The Lay of the Land (40 page)

“What’s wrong with Jill?” I say.

“Way-ell.” Clarissa casts an eyebrows-raised look of appraisal up at me. She can’t see well without her contacts.

Thom suddenly snaps to, grins, showing huge incisors, blinks his eyes and says, “What? Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

“Did he tell you she only has one hand? I mean she’s perfectly okay. They probably love each other. But yeah. It’s fine, of course. It’s not a problem.”

“One hand?” I say.

“The left one.” Clarissa bites the corner of her mouth. “I mean she’s right-handed, so to speak.”

“Where’d it go?” I have both of mine. Everybody I know has both of theirs. I of course know people suffer such things—all the time. It shouldn’t be a shock that Paul romances a girl with only one arm. But it is. (Never wonder what else can happen next. Much can.)

“We didn’t get into it.” Clarissa shakes her head, her foot still tucked away in plain sight into Thom’s man department. “I guess they met on-line. But she actually works where he works, whatever that’s called. The card company.” (She knows what it’s called.)

I say, “Maybe she works in the sympathy-card department.”

Clarissa smiles an unfriendly smile and gives me one of her long looks that means everything I say is wrong. “A lot of people who write sympathy cards have disabilities themselves. She did tell us that—apropos of nothing. They didn’t stick around that long. I think he wants to surprise you.” She prisses her lips and goes back to her Orvis catalog.

Clarissa, who’s my only earthly ally, if provoked in front of Thom, will jump to Paul’s and one-arm Jill’s defense for anything inappropriate in my body language, facial expression, much less my word-of-mouth. Never mind that she thinks it’s all the strangest of strange. Paul may have hired an actor to bring home just to drive us all crazy. It’s in his realm. Otto in a skirt.

“They said they were going to ‘pick up a motel room.’” Clarissa’s very businessy-sarcastic now because she wants to be—but I can’t be. “They’re going to Ann’s for dinner.” (First names only here.) I don’t want to tell her I’ve invited Ann for Thanksgiving and hear from her what an insanely bad idea it is. “Surprises all around. She’ll flip.” Clarissa executes a perfectly glorious smile that says, I wish I could be there.

Words, I find, are not in full abundance. “Okay,” I say.

“
We’re
going to Atlantic City, by the way.” She extends a hand over onto velvety Thom’s singleted shoulder and rolls her eyes upward (in mockery). Thom seems confused—that so much could go on in one family in so short a period of time without any of it being about him. “We’ll be back in the morning.” More woogling, this time at Trump’s. “I’m going to try my luck at roulette.” She pats Thom’s tawny, muscular thigh right where the shark took its nip or where he rappelled down the face of Mount whatever. Maybe they’ll see the Calderons at the free high-roller buffet.

“Then I think I’ll just go off and try to sell a house.” I grin insincerely.

“Okay now, is that what you do?” Thom blinks at me. The widely separated corners of his mouth flicker with a smile that may be amused or may be amazed but is not interested.

“Pretty much.”

“Great. Do you do commercial or just houses?” His smile’s tending toward being amused. I’m sure his father did commercial in Rio and printed his own currency.

“Mostly residential,” I say. “I can always use a mid-career salesman, if you’re interested. I have a Tibetan monk working for me right now who’s maybe going to leave. You’d have to take the state test, and I get half of everything. I’d put you on salary for six months. You’d probably do great.”

Amazement. His teeth are truly enormous and white and unafflicted by worry. He likes flashing them as proof of invulnerability.

“I’ve got my hands pretty full at the Down’s center,” he says, smiling self-beknightedly.

“Do those little devils really stay on a horse without being wired on?”

“You bet they do,” Thom says.

“Does riding horses cure Down’s syndrome?”

“There isn’t any
cure.
” Clarissa smacks shut her Orvis catalog and retracts her heels from Thom’s scrotal zone. It’s time to go. This is her house, too, she wants me to understand—though it isn’t. It’s mine. “You know it doesn’t cure Down’s syndrome, you cluck.” She starts gathering dishes and ferrying them noisily to the sink. “You should come over and volunteer, Frank. They’ll let you ride a pony if you want to. No wires.” Her back is to me. Thom’s gazing at me wondrously, as if to say, Yep, you’re getting a good scolding now, I’m sorry it has to happen, but it does.

