“Naw.”
“Is the Mayflower home office out here someplace?”
He shakes his head. “They don’t matter where you live. You just drivin’ for them.”
I look at Mr. Tanks curiously. “Do you like it out here?” Meaning the seaboard, the Del-Mar-Va to Eastport, from the Water Gap to Block Island.
“It’s pretty good,” he says. His cavey eyes narrow and flicker at me, as if he’d caught a whiff suggesting I might be amused by him.
But I’m not! I understand (I think) perfectly well what he’s getting at. If he’d answered in the usual way—that his Aunt Pansy lived in Brockton, or his brother Sherman in Trenton, or if he was positioning himself for a managerial charge inside corporate Mayflower, home offices, say, in Frederick, MD, or Ayer, Mass., and needed to move nearer—that would make sound sense. Though it would be a whole lot less interesting on the human side. But if I’m right, his question is of a much more omenish and divining nature, having to do with the character of eventuality (not rust-belt economics or the downturn in per-square-foot residential in the Hartford-Waterbury metroplex).
Instead, his is the sort of colloquy most of us engage in alone with only our silent selves, and that with the right answers can give rise to rich feelings of synchronicity of the kind I came back from France full of four years ago: when everything is glitteringly about
you
, and everything you do seems led by a warm, invisible astral beam issuing from a point too far away in space to posit but that’s leading you to the place—if you can just follow and stay lined up—you
know
you want to be. Christians have their grimmer version of this beam; Jainists do too. Probably so do ice dancers, bucking-bronco riders and grief counselors. Mr. Tanks is one of the multitude seeking, with hope, to emerge from a condition he’s grown weary of in pursuit of something better, and wants to know what he should do—a profound inquiry.
I’d of course love to help with this alignment of small stars, and without making him worry I’m a loony or a realty shark or a homosexual with polyracial endomorphic appetites. In the most magnanimous sense, such assistance is the heart of the realty profession.
I fold my arms and let myself sway sideways so my thigh pushes against the back bumper of my Crown Victoria. I wait a few seconds, then say, “I think I know exactly what you’re getting at.”
“What about?” Mr. Tanks says suspiciously.
“About wondering where you ought to go,” I say in as unaggressive, unsharky, unhomophilic a way as possible.
“Yeah, but that don’t really matter,” Mr. Tanks says, instantly shying off the subject now that he’s raised it. “But okay,” he says, still showing interest. “I’d like to set down someplace else, you know? Like a neighborhood.”
“Would you live there?” I say in a helpful, professional voice. “Or would it just be someplace for your furniture to live?”
“I’d live there,” Mr. Tanks says, and nods, looking up at the sky as though wishing to envision a future. “If I liked it, I wouldn’t necessarily even mind being in someplace I’ve lived before. You understand what I mean?”
“Pretty much,” I say, meaning “perfectly.”
“The East Coast just seems sorta homey to me.” Mr. Tanks suddenly looks around at his truck as if he’s heard a sound and expects to see someone scaling the side, ready to break in and steal his TV. Though there’s no one.
“Where’d you grow up?” I say.
He continues staring at his truck and away from me. “Michigan. Old man was a chiropractor in the U.P. Wasn’t too many Negroes doing that work.”
“I bet not. Do you like it up there?”
“Oh yeah. I love it.”
There’s no use blabbing that I’m an old Wolverine or that we probably have experiences in common. Divorce, for starters. My memories, in any case, would probably conflict with his.
“Then why don’t you go back and buy a house? Or build one? That seems like a no-brainer to me.”
Mr. Tanks turns and gives me a wary look, as if I might’ve been referring to
his
brain. “My ex-wife stays up there now. That don’t work.”
“Do you have any children?”
“Uh-uh. That’s why I ain’t been to the Hall of Fame.” His big eyebrows lower. (What business is it of mine if he has children?)
