Independence Day

3

In my air-conditioned Crown Vic heading up Route 1 both Markhams sit, Joe in front, Phyllis in back, staring out at the rainy morning bustle and rush as though they were in a funeral cortege for a relative neither of them liked. Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home — when your personal clouds don’t move but hang — can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.

My own view is that the realty dreads (which is what the Markhams have, pure and simple) originate not in actual house buying, which could just as easily be one of life’s most hopeful optional experiences; or even in the fear of losing money, which is not unique to realty; but in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold. And as we come nearer the moment of closing — when the deal’s sealed and written down in a book in the courthouse — what we sense is that we’re being tucked even deeper, more anonymously, into the weave of culture, and it’s even less likely we’ll make it to Kitzbühel. What we all want, of course, is all our best options left open as long as possible; we want not to have taken any obvious turns, but also not to have misread the correct turn the way some other boy-o would. As a unique strain of anxiety, it makes for a vicious three-way split that drives us all crazy as lab rats.

If I, for instance, were to ask the Markhams, staring stonily now at rain-drenched exurbia, cartage trucks and Mercedes wagons sluicing by, spewing water right into their mute faces — ask them if they were self-conscious about leaving homespun Vermont and copping an easier, more conventional life of curbs, reliable fire protection, garbage pickup three days a week, they’d be irate. Jesus, no, they’d shout. We simply discovered we had some pretty damn unique needs that could only be met by some suburban virtues we’d never even heard aboutbefore. (Good schools, malls, curbs, adequate fire protection, etc.) I’m sure, in fact, the Markhams feel like pioneers, reclaiming the suburbs from people (like me) who’ve taken them for granted for years and given them their bad name. Though I’d be surprised if the distaste they feel about being in the wagon with everybody else isn’t teamed with the usual pioneer conservatism about not venturing too far — in this case toward a glut of too many cinemas, too-safe streets, too much garbage pickup, too-clean water — the suburban experiential ante raised to dizzier and dizzier heights.

My job — and I often succeed — is to draw them back toward a chummier feeling, make them less anxious both about the unknown and the obvious: the ways they’re like their neighbors (all insignificant) and the happy but crucial ways they’re not. When I fail at this task, when I sell a house but leave the buyers with an intact pioneer anxiety, it usually means they’ll be out and on the road again in 3.86 years instead of settling in and letting time slip past the way people (that is, the rest of us) do who have nothing that pressing on their minds.

I turn off Route 1 onto NJ 571 at Penns Neck and hand Phyllis and Joe two fresh listing sheets so they can begin placing the Houlihan house into a neighborhood context. Neither of them has had much to say on the drive up — I assume they’re letting their early-morning emotional bruises heal in silence. Phyllis has posed one question about “the radon problem,” which she said was more serious than a lot of their Vermont neighbors would ever admit. Her blue, exophthalmic eyes grew hooded, as if radon was only one item in a Pandora’s box of North-country menace and grimness she’d grown prematurely old worrying about. Among them: asbestos in the school heating system, heavy metals in the well water, B. coli bacteria, wood smoke, hydrocarbons, rabid foxes, squirrels, voles, plus cluster flies, black ice, frozen mud — the wilderness experience up the yin-yang.

I, however, assured her radon wasn’t a big problem in central New Jersey, owing to our sandy-loamy soil, and most people I knew had had their houses “crawled” and sealed around 1981, when the last scare swept through.

Joe has had even less to say. As we neared the 571 turnoff he peered back once through his side mirror at the streaming roadway behind and asked in a mumbling voice where Penns Neck was. “It’s in the Haddam area,” I said, “but across Route I nearer the train line, which is a plus.”

He was silent for a while, then said, “I don’t want to live in an area.”

“You don’t what?” Phyllis said. She was leafing through the green-jacketed Self-Reliance I have brought along for Paul (my old, worn, individually bound copy from college).

“The Boston area, the tristate area, the New York area. Nobody ever said the Vermont area, or the Aliquippa area,” Joe said. “They just said the places.”

“Some people said the Vermont area,” Phyllis answered, flipping pages smartly.

“The D.C. area,” Joe said as a reproach. Phyllis said nothing. “Chicagoland,” Joe continued. “The Metro area. The Dallas area.”

“I guess you have to chalk it up to perception again,” I said, passing the little metal Penns Neck sign, which looked like a license plate, nearly hidden by some clumpy yew trees. “We’re in Penns Neck now,” I said, though no one answered.

Penns Neck is not in fact much of a town, much less an area: a few tidy, middle-rank residential streets situated on either side of busy 571, which connects the serenely tree-studded and affluent groves of nearby Haddam with the gradually sloping, light-industrial, overpopulous coastal plain where housing is abundant and affordable but the Markhams aren’t interested. In decades past, Penns Neck would’ve boasted a spruced-up, Dutchy-Quakery village character, islanded by fertile cornfields, well-tended stone walls, maple and hickory farmsteads teeming with wildlife. Only now it’s become just one more aging bedroom community for other larger, newer bedroom communities, in spite of the fact that its housing stock has withstood modernity’s rush, leaving it with an earnest old-style-suburban appeal. There is, however, no intact town center left, only a couple of at-home antique shops, a lawn-mower repair and a gas station-deli hard by the state road. The town office (I’ve checked into this) has actually been moved to the next town down Route 1 and into a mini-mall. At the Haddam Realty Board I’ve heard the sentiment bruited that the state should unincorporate Penns Neck and drop it onto the county tax rolls, which would sweeten the rates. In the past three years I’ve sold two houses here, though both families have since departed for better jobs in upstate New York.

But in truth I’m showing the Markhams a Penns Neck house not because I think it’ll be the house they’ve waited for me to show them all along, but because what’s here is what they can afford and because I think they may be dejected enough to buy it.

Once we turn left off 571 onto narrow Friendship Lane, pass a series of intersecting residential streets to the north, ending up at Charity Street, the beating-whomping hum of Route 1 traffic fades out of earshot and the silken, seamless ambience of quiet houses all in neat, close rows amid tall trees, nice-ish shrubberies and edged lawns with morning sprinklers hissing, plus no overnight parking — all this begins to fill the space that worry likes to occupy.

The Houlihan house, at 212 Charity, is forthright and not even so little, a remodeled gable-roofed American farmhouse set back on a shaded and shrubbed double lot among some old hardwoods and younger pines, farther from the street than any of its neighbors, and also elevated enough in its siting to suggest it once meant more than it means now. It has, in fact, the nicer, larger, slightly out-of-place look of having been the “original farmhouse” when all this was nothing but cow pastures and farmland, and pheasants and unrabid foxes coursed the turnip rows and real estate meant zip. It also has a new bright-green shingled roof, a solid-looking brick front stoop, and white wooden siding a generation older but of more or less the same material as the other houses on the street, which are smaller one-storey, design-book ranches with attached pole garages and little concrete walks straight to the curb, where mailboxes are posted house after house after house.

But here — and to my complete surprise, since I see I’ve, in fact, never seen it before — here might be the house the Markhams have been hoping for; the fabled long-shot house, the one I’d never shown them, the little Cape set too far back, with too many trees, the old caretaker’s cottage from the once-grand manor now gone, a place requiring “imagination,” a place no other clients could quite “visualize,” a house with “a story” or “a ghost,” but which might have a je-ne-sais-quoi attraction for a couple as amusingly offbeat as the Markhams. (Again, such houses do exist. They’ve usually just been retrofitted into single-practice laser-gynecological clinics run by doctors with Costa Rican M.D.’s and are most often found along older, major thoroughfares and not in actual neighborhoods in towns like Penns Neck.)

Our “Lauren-Schwindell Exclusive” sign is staked out front on the sloping lawn with Julie Loukinen, the listing agent’s name, dangling from the bottom. The grass has been newly trimmed, shrubbery pruned, the driveway swept clear to the back. There are lights inside, glowing humidly in the post-storm gloom. A car, an older Merc, sits in the driveway, and the door behind the front screen is standing open (aka no central air). This could be Julie’s car, though we haven’t planned to show the house as a team, so that it probably belongs to owner Houlihan, who (I’ve arranged this with Julie) is right now supposed to be eating a late breakfast at Denny’s courtesy of me.

The Markhams sit silent, noses first in their listing sheets then to the windows. This has often been the point when Joe announces he’s seen quite enough.

“Is that it?” Phyllis says.

