Fair Warning

by Robert Olen Butler

  “A little.”

  “She says to her lute that it is her companion in adversity—over a departed lover, clearly—and the lute laments with her and moderates her troubles. She goes on to say that even when she begins to play some delightful air, her lute changes her tone to a lament, as if the lute itself has sensed her deeper need and makes her … as she says, ‘En mes ennuis me plaire suis contreinte, Et d’un dous mal douce fin espérer.’ That is to say, she is forced—by her lute—to find her pleasure in grief and hope for sweet endings to so sweet a pain.”

  He fell silent and I found my hand with its own desire at this moment. I reached across the table and laid my palm on his right temple. I wanted to kiss his mind. He reached up and took my hand and kissed me in the palm. He let my hand go and it came back to me, reluctantly. I was having just a bit of trouble breathing and I suppose that scared me a little, the letting go of a certain kind of control, and so I said, “If I’d known all that, I would have been able to make you pay even more.”

  He smiled—at my cheekiness, I think. I usually valued that trait in myself, as well, but I was suddenly appalled by it. I’d broken this mood of his, I was afraid, a mood I felt was uniquely part of him—all at once intellectual and romantic and faintly pretentious, too, though not offensively so, more boyishly so, or up-from-the-docks-of-Marseilles-and-still-delighted-by-what-it-turns-out-I-can-do so—I truly liked this man and I had to accept being breathless, now and then, with him.

  He said, “I would have paid whatever it took.”

  “Yes.”

  “I bought a painting recently,” he said. “From a museum in Budapest. I had friends there and they knew I had loved it for years. So when they were refocusing their collection, they let me purchase it. It was painted by Parrasio Micheli, a Venetian artist, done about the time Louise Labé wrote her sonnet. It is an image of Venus playing a lute. The lute is almost exactly the lute I bought today. Her garment has fallen off her shoulders and her breasts are bare and she is playing the lute and Cupid is beside her, leaning on her thigh, staring at the rose in the lute’s center. He stares quite lovingly and with a little bit of guilt, as if it is his goddess’s luit he is looking at. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “She holds the lute just so, beneath her lovely, naked breasts, and her face is lifted. She is singing, and I stare at her now on the wall of my apartment in Paris and I strain to hear the song that she sings.”

  I do not play a musical instrument. I do not sing. These things filled me with regret as I listened to Alain across the table that night. He fell silent, sipping his cheap Eastern European wine and thinking about Venus on his wall. Then he looked at me, abruptly, as if waking from a dream, and he said, “I look forward to showing you Paris.”

  “Soon, yes?”

  The waiter was suddenly beside us with pelmeni and caviar and we turned our attention to the food. And when we returned to words, we spoke of minor things through the rest of the dinner—the fineness of the beluga, the chill of the borscht, the tenderness of the lamb in Alain’s Azu, the way the bidding went that evening for the Ravel manuscript and the harmonium and the Toscanini letters, the weather in New York and the weather in Paris, the relief we were feeling at switching to a very nice 1985 Coppola Rubicon.

  But at the same time my mind was following little daisy chains of associations: Venus would come to me and link to Alain standing before her in his apartment and that image would link to Alain’s own newly acquired lute and then to the plucking of its strings and to his hands and to my little fantasy of him loading and unloading ships on the docks in Marseilles, and then, over fruit crêpes, I let the next link in that particular chain find voice. I said, “I keep thinking you must once have worked with your hands.”

  He furrowed his brow and tilted his head slightly. “Such as?”

  A tiny-toothed panic began nibbling in my head—Alain’s face could simply be registering puzzlement, but I was afraid he was somehow offended. Still, I plunged ahead. “Oh, like, a stevedore or something.”

  “No, nothing like that at all,” he said and though he was not smiling at the suggestion, his forehead had smoothed out and he seemed okay.

  “I didn’t mean to …”

  One of the hands that started this all came out to the center of the table to reassure me. “It’s all right. I am just curious what made you think this.”

  I nodded at the hand.

  He looked but did not comprehend.

  “Your hands seem very powerful. Like they grew up working at something quite physical,” I said, and then I added, emphatically, “I love your hands.” I said this to prevent a further furrowing of his brow, to make sure there would be no misunderstanding. But this open and direct declaration of regard for a part of his body sucked the air out of me.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But it is strictly genetic, I’m afraid.”

  I put my hand on top of his. “However they came to be like this is fine with me.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment, and he said, “You were wonderful tonight at the auction. You were everything Arthur said you were, and more.”

  “It’s strictly genetic,” I said.

  “However you came to be like this is fine with me,” he said, and we kept straight faces for each other. Then he said, “You don’t mind if I speak a tiny bit of business?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “The deal is completed now.”

  “To buy Nichols & Gray?”

  “Yes. It is what you call a done deal.”

  “Shall we drink to that?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”

  Alain poured out the rest of the Rubicon and we touched glasses.

  “To Bouchard, Nichols & Gray,” I said.

  “Bouchard will be a very distant partner to the business,” he said. “To Nichols & Gray.”

  We touched glasses and drank. There was a hint of something like chocolate in it this time that I hadn’t noticed before. I put down my glass.

