Independence Day

2

On Seminary Street at 8:15, Independence Day is the mounting spirit of the weekend, and all outward signs of life mean to rise with it. The 4th is still three days off, but traffic is jamming into Frenchy’s Gulf and through the parking lot at Pelcher’s Market, citizens shouting out greetings from the dry cleaners and Town Liquors, as the morning heat is drumming up. Plenty of our residents are already taking off for Blue Hill and Little Compton; or, like my neighbors the Zumbros, with time on their hands, to dude ranches in Montana or expensive trout water in Idaho. Everyone’s mind-set reads the same: avoid the rush, get a jump, hit the road, put pedal to the metal. Exit is the seaboard’s #1 priority.

My first order of business is to make an early stop at one of two rental houses I own, with a mind to collecting the rent, then do a quick sweep through the realty office to drop off my editorial, pick up the key for the house I’m showing in Penns Neck and have a last-minute map-out session with the Lewis twins, Everick and Wardell, the agency’s “utility men,” regarding our planned participation in Monday’s holiday events. As it happens, our part simply amounts to handing out free hot dogs and root beer from a portable “dogs-on-wheels” stand I myself own and am lending to the cause (all proceeds to Clair Devane’s two orphaned children).

Up Seminary, which since the boom has become a kind of Miracle Mile “main street” none of us ever wished for, all merchants are staging sidewalk “firecracker sales,” setting out derelict merchandise they haven’t moved since Christmas and draping sun racks with patriotic bunting and gimmicky signs that say wasting hard-earned money is the American way. Virtual Profusion has laid in extra bunches of low-quality daisies and red bachelor buttons to draw the bushed businessman or seminarian hiking home in a funk but determined to seem festive (“Say it with cheap flowers”). Brad Hulbert, our gay shoe-store owner, has stacked boxes of one-size-only oddities along his front window and stationed his tanned and bored little catamite, Todd, on a stool behind an open-air cash register. And the bookstore has hauled out its overstocks — piles of cheap dictionaries, atlases and unsellable ’88 calendars, plus last season’s computer games, all of it heaped high on a banquet table to be eyed and picked over by larcenous teens like my son.

For the first time, though, since I moved here in 1970, two businesses on Seminary have left their stores standing empty, their management clearing out under cover of darkness, owing people money and merchandise. One has since resurfaced in the Nutley Mall, the other hasn’t been heard from. Indeed, many of the high-dollar franchises — places that never staged a sale — have now gone through takeovers and Chapter 11 reorganizations and given way to second-echelon high-dollar places where sales are a way of life. This spring, Pelcher’s postponed a grand reopening of its specialty meat-and-cheese boutique; a Japanese car dealership suddenly went belly-up and now sits empty on Route 27. And on the weekend streets there’s even a different crowd of visitors. In the early Eighties, when the Haddam population ballooned from twelve to twenty thousand, and I was still writing for a flashy sports magazine, our typical weekenders were suave New Yorkers — rich SoHo residents in bizarre getups and well-heeled East Siders come down to “the country” for the day, having heard it was a quaint little village here, one worth seeing, still unspoiled, approximately the way Greenwich or New Canaan used to be fifty years ago, which was at least partly true, then.

Now those same people are either staying at home in their cement-and-burglar-barred pillboxes and getting into urban pioneering or whatever their checkbooks allow; or else they’ve sold out and gone back to KC or decided to make a new start in the Twin Cities or Portland, where life’s slower (and cheaper). Though plenty, I’m sure, are lonely and bored silly wherever they are and are wishing someone would try to rob them.

But in Haddam, their place has been taken by, of all things, more Jerseyites, down from Baleville and Totowa or up the dogleg from Vineland and Millville — day-trippers driving 206 “just to remember where it goes” and who stop in here (unhappily rechristened “Haddam the Pleasant” by the village council) for a snack and a look-around. These people — I’ve watched them through the office window when I’ve been “on point” on the weekend — all seem to be a less purposeful lot of humans. They have more kids that’re noisier, drive rattier cars with exterior parts missing and don’t mind parking in handicap spaces or across a driveway or beside a fire hydrant as though they didn’t have fire hydrants where they come from. They keep the yogurt franchise jumping and bang down truckloads of chocolate-chip cookies, but few of them ever sit down at The Two Lawyers for an actual lunch, fewer still spend a night in the August Inn, and none get interested in houses — though sometimes they’ll waste half your day larky-farking around looking at places they’ll forget the instant they’re back in their Firebirds and Montegos, beetle-browing it down to Manahawkin. (Shax Murphy, who took over the agency when old man Otto Schwindell passed on, tried instituting a credit check before allowing a house to be shown over 400K. But the rest of us did some lobbying after a rock star got turned away, then spent two million at Century 21.)

I turn off Seminary out of the holiday traffic, coast down Constitution Street behind downtown, past the library, across Plum Road at the blinker, and cruise along outside the metal-picket fence behind which my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried, out as far as Haddam Medical Center, where I make a left at Erato, then over to Clio, where my two rental houses sit in their quiet neighborhood.

It might seem unusual that a man my age and nature (unadventuresome) would get involved in potentially venal landlording, chockablock as it is with shady, unreliable tenants, vicious damage-deposit squabbles, dishonest repair persons, bad checks, hectoring late-night phone calls over roof leaks, sewage backups, sidewalk repairs, barking dogs, crummy water heaters, falling plaster and noisy parties requiring the police being called, often eventuating in lengthy lawsuits. The quick and simple answer is that I decided none of these potential nightmares would be my story, which is how it’s mostly happened. The two houses I own, side by side, are on a quiet, well-treed street in the established black neighborhood known as Wallace Hill, snugged in between our small CBD and the richer white demesnes on the west side, more or less behind the hospital. Reliable, relatively prosperous middle-aged and older Negro families have lived here for decades in small, close-set homes they keep in much better than average condition and whose values (with a few eyesore exceptions) have gone steadily up — if not keeping exact pace with the white sections, at least approximating them but also not suffering price slippage related to recent sags in white-collar employment. It’s America like it used to be, only blacker.

Most of the residents on these streets are blue-collar professionals — plumbers or small-engine mechanics or lawn-care partners who work out of garage setups that come right off their taxes. There are a couple of elderly Pullman porters and several working moms who’re teachers, plus plenty of retirees whose mortgages are paid off and who are perfectly happy to be going nowhere. Lately a few black dentists and internists and three trial lawyer couples have decided to move back to a neighborhood similar to where they grew up, or at least where they might’ve grown up if their families hadn’t been trial lawyers and dentists themselves, and they hadn’t gone to Andover and Brown. Eventually, of course, as in-town property becomes more valuable (they aren’t making any more of it), all the families here will realize big profits and move away to Arizona or down South, where their ancestors were once property themselves, and the whole area will be gentrified by incoming whites and rich blacks, after which my small investment, with its few-but-bearable headaches, will turn into a gold mine. (This demographic shifting is, in fact, slower-moving in the stable black neighborhoods, since there aren’t that many places for a well-heeled black American to go that’s better than where he or she already is.)

Though that isn’t the whole picture.

Since my divorce and, more pointedly, after my former life came to a sudden end and I suffered what must’ve been a kind of survivable “psychic detachment” and took off in a fugue for Florida and afterward to as far away as France, I had been uneasily aware that I had never done very much in my life that was honestly good except for myself and my loved ones (and not all of them would agree even with that). Writing sports, as anyone can tell you who’s ever done it or read it, is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal, waits nervously in the doctor’s office for CAT-scan results or mulls away dreamy, solitary minutes in the can. And as far as my own hometown was concerned, apart from transporting the occasional half-flattened squirrel to the vet, or calling the fire department once when my elderly neighbors the Deffeyes let their gas barbecue set their back porch on fire and threatened the neighborhood, or some other act of tepid suburban heroism, I’d probably contributed as little to the commonweal as it was possible for a busy man to contribute without being plain evil. This, though I’d lived in Haddam fifteen years, ridden the prosperity curve right through the roof, enjoyed its civic amenities, sent my kids to its schools, made frequent and regular use of the streets, curb cuts, sewers, water mains, police and fire, plus various other departments dedicated to my well-being. Almost two years ago, however, while driving home in a weary semi-daze after a long, unproductive morning of house showings, I took a wrong turn and ended up behind Haddam Medical Center on little Clio Street, where most of our town’s Negro citizens were sitting out on their porches in the late August heat, fanning themselves and chatting porch to porch, pitchers of iced tea and jars of water at their feet and little oscillating fans connected with cords through the windows to keep the air moving. As I drove past they all looked out at me serenely (or so I judged). One elderly woman waved. A group of boys stood on the street corner wearing baggy athletic shorts, holding basketballs, smoking cigarettes and talking, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders. None of them seemed to notice me, or do anything menacing. So that for some reason I felt compelled to make the block and do the whole tour over, which I did — complete with the old woman waving as if she’d never laid eyes on me or my car in her life, much less two minutes before.