“It’s our sign,” I say, turning in the driveway and pulling up halfway. Rain has stopped now. Beyond the old Merc, at the end of the drive behind the house, a detached wooden garage is visible, plus an enticing angle-slice of green from the shaded back yard. No crime bars are on any windows or doors.

“What’s the heating?” Joe — veteran Vermonter — says, squinting out the windshield, his listing sheet in his lap.

“Circulating hot water, electric baseboards in the den,” I say verbatim from the same sheet.

“How old?”

“Nineteen twenty-four. Not in the floodplain, and the side lot’s buildable if you ever want to sell or add on.”

Joe casts a dark frown of ecological betrayal at me, as if the very idea of parceling off vacant lots was a crime of rain-forest-type gravity which no one should even be allowed to conceptualize. (He himself would more than conceptualize it if he ever needed the money, or were getting divorced. I of course conceptualize it all the time.)

“It has a nice front yard,” I say. “Shade’s your hidden asset.”

“What kind of trees?” Joe says, scowling and concentrating on the side yard.

“Let’s see,” I say, leaning and looking out past his thick, hairmatte chest. “One’s a copper beech. That one’s a split-leaf maple, I’d say. One’s a sugar maple — which you should like. There’s a red oak. And one may be a ginkgo. It’s a good mix soilwise.”

“Ginkgoes stink,” Joe says, fixed in his seat, as is Phyllis, neither one offering to get out. “What’s it border on the back side?”

“We’ll need to look at that,” I say, though of course I know.

“Is that the owner?” Phyllis says, looking out.

A figure has come to the door and is rubbernecking from behind the shadowy screen: a man — not large — in a shirt and tie with no jacket. I’m not sure he even sees us.

“We’ll just have to find that out,” I say, hoping not, but easing the car a notch farther up the drive before shutting it off and immediately opening my door to the summer heat.

Once out, Phyllis steams right up the walk, moving with the same wobble-gaited unwieldiness as before, toes slightly out, arms working, intent on loving as much as possible before Joe can weigh in with the bad news.

Joe, though, in his silver shorts, flip-flops and pathetic muscle shirt, hangs back with me, then stops stock-still on the walk to survey the lawn, the street and the neighboring houses, which are Fifties constructions and cheaper, but with fewer maintenance worries and more modest, less burdensome lawns. The Houlihans’ is in fact the nicest house on the street, which can become a scratchy price issue with an experienced buyer but probably will not be today.

I have grabbed my clipboard and put on my red nylon windbreaker from the back seat. The jacket has the Lauren-Schwindell Societas Progressioni Commissa crest on the breast and a big white stenciled REALTOR across the back, like an FBI agent’s. I’m wearing it today in spite of the heat and humidity to get a point across to the Markhams: I’m not their friend; it’s business, not a hobby; there’s something at issue. Time’s a-wastin’.

“It ain’t Vermont, is it?” Joe muses as we stand side by side in the last drippy moments of the morning’s wet weather. This is exactly what he’s said at similar moments outside any number of other houses in the last four months, though he probably doesn’t remember. And what he means is: Well, fuck this. If you can’t show me Vermont, then why the hell are you showing me a goddamned thing? After which, often before Phyllis has even made it to the front door, we’ve turned around and left. This is why Phyllis caught fire to get inside. I, however, am frankly glad just to get Joe out of the car and this far, no matter what his objections might later be.

“It’s New Jersey, Joe,” I say as always. “And it’s pretty nice, too. You got tired of Vermont.”

Which has usually prompted Joe to say ruefully, “Yeah, and what a stupid fuck I am.” Only this time he says “Yeah” and looks at me soulfully, his little flat brown irises gone flatter, as if some essential lambency has droozled out and he has faced certain facts.

“That’s not a net loss,” I say, zipping my jacket halfway up and feeling my toes, damp from standing in the rain back at the Sleepy Hollow. “You don’t have to buy this house.” Which is a hell of a thing for a realtor to say, instead of: “You goddamn do have to buy it. It’s God’s patent will that you buy it. He’ll be furious at you if you don’t. Your wife’ll leave you and take your daughter to Garden Grove and enroll her in an Assembly of God school, and you’ll never see her again if you don’t buy this son of a bitch by lunchtime.” Yet what I go on airily to say is: “You can always head back to Island Pond tonight and be there in time to watch the crows come home to roost.”

Joe is not susceptible to other people’s witticisms and looks up at me strangely (I’m a few inches taller than he is, though he’s a little bullock). He clearly starts to say one thing in one tone of voice (sarcastic, without doubt), then just lets it go and stares out at the unpretentious row of hip-roofed, frame-with-brick-facade houses (some with crime bars), all built when he was a teenager, and where now, across Charity Street at 213, a young, shockingly red-haired woman — brighter red even than Phyllis’s — is pushing a big black-plastic garbage-can-on-wheels to the curb for the last pickup before the 4th.

The woman is obviously a young mom, in blue jeans cut off midthigh, sockless tennies and a blue work shirt sloppily but calculatedly cinched in a Marilyn Monroe knot just below her breasts. When she squares her plastic can up beside her mailbox, she looks at us and waves a cheery, careless wave that means she knows who we are — new-neighbor candidates, more lively maybe than the current owner.

I wave back, but Joe doesn’t. Possibly he is thinking about seeing things across a flat plain.

“I was just thinking as we were driving over here …,” he says, watching young Marilyn flounce back up the driveway and disappear into an empty carport. A door closes, a screen slams. “… that wherever you took us today was going to be where I was going to live for the rest of my life.” (I was right.) “A decision almost entirely in other people’s hands. And that in fact my judgment’s no good anymore.” (Joe hasn’t tumbled to my telling him he didn’t have to buy this place.) “I don’t know what the hell’s the right thing anymore. All I do is hold out as long as I can in hopes the really fucked-up choices will start to look fucked up, and I’ll be saved at least that much. You know what I mean?”

“I guess so.” I can hear Phyllis yakking inside, introducing herself to whoever was at the front door — not, I still hope, Houlihan himself. I would like to get inside, but I can’t leave Joe here under the dripping oaks in a brown study whose net yield might be double-decker despair and a botched chance at an offer.

Across in 213, the redhead we’ve watched suddenly whips open the draw drapes in a far-end bedroom window. I see only her head, but she is watching us brazenly. Joe is still lost in his bad-judgment funk.

“The other day Phyl and Sonja were off in Craftsbury,” he says, somberly, “and I got on the phone and called a woman I used to know. Just called her up. Out in Boise. I had a little — really a not so little — thing with her after my first marriage went south. Just before that happened, actually. She’s a potter too. Makes finished-looking stuff she sells to Nordstrom’s. And after we’d talked a while, just past events and whatnot, she said she had to get off the phone and wanted to know my number. But when I told her she laughed. She said, ‘God, Joe, there were a whole lot of pay-phone numbers for you in my book, but none of the M’s are you now.’” Joe stuffs his little hands up under his damp armpits and ponders this, staring in the direction of 213.

“She didn’t mean anything by that,” I say, still wanting to get a move on. Phyllis has not gone much farther than inside the door yet. I can hear her sing-songy voice exclaiming that everything in sight’s the nicest she ever saw. “You probably ended it on a good note way back then, didn’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have called her.”

“Oh, absolutely.” Joe’s little goatee works first this way and then that, as if he is double-checking his memory on all counts. “No blood let. Ever. But I really thought she’d call me later to say we needed to get together — which I was willing to do, to be honest. This house-buying business pushes you to extremes.” Willing-wife-deceiver Joe looks at me importantly.

“Right,” I say.

“But she never called. At least I never knew if she did.” He nods, still staring across at 213, which is painted a not very bright green on the wood above the brick and has a faded red front door no one ever uses. The bedroom curtain zips closed. Joe hasn’t been paying attention there. Some somnolent quality in the moment or the place or the misty rain or the distant rumble of Route 1 has rendered him unexpectedly capable of thinking a whole thought through.

“I don’t think it’s that meaningful, though, Joe,” I say.

“And I don’t even care a goddamned thing about this woman,” he says. “If she’d called me and said she was flying out to Burlington and wanted to meet me in a Holiday Inn and fuck me to death, I’d have most likely begged off.” Joe is not aware he has contradicted himself inside of a minute.

“Maybe she just figured that out and decided to let it go herself. Saved you the trouble.”

“But I’m just struck about my judgment,” Joe says sadly. “I was sure she’d call. That’s all. It was something she did, not something I did, or was even right about. Everything happened without me. Just like what’s going on here.”

