Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

This freed moment, however, strands me out of context and releases me to the good sensations we all wish were awaiting us “behind” every moment: That — despite my moment of syncope, my failed house-showing, my crumbling Thanksgiving plans, my condition, my underlying condition, my overarching condition — there is still a broad fertile plain where we can see across to a white farmhouse with willows and a pond the sky traffics over, where the sun is in its soft morning quadrant and there is peace upon the land. I suddenly can feel this. Even the prep school kids seem excellent, promising, doing what they should. I wish Clare could feel it. Since with just a glimpse — permitted by a kindly, impersonal life force — many things sit right down into their proper, proportionate places. “It’s enough,” I hear myself breathing to myself. “It’s really enough.”

“Yep, yep, yep.” Clare’s internalizing whatever’s to be internalized. Get those fresh troopers up where they can see the back side of that hill and start raining hellfire down on the sorry bastards. And don’t be back to me till that whole area’s secured and you can give me a full report, complete with casualties. Theirs and ours. Got that? Yep, yep. “I’ll get home around one, sweetheart. We’ll have some lunch.” It is a homelier communiqué than imagined.

Clare punches off his Nokia and returns it to its holster without turning around. He’s facing north, up the shore toward Asbury Park, miles off, and where I’ll soon be going. His posture of standing away gives him the aura of a man composing himself.

“Everything copacetic?” I smile, in case he should turn around and unexpectedly face me. A friendly visage is always welcome.

“Yes, sure.” Clare does turn, does see my welcoming mug — a mug that says, We aren’t looking at a house anymore; we’re just men out here together, taking the air. The volleyballers have formed a caucus beside their net and are laughing. I hear one of their cell phones ringing — a gleeful little rilling that exults, Yes, yes, yes! “My wife, Estelle — well, you know her name.” Clare glances toward the calm sea and its white filigree of sudsy surf, over which gulls are skimming for tiny fleeing mackerel. “When I’m gone for very long, it’s like she thinks I’m not coming back.” He dusts his big hands, cleaning off some residue of his call. “Of course, I did go away and didn’t come back. You can’t blame her.”

“Sounds like it’s all different now.”

“Oh yeah.” Clare runs his two clean hands back through his salt ’n pepper hair. He is a handsome man — even if part doozie, part fearful shrinker from the world’s woe and clatter. We have things in common, though I’m not as handsome. “What were we gassing about?” His call has erased all. A positive sign. “I was bending your ear about some goddamn thing.” He smiles, abashed but happy not to remember. A glimpse of my wide plain with the house, sun, pond and willows may, in fact, have been briefly his.

“We were talking about foundations, Clare.”

“I thought we were talking about fears and commitments.” He casts a wistful eye back at #61’s troubled exterior — its weathered soffits, its gutter straps (defects I hadn’t noticed). I say nothing. “Well,” Clare says, “same difference.”

“Okay.”

“Somebody else’ll want this place.” He offers a relieved grin. Another bullet dodged.

“Somebody definitely will,” I say. “You can bet on it. Not many things you can bet on, but on that, you can.”

“Good deal,” Clare says.

We find other things to talk about — he is a Giants fan, has season tickets — as I walk him back down and out to his Only Connect truck. He’s happy to be heading home empty-handed, happy to be going where someone loves him and not where somebody’s studying archaeology. I’m satisfied with him and with my part in it all. He is a good man. The Doolittles, I’m sure, after a day of raging, then brooding, then grudging resolution, could easily decide to come down on their asking. Houses like theirs change hands every four to six years and are built for turnover. Not many people feel they were born to live in a house forever. I’ll sell it by Christmas, or Mike will. Possibly to Clare. They truly aren’t making any more of it here at the beach. And in fact, if the Republicans steal the show, they’ll soon be trucking it away.

O n my way back out Cormorant Court, Clare blinks his lights, and I pull over in front of a chalet where my red-and-white REALTY-WISE sign stands out front. The Hondurans lounge on the little front steps, eating their lunches brought from home.

Clare idles alongside, his window already down so we can confer vehicle-to-vehicle in the cold air. Possibly he wants to set matters straight about my BUSH? WHY? bumper sticker, which I’m sure he doesn’t approve of. I should probably peel it off now.

“What’s the story with these?” he half shouts through his window (his passenger seat’s been removed for insurance reasons). He’s now wearing a pair of Foster Grants that make him look more like General MacArthur. He’s talking about the chalet being spiffed up.

“Same old,” I say. “I sell. You buy.”

Clare’s tough Marine Corps mouth, used to doing the talking, all the ordering, assumes a wrinkled, compromised expression of deliberate tolerance. He knows the opportunity to be taken seriously even by me is almost over. He gets most things — it’s one of his virtues. But I’m as happy to sell him one of these as I am the Doolittles’. I’ve shown many a client a house they didn’t want, then sold them a chalet as a consolation prize. Although blending business (potential rental income) with sentimental impulses (buying a house for the dying wife) can be troublesome for buyers. Internal messages can become seriously mixed, and bad results in the form of lost revenues ensue.

“What’s the damage?” Clare says from the financial safety of his work truck.

“A buck seventy-five.” Add twenty-five for wasting my time this morning, and since he’s obviously got the scratch. “Walking distance to the beach.”

“Rent ’em year-round?” Clare’s smiling. He knows what a schmendrick he is.

“Make your nut in the summer. Seven-fifty a week last year. I take fifteen percent, get my crew in for upkeep. Capital improvement’s yours. You probably clear seven per summer, before taxes and insurance. You really need to own three or four to make it happy.” And you have to keep your heart out of your pocketbook. And this last summer wasn’t that great. And Estelle won’t like it. Clare’s probably not ready for all this.

“That’s assuming some miserable asshole doesn’t sue you,” he says out of the echo chamber of his truck. He may have heard me say something I didn’t say. But he’s refound his authority and begun frowning not at me but out his windshield toward NJ 35 at the end of Cormorant Court.

“There’s always that.” I smile a zany smile of who cares.

“Fuckin’ ambulance chasers.” Clare’s two divorces could conceivably have left a bad taste in his mouth for the legal profession. He shakes his head at some unavenged bad memory. We’ve all been there. It’s nothing to share the day before Thanksgiving. I try to think of a good lawyer joke, but there aren’t any. “I see you voted for Gore. The patsy.” He’s acknowledging my BUSH? WHY? sticker.

“I did.”

He stares stonily ahead at nothing. “I couldn’t vote for Bush. I voted for his old man. Now we’re in the soup. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I think we are.”

“God help us,” Clare says, and looks puzzled for the first time.

“I doubt if he will, Clare,” I say. “Are you staging a big Thanksgiving?” I’m ready to part company. But I want to celebrate Clare-the-redeemed-Republican with a warm holiday wish.