And what I thought, when I’d driven around a third time, was that I’d passed down this street and the four or five others like it in the darktown section of Haddam at least five hundred times in the decade and a half I’d lived here, and didn’t know a single soul; I had been invited into no one’s home, had paid no social calls, never sold a house here, had probably never even walked down a single sidewalk (though I had no fear about doing it day or night). And yet I considered this to be a bedrock, first-rate neighborhood and these souls its just and sovereign protectors.

On my fourth trip around the block, naturally no one waved at me (two people in fact came to the top of their porch steps and frowned, and the boys with the basketballs glowered with their hands on their hips). However, I had seen two identical next-door houses — single-storey, American-vernacular frame structures in slightly run-down condition, with keyboard awnings, brick-veneer half-fronts, raised, roofed porches and a fenced alley in between, both with a Trenton realty company’s FOR SALE sign out front. I discreetly jotted down the phone number, then went straight to the office and put in a call to investigate price and the possibility of buying both places. I hadn’t been in the realty business long and was happy to think about diversifying my assets and stashing money away where it’d be hard to get at. And I thought that if I could buy both houses at a bargain, I could then rent them to whoever wanted to live there — black retirees on fixed incomes, or not-entirely-healthy elderlies still able to look after their affairs and not be a burden on their kids, or young-marrieds in need of a sensibly priced but sturdy leg up in life — people I could assure a comfortable existence in the face of housing costs going sky-high and until such time as they could move into a perpetual-care facility or buy a starter home of their own. All of which would bestow on me the satisfaction of reinvesting in my community, providing affordable housing options, maintaining a neighborhood integrity I admired, while covering my financial backside and establishing a greater sense of connectedness, something I’d lacked since before Ann moved to Deep River two years before.

I would, I felt, be the perfect modern landlord: a man of superior sympathies and sound investments, with something to donate from years of accumulated life led thoughtfully if not always at complete peace. Everybody on the street would be happy to see my car come cruising by, because they’d know I was probably stopping in to install a new faucet kit in the kitchen, or to service the washer-dryer, or was just paying a visit to see if everybody was feeling good about things, which they always, I felt sure, would be. (Most people with an urge to diversify, I knew, would’ve checked with their accountant, bought beachfront condos on Marco Island, limited their loss exposure, set aside one unit for themselves, one for their grandchildren, put the others with a management company, then cleared the whole business out of their mind April to April.)

What I thought I had to offer was a deep appreciation for the sense of belonging and permanence the citizens of these streets might totally lack in Haddam (through no fault of their own), yet might long for the way the rest of us long for paradise. When Ann and I — expecting the arrival of our son, Ralph — first came to Haddam from New York and moved into our Tudor-style house on Hoving Road, we landed with the uneasy immigrant sense that everybody but the two of us had been here since before Columbus and they all damn well wanted us to feel that way; that there was some secret insider knowledge we didn’t have simply because we’d shown up when we did — too late — yet unfortunately it was knowledge we could also never acquire, for more or less the same reasons. (This is total baloney, of course. Most people are late arrivals wherever they live, as selling real estate makes clear in fifteen minutes, though for Ann and me the uneasy feeling lasted a decade.)

But the residents of Haddam’s black neighborhood, I concluded, had possibly never felt at home where they were either, even though they and their relatives might’ve been here a hundred years and had never done anything but make us white late-arrivers feel welcome at their own expense. And so what I thought I could do was at least help make two families feel at home and let the rest of the neighbors observe it.

Therefore, with a relatively small down, I quickly snapped up the two houses on Clio Street, presented myself at the front door of each as the new owner and gave my pledge to the two startled families inside that I intended to keep the houses as rental properties, all reliances and responsibilities to be meticulously honored, and that they could feel confident about staying put as long as they wanted.

The first family, the Harrises, immediately asked me in for coffee and carrot cake, and we got started on a good relationship that has lasted to the present — though they’ve since retired and moved in with their children in Cape Canaveral.

The other family, however, the McLeods, were unfortunately miles different. They are a mixed-race family — man and wife with two small children. Larry McLeod is a middle-aged former black militant who’s married to a younger white woman and works in the mobile-home construction industry in nearby Englishtown. The day I came to his door he opened it wearing a tight red tee-shirt that had Keep on shooting ’til the last motherfucker be dead stenciled across the front. A big automatic pistol was lying just inside the door on a table, and not surprisingly it was the second thing my eyes lit on. Larry has long arms and bulging, venous biceps, as if he might’ve been an athlete once (a kick boxer, I decided), and acted surly as hell, wanting to know why I was bothering him during the part of the day when he was usually asleep, and even going so far as to tell me he didn’t believe I owned the house and was just there to hassle him. Inside on the couch I could see his skinny little white wife, Betty, watching TV with their kids — all three of them looking wan and drugged in the watery light. There was also an odd, bestilled odor inside the house, something I could almost identify but not quite, though it was like the air in a closet full of shoes that has been shut up for years.

Larry kept on seeming mad as a bulldog and glaring at me through the latched screen. I told him exactly what I’d told the elderly Harrises — all responsibilities and reliances meticulously honored, etc., etc., though I specifically mentioned to him the requirement of keeping up the rent, which I spontaneously decided to drop by ten dollars. I added that I wanted the neighborhood to stay intact, with housing available and affordable for the people who lived there, and while I intended to make needed capital improvements to both houses he should feel confident these would not be reflected in rent increases. I explained that with this plan I could realistically foresee a net gain just by keeping the property in excellent condition, deducting expenses from my taxes, keeping my tenants happy and possibly selling out when I was ready to retire — though I allowed that seemed a long way off.

I smiled at Larry through the metal screen. “Uh-huh,” was the total of what he had to say, though he glanced over his shoulder once as if he was about to instruct his wife to come interpret something I’d said. Then he returned his gaze to me and looked down at the pistol on the table. “That’s registered,” he said. “Check it out.” The pistol was big and black, looked well oiled and completely bursting with bullets — able to do an innocent world irretrievable damage. I wondered what he needed it for.

“That’s good,” I said cheerfully. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other.”

“Is that it?” Larry said.

“That’s about it.”

“All right then,” he said, and closed the door in my face.

Since this first meeting nearly two years ago, Larry McLeod and I have not much enriched or broadened each other’s world-views. After a few months of sending his rent check by mail he simply stopped, so that I now have to go by the house every first of the month and ask for it. If he’s there, Larry always acts menacing and routinely asks me when I plan to get something fixed — though I’ve kept everything in both houses in good condition the entire time and have never let longer than a day go by to have a drain unplugged or a ball float replaced. On the other hand, if Betty McLeod happens to answer the door she simply stares out at me as if she’s never seen me before and has in any case stopped communicating with words. She almost never has the rent check herself, so when I see her pale, scraggly-haired little pointy-nosed face appear like a specter behind the screen, I know I’m out of luck. Sometimes neither of us even speaks. I just stand on the porch trying to look pleasant, while she peers silently out as if she were staring not at me but at the street beyond. Finally she just shakes her head, begins pushing the door closed, and I understand I am not getting paid that day.

This morning when I park at 44 Clio it is eight-thirty and already a third way up the day’s heat ladder and as still and sticky as a summer morning in New Orleans. Parked cars line both sides, and a few birds are chirping in the sycamores planted in the neutral ground decades ago. Two elderly women stand farther down the sidewalk chatting at the corner of Erato, leaning on brooms. A radio plays somewhere behind a window screen — an old Bobby Bland tune I knew all the words to when I was in college but now can’t even remember the title of. A somber mix of vernal lethargy and minor domestic tension fills the air like a funeral dirge.

The Harrises’ house sits still empty, our agency’s green-and-gray FOR RENT sign in the yard, the new white metal siding and new three-way windows with plastic screens glistening dully in the sunlight. The aluminum flashing I installed below the chimney and above the eaves makes the house look spanking new, which in most ways it is, since I also installed soffit vents, roll-in insulation in the attic (upping the R factor to 23), refooted half the foundation and still mean to put up crime bars as soon as I find a tenant. The Harrises have been gone now for half a year, and I frankly don’t understand my failure to attract a tenant, since rentals are tight as a drumhead and I have priced it fairly at $575, utilities included. A young black mortuarial student from Trenton came close, but his wife felt the commute was too long. Then two sexy black legal secretaries came frisking through, though for some reason felt the neighborhood wasn’t safe enough. I of course had a long explanation ready for why it was probably the safest neighborhood in town: our one black policeman lives within shouting distance, the hospital is only three blocks away, people on the block get to know one another and pay attention as a matter of course; and how in the one break-in in anybody’s memory, citizen-neighbors charged out of their houses and brought the crook to ground before he got to the corner. (That the crook turned out to be the son of the black policeman, I didn’t mention.) But it was no use.

