“That’s okay,” I said brightly. “It’s harder, that’s for sure.”
“You know, when I saw you today I felt very good about you. That was the first time in a long time. It seemed very strange. Did you notice it?”
I couldn’t answer that, so I just said, “That’s not bad, though, is it?” my voice still bright. “That’s an advance.”
“You always seem like you want something from me,” she said. “But I think maybe you just want to make me feel better when you’re around. Is that right?”
“I do want you to feel better,” I said. “That’s right.” It is part of the Existence Period — and I think now not a good part — to seem to want something but then not to.
Ann paused again. “Do you remember I said it’s not easy being an ex-spouse?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, it’s not easy not being one, either.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not,” and then I said nothing.
“So. Call up tomorrow,” she said cheerfully — disappointed, I knew, by some more complicated, possibly sad, even interesting truth she had heard herself speak and been surprised by but that I hadn’t risen to. “Call the hospital. He’ll need to talk to his Dad. Maybe he’ll tell you about the Hall of Fame.”
“Okay,” I said softly.
“Bye-bye.”
“Bye-bye,” I said, and we hung up.
Blam!
I watch the red coffee can spin high as the rooftops, become a small, whirly shadow on the sky, then lazily sink back toward the hot pavement.
All the kids hightail it down the street, their feet slapping, including Uncle Sam, holding for some reason the top of his head, where he has no tall hat.
“You gon git yo eye put out!” someone shouts.
“Wooo, wooo, wooo, got damn!” is what they say in answer. Across Clio Street a young black woman in astonishing yellow short shorts and a yellow buxom halter top leans out over her porch rail, watching the boys as they scatter. The can hits the pavement in front of her house, torn and jagged, bounces and goes still. “Ah-mo beat ya’ll butts!” she shouts out as Uncle Sam rounds the corner onto Erato on one hopping, skidding foot, still holding his bare head, and then is gone. “Ah-mo call the cops ’n’ they gon beat ya’ll butts too!” she says. The boys are laughing in the distance. There is, I see, a FOR SALE sign in front of her house, conspicuous in the little privet-hedged and grassy postage-stamp yard. It is new, not ours.
With her hands on the banister, the woman turns her gaze my way, where I’m seated on my porch steps with my paper, gazing back in a neighborly way. She is barefooted and no doubt has just been waked up. “’Cause ah-mo be glaaad to git outa this place, y’unnerstan?” she says to the street, to me, to whoever might have a door open or a window ajar and be listening. “’Cause it’s noisy up here, ya’ll. Ah’m tellin ya’ll. Ya’ll be noiseee!”
I smile at her. She looks at me in my red jacket, then throws her head back and laughs as if I was the silliest person she ever saw. She puts her hand up like a church witness, lowers her head, then wanders back inside.
Crows fly over — two, six, twelve — in ragged, dipping lines, squawking as though to say, “Today is not a holiday for crows. Crows work.” I hear the Haddam H.S. band, as I did Friday morning, early again on its practice grounds, rich, full-brass crescendos streets away, a last fine-tuning before the parade. “Com-onna-my-house-my-house-a-com-on” seems to be their rouser. The crows squawk, then dive crazily through the morning’s hot air. The neighborhood seems unburdened, peopled, serene.
And then I see the Markhams’ beater Nova appear at the top of the street, a half hour late. It slows as though its occupants were consulting a map, then begins again bumpily down my way, approaches the house with my car in front, veers, someone waves from inside, and then, at last, they have come to rest.
Oh, we got into such a bind, Frank,” Phyllis says, not quite able to portray for me what she and Joe have been forced through. Her blue eyes seem bluer than ever, as if she has changed to vivider contacts. “We felt like we were strapped to a runaway train. She just wouldn’t quit showing us houses.” She, of course, refers to the horror-show realty associate from East Brunswick. Phyllis looks at me in dejected wonderment for the way some people will act.
We’re on the stoop of 46 Clio, paused as though to defeat a final reluctance before commencing our ritual walk-thru. I’ve already pointed out some improvements — a foundation vent, new flashing — noted the convenience of in-town shopping, hospital, train and schools. (No mention has been made by them of other races in close proximity.)
“I guess she was going to make us buy a house if it killed her,” Phyllis says, bringing the Other Realtor story to a close. “Joe sure wanted to murder her. I just wanted to call you.”
It is of course foregone that they will rent the house and move in as early as within the hour. Though in the spirit of lagniappe I am acting as if all is not yet quite settled. Another realtor might adopt a supercilious spirit toward the Markhams for being hopeless donkeys who wouldn’t know a good deal if it grabbed them by the nuts. But to me it’s ennobling to help others face their hard choices, pilot them toward a reconciliation with life (it’s useful in piloting toward one’s own). In this case, I’m helping them believe renting is what they should do (being wise and cautious), by promoting the fantasy that each is acting in his own best interest by attempting to make the other happy.
“Now, I can tell this is a completely stable neighborhood,” Joe says with more of an off-duty military style now. (He means, though, no Negroes in evidence, which he takes to be a blessing.) He’s remained on the bottom step, small hands inserted in his pockets. He’s dressed entirely in Sears khaki and looks like a lumberyard foreman, his nutty goatee gone, his pecker shorts, flip-flops and generic smokes all gone, his little cheeky face as peaceable and wide-eyed as a baby’s, his lips pale with medicated normalcy. (The “big cave-in” has apparently been averted.) He is, I’m sure, contemplating the front bumper of my Crown Vic, where sometime in the last three days Paul — or someone like Paul — has affixed a LICK BUSH sticker which, also in the spirit of lagniappe, I’m leaving on.
Joe senses, I’m sure, his gaze carrying across the newly mown lawn and down Clio Street, that this neighborhood is a close replica writ small of the nicer parts of Haddam he was offered and mulishly turned down, and of nicer parts he wasn’t offered and couldn’t afford. Only he seems happy now, which is my wish for him: to put an end to his unhappy season of wandering, set aside his ideas of the economy’s false bottom or whether a significant event ever occurred in this house, to be a chooser instead of a bad-tempered beggar, to view life across a flatter plain (as he may be doing) and come down off the realty frontier.
Though specifically my wish is that the Markhams would move into 46 Clio, ostensibly as a defensive holding action, but gradually get to know their neighbors, talk yard-to-yard, make friends, see the wisdom of bargaining for a break in the rent in exchange for minor upkeep responsibilities, join the PTA, give pottery and papermaking demonstrations at the block association mixers, become active in the ACLU or the Urban League, begin to calculate their enhanced positive cash flow against the dour financial imperatives of ownership in fashioning an improved quality of life, and eventually stay ten years — after which they can move to Siesta Key and buy a condo (if condos still exist in 1998), using the money they’ve saved by renting. In other words, do in New Jersey exactly what they did in Vermont — arrive and depart — only with happier results. (Conservative, long-term renters are, of course, any landlord’s dream.)