Good Faith (3 page)

“Just a come-on. It popped into my mind.”

“Pure genius.” She smiled.

She put the burgers on a couple of plates, arranging the vegetables in neat rings, looked in the pantry and found some potato chips, did it all efficiently and gracefully.

I said teasingly, “Thanks for the burgers, Mom,” and put my arm around her. What I was really doing was getting inside that force field of honest pleasure again. Then Felicity got up, went over to the cupboard, and rummaged around. She came back with Tabasco sauce, sprinkled it all over her burger, and set it down. “Want some?”

“I don’t need any of my own. I can feel yours inside my nose.”

“Those Tabasco-sauce people own something called a salt dome.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s a geological formation where there’s a big pool of oil deep in the ground, then there’s a cap of salt over it. You can extract both, I guess. Tabasco sauce is just a sideline business with them. Their real fortune is in oil. Daddy always said that if any of us ever ran into a McIlhenny, marry him or her quick. But we didn’t.” She finished her burger, not without looking at it appreciatively, then ate her chips, licked her fingers, and sat back. Now was the moment to ask her what we were doing, what it meant, what she thought about it, what was next. Instead, I ate my own hamburger. I was not entirely motivated by uneasiness, or fatigue, or even indecision. Right in there with those heavy hesitant feelings was something lighter and more expansive. Along with my knowledge of all the things that could go wrong here, there was a caroling inner voice that kept repeating, What could possibly go wrong?

I cleaned up the plates, and we went back to bed. It was bright day when we woke up. While I was rolling over, just beginning to appreciate the sunshine, Felicity bounded out of bed, pushing her hair out of her face. She was smiling and stretching, saying, “Oh, Joey, that was nice. Thank you. I feel much better,” and I was wondering in what way she had felt bad, and then she took a big deep breath, sat on the bed, kissed me in a sisterly way on the cheek, and said, “I have a million things to do before Hank gets home.” I was listening for any sign in her voice of fear or regret, but there was none. She got into her clothes. She was very boyish in her way, casual but confident about putting on this and stepping into that. She had slim hips, a small potbelly, and small breasts, long arms and a long neck. Her body was sexy in the same way that the whole experience had been sexy—a fluid combination of maternal, girlish, and boyish, not like anything I’d known before.

I said, “You know, Felicity, this sounds strange, but I think you’re the only mother I’ve ever slept with. Some of them went on to be mothers, of course.”

“We’ll have to talk about that sometime, Joey. That’s a very bad sign with regard to your level of maturity.”

“Do you think so?”

She kissed me again. “No. Good-bye. I’m leaving.” On the way out the door, she said, “By the way, Daddy seems to have solved that tax problem he’s been having. Thank you thank you.” She blew me a kiss and was out the door.

CHAPTER

3

O
N MONDAY,
Bobby presented me with an offer from Marcus Burns for Gottfried Nuelle’s most expensive house. It was a full-price offer, but there was one contingency: that Gottfried would fence the road frontage with something appealing, like split rails. It was a smart contingency. The property would look better for it. If Gottfried had done it in the first place, the house might have sold more quickly and for more money. But it was a contingency that would drive Gottfried crazy, implying, in his view, that the property was less than perfect. When I went over to Maple Glen to present the offer, I was careful. I clapped him on the back. I was extremely enthusiastic. I exclaimed that it was a full-price offer with an early closing, only one small contingency.

Gottfried, who was feeding electrical wire into a hole while someone two rooms away pulled it, shouted, “Stop! Wait a minute! Now.” He looked at me for the first time. “What contingency?”

“Split-rail fence along the road frontage.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then shouted, “Dale! Get in here!”

Dale, the young kid who did all the moldings, entered from the kitchen. Gottfried said, “That Maple Glen Road house. Split-rail fencing along the road.”

Dale shook his head.

“No,” said Gottfried.

Dale went out of the room.

