Fair Warning
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Praise for Fair Warning:
“[Fair Warning is] often brilliant, [a] meditation on love and possession.… Butler wins us over in the opening pages with this companionable, warts-and-all narrator.… Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility.”
—Todd Kilman, The Washington Post
“Fair Warning is a strange and finally beautiful tale about obsession and modern love.”
—Beth Kephart, The Baltimore Sun
“Robert Olen Butler is one of the stars of the literary firmament.… He is the sexiest living prose stylist, a master of first-person narrative who has a bold talent for getting into the heads of women, as he does in this novel.… Butler is a serious literary fictioneer.”
—Donald Harington, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“Smart variations on the life of a single woman in New York … Pulitzer Prize–winning Butler has created one of the more fascinating female protagonists in recent history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Butler does well with the emotions attendant to what is essentially a love story, never mistaking sentimentality for sentiment, and the world of high-stakes auctioneering is a rich and captivating backdrop.”
—Les Standiford, The Miami Herald
“Incisively frank and permeated with chilly wit … A clever and provocative narrative about a society obsessed with the trappings of money and prestige.”
—Publishers Weekly
“How innovative to create in a novel a smart, erotic, emotional woman taking control of her life without any ironic sigh or depressed acceptance of her independence.”
—Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor
“Amy’s hands-on appraisal of an expensive Frenchman and her tiny attempts at becoming human are diverting. Spending time in Butler’s affluent New York is like curling up with the first chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
—The New Yorker
“[Fair Warning] questions what it means to spend a life in pursuit of only the best.… [A] sly, elegant novel.”
—Sherryl Connelly, The Daily News (New York)
“[Butler] transcends the formula with his usual aptitude for finding exactly the right words to make the familiar patterns of love and desire seem fresh again. An excellent introduction to readers unfamiliar with Butler’s work; highly recommended.”
—Marc Kloszewski, Library Journal
Fair Warning
ALSO BY ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
The Alleys of Eden
Sun Dogs
Countrymen of Bones
On Distant Ground
Wabash
The Deuce
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
They Whisper
Tabloid Dreams
The Deep Green Sea
Mr. Spaceman
Fair Warning
a novel
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Olen Butler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Butler, Robert Olen.
Fair warning : a novel / Robert Olen Butler.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4618-3
1. Auctioneers—Fiction. 2. Art—Collectors and collecting—Fiction. 3. Americans—France—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.U8278 F35 2002
813′.54—dc21 2001022523
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
For Elizabeth Dewberry,
my wife and best friend
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks is owed to a number of people who made this book possible. First to Francis Ford Coppola for hiring me to pursue his idea of creating a story around a female auctioneer. And to Sharon Stone for inspiring Francis. To Adrienne Brodeur, a remarkable editor who richly deserves the honors that have come to Zoetrope: All Story, where Fair Warning first appeared in story form. To my splendid agents, Kim Witherspoon in New York and Michael Siegel and Priscilla Cohen in L.A. And, of course, to Morgan Entrekin for his brilliant editorial guidance, and to all the other folks at Grove/Atlantic, who still care deeply about literary fiction. Thanks, too, to Bruce Cockburn, whose music has long nurtured my vision of things, and to my son, Joshua, whose own wonderful work has begun. And a special thanks to Betsy, without whom my words would have blurred into mumbling some time ago.
Fair Warning
Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year-old sister. My father had taken me to a couple of cattle auctions, not minding that I was a girl—this was before Missy was born, of course—and I’d loved the fast talk and the intensity of the whole thing. So the day of my seventh birthday party, where Missy did a song for everyone while I sat alone, my chin on my hand, and meditated behind my still uncut birthday cake, it seemed to me that here was a charming and beautiful little asset I had no further use for and that could be liquidated to good effect. The next day I gathered a passel of children from our gated community in Houston, kids with serious money, and I had Missy do a bit of her song once more, and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, no greater or more complete perfection of animal beauty ever stood on two legs than the little girl who stands before you. She has prize-winning breeding and good teeth. She will neither hook, kick, strike nor bite you. She is the pride and joy and greatest treasure of the Dickerson family and she is now available to you. Who will start the bidding for this future blue ribbon winner? Who’ll offer fifty cents? Fifty cents. Who’ll give me fifty?” I saw nothing but blank stares before me. I’d gotten all these kids together but I still hadn’t quite gotten them into the spirit of the thing. So I looked one of these kids in the eye and I said, “You, Tony Speck. Aren’t your parents rich enough to give you an allowance of fifty cents?” He made a hard, scrunched-up face and he said, “A dollar.” And I was off. I finally sold her for six dollars and twenty-five cents to a quiet girl up the street whose daddy was in oil. She was an only child, a thing I made her feel sorry about when the bidding slowed down at five bucks.
