She waited a beat, but I had no answer for this.
Then she said, “Are you sure you’re not lesbian, honey?”
“Mama.”
“Not that I’d judge you.”
“I’m not a lesbian. But even if I were, that’s not the same as a being a man.”
“Your father is dead.”
Usually I could follow the eccentric associative leaps of her mind, but this one puzzled me. “I know, Mama.”
“I’m all alone now.”
“We could get you a place out here, Missy and I. You could get a nice place close to everyone.”
“I’m a Texan.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“And so are you,” she said.
“I don’t think so anymore.”
“You both are. You’ll always be.”
“Okay, Mama. Okay.”
“I’m surrounded by your father’s things.”
I heard this as another reason she couldn’t move. I was wrong.
“I want to get rid of them,” she said.
“What?”
“He liked machines. I’ve got chain saws, electric carving knives, stereos and TVs galore. My garage door opens like the jaws of hell when the police use their radios in the neighborhood. I’ve got a Ford pickup and a Hummer and a Cadillac something-or-other beyond the nice little BMW that I use. Don’t tell me I’m contradicting myself. I know that’s a machine, but I can like my BMW.”
“You can give most of that stuff away,” I said.
“I need your help.”
“Take the excess vehicles to a used-car lot. For the rest, just call one of your charities. You couldn’t get more than garage-sale prices for it, anyway.”
“That’s fine for the things I mentioned. But there are plenty of valuables, too. Things he collected. Jewelry he bought me. Furniture he chose. I want to get rid of it all. And I want some money for it”
I’d paid easy lip-service to Mama’s hatred for Daddy. But in the face of a clear, avid expression of it, I found myself trembling faintly.
“I need your help with a lot of this,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“You won’t help me?”
This was an intensely unpleasant prospect, but there was no excuse. “Of course I will,” I said. “But are you sure?”
“I’m sure. You can come down, okay? Look it all over. I don’t want to get hornswoggled.”
“Okay, Mama. I just don’t know when.”
“As soon as possible, honey. There’s a bull moose staring down from the wall at me right now. I’m tired of living in the middle of all this.”
“You can get rid of the moose right now, Mama.”
“You don’t think it’s valuable?”
“Only to Daddy.”
“He’s dead.”
“I know.”
“Then the moose is outahere.”
The thought of going to Houston to evaluate my father’s things rasped at me through a quiet Monday at work, and then on Tuesday morning there was a padded envelope, without stamps and without a routing slip, sitting in the center of my desk. In a bold hand, using what I recognized as a flexible-nib fountain pen—probably vintage—was my name “Amy Dickerson” in the center and a simple “Bouchard” in the return address spot. I called for Lydia, who appeared in my doorway and seemed hesitant to cross the threshold without permission.
“When did this arrive?” I asked, nodding to the envelope.
She clearly didn’t know what I was talking about. I held it up.
“I’ve never seen it,” Lydia said.
“Thanks.”
“Honest,” she said.
“I believe you. Thanks.”
She disappeared and I sat down. I never locked my office. Alain had slipped in early this morning—or late last night—and placed this here himself.
I opened the envelope and inside was a cobalt blue Groupe Bouchard S.A. folder. In the folder was a thick, slick booklet on his corporation, a formal tender of stock options in the parent company, a salary offer that represented a fifty-percent raise, a commission proposal that gave me three extra points, an open-date airplane ticket to Paris, and a folded heavy-vellum note with the flexing nib shaping the words from thick downstrokes to delicate thin swoops and back again, the written equivalent, it felt, of Alain’s expressively conversational hands.
Dear Amy Dickerson, I hope these figures make you wish to remain a part of Nichols & Gray. Since under this proposal you would, as you can see, own a part of my company, I invite you to come to Paris to visit the headquarters. You may do so at any time, though Arthur will be coming soon and perhaps you wish to accompany him. But first, shall we have a dinner before I leave NewYork? I promise not to be vaguely personal. Alain Bouchard.
I folded the note and put the whole packet together again, sliding it all back into the envelope, and then I laid it on the center of my desk where I’d found it, squaring up the sides so that it was perfectly horizontal there, and I stared at it. I thought of his little bow to me on the balcony Sunday night. I’d said no more bullshit—I hadn’t used the exact word, but it felt like it; that was in my tone, certainly—and less than thirty-six hours later he’d made me an offer I was hardly inclined even to dicker about.
I rose from my chair and stood looking at the packet and I felt oddly affectless. I circled the desk and went out of my office and down the hall and straight into Arthur’s office. He was in the sitting area beneath his corner windows, sipping coffee at one end of his silk brocade couch while Winona sat at the other end pointing a microcassette recorder in his direction. Arthur was composing a letter. He missed dictating to a secretary who hunched over a notepad taking shorthand. He’d acceded to modern technology enough to use a machine, but he still insisted on his assistant holding it while he talked.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, though in fact I wasn’t.
Arthur lifted a hand toward Winona to pause the recording and said, “It’s all right, dear. We’ll finish later.”