“Maybe you’ll like this house,” I say lamely. The big front picture-window curtain at 213 now goes slashing back, and young red-haired Marilyn is standing in the middle, fixing us with what seems to me from here to be an accusing frown, as if whatever she took us for was making her mad enough to flash us the evil eye.

“You must’ve had this happen.” Joe looks toward me but not at me, in fact, looks right straight back over my left shoulder, which is his usual and most comfortable mode of address. “We’re the same age. You’ve been divorced. Had lots of women.”

“We need to go on inside, Joe,” I say. Though I am sympathetic. Not trusting your judgment — and, worse, knowing you shouldn’t trust it for some damn substantial reasons — can be one of the major causes and also one of the least tolerable ongoing features of the Existence Period, one you have to fine-tune out by the use of caution. “But let me just try to say this to you.” I cross my hands in front of my fly, holding my clipboard down there like an insurance adjuster. “When I got divorced, I was sure things had all happened to me and that I hadn’t really acted and was probably a coward and at least an asshole. Who knows if I was right? But I made one promise to myself, and that was that I’d never complain about my life, and just go on and try to do my best, mistakes and all, since there’s only so much anybody can do to make things come out right, judgment or no judgment. And I’ve kept my promise. And I don’t think you’re the kind of guy to fashion a life by avoiding mistakes. You make choices and live with them, even if you don’t feel like you’ve chosen a damn thing.” Joe may think, and I hope he does, that I’ve paid him a compliment of the rarest kind for being untranslatable.

His little bristle-mouth again makes a characteristic 0, which he is totally oblivious to, his eyes going narrow as razor cuts. “Sounds like you’re telling me to shut up.”

“I just want us to have a look at this house so you and Phyllis can think about what you want to do. And I don’t want you to worry about making a mistake before you even have a chance to make one.

Joe shakes his head, sneers, then sighs — a habit I intensely dislike, and for that reason I hope he buys the Houlihan house and discovers an eyelash too late that it’s sitting over a sinkhole. “My profs at Duquesne always said I overintellectualized too much.” He sneers again.

“That’s what I was trying to suggest,” I say, just as the flame-haired woman in 213 whisks across the picture-window space, north to south, totally in the buff, a big protuberant pair of white breasts leading the way, her arms out Isadora Duncan style, her good, muscular legs leaping and striding like a painting on an antique urn. “Wow, look at that,” I say. Joe, though, has shaken his head again over what a brainy guy he is, chuckled and ambled on off, and is already mounting the steps of what might be his last home on earth. Though what he’s just missed is a neighbor’s neighborly way of letting the prospective buyer know what he’s getting into out here, and frankly it’s a sight that causes my estimation of Penns Neck to go up and off the charts. It has mystery and the unexpected as its hidden assets — much better than shade — and Joe, had he seen it, might also have seen where his own interests lay and known exactly what to do.

Stepping inside the little arched front foyer, I can hear Phyllis far in the back already having an important-sounding conversation about gypsy moths, and about what her recent experience has been in Vermont. She is having this, I feel sure, with Ted Houlihan, who shouldn’t be here haunting his own house, badgering the shit out of my clients, satisfying himself they’re the kind of “solid” (meaning white) folks he’ll be comfortable passing his precious fee simple on to.

All the table lamps have been turned on. The floors are shiny, ashtrays cleaned, radiator tops dusted, floor moldings scrubbed, doorknobs polished. A welcome waxy smell deodorizes all — a sound selling strategy for creating the illusion that nobody actually lives here.

Joe, without even offering to greet the owner, goes right into his inspection modality, which he conducts with a brusque and speechless air of military thoroughness. In his smushed-pecker shorts, he takes a quick turn through the living room, which contains mint-condition Fifties couches, sturdy upholstered wing chairs, polished end tables, a sky-blue area rug and some elderly, store-bought prints of bird dogs, parrots in trees and lovers by a peaceful sylvan lake. He leans into the dining room, scans its heavy, polished eight-piece mahogany table-and-chairs ensemble. His beady eyes survey the crown moldings, the chair rails, the swinging kitchen door. He twists the rheostat, brightening then dimming the pink salad-bowl globe, then turns and heads back through the living room and down the central hall, where lights are also on and there’s a security panel with a keypad of oversized cartoon numbers, friendly to older users. With me right behind, Joe strides slappety-slap into each bedroom, takes an unimpressed look around, slides open then closed a closet door, mentally adds up the number of grounded wall sockets, steps to the window, takes in the view, gives each window a little lift to determine if it’s hung correctly or painted shut, then makes for the bathrooms.

In the pink-tiled master bath, he goes for the sink, twists on both taps full blast and waits, assessing the flow, how long the hot takes, how efficiently the drain drains. He flushes the toilet and stares at the bowl to time the “retrieval.” In the “little” bath he raises the thin, new-style Venetian blinds and stares out again at the park-like yard, as though contemplating the peaceful vista he would have après le bain or during another prolonged nature call. (Once a client, an eminent German economist from one of the local think tanks, actually dropped trou and plopped down for a real test.)

During all such inspections, over nearly four months, and with me in attendance, Joe has stopped looking the instant he recorded three major demerits: too few sockets, more than two squishy floorboards, any unrepaired ceiling water stain, any kind of crack or odd wall angle indicating settling or “pulling away.” Customarily he has also spoken very little, making only infrequent, undesignated hums. In one split-level in Pennington, he wondered out loud about the possibility of undetected root damage from an older linden tree planted close to the foundation; another time, in Haddam, he mumbled the words “lead-based paint” as he strode through a daylight basement, checking for seepage. In each case no response was asked from me, since he’d already found plenty not to like, starting with the price, which he later said, in both instances, indicated the owners needed to have their heads uncorked from their asses.

When Joe makes his plunge into the basement (where I’m happy not to go), flipping the light switch on at the top and then off again at the bottom, I take my opportunity to wander back where Phyllis stands with, indeed, Ted Houlihan at the glass door to the back yard. Here, an afterthought rumpus room cum live-in kitchen gives pleasingly onto a neat brick patio surrounded by luau torches, viewable through a big picture window (a neighborhood staple) that also exhibits some seepage discoloration around its frame — a defect Joe won’t miss if he gets this far.

Ted Houlihan is a recently widowed engineer, not long retired from the R & D division of a nearby kitchen appliance firm. He is a sharp-eyed little white-haired seventy-plus-year-old, in faded chinos, penny loafers, an old short-sleeved, nicely frayed blue oxford shirt and a blue-and-red rep tie, and looks like the happiest man in Penns Neck. (He looks, in fact, eerily like the old honey-voiced chorister Fred Waring, who was a favorite of mine in the Fifties but in private was a martinet and a bully despite having an old softy’s reputation.)

Ted gives me a big sincere back-over-his-shoulder smile when I arrive in my REALTOR windbreaker. It is our first meeting, and he would make me happy if he’d take this opportunity to head for Denny’s. Noisy boom, boom, boom racketing has begun below-floors, as if Joe were breaking through the foundation with a sledgehammer.

“I was just about to explain to Mrs. Markham, Mr. Bascombe,” Ted Houlihan says as we shake hands — his is small and tough as a walnut, mine pulpy and for some reason damp. “I’ve been diagnosed with testicular cancer here just last month, and I’ve got a son out in Tucson who’s a surgeon, and he’s going to do the operation himself. I’d sort of been mulling over selling for months, but just decided yesterday enough was enough.” (Which it certainly is.)

Phyllis (and who wouldn’t?) has reacted to this cancer news with a look of pale distress. No doubt it puts her in mind of her own problems — which is reason # fourteen to keep owners miles away from clients: they inevitably heave murky, irresolvable personal issues into the sales arena, often making my job all but impossible.

Though unless I’m way off, Phyllis is already well dazzled and charmed by everything. The back yard is a grassy little mini-Watteau, with carpets of deep-green pachysandra ringing the large trees. Rhodies, wisterias and peonies are set out all over everywhere. A good-size Japanese rock garden containing a little toy maple has been artfully situated under a big dripping oak that looks thoroughly robust and in no danger of falling over into the house. Plus, against the side of the garage is an actual pergola, clustered all over with dense, ropy grapevines and honeysuckle, with a little rustic English-looking iron settee placed underneath like a wedding bower — just the setting for renewing your sacred oaths on a clear late-summer’s evening, followed by some ardent alfresco lovemaking.

