IN THE MORNING, Albertine called three real estate agencies to list the hotel with them, and in the afternoon I ferried a dozen realtors out to look the place over. They spent more than an hour with Albertine, going through the buildings, walking along the beach, and listing the assets and appurtenances. Every time I crossed paths with the group, one or another of them was using the word charming, so it came as quite a shock when they suggested an asking price considerably lower than what we had invested over the years.
“Is that just for the hotel,” I asked, “or — ?”
“That would be for everything,” said Jeffrey, a fat and florid fellow who had assumed the role of spokesrealtor for the group.
“The hotel and the island?” I asked. Jeffrey laughed as if this were a joke, and I developed a strong negative attitude toward Jeffrey. “Does that mean yes or no?” I asked.
“It — um — it means yes,” said Jeffrey.
“The cottages, too?” asked Albertine.
Jeffrey nodded. No one said anything for a while, and when the silence had grown embarrassing, Jeffrey shrugged and grimaced and said, “Of course you can ask more if you like, but I understood that you were eager to sell.”
“We are,” said Albertine.
“But not that eager,” I said.
“Well,” said Jeffrey, standing and beginning to put his papers into his briefcase to signal that he had decided that it would probably not be worth his time to try to make me listen to reason, “perhaps you’d like to talk it over and give us a call when you’ve settled on a price.” He snapped the briefcase shut.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. We’d like to do that. Talk it over. I’ll — uh — take you back to the mainland — and Albertine and I will — we’ll talk it over.”
I got up and walked out of the room and out of the hotel and began walking toward the dock. The realtors followed. I stayed in the lead, moving quickly enough to stay ahead of the realtors so that I wouldn’t have to talk to them, because I didn’t want to have to listen to them appraise my hotel, my island, my life, my folly. I didn’t want to hear how little they thought it was worth, and I didn’t want to give them the opportunity to convince me that they were right. I didn’t say a word to them throughout the trip across the bay, and I mumbled my good-byes when I left them at the town dock.
ON THE WAY back home, when I was about halfway back, I throttled down and chugged along slowly to give myself some time to think. The bay was calm. The pale afternoon light flickering on the surface struck an autumnal note of things drawing to a close, of time running out. I was just beginning to try to sing the chorus to “September Song” when I spotted a rowboat ahead with someone standing in it, waving his arms. When I drew closer, I saw that it was my rowboat and that the arm-waver was Lou, the grumpy guy. I pulled the launch alongside.
“Perfect timing!” Lou sang out. “This thing really does leak.” The water was a couple of inches below the gunwales. I threw Lou a line, and when the rowboat was secure for towing, I extended a hand to him. Clambering aboard the launch, Lou said, “I was sitting there saying to myself, ‘Lou, if you get out of this alive, it’s time you recognized that most of the sand in the hourglass of life is in the bottom half,’ you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said, and after that I did not say another thing until the evening, when it was time to read “Have You Ever Wondered Why Microphones Don’t Resemble Ears?” the third episode of Dead Air.
[to be continued]
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