Good Faith (27 page)

“Is going to design our course. Only one in the neighborhood, maybe in the eastern half of the state, though I’m not sure about that. “I’ve had Dye’s people on the phone. They’re very interested.” He started laughing at my obviously terrified reaction.

“How much? What did Gordon—”

“It’s not that much more for a famous designer than some schmuck, and it’s worth it from the beginning. For one thing, all the golf magazines talk about it, and so buyers begin sniffing around for properties as soon as the guy gets on board, and anyway—”

“Anyway, nothing but the best.”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Marcus. After a moment, he said, “Crosbie insists on it. I was on the phone all last week. He knows an S and L in Oklahoma somewhere, can you believe that? And they’re doing some golf and condo development in California, near Pebble Beach somewhere, and as soon as they hired Pete Dye, the price of the lots doubled. This little S and L, you know, Okie State Savings, one branch. They’re rolling in it. Crosbie’s eyes were green when he was telling me about it. You can’t believe how I cultivate this guy, Joe. It’s hardship duty.”

“I believe you.”

“Anyway, Pete Dye, Jack Nicklaus, Dwight David Eisenhower. You’ve got to get a designer all the golfers have heard of.”

At Roaring Falls Road, we turned toward the village, and as soon as we got into town Marcus said, “Here, I’ll buy you lunch. Wow! I can’t believe that! When that guard looked at me, I didn’t know what I was going to say. You know, I still carry my IRS ID card in case it might come in handy.”

“Winning by intimidation?”

“Oh, yes! But that didn’t seem, I don’t know, it just didn’t seem cool. So I just opened my mouth and out it came.”

“Well, you were a piece of work, as my dad would say.”

“I still want to meet your parents.”

“Oh, right.”

We got out of the car and went into the Frog Prince, a lunch place that did a lot of weekend business, and when we sat down, he said, “But you’re the genius. I was really stuck. I thought he was going to make us sit there until Paul Newman pulled up! I loved how you just kind of took him aside, very confidential, and gave the guy the true picture of my worldwide importance!” He threw his head back and laughed. Then he leaned across the table and looked right at me. He said, “You know, Joe, a lot of this would be like shoveling snow if it weren’t for you. I don’t feel that anyone, other than you, can really see what I’m getting at here. Everyone thinks so small. Linda quizzes me every day about how it’s going. I mean, I know she can’t help herself. When we came out here, she was worried about the risk. She always thought at least we had her job to fall back on,
blah blah blah,
and now we don’t have that, and you know the mortgage payment is something of a stretch for us, so I’ve got to say there’s a little refrain for every day. When she’s having a good day, it’s ‘Things are really working out, aren’t they, honey? You were so right! You really can’t get anywhere without taking a plunge. We don’t want the kids just thinking we always played it safe all their lives, and set them such a, I don’t know,
unenterprising
example. I mean you have to show kids how
they
can be through how
you
are.’” He sounded exactly like her. He smiled.

“Then, on bad days, it’s much more straightforward. ‘I just have a bad feeling about this. It isn’t going to work. Your sister had a worried look on her face today, and when I asked her what was wrong, she wouldn’t tell me, so I know there’s something you have to tell me, so you’d better get it over with and we’ll deal with it somehow.’” He shook his head. “Anyway, Joe, that’s just one example. You’re the only one who just goes on, gets things done.”

“Well, I—”

“You know, it kind of amazes me that you have settled for this. I mean, I don’t want to sound like I’m running down your life or anything—”

“But you are.”

“Well, yeah. I am. But, you know, only in comparison with your potential.”

We laughed.

“No, really. You’ve got a lot on the ball. Everyone likes doing business with you. People trust you. I mean, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve said, Well, one of my partners is Joe Stratford, and they can’t help themselves, they breathe a sigh of relief. I mean, two or three of them, yes, it’s ‘Oh, that’s Daniel Stratford’s boy,’ and I guess your father is famous in his way too, but there’s lots of others that are more like, ‘Oh, I bought a house from him once,’ or ‘He brokered a deal I did once.’ You know. I mean, I can’t tell you how valuable that is in a place like this just for getting off the ground.”