“Great,” I say jovially, and give Thom a chummy grin that says we men are always in the line of female fire. I pop the spindled listing sheets in my palm—three times for emphasis. “You kids have yourselves some fun pissing Thom’s money away.”

“Yeah, we will,” Clarissa says from the sink. “We’ll think of you. Paul has a time capsule with him. I almost forgot. He wants us to put something in it and bury it someplace.” She’s smirking as she rinses cups and doesn’t turn around. Though this occasions a troubled look from Thom, as if Paul’s a sad soul who’s made all our lives one endless hell on earth.

“That’ll be great,” I say.

Clarissa says, “What’re you going to put in it?”

“I’ll have to think. Maybe I’ll put in my Michigan diploma, with a listing sheet. ‘Once there was a time when people lived in things called houses—or in their parents’ houses.’ You can put your old—”

“I’ll think about me,” Clarissa says. She knows what I was about to suggest. Her nose stud.

I consider confessing that I’ve invited her mother for Thanksgiving—just to discourage Thom from coming. But I’m late and don’t have time for an argument. “Don’t forget you’re the acting lady of the house tomorrow. I’m depending on you to be a gracious hostess.”

“Who’s the husband?”

“I hope you sell a house,” Thom says. “Is that what you want to do? My dad was in real estate. He sold big office buildings. He—” I’m on my way to the front door and miss the rest.

9

Up again, old heart. Everything good is on the highway. In this instance, New Jersey Route 35, the wide mercantile pike up Barnegat Neck, whose distinct little beach municipalities—Sea-Clift, Seaside Park, Seaside Heights, Ortley Beach—pass my window, indistinguishable. For practical-legal reasons, each boro has its separate tax collector, deeds registry, zoning board, police, fire, etc., and local patriots defend the separate characters as if Bay Head was Norway and Lavallette was France. Though I, a relative newcomer (eight years), experience these beach townlettes as one long, good place-by-an-ocean and sell houses gainfully in each. And particularly on this cold, clearing morning when it’s reassuring as a fifties memory all up the Shore, I thank my lucky stars for landing me where they did.

Christmas decorations are going up in the morning sunshine. The streets crew is stringing red-and-green plastic bunting to the intersection wires, and swagging the firemen’s memorial at Boro Hall. Candy-cane soldiers have appeared on the median strip, and a crèche with bearded, more authentic burnoose-clad Semites is now up on the lawn of Our Lady of Effectual Mercy. No revolving lights are in place. A banner announcing a Cadillac raffle and a Las Vegas Night stands on the lawn by the announcements case offering
CONFESSIONS ANYTIME
.

In Frederick Schruer’s
History of Garden State Development: A Portrait in Contrasts, Conflicts and Chaos
(Rutgers, 1984), Sea-Clift is favorably referred to as the “Classic New Jersey Shore Townlette.” Which means that owing to the beach and the crowds, we’re not a true suburb, though there’re plenty of pastel split-levels on streets named Poseidon, Oceania and Pelagic. Neither are we exactly a fishing village, though flounder fishermen and day charters leave from the bay-side wharf. We’re also not exactly a resort town, since most of the year tourists are gone and the steel Fun Pier’s ancient and the rides closed for being life-threatening. There’s not even that much to do in summer except float along in the crowds, hang out in the motel or on the beach, eat, drink, rent a boogie board or stare off.

There
is
a mix, which has encouraged a positivist small-businessman spirit that’s good for real estate. The 2,263 year-rounders (many are south Italians with enormous families) run things, own most of the businesses, staff the traffic court, police and fire—which makes Sea-Clift more like Secaucus than the ritzier enclaves north of us. Our town fathers long ago understood that xenophobia, while natural to the species, will get you broke quick in a beach town, and so have fostered a not so much
“Mia casa é tua casa”
spirit as a more level-headed “Your vacation is my financial viability” expedience, which draws eight jillion tourists to our summer streets, plus a stream of new semi-affluent buy-ins from Perth Amboy and Metuchen, all of it spiced with Filipinos, Somalians and hard-working Hondurans (who come for the schools) to brew up a tranquil towny heterogeneity that looks modern on paper without feeling much different from the way things have always felt.

For me, transacting the business of getting people situated under roofs and into bearable mortgages and out again, Sea-Clift couldn’t be a better place—real estate being one of our few year-round business incubators. People are happy to see my face, know that I’m thriving and will be there when the time comes, but still don’t have to have me to dinner. In that way, I’m a lot like a funeral home.

