The Discomfort Zone (2 page)

“This is a lovely, lovely home,” Pat said. “Your mother kept it up beautifully. And I think we can get a good price for it, but we have to act fast. I'd suggest listing it at three hundred fifty thousand, putting an ad in the paper on Tuesday, and having an open house next weekend.”

“And your commission?”

“Six percent,” she said, looking at me steadily. “I know several people who would be very interested right now.”

I told her I would let her know by the end of the day.

The third realtor burst into the house an hour later. Her name was Mike, she was a pretty, short-haired blonde about my own age, and she was wearing excellent jeans. Her plate was overfull, she said in a husky voice, she was coming from her third open house of the day, but after I'd phoned her on Friday she'd driven over to see our house and had fallen in love with it from the street, its curb appeal was
fantastic
, she knew she
had
to see the inside, and, wow, just as she suspected—she was moving hungrily from room to room—it was
adorable
, it was
dripping
with charm, she liked it even better from the inside, and she would love love love love love to be the one to get to sell it, in fact if the upstairs bathroom weren't so small she might even go as high as $405,000, this neighborhood was
so
hot,
so
hot—I knew about the Mary, Queen of Peace school district, right?—but even with the problematic bathroom and the regrettably tiny back yard she wouldn't be surprised if the house sold in the three-nineties,
plus
there were other things she could do for me, her basic commission was five and a half percent, but if the buyer's agent was from her group, she could knock that down to five, and if she herself was the buyer's agent she could knock it all the way down to four, my God, she
loved
what my mother had done, she'd known it as soon as she'd seen it from the street, she wanted this house
bad
—“Jon, I want it
bad
,” she said, looking me in the eye—and, by the way, just as a matter of fact, not to brag, truly, but she'd been number one in residential real estate in Webster Groves and Kirkwood for three years running.

Mike excited me. The sweat-damp front of her blouse, the way she strode in her jeans. She was flirting with me broadly, admiring the size of my ambitions, comparing them favorably to her own (though hers were not insubstantial), holding my gaze, and talking nonstop in her lovely husky voice. She said she totally got why I wanted to live in New York. She said it was rare that she met somebody who understood, as I obviously did, about
desire
, about
hunger
. She said she'd price the house between $380,000 and $385,000 and hope to start a bidding war. As I sat there, watching her gush, I felt like a Viking.

It shouldn't have been so hard to make the call to Pat, but it was. She seemed to me a mom I had to disappoint, a mom in the way, a nagging conscience. She seemed to know things about me and about the house—realistic things—that I wished she didn't. The look she'd given me when she'd named her commission had been skeptical and appraising, as if any responsible adult could see that she and her daughter were obviously the best agents for the job, but she wasn't sure if I could see it myself.

I waited until 9:30, the last possible minute, before I called her. Just as I'd feared, she didn't hide her surprise and displeasure. Did I mind if she asked who the other realtor was?

I was conscious of the taste and shape of Mike's name as it passed through my mouth.

“Oh,” Pat said wearily. “OK.”

Mike wouldn't have been my mother's type either, not one bit. I told Pat that the decision had been a very hard one, a really difficult choice, and that I was grateful that she'd come over and sorry that she and I weren't going to be—

“Well, good luck,” she said.

After that, I got to make the fun call, the Yes-I'm-free-on-Friday-night call. Mike, at home, confided to me in a low voice, as if to keep her husband from hearing, “Jon, I knew you'd go with me. I felt the connection between us right away.” The only slight complication, she said, was that she had long-standing vacation plans with her husband and children. She was leaving town on Friday and wouldn't be able to start showing the house until the very end of the month. “But don't worry,” she said.

 

I GREW UP
in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class. My parents were originally Minnesotan, moved south to Chicago, where I was born, and finally came to rest in Missouri, the country's cartographic linchpin. As a child, I set great store by the fact that no American state shares a boundary with more states than Missouri does (it and Tennessee are tied with eight) and that its neighbors abut states as farflung as Georgia and Wyoming. The nation's “population center”—whatever cornfield or county-road crossing the most recent census had identified as America's demographic center of gravity—was never more than a few hours' drive from where we lived. Our winters were better than Minnesota's, our summers were better than Florida's. And our town, Webster Groves, was in the middle of this middle. It wasn't as wealthy a suburb as Ladue or Clayton; it wasn't as close to the inner city as Maplewood or as far out as Des Peres; about seven percent of the population was both middle-class and black. Webster Groves was, my mother liked to say, echoing Goldilocks, “just right.”

She and my father had met in an evening philosophy class at the University of Minnesota. My father was working for the Great Northern Railroad and auditing the class for fun. My mother was a full-time receptionist in a doctor's office and was slowly accumulating credits for a degree in child de
velopment. She began one of her papers, called “My Philosophy,” by describing herself as “an average young American girl—average, I say, in that I have interests, doubts, emotions, and likes similar to those of a girl of my age in any American city.” But she then confessed to serious doubts about religion (“I believe firmly in the teachings of Christ, in all He represented, but I am not sure of supernaturalism”) which revealed her claim of being “average” as something closer to a
wish
. “I cannot see this doubting for the world as a whole,” she wrote. “There is a definite need for religion in the lives of man. I say it is right for humanity, but for myself I do not know.” Unable to sign on with God and Heaven and the Resurrection, and uncertain about an economic system that had produced the Great Depression, she concluded her paper by naming the one thing she didn't doubt: “I am a firm believer in family life. I feel that the home is the foundation of true happiness in America—much more the foundation than the church or the school can ever be.”

