Stay Up With Me Page 7

  “You ever thought of selling the place, getting some smaller spot in town?” I ask.

  Eddie shoots me a look: slow down. He’s training me so I can close this sale later on my own. He sips his tea, then places the cup on the table next to him so he can use his hands to paint the picture.

  “What Randall means is that the two of you deserve to be living better,” Eddie says. “Lord sakes, you’ve earned it. What kind of life would you want if you could have anything you’ve dreamed of?”

  “I’d say we’ve had . . . what we wanted,” the old man says, and he looks so pathetic it breaks my heart.

  “Think big,” Eddie says. “Think of what you’d want if money were no object. I mean for me, I’d think of a new car, a speedboat, maybe a cruise to South America. You ever been to South America?”

  The man lets out a sepulchral cough. Then he holds the handkerchief over his mouth and spits.

  Eddie switches the conversation, to hunting and fishing, and finding no traction there asks Mrs. Berner about her children.

  “Oh, they’re in California now,” she says.

  “Think about visiting them,” Eddie says. “It’s a beautiful world out there.”

  “I guess they’ve grown apart from us.”

  She seems to want us to ask about this.

  “Be nice to have a manageable place in town, don’t you think? And a little cash to take care of Mr. Berner,” I say.

  “Sometimes I think that’s just what we need, and then we just can’t seem to say so long to this place. You know how that is. You go to sleep and you wake up, and you’re still here.”

  I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Berner points the way and lets me loose in her house.

  I think about us sitting there in the Berners’ living room and it makes me angry at them. There’s no reason to be so trusting in a world like ours. A couple of months ago I read an article about an old couple that let a man into their house supposedly to fix their stove. They didn’t even have a problem with their stove, but they trusted him, and when they let him inside, he pulled a pistol on them. He made them lie down on the ground. He took everything they had in the house, and before he left he must have thought they’d had a long enough look at his face because he shot them both dead. I wander through the cold drafty rooms of the Berners’ house and I think about us being homicidal maniacs. We’re invited guests, in their house, and there’s no one around to hear us or see us. No witnesses. And there’s plenty here to rob. I sold at an antique shop one summer, and the Berners have possessions lying around that would bring a decent price: old snow globes; a gilded music box, mahogany it looks like; a tall grandfather clock with Westminster chimes and the wrong time, standing in the corner like a forgotten cathedral; a 1950 Winchester 12-gauge in an otherwise empty gun rack; a reading lamp with a silk shade and glass bead fringe. I flick the switch but then I see—there’s no bulb. There’s beautiful stuff here that doesn’t look like it’s been touched for years. Would they miss it if it was all gone one day? In the drawers of a maple chest in the dining room there are dusty porcelain teacups so thin they might crack the instant you lifted them to your lips.

  We could steal everything in this house if we wanted and they probably wouldn’t notice.

  In the bathroom I pick up crystal and silver perfume bottles, a magnifying glass with a mother-of-pearl handle that rests atop a pile of ancient Life magazines. I pocket one of the perfume bottles, covering it with tissues taken from their nightstand.

  On my way back, I hear Eddie laughing too loud and saying, “You’re exactly right. You’re a hundred percent on the mark.”

  Eddie gives them his card before we go, and he holds Mrs. Berner’s hand in his. “If you decide you need a change, give Randall here a call. I think we can work a nice deal for all of us.”

  He turns to me. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he says. He wants me to establish myself here. It will be my sale.

  It will be easy. They’re already leaning our way. They even like us, for God’s sake. On my way out the door, I pull the perfume bottle out from the tissues and I hold it at my side, right there for them to see. Eddie’s out in the car waiting. I stand in the doorway.

  “Is there anything else I can answer for you?” I say.

  She sees nothing.

  “No,” she says. “But I’m feeling sure there will be.”

