Fair Warning Read online

  “Two sixty,” I said. “Do I hear two seventy? Two seventy for your sweet Aunt Isabelle? Two sixty then. Fair warning.”

  Now I looked to him.

  His eyes were fixed on me as before and then he smiled, and the unflappable Amy Dickerson, master auctioneer, suddenly flapped. I lost the flow of my words and I stopped. It seemed that he was about to raise his paddle. Don’t do it, I thought, trying to send a warning to him across this space. I wrenched my attention away and cried, “Sold! For two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”

  I normally use the lull after the gavel, while the lot just sold is taken away and the next one set up, to assess certain buyers that I’ve learned to read. One woman who sits perfectly still through the bidding for items she has no interest in will suddenly start shuffling her feet when something she wants is about to come up. Another refreshes her lipstick unnecessarily. One distinguished retired surgeon, who always wears a vest, will lift up slightly from where he’s sitting, first one cheek and then the other, as if he’s passing a perfect pair of farts. But on that morning I was still struggling with an unreasonable obsession. I thought of nothing but this complete stranger and I finally realized that the only way to exorcise this feeling was to confront it, but when at last I worked up the courage to look once more to my left, Dark Eyes had gone.

  Though I’d more or less always competed with her and resented her and criticized her and argued with her and ignored her and heeded her every foolish thought—which is to say I loved her like a sister—Missy and I had lunch once a week in the Village. Sometimes, when we’d grow vaguely irritable with each other for reasons neither of us could put a finger on, one of us would smile a brittle smile at the other and say it just that way. “I love you like a sister,” she’d say or I’d say, and then the other would reply, “Just so” or “Me too” or even “Go to hell.” And still, we’d tell each other everything, as if there was an actual bond of trust between us, which there was.

  So the day after the Crippenhouse auction, over sushi on Thompson Street, I talked about Dark Eyes. “I was relieved,” I said, about his vanishing at the end. “But damn if I wasn’t wildly disappointed as well.”

  “So?”

  “So? There sat a man like John Paul Gibbons and I’m suddenly acting like his dark twin sister.”

  “Is John Paul still after you?”

  “You’re missing the point,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t think so. You’re forty now, Amy. You’re single. It’s hormones and lifestyle.”

  “Yow,” I cried.

  “Did you get some wasabi up your nose?”

  In fact, I was merely thinking, If you hadn’t gone back for your dolls and your clothes I wouldn’t be sitting here with you once a week out of familial devotion listening to your complacent hardness of heart. Though I realized, trying to be honest with myself, that my alternative today—and most days—was eating lunch on my own, bolting my food, avoiding the company of men who bored me, a list that got longer every day, it seemed. I resented her stumbling onto a half truth about me and so I leaned toward her and said, “You’re thirty-six yourself. You haven’t got much longer to be smug.”

  “That reminds me,” Missy said. “Jeff mentioned he saw a poster about that charity auction you’re doing in East Hampton.”

  “How does what I said remind you of that?” I put as much muscle in my voice as I could, but she looked at me as if I’d simply belched. She wasn’t going to answer. She had no answer. I knew the answer: her loving husband Jeff the broker was her shield against turning forty. Right. Maybe.

  “Mama said she hoped you’d call sometime,” Missy said.

  I was still following the track under Missy’s surface. Mama thought that a beautiful woman like me, as she put it, was either stupid or a lesbian not to have been married by the time I hit forty. And she knew, as God was her witness, that I wasn’t a lesbian.

  “She hated Daddy by the time she was forty,” I said.

  “Calm down,” Missy said. “Drink some green tea. It’s like a sedative.”

  “And he hated her.”

  Missy looked away, her mouth tightened into a thin red line.

  Okay. I felt guilty for rubbing this in. Both times I’d actually allowed a man to move in with me—all his stuff, no way out, one toilet one life—I eventually arrived at something like hatred for him. In another era, I would have already gone ahead and married each of them and it would have been no different for me than for Mama, except she’d never get a divorce.

