Fair Warning

by Robert Olen Butler

  I hadn’t noticed the twinkle before, but she was right. He was looking at a woman he was sleeping with. And it occurred to me that the sex part wasn’t the crucial thing. I’d never even bothered to think this most obvious thing about his relationship with Mama, and now that I’d heard it as the fact it was, it added absolutely nothing to my complex feelings about him. I understood at once the reason for that. The sense of betrayal, the sense of his commitment to someone else—I’d already felt all that about him over Missy. It wasn’t a matter of sex. It was a matter of soft and silly talk and of private understandings. It was a tightly closed circle that by some bone-deep right you should be inside, but you weren’t. Quite the contrary. That circle existed to hold you out, and there was somebody else in there with him.

  “His paintress,” Mama sneered. She extended her arm toward him and closed her hand around an invisible brush and she flicked her wrist a few times.

  “She wasn’t the painter,” I said.

  Mama looked at me and her arm drooped.

  “It’s signed ‘Gaunt.’ That’s Jonah Gaunt. He was a minor figure for a while in the photorealist movement of the seventies.”

  She looked back to the painting. “Well, she was there.”

  “Mama, I’m going to sell it. Daddy’s gone. It’s all over.”

  “No it’s not. It’s passed on to Missy.”

  This was clearly the moment when our big argument was ready to commence. But that would involve trying to convince Mama she’d made a profoundly wrongheaded decision and wasted her life as a result. She’d never be able to face that, and I honestly didn’t want her to. And Missy had to learn this thing for herself anyway.

  So I kept my mouth shut.

  And we sat for a time in silence in the parlor, my mother and I. Then, without another glance at the image of the man who, both unworthy and dead though he was, still held a perverse power over three grown women, I said good night and went to bed.

  At least three grown women.

  But I would not go there.

  And so, with the lot-sorting done and the estimates fixed and the movers hired and the hotel space booked and the ads placed in the papers, I finished my pre-auction work in Houston, and Mama hadn’t criticized me and I hadn’t criticized her for the rest of the time I was there, and I never did find the saddle and I never did find anything of Daddy’s that made me think to want to keep it, and Friday morning I was back in my office.

  Alain was out of the country again and I had final preparations to do for the music auction anyway and it was still a sweet thing to defer my touching this man. I wanted the clutter of Houston and Daddy and all his things out of my head by then. And as I headed for my office and I passed the receptionist with a push-up bra, and then the gangly, weathered-from-being-out-all-weekend-in-a-boat-off-Hyannis beauty of our art director, and then Lydia and her sad eyes, one of the bits of clutter was the thought that there were other women in the world—maybe many others—who were shaped and shaken and fucked up by Daddy. Women that Mama and Missy and I would never know about.

  I sat at my desk and the thing on top was a letter to our billing office, forwarded to me with a Post-it note from Arthur saying she must still have a hold on him. The letter was from Trevor asking for a final statement of account for our “appraisal and any other miscellaneous services.” He’d decided not to auction off the effects of his recently deceased mother. I shuddered from an unwanted vision of this man, who screwed me in an elevator, crossing that sachet-besotted room, pulling back the comforter—the dozen pillows scattering—and then him crawling in and disappearing there. I backpedaled away from all this.

  And I was moved right now to do something I’d been putting off. I picked up the phone and I dialed Missy. The phone rang eight times. Nine. Her answering machine was off. She was gone. I felt a scrabble of panic. Then she answered, her voice thick with sleep.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Missy,” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m back from Houston. I’m in my office.”

  “Amy,” she said, though there didn’t seem to be anything intended to follow.

  I waited a few moments and then I said, “Missy, are you all right?”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I need to get up. I just lay down for a few minutes after getting the girls off to school.”

  “Mama said you’re going to try again with Jeff.”

  “Listen,” she said, as if she’d not heard. “Can you come out tomorrow?”

  “Missy, what’s going on? Is he back?”

