Good Faith by Jane Smiley Page A

from the sleeve of his jacket. The jacket itself, a nubbly buff-colored weave, also looked as crisp as if he had just taken it off the rack. I looked down at his shoes. Tan loafers, as smooth around his feet as if his feet were shoe trees.
    He was younger than I was by five years, I thought. Most people who were that much younger than I were baby boomers—casual about dress at the very least, usually wearing jeans. But it was more than expense and style that struck me about Marcus Burns, it was that he gave off the air of being cleaner and better cared for than a man could do for himself, as if he employed another man to do it for him. He was good-looking, too, with a quick smile, an open face, and an easy manner. He was not the sort of guy who, I thought, would appeal to Gordon, or even to Betty. He looked too finished. Gordon liked people who were either loud or eager or a little shaggy, even a little hapless. His cronies were the last guys who could be called smooth. Their characteristic pose was gripping their poker hands, yelling about something, and squinting to avoid the smoke of the cigarettes that were dangling from the corners of their mouths.
    Linda Burns was taller than Marcus, nicely dressed too. As we went through the house, she tended to run aground here and there, standing for a long moment with a cabinet open, staring into it, or leaning her elbow against the wall, gazing out the window. Marcus and I walked briskly, inspecting Gottfried’s work and talking about it as critically as possible (which wasn’t very); she dawdled after us, almost silent. Burns was affectionate with her and eager with me. He clearly liked the house very much. In the foyer, for example, he squatted down and ran his hand across the pegged floor, then sat back on his heels a little and surveyed the woodwork: a dark chair rail and a beautiful staircase with turned spiral balusters. On the newel post, Gottfried had set a beautiful wooden globe. The grain of the wood glistened all around in tawny and chocolate striations. Burns ran his palm around it with a sigh.
    The striations were repeated in the steps, even though, no doubt, they would eventually be carpeted. I said, “Look at these steps. Gottfried builds everything to be seen, even the things he knows are going to be covered.” The steps were a perfect example of Gottfried’s idea that beauty didn’t cost much; he had taken a few minutes to look through the boards available for stair treads and had chosen interesting ones. “How hard is that?” I could hear him rant, as if I personally had dared him to overlook something.
    Burns went up the stairs, sliding his hand up the banister, and turned around on the landing and looked down at me. He put his hands in his pockets and grinned. Linda was wandering around the living room. She said, “Our furniture isn’t nice enough for this place,” but she said it dreamily. Then she said, “We can get rid of it all.”
    Normally, the buyers do their last inspection to make sure they know what they’re getting and that everything has been completed to their satisfaction before the closing, but when I heard Linda’s voice from the living room say, as if to herself, “I hope we live here forever,” I figured they were satisfied.
    Later, when we went outside to look at the grounds and the garage, they were practically swooning, their arms around each other’s waists, smiling. It was like accompanying someone on their second honeymoon. I moved off a little.
    The Burnses’ house stood on a rise facing southeast. The front yard sloped down to Maple Glen Road, and the backyard sloped somewhat less to a little rill that ran off the hump of a good-sized hill to the north. There was a good view down the long valley of the Blue River, a tributary of the Nut. A series of hills crowned with maples receded into the purple distance. One neighbor, across the road, was visible, though the windows of his house were hidden by foliage. The other