“Well. I’ll just say this.” I would still like to encourage Mr. Tanks with some useful facts offered as data for his search for what to do next. I in fact feel some anxiety that he doesn’t know how specifically I appreciate how he feels and that I’ve felt the same way myself. No disappointment is quite like the failure to share a crucial understanding. “I just
want
to say this,” I begin again, correcting myself. “I’m selling houses these days. And I live in a pretty nice town down there. And we’re about to see a rise in prices, and I believe interest rates’ll head up by the end of the year and maybe even before.”
“That’s too rich down there. I been down there. I moved some basketball player’s mother into some big house. Then moved her out again a year later.”
“You’re right, it’s not cheap. But let me just say that most experts believe a purchase price two and a half times your annual pre-tax income is a realistic debt load. And I’ve got houses right now, in the village of Haddam”—all shown to the Markhams, all promptly trashed—“at two-fifty, and I’ll have more as time goes on. And I feel like in the long run, whether it’s Dukakis or Bush or Jackson”—fat chance—“prices are going to stay up in New Jersey.”
“Uh-huh,” Mr. Tanks says, making me feel exactly like a realty shark (which is possibly what you are if you’re a realtor at all).
Only my view is, if I sell you a house in a town where life’s tolerable, then I’ve done you a big favor. And if I try and don’t succeed, then you’ve got a view you like better (assuming you can afford it). Plus, I don’t cotton to the idea of raising the drawbridge, which Mr. Tanks probably has experience with. I mean to guarantee the same rights and freedoms for all. And if that means merchandising New Jersey dirt like dog-nuts so we all get our one sweet piece, then so be it. We’ll all be dead in forty years anyway.
I won’t (or can’t), in other words, be easily shamed. And Mr. Tanks would make a good addition and be as welcome on Cleveland Street as his pocketbook could make him (he’d, of course, have to stash his truck someplace else). And I’m not doing anybody a favor if I don’t try to get him interested.
“So what’s the worst part about being a realtor?” He’s staring around somewhere else again—above the Sea Breeze roofline, where the humpy moon has floated higher and wears a fuzzy halo. Mr. Tanks is now signaling me that he’s not ready to buy a house in New Jersey, which is fine. He may conduct conversations like this with everyone—his “thing” being to ramble on dolefully about wishing he could
be
someplace better—and I’ve spoiled the fun by trying to figure out where and how. He may feel fine dedicating his life to moving other people hither and yon.
“My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way.” A gesture of hello and good-bye, poking my hand toward Mr. Tanks’s strenuous green belly. He administers a halfhearted little jiggling of just my fingers. Mr. Tanks might look like a guard for old Vince back in the Bart Starr-Fuzzy Thurston gravy days, but he shakes hands like a debutante.
“Tanks,” is all he grunts.
“Well, really, I don’t know if it has a worst part,” I say, addressing the realtor question and feeling a sudden, brain-flattening fatigue and the painful need for sleep. I pause for a breath. “When I don’t like it so much, I try not to notice it and stay home reading a book. But I guess if it has to have a bad side, it’s having clients think I want to sell them a house they don’t like, or that I don’t care if they like it or not. Which is never true.” I pull my hand over my face and push my eyelids up to keep them open.
“You don’t like being misinterpreted, is that it?” Mr. Tanks looks amused. He makes an odd gurgly chuckle deep in his throat, which makes me self-conscious.
“I guess so. Or not.”
“I figured you guys was all crooks,” Mr. Tanks says as though talking about something else
to
someone else. “Like a used-car guy, only ‘cept with houses. Or burial insurance. Something like that.”
“Some people feel that way, I guess.” I’m thinking that we’re at this moment two feet away from my trunkful of realty signs, blank offer sheets, earnest money receipts, listing forms, prospect memos, PRICE REDUCED and SORRY, YOU MISSED IT stickers. Burglar’s tools, to Mr. Tanks. “Really, a main concern
is
avoiding misrepresentation. I wouldn’t want to do anything to you that I wouldn’t want done to me—at least as far as realty goes.” This did not come out sounding right (due to exhaustion).
“Hunh,” is all Mr. Tanks offers. Our time for bearing witness to life’s strangeness is nearly over.
