Good Faith (10 page)

I said, “What sort of commute would this be for you?”

“Twenty minutes, tops. This place seems out of the way, but from South Cookborough, where my office is, it isn’t that much farther than where we live now, if you take Lansing Road.”

“Look up,” I said.

They looked up.

“What’s that?” said Mrs. Sloan.

“Water stains,” said Mr. Sloan.

“They seem too extensive for water stains,” said Mrs. Sloan. Their conversation was idle.

He said, “Let’s go upstairs and have a look.” I followed them up the third-floor staircase, which was rather steep but nicely built of dark oak. The third floor consisted of one large room to the south, the balcony outside the west wall, and a pretty arched window in the south wall.

I said, “Look up.” They looked up. In this room, the water stains on the ceiling had merged at the south end into serious deterioration—crumbling, buckling, discolored plaster. They didn’t say anything, just looked up and then looked at me. I opened the balcony door and went out, carefully, not quite sure the balcony was structurally safe.

The hillside fell dramatically away from the front of the house, and the sky billowed over a landscape of woods and clearings. Several farms were visible in the valley bottom along the road, with white fences and white barns and stone houses. Horses grazed in two or three pastures and cattle and sheep in two or three others. There was sweet corn coming up in three squared-off fields, but what was really impressive was the density of the foliage in the wooded areas. Mr. Sloan was correct in saying that we weren’t that far from civilization—twenty minutes from Cookborough and fifteen from Roaring Falls, maybe twenty-five from Deacon—but we might as well be looking back a hundred years, so little had the view changed or the landscape been developed.

No less amazing, in its way, was the roof that lay immediately in front of the balcony, the roof of the second floor. It was red tile, of the sort you see in Mediterranean climates. Given the vertigo of the location and the slipperiness of the tiles, it must have been quite a feat to install it. It was no small expanse, either, since the house was long from end to end. It was not especially steep—perhaps the architect figured that the smoothness of the tile would help the snow slide off. Unfortunately, however, the roof was installed upside down, with the tiles running upward from the seams, and the seams, which had been cemented over, serving as miniature traps to catch every drop of moisture that had fallen from the sky in sixty years. And yet the tiles were beautifully laid, in neat lines and rows. Not a single one, from where I was standing, had fallen off over the years. I started to laugh, and the Sloans pushed the door open and joined me.

“What’s the matter?” said Mr. Sloan. He was not a laughing sort of guy. I gestured at the roof. He said, “What about it?”

“Look at it.”

“Looks pretty solid.”

“George,” said Mrs. Sloan. “It runs uphill.”

“God, what a view,” said Mr. Sloan.

Mrs. Sloan and I exchanged a glance. She said, kindly I thought, given their tendency to argue, “It’s a spectacular view, honey. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

We stood there appreciatively for several minutes, until it occurred to me that maybe the balcony wasn’t built for three, and I went back inside. Now that I recognized the cause, I saw there was damage everywhere, behind the wallpaper and in the floor as well as in the ceiling. Certainly the structural beams of the house, if they happened to be revealed, would be rotten and soft. It was a shame, I thought. A lot of imagination and taste had gone into building the place. Yes, it was pleasant, okay, even inspiring, inside these rooms. You could readily see it—every season, even late winter, would be beautiful here, veils of fog drifting up from the valley, or low snowy clouds all around you, or the distant southern sun lighting up this house and no other. The site, of course, was a nightmare as well as a dream, but there are houses like that, houses someone or other devotes himself to, that are in a different category from most houses, which are built to serve.

The Sloans came in from the balcony. They were holding hands and he was smiling, as if she had just made a joke. When she saw him smiling, she sighed, I thought in relief, and we went down the stairs to the second floor. We strolled through those bedrooms one more time, glanced at the bathrooms. On the first floor, we paused in each doorway as if saying good-bye. By the time we were done, the sunset was enormous in the windows. We went out. I locked the front door and put the key in my pocket. I walked the Sloans to their car, and we stood by the right taillight, lingering just a moment because it didn’t seem proper to rush off. I said, “You know, I think there’s something coming on the market in the Blue Valley. I should know in a couple of days.” This was not true.