V
ery little’s abuzz and about today in spite of Thanksgiving being tomorrow. A few home owners down the residential streets are employed in pre-holiday cleanup, getting on ladders, opening the crawl space for termite checks, putting up storms, spooling hoses, closing off spigots, winterizing the furnace. In a town where everybody comes in the summer, now’s when many year-rounders take their three-day trips—to Niagara and the Vietnam Memorial—since the town’s theirs and empty and can be abandoned without a worry. Which doesn’t make
now
a bad selling season, since niche buyers come down when the throngs are gone, armed with intent and real money to spend.

Of course, now’s when any prudent newcomer—a software kingpin with new development dollars—would notice all that we
don’t
offer: any buildings of historical significance (there are no large buildings at all); no birthplaces of famous inventors, astronauts or crooners. No Olmsted parks. No fall foliage season, no sister city in Italy or even Germany. No bookstores except one dirty one. Mark Twain, Helen Keller or Edmund Wilson never said or did anything memorable here. There’s no Martin Luther King Boulevard, no stations on the Underground Railroad (or any railroad) and no golden era anyone can recollect. This must be true for plenty of towns.

There is, however, little teen life, so car thefts and break-ins are rare. You can smoke in our restaurants (when they’re open). The Gulf Stream moderates our climate. Our drinking water’s vaguely salty, but you get used to it. We were never a temperance town, so you can always find a cocktail. College Board scores match the state average. Two Miss Teenage New Jerseys (’41 and ’75) hail from here. We stage an interesting Frank Sinatra impersonator contest in the spring. Our town boundary abuts a state park. Cable’s good. And for better or worse, the hermit crab is our official town crustacean—though there’s disagreement over how large the proposed statue should be. You could also say that for a town founded by enterprising Main Line land speculators on the bedrock principles of buy low/sell high, we’ve exceeded our municipal mission with relatively few downsides. Since we’re bounded by ocean and bay, there’re few places where planning problems could ever arise. Water is our de facto open space plus a good population stabilizer. For a time, I sat on the Dollars For Doers Strike Council, but we never did much besides lower parking fines, pass a good-neighbor ordinance so tourists could reach the beach via private property, and give the Fun Pier a rehabilitation abatement the owners never used. Our development committee extended feelers to a culinary arts academy seeking growing room—though we didn’t have any. There was a citizen’s initiative for a new all-cement promenade, but it failed, and for establishing a dinosaur park, though we hadn’t had any dinosaurs and couldn’t legally claim one. Still, as old-timey, low-ceiling and down-market as Sea-Clift is, most people who live here like it that way, like it that we’re not a destination resort but are faithful to our original charter as a place an ordinary wage earner comes for three days, then beats it home again—a town with just a life, not a lifestyle.

I
make a stop by my office to pick up the Surf Road keys. Inside, it’s shadowy and dank, my and Mike’s desktops empty of important documents. Mike’s computer (I don’t own one) beams out his smiling picture of himself and the Dalai Lama, which coldly illuminates his Gipper portrait and his prayer flags on the wall. The office has a stinging balsam scent (mingled with a pizza odor through the wall) from the one time Mike burned incense in the john—which I put a stop to. The house keys, with white tags, are on the key rack. I have a quick piss in our bare-bones bathroom. Though when I come out, I see through the window that a car’s stopped out front by my Suburban, a tan Lincoln Town Car with garish gold trim and New York plates. Since it’s too early for a Chicago-style pizza, these are doubtless showcase shoppers eye-balling the house snapshots in the window. They’ll be scared off when they see me, sensing I might drag them in and bore them to death. But not today. I frown out at the car—I can’t see who’s inside, but no one climbs out—then I go back in the bathroom, close the door, stand and wait thirty seconds. And when I come out, as if by magic the space is empty, the Lincoln gone, the morning, or what’s left of it, returned to my uses.

