I realized that another part of my discomfort was the thought that the lute had come here to challenge me. I sat beside her. Alain did not intend it, I knew. But was she asking me to do something? Be something? Was I to learn to play the lute? No. She was simply an object, a lovely object, and I took the lute up by its throat and stood and I looked around my living room to find a place for it. Nothing came to mind. I could move this lamp, that vase, I could lean it against a wall, I could try to find a way to hang it—perhaps a thin, almost invisible cord around its neck—and this shouldn’t have been so difficult either, finding a place for this thing. My apartment had plenty of air in it, plenty of available spaces for another object, and I was eclectic in my tastes. This would fit in quite beautifully, really, and I looked at the fireplace.
The roses were on one side. I stepped forward and moved the stand of fireplace implements around to the other side and I leaned the lute there. That was fine. I stepped back. I was missing Alain, I realized. I wanted him here, before this fireplace, on this couch, in my arms. Perhaps I resented the lute for his absence. Not really. It was fine where it was. It was beautiful. And she was a pear-shaped girl, somebody’s older sister, wide in the hips. No threat at all. I was somebody’s older sister. But I was still thin. And Alain Bouchard was clearly smitten. And I was a little bit drunk, I knew. And a little bit bummed out about not being with Alain. About waiting. About Daddy, too. I didn’t like him intruding here, which he’d already done. And I didn’t like all his stuff hanging over me, unsold. I’d push that along. Arthur had already put our logistics people on the task of setting up the place in Houston for me, running the estate sale ads. Arthur was sweet. I hoped he was with a nice man tonight.
I sat down on the couch and I knew it was time to sleep. I’d start right here, right on this comfy couch, and then move to the bed sometime in the night. I could do this any damn way I wanted because I was alone. I stretched out and looked over to the lute. I blew her a kiss good night.
I wanted to be in Paris. But I had to go to Houston. Ten days and two calls from the Middle East later I was in my father’s house once more, a house I was there to wrench from his dead hands at last. The calls were brief and I was glad to get them, too glad by far, I suppose. But why too glad? Alain said, “Amy I’m calling from Dubai.” And, “Amy I’m calling from Cairo.” He said, “I miss you very much.” And, “I can’t wait till I see you.” He said, “I must go now.” And, “Tell me you are thinking of me.” “I’m thinking of you,” I said. And, “I touch the places you touched.” At this, spoken to him in Egypt, he sighed a sigh I could hear even over the transatlantic static and over a sound in the background like a jet engine.
In Houston there would be no calls. I told him I would go and do this thing in a city that was foreign to me now and he told me it would not be long before he was in the city that was his home and he would phone me when I returned to New York and after that we would be together.
Mama greeted me on the porch when I arrived, and right behind her were Molly and Maggie and then Missy, too. I hadn’t expected them. I was glad I’d gone up to the porch without my bag because instantly I lied that I’d booked a hotel room this time and I left them all standing there as if they’d been expecting something from me, though none of us could quite figure out what it was.
I came back that evening. The girls were in bed. Mama and Missy were sitting in the parlor. Daddy’s portrait was propped up with a lot-tag on it in a ballroom at a chain hotel near the Galleria, and over the fireplace was its ghost—a vast, clean, eggshell-white rectangle showing us how dingy the walls had grown all around. The pony-skin chair was gone. Everything of his gone. The door to his den was standing open and I could see the empty space, the empty bookshelves. Arthur’s local-hire Lifters and Movers had done this drastically symbolic thing while I was far away and unaware.
Mama was on her settee and I sat down on the overstuffed couch at the opposite end from Missy. We sat in silence for a time, as if I’d interrupted something private between them and they had no energy to fake some other conversation.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off where Daddy’s image had hung.
“So it’s all gone,” I said.
Mama raised her face to the empty space, as well.
“I still don’t think it’s right,” Missy said in a wee voice and Mama and I simultaneously shot her a hard glance.
