A Name in a Household

The best thing about the Marriott is brunch. My boss’s cousin is the banquet manager and he lets us access a side room off the main dining area, a quiet place with four gleaming tables and a flat-screen and staffed by the hottest servers on the planet. A haven. Our brunch isn’t like the slop they serve up out there to the paying masses, the watery eggs and undercooked bacon congealing in the time it takes those poor people to carry their chipped plates back to their tables from the breakfast bar. Ours is actually edible. Ours is actually good. Plus it’s free. It helps to know people, I guess. Any place but the Marriott and we’re sitting out there with the rest of them, paying for the privilege of washing down cold grease with coffee that tastes like it was brewed in a gas tank.

Little things like that alleviate the stress. And don’t think that auctioning land isn’t stressful. Eight a.m. to eleven, and after our forty-five-minute break it’s back to the Ocean Room, or the Adam Clayton Powell Room, or the Muniz-Marin Room—the names don’t matter, all of the big public spaces in all of the hotels look the same, from the monstrous faux-elegant chandeliers above to the neutral grays, blues, and pinks of the deep-pile carpeting underfoot—where we resume our promotion of the American dream. As corny as that sounds, we have to believe it.

Because the buyers do. How else to explain the snaking line that forms outside by seven in the morning, or the stamina that keeps the bidding going right up to five in the afternoon? Every Sunday in every hotel in the region, from Brooklyn to Uniondale to Secaucus to New Brunswick. People want property. Doesn’t matter if it’s an eighth of an acre or eighty, there’s always someone ready to put money down, and ninety-nine percent of the time it’s sight unseen. Of course, people are always losing property, too, which is the other side of this story, but when you’re promoting the dream you only do the buyers a disservice by mentioning the foreclosures, untimely deaths, and other catastrophes that have made these precious parcels of American soil available for as little as a thousand dollars apiece in the first place. Plus you stand to cut into your commission.

In any case, we take care to take care of our customers. “Know Your Risk!” Those three words are emblazoned like inspirational mantras on the shiny banners festooning the auction rooms. They run like a ticker in all—caps across the bottom of every page of the catalogs bidders carry with a reverence and awe usually reserved for sacred texts revealing eternal mysteries. And they’re repeated at regular intervals by our gravelly voiced auctioneer, who interrupts his rapid-fire patter to remind those in the audience that while Dream Land USA LLC has made every reasonable effort to verify the claims and specifications detailed herein, it cannot be held responsible for errors, omissions, and/or misstatements concerning habitability, potability, or proximity to municipal and/or state and/or federal services.

Fine print. None of that deters a determined buyer looking to invest their hard-earned savings. Nor should it. If you ask me, there are far too many obstacles to letting people own a piece of the pie. The ownership society: I’m for it, and very much so. When it’s yours, you care. It’s like one plus one is two, a simple, undeniable equation. And when you care, you contribute—to the well-being of the community, to society, to the continued advancement of the greatest civilization the world has known. All right, so I’m co-opting some of the wording there, but that’s the message, and I’m the messenger—a red-blooded, true-believer messenger. The best kind, baby. An evangelist.

I can’t help but get hyped up about it. We change lives! We make lives! Sometimes that’s lost on some of the people we’re trying to help. They get upset, aggrieved; something doesn’t work out quite the way they wanted. Hey, it does happen. I admit it: No process is perfect. No dream is perfect. We do the best we can but there is the occasional error or oversight. Nothing negligent, mind you, nothing intentional. Hey, we’re in it together with all the dreamers out there. We don’t want problems. But the fact is, there is sometimes swampland. There are tracts zoned in perpetuity for light industry. There are plots abutting rendering and incinerating facilities. We do our best to research; do you?

It’s a question I was forced to put to a recent buyer. As much as I hated to do so. On our second swing through this very same Marriott in a single month, I was accosted by one Wilton J. D’Angelique (the “J,” I later found out, stood for Juvenalius—go figure!). He claimed to recognize me, aimed to hold me responsible for his own lack of experience in matters of real estate. I sympathized with the guy—hey, it’s complicated stuff sometimes. I patiently led him back through the process, even went over again with him the salient facts of the contract. His breathing was constricted, no doubt the result of the tightly cinched knot of his tie, which bobbing next to skin the color of cola looked like a little scoop of strawberry ice cream. The ones who dress to impress are the ones who cause the most trouble, I’ve learned.

"You misled me, deliberately," said Mr. D’Angelique, his diction precise and formal. "It is my right to protest, Mr. O’Rourke, to bring my grievance personally to you!"