  I followed Missy’s eyes across the room. She was looking at no one, she was just getting pissed with me, but there was a man leaning across a table for two touching the wrist of the woman he was with. He was talking quickly, ardently. I looked away, conscious of my own wrist. Whose gesture was that from my own life? One of the live-ins. Either Max or Fred. I twisted my mind away. Who cares which one? I thought. Whoever it was would say, Amy, Amy, Amy, you get so logical when you’re angry. And yet the touch on my wrist meant he still thought I was a quaking bundle of nerves beneath the irrefutable points I’d been making against him. All he had to do was touch me there and he’d wipe the logic away and prevail. But no way, Mister. I never lost my logic in an argument, even though sometimes there were tears, as meaningless as getting wet for somebody you’re just having sex with. I’m crying, I’d say to him, but don’t you dare take it wrong, you son of a bitch. It was Max.

  “I’ve got to go,” my sister said, and I looked at her a little dazedly, I realized, and we both rose and leaned forward stiffly from the waist and kissed on the cheek. We split the bill and my half of the tip was six dollars and twenty-five cents. I watched her gliding away out the door and then I stared at the money in my hand.

  The Nichols & Gray building is a dreary Fifties thing of concrete and glass on the Upper East Side, as insipid as the old Sotheby’s building on Madison, but Arthur Gray won’t hear a word against it. “We’re not the ones who are meant to shine,” he says whenever I gripe about the place, always quickly adding, “Except for you, dear. You shine on.” Still, it was full of good associations for me, which I found myself very much aware of as I went up in the elevator after my lunch with Missy. So I got off on the second floor just to remind myself what I was all about. I stood in the back doors of the Blue Salon and watched the young men in short-sleeved white shirts and black bow ties, the Lifters and Movers, at the front, setting up the American Art Pottery auction. I looked around at the empty chairs. I could still smell the ardor hovering in the air. Shopping pheromones. They are spoken of in no book, but I know they exist. Those who exude them draw not only other shoppers to them but objects, as well. The young men were laughing. One was wobbling on a ladder setting a spotlight over the stage-left turntable. Even these hormone-besotted boys couldn’t get as hot for a piece of ass as some of the pottery-head Central-Park-Westers were going to get when they saw the Shirayamadanis coming to that turntable later in the week.

  I slipped out and took the steps up one floor and passed into my outer office without catching anybody’s eye. I’d had a quiet morning proofing a big Veteran and Vintage Cars and Motorcycles catalog and even Lydia had been gone for dental work, though she was here now. I could see the shadow of her black tee-shirt beneath her white blouse. She was a Goth leading a double life. Though she’d been with me for nearly three months now, we’d still not spoken a word about any of that. I didn’t want to chance putting her off: in her first few days, on her own initiative, she’d brilliantly reorganized my files. In the face of my grateful amazement she simply shrugged and said, “Someday you’ll need something real bad and I won’t find it and it’ll get us both fired.” She was a true believer in darkness.

  As I whisked past, grabbing the pink called-while-you-were-gone slips, she looked up from her keyboard and furrowed her brow at me. I figured I knew why. She hated filling out these slips, thinking everything should go into my computer. So I waved the slips at her now and said, “Computers crash
.”

  “That’s not the issue,” she said.

  “What, then?”

  “Am I free to speak?”

  “I won’t fire you for speaking your mind. You know that.”

  “Okay. What’s with the Frenchmen?”

  “What Frenchmen?”

  “Christie’s got bought. Phillips got bought. By two different French guys. Now Mr. Gray’s burning up the lines to Paris like it’s phone-sex.”

  “You’re afraid the French are going to buy Nichols & Gray and they’ll fire us both?”

  Lydia shrugged.

  Arthur’s Paris calls were indeed news to me. There were other explanations, of course. But it was also like Arthur Gray to keep me out of the business loop until the last minute. “Lydia, they need me here. I need you. We’re safe.”

  Lydia sighed and she stared hard at me, I think to stop herself from rolling her eyes in contempt.

  I said, “You think I’m blind to the dark forces of the universe.”

  This surprised her. But she reflected no more than a nanosecond on my insight before she leaped ahead a few steps in a presumed conversation that kept me comfortably ignorant of her. “Okay, Ms. Dickerson. I’ll chill.”

