“Do you believe it this time?” Joe is still sneering, but not quite as much. He senses we’re getting to the brassier tacks now, where I take off my realtor’s hat and let him know what’s right and what’s wrong in the larger sphere, which he can then ignore.
“I sense your reluctance pretty plainly, Joe.”
“Right,” Joe says adamantly. “If you feel like you’re tossing your life in the ter-let, why go through with it, right?”
“You’ll have plenty more opportunities before you’re finished.”
“Yup,” Joe says. I hazard another look toward Phyllis, whose mushroom head is in motionless silhouette inside my car. The glass has already fogged up from her heavy body exhalations. “These things aren’t easy,” he says, and tosses his stubby cigarette directly into the toilet he was no doubt referring to.
“If we’re not going to do this, we better get Phyllis out of the car before she suffocates in there,” I say. “I’ve got some other things to do today. I’m going away with my son for the holiday.”
“I didn’t know you had a son,” Joe says. He, of course, has never asked me one question about me in four months, which is fine, since it’s not his business.
“And a daughter. They live in Connecticut with their mother.” I smile a friendly, not-your-business smile.
“Oh yeah.”
“Let me get Phyllis,” I say. “She’ll need a little talking to by you, I think.”
“Okay, but let me just ask one thing.” Joe crosses his short arms and leans against the doorjamb, feigning even greater casualness. (Now that he’s off the hook, he has the luxury of getting back on it of his own free and misunderstood will.)
“Shoot.”
“What do you think’s going to happen to the realty market?”
“Short term? Long term?” I’m acting ready to go.
“Let’s say short.”
“Short? More of the same’s my guess. Prices are soft. Lenders are pretty retrenched. I expect it to last the summer, then rates’ll probably bump up around ten-nine or so after Labor Day. Course, if one high-priced house sells way under market, the whole structure’ll adjust overnight and we’ll all have a field day. It’s pretty much a matter of perception out there.”
Joe stares at me, trying to act as though he’s mulling this over and fitting his own vital data into some new mosaic. Though if he’s smart he’s also thinking about the cannibalistic financial forces gnashing and churning the world he’s claiming he’s about to march back into — instead of buying a house, fixing his costs onto a thirty-year note and situating his small brood behind its solid wall. “I see,” he says sagely, nodding his fuzzy little chin. “And what about the long term?”
I take another stagy peek at Phyllis, though I can’t see her now. Possibly she’s started hitchhiking down Route 1 to Baltimore.
“The long term’s less good. For you, that is. Prices’ll jump after the first of the year. That’s for sure. Rates’ll spurt up. Property really doesn’t go down in the Haddam area as a whole. All boats pretty much rise on a rising whatever.” I smile at him blandly. In realty, all boats most certainly do rise on a rising whatever. But it’s still being right that makes you rich.
Joe, I’m sure, has been brooding all over again this morning about his whopper miscues — miscues about marriage, divorce, remarriage, letting Dot marry a Hell’s Commando, whether he should’ve quit teaching trig in Aliquippa, whether he should’ve joined the Marines and right now be getting out with a fat pension and qualifying for a VA loan. All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done. But Joe doesn’t want to make another whopper, since one more big one might just send him to the bottom.
Except he doesn’t know bread from butter beans about which is the fatal miscue and which is the smartest idea he ever had.
“Frank, I’ve just been standing here thinking,” he says, and peers back out the dirty bathroom louvers as if he’d heard someone call his name. Joe may at this moment be close to deciding what he actually thinks. “Maybe I need a new way to look at things.”
“Maybe you ought to try looking at things across a flat plain, Joe,” I say. “I’ve always thought that looking at things from above, like you said, forced you to see all things as the same height and made decisions a lot harder. Some things are just bigger than others. Or smaller. And I think another thing too.”
“What’s that?” Joe’s brows give the appearance of knitting together. He is vigorously trying to fit my “viewpoint” metaphor into his own current predicament of homelessness.
“It really won’t hurt you to take a quick run over to this Penns Neck house. You’re already down here. Phyllis is in the car, scared to death you’re not going to look at it.”
“Frank, what do you think about me?” Joe says. At some point of dislocatedness, this is what all clients start longing to know. Though it’s almost always insincere and finally meaningless, since once their business is over they go right back to thinking you’re either a crook or a moron. Realty is not a friendly business. It only seems to be.
“Joe, I may just queer my whole deal here,” I say, “but what I think is you’ve done your best to find a house, you’ve stuck to your principles, you’ve put up with anxiety as long as you know how. You’ve acted responsibly, in other words. And if this Penns Neck house is anywhere close to what you like, I think you ought to take the plunge. Quit hanging onto the side of the pool.”
“Yeah, but you’re paid to think that, though,” Joe says, sulky again in the bathroom door. “Right?”
But I’m ready for him. “Right. And if I can get you to spend a hundred and fifty on this house, then I can quit working and move to Kitzbühel, and you can thank me by sending me a bottle of good gin at Christmas because you’re not freezing your nuts off in a barn while Sonja gets further behind in school and Phyllis files fucking divorce papers on you because you can’t make up your mind.”
“Point taken,” Joe says, moodily.
“I really don’t want to go into it any further,” I say. There’s no place further to go, of course, realty being not a very complex matter. “I’m going to take Phyllis on up to Penns Neck, Joe. And if she likes it we’ll come get you and you can make up your mind. If she doesn’t I’ll bring her back anyway. It’s a win-win proposition. In the meantime you can stay here and look at things from above.”
Joe stares at me guiltily. “Okay, I’ll just come along.” He virtually blurts this out, having apparently blundered into the sanction he was looking for: the win-win, the sanction not to be an idiot. “I’ve come all this fucking way.”
With my damp right arm I give a quick thumbs-up wave out to Phyllis, who I hope is still in the car.
Joe begins picking up change off the dresser top, stuffing a fat wallet into the tight waistband of his shorts. “I should let you and Phyllis figure this whole goddamn thing out and follow along like a goddamn pooch.”
“You’re still looking at things from above.” I smile at Joe across the dark room.
“You just see everything from the fucking middle, that’s all,” Joe says, scratching his bristly, balding head and looking around the room as though he’d forgotten something. I have no idea what he means by this and am fairly sure he couldn’t explain it either. “If I died right now, you’d go on about your business.”
“What else should I do?” I say. “I’d be sorry I hadn’t sold you a house, though. I promise you that. Because you at least could’ve died at home instead of in the Sleepy Hollow.”
“Tell it to my widow out there,” Joe Markham says, and stalks by me and out the door, leaving me to pull it shut and to get out to my car before I’m soaked to my toes. All this for the sake of what? A sale.