Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“They weren’t aimless,” I say. “They were looking for bargains.” I’m still thinking about the septic truck that almost flattened us. Some guy heading home to Seaside Park, kids at the front windows, hearing the truck rumble in, happy wife, supper steaming on the table, brewsky already cracked, TV tuned to the Sixers.

“So much of life’s made up of choosing things created by other people, people even less qualified than ourselves. Do you ever think about that, Frank?” He is graver than grave now, fag in mouth, its red tip a beacon as we reach the Sea-Clift end of the bridge. The illuminated NEW JERSEY’S BEST KEPT SECRET sign flashes past Mike’s face and glasses. Once again, his snappy apparel and anchorman voice don’t go together, as if someone else was talking for him. I’m about to be treated to some Buddhist ex cathedra homiletics in which I’m a hollow, echoing vessel needing filling with someone else’s better intelligence — all because I’m patient and forbearing.

“We don’t originate very much,” Mike adds. “We just take what’s already there.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that.” This very morning. Possibly he and I even talked about it and he’s appropriated it and made it the Buddha’s. I’m tempted to call him Lobsang. Or Dhargey — whichever one comes first — just to piss him off. “I’m fifty-five years old, Mike. I’m in the real estate business. I make a good living selling people houses they didn’t originate and I didn’t, either. So I’ve thought about a lot of these things over the years. Are you just a numbnuts?”

Lighted houses, wimmering up on the bay side as we circle off the bridge, are mostly ranches with remodeled camelbacks, and a few larger, modern, all-angles board-and-battens that solidify the tax base. I’ve sold a bunch of them and expect to sell more.

Mike further narrows his old-looking little eyes. This isn’t what he expected to hear. Or what I expected to say.

“I mean, what about mindfulness being a glass of yak milk sitting on your head?” This is straight out of the Dalai Lama book, which I’ve read part of — mostly on the crapper. “I mean, you aren’t acting very fucking mindful.” I’m speeding again, off the bridge and onto Route 35, Ocean Avenue, the Sea-Clift main drag, also the main drag for Seaside Heights, Ortley Beach (with a different boulevard name), Lavallette, Normandy Beach, Mantoloking — concatenated seaside proliferance all the way to Asbury Park. Mike’s Infiniti is parked at the office. I’ve so far given him little good advice about becoming a housing mogul. Possibly I have very little good advice to give. In any case, I’ll be glad to have him out of the car.

Northbound Ocean Avenue is a wide, empty one-way separated from southbound Ocean Avenue by two city blocks of motels, surfer shops, bait shops, sea-glass jewelers, tattoo parlors, taffy stores (all closed for the season), plus a few genuine lighted-and-lived-in houses. In summer, our beach towns up 35 swell to twenty times their winter habitation. But at nine at night on November 21st, the mostly empty strip makes for an eerie, foggy fifties-noir incognito I like. No holiday decorations are up. Few cars sit at curbs. The ocean, in frothy winter tumult, is glimpsable down the side streets and the air smells briny. Parking meters have been removed for the convenience of year-rounders. Two traditional tomato-pie stands are open but doing little biz. The Mexicatessen is going and has customers. Farther on, the yellow LIQUOR sign and the ruby glow of the Wiggle Room (a summer titty bar that becomes just a bar in the winter) are signaling they’re open for customers. A lone Sea-Clift town cop in his black-and-white Plymouth waits in the shadows beside the fire department in case some wild-ass boogies from East Orange show up to give us timid white people something to think about. A yellow Toms River Region school bus moves slowly ahead of us. We have now traveled as far east as the continent lasts. There’s much to be said for reaching a genuine end mark in a world of indeterminacy and doubt. The feeling of arrival is hopeful, and I feel it even on a night when nothing much is going good.

Mike’s clammed up since I scolded him about being mindful. We have yet to develop a fully operational language for conflict in the months he’s been with me. And by being scolded, he’s possibly been tossed back onto painful life lessons — the telemarketers’ bullpen with its cynical Bengali middle-management bullies; ancient, happy-little-brown-man stereotypes; muscular-McCain-war-hero imagery and plucky Horatio Algerish immigrant models — all roles he’s contemplated in his odyssey to here but that don’t really cohere to make a rational world.