For reasons of my restricted access, the McLeods’ house isn’t yet as spiffy as the former Harrises’. The seedy brick veneer’s still in place, and a couple of porch boards will soon begin “weathering” if nothing’s done. Though hiking up the front steps I can hear the new window unit humming on the side (Larry demanded it, though I got it used out of one of our management properties), and I’m sure someone’s home.

I give the doorbell one short ring, then stand back and put a businesslike but altogether friendly smile on my face. Anyone inside knows who’s out here, as do all the neighbors. I glance around and down the hot, shaded street. The two women are still talking beside their brooms, the radio is still playing blues in some hot indoors. “Honey Bee,” I remember, is the Bobby Bland song, but can’t yet think of the words. I notice the grass in both yards is long and yellowed in spots, and the spirea Sylvania Harris planted and kept watered to a fare-thee-well are scrawny and dry and brown and probably rotten at the roots. I lean around and take a quick look down the fenced side yard between houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas are barely blooming along the foundation walls where they conceal the gas and water meters, and both areas seem deserted and unused, inviting to a burglar.

I ring the bell again, suddenly conscious that no one’s answering and that I’ll have to come back after the weekend, when the rent will be more in arrears and possibly in jeopardy of being forgotten. Ever since I became the owner here, I’ve wondered if I shouldn’t just move out of my house on Cleveland — put it up for sale — and transfer into my rental unit as a cost-cutting, future-securing measure, and as a way of putting my money where my mouth is in the human-relations arena. Eventually the McLeods would take off out of pure dislike for me, and I could then locate new tenants to be my neighbors (possibly a Hmong family to spice the mix). Though under current market stresses my house on Cleveland could conceivably sit empty for months, after which I could get lowballed and sustain a major whomping — even acting as my own agent and carrying the paper. Whereas, on the other hand, finding a quality, short-term renter for a larger house like mine, even in Haddam, is a tricky proposition and rarely works out happily.

I ring the doorbell one more time, stand back to the top of the steps, listen for sounds within — footfalls, a back door closing, a muffled voice, the sound of kids’ bare feet running. But nothing. This has happened before. Someone’s, of course, inside, but no one’s answering, and short of using my landlord’s key or calling the police and saying I’m “worried” about the inhabitants, I have nothing to do but fold my tents and come again, possibly later in the day.

Back up on busy Seminary Street, I park in front of the Lauren-Schwindell building and make a fast turn through the office, where the usual holiday realty-office languor hangs over the still-empty desks, blank Real-trom consoles and copy machines. Almost everyone, including the younger agents, has stood steadfastly in bed an extra hour, pretending the holiday exodus means no one’s doing any real business and that anybody who needs to can just jolly well call them at home. Only Everick and Wardell are glimpsable, passing in and out of the back storage room, the outside door to the parking lot left standing open. They’re returning FOR SALE signs retrieved from the ditches and woodlots where our local teenagers toss them once they’re tired of having them on their walls at home or when their mothers won’t stand for it any longer. (We offer a no-questions-asked, three-dollar “capture fee” for every one brought in, and Everick and Wardell — grave-faced, gangly, beanpole bachelor twins in their late fifties, who are lifelong Haddamites and oddly enough Trenton State graduates — have made a science out of knowing exactly where to search.) The Lewises, who I usually find impossible to tell apart, live around the corner from my two rentals in a duplex left them by their parents, and in fact are tight-fisted, no-nonsense landlords in their own right, owning a block of senior-citizen units in Neshanic, from which they enjoy a nice profit. Yet they still work part-time for the agency and regularly do minor upkeep chores for me on Clio Street, duties they perform with a severe, distinctly put-upon efficiency that might make someone out of the know conclude they resented me. Though that is not at all the case, since they have both told me on more than one occasion that by being born in Mississippi, even with all the heavy baggage that brings along, I naturally possess a truer instinct for members of their race than any white northerner could ever approximate. This is, of course, not one bit true, though theirs is an old-style racial stationlessness that forever causes baseless “verities” to persist on with the implacable force of truth.

Our receptionist, Miss Vonda Lusk, has I see exited the ladies room and parked herself halfway down the row of empty desks, with a smoke and a Coke, and is sitting, one leg crossed and swinging, happily answering the phones and leafing through Time magazine till we shut down in earnest at noon. She is a big, tall, bulgy-busted, wry-humored blonde who wears a ton of makeup, bright-colored, ludicrously skimpy cocktail dresses to work, and lives in nearby Grovers Mills where she was head majorette back in 1980. She was also best friends with Clair Devane, our murdered agent, and regularly wants to discuss “the case” with me because she seems to know Clair and I once had a discreet special something of our own. “I think they’re not pushing this thing hard enough,” is her persistent view of the police attitude. “If she’d been a local white girl you’d have seen a big difference. You’d have FBI here out your butt.” Three white men, in fact, were taken into custody for a day, though they were let go, and in the weeks since then it’s true that no apparent progress has been made, though Clair’s boyfriend is a well-connected black bond lawyer in a good firm in town, and the realty board along with his partners have established a $5,000 reward. Yet it’s also true that the FBI made inquiries before deciding Clair’s death was not a federal crime but a simple murder.

In the office we’ve at least officially left her desk unoccupied until the murderer is found (though in fact business hasn’t been good enough to hire somebody in her place). And Vonda for her part has kept a piece of black ribbon taped across Clair’s chair and a single rose in a murky bud vase on the empty wood-grain top. We are all warned against forgetting.

This morning, though, Vonda has global matters more in mind. She is a current-events buff, reads all the magazines in the office and has her Time folded over on her amply exposed thigh. “Look here, Frank, are you a single-warhead guy or a ten-warhead guy?” She sings this out when she sees me and flashes me her big okay-what’s-up-with-you smile. She’s wearing an outlandish red, white and blue off-the-shoulder taffeta getup that wouldn’t let her pick a dime up off a countertop and stay decent. There is nothing between us but banter.

“I’m still a single-warhead guy,” I say, heading for the front now with three listing sheets, Everick and Wardell having taken one look at me and ducked out the back (not unusual), so that I’ve deposited in their message box some already prepared instructions for where and when to park the dogs-on-wheels stand beside the Haddam Green once they’ve trailered it Monday from Franks, the root beer stand I own west of town on Route 31. This is the way they prefer to conduct all affairs — indirectly and at a distance. “I think there’re too many warheads around these days,” I say, heading toward the door.

“Well then, you’re in deep doo-doo on your vision thing, according to Time.” She’s twirling a strand of golden hair around her little finger. She’s a yellow-dog Democrat and knows I’m one too, and thinks — unless I miss my guess — that we could have some fun together.

“We’ll have to talk about it,” I say.

“That’s quite all right,” she says archly. “I’m sure you’re busy. Did you know Dukakis speaks fluent Spanish?” This is not for me but for whoever might be listening, as if the empty office were jammed with interested people. Only I’m out la puerta seeming not to hear and as quick as possible back to the cool serenity of my Crown Victoria.

By nine I’m on my way out King George Road toward the Sleepy Hollow Motel on Route 1, to pick up Joe and Phyllis Markham and (it’s my hope) sell them our new listing by noon.

Haddam out this woodsy way doesn’t seem like a town in the throes of a price decline. An old and wealthy settlement, founded in 1795 by disgruntled Quaker merchants who split off from their more liberal Long Island neighbors, traveled south and set up things the right way, Haddam looks prosperous and confidently single-minded about its civic expectations. The housing stock boasts plenty of big 19th-century Second Empires and bracketed villas (now owned by high-priced lawyers and software CEOs) with cupolas and belvederes and oriels punctuating the basic architectural lingua, which is Greek with Federalist details, and post-Revolutionary stone houses fitted with fanlights, columned entries and Roman-y flutings. These houses were all big-ticket items the day the last door got hung in 1830, and hardly any turn up on the market except in vindictive divorces in which a spouse wants a big FOR SALE sign stuck out front of a former love nest to get the goat of the party of the second part. Even the few “village-in” Georgian row houses have in the last five years become prestige addresses and are all owned by rich widows, privacy-hungry gay husbands and surgeons from Philadelphia who keep them as country places they can hie off to with their nurse-anesthetists during the color season.

