Fair Warning

by Robert Olen Butler

  But when Alain tossed his underpants aside and struck a naked my-chest’s-a-barrel-my-arms-are-thick-my-pot-is-minimal pose before me, and given my earlier suspicion based on the alacrity of his disrobing, I was surprised at how ordinary his penis was. Not rare. Not of an ideal size, though neither was he in full readiness and I suppose there was some wiggle room here in my estimation of him. Not that it mattered to me, of course. And he did have extraordinary hands. But what was his rush, then, to be naked? Did he think what he was showing me was not ordinary? And how was it that I came to be in this frame of mind? Was I pondering making a bid on his intimacy? Perhaps.

  He was waiting.

  I felt a fluttering going on—again unpleasantly higher in my body than it was supposed to be—this one all the way up into my throat like incipient nausea. I was tired, I told myself. I’d eaten Algerian things. It wasn’t Alain causing my weirdness. I pressed on. I crossed my arms in front of me and grabbed my dress just below the waist and stripped it up and off, quickly—whatever it was causing this ickiness, I wanted to be done with this moment and then try to make it up to Alain at dawn. I was struck by how nearly naked I’d been to start with. Already there were only my panties left and Alain was breathless and gaping before me, his eyes riveted on my breasts, taking me in, and for all this ardor about my body, he’d been patient, certainly, for this moment over the past weeks, and I liked him for that and I liked him for the ardor, too, though this was more a thought than a feeling. I was still uneasy. And I understood his rush now. It wasn’t about me seeing his body. It was about him watching me. Great. That should make me feel sexy and appreciated, but all I was prompted to do was try to keep my panties on. I turned toward the bed. But Alain stopped me with a word.

  “Please,” he said. I faced him again. “Please,” he said with great tenderness and desire and he nodded at my panties.

  Okay, I said to myself, making my voice sound in my head. Okay, do this thing. It wasn’t so long ago he was making you wet down there and he was making you think about the rest of your life being ahead of you and he was convincing you quite easily that he was an exceptional man. You’re horny and you’re discriminating, okay, but this is going way too fucking far.

  So I thumbed my panties down and the sudden sense of open air on my luit made me thrum a little and Alain was riveted on that part of me, like Cupid in the other room, though there was no sense of secretiveness or innocent naughtiness about it, this was an outright gobbly stare as I stepped out of the panties and dropped them beside me and faced him. I didn’t like his expression at the moment and I glanced at him in the same place on his body and he was fully engaged now and still his penis was ordinary. On the low end of ordinary, actually, and I looked at his hands and they were clenched at his sides.

  “To sleep, perchance to dream,” I said and I turned abruptly away and darted to the bed and I stripped the covers down and slipped in. I lay on my side away from him, hoping not to offend him with the gesture. I wanted him. I’d wanted him for weeks. He’d said nothing, done nothing, to change that, surely. I couldn’t think of a thing. But I put my back to him now and the mattress sagged with his entry and his warmth was nearby and I turned around to him. He was propped up on one arm, facing me, and he was massive, really, in this bed, this close, and he was ready to do this now, I knew, but I kissed him lightly on the lips and said, “Thank you.”

  He nodded and I lay down on my back and he settled in on his back, as well. I’d meant my thanks. I was grateful to him—I liked him—for his not pushing this right now, in spite of his erection. So what the hell was going on? Jet lag was going on. Exhaustion was going on. Only that, I thought, and one breath later I was asleep.

  I sat up abruptly, the covers falling away from my naked breasts. It wasn’t dawn, I knew, but for a moment I didn’t know why that was significant. There was a phlegmy grinding in the room. A man’s snore. I shook my head sharply back and forth and understood I was in Paris, in Alain’s bed, and he was sleeping noisily beside me, preparing for the promise of first light. Across the room, on some piece of antique something-or-other, indistinguishable in the dark, the time crouched in red numerals. 12:11. I’d slept for only about an hour. I felt as queasy and displaced as ever. But I was wide awake.