  “Back? Not yet. No.”

  “Not yet. So you’re expecting him?”

  “Look, I need your help. My friend’s gone till tomorrow and I need you. She’ll pick them up from you after dinner.”

  “You want me to watch the girls tomorrow?”

  “Please.”

  “While you do what?”

  “It’s my life, Amy. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Which means it’s not Mama’s.”

  “Or yours either. Right?”

  “Right.” I meant this. Of course I meant this. I needed to stop giving a shit about how this thing came out. If she wanted to turn into Mama, it was her choice.

  “I need to see him,” she said. “He wants to spend a weekend with me. We’re going out to Montauk, as far as we can go out there, you know? Him and me out with the rocks and the seagulls and the potatoes. I need to try to save this.”

  After a day of Molly clinging and chattering and Maggie standing off and glowering, I got the girls to take a walk in the last hour of light. We bought ice-cream cones on Sea Cliff Avenue and looked at a first edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz at the antiquarian book store. Molly had Barbie and Ken in tow and she drifted to a stool to explain books to them while Maggie and I looked at the dust jacket wrapped in Mylar. Dorothy was being held aloft on the joined arms of the woodman and his twin brother.

  Both girls knew something nasty was going on in the family, Missy had informed me before she’d driven off to meet Jeff in some unspecified place. Molly just thought there was a big argument, different only in being quite a bit more intense than usual, and that her daddy had gone off on a business trip right afterwards. But Missy was afraid Maggie knew way too much. I’d not had Maggie alone yet.

  We bent over the book on the counter, and though the bookman was nearby, Maggie and I had our first moment available for a few private words. And Maggie said, “You know in the movie, there’s a guy hanging himself to death in the back of one scene.”

  “What?”

  “You can see it,” Maggie said. “It’s when they’re in the Tin Woodman’s forest. Dorothy and the Woodman and the Scarecrow go marching off singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and right then you can see him doing it in the trees. They even look straight at him as he’s dangling and kicking his legs. They just keep on singing.”

  Before I had a chance to say anything in response—not that I had the slightest idea what that might be—the bookman said, “I’d heard that too.”

  Maggie looked up at him and then at me. “See?”

  I was relieved that this wasn’t strictly a personal observation on Maggie’s part.

  The bookman drew near and put his hand on the counter near the book. He said, “But that’s not what’s really happening.”

  Maggie cocked her head at him.

  “You can see it better on the big screen,” he said. “In fact, it’s a stork flapping its wings.”

  “No it’s not,” Maggie said.

  “The hanging man’s an urban legend. It came out of people seeing the movie on TV screens.” It was clear from the tone of his voice that he did not own a TV and never would.

  “You’re wrong,” Maggie snapped.

  The bookman flinched at her vehemence. So did I.

  Maggie looked up at me. “It’s real,” she said. “He just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  The
bookman picked up The Tin Woodman of Oz and turned his back on us to put it away.

  Then the three of us were at the edge of the cliff. Molly took Barbie and Ken off to the next bench along and she sat them down and pointed out the Sea Cliff harbor and the Sound and so forth to them. Maggie sat close to me on the bench where her mother and I had spoken on my last visit. Maggie was quiet. Molly’s voice murmured nearby in the twilight breeze. I waited for a time and then I said to Maggie, low, “Are you doing all right?”

  “Duh,” she said, meaning, I suppose, that it was a stupid question, of course she wasn’t doing all right.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “About what?”

  “Whatever you’re not doing all right about.”

  “Ken and Barbie. Please,” she said.

  I laughed, too loud. Molly looked our way. I didn’t want to draw her to us, so I suppressed the sound instantly. Maggie was right. Molly’s dolls were fine, but for her to get into Barbie and Ken was pretty disturbing.

  “Now there’s a couple that should break up,” Maggie said.

  So the other thing was what was really on her mind.

  “Oh I don’t know,” I said. “They kind of deserve each other, don’t you think?”

