Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I’m grinning involuntarily as I make the turn, my head ducking, nodding unqualified 5-K approval along with my guilty admission that I’m not one of them, not brave enough, will have to try harder. I mustn’t accidentally hit the horn, punch the accelerator, veer an inch off course, or risk setting them to yelling and contesting and reviewing their civil rights. But seeing them congregated and intent, so pre-preoccupied, so vulnerably clad and unprotected, so much one thing, makes me feel just how much I’m a realtor (in the bad sense); even more so now than in my last Haddam days, when I felt coldly extraneous and already irremediably what I was — a house flogger, cruising the periphery of all the real goings-on: the shoe-repair errands, the good-results doctor and dental visits, the 5-K races, the trips to the altar to kneel and accept the holy body and blood of keerist on a kee-rutch. I felt something akin to this somber sensation when I didn’t give Bud Sloat a ride in Haddam on Tuesday.

But I’m sorry to be here feeling it now. Though it is but another in the young day’s cavalcade of good-for-my-soul, Next Level acceptances for which I’ll be thankful: I am this thing, seller of used and cast-off houses, and I am not other. It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. However, gone in a gulp are all the roles I might still inhabit but won’t, all the new learning curves I’d be good at, all the women who might adore me, the phone calls bearing welcome news and foretelling unimagined happiness, my chance to be an FBI agent, ambassador to France, a case worker in Mozambique — the one they all look up to. The Permanent Period permitted all that, and the price was small enough — self-extinguishment, becoming an instrument, blah, blah, blah. And now it’s different. The Next Level means me to say yes to myself just when it feels weirdest. Is this what it means to be mainstreamed like my son?

“I’m one of you,” I want to say to these joggers out my window like a crowd in a jogger republic undergoing a coup. “The race is ahead of me, too. I’m not just this. I’m that. And that. And that. There’s more to me than meets your gimlet eye.” But it isn’t so.

A bare coffee-colored arm flags out of the milling crowd, with a squat body attached and a face I know above the three blue stars ’n bars of the Honduran flag worn as a singlet. This is Esteban, from the Cormorant Court roofing crew, waving happily to me, el jefe, his gold restorations flashing in the hidden sun’s glint. He’s socked into the runner crowd, way more a part of things than I feel. My thumb juts to tap the horn, but I catch myself in time and wave instead. Though it’s then I have to press across the opposing lane of Ocean Ave and onto Timbuktu. The electric carillon in Our Lady commences its pre-race clamor, startling the shit out of me. The runner crowd shifts as one toward the starting line and up goes the gun (Father Ray is the shooter). I carry through with my turn, extra careful, since the motorcycle cops are eyeing me. But in an instant, I’m across and anonymous again as the gun goes off and the beast crowd swells with a sigh, and then all of it’s behind me.

M ike Mahoney — bony, businesslike, crisply turned-out realty go-getter — is the first human I see down Timbuktu. He’s out in the street beside his Infiniti with its REALTORS ARE PEOPLE TOO sticker and Barnegat Lighthouse license tag, waving, a happy grin on his round flat face, as though I’d gotten lost and just happened down the right street by dumb luck. He’s wearing his amber aviators and clutching a bouquet of white listing sheets. Twenty yards beyond him is a beige Lincoln Town Car, the exact model Newark Airport limo drivers drive. Outside the Lincoln waits a small, ovoid mustachioed personage in what looks like, through my windshield, a belted linen-looking suit that matches the Town Car’s paint job, into which the man almost perfectly blends. This is the client Mike has somehow convinced to hang around. I’m a half hour late — for reasons of my difficult son — but frankly don’t much care.

Timbuktu Street is a three-block residential, connecting Ocean Avenue to Barnegat Bay out ahead. The closed-for-the-season Yacht Club is at the end to the left, and across the gray water the low populous sprawl of Toms River is two-plus miles away. The bay bridge itself is visible, though at 11:30 on Thanksgiving morning, it is not much in use.

Houses on Timbuktu (Marrakesh Street is one street south, Bimini one street north) are all in the moderate bracket. The bay side is naturally cheaper than the ocean side, but prices go up close to the water, no matter what water it is. Most of these are frank plain-fronted ranches, some with camelbacks added, some with new wood-grained metal siding, all hip-roofed, three-window, door-in-the-middle, pastel frame constructions on small lots. Most were put up en masse, ten streets at a time, after Hurricane Cindy flattened all the aging cypress and fir bungalows the first Sea-Clift settlers built from Sears kits in the twenties. A few of those ’59-vintage owners are still around, though most houses have changed hands ten times and are owned by year-rounders who’re retired or commute to the mainland, or who keep their houses as rentals or a summer bolt-hole for the extended family. Several are owned and kept in mint condition by Gotham and Philadelphia policemen and firefighters who store their big trailered Lunds and refurbished Lymans, shrink-wrapped in blue plastic, on their pink-and-green crushed-marble “lawns.” These small streets, with their clean-facade, well-barbered, moderately-priced dwellings (250–300 bills) are, in fact, the social backbone of Sea-Clift, and even though most newcomers are Republicans, it’s they who oppose the Dollars For Doers schemes to grow out the economy like a mushroom.

It’s also these same home owners who’re made rueful by the sight of a neighbor house being torn off its foundation and trucked away, leaving behind scarred ground that once was a compatible vista, to be replaced by some frightening new construction. The worst is always assumed. And even though the identical houses along these identical, all but tree-less streets are simplicity and modesty’s essence, and finally no great shakes, that’s exactly how the owners want it, and know for certain a new house of unforeseeable design will rob their street of its known character and kick the crap out of values they’re looking to cash in on. I’ve already received concerned calls from the Timbuktu Neighbors Coalition, advancing the idea that I “donate”(!) the emptied lot at 118 for a passive park. Though even if I wanted to (which I don’t), no one in the Coalition would keep it up or pay the liability premiums, since many Coalition-owners are absentees and quite a few are elderly, on fixed whatevers. Eventually, the “park” would turn into a weedy eyesore everyone’d blame me for. Prices would then fall, and everyone would’ve forgotten that an attractive new house could’ve been there and made everything rosy. Better — as I told the Coalition lady — to sell the lot to some citizen who can afford it, then let the community do what communities do best: suppress diversity, discourage individuality, punish exuberance and find suitable language to make it seem good for everyone and what America’s all about. Placards (like election placards) still stand in some yards, shouting SAVE TIMBUKTU FROM EVIL DEVELOPERS!!! Though the house at 118 is already up on steel girders and in a week will be history.

Mike’s heading toward my driver’s window as I pull to the curb. He’s smiling and glancing back, nodding assurances to his client and generally brimming with house-selling certainty.