“Do you have a prison behind your house?” Phyllis says bluntly. She gazes at her toes, which are pinched into her sandals, their nails painted scarlet. They seem to imply something to her.
“No, but I do live in my ex-wife’s former house,” I say, “and I live alone, and my son’s an epileptic who has to wear a football helmet all day, and I’ve decided to live in her house just to give him a little semblance of continuity when he comes to visit, since his life expectancy’s not so great. So I’ve made some adjustments to necessity.” I blink at her. This is about her, not about me.
Phyllis was not expecting this, and looks stunned, suddenly acknowledging how much everything up to now has been usual salesmanship, usual aggravating clienthood; but that now everything is suddenly down to it: her and Joe’s actual situation being attended to diligently by a man with even bigger woes than they have, who sleeps less well, visits more physicians, has more worrisome phone calls, during which he spends more anxious time on hold while gloomy charts are being read, and whose life generally matters more than theirs by his being closer to the grave (not necessarily his own).
“Frank, I don’t mean to compare wounds with bruises,” Phyllis says abjectly. “I’m sorry. I’m just feeling a lot of pressure along with everything else.” She gives me a sad Stan Laurel smile and lowers her chin just like old Stan. Her face, I see, is a malleable and sweet putty face, perfect for alternative children’s theater in the Northeast Kingdom. But no less right for Penns Neck, where a thespian group she might head up could do Peter Pan or The Fantasticks (minus the “Rape” song) for the lonely, sticky-fingered ex-comptrollers and malpractitioners across the fence, leaving them with at least a temporary feeling that life isn’t all that ruined, that there’s still hope on the outside, that there are a lot of possibilities left — even if there aren’t.
I hear Ted and Joe scraping their damp dogs on the back steps, then stamping the welcome mat and Joe saying, “Now that’d be a real reality check, I’ll tell you,” while gentle, clever Ted says, “I’ve just decided for the time I have left, Joe, to let go all the nonessentials.”
“I envy that, don’t think I don’t,” Joe says. “Boy-oh-boy, I could get rid of some of those, all right.”
Phyllis and I both hear this. Each of us knows that one of us is the first nonessential Joe would like to put behind him.
“Phyllis, I figure we’ve all got scars and bruises,” I say, “but I just don’t want them to cause you to miss a damn good deal on a wonderful house when it’s in your grasp here.”
“Is there anything else we can see today?” Phyllis says dispiritedly.
I sway back slightly on my heels, arms enfolding my clipboard. “I could show you a new development.” I’m thinking of Mallards Landing, of course, where slash is smoldering and maybe two units are finished and the Markhams will go out of their gourds the minute they lay eyes on the flapping pennants. “The young developer’s a heck of a good guy. They’re all in your range. But you indicated you didn’t want to consider new homes.”
“No,” Phyllis says darkly. “You know, Frank, Joe’s a manic-depressive.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” I hug my clipboard tighter. (I’m beginning to cook like a cabbage in my windbreaker.) I mean, though, to hold my ground. Manic-depressives, convicted felons, men and women with garish tattoos over every inch of their skin: all are entitled to a hook to hang their hats on if they’ve got the scratch. This claim for Joe’s looniness is probably a complete lie, a ploy to let me know she’s a worthy opponent in the realty struggle (for some reason her female troubles still seem legit). “Phyllis, you and Joe need to do some serious thinking about this house.” I stare profoundly into her obstinate blue eyes, which I realize for the first time must have contacts, since no blue nearly similar to that occurs in nature.
She is framed by the window, her small hands clasped in front like a schoolmarm lording a trick question over a schoolboy dunce. “Do you feel sometimes”—the light glowing around Phyllis seems to have brought her in contact with the forces of saintliness—“that no one’s looking out for you anymore?” She smiles faintly. The creases at the corners of her mouth make weals in her cheeks.
“Every day.” I try to beam back a martyrish look.
“I had that feeling when I got married the first time. When I was twenty and a sophomore at Towson. And I had it this morning again at the motel — the first time in years.” She rolls her eyes in a zany way.
Joe and Ted are making a noisy second trek over the floor plan now. Ted’s unscrolling some old blueprints he’s kept squirreled away. They will soon barge into Phyllis’s and my little séance.
“I think that feeling’s natural, Phyllis, and I think you and Joe take care of each other just fine.” I peek to see if the orienteers are here yet. I hear them tromping over the defunct floor furnace, talking importantly about the attic.
Phyllis shakes her head and smiles a beatified smile. “The trick’s changing the water to wine, isn’t it?”
I have no idea what this might mean, though I give her a lawyerly-brotherly look that says this competition’s over. I could even give her a pat on her plump shoulder, except she’d get wary. “Phyllis, look,” I say. “People think there’re just two ways for things to go. A worked-out way and a not-worked-out way. But I think most things start one way, then we steer them where we want them to go. And no matter how you feel at the time you buy a house — even if you don’t buy this one or don’t buy one from me at all — you’re going to have to—“
And then our séance is over. Ted and Joe come trooping back down the hall from where they’ve decided not to take a cobwebby tour up the “disappearing” stairway to eyeball some metal rafter gussets Ted installed when Hurricane Lulu passed by in ’58, blowing hay straw through tree trunks, moving yachts miles inland and leveling grander houses than Ted’s. It’s too hot upstairs.
“God’s in the details,” one of the new best friends observes. But adds, “Or is it the devil?”
Phyllis looks peacefully at the entry, into which the two of them go first one way and then the other before locating us in the l/r. Ted, coming into view with his blueprints, looks to my estimation satisfied with everything. Joe, in his immature goatee, his vulgar shorts and Potters Do It With Their Fingers shirt, seems on the verge of some form of hysteria.
“I’ve seen enough,” Joe shouts like a railroad conductor, taking a quick estimation of the living room as if he’d never seen it in his life. He jams his thick knuckles together in satisfaction. “I can make up my mind on what I’ve seen.”
“Okay,” I say. “We’ll take a drive, then.” (Code for: We’ll go to breakfast and write up a full-price offer and be back in an hour.) I give Ted Houlihan an assuring nod. Unexpectedly he’s proved a key player in an ad hoc divide-and-conquer scheme. His memories, his poor dead wife, his faulty cojones, his Milquetoast Fred Waring soft-shoe worldview and casual attire, are first-rate selling tools. He could be a realtor.
“This place won’t stay on the market long,” Joe shouts to anyone in the neighborhood who’s interested. He swivels around and starts for the front door in some kind of beehive panic.
“Well, we’ll see,” Ted Houlihan says, and gives me and Phyllis a doubtful smile, scrolling his blueprints tighter. “I know that place across the fence disturbs you, Mrs. Markham. But I’ve always felt it made the whole neighborhood safer and more cohesive. It’s not much different from having AT & T or RCA, if you get what I mean.”