She looked at Mama and then at me and she veiled her eyes. She seemed very young. “I miss him,” she said. “If you don’t, that’s your thing. I do. I’m not ready to auction him off.”
Nobody said anything for a long while.
Then Mama cocked her head at the empty space. “It’s not all gone,” she said. “Not till it’s sold or dumped.”
Which wasn’t what I expected of her. I figured after that long pause, given time to reflect on her baby’s dissolving marriage, on the repudiation of her own choices that a divorce would represent, on her commitment to Texan family values enduring forever, she’d tone all this down a bit for Missy’s sake.
Missy rose abruptly and went out of the room.
Mama looked at me. “I don’t have the strength for this anymore.”
“Good,” I said. “I think that’s good.”
She looked sharply away as if I’d just rebuked her.
“I mean it, Mama. It’s time you stopped arguing with him and worrying about us. It’s time for yourself.”
She fluttered her hand at me to end the conversation.
I got up and followed Missy.
As I entered the staircase hall, the front door clicked shut. I went to the door and hesitated a moment, but then I followed my sister.
She was standing on the porch, surveying the yard.
I stood beside her. Out in the dark, in the direction of our pin oaks, a mockingbird was singing like one bird after another that it wasn’t.
“You didn’t come down because of the auction, did you?” I asked.
“What do you think? I don’t like this.”
“She’s not trying to take Daddy away from you.”
“Who knows what she’s trying to do? She’d have me keep Jeff while she’s selling Daddy off? Do you really think you understand her?”
I could tell her Mama was having a change of life. I could tell her the way to reconcile Mama’s advice was for her to sell off Jeff and Daddy both, that Mama was probably going to come around to that point of view herself eventually. But I said nothing.
The mockingbird did the ricochet call of a cardinal. And again. And then the sweet, watery trill that blue jays sometimes do and it surprises the hell out of you because you think they’re just mean squawkers. And the blue jay one more time, a little slower, in a lower pitch. I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be hearing the mockingbird’s voices as an identity crisis. Maybe he was a collector.
“You know, she told me about Daddy’s running around,” Missy said.
“You heard it before me.”
“I still love him,” she said.
“I do too,” I said.
We both scowled into the dark for a few moments, not having intended that little declaration. For me, at least, it made things sound too simple. Surely it was too simple for her, too.
I looked at Missy. We each of us had an old steamer trunk stuck away in some corner of our head and inside were all the bits and pieces we kept of him. Him and me moving together in an exhibition hall, sizing up cattle; us standing at attention for the moon landing, his hand on the top of my head; me laying the back of my hand against his leg with us looking out from our fence line. Missy had whatever—some moment on his lap, an aren’t-you-beautiful twinkle in his eye, a well-timed kootchy-koo—she had a thousand of those.
Then she said, “I can’t believe you’re so anxious to sell off all his stuff.”
“That’s Mama’s call.”
“You’re only too ready to do it.”
“She’d let you take anything you want, if you asked her.”
“If she doesn’t want it and you don’t really care to have it, what is your point?”
“Oh, come on, Amy. You know more than anyone that stuff isn’t just stuff. It’s him, isn’t it? Isn’t that what we’re doing here? Getting rid of him?”
She was right, of course. That’s what we were doing and I knew it. I’d just played dumb with her about this—why? To antagonize her. To make her say it for herself. Why was I such a shit to my own sister when I wouldn’t be to anyone else?
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know why we’re always at each other’s throat over something. I’m sorry for that, for my part in that.”
She didn’t say anything. Not, I’m sorry for my part. Not, I forgive you. She just kept her mouth shut, though she sagged a little bit, leaned against a porch pillar. It was all right. I wasn’t expecting anything back, which made me realize I really was sorry.
There was a rustle and a faint tracking of wings and then silence. The mockingbird had flown away. I looked into the dark, beyond the yard, down the street a ways, from one lit porch to the next. On the other side and a couple of houses down, I recognized, even in the dark, a curved portico, tapered columns.