  Maggie laughed, low, secretly, just between the two of us. “I’m never going to get married,” she said.

  I nodded and made a little sound in my throat to say I understood and I looked away to the harbor. I didn’t know, quite, what to understand—much less feel—about this declaration from my ten-year-old niece. She was in pain, or she was just ambitious for herself. She was a smart little modern female, or she was just a child. She hated her daddy, or maybe her mama, or maybe both. She admired her aunt, or she didn’t much like what her aunt was but it was all she could hope for, for herself,

  “I’ve already got breasts, you know,” she said.

  Again, all I could offer was a wee grunt of assent. I glanced at her and her breasts weren’t terribly apparent.

  “It’s from eating too much chicken,” she said. “They put hormones in them.”

  “Oh my god,” I said, in facetious shock, trying to change the mood between us. “It’s your mama’s chicken pot pie.”

  “Right. Every other night, it feels like.”

  But then I asked, “Are you angry at her?”

  “Because of the chicken?” Maggie said.

  “No. That’s not it.”

  “I should be mad at Daddy, don’t you think? Doesn’t he have a girlfriend somewhere?”

  I didn’t want to be the one to confirm this. “Is that what you’ve figured out?” I said.

  “It didn’t take any heavy figuring,” she said. “They didn’t mind much who heard them, when they started to fight.”

  “They’re trying to make up this weekend.”

  “I don’t care,” Maggie said, and her voice sounded very weary.

  I didn’t know how to comfort her.

  Then she looked me squarely in the face. “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  “Me?”

  “About not having to deal with men?”

  “I deal with them.”

  “But in your job. You make them eat out of your hand. You tell them what’s valuable and then you make them pay and you earn a lot of money for it. You like your life.”

  This last was a declaration. She’d already decided what her aunt was all about and it must have seemed a way out of whatever fix she was in at the age of ten. She was wrong. Very wrong, but she didn’t need to hear that right now.

  I was aware of a change in Molly’s sounds. She was humming and dah-de-dahing a disco beat. I looked and Barbie and Ken were dancing on the bench, Molly kneeling before them, entranced, seemingly happy.

  I looked back to Maggie and she was staring intently out at the water. She was not waiting for any answers from me. She had things figured out.

  The auctioneer always tries to find one item in a sale that stands out, an item to become emblematic of the excitement and worth of the whole event. Generally this is known as the Pearl of Great Price, an uncharacteristically sappy—not to mention trite—label for our business to use, really, and so I prefer my personal adjustment of the term—the Pearl of Great Estimate. Or, more concisely, the Poge. For example, the Music Manuscript and Vintage Instruments auction that was coming up early the next week was offering a recently discovered, previously unknown holograph manuscript of a chamber piece by Maurice Ravel that he’d titled “Aubade for Violin and Saxophone.” This was our Poge, and we were riding it hard, even making a great show of arranging the first known public performance of the piece at the auction. We’d even made it to the front page of the Times, though below the fold.

  And the sale of the Poge, whatever it is, is always deferred. This is another principle of our business. You make them wait, playing the suspense of it, the delicious anticipation.

  All of this was kicking around in my head as I rode the train from Sea Cliff back to the city on that Saturday night. Which was a way of explaining to myself why I was being as patient as I was about Alain. I was content to wait, to deliciously anticipate, to wonder with pleasure, when he’d finally put his hands on me and I’d put mine on him. In the catalog of lots that were my life at forty, I had a strong feeling that he was the Poge, and this is what you did with Poges.

  Though it’s also true—in the world of the auction—that you never let the Poge go to the very end. Those who’d marshaled their resources primarily to buy the Poge would likely refrain from buying anything else until it came up, and then all the losers would walk away empty-handed. You make them wait for a tantalizing while, but then you let them lose early enough so that out of disappointment they’d bid avidly for subsequent lesser items.

