Good Faith (38 page)

It wasn’t until dinner was over, right through the coffee and the After Eight mints, and Norton and Hank and Gordon and I were sitting at one end of the table, next to an open window, having a smoke and gazing down upon the frozen pond and the piled-up, covered lawn chairs that the mood changed. As usual, the changer of the mood was Norton, who said, “I’m telling you, Gordon, now is not the time to be plowing a lot of money into high-end residential property. You look where I am. Now, my area has generations of history as a luxury destination. Ups and downs, maybe, in terms of this group coming in and that group going away, but we got the shore, we got the roads, we got the entertainment infrastructure. A hundred and fifty years, and it’s a barometer. Some years, you can rent out a postage stamp for whatever price you want; other years you got to give away a mansion. Investment flows in and out, almost like the tide; that’s what I say. And when rents are up and money flows in—well, eighteen months down the road everybody’s rich, and when money flows out, eighteen months down the road everybody’s poor. It’s as simple as that. It’s flowing out. Take this summer. I had a place on the market all summer, not a bad place, my worst place but not a bad place taken all in all, and I thought, Norton, the canary is dying here. Everything else was rented, but that one place got me to thinking.”

“So you’re saying that eighteen months down the road—”

“Whatever you have, you won’t be able to give it away.”

Gordon, who was smoking a cigar, took it out of his mouth and looked at the tip.

I said, “But it’s a long-term thing. If there’s a long-term rise, there’re bound to be dips along the way. The vacation rental business always goes up and down. That’s like the car business. But real estate doesn’t lose value just because it isn’t producing income.”

Gordon looked at me.

“What I’m saying,” said Norton, “is that the tide is always high enough to make business in my area, because we’ve got the proximity. Where you-all have that farm, the tide is only high enough to make business once in a while. It’s in the boonies. That’s why those people bought it in the first place. Because they had places in New York and Paris and wherever, and they needed a place to get away.”

“Mind if I say something?” said Hank, who had moved his seat closer to the window and was not smoking.

“Go ahead,” said Gordon.

“Preserving wild spaces is where the thinking is now. The Nature Conservancy is very big and getting bigger.”

“What’s that?” said Gordon.

“It’s a nonprofit. They buy property and easements in wild areas or preservation areas, and they maintain the integrity of the area for future generations.”

“They don’t pay top dollar,” I said. “And Norton, even though of course you’re right in a lot of ways”—I hadn’t known Norton for twenty-five years without learning that if you disagreed with him you had to placate him—“I don’t think you’re reckoning on the population explosion and the way people want to have something special. Nobody wants to get on the train and go to the shore and stay in a boardinghouse anymore. They want to have a place. I mean, why would they? There’s no hassle like the hassle of having a house two or three hours away that you have to look after. I mean, do you really want to get in the car after every storm and drive to the shore and repair broken windows and water damage? No. But they do it. Why? Because shore property is limited and they aren’t making any more of it. Same with our clubhouse. Places like the farm are few and far between, beautiful and classy and not something you can buy into every day. I mean, whatever you say, Hank—and we’ve had this conversation before—what we’re doing
is
preservation, because say the farm went to this Nature Conservancy or whatever, or even the state. Are they really going to take care of it? Or won’t it kind of get dusty and old and damp pretty quick? And as soon as a place like that gets old-seeming and loses its feeling of warmth—well, people don’t want to go there and the whole thing deteriorates further.”

“It’s just too far away,” said Norton.

“Well, I beg to differ on that one too, because traffic makes a difference. Suppose you zip out of town and drive for three hours and go two hundred miles, so what? Or you crawl out of town and spend three hours in traffic and get fifty miles—and even when you’re there you’ve got cars and people everywhere. What’s more desirable?”

“It’s a gamble,” said Gordon.

I said, “Look at someplace like Pebble Beach, out in California, or one of those golf resorts in North Carolina. That’s our analogy, not the shore. The people we’re trying to attract want amenities, and we’re planning to give them what they want. A golf course, a swimming pool, a clubhouse restaurant, maybe even a riding center, right by the house. This is a place where people can live together in luxury in a beautiful spot.”

Norton kept shaking his head, and Gordon had gone back to inspecting the tip of his cigar. Norton said unpleasantly, “Look, Gordon. Why don’t you admit you’re in it with Burns up to your ass? This advantage, that advantage, so what? Are you really going to back out of a deal with a guy from the IRS? A guy from the IRS who
got you of
f
? At least be honest!”

