Big If Read online

  “Would you like to see the kitchen?” Peta asked.

  “No,” said Lauren, “I would like to see the sea.”

  She was skittish as a colt and twice as pretty, Peta thought. Jerzy Czoll, Lauren’s husband, BigIf’s CEO, was sitting on nine million option warrant units of unrestricted BigIf common stock. When the game went IPO, if it ever did (Peta was starting to lose faith), Jerzy would become an instant millionaire or billionaire of whatever magnitude and this pretty colt would become, thereby, an instant Mrs.–illionaire. As such, Lauren Czoll was someone to be coddled at all costs. As they stood on the patio, looking down the valley at an arm of silver marsh, Peta thought the cost was getting pretty high.

  Peta specialized in Lauren’s type, high-strung wives (second wives or third, in Lauren’s case) searching for the first true mansions of their marriages. It always went this way: the women did the looking, the footwork and the tours, treating Peta like a slave, until they found that special country seat somewhere around a million five. The husbands came in at the endgame, taking a quick tour, always on the run, sending an attorney to the closing. It was a nerve-racking jurisdiction for a realtor, new money and demanding wives, but the broker fees were making Peta the star earner at Moss Properties. She was paid to coddle women like Mitzi Hindenberg (wife of Barry Hindenberg, the screensaver visionary) and Chappie Xing (wife of Ai-Me Xing, also known as Winston, the father of the 3D e-mail singing postcard and other online breakthroughs). Peta always steered them to a closing in the end. Mitzi, after six months’ hectic searching, finally found the fifty-eight-room Tudor of her dreams. Chappie, after nine months, finally bought the private island in the Oyster River. Peta was the realtor of last resort for the problem cases, the agent you send in when lesser agents fail. But she had met her match in Lauren Czoll. Peta had been searching with Lauren for almost a year.

  “Let’s see the kitchen,” Peta said to Lauren. “It has real wow-value.”

  They crossed the terrace, heading for the house. When Lauren first came to Moss Properties, Peta had interviewed her over omelets and Chablis at the new French place on Market Square in Portsmouth, the pivotal initial step in a serious house hunt, the slightly boozy get-to-know-you luncheon in which Peta played the drab and understanding Cinderella, the bartender/confessor, the psychiatrist/sex therapist, the college roommate you haven’t seen in twenty years—played whatever role she had to play to get the facts she needed to start looking. At that luncheon, over coffee and a ten-berry tart, Peta had teased out Lauren’s list of bedrock home requirements. Lauren, prodded skillfully (Peta was the best at this), finally allowed that she needed three things: land, history, and a walk-in humidor wired for Net access, DSL or faster (Jerzy would be flexible on this). Even at the outset of the house hunt, Peta felt that she was being carelessly exploited. Peta was no Marxist (who could be in this market?), but she did believe that there was a new ruling class and a new proletariat. The rulers controlled the means of scheduling. The proles were those who bore the brunt of dithering and cancellations, who waited at the bistro when the rulers showed up twenty minutes late, as Lauren always did, mouthing stock apologies, and Peta had to smile, “Oh it’s no problem, Laur.” Time was the new factory of the service sector and the rulers were the ones who owned it, wasting yours to save their own.

  Not that Lauren saved much time, hers or anybody’s. Peta put the Czolls’ price range at one-point-one to one-point-nine (she took a guess; Lauren didn’t know), called up a hundred listings. The houses were on major land, and most of them had interesting histories, a link to someone notable (Fitz-John Porter, corps commander in the Civil War; David Dixon Porter, key admiral of that war; Edith Effing Dalrymple, early Mesmerist and crusading suffragette, mother of Finch Dalrymple, teenaged abolitionist and early investor in Coca-Cola Corporation) or to something notable (the whaling trade, the spinning mills, the Civil War, the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Coca-Cola Corporation). Lauren, being a new ruler, wasted everybody’s time, coming late, forgetting some appointments (Peta standing on the lawn, looking at her watch), always finding fault when she saw a property, inventing new requirements, requiring new searches. First it was a helipad (had to have a helipad), then a gazebo, then a sail loft, then a bridle trail, a garden maze, and a working gristmill, plus land, history, and the wired humidor. Peta found a charming Queen Anne in Rye Crossings with humidor, gazebo, secluded bridle trails, and a Class 2 landing strip, but the gristmill was too squeaky, Lauren said, and the gazebo blocked her seaward views. Lauren was big on sea views for a time, then wanted something farmy and less windblown. She forgot about the gristmill altogether, focusing instead on music rooms and apple trees, and now we’re back to sea views, Peta thought. All Peta really needed was an answer to the question What does Lauren want? What will make her happy—truly, deeply, finally happy? Why was this so difficult for people nowadays?