  Eddie has me going it on my own so that he can move to other properties. In the last year, he’s managed to buy two thousand acres of woodlands and waterfront in the Adirondacks, and our company has bought around seven times that. And these people really need the money from the looks of them. Ninety thousand dollars buys a new car, flat-screen TV, stereo and disc player, medicine and food for the next three years and a house on Collins Street, a block from the general store. Eddie’s girlfriend says it’s the Adirondacks. It’s a special part of the country. And it is. Six million acres. Almost half of it unmarked, not even a logging road or snowmobile trail. The Hudson River starts up not too far from here in Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds. It’s a lake almost a mile high, and I’ve been swimming there.

  It’s not as if we’re building factories or a toxic waste dump. The houses and cabins we build are beautiful, state of the art: high ceilings, fireplaces, wraparound porches. And the outsides are left their natural wood color, or painted brown or grass green so they blend in with the earth. The way Eddie tells it, we’re giving people their retirement and we are, but we’re also making some coin. Like the Berners’ three hundred acres. We’ll split it into eight lots, each with a calendar picture of unspoiled Adirondack riverfront, and each selling for about four times what we’ll pay the Berners. Our company places ads in the New York Times with pictures of the Oswegatchie, of the triple falls, the water dropping into spruce green eddies. “Five hours from the city and you’re in God’s backyard.” People can’t afford to buy beachfront anymore. They’re sick of the suburbs, the shopping malls. We’re giving them what they’ve been missing their whole lives. There’s an interview process for the people who want to buy. “We want people who will respect the land,” Eddie says, “who love the outdoors; people who will be good neighbors.” I’ve never seen him turn down a buyer because he thought he’d be a bad neighbor. But people like to be interviewed. They want to think they’ve passed a test.

  “Where’d you go?” he asks on the drive from the Berners’.

  “I wasn’t feeling that well.”

  “I think they’re very interested. You need to get to know them. It’s like I’ve been saying, low pressure. No one wants some salesman breathing down their neck. They don’t trust that. Call them up in a few days just to talk. Don’t ask her anything except how she’s doing, the weather, Mr. Berner, and things like that and she’ll invite you in for pie—I guarantee. And tell her about yourself a little. Ask her advice on something. I swear, it changes everything. Get them involved in your life a little. The sale has got to be secondary. You push too fast, like you were starting to in there, and people smell a rat.”

  We pass through rugged forest on our way into town.

  “What kind of things do I tell her about myself?”

  “Tell her about your family, about your mom and dad and how you worry about them from time to time. Tell her about visiting them. What that does is it makes you into a son. You’re a salesman here, but you’re also somebody’s son. See what I’m saying?”

  I am renting a three-room apartment directly above Latrell’s General Store and across Collins Street from the post office. In the mornings I buy a cup of coffee and I sit in the back with the regulars, a bunch of old guys in baseball caps who smell like cigarettes. Vern Latrell knows me by my name now on most mornings, though once he called me Andy and another time Patrick. I corrected him both times because I want him to remember me. I want everyone around here to remember me because I will be here for a while. Eddie introduced me around my first week here. They all like Eddie. A couple of them have gone fishing with him. One
old guy took him hunting. Eddie Callahan from Westchester County gumming around the woods hunting for deer. I tried to talk the way Eddie talked with them, loose and comfortable, one of the gang, but the words always came out wrong, stiff and unnatural, or else exaggerated, as though I were mimicking them. Now Eddie’s moved away to meet another town full of homeowners, and he’s left me behind as the new Eddie. No one has asked to take me hunting.

  In a few days I call Mrs. Berner. She knows my voice before I identify myself.

  “I was hoping you’d call, Randall,” she says. “Have you gotten settled in yet?”

  “All settled in at Eddie’s old place. On top of Latrell’s,” I say. “Right there in the middle of town.”

  “You must be a little restless, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not much for a young man like you to do around there, especially a young man whose roots are downstate.”

  “I like it. I’m getting to know everyone. All the regulars at Latrell’s.”

  “That’s a lazy bunch of do-nothings.”

