Chapter 15: From the Past

I HAD SEVEN PAINTINGS I’d completed since my new artistic awakening. It was almost like being newly out of art school and thinking I could paint masterpieces. But I had precious few as evidence. In the meantime, I needed to earn a living and that meant selling real estate. It pretty much pre-empted everything else. Even my weekends with Rita seemed rushed as I started scheduling open houses for the early spring market.

I focused on high-end properties that often took a year or more to move. My sales record told a story of much faster than average turnaround. I focused on the personal touch when dealing with this clientele. When they reached the level of income needed to purchase one of these houses, they were typically in it for the long haul. They would be in that house for ten to twenty years or more. Everything needed to be perfect.

I started my campaign with Holly Park. Most of the homes in the exclusive neighborhood in which my team had sold the Morrison house, were million-dollar properties. I had excellent referrals from both the Morrisons and the Cartwrights, who had purchased the home. Now, I sent personal letters to the owners of each home in the community.

There is a ‘trick’ to sending these letters. One that my rookies needed to learn. The letters needed to be perfect. The method taught in real estate school is to put together a marketing letter and send it to everyone. This clientele could tell that approach a mile away. Those letters were likely to be tossed in recycling without ever entering the house. The letters were also rife with spelling and grammar errors. When I received mail with my name misspelled on the envelope, I didn’t bother to open it. And inside, the letter should represent the meticulous care I would take in marketing and selling the home.

A personal letter, but not informal. I didn’t hand address plain white envelopes. Nor would I use a window envelope. That just screamed mass mailing. I had linen stationery with raised type return address and inside address on the letterhead. It was just slightly off-white but not so much so that it stuck out like a sore thumb. Subtlety was the key.

In the era of personal computers and word processing, there was really no excuse for misspelled or poorly formatted letters. My letters were immaculate. I carefully watched for homonyms, making especially sure that I corrected were/where, then/than, your/you’re, their/there/they’re. And if there was any doubt at all regarding the spelling of a word or a company name, I looked it up.

My letters were signed with a fountain pen and left to dry thoroughly before they were folded. They were never more than one page. They always included a personal touch, with family names when possible. For example:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Stackhouse,

Spring is just around the corner and I note that your son, John Jr., will be ready for middle school in the fall. Congratulations on raising such a fine young man.

This might be the ideal time for you to consider a new home. You’ve been at 473 Lilac Lane since before John Jr.’s birth. At the time you purchased this home, your needs were much different than they are now. You might be thinking of moving to a home more suited to entertaining and more convenient to John’s middle school.

The market is also turning. This means it is a good time to get an offer in on a home before prices resume their upward trend, and a good time to prepare your current home for sale as soon as school is out. The summer market will be strong this year and I believe we can get top dollar for your present home.

I’d like to discuss the possibilities with you in person. I will plan to call you Monday evening the 18th at 7:00 p.m. If this is inconvenient for you, please feel free to call or text me at 555-555-5555 and I will arrange my schedule to suit yours.

Thank you for hearing me out on this. I look forward to talking to you in person.

Sincerely,

D.R. ‘Doc’ Peters, Realtor

Windward Real Estate Agency

And there you have it. Does everyone respond to this? Oh, heavens no! But the response is high enough that it makes the research worthwhile. By the end of February, I was following up with both phone calls and in-person visits. In March, I began showing available properties and contacting other upscale owners to suggest it was a good time to sell and that I had a potential buyer. My pipeline was filling.

It’s good to make money while you can. I had the assistance of my four rookies and Dan had determined not to hire any more until fall. I reviewed every piece of mail they sent, visited every open house they held, and brainstormed every marketing plan with them. And they were doing well. The checks they received at the end of the year had kept them working into spring and they were actually turning some property. They also assisted me with events and marketing my high-end products.

I had a booth at the Home Show, the RV Show, and the Boat Show. These were the major shows that wealthy people seemed to attend. They were upgrading their homes, getting ready to retire and move on, or adding a significant status upgrade. I worked the busiest hours, but the rookies were getting referrals as well.

Unfortunately, the hottest real estate season meant my studio sat empty, even on my ‘weekend’ days of Monday and Tuesday. I was too tired to paint. Things have a tendency to balance out in the long run, though.

“Mr. Peters, you seem to be the first thing my wife and I have agreed on in two years. There is hope for the future,” Mr. Barrett said when we sat to discuss their purchase needs. He’d just been promoted to Vice President in a local high-tech company. Not ‘THE’ Vice President, he was quick to tell me. Just ‘A’ vice president.

“It hasn’t been quite that bad,” Mrs. Barrett said. “But it does keep life interesting.”

“I hope I can help you come to an agreement regarding your new home,” I said. Contrary to the comment, the couple seemed to get along incredibly well. She was very down-to-earth and I could see she grounded him. And they were well-matched in age. This was no trophy wife. She was the real deal and had been with him through thick and thin. He honored that.