  It seemed to be the new plague of the age, this confusion over wants and needs. Poverty was pressure, Peta knew, but wealth created pressure too. The pressure on the software wives was quiet and corrosive—if you can have anything, buy anything you see, why you are still nervous and dissatisfied? Peta saw corrosion in her clients and in Jens. Poor Jens was building monsters, on the verge of finally getting rich, but it wasn’t good or pure enough somehow. She knew he wasn’t sleeping. She pretended not to really notice, because she was afraid that Jens, confronted, would unravel. And so Peta, too, like her clients and Jens, felt that she was walking on the lip of a deep pit.

  “Right this way,” she said to Lauren.

  Peta let them in the back door of the manor house, pausing to wipe her feet on the rattan mat inside the door. Lauren, seeing this, paused to wipe her feet as well. There were two clients here, thought Peta. This morning’s Lauren was the posh, high-handed bitch. The other Lauren was the frightened child, food-disordered, lost in wealth, neurotic to the nines. One sharp word from Peta and this other Lauren would start bawling, so Peta held her tongue, just as she’d held her tongue with Jens that morning, him and his snide crack about the moon. Peta knew that Jens was jealous of the love and care she wasted on her clients’ whims, of the Saturdays she spent touring mansions with Lauren, or the nights she spent at the office, eating takeout sushi as she did her listing searches on the Web. It was a crock of shit, of course—Peta didn’t love her clients any more than a doctor loves her patients. Jens’ panic and self-pity were among his least attractive traits, ranking right down there with his lacerating tongue. He turned it on himself (“Even my best monster is a failure,” he would say), and—less often, but more often lately—on her as well.

  “Here we are,” said Peta, leading Lauren through the spacious, eat-in, center-island kitchen, newly renovated. The Bell Estate belonged to a man named Geoff Rishman, a Bell by marriage, twice removed, a pushy Boston asshole (they called them Massholes up here) who had lost the last of the Bell fortune on a team gymnastics league. His franchise, the Boston Swans, had crushed the New York Attitude in the title meet, but Geoff couldn’t get a TV deal and the league collapsed. Geoff was asking one-point-two, but Peta thought he would gladly entertain high nines.

  Lauren worked the faucets as Peta did her spiel. The pattern for the house, she said, came from thatch-roofed cottages of Lincolnshire, that’s England. It came not in blueprint but in the eye of the first Puritans, who adapted the design to the colder winters and abundant timber of America. The walk-in fireplace was actually a pyramid of Flemish bricks, brought across as ballast, 1638. The stove was Viking, high-output, as in the best restaurants.

  “No more waiting for the pasta water,” said Peta hopefully.

  Lauren touched the oven door. “Who was Silence Bell?”

  Portsmouth brokers knew their history. The big-ticket properties were the registered estates, the landmarks on the headlands down to Rye. Selling them was telling them, Noel Moss always said. Peta knew her history better than most.

  “Silence Bell,” she recited. “Born 1616, left Eng
land at the age of twenty-one under a Stuart death warrant. Elected captain of Winthrop’s militia, 1644. Came north to quell the Indians that year. Bell was related to the Mathers on his mother’s side. He was little Cotton Mather’s favorite cousin and was best man at Mather’s wedding, most historians believe. Cotton Mather, son of Increase, is regarded as the last important voice of—”

  “I know who Cotton Mather was,” Lauren said. “He was a racist dick. Was Bell a racist too?”

  “No,” said Peta mildly, “he was a moderate, a Puritan Eisenhower. He stopped the wanton massacres of the Onomonopiacs through a judicious policy of mass deportation to the Jamaican sugar fields, and presided in old age over the later Salem witch trials, voting against several of the hangings and many of the pressings. His personal narrative of the Puritan experiment, Covenantum Bloodcurdlicum, was written in this very house.”

  “Really?”

  “Upstairs, in what’s now the TV room.”