Winona shrugged and rose and she slipped past me and Arthur patted the couch next to him. Though it shouldn’t have been a gesture that appealed to me, I went to the spot he’d patted and sat and Arthur took my hand and gave it a little squeeze and in spite of myself I suddenly felt sweetly cozy.
Arthur leaned near me and said, low, “Did he make you a nice offer?”
“Didn’t he tell you what it was?”
“Of course not. That’s a private matter between the two of you.” Arthur said this grandly, as if it were a statement of personal philosophy.
“You asked and he wouldn’t say.”
“In spite of my twisting his arm.”
I smiled at Arthur’s quick reversal. He squeezed my hand again.
“You know me so well, my dear.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I said.
“So. Was he good to you?”
“He was.”
“Very good?”
“Very good.”
“Splendid then. Splendid.” He sounded relieved. He also was assuming that a very good offer would necessarily lead me to stay. Hearing the assumption in his voice made me realize what this lingering affectlessness was all about. In fact, I hadn’t decided I’d stay. I could read Arthur instantly but I suddenly was lagging way behind on myself.
But before I’d examine that, I wanted to know about the relief I’d heard. “Didn’t you expect the offer to be good?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Very good?”
“Of course.”
“Arthur.”
“Well, perhaps I wasn’t quite so sure. I told you he was a hard bargainer.”
“What did he say about me?”
“Only the highest, sweetest things.” Arthur took my hand again and looked me squarely in the eyes. I believed him.
“And how about you?” I said. “Was his offer to you a hard one?”
“Buying the company, pe
rhaps that’s a different matter.”
“Does he want you to stay on?”
“He does.”
“Good,” I said, and I realized I’d worked up a potential little panic with the question. I wanted Arthur always to be around. This time I squeezed his hand, and I realized I was making the same assumption he did. “And will you stay?”
“What else is there?” he said and I couldn’t figure out his tone.
I pressed on. “Do you mean you’d like an alternative but there’s none?”
“I mean it’s who I am.”
“That doesn’t quite answer my question,” I said.
“Would I like an alternative me?”
He was right. That’s what I was asking. But it wasn’t about him. I said, “I can’t imagine a different Arthur. Just tell Bouchard yes and let’s get on with our work.”
“That’s the ticket,” Arthur said, brightening.
I’d said our work. But it didn’t feel like a decision. Still, I let it stand for now with him. And with myself. Another issue pressed itself on me. I said, “Arthur, I may need to go to …”
“Perhaps we can go together,” he said. “Right after the Ravel auction.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’d be happy to. But I wasn’t talking about Paris.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No way for you to know. I was going to say Houston. My mother wants to auction my father’s things. I’ll need to take care of that.”
Arthur, bless his heart, suddenly looked worried. “How very strange for you,” he said. “Would you like me to get someone …”
“That’s sweet of you, Arthur. But I think that would feel even stranger, somehow.”
“Then go whenever you need to.”
He took my hand. I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
When people begin to collect a new thing—even if they are experienced collectors of something else—they will often make a common mistake. I am particularly attentive to our frequent bidders, whose every crotchet is known to me, as they move to a new category, so that I can make use of this phenomenon. These collectors will, early on, buy items that later—after their tastes have undergone an inevitable process of refinement—seem too common or undistinguished for their collection. I call this a “mistake,” but who’s to say? It can also be seen as a necessary first step into a new world. It can be seen as that classic time of initial enthusiasm for a whole new category of the world’s rich variety of objects, a time when even common things can be seen afresh and with delight. Which is why I can absolve myself of most of the guilt when I manipulate the hell out these people and move the typical middle-of-the-auction batch of mediocre stuff out the door for good prices. The sellers are happy, Nichols & Gray is happy, and the buyers, at least for a while, are happy.
As I walked back to my office after my little hand-squeezing session with Arthur, this whole process was on my mind. I realized that what I’d done in East Hampton was not simply to buy myself. I am not a one-time, single-item purchase. At the charity auction I had, in fact, begun to collect myself. I’d started by overpaying for a commonplace dinner in a restaurant with me, though it had a couple of features I’d not expected—a way of slowing down to eat, a rare moment of enjoying my own dinnertime company, an instructive encounter with a couple of men. Still, there were other items of Amyania—many items—yet to be acquired. Right at that moment, for instance, a pretty important one—vocation, profession, calling. Was there an alternative Amy Dickerson, one who was not an auctioneer?
Here was her office, however. I closed her door and sat down and swiveled her chair to face the terra-cotta lions. There had been an Amy Dickerson before Nichols & Gray. I was lanky then. Fresh Texas face. Something like that. I swirled my newly washed hair—given body and dazzle by Prell shampoo—for the viewers of half a dozen soap operas and the noontime news in fifty major local markets. Dressed in a Versace gown at the New York Auto Show, I lay draped across the hood of the last Yugo model to be sold in the United States, with bombs already falling in Croatia, and I sang—to the tune of “Camptown Races”—“You want to drive a stylish car, you go Yugo. You want to make your cash go far, you go Yugo, too. She can run all night, she can run all day, still you’ll not fill up her tank, for Yugo we shout hooray.”
