“How’s your golf game?” one of the boys asked as he wrote down the name and address of an agent named Ted Blackwell on the back of an old receipt.
“Golf?”
“Blackwell likes to hire preppy college boys with a good swing. A decent tennis serve will work, too. You’ll see.” He handed Isaac the small piece of paper.
Isaac hadn’t been to college and had never so much as picked up a golf club or tennis racket. But when he knocked on the door of Ted Blackwell & Associates the following morning, he had concocted a story so credible that he almost believed it himself. He’d gone to the University of Pennsylvania, where he’d studied Russian literature—an easy leap considering his lineage. When he wasn’t reading Dostoyevsky, he played intramural tennis, and on the weekends, he visited his aunt and uncle on the Main Line, squeezing in a round of golf at his uncle’s club every chance he got. He didn’t like to brag, by any means, but he could hold his own.
Blackwell looked Isaac up and down as he listened to his pitch. Then he told him to follow him outside. “Get in the car,” he said, nodding toward an Isotta Tourer that was parked on the street. Isaac knew it would do him no good to tell Blackwell that this was his first automobile ride, so he tried to be casual opening the door, climbing into the seat. Blackwell pulled the car out into traffic and drove across the causeway, through West Palm Beach, and then north for several miles, until the city fell away and they were surrounded by longleaf pines and rubber vines. Isaac hoped he looked comfortable in the passenger seat, like someone who was used to riding around in fine Italian cars.
“Ten years ago, no one thought this would ever be anything but swamp,” said Blackwell as he waved at the greenery out the window.
Just when the landscape had grown so desolate that Isaac couldn’t imagine selling it to a blind man, Blackwell began to slow the car. Ahead was a turnoff, marked by a pair of large and rather elaborately constructed brick columns. As the car approached the turn, Isaac saw that, hanging from the columns, there was a wrought-iron sign. He craned his neck, trying to read it, but Blackwell beat him to the punch: “Welcome to Orange Grove Estates.”
Blackwell pulled between the columns and into Orange Grove Estates, or at least the entrance of what would one day be Orange Grove Estates. Fifty yards of road had been laid, the land on either side of it cleared, but the road ended abruptly in a thicket of palm fronds and brittle thatch. There was a small gatehouse, located just behind the sign, and a tennis court, tucked against the tree line, as if it had sprung from the earth like a shoot. Three cars were parked next to it.
“Was there an orange grove here?” Isaac asked.
“Not in my lifetime.”
Blackwell pulled his car alongside the others and cut the engine. “Jim’s busy right now, so we’ll wait.”
Jim was a boy, about Isaac’s age, with a shock of blond hair and a noticeable swagger. Isaac watched from the car as he led two couples to the edge of the clearing, making sweeping gestures toward the thick underbrush that picked up where the road left off.
Blackwell looked at his watch. “Give him a quarter of an hour. He’ll have both binders by noon.”
Blackwell was right on the money. By five minutes till, Jim had the paperwork spread out over the hood of one car, each man so eager to sign that he would have killed his grandmother just to get ahold of her pen. Jim took their checks, folded them in half, and shoved them into his breast pocket. Then he handed each man a copy of the paperwork and shook his hand in turn. Isaac made note of the handshake—Jim used his left hand to squeeze each man’s shoulder, as if they were old friends who had great affection for one another. He waved as the men got into their cars and drove away.
Once both cars were gone, Jim walked over to Blackwell’s car and leaned into the open window.
“I brought you a new recruit,” said Blackwell. “This is Isaac Feldman. UPenn grad. Train him up and then maybe I’ll send him over to Sea Breeze.”
Jim nodded toward the tennis court. “How’s your game?”
“Fair, I’d say.”
“I’ll be the one to say,” Jim said, the hint of a smile curling the corners of his mouth.
In the weeks that followed, Jim said plenty. He taught Isaac how to talk up Orange Grove Estates—mention how close it is to the beach, don’t mention that it hasn’t been plumbed. He told Isaac what to say when it looked like a buyer was waffling, something that was happening with less and less frequency these days, and how to handle the wives who thought they deserved some say over their husband’s investment decisions.
The one thing that couldn’t be talked around or through was Isaac’s tennis game. “Show me your serve,” Jim said, not a quarter of an hour after Blackwell drove off, leaving Isaac to catch a ride home with Jim.
Isaac did his best to hit the ball across the net and watched as it landed on the other side of the court with a satisfying thunk. Not too bad, he thought. Jim shook his head and tsked. “You’ve never hit a tennis ball before in your life.”
Isaac worried Jim would out him to Blackwell, so he was pleasantly surprised when, instead, Jim offered to teach him how to play the game. He showed him where to stand and how to move, taught him how to serve and score.
“Why waste the money putting a tennis court in the middle of nowhere?” Isaac asked Jim one day, from the shade of a black mangrove on