  Weather, I think. “Days have been beautiful, huh? For October? I can’t believe it. Is it always that beautiful?” Sunshine glazes my window.

  “It’s usually colder. But it’s always beautiful.”

  “I think you’re right,” I say.

  She says nothing. I say nothing. I can’t think of anything else. She suspects me, I think. She knows about the perfume bottles. Good for her. Good for them. I’ll say good-bye, I decide.

  “Randall?” her voice creaks. “Do you like grilled cheese sandwiches with Virginia ham and tomato?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Well, I do too. I would like you to come over to the house and have a sandwich with me.”

  Mr. Berner is in bed with the flu, she says. From time to time we hear a frightening cough from the other room. She brings him his sandwich. I wave from the doorway. He waves back pathetically. “Hello, Randall,” he calls out. “Nice to see someone so young and healthy.”

  The rooms are so large I can’t imagine how they heat the place in the winter. I can imagine old Mr. Berner sick all winter in that cold house.

  In the living room Mrs. Berner and I sit across from each other, me on the blue couch, her on the cloth-lined rocker.

  “We’ve been discussing what you and Eddie brought up the other day. I’m starting to think it might make a whole world of sense.”

  Too fast, I think. Hold back. “But you’ve been here so long,” I say. “It’s got to be hard to think of moving from here.”

  “We’ll go broke living here. And we don’t get out that much to appreciate it that much anyhow.”

  I eat my sandwich. It is hot and gooey and as good as anything I can remember eating.

  “I’m lonely all the time,” she says. “You think you’re teaching a lesson . . . ”

  She looks so sad I feel the need to cheer her up. “My mother and father are both retired. And they get such a kick out of my coming home,” I say. “My mother makes a big deal out of it and she cooks some terrific meals. Sometimes my brothers come home at the same time. Family is important to me.”

  “What do your parents do?”

  “Well, my father is a school custodian and my mother is a secretary in the military. She works for the army.”

  Neither of these are true. I haven’t seen either of my parents in more than five years, and so I couldn’t say precisely what they do. It doesn’t seem like Mrs. Berner hears me anyhow.

  “My mother just finished a tour in Kabul,” I try.

  “I wish you’d come by whenever you like and visit us, Randall,” she says.

  On the way back from the bathroom this time I take the magnifying glass. I hold it at my side the way I did the perfume bottle as I say my good-byes. Mrs. Berner says nothing about it. She ducks back inside. On the way to my car I swipe the newspaper from the blue plastic box from the road.

  That night I meet Eddie at a bar in Saranac Lake. He has two more prospective sellers lined up—another old couple, and a ninety-three-year-old widower. He’s doing chores for the widower, bagging leaves and painting.

  “I let him pay me a few dollars and a beer each time so he doesn’t get suspicious or anything. I haven’t even told him I work in real estate.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I was a social worker on sabbatical.”

  Eddie buys the beers and asks the bartender to make out a receipt. He knows the bartender’s name and asks him about fishing on a particular section of the river.

  “Caught two today,” the bartender answers. “Walleyes have been hitting, Eddie. But it’s just pan fish. Nothing too big.”

  “I can’t even catch a cold lately,” Eddie says.

  It seems to me there are very few people Eddie doesn’t know.

  “What’s new with the Berners?” he asks me when the bartender is out of earshot.

  “Grilled cheese and Virginia ham today. Hamburgers and peach cobbler on Sunday night.”

  “Nice. Nice.”

  “I’m following your advice. I’m taking it slow.”

  “Good, good. You’re making a friend here. Not a sale. A friend. Remember that. You are helping them get to where they need to go. They can’t survive in that place. When you’re getting close, let me know and I’ll write you out a check you can take over. She’ll cry, I guarantee. She’ll take one look at that ninety-thousand-dollar check and she’ll cry.”