“I was just saying to Mr. Houlihan what a lovely yard it is,” Phyllis says, recovering herself and smiling a little dazedly at the thought of the man in front of her having his nuts snipped by his own son. Joe has stopped banging on whatever he was banging on downstairs, though I hear other metal-to-metal scraping and prying coming up through the floorboards.

“I’ve got a bunch of old pictures someplace of the house and the yard back in 1955 when we bought it. My wife thought it was the prettiest place she’d ever seen then. There was a farmer’s field and a big stone silo out back and a cow lot and a milk parlor.” Ted points a leathery finger toward the back property line, where there’s a thick tropical-bamboo stand backed by a high plank fence painted the exact same shade of unnoticeably dark green. The fence continues in both directions behind the next-door neighbors’ houses until it goes out of sight.

“What’s back there, now?” Phyllis says. She has the look of “this is the one, this is the place” written all over her flushed, puffy face. Joe is currently clumping up the basement steps, his excavations and explorings now complete. I picture him as a miner in a metal-cage elevator rising miles and miles out of the deep Pennsylvania earth, his face caked, his eye sockets white, a bunged-up lunch pail under his ham-hock arm and a dim beacon light on his helmet. I am betting the next thing Ted Houlihan says isn’t going to faze Phyllis Markham one iota.

“Oh, the state put its little facility back there,” Ted Houlihan says genially. “Though they’re pretty good neighbors.”

“What kind of facility?” Phyllis says, smiling.

“Mmm. It’s a little minimum security unit,” Ted says. “It’s just one of these country clubs. Nothing serious.”

“For what?” Phyllis says, still happy. “What kind of security?”

“For you and me, I guess,” Ted says, and looks over at me. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Bascombe?”

“It’s the State of New Jersey’s minimum security facility,” I say chummily. “It’s where they put the mayor of Burlington, and bankers, and ordinary people like Ted and me. And Joe.” I smile a little co-conspirator’s smile.

“It’s back there?” Phyllis says. Her eyes find Joe, who has emerged from down under — no coal-dust tan or headlamp or lunch-box, just his flip-flops, jersey shirt and shorts with his wallet stuck in his belt — come in to be cordial. He’s seen some things he likes and is thinking about possibilities. “Did you hear what Frank said?” Her full and curvaceous mouth shows a slight sign of stiffening concern. For some reason she puts her palm flat on top of her bobbed red hair and blinks, as though she were holding something down inside her skull.

“I missed it,” Joe says, rubbing his hands together. There is in fact a black dust smudge on his naked shoulder, where he’s been rooting around. He looks happily at the three of us — his first onrecord pleased expression in weeks. He again makes no effort to introduce himself to Ted.

“There’s a prison behind that fence.” Phyllis points out the picture window, across the little spruced-up lawn.

“Is that right?” Joe says, still smiling. He sort of ducks so he can see out the window. “What’s that mean?” He has yet to notice the seepage.

“There’s criminals in cells behind the back yard,” Phyllis says. She looks at Ted Houlihan and tries to seem agreeable, as if this were just an irksome little sticking point to be worked out as a contingency in a contract (“Owner agrees to remove state prison on or before date of closing”). “Isn’t that right,” she asks, her blue eyes larger and intenser than usual.

“Not really cells, per se,” Ted says, thoroughly relaxed. “It’s more like a campus atmosphere — tennis courts, swimming pools, college classes. You can attend classes there yourself. A good many of the residents go home on weekends. I really wouldn’t call it a prison.”

“That’s interesting,” Joe Markham says, nodding out at the bamboo curtain and the green plank wall behind it. “You can’t really see it, can you?”

“Did you know about this?” Phyllis says to me, still agreeable.

“Absolutely,” I say, sorry to be involved. “It’s on the listing sheet.” I scan down my page. “Adjoins state land on north property line.”

“I thought that meant something else,” Phyllis says.

“I’ve actually never even been over there,” Ted Houlihan says, Mr. Upbeat. “They have their own fence behind ours, which you can’t see. And you never hear a sound. Bells or sirens or anything. They do have nice chimes on Christmas Day. I know the gal across the street works there. It’s the biggest employer in Penns Neck.”

“I just think it might be a problem for Sonja,” Phyllis says quietly to everyone.

“I don’t think there’s a threat to anything or anyone,” I say, thinking about Marilyn Monroe across the way, strapping on her hogleg and heading off to work every morning. What must the prisoners think? “I mean, Machine Gun Kelly’s not in there. It’s probably just people we all voted for and will again.” I smile around, thinking this might be a correct time for Ted to walk us through his own security setup.

“We’ve come up quite a bit in value since they built it,” Ted says. “The rest of the area — including Haddam, I should say — has lost some ground. I feel like I’m probably really leaving at the wrong time.” He gives all three of us a sad-but-foxy Fred Waring grin.

“You’re sure leaving a goddamned good house, I’ll just tell you that,” Joe says self-importantly. “I had a look at the floor joists and the sills. They don’t cut ’em that wide anymore, except in Vermont.” He gives Phyllis a narrow-eyed, approving frown meant to announce he’s found a house he likes even if Alcatraz is next door. Joe has turned a corner now — a mysterious transit no man can chart for another. “The pipes and the wiring are all copper. The sockets are all three-prongs. You don’t see that in an older home.” Joe stares at Ted Houlihan almost irritably. I’m sure he would like to dope out the entire house plan in detail.

“My wife liked everything up to code,” Ted says, a little sheepish.

“Where’s she now?” Joe has the listing sheet out and is giving it a good perusing.

“She’s dead,” Ted says, and lets his gaze for an instant slip out to his bosky lawn to glide among the white peonies and yew shrubs, up under the pergola and through the wisterias. A little glistening and chartless passage has been glimpsed open and he’s wandered in, and there is a golden cornfield beyond, and he and the missus are in their wondrous primes. (It is not foreign ground to me, this passage, though under my strict rules of existence it opens but rarely.)

Joe is running his stubby finger and snapping eyes over some listing sheet fine points, undoubtedly pertaining to “extras” and “rm sz,” and “schls.” Noting the “sq ftge” for his new work space. He is house-buying Joe now, death on the scent of a good deal.

“Joe, you asked Mr. Houlihan about his wife, and she’s dead,” Phyllis says.

“Hm?” Joe says.

“She’s lying right there in the kitchen floor, bleeding out her ears, in fact.” I’d like to say this in old reverie-lost Ted’s defense, but I don’t.

“Oh yeah, I know, I’m sorry to know that,” Joe says. He holds the listing sheet down and frowns at Phyllis and me and lastly at Ted Houlihan, as if we’d all been shouting at him “She’s dead, she’s dead, you asshole, she’s dead,” while he’s been sound asleep. “I am, I really am,” he says. “When did this happen?” Joe gives me a look of incredulity.

“Two years ago,” Ted says, back from the past and regarding Joe kindly. His is an honest face of life’s sad dwindling. Joe shakes his head as if there were things in life you just couldn’t explain.

“Let’s see the rest of the house,” Phyllis says, weary with letdown. “I’d still like to see it.”

“You bet,” I say.

“I am very interested in the house,” Joe says to no one. “It’s got a lot of features I like. I really do.”

“I’ll stay with Mr. Markham here,” Ted Houlihan says, still unintroduced. “Let’s go out and have a look at the garage.” He opens the glass door to the sweet, past-besotted yard, while Phyllis and I head moodily back into the house for what, I’m afraid, will now be only a hollow formality.

Phyllis, as expected, takes only polite interest, barely poking her head into the staid little bedrooms and baths, taking pleasant but brief notice of the plastic-decor laundry hampers and pink cotton bath mats, emitting an occasional “I see” or “That’s nice” toward a tub-and-shower that looks brand-new. Once she murmurs, “I haven’t seen that in years,” toward a phone nook built into the end of the hall.

“It’s been taken care of,” she says, standing in the front foyer but stealing a look through to the back to where Joe is now out by the bamboo wall, short arms crossed, listing sheet in hand, jawing with Ted in a pool of midmorning sunlight. She would like to leave. “I liked it so much at first,” she says, turning to gaze out the front, where sexy Marilyn-the-prison-guard’s garbage can waits at the curb.

“My advice is just to think about it,” I say, sounding insipid even to myself. My job, though, is to place a light finger on the scale of judgment when I sense the moment requires, when a potential buyer has a gold-plated chance to make herself happy by becoming an owner. “What I wonder about, Phyllis, when I sell a house is whether a client’s getting his or her money’s worth.” I say this as I feel it — truly. “You might think I’d wonder about whether he or she gets their dream house, or if they get the house they originally wanted. Getting your money’s worth, though, getting value, is frankly more important — particularly in the current economy. When the correction comes, value will be what things stand on. And in this house”—I cast a theatrical look around and up at the ceiling as if that was where value generally staked its pennant—“in this house I think you’ve got the value.” And I do. (My windbreaker is beginning to stoke up inside, but I don’t want to take it off just yet.)

