Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Clare’s a tall, bony, loose-kneed sixty-five-year-old, a bristle-haired Gyrine Viet vet with a thin, tanned jawline, creased Clint Eastwood features and the seductive voice of a late-night jazz DJ. In my view, he’d be more at home in a built-out Greek revival or a rambling California split-level. “Thornton Wilders,” we call these in our trade, and we don’t have any down here. Spring Lake and Brielle are your tickets for that dream.

But Clare’s recent life’s saga — I’ve heard all about it — has led him down new paths in search of new objectives. In that way, he is much like me.

Clare’s standing beside my Realty-Wise sign — red block letters on a white field plus the phone number, no www, no virtual tours, no talking houses, just reliable people leading other people toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness. Clare turns and faces the house as I drive up, as if to allow that he’s been waiting but time doesn’t mean much to him. He’s driven down in one of his company’s silver panel trucks, which sits in the driveway, ONLY CONNECT WELDING painted in flowing blue script. His schoolteacher wife dreamed it up, Clare told me. “Something out of a book.” Though Clare’s no mutton-fisted underachiever who married up. He won a Silver Star with a gallantry garnish in Nam, came out a major and did the EE route at Stevens Tech. He and Estelle bought a house and had two quick kids in the seventies, while Clare was on the upward track with Raytheon. But then out of the blue, he decided the laddered life was a rat-race and took over his dad’s welding business in Troy Hills and changed its name to something he and Estelle liked. Clare’s what we call a “senior boomer,” someone who’s done the course creditably, set aside substantial savings, gotten his kids set up at a safe distance, experienced appreciation in the dollar value of his family home (mortgage retired), and now wants a nicer life before he gets too decrepit to take out the garbage. What these clients generally decide to buy varies from a freestanding condo (we have few in Sea-Clift), to a weekend home near the water (these we have aplenty), to a “houseboat on the Seine”—aka something you park at a marina. Or else they choose a real honest-to-God house like this one Clare’s staring up at: Turn the key, dial up the Jacuzzi. The owners, the Doolittles — currently in Boca Grande — detected the tech-market slowdown in September, were ready to shift assets into municipals and conceivably gold and are just waiting to back their money out. So far, no takers.

The other characteristic on Clare’s buyer’s profile is that three years ago — by his own candid recounting (as usual) — he fell in love with somebody who wasn’t exactly his wife, but was, in fact, a fresh hire at the welding company — someone named Bitsy or Betsy or Bootsy. Not surprisingly, big domestic disruptions followed. The kids chose sides. Several loyal employees quit in disgust when “things” came out in the open. Welding damn near ceased. Clare and Estelle acted civilly (“She was the easy part”). A sad divorce ensued. A marriage to the younger Bitsy, Betsy, Bootsy hastily followed — a new life that never felt right from the instant they got to St. Lucia. A semi-turbulent year passed. A young wife grew restive—“Just like the goddamn Eagles song,” Clare said. Betsy/Bitsy cut off all her hair, threw her nice new clothes away, decided to go back to school, figured out she wanted to become an archaeologist and study Meso-American something or other. Somehow she’d discovered she was brilliant, got herself admitted to the University of Chicago and left New Jersey with the intention of morphing her and Clare’s spring-fall union into something rare, adaptable, unusual and modern — that he could pay for.

Only, at the end of year one, Estelle learned she had multiple sclerosis (she’d moved to Port Jervis to her sister’s), news that galvanized Clare into seeing the fog lift, regaining his senses, divorcing his young student wife. (“A big check gets written, but who cares?”) He moved Estelle back down to Parsippany and began devoting every resource and minute to her and her happiness, stunned that he’d never fully realized how lucky he was just to know someone like her. And with time now precious, there was none of it he cared to dick around with. (As heartening and sui generis as Clare’s story sounds, in the real estate profession it’s not that unusual.)

Which is when Sea-Clift came into play, since Estelle had vacationed here as a child and always adored it and hoped…. Nothing now was too good for her. Plus, in Clare’s estimation our little townlette was probably a place the two of them would die in before the world fucked it up. (He may be wrong.) I’ve driven him past thirty houses in three weeks. Many seemed “interesting and possible.” Most didn’t. Number 61 was the only one that halfway caught his fancy, since the inside was already fitted with a nursing home’s worth of shiny disabled apparatus, including — despite all the levels — a mahogany side-stair elevator for the coming dark days of disambulation. Clare told me that if he likes it when he sees it, he’ll buy it as is and give it to Estelle — who’s currently holding her own, with intermittent symptoms — as a one-year re-wedding/Thanksgiving present. It makes a pretty story.

“D ry as my Uncle Chester’s bones out here, Frank,” Clare says in his parched but sonorous voice, extending me a leathery hand. Clare has the odd habit of giving me his left hand to shake. Something about severed tendons from a “helo” crash causing acute pain, etc., etc. I always feel awkward about which hand to extend, but it’s over fast. Though he has a vise grip even with his “off” hand, which fires up my own Bob Butts injuries from last night.

Clare produces his steady, eyes-creased smile that projects impersonal pleasure, then crosses his arms and turns to look again at 61 Surf Road. I’m about to say — but don’t — that the worst droughts are the ones where we occasionally get a little rain, like yesterday, so that nobody really takes the whole drought idea seriously, then you end up ignoring the aquifer until disaster looms. But Clare’s thinking about this house, which is a good sign. The color listing brochure I’m holding is ready to be proffered before we go in.

Down Surf Road (like my road, there are only five houses), a bearded young man in yellow rubber coveralls is scrubbing the sides of a white fiberglass fishing boat that’s up on a trailer, using an extended aluminum hose brush — a blue BUSH-CHENEY sign stuck up in his weedy little yard. From back up Cormorant Court I hear the sharp shree-scree of a saber saw whanging through board filaments, followed by the satisfying bops of hammers hitting nails in rapid succession. My unexpected jefe presence has set my Hondurans into motion. Though it’s only a game. Soon they’ll be climbing down for their pre-lunch marijuana break, after which the day will go quickly.

The cold seaside air out here has a fishy and piney sniff to it, which feels hopeful in spite of the unpredictable November sky. My Thanksgiving worries have now scattered like seabirds. A squad of pigeons wheels above, as far beyond a jet contrail — high, high, high — heads out to sea toward Europe. I am rightly placed here, doing the thing I apparently do best — grounded, my duties conferring a pleasant, self-actualizing invisibility — the self as perfect instrument.

“Frank, tell me what this house’ll bring in a summer?” Clare’s mind is clicking merits-demerits.

I assume he’s talking about rent and not a quick flip. “Three thousand a week. Maybe more.”

He furrows his brow, puts a hand to his chin and rests it there — the standard gesture of contemplation, familiar to General MacArthur and Jack Benny. It is both grave and comical. Clearly it is Clare’s practiced look of public seriousness. My instant guess is we’ll never see inside #61. When clients are motivated, they don’t stand out in the road talking about the house as if it’d be a good idea to tear it down. When clients are motivated, they can’t wait to get in the door and start liking everything. I’m, of course, often wrong.