The Lay of the Land (41 page)

These days, I do my best to upgrade the ten chalets I own, plus all the ones I can talk my owners into sprucing up. Occasionally I let a struggling writer in need of quiet space to finish his
Moby-Dick,
or some poor frail in retirement from love, stay through the winter in return for indoor repairs (these guests never stay long due to the very seclusion they think they want). Looked at differently, these chalets would be a perfect place for a homicide.

Three Honduran fix-up crews (all legal, all my employees) are at work as I drive down Cormorant Court. From the roof of #11, one of these men (José, Pepe, Esteban—I’m not sure which), suited up in knee pads and roped to a standpipe, replacing shingles, rises to his feet on the steep green asphalt roof-pitch and into the clean, cold November sky, leans crazily against his restraint line and performs a sweeping hats-off Walter Raleigh-type bow right out into space, a big
amigo
grin on his wispy-mustachioed face. I give back an embarrassed wave, since I’m not comfortable being
Don Francisco
to my employees. The other workers break into laughing and jeering calls that he (or I) is a
puta
and beneath contempt.

C
lare Suddruth is already out front of the fancy beach house he thinks he might like to buy. Surf Road is a sandy lane starting at the ocean end of Cormorant Court and running south a quarter-mile. If it were extended, which it never will be due to the same shoreline ordinances that infuriate the Feensters, it would run into and become Poincinet Road a mile farther on.

Clare stands hands-in-pockets in the brisk autumn breeze. He’s dressed in a short zippered khaki work jacket and khaki trousers that announce his station as a working stiff who’s made good in a rough-and-tumble world. The house Clare’s interested in is—in design and residential spirit—not so different from my own and was built during the blue-sky development era of the late seventies, before laws got serious and curtailed construction, driving prices into deep space. In my personal view, 61 Surf Road is not the house a man like Clare should think of, so of course he
is
thinking of it—a lesson we realtors ignore at our peril. Number 61 is a mostly-vertical, isosceles-angled, many-windowed, many sky-lighted, grayed redwood post-and-beam, with older solar panels and inside an open plan of not two, not three, but six separate “living levels,” representing the architect’s concern for interior diversity and cheap spatial mystery. More than it’s right for Clare, it’s perfect for a young sitcom writer with discretionary scratch and who wants to work from home. Asking’s a million nine.

How the house “shows,” and what the client sees from the curb—if there was a curb—are only two mute, segmented, retractable brown garage doors facing the road, two skimpy windows on the “back,” and an unlocatable front door, through which you go right up to a “great room” where the good life commences. I don’t much like the place since it broadcasts bland domiciliary arrogance, typical of the period. The house either has no front because no one’s welcome; or else because everything important faces the sea and it’s not your house anyway, why should you be interested?

Clare’s a tall, bony, loose-kneed sixty-five-year-old, a bristle-haired Gyrine Viet vet with a thin, tanned jawline, creased Clint Eastwood features and the seductive voice of a late-night jazz DJ. In my view, he’d be more at home in a built-out Greek revival or a rambling California split-level. “Thornton Wilders,” we call these in our trade, and we don’t have any down here. Spring Lake and Brielle are your tickets for that dream.

But Clare’s recent life’s saga—I’ve heard all about it—has led him down new paths in search of new objectives. In that way, he is much like me.

Clare’s standing beside my Realty-Wise sign—red block letters on a white field plus the phone number, no www, no virtual tours, no talking houses, just reliable people leading other people toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness. Clare turns and faces the house as I drive up, as if to allow that he’s been waiting but time doesn’t mean much to him. He’s driven down in one of his company’s silver panel trucks, which sits in the driveway,
ONLY CONNECT WELDING
painted in flowing blue script. His schoolteacher wife dreamed it up, Clare told me. “Something out of a book.” Though Clare’s no mutton-fisted underachiever who married up. He won a Silver Star with a gallantry garnish in Nam, came out a major and did the EE route at Stevens Tech. He and Estelle bought a house and had two quick kids in the seventies, while Clare was on the upward track with Raytheon. But then out of the blue, he decided the laddered life was a rat-race and took over his dad’s welding business in Troy Hills and changed its name to something he and Estelle liked. Clare’s what we call a “senior boomer,” someone who’s done the course creditably, set aside substantial savings, gotten his kids set up at a safe distance, experienced appreciation in the dollar value of his family home (mortgage retired), and now wants a nicer life before he gets too decrepit to take out the garbage. What these clients generally decide to buy varies from a freestanding condo (we have few in Sea-Clift), to a weekend home near the water (these we have aplenty), to a “houseboat on the Seine”—aka something you park at a marina. Or else they choose a real honest-to-God house like this one Clare’s staring up at: Turn the key, dial up the Jacuzzi. The owners, the Doolittles—currently in Boca Grande—detected the tech-market slowdown in September, were ready to shift assets into municipals and conceivably gold and are just waiting to back their money out. So far, no takers.

