Mark Costello - Big If

Peta specialized in Lauren’s type, high-strung wives (second wives or third, in Lauren’s case) searching for the first true mansions of their marriages. It always went this way: the women did the looking, the footwork and the tours, treating Peta like a slave, until they found that special country seat somewhere around a million five. The husbands came in at the endgame, taking a quick tour, always on the run, sending an attorney to the closing. It was a nerve-racking jurisdiction for a realtor, new money and demanding wives, but the broker fees were making Peta the star earner at Moss Properties. She was paid to coddle women like Mitzi Hindenberg (wife of Barry Hindenberg, the screensaver visionary) and Chappie Xing (wife of Ai-Me Xing, also known as Winston, the father of the 3D e-mail singing postcard and other online breakthroughs). Peta always steered them to a closing in the end. Mitzi, after six months’ hectic searching, finally found the fifty-eight-room Tudor of her dreams. Chappie, after nine months, finally bought the private island in the Oyster River. Peta was the realtor of last resort for the problem cases, the agent you send in when lesser agents fail. But she had met her match in Lauren Czoll. Peta had been searching with Lauren for almost a year.

“Let’s see the kitchen,” Peta said to Lauren. “It has real wow-value.”

They crossed the terrace, heading for the house. When Lauren first came to Moss Properties, Peta had interviewed her over omelets and Chablis at the new French place on Market Square in Portsmouth, the pivotal initial step in a serious house hunt, the slightly boozy get-to-know-you luncheon in which Peta played the drab and understanding Cinderella, the bartender/confessor, the psychiatrist/sex therapist, the college roommate you haven’t seen in twenty years — played whatever role she had to play to get the facts she needed to start looking. At that luncheon, over coffee and a ten-berry tart, Peta had teased out Lauren’s list of bedrock home requirements. Lauren, prodded skillfully (Peta was the best at this), finally allowed that she needed three things: land, history, and a walk-in humidor wired for Net access, DSL or faster (Jerzy would be flexible on this). Even at the outset of the house hunt, Peta felt that she was being carelessly exploited. Peta was no Marxist (who could be in this market?), but she did believe that there was a new ruling class and a new proletariat. The rulers controlled the means of scheduling. The proles were those who bore the brunt of dithering and cancellations, who waited at the bistro when the rulers showed up twenty minutes late, as Lauren always did, mouthing stock apologies, and Peta had to smile, “Oh it’s no problem, Laur.” Time was the new factory of the service sector and the rulers were the ones who owned it, wasting yours to save their own.

Not that Lauren saved much time, hers or anybody’s. Peta put the Czolls’ price range at one-point-one to one-point-nine (she took a guess; Lauren didn’t know), called up a hundred listings. The houses were on major land, and most of them had interesting histories, a link to someone notable (Fitz-John Porter, corps commander in the Civil War; David Dixon Porter, key admiral of that war; Edith Effing Dalrymple, early Mesmerist and crusading suffragette, mother of Finch Dalrymple, teenaged abolitionist and early investor in Coca-Cola Corporation) or to something notable (the whaling trade, the spinning mills, the Civil War, the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Coca-Cola Corporation). Lauren, being a new ruler, wasted everybody’s time, coming late, forgetting some appointments (Peta standing on the lawn, looking at her watch), always finding fault when she saw a property, inventing new requirements, requiring new searches. First it was a helipad (had to have a helipad), then a gazebo, then a sail loft, then a bridle trail, a garden maze, and a working gristmill, plus land, history, and the wired humidor. Peta found a charming Queen Anne in Rye Crossings with humidor, gazebo, secluded bridle trails, and a Class 2 landing strip, but the gristmill was too squeaky, Lauren said, and the gazebo blocked her seaward views. Lauren was big on sea views for a time, then wanted something farmy and less windblown. She forgot about the gristmill altogether, focusing instead on music rooms and apple trees, and now we’re back to sea views, Peta thought. All Peta really needed was an answer to the question What does Lauren want? What will make her happy — truly, deeply, finally happy? Why was this so difficult for people nowadays?

It seemed to be the new plague of the age, this confusion over wants and needs. Poverty was pressure, Peta knew, but wealth created pressure too. The pressure on the software wives was quiet and corrosive — if you can have anything, buy anything you see, why you are still nervous and dissatisfied? Peta saw corrosion in her clients and in Jens. Poor Jens was building monsters, on the verge of finally getting rich, but it wasn’t good or pure enough somehow. She knew he wasn’t sleeping. She pretended not to really notice, because she was afraid that Jens, confronted, would unravel. And so Peta, too, like her clients and Jens, felt that she was walking on the lip of a deep pit.

“Right this way,” she said to Lauren.

Peta let them in the back door of the manor house, pausing to wipe her feet on the rattan mat inside the door. Lauren, seeing this, paused to wipe her feet as well. There were two clients here, thought Peta. This morning’s Lauren was the posh, high-handed bitch. The other Lauren was the frightened child, food-disordered, lost in wealth, neurotic to the nines. One sharp word from Peta and this other Lauren would start bawling, so Peta held her tongue, just as she’d held her tongue with Jens that morning, him and his snide crack about the moon. Peta knew that Jens was jealous of the love and care she wasted on her clients’ whims, of the Saturdays she spent touring mansions with Lauren, or the nights she spent at the office, eating takeout sushi as she did her listing searches on the Web. It was a crock of shit, of course — Peta didn’t love her clients any more than a doctor loves her patients. Jens’ panic and self-pity were among his least attractive traits, ranking right down there with his lacerating tongue. He turned it on himself (“Even my best monster is a failure,” he would say), and — less often, but more often lately — on her as well.

“Here we are,” said Peta, leading Lauren through the spacious, eat-in, center-island kitchen, newly renovated. The Bell Estate belonged to a man named Geoff Rishman, a Bell by marriage, twice removed, a pushy Boston asshole (they called them Massholes up here) who had lost the last of the Bell fortune on a team gymnastics league. His franchise, the Boston Swans, had crushed the New York Attitude in the title meet, but Geoff couldn’t get a TV deal and the league collapsed. Geoff was asking one-point-two, but Peta thought he would gladly entertain high nines.

Lauren worked the faucets as Peta did her spiel. The pattern for the house, she said, came from thatch-roofed cottages of Lincolnshire, that’s England. It came not in blueprint but in the eye of the first Puritans, who adapted the design to the colder winters and abundant timber of America. The walk-in fireplace was actually a pyramid of Flemish bricks, brought across as ballast, 1638. The stove was Viking, high-output, as in the best restaurants.

“No more waiting for the pasta water,” said Peta hopefully.

Lauren touched the oven door. “Who was Silence Bell?”

Portsmouth brokers knew their history. The big-ticket properties were the registered estates, the landmarks on the headlands down to Rye. Selling them was telling them, Noel Moss always said. Peta knew her history better than most.