Suddenly, at the end of the row of motel units, out the door of the lighted room we’ve been waiting a vigil over, come two uniformed local police, followed by the tough-nut detective, followed by a uniformed policewoman, holding the arm of the young blue-dressed wife who’s in turn holding the small hand of a tiny blond girl, who looks apprehensively all around in the dark and back behind her into the room she’s left, though suddenly, by dint of memory, she turns and looks up at ole Bugs, stuck to the window of the Suburban, leering his nutty brains out. She’s wearing neat little yellow shorts and tennies with white socks, and a hot-pink pullover that has a red heart on the front like a target. She is slightly knock-kneed. When she gazes around again and sees no one she recognizes, she fastens her eyes on Mr. Tanks as she’s led across the lot to an unmarked vehicle that will take her and her mother elsewhere, to some other Connecticut town, where a terrible-awful thing
hasn’t
happened. There, to sleep.
They have left their room standing open, the Whaler jammed with stealable gear somebody should see about locking up or storing. (This I would’ve waked up and worried about in the middle of the night back in 1984, even if it were my loved one who was killed.)
Though just as the young woman ducks into the dark car, she looks back at her room and at the Suburban and the Sea Breeze and then to the left at Mr. Tanks and me, her companions of a sort, watching her with distant compassion as she encounters grief and confusion and loss all alone and all at once. Her face comes up, light catches it so that I see the look of startlement on her fresh young features. It is her first scent, the first light-glimmer, that she’s no longer connected in the old manner of two hours ago but into some new network now, where caution is both substance and connector. (It is not so different from the look on the boy’s face who killed her husband.) I, of course, could connect with her—give a word or a look. But it would be only momentary, whereas caution is what she needs now, and what’s dawning. To learn a lesson of caution at a young age is not the worst thing.
Her face disappears into the squad car. The door closes hard, and in half of one minute they are all gone—the local boys in their Fairfield Sheriff’s cruiser, murmuring ahead, gumball flashing; the unmarked car with the policewoman driving—off in the direction opposite, where the ambulance has gone. Again, when they are all out of sight into the scrub-timber distance, a siren rises. They will not be back tonight.
“I bet they got their insurance paid up,” Mr. Tanks says. “Mormons. You know
they’re
paid up. Them people don’t let nothin’ slide.” He consults his wristwatch, sunk into his great arm. Time of day means nothing to him. I don’t know how he knows they were Mormons. “You know how to keep a Mormon from stealin’ your sandwich when you go fishin’, don’t you?”
“How?” It is an odd moment for a quip.
“Take another Mormon witchyou.” Mr. Tanks makes his deep-chested
hunh
noise again. This is his way of resolving the unresolvable.
I, though, have had it in mind—since his position on realtors is that we’re first cousins to odometer-spinning car dealers and burial plot scammers—to ask about his views on moving-van drivers. We hear plenty of adverse opinions of
them
in my business, where they’re generally considered the loose cannons of the removal industry. But I’m certain he wouldn’t have an opinion. I’d be surprised if Mr. Tanks practiced many analytical views of himself. He is no doubt happiest concentrating on whatever’s beyond his windshield. In this way he’s like a Vermonter.
In the thick trees behind the Sea Breeze I hear a dog barking, perhaps at the skunk, and somewhere else, faintly, a phone ringing. Mr. Tanks and I have not shared much, in spite of my wishing we could. We are, I’m afraid, not naturals for each other.
“I guess I’ll hit the hay,” I say as if the idea has just come to me. I offer Mr. Tanks a hopeful smile, which awards no closure, only its surface appeal.
“Talk about misinterpreted and not being misinterpreted.” Mr. Tanks still has in mind our conversation from before (a surprise).
“Right,” I say, not knowing what’s right.
“Maybe I’m gon’ come down there to New Jersey and buy a big house from you,” he announces imperially. I’m beginning to inch away toward my room.
“I wish you’d do that. That’d be great.”
“You got some expensive neighborhoods where they’ll let me park my truck?”
“That might take some time to find,” I say. “But we could work up something.” A ministorage up in Kendall Park, for instance.