Fair Warning Read online

  “I can think of ways.”

  He smiled again but this time at the room. He looked around. “Do you wonder if I grew up amidst all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did.”

  “And you want to get rid of it.”

  His smile came back to me. He looked at me closely and he was no Trevor at all. “Every bit,” he said.

  That first day, I sat at a bentwood table in the kitchen and he would bring me the things he could carry—a sterling silver biscuit box and a cut glass decanter, a coach-lace coffee cozy and a silver and gold peacock pendant, and on and on—and I would make notes for the catalog description and I would give him an estimate and he never challenged a figure, never asked a question. At some point I realized it was past two and we ordered in Chinese and he had already rolled the sleeves on his pale green silk shirt and we ate together, me using chopsticks, him using a fork. In the center of the table sat a spring-driven tabletop horse-racing toy with eight painted lead horses with jockeys that circled a grooved wooden track. He had just put it before me when the doorbell rang with the food.

  We ate in silence for a couple of minutes, a nice silence, I thought—we were comfortable enough with each other already that we didn’t have to make small talk. Finally, though, I pointed to the toy and asked, “Was this yours?”

  “Not really. It was around. I never played with it.”

  “Weren’t you allowed?”

  “How much will we get?” he said.

  “Toys aren’t a specialty of mine. I can only get you into the ballpark.”

  “Close enough.”

  “I think the estimate would be around three hundred dollars.”

  “And you’d work the bid up to six.”

  I looked at the row of jockeys. “Probably a little more. Understand that estimates usually run low. To whet appetites. And we do have a couple of regulars who play the horses. And more than a couple are still kids at heart.”

  “You’re scary sometimes, Amy Dickerson, what you can pick up in people.” He was smiling the same smile I’d taken for self-reflection.

  “This might be true,” I said. I was up to my elbows here in mothers and children and my own mother thought the same thing about me, expecting all the good men in the world to be frightened away. Looking into Trevor’s dark eyes I felt a twist of something in my chest that the cool and collected part of me recognized as panic.

  “I mean that in an admiring way,” he said.

  “How come I didn’t pick up on that?”

  “I’m sorry. I scare people, too.”

  “But you don’t scare me. See the problem I’m suddenly faced with? We have an imbalance here.”

  “In the courtroom,” he said.

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is scary,” I said, and part of me meant it.

  “I only defend the poor and the downtrodden,” he said.

  “Not if you can afford silk shirts.”

  “That was two categories. I defend the poor and the downtrodden rich.”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “Ask any rich man. He’ll tell you.”

  “What about rich women?”

  The playfulness drained out of him, pulling the corners of his mouth down. I knew he was thinking about his mother again.

  “Trevor,” I said, softly. He looked me in the eyes and I said, “Play the game.”

  For a moment he didn’t understand.

  I nodded to the spring-driven tabletop horse-racing toy with eight hollowcast, painted lead horses with jockeys and grooved wooden track, estimate three hundred dollars. He followed my gesture and looked at the object for a moment. Then he stretched and pulled it to him and he put his hand on the key at the side. He hesitated and looked at me. Ever so slightly I nodded, yes.

  He turned the key and the kitchen filled with the metallic scrinch of the gears and he turned it again and again until it would turn no more. Then he tripped the release lever and the horses set out jerking around the track once, twice, a horse taking the lead and then losing it to another and that one losing it to another until the sound ceased and the horses stopped. Trevor’s eyes had never left the game. Now he looked at me.

  “Which one was yours?” I asked.

  He reached out his hand and laid it over mine. Our first touch. “They all were,” he said.