  I know that he’s speaking the truth. In two or three meals, Mrs. Berner, Aurelia Berner, will do whatever I tell her because she trusts me and because she’s lonely and wants to keep me as her friend or maybe as a fill-in for the kids who left for California. And I think that if it weren’t me, it would certainly be someone else taking her money. And it isn’t her money anyhow. It would be her money if she knew what her home was worth and she doesn’t, so why should she make a fortune off a house and property she can’t even use anymore?

  Each time I visit the Berners I take something else, two of the snow globes, an old copy of Robinson Crusoe, a porcelain doll. I take three more perfume bottles. As we walk in the house I sometimes run my hand over the place where I took an object or two. I wonder where she keeps her cash, the money she probably pays a neighbor kid to do her grocery shopping.

  I ask her once if she needs someone to do her grocery shopping.

  I pick up a load of groceries for her and when I return with them I tell her they cost twice as much as they did. I want her to question me, to ask for a receipt. Instead she hands me fifty bucks for some cold cuts and fruit, bread, vegetables for a salad, and a few boxes of rice.

  Old man Berner marks me some trails he hiked when he could walk and tells me what I’ll see: “Thick red spruce and those nice fir trees in the highlands and lower down the sugar maples we get our syrup from, and beech and yellow birch, and animals, Randall, that you can’t see anywhere else: Indian bats, grouses and loons, worm snakes and bog turtles, and turkey vultures.” He reminds me a little of a turkey vulture, though I don’t tell him that.

  After a month or so, Eddie calls me in my room. “Did you get the check I sent?” he asks. My room looks like an antique shop. My place is filled with beautiful items taken from the Berners’ house. I’ve dusted them all. I collected enough money from two things I sold to buy a secondhand TV and an electric razor. Soon I will have a great deal more than that. Eddie will pay me 3 percent of the profits, which could bring me about eight thousand dollars.

  “They want out of there, Eddie. They’re ready to sign whatever I bring over.”

  “Get her to sign and then give her the check. Make it fair. Ninety thousand just like we talked about. We’re not in the business of ripping people off. We can’t get that reputation.”

  It is clear he’s convincing himself here and that he’d want to pay less. If he could get away with it, Eddie would buy their land for twenty-four dollars like the deal Peter Stuyvesant worked out for Manhattan. />
  The next weeks are freezing cold, the roads iced solid and scary to drive on. The winds whip harshly through whatever I put on. The snows come strong out of nowhere and I am forever scraping ice from my windows, knocking it out from under my boots. On my way home from the Berners’ one night I am stuck in a whiteout, white all around me, and I cannot tell which direction is forward. There aren’t any sounds. My tires are high off the road in a snow cloud. I slow to about five miles an hour and then I cut the engine. I step out of the car and let the snow fall on me and for just a moment I feel like a six-year-old.

  When I get back in and start driving again, it takes me two hours to go a distance that should take twenty minutes.

  At night I watch TV just to hear the voices. I take long walks and then I turn on the news. There’s a small mention of the man who killed the old couple in Utica. He claims he never meant to kill them. He meant to rob them but the old guy pulled out a knife. The reporter said the knife was the old man’s Swiss Army knife and the blade was smaller than four inches.

  On the night of a particularly loud and icy storm, I barricade myself in blankets against the sounds outside. I wear layers of sweaters and shirts. Before I go to sleep my phone rings.

  “Randall?”

  It’s Mrs. Berner.

  “There are two windows I can’t get closed. They’re wide open and the heat’s going right through them. I’m afraid he’ll . . . I’m afraid Mr. Berner will freeze if we don’t get the windows closed.”

  They are hard to close even for me. I pull and pull and then I begin banging on them. I pour steaming water in the openings and then smear butter in the hinges. The cold air washes in against my face. Finally one budges and in another few minutes I’ve got the other closed.

  Mrs. Berner gasps. And then she gives me a beautiful smile. We sit in her kitchen and drink hot chocolate, and the sound of old Roury Berner snoring, loud and steady, comforts us both, like the sound of the logs crackling in the wood-burning stove.