“I don’t want to live next door to a prison,” Phyllis says almost pleadingly, and walks to the screen and looks out, her pudgy hands stuffed in her culotte pockets. (It may be she is attempting one simulated act of ownership — the innocent pause of an everyday to stare out a front door — trying to feel where the “catch” comes and if it comes, the needling thought that somewhere nearby’s a TV-room full of carefree tax cheats, randy priests and scheming pension-fund CEOs who are her leering neighbors, and whether that’s as intolerable as she’s thought.)

Phyllis shakes her head, as if an unsavory taste had just been located. “I always felt I was a liberal. But I guess I’m not,” she says. “I think there ought to be these types of institutions for certain types of criminals, but I shouldn’t have to live next to one and raise my daughter there.”

“We’re all a little less flexible as we get older,” I say. I should tell her about Clair Devane being murdered in a condo, and me being bopped to the pavement by larking Orientals. A convenient good-neighbor prison wouldn’t be all that bad.

I hear Joe and Ted laugh like Rotarians out back, Joe going “Ho-ho-ho.” A greasy, gassy fragrance has wafted out from the kitchen, supplanting the clean, furniture-wax smell. (I’m surprised Joe could’ve missed it.) Ted and his wife may have mooned around here half gassed and happy as goats for decades, never knowing quite why.

“What do you do about your testicles? Is that bad?” Phyllis says, still solemn.

“I’m not much of an expert,” I say. I need to haul Phyllis back from life’s darker corridor, where she seems to be venturing, and push us on to the more positive aspects of close-by prison living.

“I was just thinking about getting old.” Phyllis gives her little mushroom top a one-finger scratching. “And how fucked up it is.” She, for this moment, is seeing all God’s children as a dying breed (possibly the gas leak is responsible), killed off not by disease but by MRIs, biopsies, sonograms and cold, blunt instruments unsoothingly entered into our most unwelcoming recesses. “I guess I have to have a hysterectomy,” she says, facing the front yard but speaking serenely. “I haven’t even told Joe yet.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, unclear whether that’s the correct and wished-for sympathy.

“Yeah. So. Ho-hum,” she says sadly, her wide backside to me. She may be dousing tears. But I’m frozen in my saddle. A less advertised part of the realtor’s job is overcoming natural client morbidity — the quickening, queasy realization that by buying a house you’re taking over someone else’s decays and lurking problems, troubles you’ll be responsible for till doomsday and that do nothing more than replace troubles of your own, old ones you’ve finally gotten used to. There are tricks of the trade to deal with this sort of recoil: stressing value (I just did it); stressing workmanship (Joe did that); stressing an older home’s longevity, its being finished with settling pains, blah, blah, blah (Ted did exactly that); stressing general economic insecurity (I did that in my editorial this morning and will see that Phyllis gets a copy by sundown).

Only for Phyllis’s particular distress and dismay I have no antidote, except to wish for a kinder world. It hardly counts.

“The whole country seems in a mess to me, Frank. We really can’t afford to live in Vermont, if you want to know the truth. But now we can’t live down here either. And with my health concerns, we need to put down some roots.” Phyllis sniffs, as if the tears she’s been fighting have retreated. “I’m riding a hormonal roller coaster today. I’m sorry. I just see everything black.”

“I don’t think things are that bad, Phyllis. I think, for instance, this is a good house with good value, just the way I’ve said, and you and Joe would be happy here, and so would Sonja, and you’d never worry about your neighbors at all. No one knows his neighbors in the suburbs anyway. It’s not like Vermont.” I peek down at my listing sheet to see if there’s anything new and diverting I can stress: “fplc,” “gar/cpt,” “lndry,” priced right at 155K. Solid value considerations but nothing to bring the hormonal roller coaster into the station.

I gaze in puzzlement at her ill-defined posterior and have a sudden, fleeting curiosity about, of all things, her and Joe’s sex life. Would it be jolly and jokey? Prayerful and restrained? Rowdy, growling and obstreperous? Phyllis has an indefinite milky allure that is not always obvious — encased and bundled as she is, and slightly bulge-eyed in her fitless, matron-designer clothes — some yielding, unmaternal abundance that could certainly get a rise out of some lonely PTA dad in corduroys and a flannel shirt, encountered by surprise in the chilly intimacy of the grade-school parking lot after parents’ night.

The truth is, however, we know little and can find out precious little more about others, even though we stand in their presence, hear their complaints, ride the roller coaster with them, sell them houses, consider the happiness of their children — only in a flash or a gasp or the slam of a car door to see them disappear and be gone forever. Perfect strangers.

And yet, it is one of the themes of the Existence Period that interest can mingle successfully with uninterest in this way, intimacy with transience, caring with the obdurate uncaring. Until very recently (I’m not sure when it stopped) I believed this was the only way of the world; maturity’s balance. Only more things seem to need sorting out now: either in favor of complete uninterest (ending things with Sally might be an example) or else going whole hog (not ending things with Sally might be another example).

“You know, Frank …” Her misty moment past, Phyllis has walked by me into the Houlihans’ living room, stepped to the front window beside a little leafed butler’s table and, just like the redhead across the street, pulled open the drapes, letting in a warm, midmorning light, which defeats the room’s funeral stillness by causing its fussy couches and feminine mint dishes, its antimacassars and polished knickknacks (all of which Ted has left sentimentally in place), to seem to shine from within. “I was just standing there thinking that maybe no one gets the house they want.” Phyllis glances around the room in an interested, friendly way, as if she liked the new light but thought the furniture needed rearranging.

“Well, if I can find it for them they do. And if they can afford it. You are best off coming as close as you can and trying to bring life to a place, not just depending on the place to supply it for you.” I give her my own version of a willing smile. This is a positive sign, though of course we’re not really addressing each other now; we’re merely setting forth our points of view, and everything depends on whose act is better. It is a form of strategizing pseudo-communication I’ve gotten used to in the realty business. (Real talk — the kind you have with a loved one such as your former wife back when you were her husband — real talk is out of the question.)

“Do you have a prison behind your house?” Phyllis says bluntly. She gazes at her toes, which are pinched into her sandals, their nails painted scarlet. They seem to imply something to her.

“No, but I do live in my ex-wife’s former house,” I say, “and I live alone, and my son’s an epileptic who has to wear a football helmet all day, and I’ve decided to live in her house just to give him a little semblance of continuity when he comes to visit, since his life expectancy’s not so great. So I’ve made some adjustments to necessity.” I blink at her. This is about her, not about me.

Phyllis was not expecting this, and looks stunned, suddenly acknowledging how much everything up to now has been usual salesmanship, usual aggravating clienthood; but that now everything is suddenly down to it: her and Joe’s actual situation being attended to diligently by a man with even bigger woes than they have, who sleeps less well, visits more physicians, has more worrisome phone calls, during which he spends more anxious time on hold while gloomy charts are being read, and whose life generally matters more than theirs by his being closer to the grave (not necessarily his own).

“Frank, I don’t mean to compare wounds with bruises,” Phyllis says abjectly. “I’m sorry. I’m just feeling a lot of pressure along with everything else.” She gives me a sad Stan Laurel smile and lowers her chin just like old Stan. Her face, I see, is a malleable and sweet putty face, perfect for alternative children’s theater in the Northeast Kingdom. But no less right for Penns Neck, where a thespian group she might head up could do Peter Pan or The Fantasticks (minus the “Rape” song) for the lonely, sticky-fingered ex-comptrollers and malpractitioners across the fence, leaving them with at least a temporary feeling that life isn’t all that ruined, that there’s still hope on the outside, that there are a lot of possibilities left — even if there aren’t.

I hear Ted and Joe scraping their damp dogs on the back steps, then stamping the welcome mat and Joe saying, “Now that’d be a real reality check, I’ll tell you,” while gentle, clever Ted says, “I’ve just decided for the time I have left, Joe, to let go all the nonessentials.”

“I envy that, don’t think I don’t,” Joe says. “Boy-oh-boy, I could get rid of some of those, all right.”

Phyllis and I both hear this. Each of us knows that one of us is the first nonessential Joe would like to put behind him.