  I drew back the covers, very gently, and I rose from the bed without altering Alain’s snore by so much as a single snaggle. I could see general shapes around me and I moved beyond the foot of the bed and I paused. My dress was somewhere on the floor, but the air felt nice on my body and I slipped out of the room and into the corridor still naked.

  The silk nap of the runner chilled the soles of my feet and I went softly along without a purpose except to move the air against my body and to put a little distance between me and Alain and perhaps to sit and think things through for a time.

  But I reached his office—the door still open, the lamp on the desk still on—and I stopped. I felt as if he were inside. The true Alain, apart from the limos and the restaurants and the bed down the hall. He’d left the door open and the light on. I realized he’d not expected to come back here with me tonight, but he still could have risen and closed this all off before he went to sleep, or even as we passed by the first time, just as he’d turned off the lights in the living room. He’d left the door open and the light on and I felt a little itchy again to touch him.

  I wasn’t being thick-headed about this. Alain was a sexually-active-teenager’s-worth older than me. His temples were gray. So I was a sucker for the open invitation to enter his den.

  Duh.

  And maybe the confusion of all that, coming here more or less straight from Houston, was what was going on inside me. But that seemed way too simple.

  I stepped into his study and now my nakedness was acute and I felt a little trembling in me, closer to the place it should be. Closer, but no cigar. I was jumpy, too. I didn’t know how to approach this room. There were things around, nice things, furniture things. That’s as far as I wanted to go. I wasn’t going to appraise in the nude. But they were his things. He was a collector. If I wanted, in fact, to know this man better—know him as a man unlike any other—before letting him enter my body, then this was the place to examine.

  I looked around. The desk was massive and functional, though inflected with Deco, and the bookshelves were built-in. But the rest still spoke of collecting—an Empire bureau plat, a tapestry fauteuil—and then my eyes fell on an odd piece, a large walnut linen press opposite the desk. It was probably early eighteenth century, but it had no drawers, only two double-paneled doors and a low, paneled base. It was most likely American and its lines were so simple and its personality so unassuming that I knew it had a special purpose in this room.

  I crossed to it. A small brass key sat in its keyhole and my hand instinctively went to it and touched it, and I paused. This was wrong, of course, to snoop around in his furniture. But he wanted to snoop around inside my body, after all. I could still retreat if things seemed private in here.

  I turned the key and pulled the door and it creaked sharply and I jumped back and I jerked my head to the office door and listened. There was nothing. I even thought I could faintly hear his snoring down the hall. I looked back to the linen press. There were boxes and books in the shadows. I grasped both doors, determined to get this over with. I opened them briskly and the creaking was quieter and they were wide open, and before I looked inside, I turned away and waited, listening to the rest of the apartment. Nothing.

  I stepped forward.

  There were three wide shelves and on the highest was a long row of stamp albums and on the second shelf was a stacking of fancy old tin boxes—chocolate and tobacco and biscuits—and on the bottom shelf were two wide, multidrawered fountain pen cases. These were his collections. His private collections, his intimate collections. I reached out to one of the tins—for Snake Charmer Cigarettes—and took it up and it was heavy. I lifted the lid and turned to the light on the desk and the tin was filled with ancient Rom
an coins in plastic holders.

  I smiled. Collections within collections. He had the heart of a little boy, squirreling away whatever struck his fancy. I closed the lid. A wide-hipped Victorian beauty in a long dress held a snake up to her face and one was wrapped around her neck and another coiled at her feet. I put the box back and went down the row a ways and picked up a Muratti “Young Ladies” Cigarettes tin and a woman in a boater was enjoying a smoke on the lid and I opened her up and inside were Potin Chocolate cards, small turn-of-the-twentieth-century photo inserts of French authors—George Sand, Jules Renard, Victor Hugo, Verlaine—and I nearly laughed out loud. I realized that a moment ago, when I saw him as a boy, I’d half expected to find baseball cards in one of these tins. And this was close enough.

  I closed the tin and put it back and now I felt ready to slip down the hall and into his bed and prepare for the dawn. But I thought of his pens and I crouched and reached to the bottom shelf and pulled open a shallow drawer in one of the cases. It was in my shadow and so I closed the drawer and drew the whole case out. It was heavy, but manageable, and I placed it on the floor beneath the spill of light. I opened the top drawer again.