But Gordon ignored this. After a few moments, he looked out the window and said, “You know, I’m not saying I haven’t had second thoughts, Norton. I’m not saying I haven’t had the feeling from time to time that we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, but every project is a gamble and the property has intrinsic value from its uniqueness.”

“That’s right,” I said, addressing myself to Norton more than anyone else. “Portsmouth Savings has had a tremendous amount of faith in the project. And they’re just giving money away.”

Gordon nodded. “I never asked for so much before, and they didn’t bat an eye. Most of the time, the savings and loan makes sure you know they’re doing you a favor when they make you a loan, but not this time, Norton, not this time. Bart and Crosbie both, they were hot to do it, hot to make this their baby. I remember thinking, They must know something we don’t know. My feeling is, if they could get this merger through, there would be even more dough lying around waiting to be put to good use. Bart keeps calling me and saying how these things take time and everything’s on track and all.”

“Well, Gordon, what does your famous gut tell you?” pressed Norton.

Gordon put the cigar back in his mouth and drew a long breath through it, lighting up the tip. Then he blew out the smoke. He said, “I’ll tell you what. My gut tells me something different every day. Your mother said she didn’t want to hear about it anymore for two days at least, so I guess that’s why
you’re
hearing about it.”

I said, “You’ve had big projects before, Gordon. You had that development up on the hill for fifteen years, and there was a time last year when I told you those higher-priced garden apartments wouldn’t go, and in the end they went like hot dogs at a picnic. Everything Marcus said was true turned out to be true. You said it yourself to me—people want to live like they do on TV.”

“But do they want to pay for it?” Norton was beginning to sound irritated.

“I think they do,” I said. “What else are they going to spend their money on? Real estate is still the—”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out,” said Norton, and he pushed back his chair and walked out of the room. On the way out, he muttered, “I give the fuck up.”

“Is he mad?” I asked. “We were just having a discussion.”

Gordon shrugged, then smiled at me. “That’s what I’ve always said about you, Joe.”

“What’s that?”

“You have a great ability to just keep negotiating. You keep coming back and coming back and you never get mad. It’s a rare quality.”

“I’m glad you’ve noticed.”

Hank said, “You can be very persistent.” Whereas Norton had walked out in a huff, Hank looked defeated. What had it been, a year since my time with Felicity? And I had found someone new and all, but I still resented his relationship to her. He stood up. “I wonder if Felicity ever showed up.”

“You concerned?” I said this cautiously.

Hank looked me right in the eye. After a moment, he said, “I don’t know. The other day I told Felicity that I didn’t understand her anymore, and then on my way to work I have to say I began to wonder whether I’ve ever understood her. I certainly don’t know what in the hell she’s after these days, and maybe I never knew what she was after. So, yes, I’m concerned, but I don’t know what to do about my concern, either.” Something Felicity had once said crossed my mind—that she felt like she was living in a frat house.

Gordon sighed. I felt a sense of alarm suddenly jolt awake. Felicity! This time last year I would have known everything about what was going on with Felicity. I took a deep breath and said very carefully, “I don’t know Felicity all that well, but she’s always struck me as someone who was able to take care of herself.”

“Really?” said Hank.

“Sure.” I glanced at Gordon to see if he was agreeing with me. He glanced back and gave a little shrug. “Maybe I’m wrong,” I said.

“I wish I knew,” said Hank. “I really wish I knew.” He turned and went out of the room.

Gordon said, “Well, if
he
doesn’t know, how are the rest of us to know? They
are
a strange pair, Joey, that’s for sure. Betty and I were talking the other night. Between you and me, we don’t know how we got these kids. We don’t know how any of the folks we know got the kids they got. It’s a mystery to me, that’s what I say.” He put his hands on his knees and stood up. Then he bent down and looked into my face. “What if you put the farm on the market right now?”

“I don’t know. I have to do some comps, look at sales in the last six months. I’m not that up to date right at this minute.”

“Well, let me know.”

I nodded. He turned away from me, but I said, “Hey, Gordon. You know, about Felicity. I’ve always thought she had a kind of ready-for-anything quality. I thought she got it from you.”