Though looks, of course, can be deceiving and usually are. Asking prices have yet to reflect it, but banks have slowly begun rationing money and coming back to us realtors with “problems” about appraisals. Many sellers who’d nailed down early-retirement plans at Lake of the Ozarks or for a “more intimate” place in Snowmass, now that the kids are finished at UVA, are taking a wait-and-see attitude and deciding Haddam’s a lot better place to live than they’d imagined when they thought their houses were worth a fortune. (I didn’t get into the residential housing business at exactly the optimum moment; in fact, I got in at almost the worst possible moment — a year before the big gut-check of last October.)

Yet like most people I remain optimistic, and feel the boom paid off no matter what things feel like at the moment. The Village of Haddam was able to annex the Township of Haddam, which deepened our tax base and gave us a chance to lift our building moratorium and reinvest in infrastructure (the excavation in front of my house is a good illustration). And because of the influx of stockbrokers and rich entertainment lawyers early in the decade, several village landmarks were spared, as well as some late-Victorian residences that were falling in because their owners had grown old, moved to Sun City or died. At the same time, in the moderate-to-low range, where I’ve shown house after house to the Markhams, prices have gone on rising slowly, as they have since the beginning of the century; so that most of our median-incomers, including our African Haddamites, can still sell out once they’re ready to quit paying high taxes, take a fistful of dollars along with a sense of accomplishment, and move back to Des Moines or Port-au-Prince, buy a house and live off their savings. Prosperity is not always bad news.

At the end of King George Road, where sod farms open out wide like a green hayfield in Kansas, I make the turn onto once-countrified Quakertown Road, then a hard left back onto Route 1, then through the jug handle at Grangers Mill Road, which lets me work back to the Sleepy Hollow and avoid a half hour of pre-4th get-away traffic. Off on the right, Quakertown Mall sits desolated on its wide plain of parking lot, now mostly empty, a smattering of cars at either end, where the anchors — a Sears and a Goldbloom’s — are still hanging on, the original developers now doing business out of a federal lockup in Minnesota. Even the Cinema XII on the backside is down to one feature, showing on only two screens. The marquee says: B. Streisand: A Star Is Bored ** Return engagement ** Congradulations Bertie and Stash.

My clients the Markhams, whom I’m meeting at nine-fifteen, are from tiny Island Pond, Vermont, in the far northeast corner, and their dilemma is now the dilemma of many Americans. Sometime in the indistinct Sixties, each with a then-spouse, they departed unpromising flatlander lives (Joe was a trig teacher in Aliquippa, Phyllis a plump, copper-haired, slightly bulgy-eyed housewife from the D.C. area) and trailered up to Vermont in search of a sunnier, less predictable Weltansicht. Time and fate soon took their unsurprising courses: spouses wandered off with other people’s spouses; their kids got busily into drugs, got pregnant, got married, then disappeared to California or Canada or Tibet or Wiesbaden, West Germany. Joe and Phyllis each floated around uneasily for two or three years in intersecting circles of neighborhood friends and off-again, on-again Weltansichts, taking classes, starting new degrees, trying new mates and eventually giving in to what had been available and obvious all along: true and eyes-open love for each other. Almost immediately, Joe Markham — who’s a stout, aggressive little bullet-eyed, short-armed, hairy-backed Bob Hoskins type of about my age, who played nose guard for the Aliquippa Fighting Quips and who’s not obviously “creative”—started having good luck with the pots and sand-cast sculptures in abstract forms he’d been making, projects he’d only fiddled around with before and that his first wife, Melody, had made vicious fan of before moving back to Beaver Falls, leaving him alone with his regular job for the Department of Social Services. Phyllis meanwhile began realizing she, in fact, had an untapped genius for designing slick, lush-looking pamphlets on fancy paper she could actually make herself (she designed Joe’s first big mailing). And before they knew it they were shipping Joe’s art and Phyllis’s sumptuous descriptive booklets all over hell. Joe’s pots began showing up in big department stores in Colorado and California and as expensive specialty items in ritzy mail order catalogues, and to both their amazement were winning prizes at prestigious crafts fairs the two of them didn’t even have time to attend, they were so busy.

Pretty soon they’d built themselves a big new house with cantilevered cathedral ceilings and a hand-laid hearth and chimney, using stones off the place, the whole thing hidden at the end of a private wooded road behind an old apple orchard. They started teaching free studio classes to small groups of motivated students at Lyndon State as a way of giving something back to the community that had nurtured them through assorted rough periods, and eventually they had another child, Sonja, named for one of Joe’s Croatian relatives.

Both of them, of course, realized they’d been lucky as snake charmers, given the mistakes they’d made and all that had gone kaflooey in their lives. Though neither did they view “the Vermont life” as necessarily the ultimate destination. Each of them had pretty harsh opinions about professional dropouts and trust-fund hippies who were nothing more than nonproducers in a society in need of new ideas. “I didn’t want to wake up one morning,” Joe said to me the first day they came in the office, looking like bedraggled, wide-eyed missionaries, “and be a fifty-five-year-old asshole with a bandanna and a goddamn earring and nothing to talk about but how Vermont’s all fucked up since a lot of people just like me showed up to ruin it.”

Sonja needed to go to a better school, they decided, so she could eventually get into an even better school. Their previous batch of kids had all trooped off in serapes and Sorels and down jackets to the local schools, and that hadn’t worked out very well. Joe’s oldest boy, Seamus, had already done time for armed robbery, toured three detoxes and was learning-disabled; a girl, Dot, got married to a Hell’s Commando at sixteen and hadn’t been heard from in a long time. Another boy, Federico, Phyllis’s son, was making the Army a career. And so, based on these sobering but instructive experiences, they understandably wanted something more promising for little Sonja.

They therefore made a study of where schools were best and the lifestyle pretty congenial, and where they could have some access to NYC markets for Joe’s work, and Haddam came at the top in every category. Joe blanketed the area with letters and résumés and found a job working on the production end for a new textbook publisher, Leverage Books in Hightstown, a job that took advantage of his math and computer background. Phyllis found out there were several paper groups in town, and that they could go on making pots and sculptures in a studio Joe would build or renovate or rent, and could keep sending his work out with Phyllis’s imaginative brochures, yet embark on a whole new adventure where schools were good, streets safe and everything basked in a sunny drug-free zone.

Their first visit was in March — which they correctly felt was when “everything” came on the market. They wanted to take their time, survey the whole spectrum, work out a carefully reasoned decision, make an offer on a house by May first and be out watering the lawn by the 4th. They realized, of course, as Phyllis Markham told me, that they’d probably need to “scale back” some. The world had changed in many ways while they were plopped down in Vermont. Money wasn’t worth as much, and you needed more of it. Though all told they felt they’d had a good life in Vermont, saved some money over the past few years and wouldn’t have done anything — divorce, wandering alone at loose ends, kid troubles — one bit differently.

They decided to sell their own new hand-built house at the first opportunity, and found a young movie producer willing to take it on a ten-year balloon with a small down. They wanted, Joe told me, to create a situation with no fallback. They put their furniture in some friends’ dry barn, took over some other friends’ cabin while they were away on vacation, and set off for Haddam in their old Saab one Sunday night, ready to present themselves as home buyers at somebody’s desk on Monday morning.

Only they were in for the shock of their lives!

What the Markhams were in the market for — as I told them — was absolutely clear and they were dead right to want it: a modest three-bedroom with charm and maybe a few nice touches, though in keeping with the scaled-back, education-first ethic they’d opted for. A house with hardwood floors, crown moldings, a small carved mantel, plain banisters, mullioned windows, perhaps a window seat. A Cape or a converted saltbox set back on a small chunk of land bordering some curmudgeonly old farmer’s cornfield or else a little pond or stream. Pre-war, or just after. Slightly out of the way. A lawn with maybe a healthy maple tree, some mature plantings, an attached garage possibly needing improvement. Assumable note or owner-finance, something they could live with. Nothing ostentatious: a sensible home for the recast nuclear family commencing life’s third quartile with a kid on board. Something in the 148K area, up to three thousand square feet, close to a middle school, with a walk to the grocery.

The only problem was, and is, that houses like that, the ones the Markhams still google-dream about as they plow down the Taconic, mooning out at the little woods-ensconced rooftops and country lanes floating past, with mossy, overgrown stone walls winding back to mysterious-wondrous home possibilities in Columbia County — those houses are history. Ancient history. And those prices quit floating around at about the time Joe was saying good-bye to Melody and turning his attentions to plump, round-breasted and winsome Phyllis. Say 1976. Try four-fifty today if you can find it.

