Richard Ford - Independence Day

In early May I came up with a furnished condominium in a remodeled Victorian mansion on Burr Street, behind the Haddam Playhouse, complete with utilities and covered off-street parking. It was steep at $1,500, but it was close to schools and Phyllis could’ve managed without a second car if they’d stayed put till Joe started work. Joe, though, swore he’d lived in his last “shitty cold-water flat” in 1964, when he was a sophomore at Duquesne, and didn’t intend to start Sonja off in some oppressive new school environment with a bunch of rich, neurotic suburban kids while the three of them lived like transient apartment rats. She’d never outlive it. He’d rather, he said, forget the whole shittaree. A week later I turned up a perfectly workable brick-and-shingle bungalow on a narrow street behind Pelcher’s — a bolt-hole, to be sure, but a place they could get into with some lease-to-buy furniture and a few odds and ends of their own, exactly the way Ann and I and everybody else used to live when we were first married and thought everything was great and getting greater. Joe, however, refused to even drive by.

Since early June, Joe has grown increasingly sullen and mean-spirited, as though he’s begun to see the world in a whole new way he doesn’t like and is working up some severe defense mechanisms. Phyllis has called me twice late at night, once when she’d been crying, and hinted Joe was not an easy man to live with. She said he’d begun disappearing for parts of the day and had started throwing pots at night over in a woman artist friend’s studio, drinking a lot of beer and coming home after midnight. Among her other worries, Phyllis is convinced he might just forget the whole damn thing — the move, Sonja’s schooling, Leverage Books, even their marriage — and sink back into an aimless nonconformist’s life he lived before they got together and charted a new path to the waterfall. It was possible, she said, that Joe couldn’t stand the consequences of real intimacy, which to her meant sharing your troubles as well as your achievements with the person you loved, and it seemed also possible that the act of trying to buy a house had opened the door on some dark corridors in herself that she was fearful of going down, though she thankfully seemed unready to discuss which these might be.

In so many sad words, the Markhams are faced with a potentially calamitous careen down a slippery socio-emotio-economic slope, something they could never have imagined six months ago. Plus, I know they have begun to brood about all the other big missteps they’ve taken in the past, the high cost of these, and how they don’t want to make any more like that. As regret goes, theirs, of course, is not unusual in kind. Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.

A tangy metallic fruitiness filters through the Jersey ozone — the scent of overheated motors and truck brakes on Route 1—reaching clear back to the roily back road where I am now passing by an opulent new pharmaceutical world headquarters abutting a healthy wheat field managed by the soil-research people up at Rutgers. Just beyond this is Mallards Landing (two ducks coasting-in on a colonial-looking sign made to resemble wood), its houses-to-be as yet only studded in on skimpy slabs, their bald, red-dirt yards awaiting sod. Orange and green pennants fly along the roadside: “Models Open.” “Pleasure You Can Afford!” “New Jersey’s Best-Kept Secret.” But there are still long ragged heaps of bulldozered timber and stumps piled up and smoldering two hundred yards to one side, more or less where the community center will be. And a quarter mile back and beyond the far wall of third-growth hardwoods where no animal is native, a big oil-storage depot lumps up and into what’s becoming thickened and stormy air, the beacons on its two great canisters blinking a red and silver steer clear, steer clear to the circling gulls and the jumbo jets on Newark approach.

When I make the final right into the Sleepy Hollow, two cars are nosed into the potholed lot, though only one has the tiresome green Vermont plate — a rusted-out, lighter-green Nova, borrowed from the Markhams’ Slave Lake friends, and with a muddy bumper sticker that says ANESTHETISTS ARE NOMADS. A cagier realtor would’ve already phoned up with some manufactured “good news” about an unexpected price reduction in a previously outof-reach house, and left this message at the desk last night as a form of torture and enticement. But the truth is I’ve become a little sick of the Markhams — given our long campaign — and have fallen into a not especially hospitable mood, so that I simply stop midway in the lot, hoping some emanations of my arrival will penetrate the flimsy motel walls and expel them both out the door in grateful, apologetic humors, fully ready to slam down their earnest money the instant they set eyes on this house in Penns Neck that, of course, I have yet to tell them about.

A thin curtain does indeed part in the little square window of room #7. Joe Markham’s round, rueful face — which looks changed (though I can’t say how) — floats in a small sea of blackness. The face turns, its lips move. I make a little wave, then the curtain closes, followed in five seconds by the banged-up pink door opening, and Phyllis Markham, in the uncomfortable gait of a woman not accustomed to getting fat, strides out into the midmorning heat. Phyllis, I see from the driver’s seat, has somehow amplified her red hair’s coppery color to make it both brighter and darker, and has also bobbed it dramatically into a puffy, mushroomy bowl favored by sexless older moms in better-than-average suburbs, and which in Phyllis’s case exposes her tiny ears and makes her neck look shorter. She’s dressed in baggy khaki culottes, sandals and a thick damask Mexican pullover to hide her extra girth. Like me, she is in her forties, though unclear where, and she carries herself as if there were a new burden of true woe on the earth and only she knows about it.

“All set?” I say, my window down now, cracking a smile into the new pre-storm breeze. I think about Paul’s horse joke and consider telling it, as I said I would.

“He says he’s not going,” Phyllis says, her bottom lip slightly enlarged and dark, making me wonder if Joe has given her a stiff smack this morning. Though Phyllis’s lips are her best feature and it’s more likely Joe has gifted himself with a manly morning’s woogling to take his mind off his realty woes.

I’m still smiling. “What’s the problem?” I say. Paper trash and parking lot grit are kicking around on the hot breeze now, and when I peek in the rearview there’s a dark-purple thunderhead closing fast from the west, toiling the skies and torquing up winds, making ready to dump a big bucket of rain on us. Not a good augury for a home sale.

“We had an argument on the way down.” Phyllis lowers her eyes, then casts an unhappy look back at the pink door, as if she expects Joe to come bursting through it in camo gear, screaming expletives and commands and locking and loading an M-16. She takes a self-protective look at the teeming sky. “I wonder if you’d mind just talking to him.” She says this in a clipped, back-of-the-mouth voice, then elevates her small nose and stiffens her lips as two tears teeter inside her eyelids. (I’ve forgotten how much Joe’s gooby western PA accent has rubbed off on her.)

Most Americans will eventually transact at least some portion of their important lives in the presence of realtors or as a result of something a realtor has done or said. And yet my view is, people should get their domestic rhubarbs, verbal fisticuffs and emotional jugular-snatching completely out of the way before they show up for a house tour. I’m more or less at ease with steely silences, bitter cryptic asides, eyes rolled to heaven and dagger stares passed between prospective home buyers, signaling but not actually putting on display more dramatic after-midnight wrist-twistings, shoutings and real rock-’em, sock-’em discord. But the client’s code of conduct ought to say: Suppress all important horseshit by appointment time so I can get on with my job of lifting sagging spirits, opening fresh, unexpected choices, and offering much-needed assistance toward life’s betterment. (I haven’t said so, but the Markhams are on the brink of being written off, and I in fact feel a strong temptation just to run up my window, hit reverse, shoot back into the traffic and head for the Shore.)