  There was a time when I thought I would be a model. I was a model. I did the catwalk glide as well as any of them, selling the clothes, selling the attitude. And off the job—when I was in my own jeans and going, Who the hell was I today?—I had trouble figuring out how to put one foot in front of the other one without feeling like I was still on the runway. There was a time when I was an actress. I was Miss Firecracker and I was Marilyn Monroe and I was passionate about a shampoo and I was still going, Who the hell was I today? Then there were the two live-ins. They didn’t help ease Mama’s angst. People actually think to get married, in Texas, she’d observe. It didn’t help ease my angst either. I was “Babe” to one and “A.D.” to the other and one never made a sound when we had sex and the other yelled, “Oh Mama,” over and over, and I found part of myself sitting somewhere on the other side of the room watching all this and turning over the same basic question.

  So what was I reading in Trevor Martin, the once and perhaps future Dark Eyes, that would make me hopeful? After he put his hand on mine he said, “I’ve been divorced for six months. My mother has been dead for six weeks. It feels good to have a woman look inside me. That’s not really happened before. But I’m trying to move slowly into the rest of my life.”

  “I understand,” I said, and I did. “For one thing, we have every object of your childhood to go through first.”

  He squeezed my hand gently, which told me he’d known I’d understand and he was grateful.

  I left him on the first evening and went to a Thai restaurant and ate alone, as had been my recent custom, though I felt the possibilities with Dark Eyes unfurling before me. But that didn’t stop me from eating too fast and I walked out with my brow sweating and my lips tingling from the peppers.

  And I went home to my apartment and I stepped in and when I switched on the lights, I was stopped cold. My eyes leaped from overstuffed chair to overstuffed couch to silk Persian rug and all of it was in fin de siècle Bloomingdale’s earth tones and it was me, it was what was left of me after I’d been dead for six weeks and somebody that wasn’t me but was like me was here to catalog it all and there was a ficus in a corner and a signed Dalí print of the Virgin Mary and her baby over the empty mantelpiece and a wall of bookshelves and I wanted to turn around and walk out, go to a bar or back to work, take my notes from the first day at Mrs. Edward Martin’s and go put them in a computer, anything but step further into this apartment with its silence buzzing in my ears.

  Then I saw the red light flashing on my answering machine and I moved into my apartment as if nothing odd was going on. I approached the phone, which sat, I was suddenly acutely aware, on an Angelo Donghia maple side table with Deco-style tapering legs, estimated value eight hundred dollars. But the flashing light finally cleared my head: I had one message and I pushed the button.

  It was Arthur Gray. “Hello, Amy,” he said. “I’m so sorry about yesterday. I promise to tell you about my every move from now on.” At this, Arthur laughed a little hee-hee laugh. “Professional move, that is. I hope you had fun today with all the bric-a-brac. I forgot to mention the benefit auction. Woody Allen just came through with a walk-on part in his new film. Postmodern Millie, I think it’s going to be called. And the mayor’s offered a dinner at Gracie Mansion. But I’ve had a special request, and since we’re not being entirely altruistic here—rightly not—I really think we should do it. More later. You know how I appreciate you. Our best customers are your biggest admirers … Almost forgot. Do you need a lift to the Hamptons Saturday? We should get out there early and I’ve got a limo. Let me know. Bye.”

&nbs
p; All of which barely registered at the time. I realized it was the assumption that the red light was Trevor that had cleared the mortality from my head.

  On that night I sat naked on the edge of my bed, my silk nightshirt laid out beside me, and I thought of Trevor, the silk of his shirt the color of a ripe honey-dew, or the color—if green is the color of jealousy—of the pallid twinge I felt when I found Max, in the third year of our relationship, in a restaurant we’d been to together half a dozen times, only this time he had a woman hanging on his arm. He saw me. I saw him. It was lunchtime and I sat down at a table, my back to him, and I ate my lunch alone, which I’d planned to do, and very fast, faster than usual. I loved that Caesar salad and split pea soup, in spite of the speed, perhaps because of it: I was furious. Only the tiniest bit jealous, surprisingly, but angry. I love to eat when I’m angry. He wouldn’t talk about it that night. The one on his arm never argued with him, he said. She was just about as stupid and irrational as he himself was, he said, thinking, I suppose, that he was being ironic. But even at that moment I thought it was the first truthful thing he’d said in a long time.