And I maybe could come close if the buyer weren’t in a big hurry and didn’t faint when the bank appraisal came in at thirty-under-asking, and the owner wanted 25 % as earnest money and hadn’t yet heard of a concept called owner finance.

The houses I could show them all fell significantly below their dream. The current median Haddam-area house goes for 149K, which buys you a builder-design colonial in an almost completed development in not-all-that-nearby Mallards Landing: 1,900 sq ft, including garage, three-bedroom, two-bath, expandable, no fplc, basement or carpets, sited on a 50-by-200-foot lot “clustered” to preserve the theme of open space and in full view of a fiberglass-bottom “pond.” All of which cast them into a deep gloom pit and, after three weeks of looking, made them not even willing to haul out of the car and walk through most of the houses where I’d made appointments.

Other than that, I showed them an assortment of older village-in houses inside their price window — mostly small, dark two-bedrooms with vaguely Greek facades, originally built for the servants of the rich before the turn of the century and owned now either by descendants of immigrant Sicilians who came to New Jersey to be stonemasons on the chapel at the Theological Institute, or else by service-industry employees, shopkeepers or Negroes. For the most part those houses are unkempt, shrunken versions of grander homes across town — I know because Ann and I rented one when we moved in eighteen years ago — only the rooms are square with few windows, low-ceilinged and connected in incongruous ways so that inside you feel as closed in and on edge as you would in a cheap chiropractor’s office. Kitchens are all on the back, rarely is there more than one bath (unless the place has been fixed up, in which case the price is double); most of the houses have wet basements, old termite damage, unsolvable structural enigmas, cast-iron piping with suspicions of lead, subcode wiring and postage-stamp yards. And for this you pay full price just to get anybody to break wind in your direction. Sellers are always the last line of defense against reality and the first to feel their soleness threatened by mysterious market corrections. (Buyers are the second.)

On two occasions I actually ended up showing houses to Sonja (who’s my daughter’s age!) in hopes she’d see something she liked (a primly painted “pink room” that could be hers, a particularly nifty place to snug a VCR, some kitchen built-ins she thought were neat), then go traipsing back down the walk burbling that this was the place she’d dreamed of all her little life and her Mom and Dad simply had to see it.

Only that never happened. On both of these charades, as Sonja went clattering around the empty rooms, wondering, I’m sure, how a twelve-year-old is supposed to buy a house, I peeked through the curtains and saw Joe and Phyllis waging a corrosive argument inside my car — something that’d been brewing all day — both of them facing forward, he in the front, she in the back, snarling but not actually looking at each other. Once or twice Joe’d whip his head around, focus-in his dark little eyes as intent as an ape, growl something withering, and Phyllis would cross her plump arms and stare out hatefully at the house and shake her head without bothering to answer. Pretty soon we were out and headed to our next venue.

Unhappily, the Markhams, out of ignorance and pigheadedness, have failed to intuit the one gnostic truth of real estate (a truth impossible to reveal without seeming dishonest and cynical): that people never find or buy the house they say they want. A market economy, so I’ve learned, is not even remotely premised on anybody getting what he wants. The premise is that you’re presented with what you might’ve thought you didn’t want, but what’s available, whereupon you give in and start finding ways to feel good about it and yourself. And not that there’s anything wrong with that scheme. Why should you only get what you think you want, or be limited by what you can simply plan on? Life’s never like that, and if you’re smart you’ll decide it’s better the way it is.

My own approach in all these matters and specifically so far as the Markhams are concerned has been to make perfectly clear who pays my salary (the seller) and that my job is to familiarize them with our area, let them decide if they want to settle here, and then use my accumulated goodwill to sell them, in fact, a house. I’ve also impressed on them that I go about selling houses the way I’d want one sold to me: by not being a realty wind sock; by not advertising views I don’t mostly believe in; by not showing clients a house they’ve already said they won’t like by pretending the subject never came up; by not saying a house is “interesting” or “has potential” if I think it’s a dump; and finally by not trying to make people believe in me (not that I’m untrustworthy — I simply don’t invite trust) but by asking them to believe in whatever they hold dearest — themselves, money, God, permanence, progress, or just a house they see and like and decide to live in — and to act accordingly.

All told today, the Markhams have looked at forty-five houses — dragging more and more grimly down from and back to Vermont — though many of these listings were seen only from the window of my car as we rolled slowly along the curbside. “I wouldn’t live in that particular shithole,” Joe would say, fuming out at a house where I’d made an appointment. “Don’t waste your time here, Frank,” Phyllis would offer, and away we’d go. Or Phyllis would observe from the back seat: “Joe can’t stand stucco construction. He doesn’t want to be the one to say so, so I’ll just make it easier. He grew up in a stucco house in Aliquippa. Also, we’d rather not share a driveway.”

And these weren’t bad houses. There wasn’t a certifiable “fixer-upper,” “handyman special,” or a “just needs love” in the lot (Haddam doesn’t have these anyway). I haven’t shown them one yet that the three of them couldn’t have made a damn good fresh start in with a little elbow grease, a limited renovation budget and some spatial imagination.

Since March, though, the Markhams have yet to make a purchase, tender an offer, write an earnest-money check or even see a house twice, and consequently have become despondent as we’ve entered the dog days of midsummer. In my own life during this period, I’ve made eight satisfactory home sales, shown a hundred other houses to thirty different people, gone to the Shore or off with my kids any number of weekends, watched (from my bed) the Final 4, opening day at Wrigley, the French Open and three rounds of Wimbledon; and on the more somber side, I’ve watched the presidential campaigns grind on in disheartening fashion, observed my forty-fourth birthday, and sensed my son gradually become a source of worry and pain to himself and me. There have also been, in this time frame, two fiery jetliner crashes far from our shores; Iraq has poisoned many Kurdish villagers, President Reagan has visited Russia; there’s been a coup in Haiti, drought has crippled the country’s midsection and the Lakers have won the NBA crown. Life, as noted, has gone on.

Meanwhile, the Markhams have begun “eating into their down” from the movie producer now living in their dream house and, Joe believes, producing porn movies using local teens. Likewise Joe’s severance pay at Vermont Social Services has come and gone, and he’s nearing the end of his piled-up vacation money. Phyllis, to her dismay, has begun suffering painful and possibly ominous female problems that have required midweek trips to Burlington for testing, plus two biopsies and a discussion of surgery. Their Saab has started overheating and sputtering on the daily commutes Phyllis makes to Sonja’s dance class in Craftsbury. And as if that weren’t enough, their friends are now home from their geological vacation to the Great Slave Lake, so that Joe and Phyllis are having to give thought to moving into the original and long-abandoned “home place” on their own former property and possibly applying for welfare.

Beyond all that, the Markhams have had to face the degree of unknown involved in buying a house — unknown likely to affect their whole life, even if they were rich movie stars or the keyboardist for the Rolling Stones. Buying a house will, after all, partly determine what they’ll be worrying about but don’t yet know, what consoling window views they’ll be taking (or not), where they’ll have bitter arguments and make love, where and under what conditions they’ll feel trapped by life or safe from the storm, where those spirited parts of themselves they’ll eventually leave behind (however overprized) will be entombed, where they might die or get sick and wish they were dead, where they’ll return after funerals or after they’re divorced, like I did.

After which all these unknown facts of life to come have then to be figured into what they still don’t know about a house itself, right along with the potentially grievous certainty that they will know a great deal the instant they sign the papers, walk in, close the door and it’s theirs; and then later will know even a great deal more that’s possibly not good, though they want none of it to turn out badly for them or anyone they love. Sometimes I don’t understand why anybody buys a house, or for that matter does anything with a tangible downside.

As part of my service to the Markhams, I’ve tried to come up with some stop-gap accommodations. Addressing that feeling of not knowing is, after all, my job, and I’m aware what fears come quaking and quivering into most clients’ hearts after a lengthy, unsatisfactory realty experience: Is this guy a crook? Will he lie to me and steal my money? Is this street being rezoned C–I and he’s in on the ground floor of a new chain of hospices or drug rehab centers? I know also that the single biggest cause of client “jumps” (other than realtor rudeness or blatant stupidity) is the embittering suspicion that the agent isn’t paying any attention to your wishes. “He’s just showing us what he hasn’t already been able to unload and trying to make us like it;” or “She’s never shown us anything like what we said we were interested in;” or “He’s just pissing away our time driving us around town and letting us buy him lunch.”

