The Lay of the Land (5 page)

But to Mike, the assumption that Lavallette, New Jersey, ought to seem like Nirvana to a smiling little brown man born in a wattle hut in the Himalayas is both true and not true. Deep in his hectic night’s sleep, with his estranged wife in her estranged home in the Amboys, his teenagers up late noodling on their laptops with SAT reviews, his Infiniti safely “clubbed” in the driveway, Mike (I would bet) wonders if this is really
it
for him. Or, might there not be just a smidgen more to be clutched at? Real estate, the profession of possibility, can keep such dreams fervid and winy for decades.

Haddam, therefore, makes him as nervous as a debutante. It makes plenty of people feel that way. All that serenely settled, arborial, inward-gazing good life, never confiding about what it knows (property values), so near and yet so far off. All that pretty possibility set apart from the regular social frown and growl. Haddam’s rare rich scent is sweetly breathable to him—as we drive past out here on 206—there behind its revetment of Revolutionary oaks and survivor elms, from its lanes and cul-de-sacs, its wood ricks, its leaf rakage, its musing, insider mutter-mutter conversations passed across hedges between like-minded neighbors who barely know one another and wouldn’t otherwise speak. Haddam rises in Mike’s mind, a citadel he could inhabit and defend.

It’s just not likely to happen. Which is fine as long as he doesn’t venture too close—which he’s almost done—so that his immigrant life flashes up in grainy black and white and not quite good enough. This, of course, happens to all of us; it’s just easier to accept when the whole country’s already your own.

“You know, when Ann and I moved to Haddam thirty years ago, none of this was out here,” I say to be encouraging as we pass a woodlot soon to be engulfed beside Montmorency Mall.
COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR SALE
is advertised. “Not even a deer-crossing sign.” I smile at him, but he frowns out ahead, his seat pressed close-up to the wheel, his mind in another place, across a gulf from me. “If you lived here then, you wouldn’t be home now.”

“Ummm,” Mike grunts. “I can see that, yes.” My attempt doesn’t work, and we are for a time sunk in reverential silence.

A
mile into Montmorency County, 206 drops into a pleasant jungly sweet-gum and red-clay creek bottom no one’s quite figured how to bulldoze yet, and the old road briefly takes on a memorial, country-highway feel. Though we quickly rise again into the village of Belle Fleur, old-style Jersey, with a tall white Presbyterian steeple beside a sovereign little fenced cemetery, and just beyond that, a seventies-vintage strip development, with two pizza shops, a laundrette, a closed Squire Tux and an H&R Block—and across on the facing side of the road two deserted, dusty-screened redbrick Depression houses (homes to humans once) from when 206 was a scenic rural pike as innocent and pristine as any back road in Kentucky. Another double-size wooden sign with big red lettering spells an end to the houses:
OWNER WILL SELL, REMOVE OR TRADE.
It’s a perfect site for a Jiffy Lube.

Mike takes a left past the church and commences west. And right away the atmosphere changes, and for the better. Somewhere out ahead of us lies the Delaware, and all can feel the relief. Though Mike’s now consulting his watch and a scribbled-on pink Post-it while the road (Mullica Road) leaves the strip development for the peaceable town ’n country housing pattern New Jersey is famous for: deep two-acre lots with curbless frontage, on which are sited large but not ominous builder-design Capes, prairie contemporaries and Dutch-door ranches, with now and then an original eighteenth-century stone farmhouse spruced up with copper gutters and an attached greenhouse to look new. Yews, bantam cedars and mountain laurels that were scrubby in the seventies are still young-appearing. The earth is flat out here, poorly drained and clayey. Plus, it’s dry as Khartoum. Still, a few maples and red oaks have matured, and paint jobs look fresh. Kids’ plastic gym sets and chain-link dog runs clutter many back lawns. Subarus and Horizons stand in new asphalt side drives (the garages jammed with out-of-date junk). Everything’s exactly as they pictured it when it was all a dream.

Passing on the left now, opposite the houses, lies a perfect, well-tended cut cornfield extending prettily down to Mullica Creek, remnant of uses that predate memory but a plus to home buyers prizing atmosphere. Though you can be sure its pristine prettiness is giving current owners across the road restless nights for fear some enterpriser (such as the one driving my car) will one day happen along, stop for a look-see, make a cell-phone call and in six months throw up a hundred minimansions that’ll kick shit out of everybody’s tax bills, fill the roads, jam the schools with new students who score eight million on their math and verbal, who steal the old residents’ kids’ places at Brown, and whose families won’t speak to anybody because for religious reasons they don’t have to. Town ’n country takes a hike.