  I laid my hand on the nightshirt. The silk was cool and slick and I clenched it with my fingers like a lover’s back. And then I let it go. It was Fred’s shirt. It had been too big for pasty slender Fred. I looked at it. Periwinkle blue. White oyster buttons. Soft tip collar. Versace. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Who’ll start the bidding at nothing? I looked at the shirt and wondered why I hadn’t given it away or thrown it away from the negative provenance. But I didn’t give a damn about that. It felt good to sleep in. That was a healthy attitude, surely.

  I looked around the room. And my eyes moved to my dresser and found a silver tankard stuffed with an arrangement of dried flowers. I rose and crossed to it and picked it up. It was from Max. The tankard, not the flowers. It was Georgian with a baluster shape and a flared circular foot and a light engraved pattern of flowers and foliate scrolls. He’d been an ignorant gift-giver. Magazine subscriptions and sweaters. I vaguely remembered challenging him about it and he’d bought me this for seven hundred dollars. On eBay, where every grandma and pack rat is her own auction house. And he’d gotten me a glorified beer mug. But I was grateful at the time. He wanted to use it himself, I realized. He said the silver was the only thing that would keep a beer cold in the Georgian era. Yum, he said. But I didn’t let him use it even once. I put flowers in his beer mug and I kept it to this moment, standing naked and alone in my bedroom, my face twisted beyond recognition in the reflection in my hand. It was beautiful, this object, really. That’s why I kept it. Both these men had vanished forever from this place. Exorcised. The objects they touche—a thing I would push like crazy in an auction if they’d been famous and dead—held not a trace of them. And I felt the chilly creep of panic in my limbs at this thought.

  I put the tankard down and turned away. I crossed to the bed and I lifted this Versace shirt with soft tip collar and I let it fall over my head and down, the silk shimmering against me, and suddenly I felt as if I’d climbed inside Trevor’s skin. Can you trust to know a man from a pair of dark eyes? From Chinese food and a child’s game played by an adult after a lifetime of quiet pain inflicted by a mother? From the touch of a hand? Inside this draping of silk my body had its own kind of logic. These details are the man, my body reasoned, as surely as the buttons and the stitching and the weave of cloth are this two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar shirt. I raised my paddle and I bid on this man.

  “One thousand dollars,” I said.

  Auctioneers are attuned to a certain gesture that is not a gesture, to the sudden presence of a thing that has no presence. I’m speaking of the hesitation. I sensed it in Trevor. We had before us on the kitchen bentwood table a sterling silver Edward Barnard and Sons centerpiece in squared oval-form on four appliqué legs and the room had been bright with sunlight all morning and it surely had made my finely textured, newly light-ash-blond hair diaphanously beautiful and I handled these objects of his mother’s life with great tenderness, and yet for the whole of this morning Trevor had been all business. Which is probably why I had just given him an estimate half of what it probably should have been—even factoring in that estimates usually run low. As a little test. This is not a good quality in me, I suppose. But yesterday he laid his hand on mine and today he had not even brushed past my shoulder on his way into the other room to gather up more objects. And he seemed way too focused, in this process, on the Money Moment. Now granted, that is a thing I should hardly be criticizing in a client, especially one who no doubt had legitimate issues with the dead collector of these objects. But here I was alone with him all morning and he’d backslid seriously and so I pushed this little needle into him.

  I let his hesitation play on for a moment and then I asked, “Is there something wrong?”

  “No,” he said, not moving his eyes from the centerpiece.

  “The money…”

  “It’s not that,” he said quickly, even ardently, and he looked at me.

  I was relieved to find I believed him, though now, from guilt, my mind wouldn’t get off the money. “I don’t mean it as the estimate,” I said. “A thousand would be more like the opening bid.”

  “Look,” he said, nodding to the centerpiece. I did.

  “I have trouble seeing the world like that,” he said.

  I knew what he meant: the body of the piece was profuse with chased flowers and leaves and fruit baskets and each leg held the face of a child nearly smothered in ruffles and scrolls.