“Phyllis, I figure we’ve all got scars and bruises,” I say, “but I just don’t want them to cause you to miss a damn good deal on a wonderful house when it’s in your grasp here.”

“Is there anything else we can see today?” Phyllis says dispiritedly.

I sway back slightly on my heels, arms enfolding my clipboard. “I could show you a new development.” I’m thinking of Mallards Landing, of course, where slash is smoldering and maybe two units are finished and the Markhams will go out of their gourds the minute they lay eyes on the flapping pennants. “The young developer’s a heck of a good guy. They’re all in your range. But you indicated you didn’t want to consider new homes.”

“No,” Phyllis says darkly. “You know, Frank, Joe’s a manic-depressive.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I hug my clipboard tighter. (I’m beginning to cook like a cabbage in my windbreaker.) I mean, though, to hold my ground. Manic-depressives, convicted felons, men and women with garish tattoos over every inch of their skin: all are entitled to a hook to hang their hats on if they’ve got the scratch. This claim for Joe’s looniness is probably a complete lie, a ploy to let me know she’s a worthy opponent in the realty struggle (for some reason her female troubles still seem legit). “Phyllis, you and Joe need to do some serious thinking about this house.” I stare profoundly into her obstinate blue eyes, which I realize for the first time must have contacts, since no blue nearly similar to that occurs in nature.

She is framed by the window, her small hands clasped in front like a schoolmarm lording a trick question over a schoolboy dunce. “Do you feel sometimes”—the light glowing around Phyllis seems to have brought her in contact with the forces of saintliness—“that no one’s looking out for you anymore?” She smiles faintly. The creases at the corners of her mouth make weals in her cheeks.

“Every day.” I try to beam back a martyrish look.

“I had that feeling when I got married the first time. When I was twenty and a sophomore at Towson. And I had it this morning again at the motel — the first time in years.” She rolls her eyes in a zany way.

Joe and Ted are making a noisy second trek over the floor plan now. Ted’s unscrolling some old blueprints he’s kept squirreled away. They will soon barge into Phyllis’s and my little séance.

“I think that feeling’s natural, Phyllis, and I think you and Joe take care of each other just fine.” I peek to see if the orienteers are here yet. I hear them tromping over the defunct floor furnace, talking importantly about the attic.

Phyllis shakes her head and smiles a beatified smile. “The trick’s changing the water to wine, isn’t it?”

I have no idea what this might mean, though I give her a lawyerly-brotherly look that says this competition’s over. I could even give her a pat on her plump shoulder, except she’d get wary. “Phyllis, look,” I say. “People think there’re just two ways for things to go. A worked-out way and a not-worked-out way. But I think most things start one way, then we steer them where we want them to go. And no matter how you feel at the time you buy a house — even if you don’t buy this one or don’t buy one from me at all — you’re going to have to—“

And then our séance is over. Ted and Joe come trooping back down the hall from where they’ve decided not to take a cobwebby tour up the “disappearing” stairway to eyeball some metal rafter gussets Ted installed when Hurricane Lulu passed by in ’58, blowing hay straw through tree trunks, moving yachts miles inland and leveling grander houses than Ted’s. It’s too hot upstairs.

“God’s in the details,” one of the new best friends observes. But adds, “Or is it the devil?”

Phyllis looks peacefully at the entry, into which the two of them go first one way and then the other before locating us in the l/r. Ted, coming into view with his blueprints, looks to my estimation satisfied with everything. Joe, in his immature goatee, his vulgar shorts and Potters Do It With Their Fingers shirt, seems on the verge of some form of hysteria.

“I’ve seen enough,” Joe shouts like a railroad conductor, taking a quick estimation of the living room as if he’d never seen it in his life. He jams his thick knuckles together in satisfaction. “I can make up my mind on what I’ve seen.”

“Okay,” I say. “We’ll take a drive, then.” (Code for: We’ll go to breakfast and write up a full-price offer and be back in an hour.) I give Ted Houlihan an assuring nod. Unexpectedly he’s proved a key player in an ad hoc divide-and-conquer scheme. His memories, his poor dead wife, his faulty cojones, his Milquetoast Fred Waring soft-shoe worldview and casual attire, are first-rate selling tools. He could be a realtor.

“This place won’t stay on the market long,” Joe shouts to anyone in the neighborhood who’s interested. He swivels around and starts for the front door in some kind of beehive panic.

“Well, we’ll see,” Ted Houlihan says, and gives me and Phyllis a doubtful smile, scrolling his blueprints tighter. “I know that place across the fence disturbs you, Mrs. Markham. But I’ve always felt it made the whole neighborhood safer and more cohesive. It’s not much different from having AT & T or RCA, if you get what I mean.”

“I understand,” Phyllis says, unmoved.

Joe is already through the front door, down the steps and out onto the lawn, scoping out the roofline, the fascial boards, the soffits, his hair-framed mouth gaped open as he searches for sags in the ridgeboard or ice damage under the eaves. Possibly it is manic-depression medicine that causes his lips to be so red. Joe, I think, needs a bit of tending to.

I find a Frank Bascombe, Realtor Associate card in my windbreaker pocket and slip it onto the umbrella stand outside the living-room door, where I’ve spent the last ten minutes keeping Phyllis in the corral.

“We’ll be in touch,” I say to Ted. (More code. Less specific.)

“Yes, indeed,” Ted says, smiling warmly.

And then out Phyllis goes, hips swaying, sandals clicking, shaking Ted’s little hand on the fly and saying something about its being a lovely house and a pity he has to sell it, but heading right out to where Joe’s trying to get a clear bead on things through whatever fog it’s his bewildered lot to see through.

“They’ll never buy it,” Ted says gamely as I head toward the door. His is not disappointment but possibly misplaced satisfaction at having foreign elements turned away, permitting a brief retreat into the comfortable bittersweet domesticity that’s still his. Joe out the door would be a relief for anyone.

“I can’t tell, Ted,” I say. “You don’t know what other people will do. If I did, I’d be in another line of work.”

“It’d be nice to think that the place was valuable to others. I’d feel good about that. There’s not a lot of corroboration there for us anymore.”

“Not what we’d like. But that’s my part in this.” Phyllis and Joe are standing beside my car, looking at the house as though it were an ocean liner just casting off for open seas. “Just don’t underestimate your own house, Ted,” I say, and once again grab his little hard-biscuit hand and give it an affirming shake. I take a last whiff of gas leak. (I’ll hear Joe out on this subject inside of five minutes.) “Don’t be surprised if I come back with an offer this morning. They won’t see a house as good as yours, and I mean to make that clear as Christmas.”

“A guy once climbed over the fence while I was out back sacking leaves,” Ted says. “Susan and I took him inside, gave him some coffee and an egg salad sandwich. Turned out he was an alderman from West Orange. He’d just gotten in over his head. But he ended up helping me bag leaves for an hour, then going back over. We got a Christmas card from him for a while.”

“He’s probably back in politics,” I say, happy Ted has spared Phyllis this anecdote.

“Probably.”

“We’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be right here,” Ted says. He closes the front door behind me.

Inside the car, the Markhams seem to want to get rid of me as fast as possible, and, more important, neither one makes a peep about an offer.

As we’re pulling out the drive we all notice another realtor’s car slowing to a stop, a young couple front and back — the woman videotaping the Houlihan place through the passenger window. The driver’s-side sign on the big shiny Buick door says BUY AND LARGE REALTY—Freehold, NJ.

“This place’ll be history by sundown,” Joe says flatly, seated beside me, his get-up-and-go oddly got-up-and-gone. No mention of any gas odor. Phyllis has had no real chance to browbeat him, but a look can raze cities.

“Could be,” I say, staring knives at the BUY AND LARGE Buick. Ted Houlihan may have already reneged on our exclusive, and I’m tempted to step out and explain some things to everybody involved. Though the sight of competing buyers could put a special, urgent onus to act on Phyllis and Joe, who watch these new people in disapproving silence as I drive us back down Charity Street.

On the way to Route 1, Phyllis — who has now put on dark glasses and looks like a diva — suddenly insists I drive them “around” so she can see the prison. Consequently, I negotiate us back through the less nice, bordering neighborhoods, curve in behind a new Sheraton and a big Episcopal church with a wide, empty parking lot, then merge out onto Route 1 north of Penns Neck, where, a half mile down the road in what looks like a mowed hayfield, there sits, three hundred yards back, a complex of low, indistinct flat-green buildings fenced all around and refenced closer in, which altogether constitutes the offending “big house.” We can see basketball backboards, a baseball diamond, several fenced and lighted tennis courts, a high-dive platform over what might very well be an Olympic-size pool, some paved and winding “reflection paths” leading out into open stretches of field where pairs of men — some apparently elderly and limping — are strolling and chatting and wearing street clothes instead of prison monkey garb. There’s also, apparently for atmosphere, a large flock of Canada geese milling and nosing around a flat, ovoid pond.