They nodded. She got in on the passenger side and he went around to the driver’s side, pausing once more to look over the roof of the car at the sunset and down the valley. The tops of the trees, the edges of all the leaves, were lit up by the long rays of the sun, and then, a moment later, they were not, and the trees looked dark and mysterious where they had just looked sparkling and alive. He got in, turned on the engine, and drove down the driveway, cautiously. In the winter, of course, they would have to park at the bottom and walk up.

CHAPTER

7

W
HEN THE DAVIDS
invited me to bring Felicity by for a visit in early July, they already had the siding off and a garden planted. They were ferociously efficient and strong and fast. When Felicity and I got there, they were stripped down to shorts and work boots, and the whole time we chatted and sipped beers, they kept working. We started out in the kitchen, where they had arranged dishes of olives and cheese and some good bread from the city. As we talked, they ripped the rotten and discolored linoleum and the underlayment it was bonded to right out from under our feet, all the time asking Felicity about her marriage and me about my divorce, and how had we met each other, and how often did we see each other, and was this an open secret or a secret that would follow us to the grave? I listened while Felicity responded.

“Well, you never know what’s secret, do you? People are tremendously revealing if anyone bothers to look, but then hardly anyone ever bothers to look. My idea is to look upon it as my own business, and that way I have what you might call a philosophical position as a basis in case of the surprise factor.”

“You mean, in case your husband surprises you with an accusation.”

“Or my father or my mother or one of my kids. Frankly, I think the idea of its being my own business is the only one my husband would accept. That’s the principle he lives by. He’s a very private person.”

“Too private for you, I’ll bet,” said David John, tearing up a three-by-four-foot piece of linoleum and plywood backing with a grunt and tossing it out the open door into the backyard.

She glanced at me. She said, “I don’t think it’s fair to Joey to talk about my husband in his presence. It makes him feel uncomfortable.”

“Does it?” said David Pollock to me.

I said, “Any kind of probing beneath the surface makes me uncomfortable here.”

“Oh my God,” said David Pollock. “We are dedicated probers beneath the surface. How can we be friends unless we can ask you anything and everything? Especially since we always tell all. For example, David was married. He married his high school sweetheart. They were all tremendously Baptist. You wouldn’t believe what a scandal it was when he ran off with
moi
. Absolutely the only way to get over the whole thing was to talk it to death. His parents wanted to hide everything, from the boy aspect to the Jew aspect to everything in between. But we said, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to get this vermin out of the box and look at it till we love it,’ and that’s what we do. Marlene, his wife—she comes around.”

“How did you meet?” asked Felicity.

“At a yoga class,” said David Pollock. “Actually, a yoga class that Marlene signed him up for to get him out of the house.”

“Marlene had hippie aspirations that we exploited shamelessly for our own purposes,” said David John. “When I was in the navy, I wouldn’t let her wear bellbottoms or tie-dye. I was very strict. So actually she likes me better now.”

“So do I,” said David Pollock. “Anyway, you’ll see her sometime. She comes to visit.”

“That sounds very nice,” said Felicity. She glanced at me again. “I keep telling Joey that this is nothing about my life, only about how I can’t get enough of him.” Her arms snaked around my waist and she laid her head on my chest. I could feel in the way she melted against me that although her tone was light, her feeling was strong and almost frightening. I put my arms around her and kissed her on the top of her head. Both Davids looked at her for a moment. Finally, David Pollock ripped up another piece of linoleum with a long loud cracking sound and said, “I think she’s serious.” He tossed it out the door on top of the others, crossed to where we were, and took another sip of wine.

“Far be it from us,” said David John, “to object to any sort of seize-the-day experience. My God! Look what happened in the last election! If that isn’t a lesson for us all, then what is?” I laughed, but after that they didn’t ask any more questions. Felicity had added something to our romance that was no longer simple, cool, or bright. David John continued. “Of course, it’s one of life’s imponderables, this passion thing. Joe seems like a perfectly decent person all around, but let’s face it, he’s not, on the surface, an obvious candidate for stardom.” He grinned. A smaller piece of the floor came up with more difficulty, and then a larger piece. David Pollock set down his crowbar with a sigh, picked up a towel, and wiped his face. It was hot, and he was dripping with sweat. Hearing the Davids talk was not like anything else I knew, and if they didn’t think I seemed worthy of Felicity’s feelings, well, they were only echoing my own doubts.

