“I see.” Joe’s stupid half-bearded red mouth rises and lowers in the dark. “Penns Neck. I live in Penns Neck, New Jersey. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing, I guess, if you don’t want it to.” (Or better yet if the bank doesn’t want you to, or if you’ve got a mean Chapter 7 lurking in your portfolio, or a felony conviction, or too many late payments on your Trinitron, or happen to enjoy the services of a heart valve. In that case it’s back to Vermont.) “I’ve shown you a lot of houses, Joe,” I say, “and you haven’t liked any of them. But I don’t think you’d say I tried to force you into any of them.”
“You don’t offer advice, is that it?” Joe is still cemented to his lounge chair, where he obviously feels in a powerful command modality.
“Well. Shop around for a mortgage,” I say. “Get a foundation inspection. Don’t budget more than you can pay. Buy low, sell high. The rest isn’t really my business.”
“Right,” Joe says, and smirks. “I know who pays your salary.”
“You can always offer six percent less than asking. That’s up to you. I’ll still get paid, though.”
Joe takes another drastic slag-down on his weed. “You know, I like to have a view of things from above,” he says, absolutely mysteriously.
“Great,” I say. Behind me, air is changing rapidly with the rain, cooling my back and neck as the front passes by. A sweet rain aroma envelops me. Thunder is rumbling over Route 1.
“You remember what I said when you first came in here?”
“You said something about reality setting in. That’s all I remember.” I’m staring at him impatiently through the murk, in his flip-flops and Mylar shorts. Not your customary house-hunting attire. I take a surreptitious look at my watch. Nine-thirty.
“I’ve completely quit becoming,” Joe says, and actually smiles. “I’m not out on the margins where new discoveries take place anymore.”
“I think that’s probably too severe, Joe. You’re not doing plasma research, you’re just trying to buy a house. You know, it’s my experience that it’s when you don’t think you’re making progress that you’re probably making plenty.” This is a faith I in fact hold — the Existence Period notwithstanding — and one I plan to pass on to my son if I can ever get where he is, which at the moment seems out of the question.
“When I got divorced, Frank, and started trying to make pots up in East Burke, Vermont”—Joe crosses his short legs and cozies down authoritatively in his lounger—“I didn’t have the foggiest idea about what I was doing. Okay? I was out of control, actually. But things just worked out. Same when Phyllis and I got together — just slammed into each other one day. But I’m not out of control anymore.”
“Maybe you are more than you think, Joe.”
“Nope. I’m in control way too much. That’s the problem.”
“I think you’re confusing things you’re already sure about, Joe. All this has been pretty stressful on you.”
“But I’m on the verge of something here, I think. That’s the important part.”
“Of what?” I say. “I think you’re going to find this Houlihan house pretty interesting.” Houlihan is the owner of the Penns Neck property.
“I don’t mean that.” He pops both his chunky little fists on the plastic armrests. Joe may be verging on a major disorientation here — a legitimate rent in the cloth. This actually appears in textbooks: Client abruptly begins to see the world in some entirely new way he feels certain, had he only seen it earlier, would’ve directed him down a path of vastly greater happiness — only (and this, of course, is the insane part) he inexplicably senses that way’s still open to him; that the past, just this once, doesn’t operate the way it usually operates. Which is to say, irrevocably. Oddly enough, only home buyers in the low to middle range have these delusions, and for the most part all they bring about is trouble.
Joe suddenly bucks up out of his chair and goes slappety-slap through the dark little room, taking big puffs on his cigarette, looking into the bathroom, then crossing and peeping out between the curtains to where Phyllis waits in my car. He then turns like an undersized gorilla in a cage and stalks past the TV to the bathroom door, his back to me, and stares out the frosted, louvered window that reveals the dingy motel rear alley, where there’s a blue garbage lugger, full to brimming with white PVC piping, which I sense Joe finds significant. Our talk now has the flavor of a hostage situation.
“What do you think you mean, Joe?” I say, because I detect that what he’s looking for, like anybody on the skewers of dilemma, is sanction: agreement from beyond himself. A nice house he could both afford and fall in love with the instant he sees it could be a perfect sanction, a sign some community recognizes him in the only way communities ever recognize anything: financially (tactfully expressed as a matter of compatibility).
“What I mean, Bascombe,” Joe says, leaning against the door-jamb and staring pseudo-casually through the bathroom at the blue load lugger (the mirror where he’s caught himself on the can must be just behind the door), “is that the reason we haven’t bought a house in four months is that I don’t want to goddamned buy one. And the reason for that is I don’t want to get trapped in some shitty life I’ll never get out of except by dying.” Joe swivels toward me — a small, round man with hirsute butcher’s arms and a little sorcerer’s beard, who’s come to the sudden precipice of what’s left of life a little quicker than he knows how to cope with. It’s not what I was hoping for, but anyone could appreciate his predicament.
“It is a big decision, Joe,” I say, wanting to sound sympathetic. “If you buy a house, you own it. That’s for sure.”
“So are you giving up on me? Is that it?” Joe says this with a mean sneer, as if he’s observed now what a shabby piece of realty dreck I am, only interested in the ones that sell themselves. He is probably indulging in the idyll of what it’d be like to be a realtor himself, and what superior genius strategies he’d choose to get his point across to a crafty, interesting, hard-nut-to-crack guy like Joe Markham. This is another well-documented sign, but a good one: when your client begins to see things as a realtor, half the battle’s won.
My wish of course is that after today Joe will spend a sizable portion if not every minute of his twilight years in Penns Neck, NJ, and it’s even possible he believes it’ll happen, himself. My job, therefore, is to keep him on the rails — to supply sanction pro tempore, until I get him into a buy-sell agreement and cinch the rest of his life around him like a saddle on a bucking horse. Only it’s not that simple, since Joe at the moment is feeling isolated and scared through no fault of anyone but him. So that what I’m counting on is the phenomenon by which most people will feel they’re not being strong-armed if they’re simply allowed to advocate (as stupidly as they please) the position opposite the one they’re really taking. This is just another way we create the fiction that we’re in control of anything.
“I’m not giving up on you, Joe,” I say, feeling a less pleasant dampness on my back now and inching forward into the room. Traffic noise is being softened by the rain. “I just go about selling houses the way I’d want one sold to me. And if I bust my ass showing you property, setting up appointments, checking out this and that till I’m purple in the face, then you suddenly back out, I’ll be ready to say you made the right decision if I believe it.”