No one could constantly agree yet remain so disagreeable. Rhonda nodded her head, rattling the bangles that hung from her ears and encircled her goose neck. She said she understood, that she completely agreed, but her icy stare said she did not understand nor agree.
But she could not express her thoughts. Her job as realtor required her to keep us happy, while trying to convince us that it would not cost much to renovate the condo she just showed us. Yes, the second bedroom was too small. Much too small. And the building did have an odd smell. But we had to consider the building was almost a hundred years old and we could not find the building’s special features such as a butler’s pantry, coved ceilings and leaded glass windows that sparkled when the sun set. I agreed, but of course I did; I loved vintage, which Troy called old while he loved modern, which I called soulless.
The only thing Troy and I agreed on was that we picked the wrong realtor. Troy’s ex, Stuart who had the wherewithal to buy a home in Lincoln Park and a vacation home in Saugatuck recommended Rhonda. Yes, Rhonda was old enough to be an actual daughter of the American Revolution, looked like an apple cob-head doll and dressed like she shopped at Rhoda garage sale. But she knew every realtor in town and had the tenacity of a badger.
Rhonda had every reason to be exasperated. Troy wanted a condo in the center of the action. I wanted a bungalow where I could have a garden and maybe a dog or two. Troy patronized me as being the world’s oldest 38-year-old octogenarian. “No worries,” she said, in a cheerful voice that macerated insincerity, “I will show you a number of places in your price range, some condos and some houses. She winked at Troy conspiratorially and then blinked at me with the same eye.
“In your price range” was the universal response of why she could not show us a place in which we could actually imagine ourselves living. “Well,” she said with a dismissive wave of her Bakelite bracelets, “at your price range, you are going to have to make some compromises.”
While Rhonda was rifling through the homeowner’s mail to check for envelopes from collection agencies (“it is always good to know if they have to sell”), Troy and I would amuse ourselves doing Rhonda impersonations, trying to find common ground. Maybe the novelty of being so different was what motivated us to become friends, lovers and eventual homeowners. There remained significant differences. He was an extrovert with a congenital inability to put clothes in the hamper or dishes in the dishwasher. I was quieter and could only express my disinclinations in pouts or sighs. Troy wished I came with subtitles and then, looking at my distended lower lip, decided perhaps not. I suppose we would be better off apart, but being gay men on the wrong side of 35, we would best adhere to Rhonda’s advice to compromise.
The more places we saw, the heavier Rhonda’s shoulders heaved. She never disagreed with our assessments of too old, too new, too little, too open, too smelly or too stark. She nodded her head as if we were debating philosophy, but would always manage to slip in something about not always getting what we wanted.
And then a small miracle occurred. Somehow we agreed on a townhouse that was close enough to the clubs for Troy but on a one-way street with speed bumps for me. He could take the El if he overindulged and I could coax a couple of tomato plants to grow in the backyard. The townhouse was nearly a hundred years old, but someone with taste had renovated it to Troy’s standards. The only downside was that the stairs were obviously not up to code. They were narrow and steep. Troy and I vowed to look it as a positive in that we would have to be careful how much we drank when ascending the stairs to our third-floor bedroom. Rhonda was thrilled and whipped out the offer sheet before we had a chance to find the typical uncommon ground.
The purchase process went smoothly and less than a month later we answered the door in midst of unpacking to welcome Rhonda holding a warm bottle of warm domestic sparkling wine. She wanted to see what we had done with the place and our mistake was letting her go beyond the ground floor. After oohing and ahhing her way upstairs, she pronounced the place “perfect” from the top stair of the second floor. She promptly slipped on a scarf that had become unraveled and wrapped around her feet. She cascaded down the stairs, breaking her neck on the third tread, coming to rest face up.
Our initial thought was to pack her into the trunk and dump her somewhere. It is not that we were unsympathetic, it was just that things were going so well with Troy and me. He tended to stay home instead of going out, intrigued by the possibility of hosting parties on our roof deck. We didn’t need the turmoil right now.
Rhonda stared at us with vacant eyes and a frozen grimace. Troy called the police while I tried to make her look more comfortable, only to be yelled at by the cops for tampering with “evidence.” So that is the way it goes—one minute you are Realtor Rhonda of the plethoral scarves, the next moment you are evidence. Troy could not wait until they bagged the evidence so he could “Lysol the house.”
Early this morning Rhonda appeared on the second floor landing. Just my luck as I was already feeling like God’s little fool. Upset by Rhonda’s death, Troy and I reverted to form, arguing about what to do at night. He wanted to go out and get drunk. I wanted to calm myself by staying in, eating take-out and watching a movie. We compromised with him slamming the door on his way out and me eating a large Ma-Po Tofu by myself and watching Rear Window.
To make a point, I turned off every light in the house before turning in at 10. Troy’s bumbling and cursing on his way up the three stories woke and amused me. Booze made Troy horny and he crawled into bed smelling of Velvet Orchid, gin and cigarettes. Assuming I was equally aroused, he started mounting me like a bull in a paddock. Even though I welcomed the attention, I pushed him off and told him to jerk himself off as he clearly didn’t care what I wanted. I slid out of bed and made my way downstairs for a glass of water to wash down another Ambien.
And there she was, in the same gaudy dress and long scarf she was wearing when she took a tumble down the stairs. The only thing odd about her—besides being dead—was the obtuse angle of her head, which conformed perfectly to the tread on which she had come to rest.
Once I could breathe and confirmed consciousness via pinching, I staccatoed my way through a question: “you…here…why?”
She smiled at me wryly. “Scared you near half out of your boyfriend, did I? Never understood gay sex. Always seemed a matter of a round peg and a square hole. She shivered and her head bobbed about like a buoy on a stormy sea. “Ooh, that felt good. All those years of holding my tongue while clients wanted it all: ‘I want a pool, a great room, three-full baths, in a good school district. And I don’t want to pay more than $200,000.’ Oh God, years and years of smiling and nodding and gently prompting them to return to planet Earth.”
“Why are you here?”
“Here, at the top of the stairs? Don’t you know?” she asked in a ghoulish voice. Ghosts haunt where they died, doomed for a certain period of time to walk the earth at night until the regret they stockpiled in life is purged. And believe me as a realtor, I got a lot of regret: The lies. The exaggerations. The concealing. The strategic steering away from the cellar door.
Unbidden, she unraveled the purple scarf from around her neck and laid it at her feet. She cart-wheeled down the stairs, coming to rest at the bottom. She repositioned her head, wrapped the scarf around her neck and hiked up the stairs like an exhausted toddler pulling a sled. “Now, let’s talk about that boyfriend of yours and why he’s such a bad idea.”