Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I’m an essentialist in things,” I said. “I believe humans buy houses to live in them, or so other people will.”

Mike didn’t attempt a reply, just looked up at the frosted clouds quickly forming. I cast a speculative eye up at the unsold green house, raised and allowing the glimpse of fenced back yards on Bimini Street. Possibly Thanksgiving wasn’t really a great day to sell a house. On a day to summon one’s blessings and try to believe in them, it might be common sense not to risk what you’re sure you have.

L ast night’s storm has widened the bay’s perimeter and shoved water up onto Bay Drive, where it exudes swampy-sweet odors of challenged septics. Yellow fluff rides in the weeds where the black-billed swans have foraged. This part of the bay shore has remained undeveloped due to seventies-era open-space ordinances mandating jungle gyms, slides and merry-go-rounds for younger, child-bearing families in the neighborhood. These apparatuses are here but now disused and grown dilapidated on the skimpy beach. A billboard announcing WE CAN DO IT IF WE TRY has been erected on the bay’s sandy-muddy shore. I’m not sure what this message means. Possibly save the bay. Or possibly that condos, apartments and shops will soon be here where there’s now a pleasant vista across the water, and that the families with kids will have to do their own math or else take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

The two swans have moved off among the Yacht Club buoys. Bits of white Styrofoam, yellow burger wrappers and a faded red beach ball have washed in among the weeds with last night’s blow. A gentleman is working alone on his black-hulled thirty-footer, readying it for winter storage. His white-helmeted kid plays with a cat on the dock plankings. Thanksgiving now and here feels evasive, the day at pains to seem festive. It’s cold and damp. The usual band of bad air along the far, cluttered Toms River horizon has been washed away in the night. I have noted in our walk down that I am not keen to walk as fast as Mike, whose little green loafers step out lively as he talks in his businessy voice. I’m hoping not to forget his name in mid-announcement of his developer plans. I want to be upbeat and comradely — even if I don’t feel that way. We can, after all, always set aside our real feelings — which usually don’t amount to a hill of beans anyway, and may not even be genuine — and let ourselves be spontaneous and bounteous with fast-flowing vigor, just as when we’re at our certifiable best. This is the part of acceptance I welcome, since it has down-the-line consolations.

On our walk down, Mike has said matter-of-factly that the last two nights have been a “great sufferance” to him, that he dislikes dilemmas (the middle way should preclude them), hates causing me “uncertainty,” is uncomfortable with ambition (though he’s been practicing it for a coon’s age), but has had to concede these “pressures” are a part of modern life (here in America, apparently not in Tibet) and there’s no escaping them (unless of course you can get stinking rich, after which you have no real problems). I was curious if he was fingering a pack of Marlboros in his sweater pocket and would’ve preferred to be puffing away Dick Widmark-style as he spieled all this out to me.

I’ve begun to enjoy the lake-like bay, the clanking halyards of the remaining Yacht Club boats, the rain-cleared vista across to the populous mainland, even the distant sight of the newer homes down the shore, from the go-go nineties. There’s nothing wrong with development if the right people do the developing. At the gritty water’s edge, with the wind huskier, I can see that the WE CAN DO IT billboard has a tiny Domus Isle Realty logo at its bottom corner, an artist’s conception of a distant desert atoll with a lone red palm silhouetted. Unfortunately, though maybe only in my view, the desert-island motif calls to mind Eniwetok, not some South Sea snug-away where you’d like to buy or build your dream house, but in any case has nothing at all to do with Sea-Clift, New Jersey. I’ve met the owners, two former sports-TV execs from Gotham, a husband and wife team, and by most accounts, they’re perfectly nice and probably honest.

Farther down Bay Drive, where it approaches the first of the newer nineties homes, a two-person survey crew has set up — a man with a tall zebra stake and a girl bent over a svelte-looking digital transit on a tripod. Something’s already afoot, out ahead of public approval and opinion. These two are working where a sign designates CABLE CROSSING. I can make out the tiny red digitalized numerals in the transit box, glowing at me each time the young surveyor girl stands up to take a sight line.

There’s absolutely no reason to drag out Mike’s epic new-vistas announcement and spend all day out here where it’s cold and gusty. I’m ready to get on board, whatever it is. I regret our last collaboration hasn’t been a money-maker. Averages of showings-to-sales run 12 percent, and we came close on an unpromising day. I want to get home in case Sally hasn’t called. But because Mike’s a Buddhist, he can only proceed the way he wants to proceed and not the way anybody else does, which means he often has to be humored.

In my rising spirit, I take a cold seat on the low barn-red kids’ merry-go-round and give it a rounding push with my toe, so that Mike has to come where I am to speak his piece.

“So’re we gonna jump into the McMansion business with our new pecorino cumpari ?” I say, and give another spin around. The wrecked old contraption squalls with a metal-on-metal skweeeee-er that unfortunately nullifies my spirited opening. I’m succeeding in feeling munificent, but can’t be sure how long it’ll last.

“Tom’s a real good guy,” Mike says gravely.

I can’t hear that well as the merry-go-round takes my gaze past the surveyors, across the bay, past the nineties housing, then back to Mike, who’s stationed himself legs apart, arms folded like an umpire. His brow’s furrowed and he looks frustrated that I won’t be still.

“Yep, yep, yep,” I say. “He seemed pretty solid — for a bozo developer.” Benivalle, however, also once knew my precious son Ralph — whose death I have now accepted — and thus occupies a special place in my heart’s history book. But I don’t want to piss Mike off after I’ve queered the Bagosh deal like an amateur, so I stop the merry-go-round in front of him and offer up a general smile of business forgiveness for quitting on me when I’m not feeling my best.

“I think now’s the right time to make a change,” Mike says, seeming to widen his eyes to indicate resolution, his pupils large behind his glasses. “I think it’s time to get serious about real estate, Frank. Bush is going to win Florida, I’m sure. We’ll see a turn-around by fiscal ’01.” I don’t know why Mike has to sear his little self-important gaze into my brain just to tell me what he’s going to do.

“You could be right.” I try to look serious back. I’d like to take another spin on the old go-round, but my ass is frozen on the boards and what I need to do is stand up. Only then I’d tower over Mike and ruin his little valedictory. I just want him to get on with it. I’ve got places to go, telephone calls to answer, children to be driven crazy by.

“People need to stay the course, Frank,” he says. “If it isn’t broken, don’t break it, you know. Stick with old-fashioned competence. Thanksgiving’s a good time for this.” Mike uncorks a giant happy-Asian smile, as if I’d just said something I haven’t said. He’s, of course, kidnapping Thanksgiving for his own selfish commercial lusts, the same as Filene’s. “I’ve got a new person in my life,” Mike says.