Richard Ford - Independence Day

I hear Ted and Joe scraping their damp dogs on the back steps, then stamping the welcome mat and Joe saying, “Now that’d be a real reality check, I’ll tell you,” while gentle, clever Ted says, “I’ve just decided for the time I have left, Joe, to let go all the nonessentials.”

“I envy that, don’t think I don’t,” Joe says. “Boy-oh-boy, I could get rid of some of those, all right.”

Phyllis and I both hear this. Each of us knows that one of us is the first nonessential Joe would like to put behind him.

“Phyllis, I figure we’ve all got scars and bruises,” I say, “but I just don’t want them to cause you to miss a damn good deal on a wonderful house when it’s in your grasp here.”

“Is there anything else we can see today?” Phyllis says dispiritedly.

I sway back slightly on my heels, arms enfolding my clipboard. “I could show you a new development.” I’m thinking of Mallards Landing, of course, where slash is smoldering and maybe two units are finished and the Markhams will go out of their gourds the minute they lay eyes on the flapping pennants. “The young developer’s a heck of a good guy. They’re all in your range. But you indicated you didn’t want to consider new homes.”

“No,” Phyllis says darkly. “You know, Frank, Joe’s a manic-depressive.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I hug my clipboard tighter. (I’m beginning to cook like a cabbage in my windbreaker.) I mean, though, to hold my ground. Manic-depressives, convicted felons, men and women with garish tattoos over every inch of their skin: all are entitled to a hook to hang their hats on if they’ve got the scratch. This claim for Joe’s looniness is probably a complete lie, a ploy to let me know she’s a worthy opponent in the realty struggle (for some reason her female troubles still seem legit). “Phyllis, you and Joe need to do some serious thinking about this house.” I stare profoundly into her obstinate blue eyes, which I realize for the first time must have contacts, since no blue nearly similar to that occurs in nature.

She is framed by the window, her small hands clasped in front like a schoolmarm lording a trick question over a schoolboy dunce. “Do you feel sometimes”—the light glowing around Phyllis seems to have brought her in contact with the forces of saintliness—“that no one’s looking out for you anymore?” She smiles faintly. The creases at the corners of her mouth make weals in her cheeks.

“Every day.” I try to beam back a martyrish look.

“I had that feeling when I got married the first time. When I was twenty and a sophomore at Towson. And I had it this morning again at the motel — the first time in years.” She rolls her eyes in a zany way.

Joe and Ted are making a noisy second trek over the floor plan now. Ted’s unscrolling some old blueprints he’s kept squirreled away. They will soon barge into Phyllis’s and my little séance.

“I think that feeling’s natural, Phyllis, and I think you and Joe take care of each other just fine.” I peek to see if the orienteers are here yet. I hear them tromping over the defunct floor furnace, talking importantly about the attic.

Phyllis shakes her head and smiles a beatified smile. “The trick’s changing the water to wine, isn’t it?”

I have no idea what this might mean, though I give her a lawyerly-brotherly look that says this competition’s over. I could even give her a pat on her plump shoulder, except she’d get wary. “Phyllis, look,” I say. “People think there’re just two ways for things to go. A worked-out way and a not-worked-out way. But I think most things start one way, then we steer them where we want them to go. And no matter how you feel at the time you buy a house — even if you don’t buy this one or don’t buy one from me at all — you’re going to have to—“

And then our séance is over. Ted and Joe come trooping back down the hall from where they’ve decided not to take a cobwebby tour up the “disappearing” stairway to eyeball some metal rafter gussets Ted installed when Hurricane Lulu passed by in ’58, blowing hay straw through tree trunks, moving yachts miles inland and leveling grander houses than Ted’s. It’s too hot upstairs.

“God’s in the details,” one of the new best friends observes. But adds, “Or is it the devil?”

Phyllis looks peacefully at the entry, into which the two of them go first one way and then the other before locating us in the l/r. Ted, coming into view with his blueprints, looks to my estimation satisfied with everything. Joe, in his immature goatee, his vulgar shorts and Potters Do It With Their Fingers shirt, seems on the verge of some form of hysteria.

“I’ve seen enough,” Joe shouts like a railroad conductor, taking a quick estimation of the living room as if he’d never seen it in his life. He jams his thick knuckles together in satisfaction. “I can make up my mind on what I’ve seen.”

“Okay,” I say. “We’ll take a drive, then.” (Code for: We’ll go to breakfast and write up a full-price offer and be back in an hour.) I give Ted Houlihan an assuring nod. Unexpectedly he’s proved a key player in an ad hoc divide-and-conquer scheme. His memories, his poor dead wife, his faulty cojones , his Milquetoast Fred Waring soft-shoe worldview and casual attire, are first-rate selling tools. He could be a realtor.

“This place won’t stay on the market long,” Joe shouts to anyone in the neighborhood who’s interested. He swivels around and starts for the front door in some kind of beehive panic.

“Well, we’ll see,” Ted Houlihan says, and gives me and Phyllis a doubtful smile, scrolling his blueprints tighter. “I know that place across the fence disturbs you, Mrs. Markham. But I’ve always felt it made the whole neighborhood safer and more cohesive. It’s not much different from having AT & T or RCA, if you get what I mean.”

“I understand,” Phyllis says, unmoved.

Joe is already through the front door, down the steps and out onto the lawn, scoping out the roofline, the fascial boards, the soffits, his hair-framed mouth gaped open as he searches for sags in the ridgeboard or ice damage under the eaves. Possibly it is manic-depression medicine that causes his lips to be so red. Joe, I think, needs a bit of tending to.

I find a Frank Bascombe, Realtor Associate card in my windbreaker pocket and slip it onto the umbrella stand outside the living-room door, where I’ve spent the last ten minutes keeping Phyllis in the corral.

“We’ll be in touch,” I say to Ted. (More code. Less specific.)

“Yes, indeed,” Ted says, smiling warmly.

And then out Phyllis goes, hips swaying, sandals clicking, shaking Ted’s little hand on the fly and saying something about its being a lovely house and a pity he has to sell it, but heading right out to where Joe’s trying to get a clear bead on things through whatever fog it’s his bewildered lot to see through.

“They’ll never buy it,” Ted says gamely as I head toward the door. His is not disappointment but possibly misplaced satisfaction at having foreign elements turned away, permitting a brief retreat into the comfortable bittersweet domesticity that’s still his. Joe out the door would be a relief for anyone.

“I can’t tell, Ted,” I say. “You don’t know what other people will do. If I did, I’d be in another line of work.”

“It’d be nice to think that the place was valuable to others. I’d feel good about that. There’s not a lot of corroboration there for us anymore.”

“Not what we’d like. But that’s my part in this.” Phyllis and Joe are standing beside my car, looking at the house as though it were an ocean liner just casting off for open seas. “Just don’t underestimate your own house, Ted,” I say, and once again grab his little hard-biscuit hand and give it an affirming shake. I take a last whiff of gas leak. (I’ll hear Joe out on this subject inside of five minutes.) “Don’t be surprised if I come back with an offer this morning. They won’t see a house as good as yours, and I mean to make that clear as Christmas.”