The other characteristic on Clare’s buyer’s profile is that three years ago—by his own candid recounting (as usual)—he fell in love with somebody who wasn’t exactly his wife, but was, in fact, a fresh hire at the welding company—someone named Bitsy or Betsy or Bootsy. Not surprisingly, big domestic disruptions followed. The kids chose sides. Several loyal employees quit in disgust when “things” came out in the open. Welding damn near ceased. Clare and Estelle acted civilly (“She was the easy part”). A sad divorce ensued. A marriage to the younger Bitsy, Betsy, Bootsy hastily followed—a new life that never felt right from the instant they got to St. Lucia. A semi-turbulent year passed. A young wife grew restive—“Just like the goddamn
Eagles
song,” Clare said. Betsy/Bitsy cut off all her hair, threw her nice new clothes away, decided to go back to school, figured out she wanted to become an archaeologist and study Meso-American something or other. Somehow she’d discovered she was brilliant, got herself admitted to the University of Chicago and left New Jersey with the intention of morphing her and Clare’s spring-fall union into something rare, adaptable, unusual and modern—that he could pay for.

Only, at the end of year one, Estelle learned she had multiple sclerosis (she’d moved to Port Jervis to her sister’s), news that galvanized Clare into seeing the fog lift, regaining his senses, divorcing his young student wife. (“A big check gets written, but who cares?”) He moved Estelle back down to Parsippany and began devoting every resource and minute to her and her happiness, stunned that he’d never fully realized how lucky he was just to know someone like her. And with time now precious, there was none of it he cared to dick around with. (As heartening and
sui generis
as Clare’s story sounds, in the real estate profession it’s not that unusual.)

Which is when Sea-Clift came into play, since Estelle had vacationed here as a child and always adored it and hoped…. Nothing now was too good for her. Plus, in Clare’s estimation our little townlette was probably a place the two of them would die in before the world fucked it up. (He may be wrong.) I’ve driven him past thirty houses in three weeks. Many seemed “interesting and possible.” Most didn’t. Number 61 was the only one that halfway caught his fancy, since the inside was already fitted with a nursing home’s worth of shiny disabled apparatus, including—despite all the levels—a mahogany side-stair elevator for the coming dark days of disambulation. Clare told me that if he likes it when he sees it, he’ll buy it as is and give it to Estelle—who’s currently holding her own, with intermittent symptoms—as a one-year re-wedding/Thanksgiving present. It makes a pretty story.

“D
ry as my Uncle Chester’s bones out here, Frank,” Clare says in his parched but sonorous voice, extending me a leathery hand. Clare has the odd habit of giving me his left hand to shake. Something about severed tendons from a “helo” crash causing acute pain, etc., etc. I always feel awkward about which hand to extend, but it’s over fast. Though he has a vise grip even with his “off” hand, which fires up my own Bob Butts injuries from last night.

Clare produces his steady, eyes-creased smile that projects impersonal pleasure, then crosses his arms and turns to look again at 61 Surf Road. I’m about to say—but don’t—that the worst droughts are the ones where we occasionally get a little rain, like yesterday, so that nobody really takes the whole drought idea seriously, then you end up ignoring the aquifer until disaster looms. But Clare’s thinking about this house, which is a good sign. The color listing brochure I’m holding is ready to be proffered before we go in.

