Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

There’s even talk that a group representing the Lenape Band — New Jersey’s own redskins, who believe they own Haddam and always have — is setting up to picket the Pilgrims on Thursday, wearing their own period outfits and carrying placards that say THANKS FOR NOTHING and THE TERRIBLE LIE OF THANKSGIVING and stirring up a bad-for-business backlash. There’s likewise a rumor that a group of re-enactors will go AWOL, march to the Pilgrims’ defense and reenact a tidy massacre on the front steps of the Post Office. This is all probably skywriting by the boys at United Jersey and represents less truth than their wish that something out of the ordinary could happen so they can quit boring themselves to death approving mortgage after mortgage.

What it all comes down to, though, as with so many vital life issues and blood-boiling causes, is traffic and more traffic. An ambulance carrying our President and Pope John Paul couldn’t make it the two blocks from the Recovery Room Bar to Caviar ’n Cashmere in less than three-quarters of an hour, by which time both these tarnished exemplars would be out on the street walking.

L ong manorial lawns sweep down to the north side of Brunswick Pike, facing the lake, with heavy hemlock growth and rhododendron splurge giving the white, set-back, old-money mansions their modesty protection. In my years selling houses here, I sold three of these goliaths, two twice, once to a famous novelist. Still, I take my first chance to turn off, to avoid the town traffic, and pass along onto bosky, stable, compromise-with-dignity Gulick Road — winding streets, mature plantings, above-ground electric, architect-design “family rooms” retrofitted onto older reasonable-sized Capes and ranches a year beyond their paint jobs. (I sold twenty of these.) Yukons and Grand Cherokees sit in driveways. Older tree houses perch in many oaks and maples. New mullions have been added to old seventies picture windows and underground sprinklers laid in. It’s the suburban sixties grown out, with many original owner-pioneers holding fast to the land and happy to be, their “new development” now become solidly in-town, with all the old rawness ironed out. It’s now a “neighborhood,” where your old Chesapeake, Tex, can take his nap in the street without being rumbled over by the bottled-water truck, where once-young families have become older but don’t give a shit, and where fiscal year to fiscal year everybody’s equity squeezes up as their political musings drift to the right (though it feels like the middle). It’s the height of what’s possible from modest beginnings, and as near to perfection as random settlement patterns and anxiety for permanence can hope for. It’s where I’d buy in if I moved back — which I won’t.

Though passing down these quiet, reserved streets — not splashy but good — I sometimes think I might’ve left for the Shore and Sea-Clift a bit too soon in 1992, since I missed the really big paydays (I still made a pot full). But by then I had an unusual son in my care, clinging precariously to his hold on Haddam High. (He actually graduated and left for college at Ball State — his odd choice.) I had a girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, who was giving me the old “now or never.” I was forty-seven. And I was experiencing the early, uneasy symptoms — it pretty quickly got better — of the Permanent Period of life. I couldn’t have told you what that was, only that after Paul left for Muncie, I began to feel a sort of clanking, mechanistic, solemn sameness about flogging these very houses, whereas earlier in my realty life I’d felt involved in, even morally committed to, getting people into the homes they (and the economy) wanted themselves to be in (at least for a while). Though what had always accompanied my long state of real estate boosterism was a sensation I’ve described in differing ways using differing tropes, but which all speak to the dulling complexity of the human organism. One such sensation was of constantly feeling offshore, a low-level, slightly removed-from-events, wooing-wind agitation that doing for others, in the frank, plain-talk way I was able to as a house seller, generally assuaged but never completely stilled. Experiencing the need for an extra beat was another of my figures. This I’d felt since military school in Mississippi — as if life and its directives were never quite all they should be, and, in fact, should’ve meant more. Regular life always felt like an unfinished flamenco needing, either from me or a source outside me, a completing beat, after which tranquillity could reign. Women almost always did the trick pretty neatly — at least till the whole thing started up again.

There were other such expressions — some warriorlike, some sports-related, some hilarious, some fairly embarrassing. But they pointed to the same wearying instinct for becoming, of which realty is an obvious standard-bearer profession. I really did fantasize that if Clinton could just win the White House in ’92, then a renaissance spirit would open like a new sun, whereby through a mysterious but ineluctable wisdom I would be named ambassador to France — or at least the Ivory Coast. That and a lot more didn’t happen.

Only, neuron by neuron, over a period of months (this was nearing the middle of the doomed and clownish Bush presidency) I realized I was feeling different about things. I remember sitting at my desk at my former employer, the Haddam realty firm of Lauren-Schwindell, tracking down some computerized post-sale notes I’d made on a house on King George Road that had come back on the market six months later, sporting a 30 percent increase in asking, and overhearing a colleague three cubicles away saying, just loud enough for me to take an interest, “Oh, that was Mr. Bascombe. I’m sure he would never do or say that.” I never found out what she was talking about or to whom. She normally didn’t speak to me. But I went off to sleep that night thinking of those words—“Mr. Bascombe would never…”—and woke up the next morning thinking them some more. Because it occurred to me that even though my colleague (a former history professor who’d reached the end of her patience with the Compromise of 1850) could say what Mr. Bascombe would never do, say, drive, eat, wear, laugh about, marry or think was sad, Mr. Bascombe himself wasn’t sure he could. She could’ve said damn near anything about me and I would’ve had to give the possibility some thought — which is why I’d never take a lie-detector test; not because I lie, but because I concede too much to be possible.

But very little about me, I realized — except what I’d already done, said, eaten, etc. — seemed written in stone, and all of that meant almost nothing about what I might do. I had my history, okay, but not really much of a regular character, at least not an inner essence I or anyone could use as a predictor. And something, I felt, needed to be done about that. I needed to go out and find myself a recognizable and persuasive semblance of a character. I mean, isn’t that the most cherished pre-posthumous dream of all? The news of our premature demise catching everyone so unprepared that beautiful women have to leave fancy dinner parties to be alone for a while, their poor husbands looking around confused; grown men find they can’t finish their after-lunch remarks at the Founders Club because they’re so moved. Children wake up sobbing. Dogs howl, hounds begin to bark. All because something essential and ineffable has been erased, and the world knows it and can’t be consoled.

But given how I was conducting life — staying offshore, waiting for the extra beat — I realized I could die and no one would remember me for anything. “Oh, that guy. Frank, uh. Yeah. Hmm…” That was me.