“Do you believe in progress, Bascombe?” Old man Schwindell squinted his almost hueless blue eyes up at me. He had a big mustache yellowed by eight million Pall Malls, and his grizzled hair was thick on the sides and growing out his ears but was thin on top and falling out in clusters. He suddenly groped behind himself without looking, clutched at the clear plastic hose attached to a big oxygen cylinder on wheels, yanked it and strapped a little elastic band around his head so that a tiny clear nozzle fit up into his nose and fed him air. “You know that’s our motto,” he gasped, routing his eyes down to monkey with his lifeline.
“That’s what Rolly’s told me,” I said. Roily had never mentioned word one about progress, had talked only about risk gauntlets, capital gains taxes and exposure, all of which he was dead against.
“I’m not going to ask you about it now. Don’t worry,” old man Schwindell said, not entirely satisfied with his flow, straining around to twist a green knob on the cylinder and succeeding only in getting half a good breath. “When you’ve been around here and know something,” he said with difficulty, “FU ask you to tell me your definition of progress. And if you give me the wrong answer, FU get rid of you on the spot.” He swiveled back around and gave me a mean little ocher-toothed leer, his air apparatus getting in the way of his mouth, though his breathing was going much more smoothly, so that he might’ve felt like he wasn’t about to die that very minute. “How’s that? Is that fair?”
“I think that’s fair,” I said. “I’ll try to give you a good answer.”
“Don’t give me a good answer. Give me the right answer!” he shouted. “Nobody should graduate the sixth grade without an idea of what progress is all about. Don’t you think so?”
“I agree completely,” I said, and I did, though mine had been suffering some setbacks.
“Then you’re good enough to start. You don’t have to be any good anyway. Realty sells itself in this town. Or it used to.” He started fiddling more furiously with his breathing tubes, trying to get the holes to line up better with his old hairy nostrils. And my interview was over, though I stood there for almost another minute before I recognized he wasn’t going to say anything else, so that I just eventually let myself out.
And for all practical purposes I was on my sweet way after that. Roily Mounger took me to lunch at The Two Lawyers. I’d have a “break-in period,” he told me, of about three months, when I’d be on salary (no insurance or benefits). Everybody would chip in and rotate me around the office, see to it I learned the MLS hardware and the office lingo. I’d go on “beaucoup” house showings and closings and inspections and realty caravans, “just to get to know whatever,” all this while I was going to class at my own expense—“three hundred bucks más o menos.” At the end of the course I’d take the state exam at the La Quinta in Trenton, then “jump right in on the commission side and start root-hoggin’.”
“I wish I could tell you there was one goddamn hard thing about any of this, Frank,” Roily said in amazement. “But”—and he shook his jowly, buzz-cut head—“if it was so goddamned hard why would I be doing it? Hard work’s what the other asshole does.” And with that he cut a big bracking fart right into his Naugahyde chair and looked all around at the other lunchers, grinning like a farm boy. “You know, your soul’s not supposed to be in this,” he said. “This is realty. Reality’s something else — that’s when you’re born and you die. This is the in-between stuff here.”
“I get it,” I said, though I thought my personal take on the job probably wouldn’t be just like Rolly’s.
And that was that. In six months old man Schwindell gorked off in the front seat of his Sedan de Ville, stopped at the light at the corner of Venetian Way and Lipizzaner Road, a man-and-wife ophthalmologist team in the car, on their way to the preclosing walkthrough at the retired New Jersey Supreme Court Justice’s house, down the street from my former home on Hoving (the deal naturally fell through). By then Roily Mounger was steaming along selling time-shares to Seattleites, most of the young people in our office had taken off for better pickings in distant area codes, and I’d passed the board and was out hawking listings.
Though based on strict cash flow and forgetting about taxes, it was already true by then that a person could rent for half the cost of buying, and a lot of our clients were beginning to wise up. In addition — as I have ever so patiently told the Markhams, fidgeting now out in the Sleepy Hollow — housing costs were rising faster than incomes, at about 4.9 percent. Plus, plenty of other signs were bad. Employment was down. Expansion was way out of balance. Building permits were taking a nosedive. It was “what the monkey does on the other side of the stick,” Shax Murphy said. And those who had no choice or, like me, had choices but no wish to pursue them, all dug in for the long night that becomes winter.
But truth to say, I was as happy as I expected to be. I enjoyed being on the periphery of the business community and having the chance to stay up with trends — trends I didn’t even know existed back when I was writing sports. I liked the feeling of earning a living by the sweat of my brow, even if I didn’t need the money, still don’t work that hard and don’t always earn a great deal. And I managed to achieve an even fuller appreciation of the Existence Period; began to see it as a good, permanent and adaptable strategy for meeting life’s contingencies other than head-on.
For a brief time I took some small interest in forecast colloquia, attended the VA and FHA update meetings and a few taking-control-of-the-market seminars. I attended the state Realty Roundtable, sat in on the Fair Housing Panel down in Trenton. I delivered Christmas packages to the elderly, helped coach the T-ball team, even dressed up like a clown and rode from Haddam to New Brunswick in a circus wagon to try to spruce up the public perception of realtors as being, if not a bunch of crooks, at least a bunch of phonies and losers.
But eventually I let most of it slide. A couple of young hotshot associates have come in since I signed on, and they’re fired up to put on clown suits to prove a point. Whereas I don’t feel like I’m trying to prove a point anymore.
And yet I still like the sunny, paisley-through-the-maples exhilaration of exiting my car and escorting motivated clients up some new and strange walkway and right on into whatever’s waiting — an unoccupied house on a summer-warm morning when it’s chillier indoors than out, even if the house isn’t much to brag about, or even if I’ve shown it twenty-nine times and the bank’s got it on the foreclosure rolls. I enjoy going into other people’s rooms and nosing around at their things, while hoping to hear a groan of pleasure, an “Ahhh, now this, this is more like it,” or a whispered approval between a man and wife over some waterfowl design worked into the fireplace paneling, then surprisingly repeated in the bathroom tiles; or share the satisfaction over some small grace note — a downstairs-upstairs light switch that’ll save a man possible injury when he’s stumbling up to bed half sloshed, having gone to sleep on the couch watching the Knicks long after his wife has turned in because she can’t stand basketball.
Beyond all that, since two years ago I’ve bought no new houses on Clio Street or elsewhere. I ride herd on my small hot dog empire. I write my editorials and have as always few friends outside of work. I take part in the annual Parade of Homes, standing in the entryway of our fanciest listings with a big smile on my chops. I play an occasional game of volleyball behind St. Leo’s with the co-ed teams from other businesses. And I go fishing as much as I can at the Red Man Club, where I sometimes take Sally Caldwell in violation of Rule 1 but never see other members, and where I’ve learned over time to catch a fish, to marvel a moment at its opaline beauties and then to put it back. And of course I act as parent and guardian to my two children, though they are far away now and getting farther.