Independence Day (19 page)

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-toothed 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.”

“I get it,” I said, though I thought my personal take on the job probably wouldn’t be just like Rolly’s.

And that was that. In six months old man Schwindell gorked off in the front seat of his Sedan de Ville, stopped at the light at the corner of Venetian Way and Lipizzaner Road, a man-and-wife ophthalmologist team in the car, on their way to the preclosing walkthrough at the retired New Jersey Supreme Court Justice’s house, down the street from my former home on Hoving (the deal naturally fell through). By then Roily Mounger was steaming along selling time-shares to Seattleites, most of the young people in our office had taken off for better pickings in distant area codes, and I’d passed the board and was out hawking listings.

Though based on strict cash flow and forgetting about taxes, it was already true by then that a person could rent for half the cost of buying, and a lot of our clients were beginning to wise up. In addition—as I have ever so patiently told the Markhams, fidgeting now out in the Sleepy Hollow—housing costs were rising faster than incomes, at about 4.9 percent. Plus, plenty of other signs were bad. Employment was down. Expansion was way out of balance. Building permits were taking a nosedive. It was “what the monkey does on the other side of the stick,” Shax Murphy said. And those who had no choice or, like me, had choices but no wish to pursue them, all dug in for the long night that becomes winter.

But truth to say, I was as happy as I expected to be. I enjoyed being on the periphery of the business community and having the chance to stay up with trends—trends I didn’t even know existed back when I was writing sports. I liked the feeling of earning a living by the sweat of my brow, even if I didn’t need the money, still don’t work that hard and don’t always earn a great deal. And I managed to achieve an even fuller appreciation of the Existence Period; began to see it as a good, permanent and adaptable strategy for meeting life’s contingencies other than head-on.

For a brief time I took some small interest in forecast colloquia, attended the VA and FHA update meetings and a few taking-control-of-the-market seminars. I attended the state Realty Roundtable, sat in on the Fair Housing Panel down in Trenton. I delivered Christmas packages to the elderly, helped coach the T-ball team, even dressed up like a clown and rode from Haddam to New Brunswick in a circus wagon to try to spruce up the public perception of realtors as being, if not a bunch of crooks, at least a bunch of phonies and losers.

But eventually I let most of it slide. A couple of young hotshot associates have come in since I signed on, and they’re fired up to put on clown suits to prove a point. Whereas I don’t feel like I’m trying to prove a point anymore.

And yet I still like the sunny, paisley-through-the-maples exhilaration of exiting my car and escorting motivated clients up some new and strange walkway and right on into whatever’s waiting—an unoccupied house on a summer-warm morning when it’s chillier indoors than out, even if the house isn’t much to brag about, or even if I’ve shown it twenty-nine times and the bank’s got it on the foreclosure rolls. I enjoy going into other people’s rooms and nosing around at their things, while hoping to hear a groan of pleasure, an “Ahhh, now
this
, this is more like it,” or a whispered approval between a man and wife over some waterfowl design worked into the fireplace paneling, then surprisingly repeated in the bathroom tiles; or share the satisfaction over some small grace note—a downstairs-upstairs light switch that’ll save a man possible injury when he’s stumbling up to bed half sloshed, having gone to sleep on the couch watching the Knicks long after his wife has turned in because she can’t stand basketball.

Beyond all that, since two years ago I’ve bought no new houses on Clio Street or elsewhere. I ride herd on my small hot dog empire. I write my editorials and have as always few friends outside of work. I take part in the annual Parade of Homes, standing in the entryway of our fanciest listings with a big smile on my chops. I play an occasional game of volleyball behind St. Leo’s with the co-ed teams from other businesses. And I go fishing as much as I can at the Red Man Club, where I sometimes take Sally Caldwell in violation of Rule 1 but never see other members, and where I’ve learned over time to catch a fish, to marvel a moment at its opaline beauties and then to put it back. And of course I act as parent and guardian to my two children, though they are far away now and getting farther.

I try, in other words, to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear. Though it’s true that sometimes in the glide, when worries and contingencies are floating off, I sense I myself am afloat and cannot always feel the sides of where I am, nor know what to expect. So that to the musical question “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I’m not sure I’d know the answer. Although to the old taunt that says, “Get a life,” I can say, “I already have an existence, thanks.”

And this may perfectly well constitute progress the way old man Schwindell had it in mind. His wouldn’t have been some philosopher’s enigma about human improvement over the passage of time used frugally, or an economist’s theorem about profit and loss, or the greater good for the greater number. He wanted, I believe, to hear something from me to convince him I was simply
alive
, and that by doing whatever I was doing—selling houses—I was extending life and my own interest in it, strengthening my tolerance for it and the tolerance of innocent, unnamed others. That was undoubtedly what made him “dean” and kept him going. He wanted me to feel a little every day—and a little would’ve been enough—like I felt the day after I speared a liner bare-handed in the right-field stands at Veterans Stadium, hot off the bat of some black avenger from Chicago, with my son and daughter present and awed to silence with admiration and astoundment for their Dad (everyone around me stood up and applauded as my hand began to swell up like a tomato). How I felt at that moment was that life would never get better than that—though later what I thought, upon calmer reflection, was that it had merely been just a damn good thing to happen, and my life wasn’t a zero. I’m certain old Otto would’ve been satisfied if I’d come in and said something along those lines: “Well, Mr. Schwindell, I don’t know very much about progress, and truthfully, since I became a realtor my life hasn’t been totally transformed; but I don’t feel like I’m in jeopardy of disappearing into thin air, and that’s about all I have to say.” He would, I’m certain, have sent me back to the field with a clap on the back and a hearty go-get-’em.

And this in fact may be how the Existence Period helps create or at least partly stimulates the condition of honest independence: inasmuch as when you’re in it you’re visible as you are, though not necessarily very noticeable to yourself or others, and yet you maintain reason enough and courage in a time of waning urgency to go toward where your interests lie as though it mattered that you get there.

T
he rain that dumped buckets on Route 1 and Penns Neck has missed Wallace Hill, so that all the hot, neat houses are shut up tight as nickels with their window units humming, the pavement already giving off wavy lines no one’s willing to tread through at eleven-thirty. Later, when I’m long gone to South Mantoloking and shade inches beyond the eaves and sycamores, all the front porches will be full, laughter and greetings crisscrossing the way as on my first drive-by. Though now everyone who’s not at work or in summer school or in jail is sitting in the TV darkness watching game shows and waiting for lunch.