  “It’s all like that,” he said.

  I wished I could say, You’re going to like my apartment. I couldn’t, but at least I was feeling again it might come to that. Which meant more guilt, me thinking about romance while he was struggling to come to terms with the mother with each object we examined. So this time I laid my hand on his.

  And before even I could figure out what my primary intent was, the phone rang.

  I lifted my hand at once. Trevor rose and went to the wall phone by the door and answered. I let his voice turn into a murmur and I looked out the window to the treetops of Central Park. I found myself not wanting to know who might call him. I refused to let this headlong silliness that was going on inside me include jealousy. I concentrated on the park, thinking, who are we trying to kid with all these trees? This is goddam New York City. Get used to it.

  “It’s for you,” Trevor said.

  I almost said, “Good.” But I clamped my mouth shut and rose and took the phone.

  It could only be Arthur. He said, “Hello, my dear. Mr. Martin has kindly agreed to give you a few hours off. He’s here and we’re to have lunch.”

  “He?”

  “Alain Bouchard. Come twinkle.”

  “Where?”

  “You won’t believe it.”

  Down the block from the Nichols & Gray building is the Provenance Deli, the place we all go or send out to for lunch, with sandwiches named The Chippendale and The Tiffany and The Art Deco and all of it straight New York Deli, the Deco, for example, being square-cut turkey, triangle-cut salami, and halved cherry tomatoes. I moved through the packed-too-close marble-top tables full of lunchers to the back of the place where Arthur’s table sat in a corner beneath some third-rate Victorian landscapes the deli owner had picked up cheap at one of our arcade sales. Arthur rose at my approach, and also rising, beside him, more slowly, was a tall, broad-set, early fifty-something man—perhaps even a vigorously preserved late-fifties—with a tanned, smooth-molded face and nearly black eyes and tightly cropped hair faintly graying at the edges. It was a face from a black-and-white film with subtitles and probably costarring Jeanne Moreau. His hands were large, too, as both of them took mine. I’d offered a simple handshake but was instead being engulfed by hands that were smooth to the touch but felt as hard as the hands of, say, a Marseilles dockworker.

  Arthur was making introductions that I ignored and Alain Bouchard and I looked at each other directly and we did not so m
uch as blink. For a long moment I concentrated on standing up to a possible future boss and he concentrated, I assumed, on being the guy with the dough and the clout. Then he said, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  He spoke with only the faintest trace of an accent, just a little pinchy thing around some of the vowels. “I’ve heard almost nothing about you,” I said.

  Alain glanced sharply at Arthur who beamed at each of us in turn. Alain turned his eyes back to me. “I will have to explain myself,” he said and he motioned us both to our chairs. “Please.”

  He waited where he stood for us to settle in and then he waited another few beats, him towering above the two of us. It was a cheap trick, this little tableau of power, and I refused to raise my eyes to him.

  Arthur, however, toggled obsequiously between Alain and me. I wanted to kick him under the table to make him stop, but instead, with my eyes fixed on my sweet-natured, pathetic, antique-maven of a boss, I said, “First Arthur has to explain why he’s brought you to this place for lunch.”

  “That is an easy thing,” Alain said, finally descending. “I insisted. His first suggestion was a French restaurant. I said to him, ‘How absurd, isn’t it? I have too many French lunches. I am from France. I come to New York, so I wish to go to a New York deli.’”

  Arthur forced a little laugh. “I tried to carry coals to Newcastle.”

  I looked at Alain. He was puzzling this out, I realized. I said, “You’re trying to understand how you’ve become a lump of coal.”

  Alain laughed. “I still treat an unfamiliar idiom as a mathematical equation to work out the x and the y. But now I see. Porter de l’eau à la rivière. Am I right?” He turned to Arthur as if he understood the French. I could not tell if Arthur’s little pretense of knowing the language had betrayed him now for the first time or if Alain was needling Arthur for something that had already come out between them.