Richard Ford - Independence Day

“I get it,” I said, though I thought my personal take on the job probably wouldn’t be just like Rolly’s.

And that was that. In six months old man Schwindell gorked off in the front seat of his Sedan de Ville, stopped at the light at the corner of Venetian Way and Lipizzaner Road, a man-and-wife ophthalmologist team in the car, on their way to the preclosing walkthrough at the retired New Jersey Supreme Court Justice’s house, down the street from my former home on Hoving (the deal naturally fell through). By then Roily Mounger was steaming along selling time-shares to Seattleites, most of the young people in our office had taken off for better pickings in distant area codes, and I’d passed the board and was out hawking listings.

Though based on strict cash flow and forgetting about taxes, it was already true by then that a person could rent for half the cost of buying, and a lot of our clients were beginning to wise up. In addition — as I have ever so patiently told the Markhams, fidgeting now out in the Sleepy Hollow — housing costs were rising faster than incomes, at about 4.9 percent. Plus, plenty of other signs were bad. Employment was down. Expansion was way out of balance. Building permits were taking a nosedive. It was “what the monkey does on the other side of the stick,” Shax Murphy said. And those who had no choice or, like me, had choices but no wish to pursue them, all dug in for the long night that becomes winter.

But truth to say, I was as happy as I expected to be. I enjoyed being on the periphery of the business community and having the chance to stay up with trends — trends I didn’t even know existed back when I was writing sports. I liked the feeling of earning a living by the sweat of my brow, even if I didn’t need the money, still don’t work that hard and don’t always earn a great deal. And I managed to achieve an even fuller appreciation of the Existence Period; began to see it as a good, permanent and adaptable strategy for meeting life’s contingencies other than head-on.

For a brief time I took some small interest in forecast colloquia, attended the VA and FHA update meetings and a few taking-control-of-the-market seminars. I attended the state Realty Roundtable, sat in on the Fair Housing Panel down in Trenton. I delivered Christmas packages to the elderly, helped coach the T-ball team, even dressed up like a clown and rode from Haddam to New Brunswick in a circus wagon to try to spruce up the public perception of realtors as being, if not a bunch of crooks, at least a bunch of phonies and losers.

But eventually I let most of it slide. A couple of young hotshot associates have come in since I signed on, and they’re fired up to put on clown suits to prove a point. Whereas I don’t feel like I’m trying to prove a point anymore.

And yet I still like the sunny, paisley-through-the-maples exhilaration of exiting my car and escorting motivated clients up some new and strange walkway and right on into whatever’s waiting — an unoccupied house on a summer-warm morning when it’s chillier indoors than out, even if the house isn’t much to brag about, or even if I’ve shown it twenty-nine times and the bank’s got it on the foreclosure rolls. I enjoy going into other people’s rooms and nosing around at their things, while hoping to hear a groan of pleasure, an “Ahhh, now this , this is more like it,” or a whispered approval between a man and wife over some waterfowl design worked into the fireplace paneling, then surprisingly repeated in the bathroom tiles; or share the satisfaction over some small grace note — a downstairs-upstairs light switch that’ll save a man possible injury when he’s stumbling up to bed half sloshed, having gone to sleep on the couch watching the Knicks long after his wife has turned in because she can’t stand basketball.

Beyond all that, since two years ago I’ve bought no new houses on Clio Street or elsewhere. I ride herd on my small hot dog empire. I write my editorials and have as always few friends outside of work. I take part in the annual Parade of Homes, standing in the entryway of our fanciest listings with a big smile on my chops. I play an occasional game of volleyball behind St. Leo’s with the co-ed teams from other businesses. And I go fishing as much as I can at the Red Man Club, where I sometimes take Sally Caldwell in violation of Rule 1 but never see other members, and where I’ve learned over time to catch a fish, to marvel a moment at its opaline beauties and then to put it back. And of course I act as parent and guardian to my two children, though they are far away now and getting farther.

I try, in other words, to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear. Though it’s true that sometimes in the glide, when worries and contingencies are floating off, I sense I myself am afloat and cannot always feel the sides of where I am, nor know what to expect. So that to the musical question “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I’m not sure I’d know the answer. Although to the old taunt that says, “Get a life,” I can say, “I already have an existence, thanks.”

And this may perfectly well constitute progress the way old man Schwindell had it in mind. His wouldn’t have been some philosopher’s enigma about human improvement over the passage of time used frugally, or an economist’s theorem about profit and loss, or the greater good for the greater number. He wanted, I believe, to hear something from me to convince him I was simply alive , and that by doing whatever I was doing — selling houses — I was extending life and my own interest in it, strengthening my tolerance for it and the tolerance of innocent, unnamed others. That was undoubtedly what made him “dean” and kept him going. He wanted me to feel a little every day — and a little would’ve been enough — like I felt the day after I speared a liner bare-handed in the right-field stands at Veterans Stadium, hot off the bat of some black avenger from Chicago, with my son and daughter present and awed to silence with admiration and astoundment for their Dad (everyone around me stood up and applauded as my hand began to swell up like a tomato). How I felt at that moment was that life would never get better than that — though later what I thought, upon calmer reflection, was that it had merely been just a damn good thing to happen, and my life wasn’t a zero. I’m certain old Otto would’ve been satisfied if I’d come in and said something along those lines: “Well, Mr. Schwindell, I don’t know very much about progress, and truthfully, since I became a realtor my life hasn’t been totally transformed; but I don’t feel like I’m in jeopardy of disappearing into thin air, and that’s about all I have to say.” He would, I’m certain, have sent me back to the field with a clap on the back and a hearty go-get-’em.

And this in fact may be how the Existence Period helps create or at least partly stimulates the condition of honest independence: inasmuch as when you’re in it you’re visible as you are, though not necessarily very noticeable to yourself or others, and yet you maintain reason enough and courage in a time of waning urgency to go toward where your interests lie as though it mattered that you get there.

T he rain that dumped buckets on Route 1 and Penns Neck has missed Wallace Hill, so that all the hot, neat houses are shut up tight as nickels with their window units humming, the pavement already giving off wavy lines no one’s willing to tread through at eleven-thirty. Later, when I’m long gone to South Mantoloking and shade inches beyond the eaves and sycamores, all the front porches will be full, laughter and greetings crisscrossing the way as on my first drive-by. Though now everyone who’s not at work or in summer school or in jail is sitting in the TV darkness watching game shows and waiting for lunch.