It had occurred to me—I was, in fact, about to make a career change—that I could do a much better job of selling the idea of this car with my own words. Car buyers knew what a wimp the thing was. I’d go straight to the worst of what they were thinking. Sixty-two horsepower? Hell yes. That’s plenty to get you where you’re going, and when the shit once again hits the fan in the Middle East, you’ll be happy you’ve got fewer mouths to feed under that hood. But I’d sung that goddam song a hundred times just as it was when I finally realized something had to be done about my life, and so instead of improving the sales pitch, I gave it quite a different spin, in order to turn in my resignation. One night with a pretty good crowd milling around I stood up straight and practically deep-throated my mike to sing, “Tito’s dead and so’s this car, bye-bye, Yugo. Without new parts you won’t go far, oh the Yugo’s dead. The gears are prone to strip, the gas tank catches fire, inside a year you’ll fix this car, with gum and baling wire.”
This ended my acting career, though it was clearly in the same state as the Yugo by then anyway. And a few years later I sold the most weirdly beautiful car in the world—one of only three ever known to exist—in a private auction in Darien. It was a 1938 Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic, created by Ettore Bugatti’s son, Jean, who died the next year test-driving a LeMans racer and killed the company at the same moment by devastating Ettore, who in his grief found it in himself effectively to make bombs and torpedoes for Mussolini but failed utterly to make more cars. My Atlantic was midnight blue with great billowing front fenders and swooping lines and a low central fin starting at its radiator and splitting the wind along the hood and up the center of the angled windshield and over the sweet, tight curve of the roof and down a long, unmodulated slope through the back windows—which looked more to the heavens than the road behind—and down the trunk to the bot tom of its bumperless tail. And I had half an hour in a room alone with this car and I draped myself over its hood and I sat in its suffocatingly small cabin and it smelled of leather and very old wood and I sold the hell out of it, to three dozen connoisseurs, and I made them see even more vividly what was there in that room with them, the beauty of it, the dark history of it, and they ran past the estimate and on and on and I gaveled it down at seven million dollars, even.
Why was I hesitating to accept the offer sitting behind me in the center of my desk and settle in to the rest of my professional life at Bouchard’s Nichols & Gray? Was I thinking of going to some other house? There was only a handful of them in our league and they all operated more or less the same way, if anything somewhat more conservatively. I knew they’d probably try to tone down my podium style. If Bouchard and his company looked okay, there was no point in moving on. The lions before me yawned in boredom at all this thinking.
But my hesitation ran deeper. Was there a drastically different Amy that I should hunt down? I spun around in the chair and laid my hands on the desktop. Was there a fourth Bugatti Atlantic out there somewhere, tucked away in a fieldstone barn in a village in Tuscany? Original paint. American Beauty red.
For a few days I put aside any thoughts of a future beyond the imminent Music Manuscript and Vintage Instruments auction, and I made that dinner date with Alain for Saturday night. I spoke only with his secretary—he himself had dashed back to France for a couple of days—and when the time came, a Lincoln Town Car arrived for me at the door of my building. I answered the doorman’s buzz and stopped for a moment in the center of my apartment, caught by the vague impulse to consider its silence. And then I went down the elevator and across the marble lobby and out the door and for some reason I did not expect Alain to be inside the car. But the chauffeur opened the back door and bowed a litt
le and I plunged into the smell of seat leather and there Alain was, taking my hand in both of his.
The door clicked shut and he said, “I’m so sorry to have been away when you called.”
He let go of my hand and I said, “I hope you had a good trip.”
“Ça va,” he said.
We rolled away from the curb and the car was dim and we made small talk for a few moments, but then we rode in a silence that, surprisingly, felt entirely comfortable, with nothing to prove to each other, no impressions to cultivate, just here we are in New York on a Saturday night. The lights of the city splashed on Alain’s face and washed away and splashed again and he seemed much younger in the dark and he smelled of something earthy, deep-woodsy, but very nice, patchouli perhaps. I would have expected him to smell just slightly too sweet.
He’d heard I liked sushi and so we ended up in the Village at a place with a woman planted in a corner in a kimono, playing a koto, and he told me of his regard for sumo wrestling, its traditions and its ritual and the psychological subtlety of the struggle, the wrestlers waging a war of the eyes for a long while before the actual clash, which itself, he said, was often quite wonderfully graceful. He made a joke with the Japanese waiter about the Ozeki-brand saki, saying it should be called Yokozuna saki, which, he explained to me after the waiter went away laughing, was actually a higher sumo rank than Ozeki. All of this, and we were through our gyoza and seaweed salads, before he finally said, “I trust you found the envelope of information.”
“I did. Thanks.” I knew he wanted me to answer questions that he was trying not to ask, but I said no more.
A platter of sushi, chosen specially by the chef, arrived in time to get us both off the hook. We focused on the sea urchin and the monk liver and things I could not name and had never eaten before and we prowled the ocean, Alain and I, taking in our fellow creatures raw, and all we spoke about was how good it was, how very good were these tastes in our mouths.
At last, over green tea ice cream and more saki, I said, “I don’t mean to be coy.”
He acted genuinely puzzled.
Fair Warning Page 9
