Vintage Ford by Richard Ford Page A

did.
    After which all these unknown facts of life to come have then to be figured into what they still don’t know about a house itself, right along with the potentially grievous certainty that they
will
know a
great
deal the instant they sign the papers, walk in, close the door and it’s theirs; and then later will know even a great deal more that’s possibly not good, though they want none of it to turn out badly for them or anyone they love. Sometimes I don’t understand why anybody buys a house, or for that matter does anything with a tangible downside.
    As part of my service to the Markhams, I’ve tried to come up with some stopgap accommodations. Addressing that feeling of not knowing
is
, after all, my job, and I’m aware what fears come quaking and quivering into most clients’ hearts after a lengthy, unsatisfactory realty experience: Is this guy a crook? Will he lie to me and steal my money? Is this street being rezoned C-1 and he’s in on the ground floor of a new chain of hospices or drug rehab centers? I know also that the single biggest cause of client “jumps” (other than realtor rudeness or blatant stupidity) is the embittering suspicion that the agent isn’t paying any attention to your wishes. “He’s just showing us what he hasn’t already been able to unload and trying to make us like it”; or “She’s never shown us anything like what we said we were interested in”; or “He’s just pissing away our time driving us around town and letting us buy him lunch.”
    In early May I came up with a furnished condominium in a remodeled Victorian mansion on Burr Street, behind the Haddam Playhouse, complete with utilities and covered off-street parking. It was steep at $1,500, but it was close to schools and Phyllis could’ve managed without a second car if they’d stayed put till Joe started work. Joe, though, swore he’d lived in his last “shitty coldwater flat” in 1964, when he was a sophomore at Duquesne, and didn’t intend to start Sonja off in some oppressive new school environment with a bunch of rich, neurotic suburban kids while the three of them lived like transient apartment rats. She’d never outlive it. He’d rather, he said, forget the whole shittaree. A week later I turned up a perfectly workable brick-and-shingle bungalow on a narrow street behind Pelcher’s—a bolt-hole, to be sure, but a place they could get into with some lease-to-buy furniture and a few odds and ends of their own, exactly the way Ann and I and everybody else used to live when we were first married and thought everything was great and getting greater. Joe, however, refused to even drive by.
    Since early June, Joe has grown increasingly sullen and mean-spirited, as though he’s begun to see the world in a whole new way he doesn’t like and is working up some severe defense mechanisms. Phyllis has called me twice late at night, once when she’d been crying, and hinted Joe was not an easy man to live with. She said he’d begun disappearing for parts of the day and had started throwing pots at night over in a woman artist friend’s studio, drinking a lot of beer and coming home after midnight. Among her other worries, Phyllis is convinced he might just forget the whole damn thing—the move, Sonja’s schooling, Leverage Books, even their marriage—and sink back into an aimless nonconformist’s life he lived before they got together and charted a new path to the waterfall. It was possible, she said, that Joe couldn’t stand the consequences of real intimacy, which to her meant sharing your troubles as well as your achievements with the person you loved, and it seemed also possible that the art of trying to buy a house had opened the door on some dark corridors in herself that she was fearful of going down, though she thankfully seemed unready to discuss which these might