“Oh yeah. I love it.”
There’s no use blabbing that I’m an old Wolverine or that we probably have experiences in common. Divorce, for starters. My memories, in any case, would probably conflict with his.
“Then why don’t you go back and buy a house? Or build one? That seems like a no-brainer to me.”
Mr. Tanks turns and gives me a wary look, as if I might’ve been referring to his brain. “My ex-wife stays up there now. That don’t work.”
“Do you have any children?”
“Uh-uh. That’s why I ain’t been to the Hall of Fame.” His big eyebrows lower. (What business is it of mine if he has children?)
“Well. I’ll just say this.” I would still like to encourage Mr. Tanks with some useful facts offered as data for his search for what to do next. I in fact feel some anxiety that he doesn’t know how specifically I appreciate how he feels and that I’ve felt the same way myself. No disappointment is quite like the failure to share a crucial understanding. “I just want to say this,” I begin again, correcting myself. “I’m selling houses these days. And I live in a pretty nice town down there. And we’re about to see a rise in prices, and I believe interest rates’ll head up by the end of the year and maybe even before.”
“That’s too rich down there. I been down there. I moved some basketball player’s mother into some big house. Then moved her out again a year later.”
“You’re right, it’s not cheap. But let me just say that most experts believe a purchase price two and a half times your annual pre-tax income is a realistic debt load. And I’ve got houses right now, in the village of Haddam”—all shown to the Markhams, all promptly trashed—“at two-fifty, and I’ll have more as time goes on. And I feel like in the long run, whether it’s Dukakis or Bush or Jackson”—fat chance—“prices are going to stay up in New Jersey.”
“Uh-huh,” Mr. Tanks says, making me feel exactly like a realty shark (which is possibly what you are if you’re a realtor at all).
Only my view is, if I sell you a house in a town where life’s tolerable, then I’ve done you a big favor. And if I try and don’t succeed, then you’ve got a view you like better (assuming you can afford it). Plus, I don’t cotton to the idea of raising the drawbridge, which Mr. Tanks probably has experience with. I mean to guarantee the same rights and freedoms for all. And if that means merchandising New Jersey dirt like dog-nuts so we all get our one sweet piece, then so be it. We’ll all be dead in forty years anyway.
I won’t (or can’t), in other words, be easily shamed. And Mr. Tanks would make a good addition and be as welcome on Cleveland Street as his pocketbook could make him (he’d, of course, have to stash his truck someplace else). And I’m not doing anybody a favor if I don’t try to get him interested.
“So what’s the worst part about being a realtor?” He’s staring around somewhere else again — above the Sea Breeze roofline, where the humpy moon has floated higher and wears a fuzzy halo. Mr. Tanks is now signaling me that he’s not ready to buy a house in New Jersey, which is fine. He may conduct conversations like this with everyone — his “thing” being to ramble on dolefully about wishing he could be someplace better — and I’ve spoiled the fun by trying to figure out where and how. He may feel fine dedicating his life to moving other people hither and yon.
“My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way.” A gesture of hello and good-bye, poking my hand toward Mr. Tanks’s strenuous green belly. He administers a halfhearted little jiggling of just my fingers. Mr. Tanks might look like a guard for old Vince back in the Bart Starr-Fuzzy Thurston gravy days, but he shakes hands like a debutante.
“Tanks,” is all he grunts.
“Well, really, I don’t know if it has a worst part,” I say, addressing the realtor question and feeling a sudden, brain-flattening fatigue and the painful need for sleep. I pause for a breath. “When I don’t like it so much, I try not to notice it and stay home reading a book. But I guess if it has to have a bad side, it’s having clients think I want to sell them a house they don’t like, or that I don’t care if they like it or not. Which is never true.” I pull my hand over my face and push my eyelids up to keep them open.
“You don’t like being misinterpreted, is that it?” Mr. Tanks looks amused. He makes an odd gurgly chuckle deep in his throat, which makes me self-conscious.
“I guess so. Or not.”
“I figured you guys was all crooks,” Mr. Tanks says as though talking about something else to someone else. “Like a used-car guy, only ‘cept with houses. Or burial insurance. Something like that.”
“Some people feel that way, I guess.” I’m thinking that we’re at this moment two feet away from my trunkful of realty signs, blank offer sheets, earnest money receipts, listing forms, prospect memos, PRICE REDUCED and SORRY, YOU MISSED IT stickers. Burglar’s tools, to Mr. Tanks. “Really, a main concern is avoiding misrepresentation. I wouldn’t want to do anything to you that I wouldn’t want done to me — at least as far as realty goes.” This did not come out sounding right (due to exhaustion).
“Hunh,” is all Mr. Tanks offers. Our time for bearing witness to life’s strangeness is nearly over.
Suddenly, at the end of the row of motel units, out the door of the lighted room we’ve been waiting a vigil over, come two uniformed local police, followed by the tough-nut detective, followed by a uniformed policewoman, holding the arm of the young blue-dressed wife who’s in turn holding the small hand of a tiny blond girl, who looks apprehensively all around in the dark and back behind her into the room she’s left, though suddenly, by dint of memory, she turns and looks up at ole Bugs, stuck to the window of the Suburban, leering his nutty brains out. She’s wearing neat little yellow shorts and tennies with white socks, and a hot-pink pullover that has a red heart on the front like a target. She is slightly knock-kneed. When she gazes around again and sees no one she recognizes, she fastens her eyes on Mr. Tanks as she’s led across the lot to an unmarked vehicle that will take her and her mother elsewhere, to some other Connecticut town, where a terrible-awful thing hasn’t happened. There, to sleep.
They have left their room standing open, the Whaler jammed with stealable gear somebody should see about locking up or storing. (This I would’ve waked up and worried about in the middle of the night back in 1984, even if it were my loved one who was killed.)
Though just as the young woman ducks into the dark car, she looks back at her room and at the Suburban and the Sea Breeze and then to the left at Mr. Tanks and me, her companions of a sort, watching her with distant compassion as she encounters grief and confusion and loss all alone and all at once. Her face comes up, light catches it so that I see the look of startlement on her fresh young features. It is her first scent, the first light-glimmer, that she’s no longer connected in the old manner of two hours ago but into some new network now, where caution is both substance and connector. (It is not so different from the look on the boy’s face who killed her husband.) I, of course, could connect with her — give a word or a look. But it would be only momentary, whereas caution is what she needs now, and what’s dawning. To learn a lesson of caution at a young age is not the worst thing.
Her face disappears into the squad car. The door closes hard, and in half of one minute they are all gone — the local boys in their Fairfield Sheriff’s cruiser, murmuring ahead, gumball flashing; the unmarked car with the policewoman driving — off in the direction opposite, where the ambulance has gone. Again, when they are all out of sight into the scrub-timber distance, a siren rises. They will not be back tonight.