“Betty says she’s more like me than the boys are. I don’t know. There’s a lot of women’s lib around these days. Maybe that’s what Felicity needs.”

“Are you worried about her?”

“Nah. Well, yeah, in this sense. I used to not worry about anything. Something always turned up, for one thing. I began with luck and I went along being lucky, and I depended on going along being lucky. Then we bought that farm. I thought I was being lucky again. But when I think about old man Thorpe—well, he was never lucky. With all his money, when something had to go one way or another, chances were it went against him rather than for him, all the way to the end, to the way he died on Friday the thirteenth.”

“Well, the stringer from my fence didn’t impale him.”

Gordon laughed. “No, it didn’t. But the kind of luck I want is not the avoiding-disaster kind but the winning-the-jackpot kind.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Anyway, here’s hoping we didn’t buy into his bad luck, you know?”

“I know.”

“Let’s go see what the kids are doing.”

I went home late that night. Felicity never came back.

CHAPTER

27

G
OTTFRIED DIDN’T MIND
me coming over, especially since his two good houses were getting a lot of lookers, and the lookers were doing a lot of admiring. Over the week of Thanksgiving, four Realtors let me know I could expect to see offers on the one—the farmhouse-style with the huge kitchen—shortly after the holiday was over, and so on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving I called Gottfried and said, “Meet me at the Hopewell Road house at ten to one.” Of course I no longer had an office. And I didn’t have to have Gottfried along, but I wanted him to appreciate what I was doing for him.

When we got there, three cars were already parked across the street, and as I unlocked the front door, another pulled up. It was a beautiful sunny day, and even though the kitchen was heated only to fifty-five, solar gain made it warm, almost tropical.

At one, the doorbell rang.

Each of the four Realtors presented an offer. I thanked each one, said that we would get back to them in twenty-four hours, and closed the door. Gottfried and I went into the kitchen and laid the offers out on the kitchen counter. One was easy to throw out. The buyers’ financial statement showed it would be a stretch for them to qualify and they were borrowing part of the down payment from her parents. We set that aside.

I said, “Here’s one. Twenty thousand more than the asking price.”

“What do they want?” he asked suspiciously.

“Well, they’d like you to replace the refrigerator with a Sub-Zero.”

“What else?”

I read down the list of contingencies. Best to get the toughest one out of the way first. “They want you to build a wine cellar in the basement in the same style as the kitchen cabinetry.”

“Stupid. Get rid of it.” He put that one underneath the other one.

The last two, both for the full price, were almost identical. The buyers had plenty of money and qualified easily. Their contingencies were mostly about time and financing. One wanted a forty-five-day closing—after Christmas—and the other wanted to be sure he got a mortgage. I said, “We don’t have to respond until tomorrow. I expect I’ll be hearing from all four Realtors tonight, now that they’ve seen the competition.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t crack a smile.

“Aren’t you happy? Look how this is going! I’m going to have an offer on that other house pretty soon too.”

“I’m happy.”

“Then smile.”

“I’m not
that
happy.”

He meant it. He said, “We done here? I got to get back to the farm.” He left. Someday, I thought. Someday I will get used to him.

That evening, the four Realtors, who had of course seen one another, called me to sweeten the deals they were trying to make. By the end of the evening, Gottfried’s wife and I had accepted an offer for the house in question—fifteen-day closing, no mortgage contingency—and had generated tremendous enthusiasm in the breast of the losing buyer for the other house, a Queen Anne not unlike Marcus’s house but on a bigger lot. That buyer had seen the Queen Anne once. The next day he and his wife would be seeing it again. I expected I would be making a deal on that one within days. Closing on the first house meant over sixteen thousand in commission for me, before Christmas, and after I called Susan and then got into bed, I lay awake for a while, spinning a fantasy of short-term riches. There was, on the one hand, the future billion, but perhaps even more interesting than that, there was the immediate, say, fifty thousand. I could build a nice house for that in a spot that Susan would like, maybe on one of those south-facing hills near Roaring Falls, not so far from Deacon, up on high ground. Gottfried could build it.

In the morning, I got to work ten minutes early, and I went into the gold trader’s office, and there I found George Sloan, still with that permanent grin on his face, and I said, “Am I going to be priced out of the gold market by Christmas?”

“It goes up and down. I’ve made a bundle in the last week. But I’ve been tracking it pretty closely.” He shrugged.