I said, “What do you mean, no?”

“No split-rail fencing. It’s an aesthetic abomination.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s a Queen Anne. Now, in this part of the country, the vogue for Queen Anne houses was in the late Victorian period, say 1890s. You didn’t do split rail in those days. Split rail was more rustic, a pioneer thing.”

“They aren’t insistent about the split rail, they just want a fence. If there’s a style that would—”

“They thought split rail; that’s what they
saw
there.”

“I don’t know that, Gottfried. I can’t remember how the idea of split rail came up, actually. What sort of fence would
you
put up there?”

“I wouldn’t put a fence up there. I didn’t put a fence up there, so if I didn’t, I wouldn’t.”

“It’s a full-price offer. The house has been on the market since the first of September.”

“I’m going to move in there myself.”

“You don’t want to do that, Gottfried. That way lies bankruptcy. That’s what you always tell me.”

“No fence.”

“How about a hedge?”

He looked at me, leading me to believe that a hedge was unspeakable. I glanced around the room. Gottfried was putting in flooring, which was wide pine boards of random lengths, nice and knotty. One of the knots caught my eye—it looked exactly like the head of a bird with a long beak and a wary eye. He said, “It pains me to say this, but have you noticed the way that slope on Maple Glen Road curves up from the road there? It’s a beautiful thing. It always reminds me of a woman’s ass. I laid sod there, you know that? Because I didn’t want to wait to have that nice feeling that I got when I approached that house from the west. I’m a cheapskate, but I didn’t want to wait for the grass to grow.” Gottfried’s favorite wrong idea about himself was that he was a cheapskate.

I said, “You know, I’ve sold seventeen houses for you over the years. Every one, I’ve had to pry it out of your hands even though you were bitching at me for months that the carrying costs were killing you.”

“A guy who wants to put a fence around the swell of a woman’s buttock doesn’t deserve to live there.”

“He loves the house. It’s the only house he wants. He thinks it’s perfect.”

“Perfect for what, entertaining? Showing off? I guarantee you, this guy’s an egomaniac. Mark my words.”

“You haven’t met the guy, Gottfried.”

He turned on me suddenly and shouted, “You want to make this sale?
You
put up the fence. I don’t ever want to see that house again, though. Out of your commission, a Goddamned white board fence, clean and straightforward, no split rails. I won’t pay for it, and I won’t build it, and I won’t even look at it, but I’ll sell the house at full price to this bozo because the bank’s got me by the balls! Do you know what my life is like? I worry every night about carrying costs, and then you take some guy out there and bingo, you got fifteen grand that comes right out of my pocket! What are you coming around to me for, asking me about this shit? Dale!”

“Then you’ll take the offer?”

“You build the fence and I’ll take the Goddamned offer!”

I went over to the worktable and laid out the papers. They were already flagged for signatures, flagged in yellow, though they might as well have been flagged in red. I handed Gottfried a pen. He managed to sign the papers without tearing through them, but I knew he would rant around for the rest of the morning. Fortunately, Dale, the only guy working with him that day, was impervious.

When I first met him, Gottfried was a shop teacher at the middle school, building houses on the weekends. When I listed his first house, he was amazed and gratified to have made it to the selling stage; he was utterly polite with me, almost obsequious. But that vanished when he met the buyers. They did not meet his standards; no buyers ever had. But he had made a fortune, his houses were famous, magazines took pictures of them, commercials were filmed in them. I was his only listing agent. Sometimes we socialized, and once, over a beer, he had loosened up and told me that when his family was escaping the Huguenot purges in France, they had changed their name to Nuelle because Nuelle meant
nothing
or
no one
. He’d looked at me and said, “Think about that, Joe. Think about running off to North Dakota or somewhere and changing your name to ‘Joe Nobody.’” For whatever reason, after he told me that, I didn’t take his rants personally anymore. Nevertheless, I was more than relieved to flee with the signed purchase agreement in my hand.

