“I understand,” Phyllis says, unmoved.
Joe is already through the front door, down the steps and out onto the lawn, scoping out the roofline, the fascial boards, the soffits, his hair-framed mouth gaped open as he searches for sags in the ridgeboard or ice damage under the eaves. Possibly it is manic-depression medicine that causes his lips to be so red. Joe, I think, needs a bit of tending to.
I find a Frank Bascombe, Realtor Associate card in my windbreaker pocket and slip it onto the umbrella stand outside the living-room door, where I’ve spent the last ten minutes keeping Phyllis in the corral.
“We’ll be in touch,” I say to Ted. (More code. Less specific.)
“Yes, indeed,” Ted says, smiling warmly.
And then out Phyllis goes, hips swaying, sandals clicking, shaking Ted’s little hand on the fly and saying something about its being a lovely house and a pity he has to sell it, but heading right out to where Joe’s trying to get a clear bead on things through whatever fog it’s his bewildered lot to see through.
“They’ll never buy it,” Ted says gamely as I head toward the door. His is not disappointment but possibly misplaced satisfaction at having foreign elements turned away, permitting a brief retreat into the comfortable bittersweet domesticity that’s still his. Joe out the door would be a relief for anyone.
“I can’t tell, Ted,” I say. “You don’t know what other people will do. If I did, I’d be in another line of work.”
“It’d be nice to think that the place was valuable to others. I’d feel good about that. There’s not a lot of corroboration there for us anymore.”
“Not what we’d like. But that’s my part in this.” Phyllis and Joe are standing beside my car, looking at the house as though it were an ocean liner just casting off for open seas. “Just don’t underestimate your own house, Ted,” I say, and once again grab his little hard-biscuit hand and give it an affirming shake. I take a last whiff of gas leak. (I’ll hear Joe out on this subject inside of five minutes.) “Don’t be surprised if I come back with an offer this morning. They won’t see a house as good as yours, and I mean to make that clear as Christmas.”
“A guy once climbed over the fence while I was out back sacking leaves,” Ted says. “Susan and I took him inside, gave him some coffee and an egg salad sandwich. Turned out he was an alderman from West Orange. He’d just gotten in over his head. But he ended up helping me bag leaves for an hour, then going back over. We got a Christmas card from him for a while.”
“He’s probably back in politics,” I say, happy Ted has spared Phyllis this anecdote.
“Probably.”
“We’ll be in touch.”
“I’ll be right here,” Ted says. He closes the front door behind me.
Inside the car, the Markhams seem to want to get rid of me as fast as possible, and, more important, neither one makes a peep about an offer.
As we’re pulling out the drive we all notice another realtor’s car slowing to a stop, a young couple front and back — the woman videotaping the Houlihan place through the passenger window. The driver’s-side sign on the big shiny Buick door says BUY AND LARGE REALTY—Freehold, NJ.
“This place’ll be history by sundown,” Joe says flatly, seated beside me, his get-up-and-go oddly got-up-and-gone. No mention of any gas odor. Phyllis has had no real chance to browbeat him, but a look can raze cities.
“Could be,” I say, staring knives at the BUY AND LARGE Buick. Ted Houlihan may have already reneged on our exclusive, and I’m tempted to step out and explain some things to everybody involved. Though the sight of competing buyers could put a special, urgent onus to act on Phyllis and Joe, who watch these new people in disapproving silence as I drive us back down Charity Street.
On the way to Route 1, Phyllis — who has now put on dark glasses and looks like a diva — suddenly insists I drive them “around” so she can see the prison. Consequently, I negotiate us back through the less nice, bordering neighborhoods, curve in behind a new Sheraton and a big Episcopal church with a wide, empty parking lot, then merge out onto Route 1 north of Penns Neck, where, a half mile down the road in what looks like a mowed hayfield, there sits, three hundred yards back, a complex of low, indistinct flat-green buildings fenced all around and refenced closer in, which altogether constitutes the offending “big house.” We can see basketball backboards, a baseball diamond, several fenced and lighted tennis courts, a high-dive platform over what might very well be an Olympic-size pool, some paved and winding “reflection paths” leading out into open stretches of field where pairs of men — some apparently elderly and limping — are strolling and chatting and wearing street clothes instead of prison monkey garb. There’s also, apparently for atmosphere, a large flock of Canada geese milling and nosing around a flat, ovoid pond.
I, naturally, have passed this place incalculable times but have paid it only the briefest attention (which is what the prison planners expected, the whole shebang as unremarkable as a golf course). Though looked at now, a grassy, summery compound with substantial trees ranked beyond its boundaries, where an inmate can do any damn thing he wants but leave — read a book, watch color TV, think about the future — and where one’s debts to society can be unobtrusively retired in a year or two, it seems like a place anyone might be glad to pause just to get things sorted out and cut through the crap.
“It looks like some goddamn junior college,” Joe Markham says, still talking in the higher decibels but seeming calmer now. We’re stopped on the opposite shoulder, with traffic booming past, and are rubbernecking the fence and the official silver-and-black sign that reads: N.J. MEN’S FACILITY — A MINIMUM SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, behind which New Jersey, American and Penal System flags all rustle on separate poles in the faint, damp breezes. There’s no guardhouse here, no razor wire, no electric fences, no watchtowers with burp guns, stun grenades, searchlights, no leg-chewing canines— just a discreet automatic gate with a discreet speaker box and a small security camera on a post. No biggie.
“It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” I say.
“Where’s our house from here?” Joe says, still loudly, leaning to see across me.
We study the row of big trees which is Penns Neck, the Houlihan house on Charity Street invisible within.
“You can’t see it,” Phyllis says, “but it’s back there.”
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Joe says. He flashes a look back at Phyllis in her shades. A giant dump truck blows past, rocking the car on its chassis. “They have a gap in the fence where you can trade recipes.” He snorts.
“A cake with a file in it,” Phyllis says, her face unresigned. I try to catch her eye in the rearview, but can’t. “I don’t see it.”
“I goddamned see it,” Joe growls.
We sit staring for thirty more seconds, and then it’s off we go.
As a negative inducement and a double cincher, I drive us out past Mallards Landing, where everything is as it was two hours ago, only wetter. A few workmen are moving inside the half-studded homes. A crew of black men is loading wads of damp sod off a flatbed and stacking them in front of the MODEL that’s supposedly OPEN but isn’t and in fact looks like a movie façade where a fictionalized American family would someday pay the fictionalized mortgage. It puts me and, I’m sure, the Markhams in mind of the prison we just left.