“Well, I’m coming into a couple of unexpected commissions. Well, not unexpected, but unexpectedly early. I thought I might gamble a little.”

“I think that’s a good idea, Joe.”

“Don’t tell Marcus.”

“How come?”

“Well, I want to try this once without him breathing down my neck. If it works, I’ll tell him.”

“I’ve got you. Boy, if ever there was a guy with a theory, he’s the one. I sit here for hours, just listening to him.”

“What do you think?”

“About his theories?”

“Yeah.”

George looked at me, then said, “Shit, Joe, I haven’t got one hell of a clue!” We laughed. “But I do listen to him about any tax thing. I figure if he does it, it’s okay to do.”

“Don’t we all? But what’s your theory about the gold market?”

“I don’t have a theory. I do it by feel.”

“And that works?”

“Works so far. But I told you my rule. I define my stake ahead of time and then I put a certain percentage of my winnings away and never touch them.”

“I’ll call you when I get the money.”

“I’ll be here.”

That was Thursday. The next day, the buyers who had lost the first house of Gottfried’s made a good offer on the second house and Gottfried accepted it Saturday morning. They offered to close between Christmas and New Year’s. Gottfried said that was fine with him. Then he got off the phone and put his wife on, and I said, “Is he smiling yet?”

“Kind of.”

“This is the quickest we’ve ever sold any of his houses, and these are the most expensive.”

“You do a good job, Joe. I bet he doesn’t tell you that.”

I thanked her.

When I saw Susan over the weekend, I had a strong sense of having a delightful secret, and there was no repeat of the cocaine. We went for a walk on Saturday afternoon, then got a bite to eat and went to a movie, and somehow that evolved, and we were still together Sunday morning, reading the paper and making toast at my place, which was nothing at all like her place, and she said, “You keep telling me how sterile your condo is, Joe, but I find it soothing.”

“Bland.”

“I don’t judge it like that. It’s clean. It’s neat. The surfaces are clear. You know what my mother says? If you’re depressed, you should always clear the surfaces in your house and put things away, and then you’ll feel genuinely better.”

“What if that doesn’t work?”

“Then you do three small things that you’ve been putting off.”

“And then?”

“Well, then you pray.”

We laughed and went back to bed.

I took her home around dusk and drove back to my condo, thinking about what sort of dog we would have and how he would go out and about with me, lying on a blanket on the backseat.

Marcus was at my condo when I got home, peering at the numbered doorbells. He’d never been there before. When I pulled up, he turned on the headlights and waved to me, then came over and opened my car door. He said, “I was trying to call you all day.”

“You came all the way over here because I had the phone unplugged? I guess you’ve forgotten what it means to be single, huh?”

“That’s an understatement. Listen, what do you have stashed away?”

“What do you mean, like dope?” But I knew what he meant.

“No, not like dope. Say, do you remember that old question, is it better to have money and no dope or dope and no money?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, it was the great existential dilemma when I was in college.”

He seemed in high spirits. I said, “Come on up.”

When we got inside, he looked around, wandering from room to room for four or five minutes. I occupied myself by putting things away. He came out into the kitchen. He said, “So, you had a woman here last night.”

“Yes, Dad, I did. Is that why you came over?”

“No. Was it Susan?”

“Seemed like it.”

“Well, best not to progress too fast. But I’ve said all I have to say on that score.” He sat down on the couch. He still hadn’t taken off his coat. His demeanor changed. He rubbed his hands together for a moment, then looked at me. He said, “You know, Joe, I didn’t want to come to you, because I’ve honored your wish to keep a little separate from the project. I think that was a natural wish, and you’ve certainly worked hard—as hard as anyone, or harder, frankly. I said to Jane that your circumstances were a little different, but she’s been after me for weeks to talk to you. Last night, she said she was going to talk to you herself if I didn’t, so I figured I’d better get to it.”

“About—”

“About some bills we’ve got to pay. Those last engineer’s bills, for one thing, and some materials for Gottfried, and the last design fee for the golf course guy. I’ve put off the architect who did the drawings of the clubhouse.”

“I thought you paid all the engineer’s bills.”

“I thought I had, but another one came in, and Jane argued with him about it for two weeks, but they went all through everything, and yes we do owe him and he wants it before New Year’s.”

“How much?”

“Well, everything together comes to about ten.”

