blue area rug and some elderly, store-bought prints of bird dogs, parrots in trees and lovers by a peaceful sylvan lake. He leans into the dining room, scans its heavy, polished eight-piece mahogany table-and-chairs ensemble. His beady eyes survey the crown moldings, the chair rails, the swinging kitchen door. He twists the rheostat, brightening then dimming the pink salad-bowl globe, then turns and heads back through the living room and down the central hall, where lights are also on and there’s a security panel with a keypad of oversized cartoon numbers, friendly to older users. With me right behind, Joe strides slappety-slap into each bedroom, takes an unimpressed look around, slides open then closed a closet door, mentally adds up the number of grounded wall sockets, steps to the window, takes in the view, gives each window a little lift to determine if it’s hung correctly or painted shut, then makes for the bathrooms.
In the pink-tiled master bath, he goes for the sink, twists on both taps full blast and waits, assessing the flow, how long the hot takes, how efficiently the drain drains. He flushes the toilet and stares at the bowl to time the “retrieval.” In the “little” bath he raises the thin, new-style Venetian blinds and stares out again at the park-like yard, as though contemplating the peaceful vista he would have
après le bain
or during another prolonged nature call. (Once a client, an eminent German economist from one of the local think tanks, actually dropped trou and plopped down for a real test.)
During all such inspections, over nearly four months, and with me in attendance, Joe has stopped looking the instant he recorded three major demerits: too few sockets, more than two squishy floorboards, any unrepaired ceiling water stain, any kind of crack or odd wall angle indicating settling or “pulling away.” Customarily he has also spoken very little, making only infrequent, undesignated hums. In one split-level in Pennington, he wondered out loud about the possibility of undetected root damage from an older linden tree planted close to the foundation; another time, in Haddam, he mumbled the words “lead-based paint” as he strode through a daylight basement, checking for seepage. In each case no response was asked from me, since he’d already found plenty not to like, starting with the price, which he later said, in both instances, indicated the owners needed to have their heads uncorked from their asses.
When Joe makes his plunge into the basement (where I’m happy not to go), flipping the light switch on at the top and then off again at the bottom, I take my opportunity to wander back where Phyllis stands with, indeed, Ted Houlihan at the glass door to the back yard. Here, an afterthought rumpus room
cum
live-in kitchen gives pleasingly onto a neat brick patio surrounded by luau torches, viewable through a big picture window (a neighborhood staple) that also exhibits some seepage discoloration around its frame—a defect Joe won’t miss if he gets this far.
Ted Houlihan is a recently widowed engineer, not long retired from the R & D division of a nearby kitchen appliance firm. He is a sharp-eyed little white-haired seventy-plus-year-old, in faded chinos, penny loafers, an old short-sleeved, nicely frayed blue oxford shirt and a blue-and-red rep tie, and looks like the happiest man in Penns Neck. (He looks, in fact, eerily like the old honey-voiced chorister Fred Waring, who was a favorite of mine in the Fifties but in private was a martinet and a bully despite having an old softy’s reputation.)
Ted gives me a big sincere back-over-his-shoulder smile when I arrive in my REALTOR windbreaker. It is our first meeting, and he would make me happy if he’d take this opportunity to head for Denny’s. Noisy
boom, boom, boom
racketing has begun below-floors, as if Joe were breaking through the foundation with a sledgehammer.
“I was just about to explain to Mrs. Markham, Mr. Bascombe,” Ted Houlihan says as we shake hands—his is small and tough as a walnut, mine pulpy and for some reason damp. “I’ve been diagnosed with testicular cancer here just last month, and I’ve got a son out in Tucson who’s a surgeon, and he’s going to do the operation himself. I’d sort of been mulling over selling for months, but just decided yesterday enough was enough.” (Which it certainly is.)
Phyllis (and who wouldn’t?) has reacted to this cancer news with a look of pale distress. No doubt it puts her in mind of her own problems—which is reason # fourteen to keep owners miles away from clients: they inevitably heave murky, irresolvable personal issues into the sales arena, often making my job all but impossible.
Though unless I’m way off, Phyllis is already well dazzled and charmed by everything. The back yard is a grassy little mini-Watteau, with carpets of deep-green pachysandra ringing the large trees. Rhodies, wisterias and peonies are set out all over everywhere. A good-size Japanese rock garden containing a little toy maple has been artfully situated under a big dripping oak that looks thoroughly robust and in no danger of falling over into the house. Plus, against the side of the garage is an actual pergola, clustered all over with dense, ropy grapevines and honeysuckle, with a little rustic English-looking iron settee placed underneath like a wedding bower—just the setting for renewing your sacred oaths on a clear late-summer’s evening, followed by some ardent alfresco lovemaking.
“I was just saying to Mr. Houlihan what a lovely yard it is,” Phyllis says, recovering herself and smiling a little dazedly at the thought of the man in front of her having his nuts snipped by his own son. Joe has stopped banging on whatever he was banging on downstairs, though I hear other metal-to-metal scraping and prying coming up through the floorboards.
“I’ve got a bunch of old pictures someplace of the house and the yard back in 1955 when we bought it. My wife thought it was the prettiest place she’d ever seen
then
. There was a farmer’s field and a big stone silo out back and a cow lot and a milk parlor.” Ted points a leathery finger toward the back property line, where there’s a thick tropical-bamboo stand backed by a high plank fence painted the exact same shade of unnoticeably dark green. The fence continues in both directions behind the next-door neighbors’ houses until it goes out of sight.
“What’s back there, now?” Phyllis says. She has the look of “this is the one, this is the place” written all over her flushed, puffy face. Joe is currently clumping up the basement steps, his excavations and explorings now complete. I picture him as a miner in a metal-cage elevator rising miles and miles out of the deep Pennsylvania earth, his face caked, his eye sockets white, a bunged-up lunch pail under his ham-hock arm and a dim beacon light on his helmet. I am betting the next thing Ted Houlihan says isn’t going to faze Phyllis Markham one iota.