“My advice is just to think about it,” I say, sounding insipid even to myself. My job, though, is to place a light finger on the scale of judgment when I sense the moment requires, when a potential buyer has a gold-plated chance to make herself happy by becoming an owner. “What I wonder about, Phyllis, when I sell a house is whether a client’s getting his or her money’s worth.” I say this as I feel it — truly. “You might think I’d wonder about whether he or she gets their dream house, or if they get the house they originally wanted. Getting your money’s worth, though, getting value, is frankly more important — particularly in the current economy. When the correction comes, value will be what things stand on. And in this house”—I cast a theatrical look around and up at the ceiling as if that was where value generally staked its pennant—“in this house I think you’ve got the value.” And I do. (My windbreaker is beginning to stoke up inside, but I don’t want to take it off just yet.)
“I don’t want to live next door to a prison,” Phyllis says almost pleadingly, and walks to the screen and looks out, her pudgy hands stuffed in her culotte pockets. (It may be she is attempting one simulated act of ownership — the innocent pause of an everyday to stare out a front door — trying to feel where the “catch” comes and if it comes, the needling thought that somewhere nearby’s a TV-room full of carefree tax cheats, randy priests and scheming pension-fund CEOs who are her leering neighbors, and whether that’s as intolerable as she’s thought.)
Phyllis shakes her head, as if an unsavory taste had just been located. “I always felt I was a liberal. But I guess I’m not,” she says. “I think there ought to be these types of institutions for certain types of criminals, but I shouldn’t have to live next to one and raise my daughter there.”
“We’re all a little less flexible as we get older,” I say. I should tell her about Clair Devane being murdered in a condo, and me being bopped to the pavement by larking Orientals. A convenient good-neighbor prison wouldn’t be all that bad.
I hear Joe and Ted laugh like Rotarians out back, Joe going “Ho-ho-ho.” A greasy, gassy fragrance has wafted out from the kitchen, supplanting the clean, furniture-wax smell. (I’m surprised Joe could’ve missed it.) Ted and his wife may have mooned around here half gassed and happy as goats for decades, never knowing quite why.
“What do you do about your testicles? Is that bad?” Phyllis says, still solemn.
“I’m not much of an expert,” I say. I need to haul Phyllis back from life’s darker corridor, where she seems to be venturing, and push us on to the more positive aspects of close-by prison living.
“I was just thinking about getting old.” Phyllis gives her little mushroom top a one-finger scratching. “And how fucked up it is.” She, for this moment, is seeing all God’s children as a dying breed (possibly the gas leak is responsible), killed off not by disease but by MRIs, biopsies, sonograms and cold, blunt instruments unsoothingly entered into our most unwelcoming recesses. “I guess I have to have a hysterectomy,” she says, facing the front yard but speaking serenely. “I haven’t even told Joe yet.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, unclear whether that’s the correct and wished-for sympathy.
“Yeah. So. Ho-hum,” she says sadly, her wide backside to me. She may be dousing tears. But I’m frozen in my saddle. A less advertised part of the realtor’s job is overcoming natural client morbidity — the quickening, queasy realization that by buying a house you’re taking over someone else’s decays and lurking problems, troubles you’ll be responsible for till doomsday and that do nothing more than replace troubles of your own, old ones you’ve finally gotten used to. There are tricks of the trade to deal with this sort of recoiclass="underline" stressing value (I just did it); stressing workmanship (Joe did that); stressing an older home’s longevity, its being finished with settling pains, blah, blah, blah (Ted did exactly that); stressing general economic insecurity (I did that in my editorial this morning and will see that Phyllis gets a copy by sundown).
Only for Phyllis’s particular distress and dismay I have no antidote, except to wish for a kinder world. It hardly counts.
“The whole country seems in a mess to me, Frank. We really can’t afford to live in Vermont, if you want to know the truth. But now we can’t live down here either. And with my health concerns, we need to put down some roots.” Phyllis sniffs, as if the tears she’s been fighting have retreated. “I’m riding a hormonal roller coaster today. I’m sorry. I just see everything black.”
“I don’t think things are that bad, Phyllis. I think, for instance, this is a good house with good value, just the way I’ve said, and you and Joe would be happy here, and so would Sonja, and you’d never worry about your neighbors at all. No one knows his neighbors in the suburbs anyway. It’s not like Vermont.” I peek down at my listing sheet to see if there’s anything new and diverting I can stress: “fplc,” “gar/cpt,” “lndry,” priced right at 155K. Solid value considerations but nothing to bring the hormonal roller coaster into the station.
I gaze in puzzlement at her ill-defined posterior and have a sudden, fleeting curiosity about, of all things, her and Joe’s sex life. Would it be jolly and jokey? Prayerful and restrained? Rowdy, growling and obstreperous? Phyllis has an indefinite milky allure that is not always obvious — encased and bundled as she is, and slightly bulge-eyed in her fitless, matron-designer clothes — some yielding, unmaternal abundance that could certainly get a rise out of some lonely PTA dad in corduroys and a flannel shirt, encountered by surprise in the chilly intimacy of the grade-school parking lot after parents’ night.
The truth is, however, we know little and can find out precious little more about others, even though we stand in their presence, hear their complaints, ride the roller coaster with them, sell them houses, consider the happiness of their children — only in a flash or a gasp or the slam of a car door to see them disappear and be gone forever. Perfect strangers.
And yet, it is one of the themes of the Existence Period that interest can mingle successfully with uninterest in this way, intimacy with transience, caring with the obdurate uncaring. Until very recently (I’m not sure when it stopped) I believed this was the only way of the world; maturity’s balance. Only more things seem to need sorting out now: either in favor of complete uninterest (ending things with Sally might be an example) or else going whole hog (not ending things with Sally might be another example).
“You know, Frank …” Her misty moment past, Phyllis has walked by me into the Houlihans’ living room, stepped to the front window beside a little leafed butler’s table and, just like the redhead across the street, pulled open the drapes, letting in a warm, midmorning light, which defeats the room’s funeral stillness by causing its fussy couches and feminine mint dishes, its antimacassars and polished knickknacks (all of which Ted has left sentimentally in place), to seem to shine from within. “I was just standing there thinking that maybe no one gets the house they want.” Phyllis glances around the room in an interested, friendly way, as if she liked the new light but thought the furniture needed rearranging.
“Well, if I can find it for them they do. And if they can afford it. You are best off coming as close as you can and trying to bring life to a place, not just depending on the place to supply it for you.” I give her my own version of a willing smile. This is a positive sign, though of course we’re not really addressing each other now; we’re merely setting forth our points of view, and everything depends on whose act is better. It is a form of strategizing pseudo-communication I’ve gotten used to in the realty business. (Real talk — the kind you have with a loved one such as your former wife back when you were her husband — real talk is out of the question.)