  It’s not where I was going, but I didn’t bother to dispute her. “Good,” I said, and I went into my office and sat down and I waited long enough so it wouldn’t seem as if I was going off to check on what Lydia had said and then I went off to check on what Lydia had said.

  Arthur’s secretary had her back to me—a long dark drape of hair. I could see her and Lydia done up in black PVC in some club on the Lower East Side comparing notes on their bosses uptown. But I kept my mouth shut. For one thing, I wanted to keep my pipeline open to Arthur’s office.

  “Hi, Winona,” I said to her and before she could turn I barged on into Arthur’s office, as was my custom.

  WQXR was playing low in the background—some simpering generic baroque thing—and Arthur was on the phone. He blew me a kiss with his fingertips and motioned me to a chair.

  “Of course,” he said into the phone. “Mais oui.” At the French phrase—which he pronounced beautifully, though I knew it to be one of only perhaps a dozen that he knew—he winked at me. Arthur could be vain over odd little things, like his perfect pronunciation of a language he didn’t speak, but this time I took the wink as a reflection of his guilty conscience. I arrived at just the right moment. “I’ll see you next week,” he said to Paris. “Au revoir. And bon voyage.”

  Heady with three killer phrases in a row, Arthur hung up and squared around to me. “Amy, my hero. You were magnificent last night.”

  I said, “Elle a eu son heure de gloire.”

  Arthur frowned. “Now, my dear, you know I can’t speak a word of that language.”

  “He’d never guess,” I said, nodding to the phone.

  “Ah. Well. I think he knows.”

  Suddenly it occurred to me that the Gothnet had leaped to the wrong conclusion. Arthur simply had a new boyfriend.

  This seemed even more likely as he veered back to the auction. “That might well be the worst Renoir I’ve ever seen. To sell that for what you did, my dear, was pure genius.” He slicked a hand back over his hair, which he’d abruptly died chestnut—the color of his youth, he said—the day after he turned sixty. I grew suspicious again.

  “Arthur, is it time to tell me something?”

  “Of course, my dear. I was just waiting for Alain to arrive in town so we three could sit down together.”

  “Alain?”

  Arthur nodded solemnly at the phone. “Alain Bouchard.”

  “So we do have a French suitor?”

  “We do. Ours is the best of the lot, too.”

  “Arthur, the secretaries all know already.”

  “He’s racehorses and wine and Mirage jets, or at least some crucial part of them.”

  “Arthur,” I said sharply. “Pay attention.”

  He blinked and focused on me.

  I said, “You’ve called me ‘my dear’ twice in a minute and a half. You know you’ve done something wrong.”

  “And ‘my hero,’ too,” he admitted, hanging his head.

  “There. You see?”

  “The secretaries know?”

  “Yes they do. I don’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Amy. You understand it’s not from lack of respect for you. I didn’t think anybody on this side of the Atlantic knew but me and Pookie’s ghost.” Arthur crossed himself, which was rather like his speaking French. He wasn’t Catholic, or even religious. Pookie had been Philip Nichols, the Nichols of Nichols & Gray.

  I waited. Arthur meditated. I presumed on his dear departed Pookie. Then he said, “Two hundred and sixty thousand dollars for that bloody awful painting. You outdid yourself.”

  “Arthur, now you’re starting to sound British. That’s the next stage when you’re feeling guilty. I suppose I know what that’s about.”

  “No you don’t. I’m doing everything I can.”

  “You promised me a chance to buy in some day.”

  “Alain knows what an asset you are in all this. I told him he had to give you a piece of it. Stock or something. He’s got plenty of stock.”

  “And?”

  “He’s anxious to meet you.”

  “That has the whiff of euphemism,” I said.

  “The whiff’s not coming from me,” Arthur said. I waited for a hand to fly up to smooth his hair, but both of them stayed on the desktop. Furthermore, he was looking at me unwaveringly in the eyes. In short, I believed him.

  But it was also clear I’d gotten as much as I was going to get out of Arthur for now and I rose from the chair. “I’d tell you to watch out for what your secretary’s hearing,” I said, “but that may be the only way I’ll ever find out what’s going on.”