  They did the dining room, the drawing room, the music room, the den. Peta pointed out the period appointments, the Hepplewhites, the Chippendales, the Sheratons, the Sonys. They came to the game room, a blast of garish ’70s—rugs like body hair and vanilla leather couches, obelisks and orbs on every table. Geoff was sleeping with his decorator and it showed.

  Peta said, “Ignore the LeRoy Neiman prints.”

  Lauren winced. “I’ll try. The listing mentioned paddocks. Can we see them?”

  They went outside and down the lawn, past the brick barbecues, the teak cabanas, and the tarpaulined pool.

  Peta said, “The paddock’s just ahead.”

  There was one horse at home that morning, a vermin-ridden thoroughbred named Locomotion, also on the market. They watched the horse munch squash rinds for a time.

  Lauren said, “Is this paddock winterized?”

  “It feels pretty winterized,” said Peta, losing patience. “I’m warm, Lauren. Are you?”

  “Check and make sure. This horse looks sick. I wouldn’t want my horse getting sick out here.”

  “Do you own a horse?”

  “No, but if I did the poor thing could freeze to death out here in this drafty paddock.”

  Locomotion flicked its tail.

  “Lauren,” Peta said. “May I make an observation? I think we’re going at this backwards. Heated paddocks, bridle paths, gazebos—that’s crossing t’s and dotting i’s, fine tuning. That’s detail, Lauren, and detail should come last.”

  “What comes first?” Lauren asked.

  “The dream. We’re searching for a home, Lauren. Home, I know, is a loaded concept for people of our generation, us feminists in particular, given the historic subjugation of the female in the domestic scheme, as you were explaining to me last week, but on the other hand, it’s just a goddamn building. And I know, as we’ve discussed, that in many ways the quest, the journey home, is more important than the destination, but on the other hand, Lauren, you are supposed to buy something eventually. Commit and post your earnest money, move to closing—”

  Lauren turned away. “You know I hate that word. You’re rushing me. I thought you were my friend and here you’re rushing me.”

  “I’m speaking as a friend. Listen to me, Lauren. The search for home must begin in dreams—one dream, one constant dream, not all this compulsive running around. Face it, darling: you are rich. You can have anything you want, housewise. All you need to do is tell me what you want. Don’t cry, baby—it’s all right. You are Odysseus, trying to get home, and I am, I don’t know, his real estate agent.”

  Lauren took the Kleenex Peta offered, blew her nose resoundingly. She said, “Lately I’ve been thinking about lighthouses. Can we look at some lighthouses?”

  “No more of that,” said Peta, firmly now. “I’m afraid it’s time for drastic measures.”

  It always came to this with the Mrs.–illionaires, the woman lying on the couch, Peta standing by the door, dimming the lights. As a realtor, Peta rarely used hypnosis, preferring less invasive means of clarifying what her clients needed in a home. When Mitzi Hindenberg was “blocked,” Peta used aromatherapy. Mitzi, sniffing almond oil, had a sudden vision of a fifty-eight-room Tudor on the beach. Peta, armed with Mitzi’s vision, found the place exactly as described; it was kind of eerie actually. Peta tried everything on her toughest clients—inkblots, bong hits, long runs, sometimes even prayer. Chappie Xing said the Act of Contrition with Peta (who, being a Boyle, knew the Act backwards and forwards, God our Lord the to me for—this was backwards). They prayed and said amen, and Chappie drew a picture of a Georgian mansion with cathedral ceilings surrounded by these little squiggles, like 3s on their sides. The squiggles puzzled Peta (they had seen several Georgian mansions with cathedral ceilings and Chappie didn’t bite). Then Peta realized that the sideways 3s were dream-symbol water and that what Chappie deeply needed was an island of her own. Again Peta found the place exactly as dreamed of, the old Honus Steadman house on what was now Xing Island. The moment Chappie stepped over the gunwales of the longboat and saw the house up in the rocks, she collapsed in Peta’s arms, saying, “Oh Peta, oh Pet, you have brought me home.” There was much for Jens to sneer at here, but some human feeling too, and Peta was happy for the Xings.

  Lauren was lying on the couch in the game room. Peta dimmed the lights, took a CD from her purse, split the case, and handled the bright object. The CD was called Voices of the Rain Forest, Vol. III, Peta’s headache music. She fed a string through the doughnut hole (the string was carried for this purpose), blew on the shiny data side, and wiped it on her blouse cuff.

