Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

W hen I start up and defrost the windshield, it’s suddenly 1:40. I’m due for my Sponsor visit on the affluent Haddam West Side at two.

Though as I wheel back out onto busy, rain-smacked 206 and head west, I recognize that while the willies I experienced after my funeral home visit certainly were due to a too-close brush with the Reaper (normal in all instances), they might also have been nothing more than the usual yellow caution flag, which signals that being marooned in your car on a dreary day in a cold town you once lived in, but don’t now, can be chancy. Especially if the town is this one, and especially if you’re in my state of repair. Activities may need to be curtailed.

I actually began experiencing adverse intimations about Haddam during my last years here, close to ten years ago (I always thought I loved it). And not that a realtor’s view would ever be the standard one, since realtors both live life in a town yet also huckster that place’s very spirit essence for whopper profits. We’re always likely to be half-distracted from regular life — like a supreme court justice who resides in a place as anonymously as a postal employee but constantly processes everybody else’s life in his teeming brain so he can know how to judge it. My life in Haddam always lacked the true resident’s naïve, relief-seeking socked-in-ed-ness that makes everyday existence feel like a warm bath you relax into and never want to leave. Surveying property lines, memorizing setback restrictions, stepping off footprint limits and counting curb-cuts all work a stern warp into what might otherwise be limitless, shapeless, referenceless — and happily thoughtless — municipal life. Realtors share a basic industry with novelists, who make up importance from life-run-rampant just by choosing, changing and telling. Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist’s deal and probably not as hard to do well.

By 1991, the year before I left and the year my son Paul Bascombe graduated from HHS and headed off to Indiana to begin studies in Puppet Arts Management (he’d mastered ventriloquism, did a hundred zany voices, told jokes and had already staged several bizarre but sophisticated puppet shows for his classmates), by then Haddam — a town where I’d felt genuine residence and that’d been the mise-enscène for my life’s most solemn adult experiences — had entered a new, strange and discordant phase in its town annals.

In the first place, real estate went nuts, and realtors even nuttier. Expectations left all breathable atmosphere behind. Over-pricing, under-bidding, sticker shock, good-faith negotiation, price reduction, high-end flux were all banished from the vocabulary. Topping-price wars, cutthroat bidding, forced compliance, broken lease and realty shenanigans took their place. The grimmest, barely habitable shotgun houses in the previously marginal Negro neighborhoods became prime, then untouchable in an afternoon. Wallace Hill, where I sold my rental houses to Everick Lewis, was designated a Heritage Neighborhood, which guaranteed all the black folks had to leave because of taxes (many fled down south, though they’d been born in Haddam). Agents sold their own homes out from under their own families and moved spouses, dogs and kids to condos in Hightstown and Millstone. New college graduates passed up med and divinity school and buyers bought million-dollar houses from twenty-one-year-olds straight out of Princeton and Columbia with degrees in history and physics and who barely had their driver’s licenses.

In ’93, after I’d left, yearly price increases had hit 45 percent, there was no affordable housing anywhere and buyers were paying full boat for tear-downs and recyclables and in some instances were burning houses to the ground. Some Haddam companies (not Lauren-Schwindell) required out-of-town clients to submit their AmEx number and authorize thousand-dollar debits just to be shown a house. Though by Christmas, there was nothing to show anyway, not even a vacant lot.

The end came personally for me at the convergence of three completely different (and unusual) events. One Saturday afternoon I was at my desk, typing an offer sheet on a property situated on the rear grounds of the former seminary director’s residence, down the street from where I myself once lived on Hoving. The building was nothing but a rotting, ruined beaverboard shack that had once been the Basque gardener’s storage shed for toxic herbicides, caustic drain openers, banned termite and Asian beetle eradicators, and would’ve alerted the state’s environmental police except in Haddam, no inspection’s required. As I filled out the green blanks on my computer, occasionally staring longingly out the front window at traffic-choked Seminary Street, I began — because of the property I was selling and the preposterous price it was commanding — to muse that a malign force seemed to be in full control of every bit of real property on the seaboard, and possibly farther away. Possibly everywhere.

This force, I began to understand, was holding property hostage and away from the very people who wanted and often badly needed it and, in any case, had a right to expect to own it. And this force, I realized, was the economy. And the practical effect of this force — on me, Frank Bascombe, age forty-five, of ordinary, unexalted and, up to then, realizable aspirations — was to render everything too goddamn expensive. So much so that selling even one more house in Haddam — and especially the gardener’s toxic hovel, on whose site was planned a big-windowed, one-man live-in studio for a sculptor who mostly lived in Gotham and was willing to pay 500K — was going to be demoralizing as hell.

What I was thinking, of course, as cars edged thickly past the Lauren-Schwindell window and passengers stared warily in at me at my desk, knowing I was totaling figures that would give them a heart attack — what I was thinking was real estate heresy. I would get burned at the real estate stake by my agent colleagues (especially the twenty-one-year-olds) if they knew about it. What we were supposed to do if we had qualms — and surely some did — was douse them. On the spot. Take a deep breath, go wash your face, lease a new Z-car, buy a condo in Snowmass, learn to fly your own Beech Bonanza, maybe take instruction in violin making. But ship as much fresh money as possible to the Caymans, then spend the rest of the time putting your feet up on your desk and chortling about how work’s for the other ranks.

Except everyone’s entitled to some glimmering sense of right in his (or her) own heart. And part of that sense of right — for real estate agents anyway — involves not just what something ought to cost (here we’re always wrong) but what something can cost in a world still usable by human beings. Every time I heard myself pronounce the asking price of anything on the market in Haddam, I’d begun to feel first a sick, emptied-out, semi-nauseated feeling, and then an impulse to break into maniac laughter right in a client’s startled face as he sat across my desk in his pressed jeans, Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense of spiritual clamor meant to me that right was being violated, and that my sense of usefulness at being what I’d been being was exhausted. It was a surprise, but it was also a big relief. It was like the experience of the sportsman who’s shot ducks in the marsh all his life but one day, standing up to his ass in freezing water, with the sky silvered and dark specks on the horizon beginning to take avian shape, realizes he’s killed enough ducks for one lifetime.

The second way I knew I’d reached the end of my rope in Haddam was simpler, though more garish and immediately life-diverting.