  His pens were beautiful. There were eight little velvet-padded troughs in the drawer and each had a Parker eyedropper pen—pens of gold and abalone and mother-of-pearl—I still held my appraiser’s instinct in check and I closed the drawer. I opened another and it was full of continental safety pens—Watermans mostly, worked over in Italy and Spain, covered with intricately filigreed rolled gold and Toledo-work—and the next drawer was full of Conklin crescent-filler pens—and the next, Parker Duofolds—and I stopped. I closed the Duofold drawer and didn’t open another. I’d seen enough. And I thought of his sweet attachment to his Waterman onyx Patrician. I wanted to touch him again. I’d go back to bed.

  But as I shifted around to get a grip on the pen case, just enough light fell at just the right spot at just the right moment for my glance to pick up an odd thing. On the inner wall of the linen press, down by the bottom shelf, was an arcing scrape.

  Okay. Not so odd. Now I understood the out-of-place piece of American furniture. It had a hidden compartment beneath the bottom shelf. I thumped back onto the floor to think. The weave of the Aubusson rug was scratchy as hell on my bare butt. That was okay. It was like a hair shirt. I needed to do a little penance—of a preemptive sort—for what I was afraid I was about to do.

  Okay. He had a collection of something or other in there. I should put the pens away and walk out of here.

  But I believed—and he openly professed to believe—that we are what we collect. So either I was going to be just fine with whatever was in there and there was no harm done in snooping, or I was not going to be fine with it and I’d gladly live with the guilt so that I didn’t have to find out something nasty about him the hard way, after I’d given him my body and—yes, it was leading to that—my heart.

  My butt had been uncomfortable enough for long enough. I rose up into a crouch and drew out the other fountain pen case and set it aside. Then I knelt before the linen press and slipped my fingertips under the tiny lip of the shelf and I lifted.

  The shelf went up easily, soundlessly, and there was darkness before me and I thought to turn on other lights in this room, but I was afraid of being found out, especially now. I twisted aside to let the light from the desk spill in, and I peered hard at the darkness, waiting for shapes to emerge.

  There was only empty space, to my eye. I was ready to close the lid and get the hell back to bed, but then I saw something. Barely. It was lying low and flat in the dark. My hands trembled as I reached in. It was a long, wide book. Bound in leather. Okay. Not so bad. Surely there wasn’t a book that could end this thing.

  I didn’t look at it at once. I rose and circled the desk with it in my arms and it was heavy and it was thick and I sat down in Alain’s chair and laid the book before me on the desktop. There was soft leather now, soft as kid gloves, on my butt.

  I looked at the book, and it wasn’t a book at all. It was an album, with heavy black photo pages.

  I made a quick sucking noise and held my breath. Reflex. My hands were on the desktop, palms down, and I pressed hard there, did not want to raise them. But I’d gone far in the past few weeks and I’d come back around to this, and now I willed myself to breathe, to draw the chair closer to the desk, to lift my hands and move them to the album, and I opened the cover.

  The first page had four tipped-in photos. Suddenly a knot unraveled in my chest. Everything was fine. This was a family album. These were his sisters, perhaps. Cousins. Here were four young women, teenagers. Top left was a faintly blurry black-and-white, a lanky girl in a one-piece bathing suit with fluting at the bodice and she had a rope of braided hair hanging over one shoulder. She was standing at the wooded edge of a grassy slope that rolled down to a lake. Lettered neatly in white ink below: Claire Reynard. 23 Juillet 1960. And in French, the words first time beneath this tree. I didn’t get it yet. But I looked at the next picture, a head-and-shoulder candid shot of a freckle-faced girl with a Santa Claus hat. Marcelle ?? vers la fin de Décembre 1960. And below her was a photo of a girl shot from above in fading color and she was sitting in front of a mirror in a bistro and she had a lovely, wide, toothy smile. Solange Lamy 8 mois, 1961.