Every morning, these original settlers who bought in at 85K—on what was Mullica Farm Road—frown down at their mutual-fund numbers, retotal their taxes against retirement investitures and wonder if now might be the time to roll over their 401s, move to the Lehigh Valley and try consulting before beating it to Phoenix at age sixty-two. Median house prices out here are at 450K, the fastest market in the land—last year. Only, that’s not holding. One or two neighbors already have
BY OWNER
signs up, which is worrisome. Though to me it’s all as natural as pond succession, and no one should regret it. I like the view of landscape in use.

Small, dark-skinned yard personnel with backpack blower units that make them look like spacemen are busy in many yards here, whooshing oceans of late-autumn leaves and heaping them in piles beside great black plastic bags, before hauling them away in their beater trucks. The cold sky has gone cerulean and untroubled (weather being what passes for drama in the suburbs). I don’t miss Haddam, but I miss this—the triggering sense of emanation that a drive in what was once the country ratchets up in me. And today especially, since I’m not risking or pitching anything, am off duty and only along for moral support.

“Is Michigan in Lansing or Ann Arbor?” Mike says, blinking expectantly, hands again in the prescribed steering positions. We are nearing our rendezvous and he’s on the alert.

He knows I bleed Michigan blue but doesn’t really know what that means. “Why?”

“I guess there’re some pretty interesting things going on at Michigan State right now.” He is speaking officially. Practicing at being authentic.

“Did they discover a featherless turkey in time for Thanksgiving?” I say. “That’s what they’re good at over there.”

A man stands alone on the wide grassy lawn of a bright yellow bay-windowed Dutch contemporary where Halloween pumpkins still line the front walk. He’s barefoot, wearing a white tae kwon do suit and is performing stylized Oriental exercises—one leg rising like a mantis while his arms work in an overhand swimming motion. Possibly it’s a form of pre-Thanksgiving stress maintenance he’s read about in an airline magazine. But something about my Suburban, its rumbling, radiant alien-ness, has made him stop, put palm to brow to shade the sun and follow us as we go past.

“In my new-product seminar last week”—Mike nods as if he’s quoting Heraclitus (I, of course, pay for this)—“I saw some interesting figures about the lag between the top of the housing market and the first downturn in askings.” His narrow eyes are fixed stonily ahead. I used to eat that kind of computer spurtage for breakfast, and made a bundle doing it. But since I arrived at the Shore, I’m happy to list ’em ’n twist ’em. When man stops wanting ocean-front, it’ll be because they’ve paved the ocean. “I guess they’ve got a pretty good real estate institute over there,” Mike blathers on about Moo-U. “Using some pretty sophisticated costing models. We might plug into their newsletter.” Mike can occasionally drone like a grad student, relying on the ritual-reflexive “I guess” to get his most significant points set in concrete. (“I guess Maine’s pretty far from San Diego.” “I guess a hurricane really whips the wind up.” “I guess it gets dark around here once the sun sets.”)

“Did you read any reports from Kalamazoo College?”

Mike frowns over at me. He doesn’t know what Kalamazoo means, or why it would be side-splittingly hilarious. His round, bespectacled, over-serious face forms a suspicious tight-lipped question mark. Sense of humor can become excess baggage for immigrants, and in any case, Mike’s not always great company for extended periods.

Ahead on the left rises an ancient white concrete silo standing in the cornfield, backed by third-growth hardwood through which mid-day light is flashing. A weathered roadside vegetable stand, years abandoned, sits at the road shoulder, and alongside it a pale blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville. When Ann and I arrived to Haddam blows ago, it was our standard Saturday outing to drive these very county roads, taking in the then-untouched countryside up to Hunterdon County and the river towns, stopping at a country store where they cooked a ham and eggs breakfast in the back, buying a set of andirons or a wicker chair, then pulling over for squash and turnips and slab-sided tomatoes in a place just like this, taking it all home in brown paper sacks. It was long before this became a wealth belt.

I’m thinking this old roadside stall may actually have been one of our regulars. MacDonald’s Farm or some such place. Though it wasn’t run by a real farmer, but a computer whiz from Bell Labs, who’d taken an early buyout to spend his happy days yakking with customers about the weather and the difference between rutabagas and turnips.

This dilapidated vegetable stand is also clearly our rendezvous point. Mike, pink Post-it in his fist, swerves us inexpertly straight across the oncoming lane and rumbles into the little dirt turn-out. The Caddy’s driver-door immediately swings open, and a large man begins climbing out. He is a square-jawed, thick-armed, tanned and taut Mediterranean, wearing clean and pressed khakis, a white oxford shirt (sleeves rolled Paul Bunyan-style), sturdy work boots and a braided belt with a silver tape measure cube riding his hip like a snub-nose. He looks like he just stepped out of the Sears catalog and is already smiling like the best, most handsome guy in the world to go into the sprawl business with. His Caddy has a volunteer fire department tag on its bumper.