The Davids didn’t rest until the entire floor was lifted and removed. What was underneath was something of a disappointment. The original kitchen had evidently been much smaller; there was an area of nice pine boards about ten feet square, but the rest of the floor was plywood, probably put down during a remodel in the fifties. The two men stood with their hands on their hips, regarding the island of pine in a lake of plywood. The two dogs, who had been sleeping in the yard, appeared on the other side of the debris. The rat terrier paused for a moment, then picked her way across the old flooring, hopped over the doorsill, and came in. She surveyed the four of us, Felicity sitting on her stool, me sitting on the counter, and the Davids pondering the floor. She went straight over to Felicity and jumped into her lap. Felicity laughed. David John said, “Marlin Perkins is no fool, honey.”

I said, “You ought to look in the attic. These old houses were originally taxed according to the width of the floorboards, so they sometimes put the wider ones in the attic where the tax man wouldn’t see them.”

“How do you get to the attic? I haven’t seen a trapdoor,” said David John.

“There’s an opening in the ceiling of one of the closets upstairs. I went up there once when I was listing the house.”

It was getting dark, but we took a couple of flashlights into the attic. The attic was more of a crawl space, not a pleasant place, but indeed the floorboards were fourteen inches wide, a treasure trove of virgin pine. The Davids were amazed.

I said, “Look at it this way. When they built the house, they got random-width boards from the sawmill, because the sawmill just milled the logs, they didn’t sort and size them the way they do today. All the boards cost the same per square foot from the mill, but some cost more after they were installed, because of the tax assessment, so you hid them away.”

“This happens to us all the time,” said David John. “When we moved into our place in the city, we took down these abominable white ceiling tiles and found beaten tin underneath. Mmmm. Yes! Look at those boards!”

It was eight when we left. We had meant to leave by six. I didn’t ask where Felicity was going or what her evening plans were, but it was hard to let her go all the same, and I wanted to stand in the street kissing her face and tangling my hands in her hair, which she wouldn’t allow, since we were right in the middle of Deacon and it was still very light. She put my car between us and the street and she held me off with her hand while reaching out with her left foot and tickling my ankle with her toes. She said, “I like them. They’re new. Do you realize how long we’ve known most of the people we know?”

“Twenty or thirty years.”

“Sally would not have stayed so close to the nest. She would have gone to live in a commune and marched in political protests and joined naked encounter groups, and now it’s too late and all those things are over.”

“I want to kiss you again.”

“No, you must give me a friendly smile and shake my hand and tell me to say Hi to Hank for you, and I will.”

And so I did, and a few moments later she drove off. That night I felt lonely in an unaccustomed way.

I can’t say that the buyers for Phase Four, at the new prices, materialized right away, but I had so many other buyers I didn’t care. The buildings went up, the places did look pretty good, and I didn’t have time to worry. One day Bobby and I were sitting around the office talking about this and that, and he started bragging about how introducing Gordon and Marcus Burns was the best thing he ever did and it was going to make everyone rich, including me.

“How’s that?” I said.

“The thing is, he knows how it works. You know, he sat in on the famous poker game a week or so ago, and he cleaned everyone out. He won four thousand dollars or something like that. Everyone was fit to be tied except Gordon, who was laughing, they said, even though he lost eight hundred dollars himself.”

“I suppose they have to have him back now.”

“Well, there’s some argument about that, because they don’t want to be cleaned out again.”

“Was he cheating?”

“Nah. He told Gordon he remembers every card laid, for one thing, and can instantly calculate the odds of anyone having a particular hand. He said he’s got this photographic memory plus an adding machine in his head. So anyway, it was a good lesson for them. And they can afford it. They were just pissed, is all.”