  Now one of Arthur’s hands rose from the desk, hovered for a moment, and then did a one-eighty flip, a presto-changeo gesture. “Here now, my dear,” he said. “A fun thing. An apartment on Central Park West chockablock full of Victoriana, all for us. Monday you get to go play.”

  The thing he wanted to changeo was my mood. Arthur hated seeing me unhappy. The sad thing was, this worked.

  The auction business is built on the three “d’s”: debt, divorce, and death. Monday morning I entered a russet brick and terra-cotta apartment building where a reclusive woman who loved her Victoriana had died in her sleep six weeks ago. I was not unaware that the quickening in me—yes, the happiness—over the prospect of eight rooms of stuff to handle and ponder and classify and value was directly a result of a woman’s death. Her only son would meet me, so I squelched my pleasure and chose from one of three Nichols-and-Gray first-meeting demeanors—the debt counselor or the divorce attorney or the mortician. I was least comfortable with the latter, but that was the obvious choice.

  The doorman had my name and I went up in an elevator that smelled faintly of Obsession and I rang the bell at the woman’s apartment. And when the door swung open I found myself standing before Dark Eyes.

  I’m sure I let the creature beneath the mortician—indeed, even beneath the gleefully object-obsessed auctioneer—show her face in that moment: the little half smile that came over Dark Eyes told me so. The smile was faintly patronizing, as well. But I forgave him that. I was, after all, making myself a gawking fool at the moment. The smile also suggested, I realized, that he had requested me specifically for this evaluation. I focused on that thought, even as I reasserted my professionalism.

  “I’m Amy Dickerson,” I said. “Of Nichols & Gray.”

  He bowed faintly and he repeated my name. “Ms. Dickerson.” He was a little older than I thought, from close up, and even handsomer. His cheekbones were high and his eyes were darker than I’d been able to see from the podium. “I’m Trevor Martin. Mrs. Edward Martin’s son.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and to myself I said, What the hell does that mean? “To meet you,” I added, though I fooled neither of us. I was glad he was h
ere and I was here. The only thing I wasn’t glad about was that his name was Trevor. It was a name made for a rainy climate and bowler hats.

  “Come in,” he said and I did and I nearly staggered from the Victorian profusion of the place. The foyer was stuffed full: an umbrella stand and a grandfather clock and a stand-up coat-rack and a dozen dark-framed hunting scenes and a giltwood and gesso mirror and a Gothic-style cupboard and a papier-mâché prie-dieu with shell-inlaid cherubs and a top-rail of red velvet, and Trevor—I had to think of him as that now, at least till I could call him Dark Eyes to his face—Trevor was moving ahead of me and I followed him into Mrs. Edward Martin’s parlor—and my eyes could not hold still, there was such a welter of things, and I went from fainting bench to pump organ to the William Morris Strawberry Thief wallpaper—the walls were aswirl with vines and flowers and strawberries and speckled birds.

  “I don’t know where the smell of lilacs is coming from,” he said.

  I looked at him, not prepared for that cognitive leap. I looked back to a mantelpiece filled with parian porcelains of Shakespeare, General Gordon, Julius Caesar, Victoria herself threatening to fall from the edge where she’d been jostled by the crowd of other white busts.

  “It’s always in my clothes after I visit here.”

  “What’s that?” I said, trying to gain control of my senses.

  “The lilac. I never asked her where it came from, but now when I’m free to look, I can’t find it.”

  “You must miss her,” I said.

  “Is that what I’m conveying?” His voice had gone flat.

  I didn’t even know myself why I’d jumped to that conclusion, much less expressed it. Maybe it was all her stuff around me. See me, love me, miss me, she was crying, I am so intricate and so ornamented that you can’t help but do that. But Trevor clearly had seen her, and whether or not he’d loved her, I don’t think he missed her much. Evidently he heard his own tone, because he smiled at me and he made his voice go so soft from what seemed like self-reflection that my hands grew itchy to touch him. “That must sound like an odd response,” he said. “How could an only child not miss his mother?”