"But Mr. D’Angelique," I said, palms out in supplication. "I’ve done you no wrong. It pains me to think that you believe I did." The knot of his necktie jumped. "Now, I have to ask. Did you do due diligence? Did you," I continued, my voice falling like a feather into a softer, cajoling register, "do your research?"

I’ve got headshots. I have a couple of minor trade-show personality credits, nearly made it onto a reality TV program, even did a screen test for a commercial. I don’t need this shit; I don’t like the idea of having to deal with another Mr. Wilton J. D’Angelique next Sunday, or the Sunday after that. I’ve got my own dreams, too.

On the other hand, I’m twenty-eight now. It’s only smart to face the facts. You want to eat, you have to work. Plus, who would I actually help by appearing in a fifteen-second spot pushing light beer to other young, single professionals? Adam O’Rourke may never be a household name. But it could be a name in a household. That’s what I like to think. I like to think of Mr. D’Angelique on a better day, once he’s found his piece of the dream and has erected his modest dwelling and is sitting there with his family while a TV hums quietly in the background and snow falls gently on the other side of the window. So far from where I started, he’ll say to himself, recalling the squalor and steam and filth of Kingston or Lagos or Port Au Prince or whatever godforsaken place he escaped from. So far from where I started, thanks to Mr. Adam O’Rourke.

Joe Cotto Plumbing Supply

They say the devil lives out here and I’d believe it even if my grandfather hadn’t seen the thing himself, that’s how eerie the Barrens still are. A short creature, my grandfather said, palm held at the height of his waist, no bigger than a small child—oh, but fiery red in color. It lit up the night all around and the snow melted beneath its single cloven hoof. It smelled bad, he said in Italian—puzzare da farre schifo. To high heaven. Sometimes he laughed as he said this part, and sipped from his wine. Other times he crossed himself.

"Don’t believe that old man," my mother would say. "He’s drunk again. Was probably drunk the night he says it happened." My mother never liked my grandfather, her father-in-law. But I loved him. I loved the feel of his rough beard against my cheek and the smell of his tobacco. I loved his heavy flannel shirts, which he wore well into spring. I loved the way he sipped his wine when he told his story about the night he saw the Jersey Devil.

I’ve divorced two husbands, and the less said about them, the better. Except for this: Neither could hold a candle to the man who started the business I now run. My grandfather got himself over from Basilicata, found paying work in New York, then came down here when he heard the big blueberry farms were hiring. Tough as nails, to be in those fields all day. He did it for ten years, and by taking some of the pennies out of the handful of pennies he was paid, he managed to buy a small piece of property and enough materials to build a shed, out of which he began to sell pipe-fittings and gaskets, and by the time his oldest granddaughter was listening to stories about the Jersey Devil he was sole proprietor of Joe Cotto Plumbing Supply, not the largest but easily one of the best known plumbing supply companies around. That’s the work of a real man.

Maybe it was the way I believed him, as he sat there with his glass of wine, that made him take me under his wing. Maybe because I believed him, he gradually let me do more in the small warehouse every day, until by the time I was of the age my girlfriends were getting married or going to secretarial school I knew enough about plumbing to run the place myself. As for my father, his own son, well, the less said about him the better, too. "Sometimes business sense skips a generation," my grandfather would say with a shrug. "Like baldness."

Today, I’ve got guys coming in from Philadelphia, from A.C., some even from New York. And from close by, too, what with all the new development everywhere you look. Woods and farmland disappearing like dust up a vacuum. I carry everything, a wide selection of the basics, plus a good representation of the higher end. My customers don’t care it’s a woman they see pacing the warehouse floor, a middle-aged Italian woman at that. Maybe I remind them of their mothers. They’re not threatened, and they know they get what they need at a good price. We topped $2 million in revenue last year, the first time ever. So I must be doing something right, huh? They shout my name when they come in. “Josephine, we’re back!” Some get wise and even call me Giuseppe, my grandfather’s name; lots of them, their own grandfathers were plumbers too, and they did business here. Deep roots. I like that, that continuation of things. Don’t underestimate the value of the familiar, that’s one of the things I’ve learned.

Things are going good, I can’t complain. Or maybe I can. I need to add about a thousand square feet of showroom space and could probably use some more parking, and though I’d had my eye on the small wooded parcel abutting my southeast lot line, there’s a complication. Someone has just purchased it at auction. I see him come to look at it, a Chinese man, or Asian, as some say. Kind of delicate, not much younger than me but, you know, it can be hard to tell with them sometimes. He prowls around out there, picking his way carefully through the mud, dressed in black loafers and a gray sweater. I tell you, when I see him he sometimes reminds me of my grandfather—the graying hair, the way he lowers his shoulders as he walks.