I, naturally, have passed this place incalculable times but have paid it only the briefest attention (which is what the prison planners expected, the whole shebang as unremarkable as a golf course). Though looked at now, a grassy, summery compound with substantial trees ranked beyond its boundaries, where an inmate can do any damn thing he wants but leave — read a book, watch color TV, think about the future — and where one’s debts to society can be unobtrusively retired in a year or two, it seems like a place anyone might be glad to pause just to get things sorted out and cut through the crap.

“It looks like some goddamn junior college,” Joe Markham says, still talking in the higher decibels but seeming calmer now. We’re stopped on the opposite shoulder, with traffic booming past, and are rubbernecking the fence and the official silver-and-black sign that reads: N.J. MEN’S FACILITY — A MINIMUM SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, behind which New Jersey, American and Penal System flags all rustle on separate poles in the faint, damp breezes. There’s no guardhouse here, no razor wire, no electric fences, no watchtowers with burp guns, stun grenades, searchlights, no leg-chewing canines— just a discreet automatic gate with a discreet speaker box and a small security camera on a post. No biggie.

“It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” I say.

“Where’s our house from here?” Joe says, still loudly, leaning to see across me.

We study the row of big trees which is Penns Neck, the Houlihan house on Charity Street invisible within.

“You can’t see it,” Phyllis says, “but it’s back there.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Joe says. He flashes a look back at Phyllis in her shades. A giant dump truck blows past, rocking the car on its chassis. “They have a gap in the fence where you can trade recipes.” He snorts.

“A cake with a file in it,” Phyllis says, her face unresigned. I try to catch her eye in the rearview, but can’t. “I don’t see it.”

“I goddamned see it,” Joe growls.

We sit staring for thirty more seconds, and then it’s off we go.

As a negative inducement and a double cincher, I drive us out past Mallards Landing, where everything is as it was two hours ago, only wetter. A few workmen are moving inside the half-studded homes. A crew of black men is loading wads of damp sod off a flatbed and stacking them in front of the MODEL that’s supposedly OPEN but isn’t and in fact looks like a movie façade where a fictionalized American family would someday pay the fictionalized mortgage. It puts me and, I’m sure, the Markhams in mind of the prison we just left.

“Like I was saying to Phyllis,” I say to Joe, “these are in your price window, but they’re not what you described.”

“I’d rather have AIDS than live in that junk,” Joe snarls, and doesn’t look at Phyllis, who sits in the back, peering out toward the strobing oil-storage depot and the bulldozed piles of now unsmoldering trees. Why have I come here? she is almost certainly thinking. How long a ride back is it by Vermont Transit? She could be down at the Lyndonville Farmers’ Co-op at this very moment, a clean red kerchief on her head, she and Sonja blithely but responsibly shopping for the holiday — surprise fruits for the “big fruit bowl” she’ll take to the Independence Day bash. Chinese kites would be tethered above the veggie stalls. Someone would be playing a dulcimer and singing quirky mountain tunes full up with sexual double meanings. Labs and goldens by the dozens would be scratching and lounging around, wearing colorful bandanna collars of their own. Where has that all disappeared to, she is wondering. What have I done?

Suddenly crash-boom! Somewhere miles aloft in the peaceful atmosphere, invisible to all, a war jet breaks the barrier of harmonious sound and dream, reverbs rumbling toward mountaintops and down the coastal slope. Phyllis jumps. “Oh fuck,” she says. “What was that?”

“I broke wind. Sorry,” Joe says, smirking at me, and then we say no more.

At the Sleepy Hollow, the Markhams, who have ridden the rest of the way in total motionless silence, seem now reluctant to depart my car. The scabby motel lot is empty except for their ancient borrowed Nova with its mismatched tires and moronic anesthetists’ sticker caked with Green Mountain road dirt. A small, pinkly dressed maid wearing her dark hair in a bun is flickering in and out the doorway to #7, loading a night’s soiled linen and towels into a cloth hamper and carting in stacks of fresh.

The Markhams would both rather be dead than anywhere that’s available to them, and for a heady, unwise moment I consider letting them follow me home, setting them up for a weekend of house discussion on Cleveland Street — a safe, depression-free base from which they could walk to a movie, eat a decent bluefish or manicotti dinner at the August Inn, window-shop down Seminary Street till Phyllis can’t stand not to live here, or at least nearby.

Though that is simply not in the cards, and my heart strikes two and a half sharp, admonitory beats at the very thought. Not only do I not like the idea of them rummaging around in my life’s accoutrements (which they would absolutely do, then lie about it), but since we’re not talking offer, I want them left as solitary as Siberia so they can get their options straight. They could always, of course, move themselves up to the new Sheraton or the Cabot Lodge and pay the freight. Though in its own way each of these is as dismal as the Sleepy Hollow. In my former sportswriter’s life I often sought shelter and even exotic romance in such spiritless hideaways, and often, briefly, found it. But no more. No way.

Joe has gone all the way through his list of questions left unanswered on the listing sheet, which he has spindled, then folded, his former lion’s certainty now beginning to wane. “Any chance of a lease option back there at Houlihan’s?” he says, as we all three just sit.

“No.”

“Any chance Houlihan might come off a buck fifty-five?”

“Make an offer.”

“When can Houlihan vacate?”

“Minimum time. He has cancer.”

“Would you negotiate the commission down to four percent?”

(This comes as no surprise.) “No.”

“What’s the bank renting money for these days?”

(Again.) “Ten-four on a thirty-year fixed, plus a point, plus an application fee.”

We skirl down through everything Joe can dredge up. I have turned the a/c vent into my face until I almost decide again to let them move into my house. Except, forty-five showings is the statistical point of no return, and the Markhams have today gone to forty-six. Clients, after this point, frequently don’t buy a house but shove off to other locales, or else do something nutty like take a freighter to Bahrain or climb the Matterhorn. Plus, I might have a hard time getting them to leave. (In truth, I’m ready to cut the Markhams loose, let them set off toward a fresh start in the Amboys.)

Though of course they might just as well say, “Okay. Let’s just get the sonofabitch bought and quit niggly-pigglying around. We’re in for the full boat. Let’s get an offer sheet filled out.” I’ve got a boxful in my trunk. “Here’s five grand. We’re moving into the Sheraton Tara. You get your sorry ass back over to Houlihan’s, tell him to get his bags packed for Tucson or go fuck himself, because one fifty’s all we’re offering because that’s all we’ve got. Take an hour to decide.”

People do that. Houses get sold on the spot; checks get written, escrow accounts opened, moving companies called from windy pay phones outside Hojo’s. It makes my job one hell of a lot easier. Though when it happens that way it’s usually rich Texans or maxillary surgeons or political operatives fired for financial misdealings and looking for a place to hide out until they can be players again. Rarely does it happen with potters and their pudgy paper-making wives who wander back to civilization from piddly-ass Vermont with emaciated wallets and not a clue about what makes the world go around but plenty of opinions about how it ought to.

Joe sits in the front seat grinding his molars, breathing audibly and staring out at the foreign national swamping out their soiled room with a mop and a bottle of Pine-Sol. Phyllis, in her Marginalia shades, sits thinking — what? It’s anybody’s guess. There’s no question left to ask, no worry to express, no resolve or ultimatum worth enunciating. They’ve reached the point where nothing’s left to do but act. Or not.

But by God, Joe doesn’t like it even in spite of loving the house, and sits inventorying his brain for something more to say, some barrier to erect. Likely it will have to do with “seeing from above” again, or wanting to make some great discovery.

“Maybe we should think about renting,” Phyllis says vacantly. I have her in my mirror, keeping to herself like a bereaved widow. She has been staring at the hubcap bazaar next door, where no one’s visible in the rain-soaked yard, though the hubcaps sparkle and clank in the breeze. She may be seeing something as a metaphor for something else.

Unexpectedly, though, she sits forward and lays a consolidating mitt on Joe’s bare, hairy shoulder, which causes him to jump like he’d been stabbed. Though he quickly detects this as a gesture of solidarity and tenderness, and lumpily reaches round and grubs her hand with his. All patrols and units are now being called in. A unified response is imminent. It is the bedrock gesture of marriage, something I have somehow missed out on, and rue.

