Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“ I count,” a boy answers. “I absolutely count. Ro -tate, ro -tate.”

“Could you entertain a quasi-philosophical question, Frank?” Clare’s now squatted atop the dune and has scooped up a handful of sand, as though assaying it, sampling its texture.

“Well—”

“Pertains to real estate. Don’t worry. It’s not about my sex life. Or yours. That’s not philosophical, is it? That’s Greek tragedy.”

“Not always.” I am on the alert for some heart-to-heart I lack the stomach for.

Clare half closes his creased submariner’s eye at the brown horizon murk then spits down into the sand he’s just released. “Do you imagine, Frank, that anything could happen in this country to make normal just not be possible?” He continues facing away, facing east, as if addressing an analyst seated behind him. “ I actually tend to think nothing of that nature can really happen. Too many checks and balances. We’ve all of us manufactured reality so well, we’re so solid in our views, that nothing can really change. You know? Drop a bomb, we bounce back. What hurts us makes us stronger. D’you believe that?” Clare lowers his strong chin, then cranks his skeptical gaze up at me, wanting an answer in kind. His kind. His kind of stagy seriousness. Semper Fi, Hué ’n Tet, the never-say-die Khe Sanh firebase of ’67 seriousness. All the things I missed in my rather easy youth.

“I don’t, Clare.”

“No. Course not. Me, either,” he says. “But I want to believe it. And that’s what scares the shit right out of me. And don’t think they’re not sitting over there in those other countries that hate us licking their chops at what they see us doing over here, fucking around trying to decide which of these dopes to make President. You think these people here”—a toss of the Clare Suddruth head toward crumbling 61 Surf Road—“have foundation problems? We’ve got foundation problems. It’s not that we can’t see the woods for the trees, we can’t see the woods or the fuckin’ trees.” Clare expels through his schnoz a breath heavy and poignant, something a Clydesdale might do.

“What does it have to do with real estate?”

“It’s where I enter the picture, Frank,” Clare says. “The circuit my mind runs on. I want to make Estelle’s last years happy. I think a house on the ocean’s the right thing. Then I start thinking about New Jersey being a prime target for some nut with a dirty bomb or whatever. And, of course, I know death’s a pretty simple business. I’ve seen it. I don’t fear it. And I know Estelle’s gonna probably see it before I do. So I go on looking at these houses as if a catastrophe — or death— can’t really happen, right up until, like now, I recognize it can. And it shocks me. Really. Makes me feel paralyzed.”

“What is it that shocks you, Clare? You know everything there is to be afraid of. You seem way ahead of the game to me.”

Clare shakes his head in self-wonder. “I’m sitting up in bed, Frank — honest to God — up in Parsippany. Estelle’s asleep beside me. And what I go cold thinking about is: If something happens — you know, a bomb — can I ever sell my fucking house? And if I buy a new one, then what? Will property values even mean anything anymore? Where the hell are we then? Are we supposed to escape to some other place? Death’s a snap compared to that.”

“I never thought about that, Clare.” As a philosophical question, of course, it’s a lot like “Why the solar system?” And it’s just about as practical-minded. You couldn’t put a contingency clause in a buy-sell agreement that says “Sale contingent on there being no disaster rendering all real estate worthless as tits on a rain barrel.”

“I guess you wouldn’t think about it. Why would you?” Clare says.

“You said it was pretty philosophical.”

“I know perfectly well it all has to do with ’Stelle being sick and my other relationship ending. Plus my age. I’m just afraid of the circumstances of life going to hell. Boom-boom-boom.” Clare’s staring out to sea, above the heads of the lithe, untroubled young volley-ballers — a grizzled old Magellan who doesn’t like what he’s discovered. Boom-boom-boom.

Clare’s problem isn’t really a philosophical problem. It just makes him feel better to think so. His problem with circumstances is itself circumstantial. He’s suffered normal human setbacks, committed perfidies, taken some shots. He just doesn’t want to fuck up in those ways again and is afraid he can’t recognize them when they’re staring him in the face. It’s standard — a form of buyer’s remorse experienced prior to the sale. If Clare would just take the plunge (always the realtor’s warmest wish for mankind), banish fear, think that instead of having suffered error and loss, he’s survived them (but won’t survive them indefinitely), that today could be the first day of his new life, then he’d be fine. In other words, accept the Permanent Period as your personal savior and act not as though you’re going to die tomorrow but — much scarier — as though you might live.

How, though, to explain this without arousing suspicion that I’m just a smarmy, eel-slippery, promise-’em-anything sharpster, hyperventilating to unload a dump that’s already crumbling from the ground upward?

You can’t. I can’t. As muddled as I feel out here, I know the Doolittles’ house has serious probs, may be heading toward tear-down in a year or two, and I would never sell this house to Clare and will, in fact, now have to be the bearer of somber financial news to the Doolittles in Boca. All’s I can do is just show Clare more houses, till he either buys one or wanders off into the landscape. (I wonder if Clare’s a blue state or a red state. Just as in Sponsoring, politics is a threshold you don’t cross in my business, though most people who look at beach houses seem to be Republicans.)

Somewhere, out of the spheres, I hear what sounds like the Marine Corps Hymn played on a xylophone. Dum-dee-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dee-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. It’s surprisingly loud, even on the dune top in the breeze. The volleyball kids stop rotating, their heads turn toward us as if they’ve registered something weird, something from home or further back in the racial fog.

Clare goes fumbling under his jacket for a little black hand-tooled holster looped to his belt like a snub-nose. It’s his cell phone, raising a sudden call to arms and valor — unmistakable as his ring and only his, in any airport, supermarket deli section or DMV line.

“Sud-druth.” Clare speaks in an unexpected command voice — urgent message from the higher-ups to the troops in the thick of it down here. His snapped answer is aimed into an impossibly tiny (and idiotic) red Nokia exactly like every one of the prep school girls has in her Hilfiger beach bag. “Right,” Clare snaps, jabbing a thumb in his other ear like a thirties crooner and lowering his chin in strict, regimental attention. He steps away a few yards along the dune, where we are trespassers. Every single particle of his bearing announces: All right. This is important. “Yep, yep, yep,” he says.

For me, though, it’s a welcome, freeing moment, unlike most cell-phone interruptions, when the bystander feels like a condemned man, trussed and harnessed, eyes clenched, waiting for the trap to drop. The worst thing about others blabbing on their cell phones — and the chief reason I don’t own one — is the despairing recognition that everybody’s doing, thinking, saying pretty much the same things you are, and none of it’s too interesting.