In early May I came up with a furnished condominium in a remodeled Victorian mansion on Burr Street, behind the Haddam Playhouse, complete with utilities and covered off-street parking. It was steep at $1,500, but it was close to schools and Phyllis could’ve managed without a second car if they’d stayed put till Joe started work. Joe, though, swore he’d lived in his last “shitty cold-water flat” in 1964, when he was a sophomore at Duquesne, and didn’t intend to start Sonja off in some oppressive new school environment with a bunch of rich, neurotic suburban kids while the three of them lived like transient apartment rats. She’d never outlive it. He’d rather, he said, forget the whole shittaree. A week later I turned up a perfectly workable brick-and-shingle bungalow on a narrow street behind Pelcher’s — a bolt-hole, to be sure, but a place they could get into with some lease-to-buy furniture and a few odds and ends of their own, exactly the way Ann and I and everybody else used to live when we were first married and thought everything was great and getting greater. Joe, however, refused to even drive by.

Since early June, Joe has grown increasingly sullen and mean-spirited, as though he’s begun to see the world in a whole new way he doesn’t like and is working up some severe defense mechanisms. Phyllis has called me twice late at night, once when she’d been crying, and hinted Joe was not an easy man to live with. She said he’d begun disappearing for parts of the day and had started throwing pots at night over in a woman artist friend’s studio, drinking a lot of beer and coming home after midnight. Among her other worries, Phyllis is convinced he might just forget the whole damn thing — the move, Sonja’s schooling, Leverage Books, even their marriage — and sink back into an aimless nonconformist’s life he lived before they got together and charted a new path to the waterfall. It was possible, she said, that Joe couldn’t stand the consequences of real intimacy, which to her meant sharing your troubles as well as your achievements with the person you loved, and it seemed also possible that the act of trying to buy a house had opened the door on some dark corridors in herself that she was fearful of going down, though she thankfully seemed unready to discuss which these might be.

In so many sad words, the Markhams are faced with a potentially calamitous careen down a slippery socio-emotio-economic slope, something they could never have imagined six months ago. Plus, I know they have begun to brood about all the other big missteps they’ve taken in the past, the high cost of these, and how they don’t want to make any more like that. As regret goes, theirs, of course, is not unusual in kind. Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.

A tangy metallic fruitiness filters through the Jersey ozone — the scent of overheated motors and truck brakes on Route 1—reaching clear back to the roily back road where I am now passing by an opulent new pharmaceutical world headquarters abutting a healthy wheat field managed by the soil-research people up at Rutgers. Just beyond this is Mallards Landing (two ducks coasting-in on a colonial-looking sign made to resemble wood), its houses-to-be as yet only studded in on skimpy slabs, their bald, red-dirt yards awaiting sod. Orange and green pennants fly along the roadside: “Models Open.” “Pleasure You Can Afford!” “New Jersey’s Best-Kept Secret.” But there are still long ragged heaps of bulldozered timber and stumps piled up and smoldering two hundred yards to one side, more or less where the community center will be. And a quarter mile back and beyond the far wall of third-growth hardwoods where no animal is native, a big oil-storage depot lumps up and into what’s becoming thickened and stormy air, the beacons on its two great canisters blinking a red and silver steer clear, steer clear to the circling gulls and the jumbo jets on Newark approach.

When I make the final right into the Sleepy Hollow, two cars are nosed into the potholed lot, though only one has the tiresome green Vermont plate — a rusted-out, lighter-green Nova, borrowed from the Markhams’ Slave Lake friends, and with a muddy bumper sticker that says ANESTHETISTS ARE NOMADS. A cagier realtor would’ve already phoned up with some manufactured “good news” about an unexpected price reduction in a previously outof-reach house, and left this message at the desk last night as a form of torture and enticement. But the truth is I’ve become a little sick of the Markhams — given our long campaign — and have fallen into a not especially hospitable mood, so that I simply stop midway in the lot, hoping some emanations of my arrival will penetrate the flimsy motel walls and expel them both out the door in grateful, apologetic humors, fully ready to slam down their earnest money the instant they set eyes on this house in Penns Neck that, of course, I have yet to tell them about.

A thin curtain does indeed part in the little square window of room #7. Joe Markham’s round, rueful face — which looks changed (though I can’t say how) — floats in a small sea of blackness. The face turns, its lips move. I make a little wave, then the curtain closes, followed in five seconds by the banged-up pink door opening, and Phyllis Markham, in the uncomfortable gait of a woman not accustomed to getting fat, strides out into the midmorning heat. Phyllis, I see from the driver’s seat, has somehow amplified her red hair’s coppery color to make it both brighter and darker, and has also bobbed it dramatically into a puffy, mushroomy bowl favored by sexless older moms in better-than-average suburbs, and which in Phyllis’s case exposes her tiny ears and makes her neck look shorter. She’s dressed in baggy khaki culottes, sandals and a thick damask Mexican pullover to hide her extra girth. Like me, she is in her forties, though unclear where, and she carries herself as if there were a new burden of true woe on the earth and only she knows about it.

“All set?” I say, my window down now, cracking a smile into the new pre-storm breeze. I think about Paul’s horse joke and consider telling it, as I said I would.

“He says he’s not going,” Phyllis says, her bottom lip slightly enlarged and dark, making me wonder if Joe has given her a stiff smack this morning. Though Phyllis’s lips are her best feature and it’s more likely Joe has gifted himself with a manly morning’s woogling to take his mind off his realty woes.

I’m still smiling. “What’s the problem?” I say. Paper trash and parking lot grit are kicking around on the hot breeze now, and when I peek in the rearview there’s a dark-purple thunderhead closing fast from the west, toiling the skies and torquing up winds, making ready to dump a big bucket of rain on us. Not a good augury for a home sale.

“We had an argument on the way down.” Phyllis lowers her eyes, then casts an unhappy look back at the pink door, as if she expects Joe to come bursting through it in camo gear, screaming expletives and commands and locking and loading an M-16. She takes a self-protective look at the teeming sky. “I wonder if you’d mind just talking to him.” She says this in a clipped, back-of-the-mouth voice, then elevates her small nose and stiffens her lips as two tears teeter inside her eyelids. (I’ve forgotten how much Joe’s gooby western PA accent has rubbed off on her.)

Most Americans will eventually transact at least some portion of their important lives in the presence of realtors or as a result of something a realtor has done or said. And yet my view is, people should get their domestic rhubarbs, verbal fisticuffs and emotional jugular-snatching completely out of the way before they show up for a house tour. I’m more or less at ease with steely silences, bitter cryptic asides, eyes rolled to heaven and dagger stares passed between prospective home buyers, signaling but not actually putting on display more dramatic after-midnight wrist-twistings, shoutings and real rock-’em, sock-’em discord. But the client’s code of conduct ought to say: Suppress all important horseshit by appointment time so I can get on with my job of lifting sagging spirits, opening fresh, unexpected choices, and offering much-needed assistance toward life’s betterment. (I haven’t said so, but the Markhams are on the brink of being written off, and I in fact feel a strong temptation just to run up my window, hit reverse, shoot back into the traffic and head for the Shore.)

But instead I simply say, “What would you like me to say?”

“Just tell him there’s a great house,” she says in a tiny, defeated voice.

“Where’s Sonja?” I’m wondering if she’s inside, alone with her dad.

“We had to leave her home.” Phyllis shakes her head sadly. “She was showing signs of stress. She’s lost weight, and she wet the bed night before last. This has been pretty tough for all of us, I guess.” (She has yet to torch any animals, apparently.)

I reluctantly push open my door. Occupying the lot beside the Sleepy Hollow, inside a little fenced and razor-wire enclosure, is a shabby hubcap emporium, its shiny silvery wares nailed and hung up everywhere, all of it clanking and stuttering and shimmering in the breeze. Two old white men stand inside the compound in front of a little clatter-board shack that’s completely armored with shiny hubcaps. One of them is laughing about something, his arms crossed over his big belly, swaying side to side. The other seems not to hear, just stares at Phyllis and me as if some different kind of transaction were going on.

“That’s exactly what I was going to tell him anyway,” I say, and try to smile again. Phyllis and Joe are obviously nearing a realty meltdown, and the threat is they may just dribble off elsewhere, feeling the need for an unattainable fresh start, and end up buying the first shitty split-level they see with another agent.

Phyllis says nothing, as if she hasn’t heard me, and just looks morose and steps out of the way, hugging her arms as I head for the pink door, feeling oddly jaunty with the breeze at my back.

