Most Americans will eventually transact at least some portion of their important lives in the presence of realtors or as a result of something a realtor has done or said. And yet my view is, people should get their domestic rhubarbs, verbal fisticuffs and emotional jugular-snatching completely out of the way before they show up for a house tour. I’m more or less at ease with steely silences, bitter cryptic asides, eyes rolled to heaven and dagger stares passed between prospective home buyers, signaling but not actually putting on display more dramatic after-midnight wrist-twistings, shoutings and real rock-’em, sock-’em discord. But the client’s code of conduct ought to say: Suppress all important horseshit by appointment time so I can get on with my job of lifting sagging spirits, opening fresh, unexpected choices, and offering much-needed assistance toward life’s betterment. (I haven’t said so, but the Markhams are on the brink of being written off, and I in fact feel a strong temptation just to run up my window, hit reverse, shoot back into the traffic and head for the Shore.)
But instead I simply say, “What would you like me to say?”
“Just tell him there’s a great house,” she says in a tiny, defeated voice.
“Where’s Sonja?” I’m wondering if she’s inside, alone with her dad.
“We had to leave her home.” Phyllis shakes her head sadly. “She was showing signs of stress. She’s lost weight, and she wet the bed night before last. This has been pretty tough for all of us, I guess.” (She has yet to torch any animals, apparently.)
I reluctantly push open my door. Occupying the lot beside the Sleepy Hollow, inside a little fenced and razor-wire enclosure, is a shabby hubcap emporium, its shiny silvery wares nailed and hung up everywhere, all of it clanking and stuttering and shimmering in the breeze. Two old white men stand inside the compound in front of a little clatter-board shack that’s completely armored with shiny hubcaps. One of them is laughing about something, his arms crossed over his big belly, swaying side to side. The other seems not to hear, just stares at Phyllis and me as if some different kind of transaction were going on.
“That’s exactly what I was going to tell him anyway,” I say, and try to smile again. Phyllis and Joe are obviously nearing a realty meltdown, and the threat is they may just dribble off elsewhere, feeling the need for an unattainable fresh start, and end up buying the first shitty split-level they see with another agent.
Phyllis says nothing, as if she hasn’t heard me, and just looks morose and steps out of the way, hugging her arms as I head for the pink door, feeling oddly jaunty with the breeze at my back.
I half tap, half push on the door, which is ajar. It’s dark and warm inside and smells like roach dope and Phyllis’s coconut shampoo. “Howzit goin’ in here?” I say into the gloom, my voice, if not full of confidence, at least half full of false confidence. The door to a lighted bathroom is open; a suitcase and some strewn clothes are on top of an unmade bed. I have the feeling Joe might be on the crapper and I may have to conduct a serious conversation about housing possibilities with him there.
Though I make him out then. He’s sitting in a big plastic-covered recliner chair back in a shadowed corner between the bed and the curtained window where I saw his face before. He’s wearing — I can make out — turquoise flip-flops, tight silver Mylar-looking stretch shorts and some sort of singlet muscle shirt. His short, meaty arms are on the recliner’s arms, his feet on the elevated footrest and his head firmly back on the cushion, so that he looks like an astronaut waiting for the first big G thrust to drive him into oblivion.
“Sooou,” Joe says meanly in his Aliquippa accent. “You got a house you want to sell me? Some dump?”
“Well, I do think I’ve got something you ought to see, Joe, I really do.” I am just addressing the room, not specifically Joe. I would sell a house to anyone who happened to be here.
“Like what?” Joe is unmoving in his spaceship chair.
“Well. Like pre-war,” I say, trying to bring back to memory what Joe wants in a house. “A yard on the side and in back and in front too. Mature plantings. Inside, I think you’ll like it.” I’ve never been inside, of course. My info comes from the rap sheet. Though I may have driven past with an agents’ cavalcade, in which case you can pretty well guess about the inside.
“It’s just your shitty job to say that, Bascombe.” Joe has never called me “Bascombe” before, and I don’t like it. Joe, I notice, has the beginnings of an aggressive little goatee encircling his small red mouth, which makes it seem both smaller and redder, as though it served some different function. Joe’s muscle shirt, I also see, has Potters Do It With Their Fingers stenciled on the front. It’s clear he and Phyllis are suffering some pronounced personality and appearance alterations — not that unusual in advanced stages of house hunting.
I’m self-conscious peeking in the dark doorway with the warm, blustery storm breeze whipping at my backside. I wish Joe would just get the hell on with what we’re all here for.
“D’you know what I want?” Joe’s begun to fiddle for something on the table beside him — a package of generic cigarettes. As far as I know, Joe hasn’t been a smoker until this morning. He lights up now though, using a cheap little plastic lighter, and blows a huge cloud of smoke into the dark. I’m certain Joe considers himself a ladies’ man in this outfit.
“I thought you came down here to buy a house,” I say.
“What I want is for reality to set in,” Joe says in a smug voice, setting his lighter down. “I’ve been kidding myself about all this bullshit down here. The whole goddamn mess. I feel like my whole goddamn life has been in behalf of bullshit. I figured it out this morning while I was taking a dump. You don’t get it, do you?”
“What’s that?” Holding this conversation with Joe is like consulting a cut-rate oracle (something I in fact once did).
“You think your life’s leading someplace, Bascombe. You do think that way. But I saw myself this morning. I closed the door to the head and there I was in the mirror, looking straight at myself in my most human moment in this bottom-feeder motel I wouldn’t have taken a whore to when I was in college, just about to go look at some house I would never have wanted to live in in a hundred years. Plus, I’m taking a fucked-up job just to be able to afford it. That’s something, isn’t it? There’s a sweet scenario.”
“You haven’t seen the house yet.” I glance back and see that Phyllis has climbed into the back seat of my car before the rain starts but is staring at me through the windshield. She’s worried Joe’s scotching their last chance at a good house, which he may be.
Big, noisy splats of warm rain all at once begin thumping the car roof. The wind gusts up dirty. It is truly a bad day for a showing, since ordinary people don’t buy houses in a rainstorm.
Joe takes a big, theatrical drag on his generic and funnels smoke expertly out his nostrils. “Is it a Haddam address?” he asks (ever a prime consideration).
I’m briefly bemused by Joe’s belief that I’m a man who believes life’s leading someplace. I have thought that way other times in life, but one of the fundamental easements of the Existence Period is not letting whether it is or whether it isn’t worry you — as loony as that might be. “No,” I say, recollecting myself. “It’s not. It’s in Penns Neck.”