And Daddy was pretty hard to face like this, me flashing on a dead past while standing before these passionless strangers, these dilettantes, these garage-sale whalers, and I forced my selling words away from the concrete things—the collectibles—and back to the abstractions. “And he knows your taste for taking risks and getting ahead and being your own man and it’s all in this face as real as your own best pal.”
And through this all, I was fixed on Daddy’s face, I was looking him in the eyes, staring down his twinkle, and I was saying too much, I knew, and it didn’t mean anything anyway to these people. I dragged myself away from him and back to the metal-stack chairs and I said, “So who’ll start the bidding for a thousand dollars?”
No one.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we’re expecting too much of him.”
Maybe we were. Especially now that he was gone.
“Who’ll start for a hundred dollars?”
No one.
I understood. I felt the same thing. He was enormous. But he was a stranger.
Then a hand went up in the back row of chairs. I could see only the hand and it had no bidding number.
“All right,” I said. “You’re without a bid number, but you can get that after the fact. To the person in the back row, a hundred dollars.”
And with her hand still raised, Missy peeked around from behind the man in front of her.
I found myself relieved. “Fair warning,” I said at once. And then, “Sold. To the woman in the back row for one hundred dollars.”
There were half a dozen boxes of books, a couple of shotguns left. I sold them quickly and the buyers scattered just as quickly and I came down from the podium and Missy was still sitting in the back.
I approached her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
I was beside her. She stayed seated and her face was turned up to me.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, though I would have had no clear answer if she’d demanded I tell her for what.
But she didn’t. She said, “Me too,” and lowered her face.
I looked at the top of her head. The white track of her part, the fall of her hair with the tips of her ears poking through—I was filled with a sudden tenderness for my little sister.
I didn’t know what to do about it, so I just kept talking.
“What are you going to do with it?” I said.
“It’s canvas, isn’t it?” she said, keeping her face down.
“Yes.”
“I’ll roll it. Put it away somewhere.”
We fell silent and did not move. My pulse thumped softly in my ears. I closed my eyes and my head was empty and I opened my eyes again.
“I’m leaving Jeff,” Missy said.
“Whatever I can do,” I said.
“Thanks.”
And still she kept her face down, my little sister. So I lifted my hand and laid it gently on the top of her head. Then, after a moment, her own hand came up and touched mine.
A week later I was sleepless on Air France Flight 9. I wedged the pillow against the window, the Atlantic Ocean dark beneath me and the night sky all around, and I closed my eyes and I opened them again. My head was full of jet hum. I wasn’t sleeping, but my mind had lost its focus. I noticed the end of my boarding pass peeking from the seat pocket and something moved me to stretch to it and pluck it out. Then I bent to the briefcase at my feet and I slipped the boarding pass in. My face grew tight from the angle forward and maybe that was my brain juicing up again because I grew suddenly conscious of this gesture. My habit as a flier was always to abandon my boarding pass in the seat pocket, but I was saving this one, I realized. Air France, JFK to Charles De Gaulle. A. Dickerson. She flies to make love to A. Bouchard for the first time. She flies to the rest of her life. The boarding pass was a collectible. As was the moment of touching Missy’s head. The touch of her hand in return. My phantom book-bid in East Hampton and dinner at Fellini’s. Lamplight in a Manhattan street and the brownstones in the shadows. A Dalí Mary and child. Max’s hands, and Fred’s. My nipples rising to Alain’s touch. A terra-cotta lion. The sweet silence of my office stuffed with reference books. Molly leaping into my arms and clinging. Maggie’s conspiratorial wink. Two hundred and sixty thousand dollars for a mediocre Renoir. Mama setting her mouth hard at Daddy’s painting, her eyes filling with tears. The painting itself, however, was sold off from the collection that is Amy Dickerson. Traded, actually, for that moment with my sister.
And inside my briefcase, the boarding pass was pressed against the folder that held my job offer, and the offer, as well, of a piece of Alain’s company. I’d still not signed, though it occurred to me to do that now. I thought how I’d gain two things at once, one inside the other, like buying a beautiful Victorian fall-front desk only to find a hidden drawer within, holding an extra treasure. Holding what? I burrowed into the pillow, closed my eyes. A jewel, say. A desk and a jewel. My career and a piece of this lovely man’s career. Something like that. But this whole metaphor was starting to cloy at me and I let it go. Though I was still overheated, thinking, I’ll sign it with him beside me. I remembered his handwriting on the envelope he’d left on my desk, the flexible fountain pen nib he’d used. I would use his own vintage pen and I’d sign it on the bed while he lay naked beside me. For now, though, I simply wanted to sleep.
But I didn’t.
My brain hummed on with the Rolls-Royce engines out on the wing and I thought about connoisseurs, those dear people who obsessed around in the center of my life. About how much they knew of the things they wanted. How much I ended up knowing in response to them. And how obsessed I myself was, as a result. Those engines out there in the dark, for example. I was sleepless and flying to my lover-to-be and what was most important was my momentum up here over the ocean, how I was being flung into my future. But instead, my—what?—this was an odd feeling now—my sense of engagement with the world, my confidence and my ease, my very sense of self—all these seemed somehow to reside in my knowing the names of these engines. The captain had mentioned their names, and I realized if I knew the type and the substance of their turbine blades, if I knew their horsepower and their thrust rating, I’d add all that to my experience of them at this moment and I’d be even more settled here and content and confident in the future. In short, I’d know them in the way of a connoisseur.
