Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

If this seems like bait-and-switch hucksterism, or just old-fashioned grinning, bamboozling faithlessness, let me assure you it’s not. All any client ever has to say is, “All right, Bascombe, how you see this really isn’t how I see it. I want to stay inside, not outside, my price window, exactly like I said when I sat down at your desk.” If that’s your story, I’m ready to sell you what you want — if I have it. All the rest — the considered, heartfelt exchange of views, the finding of common ground, the beginning of true (if ephemeral) comradeship based on time spent inside a stuffy automobile — all that I’d do with the Terminix guy. A person has only to know his mind about things, which isn’t as usual as it seems. I view my role as residential agent as having a lay therapist’s fiduciary responsibility (not so different from being a Sponsor). And that responsibility is to leave the client better than I found him — or her. Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway. Most client contacts never even eventuate in a sale and, like most human exposures, end in one encounter. Which isn’t to say that the road toward a house sale is a road without benefit or issue. A couple of the best friends I’ve made in the real estate business are people I never sold a house to and who, by the end of our time together, I didn’t want to sell a house to (though I still would’ve). It is another, if unheralded, version of the perfect real estate experience: Everyone does his part, but no house changes hands. If there weren’t, now and then, such positive outside-the-envelope transactions, I’d be the first to say the business wouldn’t be worth the time of day.

I swing off Ocean Avenue at the closed-for-the-season Custom Condom Shoppe (“We build ’em to your specs”) and motor down toward the beach along the narrow gravel lane of facing, identical white and pastel summer “chalets,” of which there must be twenty in this row, with ten identical parallel lanes stacked neighborhood-like to the north and south, each named for a New Jersey shorebird — Sandpiper, Common Tern, Plover (I’m driving down Cormorant Court). Here is where most of our weekly renters — Memorial Day to Columbus Day — spend their happy family vacations, cheek-to-cheek with hundreds of other souls opting for the same little vernal joys. At several of these (all empty now), more pre-winter fix-up is humming along — hip roofs being patched, swollen screen doors planed, brick foundation piers regrouted after years of salt air. Three of these chalet developments lie in the Boro of Sea-Clift, where I own ten units and, with Mike’s help, manage thirty more. These summer chalets and their more primitive ancestors have been an attractive, affordable feature of beach life on south Barnegat Neck since the thirties. Five-hundred-square-foot interiors, two tiny bedrooms, a simple bath, beaverboard walls, a Pullman kitchen, no yard, grass, shrubbery, no AC or TV, electric wall heaters and stove, yard-sale decor, no parking except in front, no privacy from the next chalet ten feet away, crude plumbing, tinted, iron-rich water, occasional gas and sulfur fumes from an unspecified source — and you can’t drive vacationers away. A certain precinct in the American soul will put up with anything — other people’s screaming kids, exotic smells, unsavory neighbors, unsocialized pets, high rents (I get $750 a week), car traffic, foot traffic, unsound construction, yard seepage — just to be and be able to brag to the in-laws back in Parma that they were “a three-minute walk to the beach.” Which every unit is.

Of course, another civic point of view — the Dollars For Doers Strike Council — would love to see every chalet bulldozed and the three ten-acre parcels turned into an outlet mall or a parking structure. But complicated, restrictive covenants unique to Sea-Clift require every chalet owner to agree before the whole acreage can be transferred. And many owners are among our oldest Sea-Clift pioneers, who came as children and never forgot the fun they had and couldn’t wait to own a chalet, or six, themselves and start making their retirement nut off the renters — the people they had once been. Most of the people I manage for are absentees, the sons and daughters of those pioneers, and now live in Connecticut and Michigan and would pawn their MBA’s before they’d sign away “Dad’s cottage.” (None of them, of course, would spend two minutes inside any of these sad little shanties themselves, which is when I get in the picture, and am happy to be.)

These days, I do my best to upgrade the ten chalets I own, plus all the ones I can talk my owners into sprucing up. Occasionally I let a struggling writer in need of quiet space to finish his Moby-Dick, or some poor frail in retirement from love, stay through the winter in return for indoor repairs (these guests never stay long due to the very seclusion they think they want). Looked at differently, these chalets would be a perfect place for a homicide.

Three Honduran fix-up crews (all legal, all my employees) are at work as I drive down Cormorant Court. From the roof of #11, one of these men (José, Pepe, Esteban — I’m not sure which), suited up in knee pads and roped to a standpipe, replacing shingles, rises to his feet on the steep green asphalt roof-pitch and into the clean, cold November sky, leans crazily against his restraint line and performs a sweeping hats-off Walter Raleigh-type bow right out into space, a big amigo grin on his wispy-mustachioed face. I give back an embarrassed wave, since I’m not comfortable being Don Francisco to my employees. The other workers break into laughing and jeering calls that he (or I) is a puta and beneath contempt.

C lare Suddruth is already out front of the fancy beach house he thinks he might like to buy. Surf Road is a sandy lane starting at the ocean end of Cormorant Court and running south a quarter-mile. If it were extended, which it never will be due to the same shoreline ordinances that infuriate the Feensters, it would run into and become Poincinet Road a mile farther on.

Clare stands hands-in-pockets in the brisk autumn breeze. He’s dressed in a short zippered khaki work jacket and khaki trousers that announce his station as a working stiff who’s made good in a rough-and-tumble world. The house Clare’s interested in is — in design and residential spirit — not so different from my own and was built during the blue-sky development era of the late seventies, before laws got serious and curtailed construction, driving prices into deep space. In my personal view, 61 Surf Road is not the house a man like Clare should think of, so of course he is thinking of it — a lesson we realtors ignore at our peril. Number 61 is a mostly-vertical, isosceles-angled, many-windowed, many sky-lighted, grayed redwood post-and-beam, with older solar panels and inside an open plan of not two, not three, but six separate “living levels,” representing the architect’s concern for interior diversity and cheap spatial mystery. More than it’s right for Clare, it’s perfect for a young sitcom writer with discretionary scratch and who wants to work from home. Asking’s a million nine.

How the house “shows,” and what the client sees from the curb — if there was a curb — are only two mute, segmented, retractable brown garage doors facing the road, two skimpy windows on the “back,” and an unlocatable front door, through which you go right up to a “great room” where the good life commences. I don’t much like the place since it broadcasts bland domiciliary arrogance, typical of the period. The house either has no front because no one’s welcome; or else because everything important faces the sea and it’s not your house anyway, why should you be interested?