Through the Children's Gate Read Online Free PDF

than the relationship between someone who knows where homes can be found and two people who would like to find one. For one thing, the places are not really his to sell, not really theirs to buy. A tangle of clients and banks, bids and mortgages, co-op boards and co-op skeptics surrounds their relationship.
Hypothèque
is the French word for mortgage, and a hypothetical air attends every step you take: if you could … if they would … if the bank said … if the board allows….
    Yet the broker, at the top of the triangle, is a happy man. First he forms a liaison with the wife, which unites them against all the things that husbands have—doubt, penury, a stunted imagination. Together, the broker winks at the wife; they will scale the heights, find a poetic space, a wking brk frplce, something. But by late morning he has formed a second, darker, homoerotic alliance with the husband. The two guys share musky common sense, and their eyes exchange glances—she's so demanding, pretty much impossible. Now, a couple of guys like us, we could be happy together, take what we can get, fix a place up. The skilled broker keeps the husband and wife in a perpetual state of uncertainty about whose desires will be satisfied.
    Over lunch, it becomes plain that the broker has a past, as loverswill. He did something else before—he was a journalist, or a banker, or in advertising. He chose to be a broker because it gave him freedom, and then (he admits) in the nineties it began to give him money, more money than he ever thought possible. He looks sleek in his Italian suit, while his couple feel for the moment like out-of-towners, hicks in cloth coats and rubber boots. As coffee arrives, the couple hear his cell phone buzzing, muffled somewhere near his heart. He finds the phone, mutters into it, then speaks up: “Hey, I'm in the middle of lunch.” But the husband and wife are temporarily bound together: There is another—one he may love more than us.
    The only time the broker loses his poise is when the Rival Broker is waiting for him in the lobby of the building where she has the “exclusive.” Ethics and tradition insist that the two brokers show the apartment together, and suddenly the broker, so suave, so sexy, becomes an ex-husband, the two brokers like a couple after a bad divorce, polite only for the sake of the child—the apartment.
    The billets-doux of the couple's relationship with the broker are the layouts, the small black-and-white schematic maps of apartments, with key descriptive points set off in bullets: “Triple mint” (meaning not actually falling down); “Room to roam” (a large, dark back room); “Paris rooftops” (a water tower looms in the window of the bedroom). A New York apartment layout is the only known instance of a blueprint that is more humanly appealing than the thing it represents.
    One apartment succeeds another. There are the absurd apartments, nestled in towers among towering buildings four feet away, so that every sunless window shows another sunless window, and you could wake every morning to reach out and touch your pallid neighbor with your pallid hand. There are the half-shrunk apartments, with a reasonable living room and two more rooms carved out behind that you have to enter sideways. Then there are the apartments that are genuinely unique to New York. A hugely expensive “duplex” in the West Seventies, for instance, turns out to be a basement and a sub-basement—the basement where you used to put up your sloppy cousin from Schenectady, the one who never took off his Rangers sweater, and the windowless sub-basement where the janitor was once found molestingchildren. The apartment's chief attraction is wistfully announced on its blueprint. It is “Near Restaurants.”
    W hen you're in a tiny hotel room, apartments begin to crowd your imagination and haunt your nights. They turn into bright-eyed monsters, snaking through your dreams like subway cars. Last Christmas, having decided