Needless to say, the deal didn’t go through. Missy tried to go get her dolls and clothes before she went off to what I persuaded her was a happy, extended sleep over, and Mama found out. That night my parents and Missy ate dinner in the dining room and I was put in my own room upstairs with a TV tray to eat my spaghetti alone. If I wanted to sell any one of them, then I wanted to sell them all, they claimed, and eating alone was supposed to show me how it would feel. I was supposed to be lonely. Of course, they were wrong. It was just my sister I wanted to dispose of. And all I was feeling was that somehow Missy had done it to me again. She was at my daddy’s elbow downstairs, offering her cheek for pinching. I felt pissed about that but I also felt exhilarated at the thought of what I’d done at the sale. I figured she wasn’t worth even half the final bid.
I am forty years old. Recently turned, and it’s true I don’t look it. But splendid condition—and enchanting provenance—notwithstanding, an object also is what it is by its objective stand
ards. I’m forty now. Missy is thirty-six. My daddy is dead. For more than a year. Mama sits in the same rambling faux Queen Anne on the same gated street in Houston.
And I’m sure she continues to wonder why her two daughters have chosen to live seventeen hundred miles away. She’s long wondered that, though she’s always been forgiving of Missy because there was a husband involved. As for me, I still feel exhilarated when I can sell something to somebody, especially when they end up valuing the thing more than anyone else possibly could. Perhaps in some way all our fates were sealed.
Still, these past weeks following my fortieth birthday have been, at the very least, unexpected. It started with the Crippenhouse auction. Near the end of the morning, after I’d gaveled down dozens of lots of major artwork for big money from a big crowd that nearly filled our Blue Salon, a tiny, minor Renoir came up. Barely six inches square. One fat naked young woman with a little splash of vague foliage behind her. Generic Impressionism on a very small scale. Like a nearsighted man looking through the knothole in a fence without his glasses. And yet I stood before these wealthy people and I knew them well, most of them, knew them from playing them at this podium many times before and meeting them at parties and studying the social registers and reading their bios and following their ups and downs and comings and goings in the society columns and the Wall Street Journal and even the Times news pages. I stood before them and there was a crisp smell of ozone in the air and the soft clarity of our indirect lights and, muffled in our plush drapery and carpeting, the rich hush of money well and profusely spent. I looked around, giving them a moment to catch their breath. The estimate on the Renoir was one hundred and forty thousand dollars. Often we’d put a relatively low estimate on a thing we knew would be hot in order to draw in more sharks looking for an easy kill, and if you knew what you were doing, they wouldn’t even realize that you’d actually gotten them into a feeding frenzy until they’d done something foolish. But this was one of those items where we’d jacked up the estimate on a minor piece that had one prestige selling point in order to improve its standing. Renoir. He’s automatically a big deal, we were saying. In fact, though, we were going to be happy getting eighty percent of the estimate. I had just one bid in the book lying open before me—mine was bound in Morocco with gilt pages—which is where an auctioneer notes the order bids, the bids placed by the big customers with accounts who are too busy sunning themselves somewhere in the Mediterranean or cutting deals down in Wall Street to attend an auction. For the little Renoir, the one book bid wasn’t even six figures, and I knew the guy had a thing for fat women.
So I looked out at the bid-weary group and I said, “I know you people,” though at the moment I said this, my eyes fell on a man on the far left side about eight rows back who, in fact, I did not know. There were, of course, others in the room I didn’t know, but this man had his eyes on me and he was as small-scaled and indistinct to my sight as the fat girl in the painting. But he was fixed on me and I could see his eyes were dark and his hair was dark and slicked straight back and his jaw was quite square and I know those aren’t enough things to warrant being caught stopping and looking at somebody and feeling some vague sense of possibility—no, hardly even that—feeling a surge of heat in your brow and a little catch and then quickening of your breath.
I forced my attention to the matter at hand. “I know you,” I repeated, getting back into the flow that had already started in me. “You’re wearing hundred-dollar underpants and carrying thousand-dollar fountain pens.”
They laughed. And they squirmed a little. Good.
I said, “You will not relinquish even the smallest detail of your life to mediocrity.”
Now they stirred. I am known for talking to my bidders. Cajoling them. Browbeating them, even. At Christie’s and Sotheby’s they would grumble at what I do. But they value me at Nichols & Gray for these things. And my regulars here know what to expect.
I said, “But there is a space in the rich and wonderful place where you live that is given over to just such a thing, mediocrity. A square column in the foyer, a narrow slip of wall between two doors. You know the place. Think about it. Feel bad about it. And here is Pierre-Auguste Renoir, dead for eighty years, the king of the most popular movement in the history of serious art, ready to turn that patch of mediocrity into a glorious vision of corporeal beauty. Lot 156. Entitled ‘Adorable Naked French Woman with Ample Enough Thighs to Keep Even John Paul Gibbons in One Place.’” And with this I looked directly at John Paul Gibbons, who was in his usual seat to the right side in the second row. He was as famous in the world of these people for his womanizing as for his money. I said, “Start the bidding at forty thousand, John Paul.”