“Most of your better rentals turn up when the Institute term ends and people leave. That was last month,” I say. “You didn’t like anything then.”

“Is there anything we might get into temporarily?” Joe says, limply holding Phyllis’s plump fingers as though she were laid out beside him in a hospital bed.

“I’ve got a place I own,” I say. “It might not be what you want.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Joe and Phyllis say in suspicious unison.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” I say. “It happens to be in a black neighborhood.”

“Oh Je-sus. Here we go,” Joe says, as if this was a long-foreseeable and finally sprung trap. “That’s all I need. Spooks. Thanks for nothin’.” He shakes his head in disgust.

“That’s not how we look at things in Haddam, Joe,” I say coolly. “That’s not how I practice realty.”

“Well, good for you,” he says, seething but still holding Phyllis’s hand, probably tighter than she likes. “You don’t live there,” he fumes. “And you don’t have kids.”

“I do have kids,” I say. “And I’d happily live there with them if I didn’t already live someplace else.” I give Joe a hard, iron-browed frown meant to say that beyond what he already doesn’t know about, the world he left behind in nineteen seventy-whatever is an empty crater, and he’ll get no sympathy here if it turns out he doesn’t like the present.

“What you got, some shotgun shacks you collect rent on every Saturday morning?” Joe says this in a mealy, nasty way. “My old man ran that scam in Aliquippa. He ran it with Chinamen. He carried a pistol in his belt where they could see it. I used to sit in the car.”

“I don’t have a pistol,” I say. “I’m just doing you a favor by mentioning it.”

“Thanks. Forget about it.”

“We could go look at it,” Phyllis says, squeezing Joe’s hairy knuckles, which he’s balled up now into a menacing little fist.

“In a million years, maybe. But only maybe.” Joe yanks up the door latch, letting hot Route 1 whoosh in.

“The Houlihan house is worth thinking about,” I say to the car seat Joe is vacating, giving a sidelong look to Phyllis in the back.

“You realty guys,” Joe says from outside, where I can just see his ball-packer shorts. “You’re always nosing after the fucking sale.” He then just stalks off in the direction of the cleaning woman, who’s standing beside her laundry hamper and his very room, looking at Joe as if he were a strange sight (which he is).

“Joe’s not a good compromiser,” Phyllis says lamely. “He may be having dosage problems too.”

“He’s free to do whatever he wants, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I know,” Phyllis says. “You’re very patient with us. I’m sorry we’re so much trouble.” She pats me on my shoulder, just the way she did asshole Joe. A victory pat. I don’t much appreciate it.

“It’s my job,” I say.

“We’ll be in touch with you, Frank,” Phyllis says, struggling to exit her door to the hot morning heading toward eleven.

“That’s just great, Phyllis,” I say. “Call me at the office and leave a message. I’ll be in Connecticut with my son. I don’t get to spend that much time with him. We can do pretty much everything on the phone if there’s anything to talk about.”

“We’re trying, Frank,” Phyllis says, blinking pathetically at the idea of my son who’s an epileptic, but not wanting to mention it. “We’re really trying here.”

“I can tell,” I lie, and turn and give her a contrite smile, which for some reason drives her right out of the doorway and across the hot little crumbling motel lot in search of her unlikely husband.

Inow find myself in a whir to get back into town, and so split the breeze over the steamy pavement up Route 1, retaking King George Road for the directest route to Seminary Street. I have more of the day returned to me than I’d expected, and I mean to put it to use by making a second stop by the McLeods’, before driving out to Franks on Route 31, then heading straight down to South Mantoloking for some earlier than usual quality time with Sally, plus dinner.

I’d hoped, of course, to be back in the office, running the numbers on an offer or already delivering same to Ted Houlihan, hustling to get various balls rolling — calling a contractor for a structural inspection, getting the earnest money deposited, vetting the termite contract, dialing up Fox McKinney at Garden State Savings for a fast track through to the mortgage board. There’s absolutely nothing an owner likes better than a quick, firm reply to his sell decision. Philosophically, as Ted said, it indicates the world is more or less the way we best feature it. (Most of what we unhappily hear back from the world being: “Boy, we’re back-ordered on that one, it’ll take six weeks;” or, “I thought they quit making those gizmos in ’58;” or, “You’ll have to have that part milled special, and the only guy who does it is on a walking trip through Swaziland. Take a vacation, we’ll call you.”) And yet if an agent can pry loose a well-conceived offer on an entirely new listing, the likelihood of clear sailing all the way to closing is geometrically increased by the simple weight of seller satisfaction, confidence, a feeling of corroboration and a sense of immanent meaning. Real closure in other words.

Consequently, it’s a good strategy to set the Markhams adrift as I just did, let them wheeze around in their clunker Nova, brooding about all the houses in all the neighborhoods they’ve sneered at, then crawl back for a nap in the Sleepy Hollow — one in which they doze off in daylight but awake startled, disoriented and demoralized after dark, lying side by side, staring at the greasy motel walls, listening to the traffic drum past, everyone but them bound for cozy seaside holiday arrangements where youthful, happy, perfect-toothed loved ones wave greetings from lighted porches and doorways, holding big pitchers of cold gin. (I myself hope shortly to be arriving for just such a welcome — to be a cheerful, eagerly awaited addition to the general store of holiday fun, having a million laughs, feeling the world’s woe rise off me someplace where the Markhams can’t reach me. Possibly bright and early tomorrow there’ll either be a frantic call from Joe wanting to slam a bid in by noon, or else no call — confoundment having taken over and driven them back to Vermont and public assistance — in which case I’ll be rid of them. Win-win again.)

It’s perfectly evident that the Markhams haven’t looked in life’s mirror in a while — forget about Joe’s surprise look this morning. Vermont’s spiritual mandate, after all, is that you don’t look at your-selfy but spend years gazing at everything else as penetratingly as possible in the conviction that everything out there more or less stands for you, and everything’s pretty damn great because you are. (Emerson has some different opinions about this.) Only, with home buying as your goal, there’s no real getting around a certain self-viewing.

Right about now, unless I miss my guess, Joe and Phyllis are lying just as I pictured them, stiff as planks, side by side, fully clothed on their narrow bed, staring up into the dim, flyspeck ceiling with all the lights off, realizing as silent as corpses that they can’t help seeing themselves. They are the lonely, haunted people soon to be seen standing in a driveway or sitting on a couch or a cramped patio chair (wherever they land next), peering disconcertedly into a TV camera while being interviewed by the six o’clock news not merely as average Americans but as people caught in the real estate crunch, indistinct members of an indistinct class they don’t want to be members of — the frustrated, the ones on the bubble, the ones who suffer, those forced to live anonymous and glum on short cul-de-sac streets named after the builder’s daughter or her grade-school friends.

And the only thing that’ll save them is to figure out a way to think about themselves and most everything else differently; formulate fresh understandings based on the faith that for new fires to kindle, old ones have to be dashed; and based less on isolating, boneheaded obstinance and more, for instance, on the wish to make each other happy without neutralizing the private self — which was why they showed up in New Jersey in the first place instead of staying in the mountains and becoming smug casualties of their own idiotic miscues.

With the Markhams, of course, it’s hard to believe they’ll work it out. A year from now Joe would be the first person to kick back at a summer solstice party in some neighbor’s new-mown hay meadow, sipping homemade lager and grazing a hand-fired plate full of vegetarian lasagna — naked kids a-frolic in the twilight, the smell of compost, the sound of a brook and a gas generator in the background — and hold forth on the subject of change and how anybody’s a coward who can’t do it: a philosophy naturally honed on his and Phyllis’s own life experiences (which include divorce, inadequate parenting practices, adultery, self-importance, and spatial dislocation).

Though it’s change that’s driving him crackers now. The Markhams say they won’t compromise on their ideal. But they aren’t compromising! They can’t afford their ideal. And not buying what you can’t afford’s not a compromise; it’s reality speaking English. To get anywhere you have to learn to speak the same language back.

And yet they may find hidden strengths: their fumbling, lurching Sistine Chapel touch across the car seat was a promising signal, but it’s one they’ll need to elaborate over the weekend, when they’re on their own. And inasmuch as I’m not in possession of their check, on their own’s where they’ll be — sweating it but also, I hope, commencing the process of self-seeing as a sacred initiation to a fuller later life.