  “Amy,” he said, “have you thought about the offer?”

  “For me to stay on?

  “Yes.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think you will accept it? Tonight I saw who is the soul of this business.”

  “Don’t I get a trip to Paris first?”

  “Of course.” Alain put his glass down and reached out and laid his hand on the table, turning his palm up to me. I placed my hand on his, palm to palm. He said, “You know that the auction business will be a very tiny portion of my company. This is good. It’s what makes it possible for us to touch like this.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it also means that occasionally I will be occupied with other things. My heart wants more than anything to be with you in Paris. Tonight. I would, under other circumstances, say to you, Let’s go to the airport this very moment. We will catch a cab in front of the restaurant and go to my city. But instead I have to fly in the morning to the Middle East. I have perhaps two weeks of urgent business having to do with jet planes. So I ask you please to be patient with me. I’ll bring you to Paris at the first opportunity. Do you understand?”

  “I do.” And I did, on a practical level. But I needed something more.

  “My feelings for you,” he said, “are not casual things. You know not so very much about me. I was never a stevedore, I’m afraid. I grew up quite comfortably as the son of a diplomat—I believed I mentioned my father to you—but more relevantly, my paternal grandfather acquired modest wealth in the company he owned and wished someday to pass on to me. It made machine tools, simply, and I went eventually to your Harvard Business School. My grandfather died and I took his machine tool business and I have made it into much more than that and I have made many times more money than he did, or my father, either, of course. I say these things because it is what I do in the world and it is important for me to tell you who I am apart from my hands which you love. Do you understand?”
r />   I could only nod. Whatever more I’d needed, he was doing a good job of providing.

  He said, “I am married and divorced twice. One a French girl, one an Austrian. They are no longer in my life at all. I have no children. If I seem always to be running away from you, it is not because my feelings for you are of no substance.”

  “I understand, Alain.”

  “I want Paris to be perfect for us. Can you wait?”

  “Yes.”

  On the sidewalk, with the chauffeur opening the back door of the black-windowed stretch, Alain and I confronted the unspoken question of exactly how much we would wait on. We hesitated and gave each other the your-place-or-mine look and came up with no answer. I slid into the backseat ahead of Alain and he said to the driver, “Head up-town and if you get to One-hundredth Street go back down again.” Then Alain was in, and the door was closed, and we were invisible to the city, and as the car began to roll, his arms were around me and my two hands were at the back of his head pressing his face into my kiss.

  There was no direction, no rush, to our touching. We kissed and kissed and his mouth was soft and it was pouty and floppy-lipped and his tongue tasted lightly tart and dusty with cherry tones and a hint of chocolate and one of his hands was on the small of my back and one had come around me and was on my shoulder, and eventually the hand on my back vanished for a time, and then it was on the front curve of my shoulder, and then it was on my breast, and I moved my own hand through his hair at the back of his head to tell him it was all right, and he knew things—he knew not to rub or to squeeze but to cup and slightly to lift—and my breast rose with his touch and I took my hands away from him and I slid them between us and I began to unbutton my blouse, and our lips parted and kissed and parted again, and he pulled back to watch me and his eyes were bright from the night streets of the city coming through our dark window and his eyes were full of tenderness, I could see, and my blouse was undone, and I shrugged off the cloth, and my breasts were naked before him and nipple-tight, and he took a deep, appreciative breath, and it occurred to me that he was imagining me holding a lute, and I lifted my arms to him and he came to me and kissed my lips one sweet brief moment and then his face fell to my breasts and his lips were on me and he knew to pluck.

  And so we made do for a long while with our hands and our lips and my breasts. Then, comfortable in our moist ardor, awash in the neon of storefronts passing outside, we paused and held each other. My hands had refrained from touching him in a more private way, and his hands, too, had been content with my naked breasts, holding back from the secrets of my luit, and now, sighing together, letting our breathing slow, we put our hesitation into words. I said, “This is lovely.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Which is why I think …” I hesitated briefly to find just the right way to say it.

  And he took up the thought at once. “We should wait …”

  “Yes. For Paris.”

  “For the opportunity to linger.”

  “Without passage the next morning.”

  “Passage for one.”

  “And we wait for Paris,” I repeated.

  “For Paris,” he said. “Thank you, yes, mon amour, for my Paris.”

  He had just called me his love, I knew, but it was not in the language we primarily shared and so I registered it mostly with my mind, though my mind adored it, and I burrowed deeper against him and he held me more tightly and he touched the intercom button and gave the driver the address of my apartment and we said no more and kissed no more for a long while, we simply held each other, which was just right for now and which was another true thing this man knew about women.

  Then we were before my building and my breasts were covered once more and we kissed one last sweet time and he said, “Till Paris” and I said, “Till Paris.”

  I crossed the sidewalk and passed under the awning, and I’d had a little too much to drink and my head was full of clutter: it’s right that we’re doing this right and I should turn around now for a last good-bye but I can’t see him anyway through the black windows and my lips are tingling and my nipples are too and it’s good and I should turn and wave even if he can’t see me. But I was through the door and the doorman was circling out from behind his desk, and he had his arms full of roses, and I knew who they were from. I turned and the limousine was gone. I turned back and took the roses into my arms and I could see the card and it said “You are a treasure. Alain.”