  Lauren said, “This couch is less comfortable than you might imagine.”

  “Never mind the couch,” said Peta.

  “I can’t be hypnotized. A doctor told me that. He said I’m in the five percent that can’t be—”

  “Just relax. Watch the CD, Lauren. It’s swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Your eyelids are growing heavy, heavy, heavy.”

  Soon Lauren Czoll was very, very hypnotized.

  “Lauren, do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are standing on the lawn of your dream house. The home of your dreams and inner peace. Do you see it, Lauren?”

  Lauren nodded tentatively.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Lauren spoke in a deeper voice. “Light,” she said. “Airiness.”

  People needed urging. Peta said, “Go on.”

  “Space and line and form. A sense of—”

  “Yes?”

  “Destination. Old and new in balance. A stately Greek Revival with up-to-date conveniences.”

  Greek Revival—this was good. Peta made a mental note.

  “Turf, trees, wet bricks, a self-mulching garden. But through the windows—sea. Light abundant. Not just that. No, abundant change. Each room dapples differently. Winter is a tone. Easter, a tone. I watch the gales roll in. I see my children growing up—I look forward to nostalgia, a parent’s job well done. This is mine. This is mine. Time is not an arrow.”

  “Does it have a garage?”

  “I see the neighbor’s house.”

  “Let’s stick with your house for the moment. Are you seeing a garage?”

  “I’m standing on my lawn looking at the neighbor’s house across a lake or bay. There’s a party going on, show people and a dance band. I see a green light on a dock. I see a hooker and some Dutch sailors. They’ve come for the orgy too.”

  “It’s probably a rental,” Peta said. “Now turn around on the lawn. Are you turning, Lauren?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now go in your house. Tell me what you see.”

  “A music room upstairs, a glass conservatory. Fretted ironwork, a cage for a singing bird. A chest of drawers with room for all my keepsakes. I see Jerzy in the driveway with our daughter. I’m standing at the window, looking down. The year is twenty years from now. They hug. The car is packed. Our daughter is beautiful and golden-haired and Jerzy is so ple
ased. She’s going off to college, off to Yale. No, wait—she’s going off to Wheaton. She got dinged by Yale and wait-listed by Wellesley.”

  “Breathe deeply, Lauren. Good. Just tell me what you see.”

  “Jerzy’s hugging her goodbye and—wait, that’s not our daughter. Why’s he kissing her?”

  “The house, Lauren, come back to the house.”

  “I see a chest of drawers. Room for all my pretty things. I keep a gun in there. I go down and teach that tramp a lesson on the lawn.”

  Motherhood was pressure (Kai would live on chewy sticks if Peta didn’t nark him every minute of the day); marriage was pressure, watching Jens slip off the edge, Peta feeling helpless, saying nothing; and then there was her job at Moss Properties, which used to be so fun, like being paid to shop with other peoples’ money.

  Coming up I-95, Peta felt a headache hatching in the swivel of her eyeballs. She found a bottle of Excedrin in her purse and chewed a pill dry-mouthed as she drove. Peta had two jobs at her company, and this was the problem—she was spread too thin. Noel Moss, the dapper laird and heir at Moss Properties, marveled at her talent for the million-dollar sale. He said the way she had steered crazy Mitzi Hindenberg to a closing on the Tudor was a masterful performance, like a seasoned pilot landing a crippled jumbo jet on an icy runway, and he could only doff his cap in admiration. Noel called her the Realtrix, a play on dominatrix, a playful play Peta knew because Noel was more or less openly gay and certainly not flirting. Noel was grooming her for partnership, which Peta wanted badly, but the elder Mosses—Noel’s father, grandfather, and three uncles, hardshell Yankees to a man—were against it. Peta was a crack mansion-mover, they admitted, but she had never worked the other side of the family’s business, the lucrative if dreary realm of building management. The Mosses owned or managed under contract a healthy coastal empire of retail/office space, ten strip malls, six office blocks, a quarter million square feet of light industrial. The agents at these properties advertised the vacancies, dealt with bitchy tenants, got the carpets cleaned, rode herd on the supers, a succession of small pesterings for which the building agent received nothing more dramatic than the rent.