I got back to the office, planning to give Bobby the papers right away before Gottfried Nuelle could find me and recant, but Bobby was nowhere to be found. I put the agreement on his desk and hand-printed a note saying,
Get this to the buyer asap, before the seller changes his mind.
When the phone rang, I was tempted not to pick it up, but I did anyway. If you are a Realtor, you have to answer the phone; that’s the first rule of business. It was Gordon Baldwin, not Gottfried. That put me in a better mood right there. Gordon was my main builder over the years, and his market was much different from Gottfried Nuelle’s. Gordon bought farms. He had been buying farms for twenty-five years. He had a farm-buying pickup truck, an old International Harvester with what sounded like a tractor engine under the hood. He also had farm-buying clothes, not quite overalls and a straw hat but almost. He also had a farm-buying lingo. One of his many connections would tell him that some farmer was getting old and didn’t have any farming children, or that some kids who lived in Portsmouth had inherited the family farm, and he would get on the proper costume and go talk to whoever was in a state of landowning flux. Often enough he would come back home with an oral agreement to buy, and then I would follow up on the deal with the paperwork. By the late seventies, Gordon had quite a few farms, amounting to several hundred acres in all, some of them contiguous, some of them close to town, some of them way out in the middle of nowhere. Those were the farms where he kept his cattle. One piece of property, some 120 acres, was a development about ten miles from West Portsmouth that Gordon had been building on at least since I got into his business. It was called Glamorgan Close. My father thought this name was ridiculous; the acreage was open, almost flat at the front, rolling more steeply toward the back. My father never tired of pointing out that, on the one hand, a close was a stabling area, and, on the other hand, there was nothing “close” about Glamorgan Close and nothing Glamorgany, either, since there wasn’t a Scot anywhere in the vicinity.

Glamorgan Close had had several phases. Phase One, near the highway to Portsmouth, had inexpensive three-bedroom houses with small front yards, large backyards, and three styles, the Maryland, the Virginia, and the South Carolina, which had a larger front porch, labeled in the brochure as “the veranda.” These houses, which were on straight streets (Kinloch Avenue, Glengarry Avenue, Kirkpatrick Avenue), were a quarter mile from the elementary school Gordon had talked the county into and a mile from the Kroger’s shopping center. Phase One was a big success. Behind Phase One was Phase Two: Stuart Way, Robertson Way, and Ivanhoe Way. Phase Two featured three-bedroom houses also, but with two and a half baths and a bonus room. Phase Two styles, the Sonoma, the Mendocino, and the Santa Rosa, had somewhat larger rooms than the Phase One styles, lots of wood and beams, decks off the back, and a little bit of a view. The ideal couple who moved with their first two toddlers into the Virginia would find themselves, ten years later, entertaining junior high schoolers in the bonus room of the Sonoma, the deck of which could easily support a hot tub. If the couple did extremely well and maintained the integrity of their assets by not divorcing, Gordon was ready for them with Phase Three, the Greenwich, the Hastings, and the Ardsley: four bedrooms, four baths, master suites with sitting rooms, screened-in verandas, center-island kitchens, and mother-in-law apartments. These properties (Blacklock Circle, Praed Circle, Tartan Circle) were larger and had better views than those in the other two phases and, in fact, looked down on the other two, but at this point the ideal couple was expected to finance the down payment of their eldest child and his or her spouse in one of the Phase One houses, which now had mature landscaping and the individuality born of age and idiosyncratic property ownership.