But I opened my eyes. The cabin was dim. Strangers were all around me, sleeping. I closed my eyes again. A chill came from the window. My mind would not hold still. I understood something of connoisseurs. I was one of them. Even just knowing the engines out there in the dark were made by Rolls-Royce, simply that, for all the self-assurance it gave me, it also held me at a distance from them, kept me apart from what they were most essentially giving me. The way I doted on the world—to name it, find its value—I tried to put it off for a moment. So I could sleep. Surely sleep was the opposite of naming and assessing. It was a letting go. Drift. Somewhere else. The look in Daddy’s eye. The banging of the gavel to buy myself—just the sound in that moment of self-possession—the popping of the tent in the breeze. All the connoisseurs I knew lived at a distance. In some crucial way they lost touch with the very things they loved, even as they knew more and more about them. These were the thoughts humming behind my closed eyes. Somebody said—a Frenchman, in fact, I think—that truly to see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. I wished now to forget.
Which is also to sleep.
But I did not sleep at all the night and morning I went to Paris.
It was well past one in the afternoon when I finally emerged from customs into the shoal of placards and hopeful faces of the arrival hall at Charles De Gaulle. I was wheeling a suitcase and a Rollaboard behind me and I was dazed, and then I saw Alain, standing back from the crowd and solitary as a monument, and I realized I’d never seen him any way but this, in a perfectly tailored dark suit and white shirt and tie—this one was a deep burgundy—and he saw me and smiled a
nd his hands opened at his sides and turned their palms to me. I understood this was the moment I was to run to him—I sensed his gesture was asking for that—but I was tired and I was pulling luggage, and I stopped. Alain picked up on it at once. Without turning to look, he raised one hand and made a gesture to someone behind him. Instantly a chauffeur appeared and cut a wide berth around Alain and came to me, murmuring a request in French to take my bags. I let them go to him, and Alain was still standing, smiling, and I was free to run.
I walked. Which was just fine. He took the last few steps toward me and I was in his arms. “I missed you very much,” he said.
“Me too,” I said and I lifted my face to him and he kissed me, but discreetly, on each cheek. I realized that in light of this simple bussing, even our embrace could be interpreted as platonic—we were not touching at the crotch, though I was limp enough in his arms that this was clearly his choice.
And he read my mind. He whispered, “Later, my darling, you will have my fullest feelings. I’m known in public.”
“Of course,” I said.
Then he took my arm at the elbow and he guided me outside and into a Mercedes stretch, guarded by a gendarme who tipped his hat first to me and then to Alain, and we were inside the darkened windows, and now we kissed, deep and long and, I’m afraid, for my part, tongue-tired. We ended the kiss and I tried to read his mind.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very weary. I didn’t sleep at all on the plane.”
“Of course,” he said, scooping me closer to him. I laid my head on his chest. “Rest now,” he said. “I’ll take you to the hotel and you should sleep until dinner tomorrow, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
I even slept, at last, curled against him. Then he was gently stroking me awake, touching my hair, my cheek, drawing his fingertip across my lips.
And so I found myself at the Ritz. The door clicked shut behind the bellman and I stood in the center of the floor of my room and my head began to buzz in recognition. Louis XVI all around. The furniture dazzled with marquetry and sinuous lines and cabriole legs and borders of laurel and acanthus leaves and lyres and swans, and there was a touch of the provinces, as well, a chair whose cabriole ended in a goat’s foot, a commode of solid walnut. I was trying not to see all of this in my reflexive way, but it was difficult. Alain was thoughtful and generous and oh so apt in his choice of a place for me in Paris, but it was suddenly giving me a headache. So I stripped and slid into the bed and I was gone for a long while, rising finally to pee and it was dark and then I couldn’t go back to sleep. It was past midnight, so I ate a room-service salad and some pâté and I stared at CNN for long while, trying to bore myself back to sleep, which finally happened somewhere along there in the early morning, and when I woke again, the telephone was ringing.
I reached to the phone and made a sleep-laden grunt and it was Alain’s voice. “I woke you.”
“Not quite yet,” I said.
“Should I call back?”
“No. I’m coming around even as we speak.”
“Are you naked, my darling?” he asked.
My mind was still a little slow and I thought about this for a moment and then my head rolled to the side to see. In my stretching to the phone I found my breasts were indeed naked and the rest was, no doubt, as well, and instinctively I pulled the sheet up to cover me. “I seem to be,” I said.
“In two hours time I will come to you, and we have two options. You can remain naked and we’ll order room service. Or I have reservations at a fine little Algerian restaurant.”
“Which meal would that be?” I asked.
“Why, dinner of course. You’ve followed my suggestion—the best thing for a sleepless flight and jet lag, and months of too much hard work also, I suspect. It’s five in the afternoon of the next day.”