Down Surf Road (like my road, there are only five houses), a bearded young man in yellow rubber coveralls is scrubbing the sides of a white fiberglass fishing boat that’s up on a trailer, using an extended aluminum hose brush—a blue
BUSH-CHENEY
sign stuck up in his weedy little yard. From back up Cormorant Court I hear the sharp
shree-scree
of a saber saw whanging through board filaments, followed by the satisfying bops of hammers hitting nails in rapid succession. My unexpected
jefe
presence has set my Hondurans into motion. Though it’s only a game. Soon they’ll be climbing down for their pre-lunch marijuana break, after which the day will go quickly.

The cold seaside air out here has a fishy and piney sniff to it, which feels hopeful in spite of the unpredictable November sky. My Thanksgiving worries have now scattered like seabirds. A squad of pigeons wheels above, as far beyond a jet contrail—high, high, high—heads out to sea toward Europe. I am rightly placed here, doing the thing I apparently do best—grounded, my duties conferring a pleasant, self-actualizing invisibility—the self as perfect
instrument.

“Frank, tell me what this house’ll bring in a summer?” Clare’s mind is clicking merits-demerits.

I assume he’s talking about rent and not a quick flip. “Three thousand a week. Maybe more.”

He furrows his brow, puts a hand to his chin and rests it there—the standard gesture of contemplation, familiar to General MacArthur and Jack Benny. It is both grave and comical. Clearly it is Clare’s practiced look of public seriousness. My instant guess is we’ll never see inside #61. When clients are motivated, they don’t stand out in the road talking about the house as if it’d be a good idea to tear it down. When clients are motivated, they can’t wait to get in the door and start liking everything. I’m, of course, often wrong.

“Boy, oh boy.” Clare shakes his head over modernity. “Three G’s.”

“Pays your taxes and then some,” I say, breeze waffling my listing brochure and stiffening my digits.

“So who all’s moving down to Sea-Clift now, Frank?” More standing, more staring. This is not a new question.

“Pretty much it’s a mix, Clare,” I say. “People driven out of the Hamptons. And there’s some straight-out investment beginning. Our floor hasn’t risen as fast as the rest of the Shore. No big springboard sales yet. Topping wars haven’t gotten this far down. It’s still a one-dimensional market. That’ll change, even with rates starting to creep. A really good eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house is already hard to find.” I take a glance at my sheet, as if all this crucial data’s printed there and he should read it. I’m guessing coded chalk talk will appeal to Clare-the-small-businessman, make him think I’m not trying very hard to sell him the Doolittles’ house, but am just his reliable resource for relevant factual info to make the world seem less a sinking miasma. Which isn’t wrong.

“I guess they’re not making any more ocean-front, are they?”

“If they could, they would.” In fact, I know people who’d love to try: interests who’d like to “reclaim” Barnegat Bay and turn it into a Miracle Mile or a racino. “Fifty percent of us already live within fifty miles of the ocean, Clare. Ocean County’s the St. Petersburg of the East.”

“How’s
your
business, Frank?” We’re side-by-side—me a half step behind—staring at silent multi-this, multi-that #61.

“Good, Clare. It’s good. Real estate’s always good by the ocean. Inventory’s my problem. If I had a house like this every day, I’d be richer than I am.”

Clare at this instant lets go a small, barely audible (but audible) fart, the sound of a strangled birdcall from offstage. It startles me, and I can’t help staring at its apparent point of departure, the seat of Clare’s khakis, as if blue smoke might appear. It’s the ex-Marine in Clare that makes such nonchalant emissions unremarkable (to him), while letting others know how intransigent a man he is and would be—in a love affair, in a business deal, in a divorce or a war. Possibly my reference to being rich forced an involuntary disparaging gesture from his insides.

“Tell me this now, Frank.” Clare’s stuffed both hands in his khaki side pockets. He’s wearing brown-and-beige tu-tone suede leisure sneakers of the sort you buy at shoe outlets or off the sale rack at big-box stores and that look comfortable as all get out, though I’d never buy a pair, because they’re what
doozies
wear (our old term from Lonesome Pines), or else men who don’t care if they look like doozies. The Clint Eastwood look has a bit of doozie in it. Old Clint might wear a pair himself, so uncaring would he be of the world’s opinion. “What kind of climate have we got, I mean for buying a house?”

I hear my workers up Cormorant Court begin laughing and their hammering come to a halt.
“¡Hom-bre!”
I hear a falsetto voice shout.
“Qué flaco y feo.”
One needn’t wonder. Something involving somebody’s “chilé.”