Not that Lauren saved much time, hers or anybody’s. Peta put the Czolls’ price range at one-point-one to one-point-nine (she took a guess; Lauren didn’t know), called up a hundred listings. The houses were on major land, and most of them had interesting histories, a link to someone notable (Fitz-John Porter, corps commander in the Civil War; David Dixon Porter, key admiral of that war; Edith Effing Dalrymple, early Mesmerist and crusading suffragette, mother of Finch Dalrymple, teenaged abolitionist and early investor in Coca-Cola Corporation) or to something notable (the whaling trade, the spinning mills, the Civil War, the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Coca-Cola Corporation). Lauren, being a new ruler, wasted everybody’s time, coming late, forgetting some appointments (Peta standing on the lawn, looking at her watch), always finding fault when she saw a property, inventing new requirements, requiring new searches. First it was a helipad (had to have a helipad), then a gazebo, then a sail loft, then a bridle trail, a garden maze, and a working gristmill, plus land, history, and the wired humidor. Peta found a charming Queen Anne in Rye Crossings with humidor, gazebo, secluded bridle trails, and a Class 2 landing strip, but the gristmill was too squeaky, Lauren said, and the gazebo blocked her seaward views. Lauren was big on sea views for a time, then wanted something farmy and less windblown. She forgot about the gristmill altogether, focusing instead on music rooms and apple trees, and now we’re back to sea views, Peta thought. All Peta really needed was an answer to the question What does Lauren want? What will make her happy — truly, deeply, finally happy? Why was this so difficult for people nowadays?
It seemed to be the new plague of the age, this confusion over wants and needs. Poverty was pressure, Peta knew, but wealth created pressure too. The pressure on the software wives was quiet and corrosive — if you can have anything, buy anything you see, why you are still nervous and dissatisfied? Peta saw corrosion in her clients and in Jens. Poor Jens was building monsters, on the verge of finally getting rich, but it wasn’t good or pure enough somehow. She knew he wasn’t sleeping. She pretended not to really notice, because she was afraid that Jens, confronted, would unravel. And so Peta, too, like her clients and Jens, felt that she was walking on the lip of a deep pit.
“Right this way,” she said to Lauren.
Peta let them in the back door of the manor house, pausing to wipe her feet on the rattan mat inside the door. Lauren, seeing this, paused to wipe her feet as well. There were two clients here, thought Peta. This morning’s Lauren was the posh, high-handed bitch. The other Lauren was the frightened child, food-disordered, lost in wealth, neurotic to the nines. One sharp word from Peta and this other Lauren would start bawling, so Peta held her tongue, just as she’d held her tongue with Jens that morning, him and his snide crack about the moon. Peta knew that Jens was jealous of the love and care she wasted on her clients’ whims, of the Saturdays she spent touring mansions with Lauren, or the nights she spent at the office, eating takeout sushi as she did her listing searches on the Web. It was a crock of shit, of course — Peta didn’t love her clients any more than a doctor loves her patients. Jens’ panic and self-pity were among his least attractive traits, ranking right down there with his lacerating tongue. He turned it on himself (“Even my best monster is a failure,” he would say), and — less often, but more often lately — on her as well.
“Here we are,” said Peta, leading Lauren through the spacious, eat-in, center-island kitchen, newly renovated. The Bell Estate belonged to a man named Geoff Rishman, a Bell by marriage, twice removed, a pushy Boston asshole (they called them Massholes up here) who had lost the last of the Bell fortune on a team gymnastics league. His franchise, the Boston Swans, had crushed the New York Attitude in the title meet, but Geoff couldn’t get a TV deal and the league collapsed. Geoff was asking one-point-two, but Peta thought he would gladly entertain high nines.
Lauren worked the faucets as Peta did her spiel. The pattern for the house, she said, came from thatch-roofed cottages of Lincolnshire, that’s England. It came not in blueprint but in the eye of the first Puritans, who adapted the design to the colder winters and abundant timber of America. The walk-in fireplace was actually a pyramid of Flemish bricks, brought across as ballast, 1638. The stove was Viking, high-output, as in the best restaurants.
“No more waiting for the pasta water,” said Peta hopefully.
Lauren touched the oven door. “Who was Silence Bell?”
Portsmouth brokers knew their history. The big-ticket properties were the registered estates, the landmarks on the headlands down to Rye. Selling them was telling them, Noel Moss always said. Peta knew her history better than most.
“Silence Bell,” she recited. “Born 1616, left England at the age of twenty-one under a Stuart death warrant. Elected captain of Winthrop’s militia, 1644. Came north to quell the Indians that year. Bell was related to the Mathers on his mother’s side. He was little Cotton Mather’s favorite cousin and was best man at Mather’s wedding, most historians believe. Cotton Mather, son of Increase, is regarded as the last important voice of—”
“I know who Cotton Mather was,” Lauren said. “He was a racist dick. Was Bell a racist too?”
“No,” said Peta mildly, “he was a moderate, a Puritan Eisenhower. He stopped the wanton massacres of the Onomonopiacs through a judicious policy of mass deportation to the Jamaican sugar fields, and presided in old age over the later Salem witch trials, voting against several of the hangings and many of the pressings. His personal narrative of the Puritan experiment, Covenantum Bloodcurdlicum, was written in this very house.”
“Really?”
“Upstairs, in what’s now the TV room.”
They did the dining room, the drawing room, the music room, the den. Peta pointed out the period appointments, the Hepplewhites, the Chippendales, the Sheratons, the Sonys. They came to the game room, a blast of garish ’70s — rugs like body hair and vanilla leather couches, obelisks and orbs on every table. Geoff was sleeping with his decorator and it showed.
Peta said, “Ignore the LeRoy Neiman prints.”
Lauren winced. “I’ll try. The listing mentioned paddocks. Can we see them?”
They went outside and down the lawn, past the brick barbecues, the teak cabanas, and the tarpaulined pool.
Peta said, “The paddock’s just ahead.”
There was one horse at home that morning, a vermin-ridden thoroughbred named Locomotion, also on the market. They watched the horse munch squash rinds for a time.