My gut, however, instantly says this is a man to be cautious of—the too neatly rolled sleeves are the giveaway—a man who is more or less, but decidedly not, what he seems. My gut also tells me Mike will fall in love with him in two seconds due to his large, upright, manly American-ness. If I don’t watch out, the deal’ll be done.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” I’ve heard it but don’t remember. We’re climbing out. The big Caddy guy’s already standing out in the dusty breeze, laving his big hands as if he’d just washed them in the car. Outside here, the wind’s colder than at the Shore. The barometer’s falling. Clouds are fattening to the west. I have on only my tan barracuda jacket, which isn’t warm enough. Money says this guy’s Italian, though he’s all spruced up and could be Greek, which wouldn’t be better.

“Tom Benivalle.” Mike frowns, grabbing his blazer from the backseat.

I rest my case.

“Mr. Mahoney?” the big guy announces in a loud voice. “Tom Benivalle, gladda meetcha.” Gruff, let’s-cut-the-bullshit Texas Hill Country drawl resonates in his voice. He’s seemingly not disturbed that a tiny forty-three-year-old Tibetan dressed like a Mafia golfer and with an Irish name might be his new partner.

Though it’s all an act. Benivalle is a storied central New Jersey name with much colorful Haddam history in tow. A certain Eugene (Gino) Benivalle, doubtless an uncle, was for a time Haddam police chief before opting for early retirement to Siesta Key, just ahead of a trip to Trenton on a statutory rape charge brought by his fourteen-year-old niece. Tommy, clean-cut, helmet-haired, big schnoz, tiny-dark-eyed good groomer, looks like nothing as much as a cop, up to and including a gold-stud earring. This could be a sting operation. But to catch who?

Mike thrusts himself forward, his face flushed, and gives Benivalle a squinch-eyed, teeth-bared, apologetic grin, along with a double-hander handshake I’ve counseled him against, since Jerseyites typically grow wary at free-floating goodwill, especially from foreigners who might be Japanese. Though Mike isn’t having it. He reluctantly introduces me as his “friend” while buttoning his blazer buttons. We’ve agreed to keep my part in this hazy, though I already sense he wishes I’d leave. Tom Benivalle enfolds my hand in his big hairy-backed one. His palm’s as soft as a puppy’s belly, and he transmits an amiable sweet minty smell I recognize as spearmint. He’s applied something lacquer-ish to his forehead-bordering hair that makes it practically sparkle. The prospect that Benivalle might represent shadowy upstate connections isn’t unthinkable. But face-to-face with him, my guess is not. My guess is Montclair State, marketing B.A., a tour with Uncle Sam, then home to work for the old man in the wholesale nursery bidnus in West Amwell. Married, then kids, then out on his own, tearing up turf and looking around for new business opportunities. He’s probably forty, drives his Caddy to mass, drinks a little Amarone and a little schnapps, plays racquetball, pumps minor iron, puts out the odd chimney fire and voted for Bush but wouldn’t actually hurt a centipede. Which is no reason to go into business with him.

Benivalle turns from our handshake and strides off as a gust of November breeze raises grit off Mullica Road and peppers my neck. He’s cutting to the chase, heading to the edge of the cornfield to showcase the acreage, demonstrate he’s done his homework, before sketching out the business plan. Put the small talk on hold. It’s how I’d do it.

Mike and I follow like goslings—Mike flashing me a deviled look meant to stifle early judgment. He’s
already
in love with the guy and doesn’t want the deal queered. I round my eyes at him in phony surprise, which devils him more.

“Okay. Now our parcel runs straight south to Mullica Creek,” Benivalle’s saying in a deeper but less LBJish voice, raising a long arm and pointing out toward the silo and the pretty band of trees that follows the water’s course (when there’s water there). “Which
is
in the floodplain.” He glances at me, heavy brows gathering over his black eyes. He knows I know he knows I know. Still, full disclosure, numbers crunched, regulations read and digested: My presence has been registered. It’s possible we’ve met somewhere. Benivalle bites his bottom lip with his top teeth—familiar to me as the stagecraft of our current President. Sharp wind is gusting but fails to disturb a follicle of Benivalle’s dense black do. “So,” he goes on, “we establish our south lot lines a hundred feet back from the mean high-water mark—the previous hundred-year flood. The creek runs chiefly west to east. So we have about a hundred twenty-five available acres if we clear the woods and grade it off.”