"I've been a buyer's agent since I started in the business," Barb said. Her voice was deep and loud and it caromed off all the polished surfaces in the kitchen. "It's why I got into real estate in the first place. Buying our second house was a horrible experience. Our agent and the seller's agent invented fake competing offers to get us to raise our bid. I could never prove anything, but it was obvious what was going on."
She had bright blue-green eyes, slightly small in her broad face but expressive and lively, so it was easy to maintain eye contact as she spoke. And I needed to maintain eye contact now, because if I didn't I knew my gaze would wander and I'd be staring at her chest again, which she'd busted me doing twice already.
"Of course, the higher the sale price, the higher the commission the agents got to split. They knew how much we wanted the house, they even pushed us to drop our contingencies. In the end we just bit the bullet and went along with it. But right then I knew I could do better. With just that one piece of knowledge I knew I could help other buyers navigate this gator-infested swamp."
There was a hint of sales pitch to what she was saying--you typically don't come up with
gator-infested swamp
on your first go-around--but to her credit Barb had saved it for our second day of showings, and she only brought it up when I was trying to make small talk.
We were standing in the kitchen of the third house of the day, on hold for the time being while Kelly was in the living room nursing Christopher, our ten-month-old. In hindsight, it seems like madness to have brought a baby along on a whirlwind house-hunting tour, especially since we'd driven three hours to get down there and were putting ourselves up in a very basic motel for the weekend. But at the time--this would have been the mid-2000's--we were a brand new family, Chris was the center of our lives, and the idea of leaving him with his grandparents even for one night never entered our heads.
"It hadn't occurred to me to think about that," I said to Barb. "My dad told me, make sure you get a buyer's agent, and I guess I just said, okay."
"Your dad's right. It's the only way you have any representation in the process, putting your interests first. Otherwise you're lambs to the slaughter."
"I can't believe it's a new thing. Buyer's agents, I mean. It's such an obvious conflict of interest otherwise, when you think about it."
"So much, hon. And there was some real pushback in the industry when the idea first started gaining ground. Shows you what their motives are."
She took another cursory look around the kitchen. There was a sour look on her face, possibly from the after-taste of describing the moral shortcomings in the world of real estate; but it could just as easily have been displeasure at the house we currently found ourselves in. How many houses like this had Barb shown in her career?
For Kelly and me, this was the ninth we'd looked at so far, including the six from yesterday, with another three to come today. They'd started to run together for me, and already I couldn't have recalled the specifics of any of them with any certainty. The notes I'd made on the stack of listings had grown progressively less detailed as we shuttled from one to the next. This one was neither here nor there; it could have been any of at least four we'd looked at already.
Barb opened a few drawers and cabinets and poked around in a couple of them, which I'd seen her do at most of the other places we'd toured. At first I thought it was a little presumptuous, even invasive, but it occurred to me that after ten years of showing houses like this, each with their barely distinguishable variations on fashionable themes, it's possible she was simply looking for something, anything, to make one stand out from another. Or perhaps it was just sheer boredom that drove her to do it.
She was wearing the professional uniform of the real-estate agent: cream blouse under a light-blue jacket with matching skirt in a finely spun wool. I don't know fashion, but this woman clearly knew how to dress. The skirt was tailored to her hips and thighs, tapering down to stop just above the knee, emphasizing without advertising. The jacket was cropped at just the right height so it was clear to anyone who might be paying that much attention (I was) that the eye-catching curves above and below were offset by a slender waist in between. The top button of her blouse was low enough to create a vee just above her cleavage, a little showy but still church-modest. Her light skin was a little darker there, and sun-freckled. Her hair was blonde and shoulder-length, with a gentle but irrepressible curl. I guessed it might have been a little redder when she was younger; perhaps her colorist had been taking the easy route in recent years. Barb was in her late fifties, I guessed. Sixty? Sixty-one at most.
"Have you shown this house before?"
"Hmm? Oh, yes, many times. This one's fixing to set for a while."
"Any reason for that?"
"We haven't been upstairs yet, but you'll see."
"You make it sound like I shouldn't bother to look."
"You'd save yourself some time, hon, that's for sure."
She walked away down the length of the granite countertop and I watched her go, my attention still snagged by her figure. It was extraordinary. She was much taller than the average woman. I'm a shade under six feet and with eyes horizontal I was looking at the point of her chin. She was proportionately wide, too, with broad shoulders. Head on, even when she was commanding your attention with her blue-green gaze, you couldn't escape the immanence of her breasts, rising and falling in the periphery of your vision, wide, proud and low, silently daring you to look and marvel at them, but promising devastation if you did.
And the rear view--there's no other way to put this--was all ass; gigantic, mesmerizing ass. The impression she gave then, and what sums her up when I think of her now, is of the figurehead you see on old wooden sailing ships: the carved head and torso mounted on the prow of a large and important vessel. Austere, buxom, commanding, and fearless up top, while the lower half merged seamlessly into the hull of the ship, low and wide, the business end of the enterprise. Broad enough to tame deep oceans, full of precious cargo, tended and steered to exotic destinations by an anxious and respectful crew. That big, that important. Unignorable; that was Barb's ass.
A woman of such stature was wasted in a setting like this. I wouldn't have been surprised to see Barb making fiery closing arguments as a trial attorney, or negotiating disarmament treaties with heads of state. Feminine, charming, but not classically beautiful, and all the more interesting for it; very sexy, and more than capable of crushing your nuts and making you thank her for it afterwards.
But in real life Barb was a real estate agent in a southern suburban town, late to her career having raised a family first, making the best of her talents and sensibility in the time remaining to her. And here she was out in the arena, throwing elbows with all the chiselers and johnnies-come-lately whose professional interests extended as far as fat profits and the short cut to Easy Street. To our good fortune--Kelly's and mine--Barb had chosen the good guys' side and was willing to hand-hold a young family while they decided in which of these indistinguishable cardboard-and-plastic houses they'd start their family life. It wasn't lost on me that for a price bracket two or three times what we were in the market for, the legwork for the agent is approximately the same. Barb didn't have to slum it with the first-time buyers, and I'm sure she knew she could aim higher, yet here she was. For that she had my respect.
At the far end of the counter she'd turned on her heel and was now, I eventually realized, watching me look at her. Again. When I made it up to her eyes I could see amusement there and perhaps a little exasperation. God only knows what slack-mouthed face I was wearing at that moment. She shifted her broad jaw to one side and raised her eyebrows, the way a teacher might silently call out a misbehaving student without disrupting the entire class.
"This is strike three, Mr. Puck," she might have said, "whatever you think you're doing, you can stop right now."
