by James Terry
Although all men are created equal, those who successfully accumulate property are able, through the leisure property affords, to develop fully rational minds in ways not possible for those without property.
-John Locke
Things are alright now between us and Mr. Fenton, but for a while there it got pretty tense. In late August, pining for the comforts of home, my wife and I returned from a summer in London to a dwelling under siege. Where the front lawn had previously been, there was now a hill of dirt and boards and iron rebar. The outer skin of concrete had been peeled back around the skirting of the apartment building, revealing the wooden skeleton inside. Our subletter had mentioned over the phone that our landlord was making some repairs. We’d assumed it was a leaky faucet.
Mr. Fenton welcomed us back with his usual stentorian greeting. “Hi how ya doing? Good trip? Can’t beat this weather. I started your cars like you asked me to.” We thanked him and gave him a box of Scottish chocolates.
“Termites,” he said enthusiastically. Mr. Fenton speaks at a volume irrelevant to the proximity of the listener, and because his words emanate from the velar region of his mouth, he sounds like a muppet. I followed him on a guided tour of the diseased building, a handsome, cream-colored Georgian Revival four-plex built in 1927. Mr. Fenton kneeled and pointed at patches of porous wood. “They’re feasting in there. I’ve got no choice. All of that dirt has to come out. I’ve been directed to do this, you understand. It’s not up to me.” He squinted in the shade of his cap to make sure I comprehended the magnitude of his statement. This is a habit of his, making sure everything he says, no matter how self-evident, is clearly understood. “Everyone’s going to have to do it. All these places,” he swept his arm across the horizon of the neighborhood.
When we were first considering moving into the apartment, Mr. Fenton took me down to the basement, where jars of nails segregated by size sit in rows on dust-free shelves, and the thick arms of the massive Basmor Boiler reach into the apartments above. A three-by-five index card thumbtacked to a joist beside the boiler reads, “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE FURNACE! –Mr. Fenton.”
He proudly pointed out the water filters he’d installed for each unit. The white pods looked like giant spider egg sacs. “All your water is pure. Only way to keep healthy in this polluted world.” It gave me a warm feeling to think that a landlord would care enough about his tenants to do this. Even so, he gave off some strange vibes. The more I observed his leathery head, narrow as a grasshopper’s, his expansive Howdie Doodie smile with perfectly even and white teeth, his misty gray eyes, the more I experienced an odd feeling of displacement, as if I were carrying on a conversation with a ventriloquist’s dummy.
On our way back up to the apartment, passing a battalion of locks on the back door, I told him that my wife and I were graduate students. “We’re at home a lot. Will it be quiet?”
“You can hear a pin drop in this place,” he assured me.
We moved in.
*****************************
A symphony of pneumatic drills, jackhammers and power saws filled the air from eight to five for endless weeks. Trucks and jeeps took over our driveway and our parking space in back. Ellen and I wore earplugs or escaped to cafes and university libraries.
“This is driving me up the wall,” she said. She was trying to write a grant for more study abroad.
“I hear you,” I said, but in truth I didn’t mind the noise as much as she did, and I liked having things to observe. I watched the work from my study and made notes. At exactly ten and two, Mr. Fenton turns his cap around and yells “break time.” He makes sure the men are properly fortified at noon (he is an expert on the nutritional needs of the human body). “Eat avocados,” he tells his men. “That’s good fat. There’s good fat and there’s bad fat, you understand. Avocados help you think.”
I’d been making these kinds of notes to myself ever since we moved in and discovered that landlording was Mr. Fenton’s post-retirement career; he’d worked in a university mailroom for thirty years. Every day at eight a.m., like an admiral reporting to his ship, Mr. Fenton strolled up the driveway in his navy blue Dickeys, a short-sleeved sky-blue shirt, and a USS Enterprise cap tucked tight around his skull, which made his ears look even bigger. The first order of business was trash. Moving from left to right along the back wall like a typewriter carriage, Mr. Fenton lifted the lid off of each of the five trashcans and inspected the tenants’ garbage. If the garbage wasn’t right he fixed it. Sometimes the plastic bag was at an unacceptable depth in the can and needed a lift. Or the can was too full, in which case Mr. Fenton hoisted his limber leg up and stomped the trash or transferred the offending items to another can. At precisely twelve o’clock he sat in the passenger seat of his old white Datsun and ate a bag lunch and read the paper. In the afternoon he watered the lemon tree. He stared at the juicy yellow orbs as if they were full of answers to great questions. At five he went home — to his wife, he said.
Mr. Fenton’s compulsions were not unfamiliar to me. Like a writer, he tinkered and tinkered with a thing until he thought it was perfect. There was something soothing about watching Mr. Fenton work, watching him pick dead leaves from the ground with his nimble fingers and toss them into a garbage can. To watch a man so certain of the rightness of order, to watch him think with hands on waist about what needed to be done next, was somehow reassuring. Ellen and I joked about the trauma we could cause him if we tossed a thousand orange beads onto the back lawn.
