But tiny things — things I’d never even noticed when Ann lived in Haddam and we shared responsibilities and I held down my sportswriting job — had begun to get the better of me. Some little worry, some little anything, would settle into my thinking — for instance, how was I going to get my car serviced on Tuesday but also get to the airport to sign for a Greek rug I’d ordered from Thessaloníki and had been waiting on for months and was sure some thieving airport worker would steal if I wasn’t there to lay hands on it the instant it came down the conveyer? Should I rent a car? Should I send someone? Who? And would that person even be willing to go if I could think of who he or she was, or would that person think I was an idiot? Should I call the broker in Greece and tell him to delay the shipping? Should I call the freight company and say I’d be a day late getting up there and would they please see to it the rug was kept in a safe place until my car was ready? I’d wake up right in the Red Man Club cabin, my heart booming, or in my own new house, brooding about such things, sweating, clenching my fists, scheming how to get this plus a hundred other simple, ordinary things done, as if everything were a crisis as big as my health. Later I’d start to think about how stupid it was to carry such things around all day. I’d decide then to trust fate, go up and get it when I could or maybe never, or to forget the fucking rug and just go fishing. Though then I’d start to fear I was letting everything go, that my life was spinning crazy-out-of-azimuth, proportion and common sense flying out the window like pie plates. Then I’d realize that years later I’d look back on this period as a “bad time,” when I was “waaaay out there at the edge,” my everyday conduct as erratic and zany as a roomful of chimps, only I was the last to notice (again, one’s neighbors would be the first: “He really sort of stayed to himself a lot, though he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I wouldn’t have expected anything like this!”).
Now, of course, in 1988, driving into sunny Haddam with better hopes for the day squirreling around my belly, I know the source of that devilment. I’d paid handsome dues to the brotherhood of consolidated mistake-makers, and having survived as well as I had, I wanted my goddamned benefits: I wanted everything to go my way and to be happy all the time, and I was wild it wouldn’t work out like that. I wanted the Greek rug delivery not to interfere with getting my windshield washer pump replaced. I wanted the fact that I had left France and Catherine Flaherty and come home in the best spirit of enterprise and good works to still somehow reward me in big numbers. I wanted the fact that my wife had managed to divorce me again and worse, and even divorce my kids from me, to become a fact of life I got smoothly used to and made the most of. I wanted a lot of things, in other words (these are just samples). And I’m not in fact sure all this didn’t constitute another “kind of major crisis,” though it may also be how you feel when you survive one.
But what I wanted more than anything was to quit being deviled so I could have a chance for the rest, and it occurred to me once I’d listened to Roily Mounger’s idea that I might try out a new thought (since I wasn’t making any other headway): I might just take seriously his list of my “qualifications” and let them lead me toward the unexpected — instead of going on worrying about how happy I was all the time — after which worries and contingencies might glide away like leaves on a slack tide, and I might find myself, if not in the warp of many highly dramatic events, reckless furies and rocketing joie de vivre, still as close to day-to-day happy as I could be. This code of conduct, of course, is the most self-preserving and salubrious tenet of the Existence Period and makes real estate its ideal occupation.
I told Roily Mounger I’d give his suggestion some serious thought, even though I said the idea pretty much came out of left field. He said there was no hurry to make a decision about becoming a realtor, that down at their office everyone had gotten there by different routes and timetables, and there were no two alike. He himself, he said, had been a supermarket developer and before that a policy strategist for a Libertarian state senate candidate. One person had a Ph.D. in American literature; another had left a seat on the Exchange; a third was a dentist! They all worked as independents but acted in concert whenever possible, which gave everybody a damn good feeling. Everybody had made a “ton of money” in the last few years and expected to make a ton more before the big correction came (“the whole industry” knew it was coming). From his point of view, which he admitted favored the commercial side, all you needed to do to wake up rich was “get with your money people, put some key factors and some financing on the table,” locate some unimproved parcels your group can handle the debt service and taxes on for twelve to eighteen months, then once the time’s up sell out the whole trunkload to some Johnny-come-lately Arabs or Japs and start cashing in your chips. “Let your money people run the risk gauntlet,” Roily said. “You just sit tight in the middle seat and take your commissions.” (You could always, of course, “participate” yourself, and he admitted he had. But the exposure could be substantial.)
To figure all this out took me no time at all. If everybody came at it from all angles, I thought maybe I could find one of my own to work — relying on the concept that you don’t sell a house to someone, you sell a life (this had so far been my experience). In this way I could still pursue my original plan to do for others while looking after Number One, which seemed a good aspiration as I entered a part of life when I’d decided to expect less, hope for modest improvements and be willing to split the difference.
I went down to the office in three days and got introduced around to everybody — a crew of souls who seemed like people you wouldn’t mind working out of the same office with. A short, bunchy-necked, thick-waisted dyke in a business suit and wing tips, named Peg, with Buick-bumper breasts, braces on her teeth and hair bleached silver (she was the Ph.D.). There was a tall, salt-and-pepper, blue-blazer Harvard grad in his late fifties — this was Shax Murphy, who’s since bought the agency and who’d retired out of some brokerage firm and still owned a house in Vinalhaven. He had his long, gray-flanneled legs stretched out in the aisle between desks, one big shiny cordovan oxford on top of the other, his face red as a western sunset from years of gentlemanly drinking, and I took to him instantly because when I shook his hand he had just put down a dog-eared copy of Paterson, which made me think he probably had life in pretty much the right perspective. “You just need to remember the three most important words in the ‘relaty budnus,’ Frank, and you’ll do fine in this shop,” he said, jiggering his heavy brows up and down mock seriously. ‘Locution, locution, locution.’” He sniffed loudly through his big ruby nose, rolled his eyes and went right back to reading.
Everyone else in the office at that time — two or three young realtor associates and the dentist — has left since the ’86 slide began to seem like a long fall-off. All of them were people without solid stakes in town or capital to back them up, and they quickly scattered back out of sight — to vet school at Michigan State, back home to New Hampshire, one in the Navy, and of course Clair Devane, who came later and met an unhappy end.
Old man Schwindell accorded me only the briefest, most cursory of interviews. He was an old, palely grim, wispy-haired, flaking-skinned little tyrant in an out-of-season seersucker suit and whom I’d seen in town for years, knew nothing about and viewed as a curio — though it was he who’d done the behind-the-scenes knitting of my deal with the Institute. He was also the “dean” of New Jersey realtors and had thirty plaques on his office wall saying as much, along with framed photos of himself with movie stars and generals and prizefighters he’d sold homes to. No longer officially active, he held forth in the back office, hunched behind a cluttered old glass-topped desk with his coat always on, smoking Pall Malls.