“Well, I’ve always tried to—”

“But it could be more. I mean, I’m not saying it’s not good, it is good, no two ways about it. It’s an absolute good to be respected in your community. But let’s face it, it’s a small community. Opportunities are greater elsewhere.”

“I was married until two years ago, don’t forget. Sherry—”

“Oh, the famous ex-wife! Didn’t I meet her? Oh, yeah! Madame Chef!”

“I believe that’s Ms. Chef to you, buddy.”

He grinned. “But she’s ambitious. I mean, pork medallions in Calvados,
clafouti,
crème brûlée. That’s
très français
.”

“It was a long approach to the pin, let’s put it that way. She added ambitions one grain at a time. For most of our marriage, she repainted and furnished our house. One year we repainted the living room four times and the only people who could tell that the shade was different were us.”

“Exacting. So maybe the man of the house did a lot of, you know, catering to the—oh, the queen?”

“Well, there was that. Though I didn’t see it as that at the time. I just saw it as her ideas being a little more intensely held than mine, so why not?”

Marcus looked carefully at the menu, took a couple of sips of water, and said, “I sometimes wonder how I would see my marriage if I were no longer in it.”

I pretended we had not gotten into a new uncomfortable area. “Well, I have to say, that was her idea too. I never thought about it before it happened.”

“Really?” He looked at me speculatively, and then the waitress came up and he ordered a steak sandwich and I ordered a hamburger. We didn’t say anything more until she was gone. Then Marcus said, “You know, Linda and I are very alike. We like the house to be the same way, we like the same sorts of clothes and books. We agree on how to raise the kids. I mean, lots of times couples say they’ve known each other so long they finish each other’s sentences, and they usually think of that as a bad thing, but I think of it as a good thing. I guess you will have noticed that I have an exacting side myself. Well, I prefer to call it meticulous. No, I prefer to call it a sense of style. Anyway, it’s something Linda and I share completely, and that’s valuable, and for a long time—I mean, until we moved here—I thought that was everything. But I see the move has brought out other sides of both of us, and it’s been kind of a surprise.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, you’re being very cagey, aren’t you? But let’s put it this way. Have you noticed anything about Felicity Ornquist?”

“I guess I’ve noticed a lot of things about Felicity over the years.” I said it, and I said it casually, but the sudden intrusion of her name into the conversation electrified me to the roots of my hair. “I’m not quite sure which thing you mean.”

“Well, she’s ready for anything, but he isn’t, you know? Hank’s not ready for anything.”

“He’s very outdoorsy.”

“And he doesn’t like our project at all, at all.”

“No, he’s mentioned that to me.”

“I don’t think he’s as much against our project as he’s just against anything new, and she’s just the opposite. She’s very game.” I didn’t say anything about what Felicity had said to me about the project, but I did feel a sharp retrospective pang. “Anyway. Let me put it this way. I hope being game is either learned or contagious, and that Felicity manages to communicate some of it to my wife.” The food was set on the table. By then, I hadn’t seen Felicity in a month and a half. I couldn’t help issuing a sigh, which Marcus didn’t seem to notice.

Marcus was a big talker but now he fell silent, and I have to say that the silence was companionable. I thought for a moment there about a strange thing: I couldn’t really say that I had ever had a male friend, even a buddy. My best friend in high school was Sally, I didn’t last long enough in college for anyone to make an impression, and I had been in business since I passed the exam for my broker’s license when I was twenty-two. My business didn’t really promote friendships—Realtors are likely to be loners. There was Gordon, too fatherly, there was Bobby, too goofy. I wasn’t a sports fan, I didn’t play golf or hunt or fish. It was odd to think of myself, a sociable guy, as someone without a real friend, but right then it didn’t upset me, because I felt I now had a friend, Marcus. He had slipped under the fence and into the compound and guess what? I liked him. I thought he was smart and interesting and imaginative. He laughed at jokes I made that I was used to laughing at by myself. He had a trick of laughing and glancing at me sharply, looking right into my face, that made me feel like I was actually communicating with him. I wasn’t surprised he had noticed Felicity’s gameness. I valued that about her too. If we were friends, then we would notice the same things about people. I ate my hamburger; then I said, “You know, Hank thinks I’m the brains behind this operation.”

“Who told you that?”