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Three weeks after our return, Mr. Fenton took down our front stairs and put a board across the door, as if someone had been murdered inside. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re rebuilding them over an armature of high-grade steel. You’ll be able to use the back way. I’ll make sure of that. We’re almost done, here. Wrapping things up.” He pulled a piece of lint out of his pocket and walked over to one of the trashcans and threw it in.
A long month began. Over the summer our neighbors, Jack and Sherry, had moved away, and their apartment was still vacant. Now our downstairs neighbor, a contractor who told us that this work could have been done in two weeks, was moving as well, and Mr. Fenton made no effort to replace him. Money was his least concern. He was in his element, and I have to admit that his enthusiasm was infectious. He gabbed and joked with his crew all day, diverting them from their work. I’d never seen him so happy. Meanwhile he continued to discover more projects in need of attention: submerged pipes that needed to travel perpendicular to the walls of the apartment instead of at an angle; seismic retrofitting; an expanded parking space in back. The only thing he didn’t work on was our front stairs.
Then, out of guilt, I suppose, he stopped talking to us. We chatted with the workmen instead, trying to gauge how much longer it would be; they confessed that they’d never had such steady work. One day, thinking she might encourage them to expedite the work, Ellen bought a box of donuts for them. Mr. Fenton noticed this and hurried away down the street. When he returned a few minutes later he handed each of his men a cup of frozen yogurt — a reminder to all that he was the one responsible for their nutritional needs, not the tenants.
Ellen grew despondent. “I can’t tolerate that man anymore,” she said. It was a warm Indian Summer night in October. We had opened our front door (it was still functional, despite the boards across it) and were staring into the black hole below us.
“It’s not so bad,” I tried to comfort her.
“I’m sick of stepping three feet up from a plank propped over two uneven cinderblocks, holding groceries, trying to open four deadbolts,” she said. “I’m sick of walking over a catwalk of plywood. I’m sick of construction crews, and that thing’s evil voice waking us up every morning. I want our front door back, and peace and quiet. The trick-or-treaters won’t even be able to get to the door.”
Her tone of voice made me feel like I was partly responsible.
“Maybe we should move,” she said.
I’d been considering it myself, but it just wasn’t worth it. Apart from the brown pile carpet, we liked our apartment, and still do. Once upon a time there was a lush lawn in front that sloped up toward an esplanade that led to the pilastered porch, and we were able to come and go through our front door like normal human beings. Behind the apartment was a little backyard, permanently drenched in sunshine.
“We’re stowaways in our own home,” she complained, which reminded me of an earlier Fenton encounter. Shortly after we moved in I hung a yellow and red windsock at one end of the clothesline in the backyard. At night the wind would scoot it out into the middle of the line, and in the morning when Mr. Fenton arrived for duty it would be hanging there like a dead squid. He would stand there for several minutes, hand on chin, staring at the windsock like someone mesmerized. Eventually he would slide it back to the end of the line and carry on with his routine. I was fascinated by the amount of thought he expended on the windsock. It’s as if in addition to indicating the velocity and direction of windflow, I wrote, this enchanting “weathervane” is an index to something much more ephemeral, a channel of communion between Mr. Fenton and some other world.
“Stowaways,” I said, apparently a little too intrigued for Ellen. She gave me a suspicious look out of the corner of her eye.
“If you don’t ask him for a rent reduction, I will,” she said and closed the door.
******************************
I thought it best that I be the one to deal with him. She would be too emotional. She wanted me to ask for $350, a third of our rent. I thought we should give the man a break. He meant no harm.
The next afternoon I approached Mr. Fenton while he was observing his workers and asked if I could have a word with him. He was more than happy to oblige. We walked a little ways down the driveway.
“I just wanted to say,” I said a little nervously, “or ask you, considering that the project seems to be going on longer than you’d anticipated, and it’s starting to cause us some, well, inconvenience, how you’d feel about giving us a rent reduction, say a hundred dollars, just until the work’s done?”
He bowed his head, rubbed his chin with his finger and looked at me with wounded eyes.
“You know, Martin, I took care of your cars when you were gone, and I didn’t ask for anything in return.”
“We’re very grateful for that, Bob,” I said, feeling instantly guilty. “How about this then? You figure out how much you think your starting our cars once a week was worth and subtract that from what I’m asking.”
He told me to put it in writing, he’d consider it. I composed a very readable invoice, cordial yet to-the-point, and put it in his mailslot.
I took it personally when he made no response. On the first of the month I put a check, minus $100, in his slot with a note asking him if this was acceptable.
He did not take kindly to this.
“Martin,” he said the next morning. “I want you to pay the full amount or give me a thirty-day notice to vacate the apartment. The way I see it, I took care of your cars while you were gone. You know I washed them, I moved them, I put air in one of the tires when it went low. It would have cost you thousands if they’d been towed, you understand. It would have cost you thousands. You’re ungrateful to me for that.”