I made a whoa-there-cowboy face into the empty room. I’d been riding the range pretty hard in the past weeks—the past years, to tell the truth—but that seemed like a pathological lot of sleep. “I need to land on the planet before taking off again,” I said. “Algerian first, naked later.”
“Very well,” he said, gently, but with a faint dip of disappointment in his voice. “Should I arrange another wake-up call?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Which I wasn’t, quite. I slept an hour and a quarter more and then had to race around to be ready for Alain, telling myself all the while that this awkward, displaced thing I was feeling was to be expected, considering. Mama and Missy and Daddy’s stuff. An international flight and no sleep. Half a dozen time zones. A very strange few weeks. And imminent intimacy at last with Alain.
But the strangeness persisted. I was conscious of myself, throwing on a sweet little black shift with fringe at the bottom. It struck me that I never really thought about clothes. I dressed off-the-rack—mostly Armani and Prada—and my instincts were good but somewhat perfunctory. I probably should look at clothes the way I do all the other objects of the world. But I never have. Clothes turn into a kind of second skin. The clothes you wear have rarely had a life apart from you. What interests me is all the stuff we acquire that’s been part of the lives of others before us. Stuff you’ve got to keep seeking out, even once you own it, you’ve got to go over to it and touch it or hold it or stare at it, stuff that doesn’t just walk around with you, stuff you’ve got to find a place to keep and you have to walk away from it and then return to it. I’m interested in the choices we make about stuff like that. Auctionable stuff. Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat, maybe. Marilyn Monroe’s party dress. Ella Fitzgerald’s shoe. That’s clothing of interest to me, if it’s your heart’s desire to own it and you buy it to keep apart from you. But the stuff I put on my body—I don’t know. I want to be pretty, of course. But dressed now with no conscious planning, I stood in the center of my room at the Ritz, and Alain was waiting downstairs, and I thought, I am pretty. Or not. Whichever, he wanted me and I wanted him. I looked at my hands. I would touch him and we would be naked, no clothes, no objects, either, but hands and legs and arms and tongues and a thing or two to fit together.
I shook my head to clear it.
After all the sleep I felt as muddled as I was on the plane. Had the uproar of these past weeks turned me slightly, permanently, mad?
Alain was waiting. Paris was waiting. I was waiting.
So I moved to the door, caught myself, and returned to my briefcase on a tulipwood marquetry table by the window. I took the agreements from the Groupe Bouchard S.A. packet, folded them neatly, and put them in my purse. I crossed the room again and went out and down the hall and down the elevator and along the Persian rug edged in imperial-purple and through the revolving door and into the vast brick expanse of the Place Vendôme with its great arc of hip-roofs and pilasters.
The Mercedes was there. The chauffeur was standing at the back and recognized me at once and opened the door. I moved forward, not knowing if Alain was inside or not until his hand appeared, white cuffed, but the rest of him made invisible by the shadows and my angle of approach. His hand floated there palm up, inviting me, as if only it had come to take me to dinner.
And so we kissed our way into the nineteenth arrondissement. Some trivial talk, as well, after kissing and before kissing—Cairo was hot and Houston was hot and his business went well and my auction went well and we missed each other and we both understood about the awkwardness of phones and so it was all right how few times we spoke by phone while we were apart—but mostly we kissed, and there were fleeting glimpses of Paris out the car window, but no flashes of recognition, mostly plane trees and horse chestnuts and building facades, clearly Paris, but far away and flitting past.
Then we sat, Alain and I, in a restaurant and we ate and drank, and this was very familiar suddenly, Alain and I across a table, speaking of food and wine, naming these things. The place was small and full of cigarette smoke that drifted to us and hung around the candle on our table and swarthy men slouched together at the small ba
r and Alain explained the cuisine, not Algerian in the strictest sense but pied-noir, from the French who’d been born in North Africa and grew up there and then were exiled, and their food was a mix of French and Arab and Spanish and Italian and Jewish. The waiter brought a brass mortar and pestle and set it in the center of the table—to collect the bones and the skin and the gristle of the meal, Alain said—and we drank pastis in tall glasses with ice and water and then we ate a platter of hor d’oeuvres—olives and carrots and fennel and chickpeas and artichokes in lemon juice and chilled sardines fried in garlic and pepper and cumin and cloves and paprika and vinegar. The sardines were called scabech. The whole platter was amuse-gueule—it means “make your face happy,” Alain said. And if these pieds-noirs were cooked with more of an Italian touch or a Jewish touch, then the platter would also have taiba, chilled tuna with chilies and tomatoes, he said. But these pieds-noirs didn’t.
“Is your face happy?” he asked me as the waiter whisked away the empty platter and I demurely slipped a sardine bone into the mortar.
“Yes,” I said. The truth was, I felt oddly restless. I figured I’d made the wrong choice. Perhaps naked and room service would have been better. Though I wasn’t quite sure why.
“Pied-noir. Do you know what that is?”
“No. Black feet?”
“Literally, yes. In the early nineteenth century, we took our North African colonies and our soldiers wore black boots. The Arabs were all barefoot and these boots struck them as very strange when our soldiers marched in and they called out, ‘Pieds-noirs!’ So you see?”
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