But that’s as far as my sentimentality goes. Mr. Jim—this is his name, I’ve learned, his last name—he won’t budge. First I had my lawyer track him down through county records and offer fair market price. No response. Nothing—not even a call-back to say no. Then I just figured, well, it could be cultural. Asian. Maybe they don’t do business over the phone. I’ll talk to the man myself, I said. He comes out to prowl around often enough, I’ll just wait until the next time I see him.

So, when I spot him sniffing through the woods and underbrush like a dog looking to do its business, I’m all smiles. But I don’t bite back the truth. I say, "You can’t live on it, it’s zoned all highway—commercial." I tell him, "It’s too small to build on," which it is—unless you’re only looking to add space, like me. I tell him, "Too much traffic," and it’s no lie. My parking lot empties onto the smaller local road at the northern side of the warehouse. No need for a light, at least not yet. This side, though? Even if he could build small commercial, I can see the township calling for a jug-handle and timed signals, clearing rights of way, ordering landscaping. He’d probably lose a couple of hundred feet of frontage to road reconfiguration alone. Just then a truck races by, an eighteen-wheeled tanker, just missing the Ford Taurus Mr. Jim has left parked halfway into the travel lane.

"No, I know," he says, smiling, toeing the mud with a shiny black loafer. "No, I know." And that’s all he says. When I offer a thousand above market, three thousand, five thousand, he just goes on smiling. "No, I know."

I can’t tell if he doesn’t understand me, or if he doesn’t believe me. I don’t know if I’d believe me, some woman come traipsing over from the general direction of the flat-roofed warehouse with the big plumbing supply sign. He might think it’s all a bunch of you-know-what, just to get him to sell. But I lose my temper anyway. "Well, Jesus, then. If you’re not going to work with me—"

I suppose that’s something else I share with my grandfather, that temper. Mr. Jim’s smile falters for a minute, and then he turns away from me to face the road. Another truck roars past, and the Taurus shimmies in its wake, and I want to tell him to pull the damn thing all the way off the pavement before someone gets killed.

I want to tell him a lot of things. I want to run through the list of other problems—failed perk test, no grid access without coming across my property. I want to tell him someone has taken advantage of him, getting him to part with twenty-three thousand dollars for something he can’t use. I want to tell him he sticks out like a sore thumb out here, and yes I know the world is changing but in some places progress is slow, and you’re not going to open the minds of people who don’t want them opened in the first place.

But Mr. Jim won’t let any of this affect his decision. Threats? He’s probably dealt with some; I know my grandfather did, an Italian living among those stocky, red-faced German farmers. So let Mr. Jim stand there by the side of the highway. I’ve got a business to run, and I can wait—not forever, but there will come a time when he realizes what he’s stuck with. He’ll wise up. Then he’ll come back, hat in hand.

And he’s got another thing coming if he thinks my offer will be nearly as good.

Jefferson

We borrowed the car that belongs to my wife’s brother. He told me with an edge in his voice I needn’t return it if I got into an accident. I am a good driver and it would never have occurred to me I might, but the sneer he wore when he said it made me nervous. My brother-in-law is a large man who makes even the fearless shake in their shoes and question their abilities. It is a put-on, an act, a way to make people listen to him; he says that no one trusts us Albanians anyway, so why not act like the thugs they believe us to be? I only wish he didn’t act this way with his own brother-in-law. But as Dina reminds me, he has lent us his car.

"You think there will be the job at the university, maybe? When we live there? Someday, Perparim?"

The slap of the wipers is a drum beat that won’t stop. Dina’s jeans hug the rise of her rounded thigh, and I place my hand on the swell that her heavy white sweater no longer hides. There is no university, just a community college consisting of two brick buildings. Perparim: The name means "progress" and there are times it seems like a cruel joke. "Someday," I tell her, keeping an eye on the wet road ahead.

She smiles at me. "Such possibilities."

But all I can think of is the rain, and the slick pavement, and how far we have to go, and that this can only increase the likelihood of an accident. I do not share these concerns with Dina, who has only now begun to believe that this pregnancy might not end like the last. I see my brother-in-law’s face and grip the wheel tighter.

So far north—it is hard to believe we are still in the same country after having traveled so many hours. When Dina needs to stop again to use the bathroom I fill the car with fuel, then pull under an overhang close to the building so she won’t have to walk through the rain. I make sure to step outside when I light my cigarette. My brother-in-law does not like the smell of tobacco—he has given up his own lifelong habit and is eager to ape the ways of the Americans he does business with—so I have been sure not to smoke in the car.

