Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Boy, oh boy.” Clare shakes his head over modernity. “Three G’s.”

“Pays your taxes and then some,” I say, breeze waffling my listing brochure and stiffening my digits.

“So who all’s moving down to Sea-Clift now, Frank?” More standing, more staring. This is not a new question.

“Pretty much it’s a mix, Clare,” I say. “People driven out of the Hamptons. And there’s some straight-out investment beginning. Our floor hasn’t risen as fast as the rest of the Shore. No big springboard sales yet. Topping wars haven’t gotten this far down. It’s still a one-dimensional market. That’ll change, even with rates starting to creep. A really good eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house is already hard to find.” I take a glance at my sheet, as if all this crucial data’s printed there and he should read it. I’m guessing coded chalk talk will appeal to Clare-the-small-businessman, make him think I’m not trying very hard to sell him the Doolittles’ house, but am just his reliable resource for relevant factual info to make the world seem less a sinking miasma. Which isn’t wrong.

“I guess they’re not making any more ocean-front, are they?”

“If they could, they would.” In fact, I know people who’d love to try: interests who’d like to “reclaim” Barnegat Bay and turn it into a Miracle Mile or a racino. “Fifty percent of us already live within fifty miles of the ocean, Clare. Ocean County’s the St. Petersburg of the East.”

“How’s your business, Frank?” We’re side-by-side — me a half step behind — staring at silent multi-this, multi-that #61.

“Good, Clare. It’s good. Real estate’s always good by the ocean. Inventory’s my problem. If I had a house like this every day, I’d be richer than I am.”

Clare at this instant lets go a small, barely audible (but audible) fart, the sound of a strangled birdcall from offstage. It startles me, and I can’t help staring at its apparent point of departure, the seat of Clare’s khakis, as if blue smoke might appear. It’s the ex-Marine in Clare that makes such nonchalant emissions unremarkable (to him), while letting others know how intransigent a man he is and would be — in a love affair, in a business deal, in a divorce or a war. Possibly my reference to being rich forced an involuntary disparaging gesture from his insides.

“Tell me this now, Frank.” Clare’s stuffed both hands in his khaki side pockets. He’s wearing brown-and-beige tu-tone suede leisure sneakers of the sort you buy at shoe outlets or off the sale rack at big-box stores and that look comfortable as all get out, though I’d never buy a pair, because they’re what doozies wear (our old term from Lonesome Pines), or else men who don’t care if they look like doozies. The Clint Eastwood look has a bit of doozie in it. Old Clint might wear a pair himself, so uncaring would he be of the world’s opinion. “What kind of climate have we got, I mean for buying a house?”

I hear my workers up Cormorant Court begin laughing and their hammering come to a halt. “¡Hom-bre!” I hear a falsetto voice shout. “Qué flaco y feo.” One needn’t wonder. Something involving somebody’s “chilé.”

“I’d say that’s a mixed picture, too, Clare.” He already knows everything I know, because I’ve told him, but he wants me to think he takes what we’re doing seriously — which means to me this is a waste of my time, which I in fact do take seriously. Clare came into the picture saying he was ready to buy a house sight unseen, maximize the quality-of-life remaining for his dear-stricken-betrayed-but-timeless love Estelle. Only, like most humans, when it gets down to the cold nut cutting, it’s do-re-mi his heart breaks over.

“Money’s cheap down here, Clare,” I say, “and the mortgage people have got some interesting product enhancements to shift weight toward the back end — for a price, of course. Like I said, our inventory’s down, which tends to firm up values. Most sales go for asking. You read the technology sector’s ready to cycle down. Rates’ll probably squirt up after Christmas. You’d hate to buy at the top with no short-term resale potential, but you can’t take your cue from the wind, I guess. We saw a forty percent price increase in two years. I don’t tell clients to go with their hearts, Clare. I don’t know much about hearts.”

Clare gazes at me, brown eyes squinted near-to-closing. I’ve probably said too much and strayed over into sensitive territory by referring to the heart. This sleepy-eyed look is a recognition and a warning. Though I’ve found that in business, a quick veer into the soft tissue of the personal can confuse things in a good way. Clare, after all, has given me a giant earful — probably he does everyone. He’s just suddenly gotten leery about forging an unwanted connection with me. But ditto. I like Clare, but I want him to spend his money and feel good about giving part of it to me.

“Can I show you something, Frank?” Clare peers down at his doozie tu-tones as if they were doing his thinking for him.

“Absolutely.”

“It won’t take a minute.” He’s already moving — in a bit of a slinking, pelvis-forward gait — along the driveway toward the back of the Doolittles’, between it and the next-door neighbor’s, a dull two-storey A-frame that’s boarded for the winter and has a dead look: basement windows blocked with pink Styrofoam, plants covered with miniature wooden A-frames of their own, the basement door masked with ply-board screwed into the foundation. Winter gales are expected.

“I took a walk around here while I was waiting,” Clare’s saying as he walks, but in a more intimate voice, as if he doesn’t want the wrong people hearing this. I’m following, my listing materials stuffed in my windbreaker pocket. The Doolittles’ house, I can see, is in need of upkeep. The side basement door is weathered and grayed, the veneer shredded at the bottom. A scimitar of glass has dropped out of a basement window and shattered on the concrete footing. Something metal is whapping in the wind above the soffits — a loose TV cable or a gutter strap — though I can’t see anything. I wonder if the solar panels even work. The house could do with a new owner and some knowledgeable attention. The Doolittles, who’re plastic surgeons in joint practice, have been spending their discretionary income elsewhere. Though they may soon have less of it.

Clare leads around to the “front” of the house, between the windowed concrete basement wall and the ten-foot sand dune that’s covered with dry, sparse-sprouted sea rocket from the summer. The dune — which is natural and therefore inviolable — is what keeps the house from having a full ocean view from the living room, and probably what’s retarded its sale since September. I’ve put into the brochure that “imagination” (money) could be dedicated to the living room level (moving it to the third floor) and “open up spectacular vistas.”

“Okay, look at this down here.” Clare, almost whispering, bends over, hands on his knees to designate what he means me to see. “See that?” His voice has grown grave.

I move in beside him, kneel by his knee on the gravelly foundation border and stare right where he’s pointing at an outward-curving section of pale gray concrete that’s visible beneath the sill and the footing. It is one of the deep-driven piers to which the well-named Doolittles’ house is anchored and made fast so that at times of climatological stress the whole schmeer isn’t washed or blown or seismically destabilized and propelled straight out to sea like an ark.

“See that?” Clare says, breathing out a captured breath. He gets down on both knees beside me like a scientist and brings his face right to the concrete pillar as if he means to smell it, then puts his index finger to the curved surface.