  “A package came for you also,” the doorman said—Wayne the doorman, old enough to be my father, with a weathered face, and at that moment, with these roses in my arms, I liked Wayne as I’d never liked him before, and I gave him a very big smile.

  “Could you bring it up, Wayne?”

  “Of course, Ms. Dickerson. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “You’re a dear,” I said, and I went to the elevator, wanting to concentrate entirely on Alain’s roses, three dozen long-stemmed reds. And this I did, going up in the elevator, and elevators were suddenly redeemed for me. The world had turned and I thought again how this was right.

  In my apartment I had to clear the umbrellas out of their stand—a six-gallon Red Wing stoneware butter churn—to have a thing large enough to keep all the roses together. I dropped a couple of aspirin in the water to help the flowers stay fresh—grateful at last for one of my mother’s helpful tips to make my home beautiful just in case. And I had sense enough to put the churn in place to the left of my fireplace before putting in the water and the flowers because the arrangement turned out to be massive and heavy. I was on my knees arranging their faces just so, taking in their scent, recollecting the touch of Alain’s tongue on mine, and the knock at the door startled me. I’d forgotten about the parcel.

  Wayne was full of apologies for the delay, and I stepped aside for him to bring in a rectangular box about yard long. He went away and it sat before my couch and I approached it. I recognized the Nichols & Gray address label. It still did not occur to me what was in it. I took the scissors I’d used to trim the rose stems and I ran it along the tape on the box and I opened the flaps, and there was the lute.

  I pulled back, thinking there must be some mistake. I looked at the label. It was, of course, addressed to me. But this was Alain’s. I put my hands upon its neck and I drew it from the box and held the curve of its belly against my own. I leaned to the box and peeked in. There was no note. Nothing. Just the lute suddenly in my arms. I could not hold it. I laid it carefully on the couch, propping it into the pillows. Its central rose drew me to it. I extended my hand and ran the tip of my finger over the cut-out swirls. But I still assumed this was a mistake.

  I thought to call Alain, to tell him not to worry, someone had mistakenly addressed his lute to me. I moved around the couch and to the phone, and with the night and the roses and now this object having strayed into my possession, I had not noticed the hotly burning 3 on my machine.

  I touched the play button. The first was Missy. I hadn’t spoken with her since she’d taken off to Montauk with Jeff. She said, “I’m sorry this thanks is late, but thanks for taking care of the girls. You’ll be glad to know that the happy marriage has not been restored … I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m saying you’ll think you were right, because Jeff and I still haven’t reconciled, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t just go, Okay, my course is clear … Whatever. I just wanted to say thanks.”

  I should have skipped over Missy here. I didn’t want all these further confused feelings from and for my sister on this night. This was my goddam night and it had been swell and the only should-I-stay-with-it-or-should-I-not question I wanted to think about was over me and this lute. I deleted her message and the next was Alain and my breath caught at the mere sound of his voice.

  “Hello, Amy. I am in Arthur’s office and you and I are about to have dinner in a little Russian place I know, and when you hear this message, we will have kissed some and you will have found the lute. Yes. She is yours. She was alwa
ys intended to be yours. I gave her a long, sweet kiss on the rose and now she is for you.”

  A single, uninflected tone of bafflement blared in my head now—though maybe it was simply the answering machine’s tone signaling the end of the message—and I tried to cut it off. This was a wonderfully sweet and charmingly improvised gesture, a loving thing, a geste d’amour. And now I was hearing Alain’s voice again, in message number three. “The door of the automobile is barely shut,” he said. “I have lost you from my arms and from my sight, but perhaps you already have your arms full of roses. I am so very sorry we are not together all the night long, but we are right to wait just a little. Good night, Amy.”

  The answering machine blared and stopped and its fussy man’s voice said there were no more messages. I turned and faced the roses, and the couch had its back to me, and just out of sight in the pillows was the lute. I circled to stand before her. I angled my head to match her angle as she lounged there like the Naked Maja. This was how I was trying to sense the object—as her, as an icon of womanhood—I could hear Alain ask me the question he asked more than once—Do you understand?—and I stood before the lute and worked on that. And I tried to understand why understanding this was not an immediate and happy thing. I did not play the lute. No one, surely, ever assumed I played the lute. And I saw this clearly as an instrument, as a thing to be played—it was only twenty-five years old, after all, not exactly an object transcendent with age, no matter what auctioneering spin I’d put on it tonight. So what? So this. I knew what I was thinking of. I was thinking of a goddam useless-to-me horse saddle. A beautiful saddle. And that made me mad. Get the hell out of this, Daddy. This lute was nothing like a saddle. It was not just a utilitarian thing, it was an object of beauty, as well. That’s how it was offered. It had meaning in that way for Alain. I could understand that meaning. And it actually seemed a sexy and special thing to me—in my mind, at least—for a man to elaborate his appreciation for women in this lovely, metaphorical way.