“They just didn’t build ’em in this neighborhood.” I nod, touch my sore, bitten cheek with my tonguetip, feel relieved Joe isn’t planning to fire pots on site.
“You can bet it’s a groundwater consideration,” Joe says in a spurious engineer’s voice, going to the window and looking out as Phyllis did, straight into the side of the McLeods’ house, where my hope is he doesn’t come eye-to-eye with a shirtless Larry McLeod aiming his 9-mm. across the side yard. “Anything really bad ever happen in this house, Frank?” He scratches the back of his bristly neck and peers down at something outside that has caught his eye — a cat, possibly.
“Nothing I know about. I guess all houses have pasts. The ones I’ve lived in all sure did. Somebody’s bound to have died in some room here sometime. I just don’t know who.” I say this to annoy him, knowing he’s out of options, and because I know his question is a two-bit subterfuge for broaching the race issue. He doesn’t want credit for broaching it, but he’d be happy if I would.
“Just wondering,” Joe says. “We built our own house in Vermont, is all. Nothing bad ever happened there.” He continues staring down, inventorying other gambits. “I guess this is a drug-free zone.” Phyllis looks over at him as if she’d just realized she hated him.
“S’far’s I know,” I say. “It’s a changing universe, of course.”
“Right. No shit.” Joe shakes his head in the fresh window light.
“Frank can’t be held responsible for the neighbors,” Phyllis says crabbily (though it’s not completely true). She has been standing under the arch with me, looking at the empty walls and floors, possibly envisioning her lost life as a child. Only her mind’s made up.
“Who lives next door?” Joe says.
“On the other side, an elderly couple named Broadnax. Rufus was a Pullman porter on the New York Central. You won’t see them much, but I’m sure you’ll like them. Over on the other side is a younger couple” (of miscreants). “She’s from Minnesota. He’s a Viet vet. They’re interesting folks. I own that house too.”
“You own ‘em both?” Joe turns and gives me a crafty, squint-eyed look, as if I’d just grown vastly in his estimation and was probably crooked.
“Just these two,” I say.
“So you’re holdin’ onto ’em till they’re worth a fortune?” He smirks. For the moment he has begun speaking in a Texas accent.
“They’re already worth a fortune. I’m just waiting till they’re worth two fortunes.”
Joe adopts an even more ludicrous, self-satisfied expression of appreciation. He’s always had my number but now sees we are much more of a pair and a lot sharper cookies than he ever thought (even if we are crooked), since socking away for the future’s exactly what he believes in doing — and might be doing if he hadn’t plunged off on a two-decade Wanderjahr to the land of mud season, black ice, disappointing perk tests and feast-or-famine resales, only to reenter the real world with just the vaguest memory of which coin a quarter was and which was a dime.
“It’s all still a matter of perception, idn’t it?” Joe says enigmatically.
“It seems to be, these days,” I say, thinking perhaps he’s talking about real estate. I more noisily jingle the keys to signal my readiness to get a move on — though I have little to do until noon.
“Okay, well, I’m pretty satisfied here,” Joe says decisively, Texas accent gone, nodding his head vigorously. Through the window he’s been looking out, and across the side yard, I see little Winnie McLeod’s sleepy face behind the thin curtain, frowning at us. “Whaddaya think, baby doll?”
“I can make it nicer,” Phyllis says, her voice moving around the empty room like a trapped spirit. (I’ve never imagined Phyllis as “baby doll” but am willing to.)
“Maybe Frank’ll sell it to us when we come into our inheritance.” Joe gives me a little tongue-out, sly-boots wink.
“Two inheritances,” I say and wink back. “This baby’ll cost ya.”
“Yeah, okay. Two, then,” Joe says. “When we make two fortunes we can own a five-and-a-half-room house in the darky section of Haddam, New Jersey. That’s a deal, isn’t it? That’s a success story you can brag to your grandkids about.” Joe rolls his eyes humorously to the ceiling and gives his shiny forehead a thump with his middle finger. “How ‘bout the election? How d’ya choose?”
“I’m joined at the hip with the tax-and-spenders, I guess.” Joe wouldn’t be asking if he weren’t at this very moment vacating long-held principles of cultural liberalism in favor of something leaner and meaner and more suitable to his new gestalt. He expects me to sanction this too.
“You mean joined at the wallet,” Joe says dopily. “But hell, yes. Me too.” This to my absolute surprise. “Just don’t ask me. My old man”—the Chinese-slum king of Aliquippa—“had a wide streak of social conscience. He was a Socialist. But what the fuck. Maybe living here’ll pound some sense in my head. Now Phyllis, here, she’s the mahout, she rides the elephant.” Phyllis starts for the door, tired and unamused by politics. Joe fastens on me a gaping, blunt-toothed, baby-faced smile of philosophical comradeship. These things, of course, are never as you expect. Anytime you find you’re right, you should be wrong.
It is good to stand out on the hot sidewalk with the two of them under the spreading sycamore, and encouraging to see how quickly and tidily permanence asserts its illusion and begins to confer a bounty.
In fifteen minutes the Markhams have become longtime residents, and I their unwieldy, unwished-for guest. An invitation to come back, have lemonade, sit out back on nylon lawn chairs is definitely not forthcoming. They both squint from the pavement to the sun and the untroubled beryl sky as though they judge a good soaking rain — and not my paltry, unremarked watering — to be the only thing that’ll do their yard any good.
We have painlessly agreed on a month-to-month, with three months in advance as a security blanket for me — though I’ve consented to remit a month if they find a house worth buying in the first thirty days (fat chance). I’ve passed along our agency’s “What’s The Diff?” booklet, spelling out in layman’s terms the pros and cons of renting vs. buying: “Never pay over 20 percent of gross income on housing,” although “You always sleep better in a place you own” (debatable). There’s nothing, however, about needing to “see” yourself, or securing sanction or the likelihood of significant events ever having occurred in your chosen abode. Those issues are best dealt with by a shrink, not a realtor. Finally we’ve agreed to sign the papers tomorrow in my office, and I’ve told them to feel free to haul in their sleeping bags and camp out in their “own house” tonight. Who could say nay?
“Sonja’s going to find it real eye-opening here,” Phyllis the Republican says with confidence. “It’s what we came down here for, but maybe we didn’t know it.”
“Reality check,” Joe says stonily. They’re both referring to the race issue, albeit deviously, while holding each other’s hand.
We are beside my car, which gleams blue and hot in the ten o’clock sun. I have the Harrises’ accumulated junk mail and the Trenton Times tucked under my arm, and have handed over their keys.
I know that filtering up like rare and rich incense in both the Markhams’ nostrils is the up-to-now endangered prospect of life’s happy continuance — a different notion entirely from Irv Ornstein’s indecisive, religio-ethnic-historical one, though he might claim they’re the same. An abrupter feeling is the Markhams’, though, tantamount to the end of a prison sentence imposed for crimes they’ve been helpless to avoid: the ordinary misdemeanors and misprisions of life, of which we’re all innocent and guilty. Alive but unrecognized in their pleased but dizzied heads is at least now the possibility of calling on Myrlene Beavers with a hot huckleberry pie or a blemished-second “gift” pot from Joe’s new kiln; or of finding common ground regarding in-law problems with Negro neighbors more their age; of letting little dark-skinned kids sleep over; of nurturing what they both always knew they owned in their hearts but never exactly found an occasion to act on in the monochrome Green Mountains: that magical sixth-sense understanding of the other races, which always made the Markhams see themselves as out-of-the-ordinary white folks.