The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t sure I would call it a mansion. Although I supposed when it was built in 1802, it was an even more impressive structure than it was today.
    While Brent talked with Doug, I was already imagining my life at the Beekman Mansion. I concluded that Brent and I would probably be known as the Beekman Boys. Or at least I hoped so. It would be far better than, say, the Fag Farmers.
    Yes, I thought to myself, I’d like to live in a mansion, even part-time on the weekends. A weekend mansion. A mansion in which to relax, unwind, and do other mansion-y things that I didn’t even know about yet. How could I? I’d never lived in a mansion. I wondered if there was a magazine I could get tips from. Mansion Living. Or Today’s Mansion.
    And then there was the whole farm aspect of the mansion. Looking around, there seemed to be a great deal of land included with it. I could put in a vegetable garden. There’d be no more hoofing it down to Union Square to buy fifteen-dollar organic frisée. We could get a cow. Every farm needs a cow. Surely someone would help us take care of it during the week in exchange for free milk. And chickens! We’d get the kind that laid the blue eggs, like Martha had. We’d make our houseguests rise with the roosters and go get their own eggs for breakfast.
    I stopped myself. This was ludicrous. We were twice as far away from the city as Fire Island or the Hamptons. Even if, by some chance, we could afford a mansion, how would we get up here every week? How would we take care of things?
    Brent hung up the phone.
    “What did he say?” I asked.
    “Well, it’s been for sale for over four years. That little house over there is the caretaker’s house.” He pointed to a small modular home I hadn’t even noticed on the far side of the barn.
    “Did they know how much it’s selling for?”
    “A lot.”
    “A lot a lot? Or just ‘a lot.’”
    “A lot a lot. A million.”
    “You’re kidding me. Who would pay a million dollars for something way out here?”
    “Still, can we see inside?” The fact that we couldn’t afford it in no way dampened my enthusiasm. It was probably completely run down on the inside anyway. A house this old probably had its rooms cut up, with each one remodeled during a different decade. And while owning a mansion was now firmly on my life’s wish list, a fixer-upper mansion certainly wasn’t.
    “Michelle, the real estate agent, happens to be filling in for one of the brunch hostesses at the hotel,” Brent said. “It’s slow so they said she could be here in five minutes.”
    Of course she could, I thought. If I were a real estate agent in the middle of nowhere with a million-dollar mansion to unload, I wouldn’t care how many people were waiting for their eggs Benedict.
    Brent and I passed the time silently while we waited for Michelle to arrive. We were both too afraid to mention our thoughts aloud. They were too far-fetched to deserve being spoken. We weren’t sure if the caretaker was home or not, so we didn’t want to risk getting out to scout around the place. But simply sitting there at the end of the driveway with Brent gave me a sense of calm. The only noise was the occasional orange leaf that wafted down onto the car’s roof. It was the same sort of relaxed as last night’s relaxed, back at the hotel. Maybe even more relaxed. I wasn’t sure of the last time I felt this way.
    Michelle pulled her SUV behind us and honked. As she stepped out of her car, I wondered how someone like her wound up selling real estate way the hell out here. She was incredibly stylish, wearing a hot-pink-and-orange-patterned wrap dress. It screamed “fashion magazine editor” far more than “part-time brunch hostess.” She was impossibly thin and tall—though maybe no taller than average once out of her knee-high, four-inch-heeled leather boots. The only thing that gave her away as a real estate agent was the way she immediately pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head.