A MAN OF HONOR

Just as I was heading back to work after lunch, Conrad pulled up in his sparkling white truck.

I paused at my front door, waiting for him to go wherever he was going. He owns the rental houses on each side of me. And he wanted to own mine, but he thought the lady I bought it from wanted too much money for all the work that had to be done. It would not have been a "good investment," a noun phrase that apparently gives his life meaning.

I didn't want to cross paths because I have not generally enjoyed conversations with Conrad. He is completely "property" minded and rather petty and seems like the kind of middle-aged white man who finds unparalleled wisdom in conservative talk radio. He thinks a good conversation starter is asking how much something cost. What did you pay those carpenters? How much did that countertop cost? Followed by a low whistle that suggests you've been robbed blind. And when my ex-girlfriend lived here with me, I always felt that he was scrutinizing us, disapprovingly and kind of creepily, for proof positive that we were "more" than roommates.

He has talked to my mom many times, but my mom has a gift for indulging annoying men and making them feel that they are terribly interesting. This talent has served her well in life, I will grant, but I have never found a use for it myself.

Conrad wasn't budging. He was planted there with his prematurely white Phil Donahue hair and his small, icy blue eyes in his sparkling white truck. "This guy," I thought, "likes to polish things that are already shiny." So be it. I had no more time to kill, so I took a deep breath and walked hurriedly to my car, head down, tightly focused, determined not to come up for air until I reached the safety of my car's interior. Which — what relief! — I did. Only to have him step nimbly from his pickup and give me that "roll-down-your-window" finger twirl that, just then, I associated with bad cops. I did as he asked because, while I'm willing to appear a tad unsocial or shy, I don't think it would be a "good investment" to appear hostile to a neighbor. Granted, he's not an actual neighbor because he doesn't — and wouldn't — live on this side of town, but he owns the neighboring properties, which is neighbor enough.

The first thing he said was, "This is their last day," referring to my bad-boy neighbors , whom he had recently evicted.

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "I think they've already left. I haven't seen anyone over there for a long time."

"Yeah," he said, with scorn. "They're gone. Didn't say where. Didn't pay the rent. Didn't clean. They just walked."

I didn't tell him of my fondness for the boys. I just acknowledged that things were a lot quieter now.

"The unbelievable thing," he said, "is I knew them. I knew their family. Their parents. Friends of their parents. Their grandparents. Their uncles. Their cousins." He searched his mind for more relations to count on his fingers. "I knew them," he repeated, and his scorn became suffused with sadness and disbelief.

I was touched.

This was not his usual carping. He seemed beside himself that the bond of friendship did not exact better behavior from his tenants. This, I suddenly thought, is not just a jilted landlord but a man of honor, a man who believes in honor, who has a sense of how people ought to behave, of the loyalty they owe, of the family dignity they should uphold.

"They just walked." The words were meant to convey incredible irresponsibility, but they had an unintended note of unbridled freedom, too. Imagine walking away from an obligation.

Yes, imagine that.

I knew that his coming over to my car was his way of apologizing for bringing these bad boys into my orbit. He wanted to assure me that he was a good neighbor and a good judge of character — "I've only had to evict people three times in 30 years of doing this" — and that he was thrown this one time by the family association that he mistakenly thought would ensure best behavior. "You just can't trust people to be decent."

I have been unusually sentimental lately — maybe I'm just aging softly; maybe, after all, I'm more tears than guts — which is perhaps why I had an urge to get out of my car and sit on the pavement with Conrad and share sad tales, Richard II-like, of people who have disappointed us. I imagined us sobbing with disbelief and one-upping each other with tales of how various people had misused us. I imagined us bonding in a pool of woe and a shared sense of poetic injustice. I imagined, as an olive branch, telling him how much everything in my house cost and him, instead of acting like I'd been robbed, affirming that I had gotten a damn good deal.

But instead I just smiled in sympathy — that thin, ephemeral, upturned curve that substitutes so often for actual human connection. I started my engine and said, "Good luck with the next tenants."

"Maybe they'll be librarians," he said.

"That'd be nice," I said. "Librarians would be nice."

And then, halfway down the block, to myself: "bad-boy librarians."