“I would like to have seen that. Those guys think they’re pretty tough.”

“The thing is, when someone like Marcus Burns comes around, it makes you realize how local you are. I mean, me, I’ve been to Florida and back and forth to the Caribbean a few times, but nowhere special. And you haven’t either.”

“I used to go to Europe every year for two or three weeks when I was married. Don’t make me out to be a bumpkin, whatever you say about yourself.”

“But you know, I should have gone to college longer. If I’d gotten an accounting degree or a business degree, I would have more sense of what’s possible.”

“Marcus Burns would be the first to say that all the old rules have been repealed.”

“You aren’t kidding. Listen to this.”

“What?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

Better than you can, I thought.

“You know how much Gordon owed the IRS?”

“No.”

“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“You’re joking.”

“I mean, he’s had back taxes since the sixties. He was going to have to sell the house and the farms and everything. Mom thought he was going to go to jail.”

“Gordon?”

“No kidding. I mean, you know how he is. He goes out and buys something, and he pulls the cash out of his pocket and hands it to the guy, and they shake on the deal; then he can’t remember how much he paid, and there’s no record. And then he goes and sells whatever it is for whatever he can get. I think for all those years he was thinking that the IRS was just another guy he could make a deal with. At Christmas, Mom had him sitting in a chair in the living room and she was telling him they meant it and this was the government and all.”

“I thought he looked a little on edge at Christmas.”

“Now all that’s gone. Marcus Burns. And I introduced them.”

“What did the guy do?”

“He made a phone call.”

“He made a phone call?”

“One phone call.”

“He made a phone call to the government and they decided to forgo two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars?”

“Looks that way. I mean, the night I met him and he told me he’d been working for the IRS but had quit to go into business, we got to talking about Gordon somehow, and he said, Well, maybe he could help, and then a couple of days later he and Gordon went into the office for about half an hour, and then still later, maybe a week, Gordon got a letter saying the government had miscalculated, and all this stuff about depreciation allowances and everything, and he still owes something, but I think he got a year’s extension to pay, and what they plan to do is develop one of the cattle farms over by Deacon, because Marcus says the gay couples are going to transform Deacon and make it very upscale, and then everyone will want a place there, so the key is to wait about a year or two and then be ready to move.” He leaned back in his chair. “He says gay couples always know what the next thing is going to be because they’re much more attuned to issues of style than we are, and they have a network that starts in L.A. and San Fran and all the newest ideas get here faster through that network than through things like TV or newspapers, because TV and newspapers are run by old guys.”

I digested this, thinking of the Davids. It made perfect sense to me, actually. I said, “Why would you tell family business to a guy you met in a bar?”

“Looks like pure instinct, doesn’t it? In the first place, you don’t meet very many IRS guys. They’re always working for the government, and he wasn’t. You have to take advantage of opportunity, and I did. Look how it worked out! I’m telling you, this guy is going to make us rich. He says the question is not about millions but billions.”

“Bullshit.”

“See? You’re afraid to think big. We all are around here. I’m telling you, Gordon has his eye on him all the time.”

“Why is that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Here’s a guy who knows all the rules. He knows which ones you can break and which ones you can’t. I mean, even if he doesn’t say anything, you just watch him and do what he does, and there you go.”

I thought of this conversation a few days later when a tall guy with an even taller shock of white hair walked into the office and said he wanted to have a look at Salt Key Farm. He handed me his card. His name was Bill Avery and his company was Avery Development, world headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina. Avery Development was one of the biggest construction companies in the country, maybe in the world. They built country club developments, with golf courses, clubhouses, and gates. I nearly registered a very uncool level of being impressed, but instead I said, “I am aware of your company, Mr. Avery. Welcome to the neighborhood.” I glanced out the window. He was driving a big white Chrysler. “Let me call over there and set up an appointment.”

The Thorpes were out of town, I was told, so we could come over right now, which was fortunate, since Bill Avery wasn’t saying anything and my mind was a blank. I offered him some coffee, which he turned down. He looked around the office, then looked back at me. I said, “Are you ready? Shall we take my car or yours?”