Good Faith Read Online Free PDF Page B

you noticed the way that slope on Maple Glen Road curves up from the road there? It’s a beautiful thing. It always reminds me of a woman’s ass. I laid sod there, you know that? Because I didn’t want to wait to have that nice feeling that I got when I approached that house from the west. I’m a cheapskate, but I didn’t want to wait for the grass to grow.” Gottfried’s favorite wrong idea about himself was that he was a cheapskate.
    I said, “You know, I’ve sold seventeen houses for you over the years. Every one, I’ve had to pry it out of your hands even though you were bitching at me for months that the carrying costs were killing you.”
    “A guy who wants to put a fence around the swell of a woman’s buttock doesn’t deserve to live there.”
    “He loves the house. It’s the only house he wants. He thinks it’s perfect.”
    “Perfect for what, entertaining? Showing off? I guarantee you, this guy’s an egomaniac. Mark my words.”
    “You haven’t met the guy, Gottfried.”
    He turned on me suddenly and shouted, “You want to make this sale?
You
put up the fence. I don’t ever want to see that house again, though. Out of your commission, a Goddamned white board fence, clean and straightforward, no split rails. I won’t pay for it, and I won’t build it, and I won’t even look at it, but I’ll sell the house at full price to this bozo because the bank’s got me by the balls! Do you know what my life is like? I worry every night about carrying costs, and then you take some guy out there and bingo, you got fifteen grand that comes right out of my pocket! What are you coming around to me for, asking me about this shit? Dale!”
    “Then you’ll take the offer?”
    “You build the fence and I’ll take the Goddamned offer!”
    I went over to the worktable and laid out the papers. They were already flagged for signatures, flagged in yellow, though they might as well have been flagged in red. I handed Gottfried a pen. He managed to sign the papers without tearing through them, but I knew he would rant around for the rest of the morning. Fortunately, Dale, the only guy working with him that day, was impervious.
    When I first met him, Gottfried was a shop teacher at the middle school, building houses on the weekends. When I listed his first house, he was amazed and gratified to have made it to the selling stage; he was utterly polite with me, almost obsequious. But that vanished when he met the buyers. They did not meet his standards; no buyers ever had. But he had made a fortune, his houses were famous, magazines took pictures of them, commercials were filmed in them. I was his only listing agent. Sometimes we socialized, and once, over a beer, he had loosened up and told me that when his family was escaping the Huguenot purges in France, they had changed their name to Nuelle because Nuelle meant
nothing
or
no one
. He’d looked at me and said, “Think about that, Joe. Think about running off to North Dakota or somewhere and changing your name to ‘Joe Nobody.’” For whatever reason, after he told me that, I didn’t take his rants personally anymore. Nevertheless, I was more than relieved to flee with the signed purchase agreement in my hand.
    I got back to the office, planning to give Bobby the papers right away before Gottfried Nuelle could find me and recant, but Bobby was nowhere to be found. I put the agreement on his desk and hand-printed a note saying,
Get this to the buyer asap, before the seller changes his mind.
When the phone rang, I was tempted not to pick it up, but I did anyway. If you are a Realtor, you have to answer the phone; that’s the first rule of business. It was Gordon Baldwin, not Gottfried. That put me in a better mood right there. Gordon was my main builder over the years, and his market was much different from Gottfried Nuelle’s. Gordon bought farms. He had been buying farms for twenty-five years. He had a farm-buying pickup truck, an old International Harvester