T
he client for my Surf Road showing is a welding contractor down from Parsippany, Mr. Clare Suddruth, with whom I’ve already done critical real estate spadework the past three weeks, which means I’ve driven him around Sea-Clift, Ortley Beach, Seaside Heights, etc., on what I think of as a lay-of-the-land tour, during which the client gets to see everything for sale in his price range, endures no pressure from me, begins to think of me as his friend, since I’m spending all this time with nothing promised, comes after a while to gab about his life—his failures, treacheries, joys—lets me stand him some lunches, senses we’re cut out of the same rough fustian and share many core values (the economy, Vietnam, the need to buy American though the Japs build a better product, the Millennium non-event and how much we’d hate to be young now). We probably
don’t
agree about the current election hijacking, but probably
do
see eye-to-eye about what constitutes a good house and how most buyers are better off setting aside their original price targets in favor of stretching their pocketbooks, getting beyond the next dollar threshold—where the houses you
really
want are as plentiful as hoe handles—and doing a little temporary belt-tightening while the economy’s ebb and flow keeps your boat on course and steaming ahead.

If this seems like bait-and-switch hucksterism, or just old-fashioned grinning, bamboozling faithlessness, let me assure you it’s not. All any client ever has to say is, “All right, Bascombe, how you see this really isn’t how I see it. I want to stay
inside,
not outside, my price window, exactly like I said when I sat down at your desk.” If that’s your story, I’m ready to sell you what you want—if I have it. All the rest—the considered, heartfelt exchange of views, the finding of common ground, the beginning of true (if ephemeral) comradeship based on time spent inside a stuffy automobile—all
that
I’d do with the Terminix guy. A person has only to know his mind about things, which isn’t as usual as it seems. I view my role as residential agent as having a lay therapist’s fiduciary responsibility (not so different from being a Sponsor). And that responsibility is to leave the client better than I found him—or her. Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway. Most client contacts never even eventuate in a sale and, like most human exposures, end in one encounter. Which isn’t to say that the road
toward
a house sale is a road without benefit or issue. A couple of the best friends I’ve made in the real estate business are people I never sold a house to and who, by the end of our time together, I didn’t
want
to sell a house to (though I still would’ve). It is another, if unheralded, version of the perfect real estate experience: Everyone does his part, but no house changes hands. If there weren’t, now and then, such positive outside-the-envelope transactions, I’d be the first to say the business wouldn’t be worth the time of day.

I
swing off Ocean Avenue at the closed-for-the-season Custom Condom Shoppe (“We build ’em to your specs”) and motor down toward the beach along the narrow gravel lane of facing, identical white and pastel summer “chalets,” of which there must be twenty in this row, with ten identical parallel lanes stacked neighborhood-like to the north and south, each named for a New Jersey shorebird—Sandpiper, Common Tern, Plover (I’m driving down Cormorant Court). Here is where most of our weekly renters—Memorial Day to Columbus Day—spend their happy family vacations, cheek-to-cheek with hundreds of other souls opting for the same little vernal joys. At several of these (all empty now), more pre-winter fix-up is humming along—hip roofs being patched, swollen screen doors planed, brick foundation piers regrouted after years of salt air. Three of these chalet developments lie in the Boro of Sea-Clift, where I own ten units and, with Mike’s help, manage thirty more. These summer chalets and their more primitive ancestors have been an attractive, affordable feature of beach life on south Barnegat Neck since the thirties. Five-hundred-square-foot interiors, two tiny bedrooms, a simple bath, beaverboard walls, a Pullman kitchen, no yard, grass, shrubbery, no AC or TV, electric wall heaters and stove, yard-sale decor, no parking except in front, no privacy from the next chalet ten feet away, crude plumbing, tinted, iron-rich water, occasional gas and sulfur fumes from an unspecified source—and you can’t drive vacationers away. A certain precinct in the American soul will put up with anything—other people’s screaming kids, exotic smells, unsavory neighbors, unsocialized pets, high rents (I get $750 a week), car traffic, foot traffic, unsound construction, yard seepage—just to
be
and be able to brag to the in-laws back in Parma that they were “a three-minute walk to the beach.” Which every unit is.

Of course, another civic point of view—the Dollars For Doers Strike Council—would love to see every chalet bulldozed and the three ten-acre parcels turned into an outlet mall or a parking structure. But complicated, restrictive covenants unique to Sea-Clift require every chalet owner to agree before the whole acreage can be transferred. And many owners are among our oldest Sea-Clift pioneers, who came as children and never forgot the fun they had and couldn’t wait to own a chalet, or six, themselves and start making their retirement nut off the renters—the people they had once been. Most of the people I manage for are absentees, the sons and daughters of those pioneers, and now live in Connecticut and Michigan and would pawn their MBA’s before they’d sign away “Dad’s cottage.” (None of them, of course, would spend two minutes inside any of these sad little shanties themselves, which is when I get in the picture, and am happy to be.)