“Ten what?”

He smiled at my evasion. “Ten grand. Well, that covers everything, including this month’s rent for the office. I’m thinking the big check will be here by the first of the year, so it’s just a little year-end crunch.”

I said, “I can do ten grand.” Actually, I was surprised we had gone this far without him asking me.

“I’m glad, because no one else can. If this big check doesn’t come in, it’s going to be very hard to segue into February, let me put it that way. But what’s that saying? ‘Sufficient unto the day the evils thereof.’”

“What does that mean?”

“That means, if it doesn’t work out we’ll eat shit at the time.”

“How about my mortgage payment and all that stuff?”

“Well, you ought to pay that, actually. And whatever other bills you think are essential.”

“You know, Marcus, I have the feeling you’re giving me some bad news.”

“Not really. Nothing has changed, we’re just waiting and waiting. Things are always hard around the holidays.”

I said, “The squeeze will be over once spring rolls around.”

“Yeah. Did I tell you the article is coming out in the golf magazine in March?”

“That’s the key.”

“I think so too.”

He looked at me expectantly. Finally, I said, “Oh. I guess you want a check.”

“Well, yeah.”

I stood up and went over to my desk and wrote a check out to the company for ten thousand dollars. I handed it to him and he looked at it. I said, “Thousands in, billions out.” He laughed. Only then did he stand up and take off his coat, which he draped neatly over the arm of the couch. He sat down again, put the folded check in his breast pocket. He leaned back and put his hands behind his head. He sighed. I couldn’t tell if he was relaxing or worrying. I sat down again without offering him a beer. I only had one in the fridge, and I was saving that for myself. He said, “You know, it about kills me to ask you for money.”

“Why is that? I’m a partner.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve been pretty straightforward with everyone else.”

“I have—I
was,
maybe is what I should say. I’m not quite as sure of myself now, so I can’t summon up the same self-righteous attitude.”

“That’s interesting, Marcus, because from my perspective, things are progressing and we’re getting closer and closer to actually turning up some buyers.”

“I know that.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Probably marriage.”

“How so?”

“Imagine this. Every night you go to sleep, and a couple of hours later you wake up, and right next to you in bed someone is sighing and muttering. So you lie there quietly. You can feel her shaking her head, then lying quietly, then there’s a little sigh, then there’s a sniff. Then her head turns, and she looks at you for a long moment; then she sighs and lies flat on her back.”

“Yeah, I can imagine that.”

“Well, I can read her mind. This is what she’s thinking. ‘Oh, God. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve got to get this out of my mind. I believe Marcus, but what if Marcus is wrong? He’s been wrong before. He’s been wrong more times than he’s been right, hasn’t he? Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no. Of course, there were reasons why things didn’t go the way he said they would. I’ve got to forget this and go to sleep. Is he awake? No, I don’t think so. I hope not. If he were awake, we would talk about this for the millionth time, and that wouldn’t do any good. You just can’t predict the future. Everyone knows that. I don’t know if I can stand this.’ So eventually she goes back to sleep. But then, in the morning, when the children are getting dressed for school, she says quietly to me, ‘What’s the plan for today?’ as if I’m going to tell her something the children shouldn’t hear. The plan for the day is the same as every other day—to get on with it. But she wants there to be a breakthrough, some event that will make her feel safe, except that nothing makes her feel safe.”

“My mother is kind of like that.”

“Is she? Anyway, for the last week, she’s been saying, oh, so respectfully and casually, that maybe she would like to get a job. She misses teaching. But I know it’s not about that. She didn’t like teaching very much and was glad to stop. She thought she was going to write children’s books. That was the plan when we moved here. She set up that fourth bedroom as a study so she could write a series of young adult mysteries. But she hardly goes in there. Anyway, it isn’t about missing teaching, it’s about putting her finger in the dike.” He sighed. “The worst thing is, Justin is taking her mood. He’s sensitive, you know. You saw that, I’m sure. And even though she doesn’t talk about it in front of the kids, Justin understands that she’s on edge. Actually, I think for him not talking about it is worse, because he knows something’s going on, but no one tells him how big it is. Or isn’t.” He got up and walked around the room, stopping for a moment to look at an old picture I had of woman with her hand in a muff. “So, he thinks it’s really big and getting bigger.”

“So talk to him about it.”