Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I got tied up,” I say out the window, and look annoyed.

“It’s better, it’s better,” Mike says in a whisper, then has another glance at the Town Car clients. He looks like a dashboard doll, since he’s wearing a strange knee-length black knitted sweater with a mink-looking collar, a Black Watch plaid sports-car cap, green cords and green suede loafers with argyle socks. It would seem to be his Scottish ensemble. “It’s good to make them wait.” He has drawn close to my face, so that I’m almost nose-into the fur trim on his sweater. The breeze on the bay side of Barnegat Neck is stouter than I expected. Inland weather is bringing change. We’ll have a proper blustery Thanksgiving cold snap before the day’s done. I bend forward against my steering wheel and give a look through the windshield up at pleasant, leaf-green #118, hiked up on dull red girders that have several impressive-looking hydraulic jacks under them, so the entire house, sill and all, has been elevated five feet off its brick foundation, exposing light and air and affording a view to the back yard. Two sets of heavy-duty tires and axles await use in what was once the front yard, in preparation for actually moving the house — which, like its neighbors, is unornamented, aluminum-sided, with brighter, newer green roof shingles mixed with old. The Arriba house movers have put their enigmatic sign up in the yard: EL GATO DUERME MIENTRAS QUE TRABAJAMOS.

This is the first time I’ve seen 118 up on its sleds, and I frankly can’t blame the neighbors for feeling “violated,” which is what the Coalition lady said before she started to cry and told me I was a gangster. It’s not a very good thing to do to a street’s sense of integrity — prices or no prices — to start switching houses like Monopoly pieces. I’m actually sorry I’ve done it now. It would’ve been better if the new owners had torn 118 down as planned and put their new house up in its dust. Orderly residential succession would have been satisfied, although possibly nobody would’ve been any happier. All the more reason to let Mike sell it to his clients right off the sleds and shift the focus to them — who at least plan to live in it, albeit someplace else.

“I’ve been telling them inventory’s down a third and demand’s kicking up.” Mike’s whispered breath is warm and once again has tobacco on it. He practices all kinds of breath-purifying techniques, as if that’s the thing buyers look for first. His Infiniti has a Dalai Lama-approved incense air-freshener strung to the rearview, and his car seats are always strewn with Clorets and Dentyne papers. But today’s efforts are so far unavailing.

I stare curiously out at Mike’s shiny round face — a face of high, faraway mountain crags, clouded pinnacles and thinnest airs, all forsaken for the chance to sell houses in the Garden State. And just for that instant, I cannot for the life of me think of his name — even though I just thought it. I’d like to say his name, frame a question in a confidential manner that lets him know I’m behind his deal 110 percent, and why doesn’t he just take my thumbs-up from right here in the car. I’ll wave a cheery welcome aboard to the fat little Hindu (or Mohammedan or Buddhist or Jainist or whatever he is), then motor off to be home when Sally calls and Clarissa returns with tales. Possibly Jill will have given Paul a sedative and we can all watch the Patriots pregame on Fox before the food’s festive arrival.

Only, my mind has problematically swallowed up this bright-eyed little brown man’s name, even though I can tell you everything else there is to know about him. Gone from me like a leaf in the wind.

“Uhmmm,” I say. Of course I don’t need to know his name to carry on a conversation with him. Though not knowing it has had the added defect of sweeping clean the conversational path from in front of me, like the police sweeping pedestrians from in front of the 5-K to Ortley and back. I remember all that perfectly! What the hell’s going on? Am I having a stroke? Or just bored to nullity by one more house going on the sale block? This may be how you know you’ve reached the finish line in real estate. I even remember that.

I smile out at this strangely dressed, burbling little man, hoping to neutralize alarm from my face. Though why should there be any? Whatever we’re about to do — I assume sell a house — doesn’t seem to require me. I peer out toward the small pear-shaped man in his wrong-season suit, beside his Lincoln, which wears what looks like blue-and-white Empire State plates and also, I see now, a blue BUSH sticker on its left bumper. He has his short fat-man’s arms folded and is staring thoughtfully at 118 up on its girders, as if this is a marvelous project he’s now in charge of but needs to study for a while. The Town Car appears packed with shadowy human cargo — three distinct heads in back, plus a dog staring through the back window, its tongue out in a happy-dog laugh.

I look back at this diminutive unnamed man at my window. It’s possible I don’t look normal. “So,” I say, “are we all set, then?” I smile exuberantly, suddenly invigorated with what I’m here for and ready to do it — press the flesh, seal the deal, say howdy and make the outsider feel wanted — things I’m good at. “I’m ready to meet the pigeon,” I say for some reason, which seems to distress and sink the grin on——’s round mug. Bill, Bert, Baxter, Boris, Bently…I’ll come to it.

“Mr. Bagosh, Frank,”——says, sotto voce through my window. Frank. Me.

——smiles in at me faintly. His thumb is, I can see, twisting his pinkie ring. Thank goodness he doesn’t know I can’t say his fucking name. He’d think I’m demented. Which I’m not. This kind of thing happens. Possibly vertigo again.

“How is it again?” I say.

“Bagosh,” Carl, Carey, Chris, Court, Curt, Coop says, pushing his listing papers into his silly sweater’s side pocket, then pulling down on his sports-car cap to look more official. He doesn’t want me involved in this now. Something doesn’t feel right. He sees his deal evaporating. But I’m doing it, if only because I don’t know how to leave. He casts a guarded look at my block-M sweatshirt. Then behind his aviators, his eyes drift down to my jeans, as if I might not be wearing pants at all.

“Bagosh it is. ” I start out of the car, surprisingly feeling damn good about selling a house on Thanksgiving. Cash deal to sweeten the pot — if I remember right. I actually love this kind of shirt-sleeve, write-a-check, hand-it-over deal. Real estate used to have plenty of them. Nowadays, parties are walled off from exposure, require exit strategies, escape hatches in case a sparrow flies against a screen on the third Tuesday and this is thought to be a bad omen. America is a country lost in its own escrow.

I don’t know why I can’t say Ed, Ewell, Ernie, Egbert, Escalante, Emerson, Everett’s name, but I can’t. He’s Tibetan. He’s my associate. I’ve known him for a year and a half. He and his wife are estranged, with genius-level kids. He’s a Libertarian but a social moderate. A Buddhist. A tiger in our trade, a clotheshorse, a happy little business warrior. I just can’t come up with his handle, even out on chilly Timbuktu, with a mind-clearing whistle-breeze gusting off the bay. Maybe I should ask to borrow his business card to make a note.

Mr. Bagosh is heading toward us with a big pleased grin on his plump lips. He has a toddling-sideways motoring gait you sometimes see experienced waiters use. What I couldn’t see from the car is that he’s wearing walking shorts with his belted Raj jacket, plus rattan loafers and socks of the thinnest white silk up to his knees. We are in Rangoon (when it was still Burma). I’m just out of the cockpit of my Flying Fortress, ready for a gin-rickey, a good soak, a new linen suit of my own and some social introductions. This man — Bagosh — coming across the lobby is just the fellow to make it all happen (in addition to being a spy for our side).