“Frank, Joe said he could see himself standing in the driveway being interviewed by a local TV reporter,” Phyllis says sheepishly, “and he didn’t want to be that person, not in the Houlihan house.” I must’ve already talked to Joe about my theory of seeing yourself and learning to like it, since he’s now claimed it as his own patented wisdom. Joe has apparently left the room.
“What was he being interviewed about?” I say.
“That didn’t matter, Frank. It was the whole situation.”
Outside the glass doors in the orange-lit parking lot, a big gold-and-green cruiser bus pulls past the entrance, Eureka written on its side in lavish, curving scripted letters. I’ve seen these buses while driving to Sally’s via the Garden State. They’re usually crammed with schnockered Canucks headed for Atlantic City to gamble at Trump Castle. They motor straight through, arrive at 1 a.m., gamble forty-eight hours without cease (eats and drinks on the cuff), then hustle back on board and sleep the whole way back to Trois-Rivières, arriving in time for half a day’s work on Monday. Someone’s idea of fun. I’d like to get on my way before a crew of them comes storming in.
Phyllis, though, has won a round, somehow letting Joe convince himself he’s the bad-tempered, tight-fisted old noncompromiser who put the ki-bosh on the Houlihan house. “We also feel, Frank,” Phyllis drones, “and I feel this as strongly as Joe, that we don’t want to be bossed around by a false economy.”
“Which economy is that?” I say.
“The housing one. If we don’t get in now, it could be better later.”
“Well, that’s true. You never get in the river the same place twice,” I say dully. “I’m curious, though, if you know where you’re going to live by the time school starts.”
“Uh-huh,” Phyllis says competently. “We think if worse comes to worst, Joe can rent a bachelor place near his work and I can stay on temporarily in Island Pond. Sonja can go right on with her friends in school. We plan to talk to the other relator about that.” Phyllis actually says “relator,” something I’ve never heard her say, indicating to me she’s reverting to a previous personality matrix — more desperate, but more calculating (also not unusual).
“Well, that’s all pretty sound reasoning,” I say.
“Do you think that, really?” Phyllis says, undisguised fear suddenly working through her voice like a pitchfork. “Joe says he didn’t have a feeling anything significant ever happened in any of the places you showed us. But I wasn’t sure.”
“I wonder what he had in mind there?” I say. Possibly a celebrity murder? Or the discovery of a new solar system from an attic-window telescope?
“Well, he thinks if we’re leaving Vermont we should be moving into a sphere of more important events that would bring us both up in some way. The places you showed us he didn’t think did that. Your houses might be better for someone else, maybe.”
“They aren’t my houses, Phyllis. They belong to other people. I just sell them. Plenty of people do okay in them.”
“I’m sure,” Phyllis says glumly. “But you know what I mean.”
“Not really,” I say. Joe’s theory of significant events suggests to me he’s lost his new finger-hold on sanction. Though I’m not interested. If Joe rents a little dépendance in Manalapan, and Phyllis finds “meaningful” work substituting in the Island Pond alternative crafts school, gets into a new “paper group” with a cadre of acid-tongued but spiritually supportive women friends, while Sonja makes the pep squad at Lyndon Academy, marriage Markham-style will be a dead letter by Turkey Day. Which is the real issue here, of course (a pro-founder text runs beneath all realty decisions): Is being together worth the unbelievable horseshit required to satisfy the other’s needs? Or would it just be more fun to go it alone? “Looking at houses is a pretty good test of what you’re all about, Phyllis,” I say (the very last thing she wants to hear).
“I would’ve looked at your colored house, Frank — I mean your rental. But Joe just didn’t feel right about it.”
“Phyllis, I’m at a pay phone on the turnpike, so I better be going before a truck runs over me. But our rental market’s pretty tight, I think you’ll find.” I spy a phalanx of chortling Canadians, most of them in Bermudas, rumbling across the lot, all primed to hit the can, down a gut-bomb, have a sniff at the Vince trophy case, then grab one last en-route catnap before nonstop gaming commences.
“Frank, I don’t know what to say.” I hear something made of glass being knocked over and broken into a lot of pieces. “Oh, shit,” Phyllis says. “This isn’t, by the way, a realtor in Haddam. She’s more in the East Brunswick area.” A portion of central New Jersey resembling the sere suburban scrub fields of Youngstown. It’s also where Skip McPherson rents ice time before daylight.
“Well, that’ll have a whole new feel for you guys” (the Youngstown feel).
“It’s sort of starting over, though, isn’t it?” Phyllis says, giving in to bewilderment.
“Well, maybe Joe’ll picture himself better up there. And there really isn’t any starting over involved, Phyllis. It’s all part of your ongoing search.”
“What do you think’s going to happen to us, Frank?”
The Canadians are now bustling into the lobby, elbowing each other and yucking it up like hockey fans — men and women alike. They are big, healthy, happy, well-adjusted white people who aren’t about to miss any meals or get dressed up for rio good reason. They break off into pairs and threes, guys and gals, and go yodeling off through the metal double doors to the rest rooms. (The best all-around Americans, in my view, are Canadians. I, in fact, should think of moving there, since it has all the good qualities of the states and almost none of the bad, plus cradle-to-grave health care and a fraction of the murders we generate. An attractive retirement waits just beyond the forty-ninth parallel.)
“Did you hear me, Frank?”
“I hear you, Phyllis. Loud and clear.” The last of the laughing Canadian women, purses in hand, disappear into the women’s, where they immediately start unloading on the men and gassing about how “lucky” they were to hook up with a bunch of cabbage-heads like these guys. “You and Joe are just overwrought about happiness, Phyllis. You should just buy the first house you halfway like from your new realtor and start making yourselves happy. It’s not all that tricky.”
“I’m just in a black mood because of my operation, I guess,” Phyllis says. “I know we’re pretty lucky. Some young people can’t even afford a home now.”
“Some older people too.” I wonder if Phyllis visualizes herself and Joe as among the nation’s young. “I gotta get a move on here,” I say.
“How’s your son? Didn’t you tell me he had Hotchkin’s or brain damage or something?”
“He’s making a comeback, Phyllis.” Until this afternoon. “He’s quite a boy. Thanks for asking.”
“Joe needs a lot of maintenance right now too,” Phyllis says, to keep me on the phone. (Some woman in the rest room lets out an Indian whoop that sets the rest of them howling. I hear a stall door bang shut. “Yew-guyz … Jeeeeez-us,” one of the men answers from next door.) “We’ve seen some changes in our relationship, Frank. It’s not easy to let someone into your inner circle if you’re both second-timers.”
“It’s not easy for first-timers either,” I say impatiently. Phyllis seems to be angling for something. Though what? I once had a client — the wife of a church history professor and a mother of three, one of whom was autistic and got left in the car in a restraining harness — who asked me if I had any interest in getting naked with her on the polished floor of a ranch-style home in Belle Mead, a house her husband liked but she wanted a second look at because she felt the floor plan lacked “flow.” An instance of pure transference. Though no one in the realty business isn’t clued in to the sexual dimension: hours spent alone in close quarters (front seats of cars, provocatively empty houses); the not-quite-false aura of vulnerability and surrenderment; the possibility of a future in the same grid pattern, of unexpected, tingly sightings at the end of the lettuce rack, squirmy, almost-missed eye contact across a hot summer parking lot or through a plate-glass window with a spouse present. There have been instances in these three years and a half when I haven’t been a model citizen. Except you can lose your license for that kind of stunt and become a bad joke in the community, neither of which I care to risk as much as I might once have.