I half tap, half push on the door, which is ajar. It’s dark and warm inside and smells like roach dope and Phyllis’s coconut shampoo. “Howzit goin’ in here?” I say into the gloom, my voice, if not full of confidence, at least half full of false confidence. The door to a lighted bathroom is open; a suitcase and some strewn clothes are on top of an unmade bed. I have the feeling Joe might be on the crapper and I may have to conduct a serious conversation about housing possibilities with him there.

Though I make him out then. He’s sitting in a big plastic-covered recliner chair back in a shadowed corner between the bed and the curtained window where I saw his face before. He’s wearing — I can make out — turquoise flip-flops, tight silver Mylar-looking stretch shorts and some sort of singlet muscle shirt. His short, meaty arms are on the recliner’s arms, his feet on the elevated footrest and his head firmly back on the cushion, so that he looks like an astronaut waiting for the first big G thrust to drive him into oblivion.

“Sooou,” Joe says meanly in his Aliquippa accent. “You got a house you want to sell me? Some dump?”

“Well, I do think I’ve got something you ought to see, Joe, I really do.” I am just addressing the room, not specifically Joe. I would sell a house to anyone who happened to be here.

“Like what?” Joe is unmoving in his spaceship chair.

“Well. Like pre-war,” I say, trying to bring back to memory what Joe wants in a house. “A yard on the side and in back and in front too. Mature plantings. Inside, I think you’ll like it.” I’ve never been inside, of course. My info comes from the rap sheet. Though I may have driven past with an agents’ cavalcade, in which case you can pretty well guess about the inside.

“It’s just your shitty job to say that, Bascombe.” Joe has never called me “Bascombe” before, and I don’t like it. Joe, I notice, has the beginnings of an aggressive little goatee encircling his small red mouth, which makes it seem both smaller and redder, as though it served some different function. Joe’s muscle shirt, I also see, has Potters Do It With Their Fingers stenciled on the front. It’s clear he and Phyllis are suffering some pronounced personality and appearance alterations — not that unusual in advanced stages of house hunting.

I’m self-conscious peeking in the dark doorway with the warm, blustery storm breeze whipping at my backside. I wish Joe would just get the hell on with what we’re all here for.

“D’you know what I want?” Joe’s begun to fiddle for something on the table beside him — a package of generic cigarettes. As far as I know, Joe hasn’t been a smoker until this morning. He lights up now though, using a cheap little plastic lighter, and blows a huge cloud of smoke into the dark. I’m certain Joe considers himself a ladies’ man in this outfit.

“I thought you came down here to buy a house,” I say.

“What I want is for reality to set in,” Joe says in a smug voice, setting his lighter down. “I’ve been kidding myself about all this bullshit down here. The whole goddamn mess. I feel like my whole goddamn life has been in behalf of bullshit. I figured it out this morning while I was taking a dump. You don’t get it, do you?”

“What’s that?” Holding this conversation with Joe is like consulting a cut-rate oracle (something I in fact once did).

“You think your life’s leading someplace, Bascombe. You do think that way. But I saw myself this morning. I closed the door to the head and there I was in the mirror, looking straight at myself in my most human moment in this bottom-feeder motel I wouldn’t have taken a whore to when I was in college, just about to go look at some house I would never have wanted to live in in a hundred years. Plus, I’m taking a fucked-up job just to be able to afford it. That’s something, isn’t it? There’s a sweet scenario.”

“You haven’t seen the house yet.” I glance back and see that Phyllis has climbed into the back seat of my car before the rain starts but is staring at me through the windshield. She’s worried Joe’s scotching their last chance at a good house, which he may be.

Big, noisy splats of warm rain all at once begin thumping the car roof. The wind gusts up dirty. It is truly a bad day for a showing, since ordinary people don’t buy houses in a rainstorm.

Joe takes a big, theatrical drag on his generic and funnels smoke expertly out his nostrils. “Is it a Haddam address?” he asks (ever a prime consideration).

I’m briefly bemused by Joe’s belief that I’m a man who believes life’s leading someplace. I have thought that way other times in life, but one of the fundamental easements of the Existence Period is not letting whether it is or whether it isn’t worry you — as loony as that might be. “No,” I say, recollecting myself. “It’s not. It’s in Penns Neck.”

“I see.” Joe’s stupid half-bearded red mouth rises and lowers in the dark. “Penns Neck. I live in Penns Neck, New Jersey. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing, I guess, if you don’t want it to.” (Or better yet if the bank doesn’t want you to, or if you’ve got a mean Chapter 7 lurking in your portfolio, or a felony conviction, or too many late payments on your Trinitron, or happen to enjoy the services of a heart valve. In that case it’s back to Vermont.) “I’ve shown you a lot of houses, Joe,” I say, “and you haven’t liked any of them. But I don’t think you’d say I tried to force you into any of them.”

“You don’t offer advice, is that it?” Joe is still cemented to his lounge chair, where he obviously feels in a powerful command modality.

“Well. Shop around for a mortgage,” I say. “Get a foundation inspection. Don’t budget more than you can pay. Buy low, sell high. The rest isn’t really my business.”

“Right,” Joe says, and smirks. “I know who pays your salary.”

“You can always offer six percent less than asking. That’s up to you. I’ll still get paid, though.”

Joe takes another drastic slag-down on his weed. “You know, I like to have a view of things from above,” he says, absolutely mysteriously.

“Great,” I say. Behind me, air is changing rapidly with the rain, cooling my back and neck as the front passes by. A sweet rain aroma envelops me. Thunder is rumbling over Route 1.

“You remember what I said when you first came in here?”

“You said something about reality setting in. That’s all I remember.” I’m staring at him impatiently through the murk, in his flip-flops and Mylar shorts. Not your customary house-hunting attire. I take a surreptitious look at my watch. Nine-thirty.

“I’ve completely quit becoming,” Joe says, and actually smiles. “I’m not out on the margins where new discoveries take place anymore.”

“I think that’s probably too severe, Joe. You’re not doing plasma research, you’re just trying to buy a house. You know, it’s my experience that it’s when you don’t think you’re making progress that you’re probably making plenty.” This is a faith I in fact hold — the Existence Period notwithstanding — and one I plan to pass on to my son if I can ever get where he is, which at the moment seems out of the question.

“When I got divorced, Frank, and started trying to make pots up in East Burke, Vermont”—Joe crosses his short legs and cozies down authoritatively in his lounger—“I didn’t have the foggiest idea about what I was doing. Okay? I was out of control, actually. But things just worked out. Same when Phyllis and I got together — just slammed into each other one day. But I’m not out of control anymore.”

“Maybe you are more than you think, Joe.”

“Nope. I’m in control way too much. That’s the problem.”

“I think you’re confusing things you’re already sure about, Joe. All this has been pretty stressful on you.”

“But I’m on the verge of something here, I think. That’s the important part.”

“Of what?” I say. “I think you’re going to find this Houlihan house pretty interesting.” Houlihan is the owner of the Penns Neck property.

“I don’t mean that.” He pops both his chunky little fists on the plastic armrests. Joe may be verging on a major disorientation here — a legitimate rent in the cloth. This actually appears in textbooks: Client abruptly begins to see the world in some entirely new way he feels certain, had he only seen it earlier, would’ve directed him down a path of vastly greater happiness — only (and this, of course, is the insane part) he inexplicably senses that way’s still open to him; that the past, just this once, doesn’t operate the way it usually operates. Which is to say, irrevocably. Oddly enough, only home buyers in the low to middle range have these delusions, and for the most part all they bring about is trouble.

Joe suddenly bucks up out of his chair and goes slappety-slap through the dark little room, taking big puffs on his cigarette, looking into the bathroom, then crossing and peeping out between the curtains to where Phyllis waits in my car. He then turns like an undersized gorilla in a cage and stalks past the TV to the bathroom door, his back to me, and stares out the frosted, louvered window that reveals the dingy motel rear alley, where there’s a blue garbage lugger, full to brimming with white PVC piping, which I sense Joe finds significant. Our talk now has the flavor of a hostage situation.

“What do you think you mean, Joe?” I say, because I detect that what he’s looking for, like anybody on the skewers of dilemma, is sanction: agreement from beyond himself. A nice house he could both afford and fall in love with the instant he sees it could be a perfect sanction, a sign some community recognizes him in the only way communities ever recognize anything: financially (tactfully expressed as a matter of compatibility).