I was stunned by his irrationality. Adrenaline zapped my fingertips.
“There’s no correlation between starting a car and having no front door,” I said.
“But there is a correlation. If you don’t like it you can leave. I’ve got someone else who wants your apartment.” He walked away.
Standing there, heart hammering, everything became clear to me. Mr. Fenton wanted us out of the building. He’d been trying to drive us out all along. We were the only ones left.
Walking back inside, I felt like a piece of lint plucked from one of his pockets and summarily flicked into the recycle bin. I decided right then and there that I would never give in to him, no matter how far he pushed us.
******************************
I went to the library to research California’s landlord and tenant laws and discovered that Mr. Fenton had violated several civil codes, including the aptly named “maintaining a nuisance.” This reanimated my spirits.
On the advice of the American Arbitration Association, Ellen wrote a four-page ultimatum to Mr. Fenton, telling him to respond to our requests for a rent reduction by a specific date or be prepared for legal action. I intercepted it and spent an evening reconstructing it. I stripped away all of the emotion, jack-hammered out the adjectives, sawed off the exclamation marks. I labored over it for hours until it was absolutely perfect. I was particularly fond of my closing remarks: We have no intention of leaving, and we refuse to feel pressured to leave by this unnecessarily protracted construction work and by your negligence in regard to our living conditions. We do, however, expect to be compensated for the very real inconveniences the construction has caused us. The thought of taking legal action against Mr. Fenton for his refusal to acknowledge our humanity suddenly seemed like a wonderful thing to do. Never once had he made a gesture of apology or asked us how we were holding up. With revenge in my heart I sent the letter by certified mail.
Two days later I held my breath when I stepped through the back door. Mr. Fenton was pacing, hands in back pockets, awaiting his crew. To my surprise he was unusually cheerful. “Watch that step, Martin.”
I figured he must not have received my letter, and I suppose I was relieved. But later in the day Ellen said he was behaving strangely toward her as well, unusually cheerful and accommodating. He’d even offered to help her up the rickety back step.
Next day, same thing. I felt awkward with him behaving so gentlemanly. I’m no fan of conflict, but I’d been counting on this to be my first legal battle, my American rite of passage. More than anything, I suppose, I wanted him to respond to my letter the way I’d designed it to be responded to: as a declaration of war.
What’s he up to? I wrote. I researched some more, and in a book titled Tenants & the American Dream I came across a passage which shed some light on Mr. Fenton’s mysterious change of mood: “Small landlords often form near familial relationships with their tenants, and through this device control their tenant’s behavior. They can go a long way toward defeating a round in an organizing drive by launching a concerted ‘counteroffense’ that consists primarily of being nice to the tenants.” A-ha! I would not be fooled by Mr. Fenton.
But the drama I was looking for never came. The day before our deadline, Mr. Fenton asked me up to one of the vacant apartments. Like weary travelers at a campfire we sat cross-legged on the carpet in the empty living room, a denuded twin of our own.
“After reviewing the situation,” he said, as if reading from a cue card, “I see that you do have a legitimate claim on a rent reduction.” I looked into his vacant eyes and saw only my own reflection. He admitted to the inconveniences he’d caused us and agreed to pay us what we asked. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get to this sooner, but I’ve had so much to do. You see, I have no choice, it’s got to be done, I’ve been directed to do this, if it were up to me I wouldn’t do it, I’d much rather be doing something else, you have no idea, no idea.”
“I understand,” I said and thanked him for looking into it. It felt good to be able to talk to him like a normal human being again and have him see our side of the picture. A weight, heavy as a Georgian four-plex, drifted away from me. I told Ellen the good news over dinner and we gave each other high fives.
I should have slept like a baby that night, but I kept dreaming that I was falling. Then I’d wake up feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The more stressful moments of the saga kept flickering through my mind. Something about the ease with which the dispute had been solved disturbed me. I didn’t trust him. I’d learned too much from my research to believe that this was the end of it.
Hungry and restless I got up and went into the kitchen and ate a bowl of cereal. I sat there for about half an hour, reading yesterday’s paper, before returning to the bedroom. The moonlight spilling through the gauzy curtains looked brighter than usual. I didn’t think there was a full moon yet, so I took a look out the window. The moon was stunning — bigger and brighter than I’d ever seen it before. I felt like I could reach out and touch it. I stared at it for several minutes, wondering if mankind would ever really live on it, then I crawled back into bed.
Sometime in the night I had a wonderful dream. I was looking out the window again, only now I noticed that the retirement home next door was gone. So was the streetlight, and the road, and the parking lot across the street. Everything was gone: the skyscrapers, the bridge, California, Earth. Everything gone but the void of space. And stars. I woke Ellen and brought her to the window. We stood there for a long time, saying nothing, mesmerized by the luminance of a zillion galaxies. I was afraid that in her heart she was blaming me, but she just smiled and said:
“It’s so quiet.”
