“Then where you two goin’?” He is crushing his gum wrapper and chewing vigorously. He wears a great chunky diamond-and-gold-crusted ring on his right ring finger, something a large person might design for himself or possibly get by winning the Super Bowl.
“We’re going to the Baseball Hall of Fame.” I look around at him amiably. “Did you ever go there?”
“Uh-uh,” he says, and shakes his head, his mouth emitting a loud Spearminty sweetness. Mr. Tanks’s hair is short and dense and black, but doesn’t grow on all parts of his head. Islands of his glistening black scalp appear here and there, making him look older than I’m sure he is. We’re probably the same age. “What line of work you do?”
The VACANCY sign goes silently off, then the MOTEL sign itself, leaving only a humming red NO illuminated. The clerk lowers the blinds inside the office, switches them closed, and the office lights go almost immediately out.
We aren’t socializing here, I realize, only bearing brief dual witness to the perilous character of life and our uncertain presences in it. Otherwise there’s no reason for us to stand here together.
“Real estate,” I say, “down in Haddam, New Jersey. About two and a half hours from here.”
“That’s a rich man’s town,” Mr. Tanks says, still chewing rapidly.
“Some rich people live there,” I say. “But some folks just sell real estate. Where do you live?”
“Divorced,” Mr. Tanks says. “I ‘bout live in that rig.” He swivels his big midnight face in the direction of his truck.
There in the shadows Mr. Tanks’s enormous trailer displays a jaunty good ship Mayflower in green, abreast a jaunty sea of yellow. It’s the most nearly patriotic sight I’ve seen in the Ridgefield area. I think of Mr. Tanks snugged up in his high-tech sleep cocoon, decked out (for some reason) in red silk pj’s, earphones plugged into an Al Hibbler CD, perusing a Playboy or a Smithsonian and munching a gourmet sandwich purchased somewhere back down the line and heated up in his mini-micro. It’s as good as what I do. Possibly the Markhams should consider long-haul trucking instead of the suburbs. “That must not be so bad,” I say.
“It gets old. Cramped gets old,” he says. Mr. Tanks must weigh 290. “I own a home out in Alhambra.”
“Does your wife live there, then?”
“Uh-uh,” Mr. Tanks grunts. “My furniture stays out there. I pay it a visit once in a while when I miss it.”
Down at the lighted room where a murder has taken place, the local cops shut the Suburban’s doors and wander inside, talking quietly, their local-cop hats pushed back on their heads. Mr. Tanks and I are the last observers left. I’m sure it’s close to three. I yearn for bed and sleep, though I don’t want to leave Mr. Tanks alone.
“Lemme just ask you a question.” Mr. Tanks is holding his attaché still under his giant arm and gravely chewing his Spearmint. “Since you’re into real estate now” (as if I’d only been in it a couple of weeks). He doesn’t look at me. It may embarrass him to address me in terms of my profession. “I’m thinking about selling my home.” He stares straight away into the dark.
“The one in Alhambra?”
“Uh-huh.” He breathes again noisily through his big nostrils.
“California’s holding onto its value is all I hear, if that’s what you want to know.”
“I bought in seventy-six.” Another big sigh.
“Then you’re in great shape,” I say, though why I’d say that I don’t know, since I’ve never been in Alhambra, don’t know the tax base, the racial makeup, the comp situation or the market status. I’ll probably visit the Alhambra before I visit Mr. Tanks’s Alhambra.
“What I’m wonderin’ is,” Mr. Tanks says and wipes his big hand over his face, “if I oughtn’t not to move out here.”
“To Ridgefield?” Not an obvious match.
“It don’t matter where.”
“Do you have any friends and family out here?”
“Naw.”
“Is the Mayflower home office out here someplace?”
He shakes his head. “They don’t matter where you live. You just drivin’ for them.”
I look at Mr. Tanks curiously. “Do you like it out here?” Meaning the seaboard, the Del-Mar-Va to Eastport, from the Water Gap to Block Island.
“It’s pretty good,” he says. His cavey eyes narrow and flicker at me, as if he’d caught a whiff suggesting I might be amused by him.
But I’m not! I understand (I think) perfectly well what he’s getting at. If he’d answered in the usual way — that his Aunt Pansy lived in Brockton, or his brother Sherman in Trenton, or if he was positioning himself for a managerial charge inside corporate Mayflower, home offices, say, in Frederick, MD, or Ayer, Mass., and needed to move nearer — that would make sound sense. Though it would be a whole lot less interesting on the human side. But if I’m right, his question is of a much more omenish and divining nature, having to do with the character of eventuality (not rust-belt economics or the downturn in per-square-foot residential in the Hartford-Waterbury metroplex).
Instead, his is the sort of colloquy most of us engage in alone with only our silent selves, and that with the right answers can give rise to rich feelings of synchronicity of the kind I came back from France full of four years ago: when everything is glitteringly about you, and everything you do seems led by a warm, invisible astral beam issuing from a point too far away in space to posit but that’s leading you to the place — if you can just follow and stay lined up — you know you want to be. Christians have their grimmer version of this beam; Jainists do too. Probably so do ice dancers, bucking-bronco riders and grief counselors. Mr. Tanks is one of the multitude seeking, with hope, to emerge from a condition he’s grown weary of in pursuit of something better, and wants to know what he should do — a profound inquiry.
I’d of course love to help with this alignment of small stars, and without making him worry I’m a loony or a realty shark or a homosexual with polyracial endomorphic appetites. In the most magnanimous sense, such assistance is the heart of the realty profession.
I fold my arms and let myself sway sideways so my thigh pushes against the back bumper of my Crown Victoria. I wait a few seconds, then say, “I think I know exactly what you’re getting at.”
“What about?” Mr. Tanks says suspiciously.
“About wondering where you ought to go,” I say in as unaggressive, unsharky, unhomophilic a way as possible.
“Yeah, but that don’t really matter,” Mr. Tanks says, instantly shying off the subject now that he’s raised it. “But okay,” he says, still showing interest. “I’d like to set down someplace else, you know? Like a neighborhood.”
“Would you live there?” I say in a helpful, professional voice. “Or would it just be someplace for your furniture to live?”
“I’d live there,” Mr. Tanks says, and nods, looking up at the sky as though wishing to envision a future. “If I liked it, I wouldn’t necessarily even mind being in someplace I’ve lived before. You understand what I mean?”
“Pretty much,” I say, meaning “perfectly.”
“The East Coast just seems sorta homey to me.” Mr. Tanks suddenly looks around at his truck as if he’s heard a sound and expects to see someone scaling the side, ready to break in and steal his TV. Though there’s no one.
“Where’d you grow up?” I say.
He continues staring at his truck and away from me. “Michigan. Old man was a chiropractor in the U.P. Wasn’t too many Negroes doing that work.”
“I bet not. Do you like it up there?”