All her life, she hated not belonging. Anything that tended to divide us from the rest of the community (her unbelief, my father's sense of superiority) had to be countered with some principle that would draw us back to the middle and help us to fit in. Whenever she talked to me about my future, she stressed that a person's character mattered more than his or her achievements, and that the more abilities a person had, the more he or she owed society. People who impressed her were always “highly able,” never “smart” or “talented,” or even “hardworking,” because people who thought of themselves as “smart” might be vain or selfish or arrogant, whereas people who considered themselves “able” were constantly reminded of their debt to society.

The American society of my childhood was shaped by similar ideals. Nationwide, the distribution of income had never been more equitable and never would be again; company presidents typically took home only forty times more than their lowest-paid worker. In 1965, near the peak of his career, my father was making $17,000 a year (just over
twice the national median income) and had three boys in public school; we owned one mid-sized Dodge and one twenty-inch black-and-white TV; my weekly allowance was twenty-five cents, payable on Sunday mornings; a weekend's excitement might consist of the rental of a steam machine to strip off old wallpaper. To liberals, the mid-century was an era of unexamined materialism at home, unabashed imperialism abroad, the denial of opportunity to women and minorities, the rape of the environment, and the malign hegemony of the military-industrial complex. To conservatives, it was an era of collapsing cultural traditions and bloated federal government and confiscatory tax rates and socialistic welfare and retirement schemes. In the middle of the middle, though, as I watched the old wallpaper come off in heavy, skinlike, pulp-smelling masses that reglued themselves to my father's work boots, there was nothing but family and house and neighborhood and church and school and work. I was cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned. I was the late-arriving son to whom my father, who read to me every weeknight, confided his love of the depressive donkey Eeyore in A. A. Milne, and to whom my mother, at bedtime, sang a private lullaby that she'd made up to celebrate my birth. My parents were adversaries and my brothers were rivals, and each of them complained to me about each of the others, but they were all united in finding me amusing, and there was nothing not to love in them.

Need I add that it didn't last? As my parents grew older and my brothers and I fled the center geographically, ending up on the coasts, so the country as a whole has fled the center economically, ending up with a system in which the wealthiest one percent of the population now takes in sixteen percent of total income (up from eight percent in 1975). This is a great time to be an American CEO, a tough time to be the CEO's lowest-paid worker. A great time to be Wal-Mart, a tough time to be in Wal-Mart's way, a great time to be an incumbent extremist, a tough time to be a moderate challenger. Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to
be an adjunct at Queens College; outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list; phenomenal to win a Texas Hold 'Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict.

On an August afternoon six years after my mother died, while a major American city was being destroyed by a hurricane, I went golfing with my brother-in-law on a funky little mountain course in northern California. It was a tough time to be in New Orleans but a great time to be out West, where the weather was perfect and the Oakland A's, an underpaid team I like to follow, were making their annual late-summer run at first place. My biggest worries of the day were whether I should feel bad about quitting work at three and whether my favorite organic grocery store would have Meyer lemons for the margaritas I wanted to make après golf. Unlike George Bush's crony Michael Brown, who was thinking about his manicure and his dinner reservations that week, I had the excuse of not being the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. With every ball I hooked into the woods or topped into a water hazard, my brother-in-law joked, “At least you're not sitting on a roof with no drinking water, waiting for a helicopter to pick you up.” Two days later, when I flew back to New York, I worried that Katrina's aftermath might create unpleasant turbulence on my flight, but the ride was unusually smooth, and the weather in the East was warm and cloudless.

Things had been going well for me in the years since my mother's death. Instead of being in debt and living at the mercy of the city's rent-control laws, I now owned a nice apartment on East Eighty-first Street. Walking in the door, after two months in California, I had the sensation of walking into somebody else's apartment. The guy who lived here was apparently a prosperous middle-aged Manhattanite with the sort of life I'd spent my thirties envying from afar, vaguely disdaining, and finally being defeated in my attempts to imagine my way into. How odd that I now had keys to this guy's apartment.

My housesitter had left the place clean and neat. I'd always favored bare floors and minimal furniture—had had my fill of Traditional when I was growing up—and I'd taken very few things from my mother's house after she died. Kitchenware, photo albums, some pillows. A tool chest that my great-grandfather had made. A painting of a ship that could have been the
Dawn Treader
. An assortment of small objects that I held on to out of loyalty to my mother: an onyx banana, a Wedgwood candy dish, a pewter candlesnuffer, a brass niello-handled letter opener, with matching scissors, in a green leather sheath.

Because there were so few things in the apartment, it didn't take me long to figure out that one of them—the pair of scissors from the sheath—had disappeared while I was in California. My reaction was like that of the dragon Smaug in
The Hobbit
, when Smaug realizes that a gold cup is missing from his mountain of precious objects. I flew around and around the apartment, smoke spewing from my nostrils. When I interrogated the housesitter, who said she hadn't seen the scissors, I had to struggle not to bite her head off. I ransacked the place, went through every drawer and cabinet twice. It enraged me that, of all the things that could have disappeared, what I'd lost had been something of my mother's.

I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn't go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane's homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well orchestrated it seemed quasi-official, like the “Support Our Troops” ribbons that had shown up on half the country's cars overnight. But it seemed to me that helping Katrina's homeless victims ought to be the government's job, not mine. I'd always voted for candidates who wanted to raise my taxes, because I thought paying taxes was patriotic and because my idea of how to be left alone—my libertarian ideal!—was a well-funded, well-managed central government that spared me from having to make a hundred different spending decisions every week. Like, was Katrina as bad as the Pakistan earth
quake? As bad as breast cancer? As bad as AIDS in Africa? Not as bad? How much less bad? I wanted my government to figure these things out.