  And the thing I hadn’t quite let sink in finally did. These were the girls he’d fucked. I opened a batch of pages, about a third of the way in, and a model lounged on the fender of a Citroen DS and she was Yvonne who Alain fucked for about a year from the summer of 1967 to the summer of 1968, and on the next page was a grouping of three Polaroids of three different women and their dates all overlapped with each other and with Yvonne’s, and they were all variously naked—one with her blouse open, lifting her puffy nipples to the camera in what looked like the Tuileries; one naked in side-view with tight, small breasts, bending into a refrigerator and glancing at the camera with a faint look of surprise; another with long, wild hair lying back on a couch with one leg hooked up over the back and she was blowing a kiss to Alain behind the Polaroid. She was aware, it seemed, that he was in the process of remembering her heavily befurred pussy forever.

  I sat back in the chair.

  I didn’t know what I was feeling about all this.

  Jealous? Not exactly. Would Alain have reason to be jealous of the memories I have of my lovers’ hands? He might, of course. Men like to wipe away the past. But not Alain. He preserved the past. Here he was, collecting images of all the women he’d fucked—no, to keep thinking of it as fucking, I was still struggling with something that had to do with me—to fuck is to take the intimacy lightly and throw it off and not give it a place inside you. He obviously was doing much more than that. He was not just collecting images of these women here, he was collecting them.

  Which somehow didn’t make me feel any better.

  I leaned forward and opened the book another batch of pages and another. He was into preserving pussies for quite a few years. And there were some portraits, too, clothed shots—I presumed these were women who’d said no to the pussy-shots. And then I jerked forward. I’d skipped ahead to a page near the end and I was looking at a woman with her blond hair tied up behind her and her breasts naked and her face lifted and the lute in her lap. Sybil Harlowe. 1995. And I turned another few pages at once and now there was a redhead, as wide-hipped and well-fed as Venus herself, and she was Colleen and she was the month of May in 1997 and her left hand was curved delicately around the neck of the lute and her right hand was about to pluck a string near the rose, and I closed the album.

  I suppose it’s inevitable that an auctioneer comes to divide the world into collectors and noncollectors. But it is a true principle of my trade, as well, I think—especially in Paris, whose cafes gave succor to the notion that we create ourselves in our choices, our actions—it is true of an auctioneer in Paris to think that we all either collect or we are collected. Alain would ask me, one day, to pose for a special rememb
rance—something to carry off to Cairo with him, he’d say, to meditate on through the long nights at the Semiramis Inter-Continental. Please, he’d say, shrug off your clothes and take up the lute and lift your eyes to heaven. Let me take your picture. And if I’d given my body and my heart I could only say yes. And that’s who Amy Dickerson would be.

  So I rose now and I took up the album and I went to the linen press and I laid the book in the shadows. I closed the hidden compartment and placed the pen cases back on the shelf and I closed the doors and turned the key.

  Then I slipped quietly, calmly, down the hall and found my panties and my dress and my shoes and my purse in the dark, even as Alain slept on, dreaming, perhaps, of all his women, and I covered my body and I went down the corridor and into his office one last time.

  I sat at his desk and took out the Nichols & Gray agreements and I dug into my purse and I found a Bic Clic Stic made of smooth-molded plastic and containing 1.2 miles of ink, estimated value eighty-nine cents. And I clicked my Bic and signed the contracts and I took a piece of memo paper from a container on the desk and I wrote: Alain, I will be much more valuable to you if I strictly remain the star of one of your properties. I hesitated at “star,” but in my world, that is, in fact, what I am, and I left it. I wrote, I will enjoy owning a piece of you. And I signed Amy Dickerson and squared up the contracts and the memo in the center of the desk, and I rose and I stepped out into the corridor. Down the way Alain was snoring on, and I turned and moved to the living room.

  And I was struck motionless: the place was bright with the luminosity of Paris. I crossed the room, heading for the light and for what I’d sensed, but not seen, when I first came in. I slowed and stopped, and the tops of the plane trees were before me and below were the Haussmann streetlamps and the wall of the quai. And beyond was the thing I’d somehow missed for the thirty-some-odd hours I’d been in this city: the river. She was the wet, strong, independent center of Paris, and there was silence in my head at last and a sudden, quirky sense of purpose.