This was Gordon’s vision of life, even if he didn’t say so—you made your way and populated your vicinity with your offspring, who then dropped the grandchildren off at your house whenever they felt like it. Phase Three was essentially complete now, some twenty years after groundbreaking for Phase One. There was still some land, though not much, and Gordon was going to start Phase Four when he could get around to it. Glamorgan Close was not Gordon’s only development, but it was the one that had established him in the Portsmouth area. Selling houses in Glamorgan Close was as simple as putting a notice in the paper that one was available. They were reasonably priced, well-enough built, and perfect examples of my basic belief about housing and the corollary, that what people really like is a simple canvas to fiddle around with. Gottfried Nuelle couldn’t stand anyone to fiddle with his houses, but Gordon relied upon his buyers to transform the uniformity of his developments. Gordon had some ideas about Phase Four, and he wanted to talk to me about them.

Gordon’s other developments were smaller and less philosophical, and he also built commercial properties. If one of his cronies wanted to open another restaurant or put in a miniature golf course with six waterfalls and a merry-go-round, Gordon would do that. He had sold one farm ten years ago, way out in the country but at the busy intersection of Highway 12 and Hardy Well Road, to Bert Milstein and then built a Colonial-style shopping village that specialized in shops that sold one thing: door handles or table linens or fudge. The security guards wore knee pants and the waitresses wore long skirts and frilly décolletage, and the center had succeeded against all odds, partly by hosting nonretail events, like chamber music groups and pig roasts, and partly by hosting craft fairs and swap meets. It had become a very successful fake village and Gordon loved it—it was not at all the sort of place he would ever shop, or even go, but exactly the sort of place where he could sell high what he had bought low. He couldn’t believe how the small shops and upscale décor put people in the mood to pay through the nose, but he had a little antiques shop there, which Betty ran with a friend, and he stocked it with whatever he had found here and there. One year they made a huge amount of money on gilt-framed mirrors that he got out of a hotel in Buffalo. Another year they had fifteen golden oak washstands and a rack full of silk kimonos from prewar Japan.

At any rate, I got in the car and drove over to Gordon’s in a happy mood. Phase Four would be simple and fun. Gordon would build them, and Bobby and I would sell them. One of the ways that Gordon kidded himself that he wasn’t supporting Bobby was that he only discussed his projects with me, and Bobby did all his sales of Gordon’s properties through me as the broker.

Of Gordon, my mother always said, “Well, I never thought he was a handsome man, though obviously some people do.” Some people did; he looked like a movie star of a certain era, Tyrone Power, say, whose looks not only change but become outmoded. In his early sixties, he was florid and jowly, and his dark pomaded hair had failed, suspiciously, to thin or recede. He had big shoulders and big hands but he was actually not a large man; I was an inch or two taller and outweighed him by maybe fifteen or twenty pounds. What he had was ease of movement. When he opened the door for me, put his arm around me, propelled me across the foyer into his office (shouting the whole time for Betty to come out and say hi and bring me a beer), it was his dance. His touch and his presence felt like they were infusing grace into me. In his office, which was pure 1970—orange shag carpet, a long low window looking out on their back acreage, which featured a man-made pond with a swimming raft and a rope swing hanging from the limb of a big oak—he had the plans for townhouses spread out on his desk. At first, say just for two or three minutes, I forgot that Felicity had put us in a new and strange relationship. He was just Gordon and I was just Joe and we were about to do what we had done so many times—build and sell and drink and eat and talk and shout and curse or celebrate as the deals rolled by. Then Betty came in with the beer.

Betty was about sixty then. I suppose when I first met her she was in her mid-thirties, and of course she had changed. Sally had adored Betty. What she always said was, “My mother was a legendary beauty, you know. None of us girls will
ever
be as beautiful as my mother. Daddy says that’s evidence right there that the theory of evolution is wrong.” Then she would laugh, so pleased that she was lucky enough to be Betty’s daughter. I liked beautiful women as much as anyone, and I had seen quite a few over the years who possessed a more perfect surface than Betty, but she had a thoughtful and yet entirely untormented quality that I had never seen in another person that made her beauty open, contented, and unsullied. Of Betty, my mother always said, “She’s a very nice woman, Joey. Between you and me, he’s lucky to have her.” That was my mother’s highest compliment.