Either way, I felt bad for Arthur and jumped in. “To carry water to the river,” I said.
“Yes,” Alain said. “Good. This is the thing we have avoided.” Then he made a show of opening the menu. “So tell me why the Louis XIV sandwich is made of sun-dried tomatoes, chopped liver, and Swiss cheese.”
“The owner hates the French,” I said.
Alain nodded sedately at this, without looking up from the menu.
It was Arthur who jumped in now, clearly thinking he’d help me out of what he took to be an embarrassing situation. He said, “All in good fun. They did a sandwich of me once. Roast beef, tongue, and American cheese. And they like me.”
Alain laughed and squinted hard at the menu. “Where is this Arthur Gray sandwich? That is what I will have. With Dijon mustard.”
“I’m afraid you won’t find me there. They took it off some time ago. I was a slow seller.”
“Ah but they have made a mistake,” Alain said. “That is a very fine combination.”
Arthur brushed aside the remark with a wave of the hand as if it were complimentary to him. “They’re working on an Amy Dickerson, I’m told.”
This was the first I’d heard of it and probably a lie. But Alain put down his menu and said, “How wonderful. And Mademoiselle Dickerson, what would you like to see on your sandwich?”
“Testicules du taureau,” I said. “Plain.”
Alain finally flinched. Then he threw his head back and laughed. I felt a little better about Alain for this, though I knew I was still on Arthur’s side. It occurred to me that Arthur had missed the operative word in my sandwich meat, given the French pronunciation. I turned to him and he was looking a little blank. I leaned to him. “Prairie oysters,” I said, though my daddy’s name for them left Arthur just as baffled. It pleased me now to say it bluntly, for both of these men. “Bull’s balls,” I said.
I once auctioned a jar of them. A large jar, specially prepared and preserved, sold with a rich catalog of other culinary curiosities from the effects of a great Spanish cook who’d run a Valencian restaurant on the Upper East Side and died from a heart attack with his face buried in a paella. I sold these criadillas for nearly three thousand dollars. Someone cared passionately about that jar of bull’s balls. I had coaxed out that passion, led it along to the moment when he possessed this thing. And on the afternoon of this first lunch, after small talk and our sandwiches—Alain finally special-ordered roast beef, tongue, and American cheese with Dijon mustard—and as we drank our coffee, Alain did at last explain himself and I decided he would understand the man who bought that jar. “I adore the collector,” he said. “I adore the collecting spirit. The man or the woman who loves to collect is a man or woman who loves the rich variety of life. We can only live among things. Even the monks, who are supposed to own nothing, had their stones and their beads and their sandals and the bright illumination of words that flowed from their quill pens. They surely held this quill pen or that quill pen and appreciated what could be wrought with it. The object itself was wonderful to them. No one can ignore objects, and the collector says, Yes. Yes, I will embrace these things. I will treasure these things. I will own these things so that I might possess a little of what the world is all about. It is like identity, is it not? I own this thing, therefore I am? I am making a partial jest now. But only partial. We choose the objects around us to discover who we are. Don’t you agree?”
I felt a little breathless. In spite of there being a faint air of bullshit about this rush of words. Wasn’t all this sounding a little like the flow of rhetoric from an articulate seducer who, at the end of the day, only wants to fuck you? But I was breathless nonetheless. “I agree,” I said.
“Oh yes,” said Arthur, who was ready to be seduced.
Alain nodded approvingly at us both.
I had a thought about what he’d just said—that for some it’s more, I buy, therefore I am. In spite of my suspicions about him, I liked his provoking this kind of meditation on what we do. But I figured this man who might soon be my boss wanted to hear only his own words right now, so I kept my mouth shut.
He said, “Then for me to buy Nichols & Gray, this is a very postmodern thing, is it not?”
I think we both showed a blankness at this turn in his ideas, a moment I suspect he relished in and of itself. He was in control. He let us dangle, and then he said, “At least the part of postmodernism that in a writer, for instance, might make him create a work about creating a work. Metafiction, you call it? Unlike my other businesses—which I collect, I make no secret of that element in what I do—with Nichols & Gray I am collecting a thing whose very existence is about collecting things. Do you understand?”