We met for over an hour as I probed for what they really wanted. Sometimes it seems a real estate agent needs to be part psychologist. They also gave me a tour of their home and I took photos so I could work up a good estimate on its market value. I met their two children, both of whom seemed eager to move to a new and bigger house. They gave me some input regarding what they wanted, including a big yard so they could have a dog. The elder Barretts smiled indulgently.

“Oh, there is one other thing,” Mrs. Barrett said, nudging her husband. I was at the door and ready to leave. Mr. Barrett seemed a little embarrassed.

“Your name came up in another context during a dinner we had with Keith and Louise Brainerd. You are the artist who painted Louise’s portrait, aren’t you?” Mr. Barrett asked.

“Yes. That piece was done some ten years ago.”

“But you are still painting, aren’t you?” Mrs. Barrett asked.

“Certainly. This season makes it a little difficult to find the time as I’m trying to get the best real estate deals for my clients, but I do find some time to paint and do portraits,” I said.

“Well, as you look for a new home for us, keep in mind that we’ll want a place to display the portrait of Donna that we’d like you to paint,” Mr. Barrett said. “That is, if you are still doing commissions.”

“I’ll definitely keep that in mind,” I said. Mrs. Barrett gave me a shy smile.

Easter Sunday afternoon, Rita came into my studio as I was flipping through sketches, looking for more material. She brought one of my portfolios over and sat on my lap as we opened it and perused the sketches. It was an older portfolio and I hadn’t seen these pictures in a good ten years or more. Rita tried to guess which models I’d slept with based on my drawings, but I told her that wasn’t likely, simply because I seldom slept with a model before I had done the sketches, and usually not until after a painting was finished. Still, she was uncannily correct in most of her assessments.

It’s not that I sleep with all my models, or even a majority of them. I don’t. There has to be a special spark that connects us. It wasn’t until I painted Pain is Pleasure in my newer style that I’d been moved by a sexual experience before I painted. I’d never seen Kelly when I painted Out of Body, though we’d had sex. Cold Fusion was painted months after my experience with Sheila and I had pleasured her but didn’t go all the way. It wasn’t until the two most recent paintings of Lori that I’d approached the canvas with every intention of sleeping with the model. That was at Rita’s instigation.

And Rita was looking for signs of raw passion that I could interpret anew in a painting. I was certainly not going back ten years or more to track down a model with the intent of having sex so I could paint her. Our relationship had long since left the “teaching” of the art of love behind. She approached looking at the sketches with an eye toward formulating an experiment. We were laughing and I had reached the point of wanting to try another posed portrait with her when I heard her breath catch.

When I realized what sketch she was looking at, I held my breath, awaiting the explosion.

“Oh. My. God.” Rita got up from my lap, carrying the sketch with her. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think how I would explain this. The portfolio was over ten years old, right? That particular sketch was one of the earliest pieces I did in my studio, maybe fourteen years ago. Rita was what? Twelve?

“You slept with her, didn’t you?” she asked without looking back at me. I chose not to confirm or deny, but stayed silent. She carried the sketch to my modeling stage and began arranging furniture on it. She quickly found the wicker chair that was in the picture, though I’d refinished it and it was no longer white. She went to the blanket box where I kept various drapes and brought out a knitted afghan. She looked at the pattern, comparing it to the sketch before bringing it to her nose to inhale deeply.

That was a waste of effort. Once a drape has been used, I always had it laundered or cleaned. I couldn’t remember having used that particular one since the sketch she held. It had been at the bottom of the box a long time.

She arranged the chair and afghan along with a wooden stool and a bowl for fruit on the platform. I left the studio while she worked, knowing what she would want next. I returned with a selection of apples, oranges, a pear, and bananas. She took them from me and smiled. The smile did nothing to set me at ease. If anything, it was predatory. She arranged the fruit in the bowl like it had been in the sketch, then stepped back off the platform to look at the setting from the perspective of the sketch. Since her initial question, neither of us had spoken a word. She went to my supply cabinet and found a sketchbook the same size and texture as the paper in her hands, and gave it to me. I understood what was about to happen—or what I thought was about to happen—I glanced at the sketch again and went to get a selection of graphite, erasers, and a tortillon. When I returned to my position and faced the platform, Rita was nude, sitting in the chair with the throw across her lap and one foot on the stool. Her hand was poised over the fruit bowl, head lowered seductively and facing me. I knew my role. I sketched.

“All these years, I never knew,” she said as I worked. Her shape was incredible, and seeing her in that position brought a flood of memories. I was so young and full of myself. I thought my first paintings would sell for a fortune and I’d paint only for pleasure. That sketch was only for pleasure, completed after we’d been lovers for several weeks. But even when I did it, I knew we wouldn’t last.