Just then, a young woman in a tan coat with a fake-fur-lined hood comes out of the woods at the other end of the gas station parking lot. I watch as she makes her way across the wet asphalt. She stops before me and smiles.

"Got a spare?"

"I’m sorry?" Like a boy, I still am sometimes confused by beauty. And so here is this creature of the woods, with a wide, white-toothed smile and wisps of blond hair that escape her hood and lie across her forehead like strands of wheat.

She points to my cigarette. "An extra smoke for me?"

When I hand her the box she slips two out from beneath the foil flap; I light one for her with a trembling hand, and she puts the other behind her ear. Then she walks back across the parking lot in the direction she came from and out of sight.

Dina returns, and back in the car she immediately falls asleep. Left to my own thoughts, with no one to talk to, I worry that I am not making the best decision in quitting my job, since it is a good job: It is reliable and provides shelter and the people who live in the building seem to respect me. To them I am Paul, their superintendent. I have learned something in being a superintendent, even if it is not anything I ever anticipated learning or even particularly wanted to. But perhaps that is the meaning of “experience,” the way they mean it here? Practical skills: Learn what you can, while you can, so that you might know something more than the other person, who maybe has never had to recalibrate electronic boiler settings. Learn how to maintain and repair a trash compressor. Not everyone knows such things, not even other people with engineering degrees. I should not underestimate the value of what I know! Why do I trivialize it?

Around and around my thoughts go like this, as the rain comes down and the road never ends.

"Are you all right?" Dina asks, waking up.

"Yes." I swallow, feeling the need to smoke again. "Fine."

"Are we almost there, do you think?"

"I think so." I nod. "It can’t be too much longer."

But an hour passes, and then another, so that when the sign appears the anticipation has turned to anxiety. The sign materializes out of the rain like a gray ship on the horizon—the sign with the name I have been whispering to myself since that moment at the auction when a young man in a tuxedo took my arm and led me to a room to put my signature to various forms. “Jefferson,” the sign reads—the name of so many things in this country, conferred upon so much. We leave the highway, and though we pass through no town—never so much as see a building of any kind—we soon come upon another, much smaller sign reading, "Leaving Jefferson."

"We must have driven by it," I tell Dina, although I do not know this to be true. After two more passes back along this same stretch of road, I begin to panic. It is possible the place doesn’t exist at all. It is likely that I have been swindled.

"Maybe the directions aren’t right," Dina suggests.

"They must be. Why wouldn’t they be?"

My hands are white on the wheel, and the thump of the windshield wipers has become a hammer on my brain. Swindled, I think. Cheated. I turn the car around once more and then, finally, it is there, in a clump of trees, just as the directions state: a plank board with a white "31" spray-painted on it. There is even a small turnout with fresh tire tracks in the mud. People, I think. Someday, neighbors.

"This is it," I say to Dina. "I found it."

She lowers her head and frowns. "It’s raining so hard."

"We will put on our raincoats."

"And it feels so cold." She hugs her arms around her.

"You’re tired. It’s not cold. We’ll put on our raincoats."

"No." She puts her hand on mine. "You go." She smiles. "I’ll wait for you. You tell me about it when you come back."

In truth, it is better that Dina has chosen to wait in the car. Property 58, according to the map, is off to the northwest, about a quarter-mile from Property 31 here at the edge of the road, and there is only a faint path to follow—what might have been tracks from the truck of a surveying crew, now almost entirely grown in with knee-high grass made green by the rains. I follow the spray-painted markers as best I can. Wet leaves slap at my face. Here and there, orange strips of nylon, limp and wet, are knotted around low branches. Brightly colored shotgun shells litter a clearing. The land descends very steeply, and then it levels out again. The woods are thinner here so I can see it. Some more orange ties, and a wooden plank with a number sprayed in white paint: 58.

Of course, it is hard to imagine a house here, so far from everything. Property 58 is not just a quarter-mile from the road, but more than twice that distance. It’s a day’s journey from where I live now, and half a world from the chaotic country I left. A hundred feet up and black against the low clouds there are thick, heavy wires, straight and orderly as the lines of an equation—cables carrying megawatts of electricity to the rest of the region.

I reach for my cigarettes but I know as soon as my fingers close around the package that it is empty. The woman who came out of the woods took the last. No matter. There is another beautiful woman sitting safely in a car, carrying a child. The dripping bushes and sodden undergrowth, the birch saplings shining with rain, the smell of the mud in which I’m sunk to my ankles, the earth in which one day we’ll plant vegetables—

I think: Perparim, this belongs to you.