Though I don’t mind if Mike’s being pushed out of his comfort zone. He’s like every other Republican: nervous about commitment; fearful of future regret; never saw a risk he wouldn’t like somebody else to take. Benivalle may have done his dreams brusque disservice by putting his own little domestic Easter egg on display. Since what he’s done is make Mike stop, think and worry — bad strategy if your customer’s a Buddhist. Mike’s now being forced to consider his own Big Fear — the blockade that has to be broken through sometime in life or you go no further. (I used to think mine was death. Then cancer taught me it wasn’t.)

Mike now has to figure out if his big fear is the terror of going on ahead (into the mansioning business) or the terror of not; if he’s ready to buy into the proposition most Americans buy into and that says “You do this shit until either you’re rich or you’re dead”; or if he’s more devoted to his old conviction that dying a millionaire is dying like a wild animal, attachment leads to disappointment and pain, etc. In other words, is he really a Republican, or is this dilemma the greening of Mike? Flattening pretty cornfields for seven-figure mega-mansions isn’t, after all, really helping people in the way that assisting them to find a modest home they want — and that’s already there — helps them. Benivalle’s idea, of course, is more the standard “we build it, they come,” which Mike uncomfortably sniffed back in Toms River: If we build Saturns, they will want to drive them; if we build mini-crepe grills, they will want to eat mini-crepes; if we invent Thanksgiving, they will try to be thankful (or die in the process).

M y Realty-Wise office sits tucked between a Chicago-Style Pizza that previously occupied my space, and the Sea-Clift Own-Make Candies, that’s only open summers and whose owners live in Marathon. The pizza place is lighted inside. The tricolor flag still leans out from its window peg over the sidewalk (Italy is the official kingdom-in-exile on the Shore). Bennie, the Filipino owner, is alone inside, putting white dough mounds back in the cold box and closing down the oven until Saturday, when everybody will crave a slice of “Kitchen Sink.” Some days, when the humidity’s high, my office smells like rich puttanesca sauce. I can’t tell if this inclines clients more, or less, to buy beach property, though when they aren’t serious enough to get in the car and go have a look at something up their alley, I often later see them next door, staring out Bennie’s front window, a slice on a piece of wax paper, happy as clams for having exercised self-control.

Mike’s silver Infiniti, with a REALTORS ARE PEOPLE TOO sticker on the back bumper and a Barnegat Lighthouse license plate, sits in front of my white, summery-looking, cubed building, which announces REALTY-WISE in frank gold-block lettering on its front window like an old-time shirtsleeve lawyer’s office. Home-for-sale snapshots are pinned to a corkboard that’s visible inside the door. In general, my whole two-desk set-up is decidedly no-frills when compared to the Lauren-Schwindell architect’s showplace on Seminary, which shouted Money! Money! Money! Nothing along this stretch of the Shore compares to Haddam, which is good, in my estimation. Here at this southern end of Barnegat Neck, life is experienced less pridefully, more like an undiscovered seacoast town in Maine, and no less pleasantly — except in summer, when crowds rumble and surge. When I came over with my broker’s license in ’92, seeking a place to set up shop, all my competitors gave me to understand that everyone was collegial down here, there was plenty of business (and money) to go around for someone who wanted not to work too hard but keep on his toes (handle summer rentals, own a few apartments, do the odd appraisal, share listings, back up a competitor if things got tight). I purchased old man Barber Featherstone’s business when Barber opted for managed care near his daughter’s in Teaneck, and everybody came by and said they were glad I was here — happy to have a realty veteran instead of a young cut-throat land shark. I took over Barber’s basic colors — red and white (no motto or phony Ivy League crest) — substituted Realty-Wise for Featherstone’s Beach Exclusives, and got to work. Anything fancier wouldn’t have helped and eventually would’ve made everyone hate my guts and be happy to cut me off at the knees whenever they had the chance — and there are always chances. As a result, in eight years I’ve made a bundle, missed the stock market boom — and the correction — and hardly worked a lick.