I said, “Do you remember the … what was their family name? Clayton, I think. The Claytons down there? I sold you to the daughter. Wendy, it was. Wendy Clayton. I held a play auction and she wanted a little sister and I sold you to her.”
I looked at Missy. She was still leaning against the pillar but had turned her face to me and had narrowed her eyes.
“You don’t remember this,” I said.
“No. You sold me?”
“You were three.”
“Are you sorry for that, too?”
This wasn’t going all that well. I looked back to the street. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry I sold you.”
“I don’t remember growing up down there.”
“The deal didn’t go through.”
“Ah,” Missy said, like that explained everything.
“I thought I’d told you this before,” I said.
“Was it buyer’s regret?”
I looked at her.
“That the deal didn’t go through,” she said.
“No. Wendy was happy enough.”
“It wasn’t seller’s regret.” Missy said this matter-of-factly.
“I was seven,” I said.
Missy nodded. We fell silent for a while, and her mind clearly tracked far away, because she finally said, “I can’t reinvent myself just like that. I bought into the family stuff big time. There’s no diversity in my portfolio.”
This last was a sneer. I didn’t like to think how Jeff might have used that stupid line on her in the last few days.
“I understand,” I said.
“No you don’t. You don’t understand. I’ve got a B.A. in English and my last job was organizing our Tri-Delt ‘Hearts for the Arts’ Valentine ball my junior year. What are my options?”
I almost said, Alimony and child support. But I didn’t. I understood her point.
“And you know what gets me?” she said. “Mama trying to have it both ways. For me it’s, Think of the girls and keep the family together. Fine. For her it’s, Auction every last thing off so Mama can go on. Fine. But she can get rid of Daddy because she has all his money.”
“And no kids,” I said.
“And no kids. We’re not kids.”
“No.”
“But I feel like one,” Missy said. “I feel as helpless as the toddler you sold down the river.”
“Down the street.”
“Maybe you’re both right. Maybe I’ve got to let him go too. He gave you the career. He gave me jack shit.”
My first, very superficial, reaction to this was to think, No, Missy, you’re wrong, he hated my career. But that didn’t last long. She was right. He’d always taken me seriously, Daddy. He’d made me keep up, pay attention. He treated me like a Texas son. He made it possible for me to do what I did.
I turned around to face Missy. In spite of the anger at Daddy, there seemed to be no real fight in her. Her head lolled sideways against the pillar. She was right about me, I thought, but wrong about herself.
I said, “But he gave you all the love.”
“Was that what it was?” she said and she didn’t lift her head and she didn’t look at me and her voice was so faint and seemed so full of something dark that my limbs went suddenly leaden and I had to work to hold myself up.
“Missy,” I said and I put my hand on her arm, and my panic and my saying her name and my touching her all went before the first conscious shaping of an image of Missy on his lap—a thing I’d seen a thousand times—and now I wouldn’t let myself see his hands.
Missy picked up on my state and turned her face to me and she looked at me closely and knew at once what I was thinking. “No,” she said emphatically. “No, I didn’t mean that.” She squared around and took my two hands in hers. “Are you thinking that Daddy … ? God no, Amy. He never did anything wrong like that. I swear.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” Her eyes held steadily on mine. She was focused and she was calm, in spite of this thing I’d raised. My panic dissolved and I squeezed her hands tightly.
“Okay. I’m sorry,” I said.
“Jesus, Amy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I just meant … he loved me, yes, he made over me a lot, but what did I get from all that? Stunted growth. I never wanted to stop being his little Missy girl.”
We realized now that we were still holding hands and we let go.
Missy shuddered. “I can’t believe you thought that, even for a moment.”
I had no answer. I looked out into the night, thinking how it was true, I was ready to believe that of Daddy. Instantly. And the corollary was that I was ready to believe Missy, instantly, in such a charge against him. She was my sister.