“He did, a few weeks ago, when he was trying to dissuade me from going forward. He hates golf courses.”

“What’s there to hate about a golf course?”

“Fertilizer, I suppose. Or maybe social privilege.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said what else are we going to do with the place, let it go to seed?”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t have an answer.”

He ate a few french fries; then he said, “It’s good that he thinks you’re the brains.” But he didn’t say why. After that we chatted idly about golf courses and made plans to see four more. He promised me that after those four we would know all we needed to know about golf courses.

I said, “I still know nothing about golf courses.”

“Just wait. I guarantee you’ve taken in more than you think, just driving around.”

“Well, I’m glad there are only four more, because I have to get back to selling houses.”

“Oh,” he said, “we’ll just see about that.”

CHAPTER

18

N
O MATTER WHAT SIZE
your project is, the first person you pay is the town engineer and the second person you pay is your own engineer, so I called up Marcus when the bills came in and told him to pay them right away. Our start-up money, which had looked like not enough but at least respectable, had dwindled considerably. The imminent merger between Portsmouth Savings and the S and L from the western part of the state, after which we were planning to roll in money, had hit a snag and wouldn’t be complete until at least the late summer. In the meantime, Marcus had hired an architect to refurbish the house and a firm of golf course designers from North Carolina who were not famous but better than famous, because they were absolutely guaranteed by the insidest of the insiders to be the next great thing, to design the golf course. As long as I had known him, Gordon had engaged in robbing Peter to pay Paul, as did most developers, and I didn’t know who all the Peters were.

Marcus told me he had it all in his head. “I keep telling you that my mind works like an adding machine.”

“All right,” I said. If he wanted to take care of it, so be it. Just organizing the paperwork for the township was plenty of work for me.

Gordon called me early in May. “You know that farm on the interstate north of Portsmouth? You got to go over there.”

“Why?”

“You got to see it, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Some paperwork. Then I’m showing a house in Farmington.”

“Forget the paperwork. You meet me there.” He hung up. I put on my coat.

Gordon had owned the Portsmouth farm for years, ever since he bought it from a farmer whose house had been separated from the rest of the farm when they rerouted the interstate in the early fifties. He had sold the lot with the house on it back to the farmer. Then he had leased the rest of the property to another farmer, who kept some of his own cows and some of Gordon’s cows there. I wasn’t too knowledgeable about that business, except that the cows had started out black-and-white and then become all black and now they had disappeared.

The farm had two pieces, a front piece of some twenty acres and a back piece of some forty-five acres, joined at a narrow waist where a grove of trees crossed the property and hid the back part from the road. The forty-five acres was a hilly pasture that was too steep ever to be cropped. You could just see the barn from the highway, I had thought, but on the day I met Gordon there, I couldn’t see it anymore.

“Tore it down!” exclaimed Gordon. “Sold the cows, too, but that isn’t the brilliant part. Follow me!”

I followed him to the back part of the property, where I saw ten large dump trucks idling in a line, maybe four hundred yards from the old house, and a large earthmoving machine and a large backhoe picking up topsoil and pouring it into the first truck bed. I got out of the car. “Look at that!” said Gordon. “You know that crazy intersection up by Fox Mountain where they used to have that three-lane highway and they made it four-lane with the median, but regular intersections? Terrible stretch of highway. People killed there all the time. Well, the state highway department called me and said they’re finally building a regular interchange, but it’s all clay soils up there and they want all this alluvial soil I’ve got here, so there it goes. They’ve been carting it away for two weeks.”

And they had made something of a dent in the hill, which now looked like a cliff, with the machines working away at its face. It was nice loose soil, full of tiny pebbles, not great loam or anything like that, but perfect for draining the highway. I said, “The township is letting you remove part of itself and send it to Fox Mountain?”

“The value of the whole property will be enhanced when it’s leveled off, and it will. And the state, you know, they want what they want. Otherwise, they’d have to go another hundred miles for the right gravel. I love it. Look at it! Those cows hardly even paid the taxes, but finally this place is coming into its own. It’s going to be flat as a pancake in another month or two.”

“Free money,” I said.

“Free money,” said Gordon.

A few days later, Marcus called me up and asked me to come over to the office. He wanted to have a meeting with all the partners.