He winked at me and waved his bidder’s paddle and we were off.
“Forty thousand,” I said. “Who’ll make it fifty?”
Since John Paul was on my right, I suppose it was only natural for me to scan back to the left to draw out a competing bid. I found myself looking toward the man with the dark eyes. How had I missed this face all morning? And he raised his paddle.
“Fifty thousand … ” I cried and I almost identified him in the way I’d been thinking of him, as “Dark Eyes.” But I caught myself. “… to the gentleman on the left side.” I was instantly regretful for having started this the way I had. Was Renoir’s pudgy beauty his type?
My auctioneer self swung back to John Paul Gibbons to pull out a further bid, even as the thoughts of another, covert self in me raced on.
“Sixty from Mr. Gibbons,” I said, thinking, If she is his type, then I’m shit out of luck. All my life I’ve been in desperate pursuit of exactly the wrong kind of butt.
And sure enough, Dark Eyes bid seventy. I was happy for womanhood in general, I guess, if this were true, that men were coming back around to desiring the likes of this plumped-up pillow of a young woman, but I was sad for me, and I looked over my shoulder at her and my auctioneer self said, “Isn’t she beautiful?” and my voice betrayed no malice.
John Paul took it to eighty and Dark Eyes took it to ninety while I paused inside and grew sharp with myself. You’ve become a desperate and pathetic figure, Amy Dickerson, growing jealous over a stranger’s interest in the image of a naked butter-ball. “Ninety-five to the book,” I said.
And there was a brief pause.
I swung back to John Paul. A man like this—how many times had he merely seen a woman across a room and he knew he had to get closer to her, had to woo and bed her if he could? Was I suddenly like him? “A hundred? Can you give me a hundred? No way you people are going to let a Renoir go for five figures. You’d be embarrassed to let that happen.”
John Paul raised his paddle. “A hundred thousand to John Paul Gibbons.”
The bid had run past the order bid in my book and a basic rule for an auctioneer is to play only two bidders at a time. But I didn’t want to look at Dark Eyes again. I should have gone back to him, but if he had a thing for this woman who looked so unlike me, then to hell with him, he didn’t deserve it. If he was bidding for it—and this thought made me grow warm again—if he was bidding for it merely out of his responsiveness to me, then I didn’t want him to waste his money on a second-rate piece. “One ten?” I said and I raised my eyes here on the right side and another paddle went up, about halfway back, a woman who lived on Park Avenue with a house full of Impressionists and a husband twice her age. “One ten to Mrs. Fielding on the right.”
She and John Paul moved it up in a few moments to the estimate, one forty. There was another little lull. I said, “It’s against you, Mrs. Fielding.” Still she hesitated. I should turn to my left, I knew. Dark Eyes could be waiting to give a bid. But instead I went for all the other Mrs. Fieldings. I raised my hand toward the painting, which sat on an easel behind me and to my left. My auctioneer self said, “Doesn’t she look like that brief glimpse you had of your dearest aunt at her bath when you were a girl? Or even your dear mama? Her essence is here before you, a great work of art.” B
ut the other me, with this left arm lifted, thought—for the first time ever from this podium, because I was always a cool character in this place, always fresh and cool—this other me that had gone quite inexplicably mad thought, My god what if I’m sweating and he’s looking at a great dark moon beneath my arm?
I know about desire. It’s my job to instill it—blind, irrational desire—in whole crowds of people. But doctors get sick. Lawyers go to jail. Evangelists get caught with prostitutes. There are impulsive attractions that make you feel like you’re in control of your life somehow—here’s something I want, even superficially, and I’m free to grab it. Then there are the impulsive attractions that only remind you how freedom is a fake. You might be free to pursue your desires, but you’re never free to choose them.
And I had no choice that morning. I lowered my arm abruptly in spite of the fact I hadn’t sweat from nerves since I was sixteen. But I’d already made my selling point. I’d stoked the desire of others and Mrs. Fielding took up the pursuit, as did another wealthy woman for a few bids and then another—I played them two at a time—and then it was one of the moneyed women against a little man who dealt in art in the Village and should have known better about this piece, which made me wonder if he’d had a life-changing glimpse of his corpulent mama at her bath, but that was the kind of thing my auctioneer self rightly ruminated on during the rush of the bidding and I had more or less put Dark Eyes out of my mind and we climbed over a quarter of a million and my boss was beaming in the back of the room and then it stopped, with the little man holding a bid of two hundred and sixty thousand dollars. “It’s against you,” I said to the woman still in the bidding. She shook her head faintly to say she was out of it.
There is a moment that comes, if you’ve done your work well, when the whole room finally and abruptly goes, What the hell are we doing? I knew we had reached that moment. But I would have to look back to my left before I could push on to a conclusion.