I love my job. I am the maker of crucial connections. Between the passion in a heart for an object outside it and the object itself. Between the self and its defining act of acquiring a certain thing of this world. And in that transaction, my own passion flows both ways—through the object desired and through the one who desires it. I become part of both. I value and I am valued. I collect and I am collected.
But I did not love my job the next day. I was in a hotel ballroom with garish glass chandeliers and soda-cracker-white walls and filled with the ghosts of sales-rep conventions and junior-league banquets. Rows and rows of padded metal-stack chairs were arrayed before me and scattered about on them was a wildly mixed lot of absolute strangers. And all around the vast room were Daddy’s things.
And I sold them. Mama was not there and Missy was not there. I was alone, and I told myself I was just an auctioneer, that’s all. We had antiques dealers in attendance who knew the value of some things and were interested only in getting them at a fraction of that value, and we had civilians who actually wanted some things, though mostly casually, as long as it was a bargain. But that was okay. It didn’t make any difference. Mama had said to me the night before, Honey just do the best you can but I don’t really care how much money comes out of all this, just sell it all off, make sure not one bit of it comes back to me.
So I sold his quarter-repeater pocket watch for eight hundred dollars and his naked-breasted pre-Columbian woman for six hundred and his Calvinist King James for four hundred and on and on. These weren’t great prices but it was the best I could do. I sold them. A hundred lots. More. I moved them out. All of them. The dealers got their keystones and better. The civilians got their bargains. And then his portrait came up.
The two hotel guys who’d been working the floor carried it forward and leaned it against the lot table to my left, angled slightly toward me, and they stepped away.
It was just Daddy and me, face to face for the last time. I was struck by how large th
is thing was. And by how it was him.
“Lot number one hundred twelve,” I said. “Portrait of … a Texan. By Jonah Gaunt.” I turned to the faces in the chairs. There were sixty or seventy scattered around. There’d been a great deal of coming and going. I’d long ago stopped trying to read these faces. I just looked for the numbered cards going up. Daddy was staring out at them, too, and maybe Mama was right, he was looking at us all with the twinkle of adultery in his eyes, but I didn’t care about that at the moment. The point was, this was Daddy, whatever he was. It was Daddy and he was facing a room full of strangers and I had to make one of them love him.
No. The image of him, I reminded myself. It was simply the image of him they had to love. Get a goddam grip, Amy.
The estimate I’d put on him was four thousand dollars. All the estimates had proved to be high. I didn’t know where to begin.
I stole a glance in his direction.
And I asked what the passion was in my own heart.
It was to sell.
I confronted this raggedy band of mostly ignorant, tight-fisted buyers and I said, “Who’ll start with one thousand dollars?”
No one.
I said, “Some of you surely know the name of Jonah Gaunt, and if you don’t, then that’s the reason you should bid now. The man will someday take his place with Richard Estes and Chuck Close as one of the important photorealists of the twentieth century. He worked with them. He partied with them. He saw the world the way they saw it. And you can see his expert hand here in this Texan. One thousand?”
Again, nothing.
Suddenly I felt bad for him.
I turned to him. I said, “You can look into his eyes and expect him to speak. And he’ll know you. Here’s a man who will know your passion for hard work and open spaces and the old-time virtues and the two-step and Lone Star Beer.” And I was suddenly popping little flares of him—Daddy on the dark porch drinking a beer and me sitting very still nearby, listening to the night, and he nudged me and offered me a sip and I took it, and it tasted like pee, I said, and he jerked the bottle back; Daddy Texas-two-stepping with Mama at Gilley’s—maybe it was Gilley’s, maybe somewhere else—but I was watching them dance while keeping an eye on Missy and we were kids, and then she and I finally did a little walk-around ourselves, two-stepping around the table, me being Daddy and Missy being Mama.
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