  Not that I had the slightest idea on the train what the relevance of that might be with regards to me and men. Obviously I’d already bid too avidly for much inferior lots. Trevor and Max and Fred, to name three, and there were others. But of course, life hadn’t produced a four-color slick catalog in advance. Who knew what was left, out there, that might come your way?

  Which might very well be how Jeff was looking at his situation, I thought. Certainly it was how Missy should look at hers.

  I dipped into my purse and took out my cell phone and I called my apartment, and I knew why.

  I wanted Alain to have called me and the message to be waiting even then on my machine. By rights, there should have been nothing. Maybe a resumption of whining and bitching by my mother. Arthur being his sweetly solicitous self. But Alain’s voice, grainy, crackling, filled my head and I turned to the window, away from the rest of the train car, as if he and I were about to speak intimately.

  “You should be home by now, I believe,” he said. “I am so very sorry to be running around the world again. I have been missing you. I will certainly be back for the auction this week. And then we will fly to Paris. Perhaps together, yes? Sweet dreams, Amy Dickerson.”

  In front of the dais, the violinist and the saxophonist were softly tuning up and our Blue Salon was overflowing and I stood in the shadows to the side, watching the crowd, sorting the faces—there were, of course, many new ones for this event—and I should have been feeling the rush of an actor’s exhilaration—I’d felt it before, just like this, in one of my other lives, waiting for my cue in some play or other—and I’d felt it often in this very room, as I waited to take center stage—live at the improv, The Female Auctioneer—and tonight was especially big, with the floodlights of the TV-news operations and the NPR sound engineer on the other side of the dais, ready to record the Ravel premiere for “Performance Today,” and I was indeed keyed up, from my starring role, yes—tonight even with an overture—but not as much from that as from the absence of Alain. Here I was again in the midst of this thing I do so well and my mind was preoccupied with a man. A far far better man than the last time, of course, but I wished he was just here and that was that so I could concentrate on what I came here t
o do and to be. Arthur said Alain was due back soon—his plane had been scheduled in at JFK this afternoon—but it was time to begin and I was picking through the faces once more and there was no sign of him.

  Then there was a touch on my elbow. I turned brightly, but it was John Paul Gibbons. I was surprised to see him, though he certainly had more eclectic tastes than most of our clients. “Are you ready to shine for us?” he purred.

  “You’re the star, John Paul,” I said, forcing myself to banter, though I was still feeling distracted. “You and your fine collector’s eye.”

  “And my slut of a checkbook.”

  “That, too, God bless her,” I said.

  John Paul laughed. He touched my elbow again. I glanced at his hand there, but averted my eyes at once. I frankly didn’t want to look too closely at John Paul Gibbons’s hands. He said, “You know, you’ve promised for ages to have dinner with me.”

  In fact, I’d deflected his half dozen or so requests for dinner with studied vagueness. “You had your chance in East Hampton a while ago,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Your slut must have gotten jealous,” I said. “She clamped her legs shut pretty quick.”

  “I’ve regretted it ever since,” he said.

  “The book bid would have surprised you,” I said.

  This intrigued John Paul and I knew he was about to ask who the buyer had been, but I’d had quite enough and I said, “Go to your seat now, John Paul. We’re about to start.”

  He gave my elbow another little squeeze and he slid off.

  I puffed faintly in exasperation.

  I shifted a bit to try to catch the faces toward the back of the room. If Alain was there, he would be standing, but I didn’t see him.

  Arthur was tapping the microphone with his fingertip. The mike was on and he began his welcome. I tuned it out. I tried to put Alain out of my mind. I was holding my bid-book and I checked, for the third or fourth time, the order bids.

  Then Arthur stopped speaking, the crowd applauded and fell silent, and I looked to the musicians. The saxophonist was a youngish man in a tuxedo, prematurely bald with his circling ring of hair lapping down to his shoulders. He licked his reed and looked to the youngish woman who lifted her violin to her chin, cocked her head to meet it, and then nodded, violin and all, at the young man.