“Who are all the partners? You mean me and Gordon?”

“And Jane.”

But when I got there, there was quite a crowd. Not only Gordon and me, but Bobby and someone I vaguely recognized but didn’t know from where. Marcus introduced me. “Hey. Joe. This is Mike Lovell. You know, Mike’s garage?”

I nodded. At that point, all I remembered about the February meeting (which had been succeeded by two more) was that it had been really cold. Marcus said, “We took out and replaced that tank at Mike’s garage last week.”

“I will never understand that bitch,” said Mike.

Marcus grinned at me and said soothingly to Mike, “Well, it’s done now.”

“Thanks to you,” said Mike. He sat down in Jane’s office and picked up a magazine. As we went into the conference room, Marcus whispered, “That guy is going to come in handy. He knows the township like the back of his hand.”

Marcus sat at the head of the table and motioned me to the foot. Gordon and Bobby sat to my right and Jane sat across from them. She was smiling as if something amused her. Marcus was in a good mood. He shut the door and said, “All right.”

It was a nice table, cherry or maybe a dark-stained hickory with a handsome grain in the wood, and stylish comfortable chairs. The carpet was a deep green plush with a white fleck in it. They had painted the walls cream above the chair rail and green below it, not unlike the hallways in the rest of the building. There were pictures. Jane looked rich, and Marcus did too. I wasn’t quite sure why Bobby was there—whether at the invitation of Gordon or of Marcus, or whether he had just barged in—but he ran his hand over the surface of the table and smiled appreciatively.

Marcus said, “Well, thanks for coming over. Jane and I were talking the other day, and we thought that since things are beginning to roll, we should stop doing things by rumor and gossip and start holding meetings and agreeing on things as a group. I had a moment of—oh, I don’t know, fear or just maybe anxiety the other day—when Bart over at the savings and loan told me he heard the golf course designer had designed a course up in Buffalo, New York, and I knew that wasn’t true. I’m sure he’s never been to Buffalo, and it wouldn’t matter if he had, but talk is talk.”

“Oh, that was me,” said Bobby. “Gordon said the guy had worked somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where, so when Bart asked me I said Buffalo because that was the first city that popped into my head.” He continued to smile.

Marcus’s smile flickered, but only for a moment. He said, “You know, this is something I was thinking about. We don’t really want a lot of extraneous information floating around. We need to all know the same things, but even more important than that, we need to all agree on what is to be divulged and what isn’t. With a development like this, especially with the sort of financing Jane and I are working on, even the tiniest thing can put off a potential investor or lender. Let’s say I wine-and-dine some guy until I’m full to the back teeth, and he hears the golf course designer is in the habit of designing courses in Buffalo and West Nowheresville. Then in comparison to someone whose designer is designing courses in Houston or Palm Springs, we don’t look serious. So I think the best thing is, if one of us doesn’t know the true answer to a question, he just refers that questioner to me, and I will answer.”

We all nodded. Seemed reasonable to me.

“Now,” said Marcus, with a look at Jane. “Joe can correct me, but it’s my understanding that the permit procedures are proceeding fairly deliberately, or even glacially, so this puts us in something of a bind.”

“No more slowly than I expected all along,” I said.

“I was more optimistic,” said Marcus. “I really was. I really thought we would be building by now, and we aren’t, so I think that it would be wise, Joe, if you closed up your business and came over here to work and just devoted all of your time to getting these things through. Potential investors have to know there’s a full-court press here.”

The group became very quiet. I wasn’t sure why. It was as if Marcus had said something embarrassing, but it didn’t embarrass me. I just laughed. I thought he was joking. “I can’t afford to do that, Marcus.”

“You can if I pay your bills. You just change all their addresses, send them to me, and I’ll pay them.”

“What bills?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Lights, heat, car payment, gas for the car. The partnership will just pay them, and then you can devote your time to getting all of this going. You’ve got some savings. You can pay your beer bill out of those.” He grinned. Maybe because this was such an unexpected idea, inserted into my brain without any preparation on my part, it rather blossomed there for a moment. I saw myself driving around the countryside, everything paid for, in some sense, everything free. No more getting and spending, which suddenly seemed tedious and repetitive to contemplate. I knew how to get projects moving, at least small projects, and there would be none of that conflict between doing my own business and doing Salt Key business that had come up from time to time—several times I had had to choose between showing a house and making appointments with one engineer or the other. If I did this, I would have no one to please but Marcus, and, as I knew, Marcus was easily pleased.