“What I mean, Bascombe,” Joe says, leaning against the door-jamb and staring pseudo-casually through the bathroom at the blue load lugger (the mirror where he’s caught himself on the can must be just behind the door), “is that the reason we haven’t bought a house in four months is that I don’t want to goddamned buy one. And the reason for that is I don’t want to get trapped in some shitty life I’ll never get out of except by dying.” Joe swivels toward me — a small, round man with hirsute butcher’s arms and a little sorcerer’s beard, who’s come to the sudden precipice of what’s left of life a little quicker than he knows how to cope with. It’s not what I was hoping for, but anyone could appreciate his predicament.

“It is a big decision, Joe,” I say, wanting to sound sympathetic. “If you buy a house, you own it. That’s for sure.”

“So are you giving up on me? Is that it?” Joe says this with a mean sneer, as if he’s observed now what a shabby piece of realty dreck I am, only interested in the ones that sell themselves. He is probably indulging in the idyll of what it’d be like to be a realtor himself, and what superior genius strategies he’d choose to get his point across to a crafty, interesting, hard-nut-to-crack guy like Joe Markham. This is another well-documented sign, but a good one: when your client begins to see things as a realtor, half the battle’s won.

My wish of course is that after today Joe will spend a sizable portion if not every minute of his twilight years in Penns Neck, NJ, and it’s even possible he believes it’ll happen, himself. My job, therefore, is to keep him on the rails — to supply sanction pro tempore, until I get him into a buy-sell agreement and cinch the rest of his life around him like a saddle on a bucking horse. Only it’s not that simple, since Joe at the moment is feeling isolated and scared through no fault of anyone but him. So that what I’m counting on is the phenomenon by which most people will feel they’re not being strong-armed if they’re simply allowed to advocate (as stupidly as they please) the position opposite the one they’re really taking. This is just another way we create the fiction that we’re in control of anything.

“I’m not giving up on you, Joe,” I say, feeling a less pleasant dampness on my back now and inching forward into the room. Traffic noise is being softened by the rain. “I just go about selling houses the way I’d want one sold to me. And if I bust my ass showing you property, setting up appointments, checking out this and that till I’m purple in the face, then you suddenly back out, I’ll be ready to say you made the right decision if I believe it.”

“Do you believe it this time?” Joe is still sneering, but not quite as much. He senses we’re getting to the brassier tacks now, where I take off my realtor’s hat and let him know what’s right and what’s wrong in the larger sphere, which he can then ignore.

“I sense your reluctance pretty plainly, Joe.”

“Right,” Joe says adamantly. “If you feel like you’re tossing your life in the ter-let, why go through with it, right?”

“You’ll have plenty more opportunities before you’re finished.”

“Yup,” Joe says. I hazard another look toward Phyllis, whose mushroom head is in motionless silhouette inside my car. The glass has already fogged up from her heavy body exhalations. “These things aren’t easy,” he says, and tosses his stubby cigarette directly into the toilet he was no doubt referring to.

“If we’re not going to do this, we better get Phyllis out of the car before she suffocates in there,” I say. “I’ve got some other things to do today. I’m going away with my son for the holiday.”

“I didn’t know you had a son,” Joe says. He, of course, has never asked me one question about me in four months, which is fine, since it’s not his business.

“And a daughter. They live in Connecticut with their mother.” I smile a friendly, not-your-business smile.

“Oh yeah.”

“Let me get Phyllis,” I say. “She’ll need a little talking to by you, I think.”

“Okay, but let me just ask one thing.” Joe crosses his short arms and leans against the doorjamb, feigning even greater casualness. (Now that he’s off the hook, he has the luxury of getting back on it of his own free and misunderstood will.)

“Shoot.”

“What do you think’s going to happen to the realty market?”

“Short term? Long term?” I’m acting ready to go.

“Let’s say short.”

“Short? More of the same’s my guess. Prices are soft. Lenders are pretty retrenched. I expect it to last the summer, then rates’ll probably bump up around ten-nine or so after Labor Day. Course, if one high-priced house sells way under market, the whole structure’ll adjust overnight and we’ll all have a field day. It’s pretty much a matter of perception out there.”

Joe stares at me, trying to act as though he’s mulling this over and fitting his own vital data into some new mosaic. Though if he’s smart he’s also thinking about the cannibalistic financial forces gnashing and churning the world he’s claiming he’s about to march back into — instead of buying a house, fixing his costs onto a thirty-year note and situating his small brood behind its solid wall. “I see,” he says sagely, nodding his fuzzy little chin. “And what about the long term?”

I take another stagy peek at Phyllis, though I can’t see her now. Possibly she’s started hitchhiking down Route 1 to Baltimore.

“The long term’s less good. For you, that is. Prices’ll jump after the first of the year. That’s for sure. Rates’ll spurt up. Property really doesn’t go down in the Haddam area as a whole. All boats pretty much rise on a rising whatever.” I smile at him blandly. In realty, all boats most certainly do rise on a rising whatever. But it’s still being right that makes you rich.

Joe, I’m sure, has been brooding all over again this morning about his whopper miscues — miscues about marriage, divorce, remarriage, letting Dot marry a Hell’s Commando, whether he should’ve quit teaching trig in Aliquippa, whether he should’ve joined the Marines and right now be getting out with a fat pension and qualifying for a VA loan. All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done. But Joe doesn’t want to make another whopper, since one more big one might just send him to the bottom.

Except he doesn’t know bread from butter beans about which is the fatal miscue and which is the smartest idea he ever had.

“Frank, I’ve just been standing here thinking,” he says, and peers back out the dirty bathroom louvers as if he’d heard someone call his name. Joe may at this moment be close to deciding what he actually thinks. “Maybe I need a new way to look at things.”

“Maybe you ought to try looking at things across a flat plain, Joe,” I say. “I’ve always thought that looking at things from above, like you said, forced you to see all things as the same height and made decisions a lot harder. Some things are just bigger than others. Or smaller. And I think another thing too.”

“What’s that?” Joe’s brows give the appearance of knitting together. He is vigorously trying to fit my “viewpoint” metaphor into his own current predicament of homelessness.

“It really won’t hurt you to take a quick run over to this Penns Neck house. You’re already down here. Phyllis is in the car, scared to death you’re not going to look at it.”

“Frank, what do you think about me?” Joe says. At some point of dislocatedness, this is what all clients start longing to know. Though it’s almost always insincere and finally meaningless, since once their business is over they go right back to thinking you’re either a crook or a moron. Realty is not a friendly business. It only seems to be.

“Joe, I may just queer my whole deal here,” I say, “but what I think is you’ve done your best to find a house, you’ve stuck to your principles, you’ve put up with anxiety as long as you know how. You’ve acted responsibly, in other words. And if this Penns Neck house is anywhere close to what you like, I think you ought to take the plunge. Quit hanging onto the side of the pool.”

“Yeah, but you’re paid to think that, though,” Joe says, sulky again in the bathroom door. “Right?”

But I’m ready for him. “Right. And if I can get you to spend a hundred and fifty on this house, then I can quit working and move to Kitzbühel, and you can thank me by sending me a bottle of good gin at Christmas because you’re not freezing your nuts off in a barn while Sonja gets further behind in school and Phyllis files fucking divorce papers on you because you can’t make up your mind.”

“Point taken,” Joe says, moodily.

“I really don’t want to go into it any further,” I say. There’s no place further to go, of course, realty being not a very complex matter. “I’m going to take Phyllis on up to Penns Neck, Joe. And if she likes it we’ll come get you and you can make up your mind. If she doesn’t I’ll bring her back anyway. It’s a win-win proposition. In the meantime you can stay here and look at things from above.”

Joe stares at me guiltily. “Okay, I’ll just come along.” He virtually blurts this out, having apparently blundered into the sanction he was looking for: the win-win, the sanction not to be an idiot. “I’ve come all this fucking way.”

With my damp right arm I give a quick thumbs-up wave out to Phyllis, who I hope is still in the car.

Joe begins picking up change off the dresser top, stuffing a fat wallet into the tight waistband of his shorts. “I should let you and Phyllis figure this whole goddamn thing out and follow along like a goddamn pooch.”

“You’re still looking at things from above.” I smile at Joe across the dark room.

“You just see everything from the fucking middle, that’s all,” Joe says, scratching his bristly, balding head and looking around the room as though he’d forgotten something. I have no idea what he means by this and am fairly sure he couldn’t explain it either. “If I died right now, you’d go on about your business.”

“What else should I do?” I say. “I’d be sorry I hadn’t sold you a house, though. I promise you that. Because you at least could’ve died at home instead of in the Sleepy Hollow.”

“Tell it to my widow out there,” Joe Markham says, and stalks by me and out the door, leaving me to pull it shut and to get out to my car before I’m soaked to my toes. All this for the sake of what? A sale.