And, of course, no taxes to pay.

Jane said, “That’s ridiculous, Marcus. I told you you can’t ask that.” She looked at me. “Marcus was always terribly spoiled, you know. He would sit down at the table, and there would be eight pork chops for the dad and the mom and the six kids, and Marcus would look right at our mother and say, ‘Can I have two?’ and more often than not she’d say yes and give him hers! The rest of us considered him such a brat.”

I said, “Actually, it makes some sense. Not complete sense, but some sense.”

“This project isn’t a part-time job,” said Marcus. “You know, there’s always a point with every big project where the people doing the work have to make the commitment or not. This is what I do all day every day. It’s not like you’re going to do this, make millions of bucks—”

“Billions,” I said.

“And go back to being Joe Stratford Realty. I mean, is this a part-time job for everyone but me?”

I looked at Gordon. For Gordon, everything was a part-time job. Not putting all your eggs of any kind—financial eggs, job eggs, recreational eggs—in one basket was a life principle with him. And Gordon was looking at Marcus with a Gordonish look on his face, irritable but not resistant. It meant that he didn’t like the discussion, but he did agree with the point. I did too. I thought Jane was implying that we couldn’t really do this, couldn’t really do what it took to make this go. I thought this was a relic of Jane’s former corporate life, where the size of the company did a lot to carry you forward, so you could pay attention to the difference between your life and its life. But when you were starting something, you had to accept, and even to embrace, the fact that there was no difference between your life and it. That was the way it had been when I started out as a real estate broker. What about all the times I had gotten up from dinner with Sherry, or left a party, or even gotten out of bed to go show someone a house? All those times I had said, “If I want to get this going, I have to do what it takes.” Now I said, “I’ll think about it.” But I didn’t really mean that. What I meant was that I would exit my little company as gracefully as I could and do what had to be done. Marcus cocked his head and cleared his throat. He was satisfied. I knew he knew exactly what I meant.

Bobby, who had been quiet, said, “What about me? Are you going to pay my bills too?”

Marcus turned to him. “How much did you clear last year after taxes?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should know.”

“I could figure it out.”

“Why don’t you? You’re almost thirty years old, Bobby. It’s time you got it together and grew up, and the first step in that direction is sorting out your financial situation instead of coasting along hoping your dad will give you a new car and find you something to do and talk your girlfriend into marrying you. You could start by calling yourself Bob.”

Bobby said, in a deep voice, “Hey,
Bob
!”

“I’m not kidding. You talk too much. You don’t take responsibility for yourself in any way. You act like a baby. You don’t take care of anything, and you require lots of care. You’re a hindrance rather than a help. You don’t have to break this and sprain that and come down with the other thing. You don’t have to live like you do.”

Jane said, “Good Lord, Marcus!”

“If no one else is going to do you a favor and furnish you with a good swift kick in the ass, I will. The others care about you, but not enough to show you how to be a man. I care about the partnership and the project, and I care about it enough to care about what
you’re
doing. You can’t be fired, so you’ve got to be fixed. So get your financial stuff together and bring it over here tomorrow and we’ll start there.” He spoke energetically, even indignantly, but it was more like he had to do it than that he really felt something. Bobby looked startled but, let’s say, invigorated. He nodded.

Jane said to Marcus, “May I speak with you out in the hall, just for a moment?”

He replied, in a congenial tone of voice, I thought, “Not right now.” Then he took a deep breath and looked around the table. “It isn’t comfortable for me to talk like this. You know”—he looked at Gordon—“maybe I rely more than I should on charm and indirection and I suppose what you, Gordon, would call a good line of bullshit. But I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little scared right now because I’ve quit my other job, the one that brought me here in the first place, and my wife doesn’t have a job other than the house and the kids, and I’m a little overextended.” He looked at me. “I didn’t tell you that a branch came down on the roof a couple of weeks ago and made a hole and guess what? We can’t afford to have it fixed.”