“This is your metabusiness,” Arthur said.
Alain was pleased. “Exactly.”
“So you should not be so concerned about our profit and loss,” Arthur said. Our balance sheet—which had suffered with the stock market—must have been an important price-setting point in the discussions so far. For all his dithering and occasional pretense, Arthur was still a shrewd cookie. Now it was Alain who was caught off guard.
It didn’t last long. Alain cocked his head at Arthur and smiled a pouty smile and I thought of Maurice Chevalier about to do a dance step. He said, “If you find even one more buyer who will desire you for the same thing, perhaps. But I am the exception. The eccentric. The world at large has its own standards. And there, you have an appropriate value. We all do, do we not?”
With this, Alain turned his smile to me, as well. I looked away.
If Alain Bouchard did nothing else, he got me to thinking anew about fundamentals. How do you assess the value of a thing? People in the business talk about this and that, but it comes down to five major objective standards. The condition: the more nearly perfect, the better. The rarity: the rarer, the better. The size: usually neither too big nor too small. The provenance: not just the record of ownership but the personal history of the object, the more extraordinary—either good or bad—the better. The authenticity: though a fake may be, to any but an informed eye, indistinguishable from the true object, the world of the auction will cast out the pretender.
After lunch I went to the corner and took out my cell phone while the two men walked back toward Nichols & Gray. I watched them, Alain quite tall and wide-shouldered, Arthur narrow and diminutive, fully a head shorter. One seemed too big, the other too small, but both struck me as unquestionably rare. Deep down, how authentic either one of them was, was still an open question.
I called Trevor’s apartment on my cell phone. He picked up and said at once, “Hello, Amy.”
I was stopped by this. “My cell phone doesn’t register on caller ID,” I said.
“It could be no one but you at this moment,” he said.
I felt very odd about that response for reasons that weren’t apparent to me. I squinted into the street, looking at nothing in particular for a few beats, trying unsuccessfully to figure this out.
“You’re finished with your lunch,” Trevor said.
“Yes.”
“Will you come back this afternoon?” he said. There was something almost plaintive in his voice.
“Yes,” I said.
And nothing happened. We sat side by side. We handled and pondered and evaluated object after object. And he did not so much as brush my arm passing by, though the warmth stayed in his eyes and in his voice. I was weary of feeling caught off guard with men. I reminded myself that this was a man dealing with the death of his mother. Dealing with the rest of his life. Blah blah blah. And so I focused on my work and I turned off the spigot of my own pheromones. Wrench tight.
And then it was Friday, our fifth and final day of assessments in the apartment of the deceased Mrs. Edward Martin, mother of Trevor Martin. On this fifth day he opened the door to my ringing the bell and this fifth silk shirt he wore was bloused in the sleeves and open to the third button and his chest was covered with dark down and his smile was so deeply appreciativ
e of my standing there waiting to be let in that I thought for a moment he was about to take me in his arms and kiss me. And I was no longer in control of my attitude. Fuck the spigot, I didn’t even have the option of turning it back on or not, the goddam pipe burst and I was suddenly up to my nostrils in my own ardor. I was more than ready for him to make a move.
But he did not. Nor did I, I suppose from a residue of Texas mores still in me, which I didn’t like. But I wasn’t compelled to override them and he obviously had another agenda, and so we spent the morning and the first hours of the afternoon working our way around the larger pieces in the foyer, the parlor, the library, the dining room. Then after I’d assessed a beautiful mahogany three-pedestal dining table with brass paw feet, he said, “You’re hungry.” He was right. And for the second day in a row he did not even ask what I wanted but went to the phone and ordered my favorite Chinese dishes—though, in all honesty, I would have varied my fare if he’d asked—but I found myself liking his presumption, liking that he should know this domestic detail about me.
And after we ate, he took me to a small room lined completely with armoires in rosewood and mahogany and walnut, and filling the armoires were all things that could be embroidered—quilts and drapes and cushions and bellows and doilies and on and on, big things and small—and there were Persian rugs stacked knee high in the center of the floor and on top of them sat two open steamer trunks, overflowing with indistinguishable cloth objects all frilled and flowered.
“I’m surprised at her,” I said without thinking. “She’s out of control in here.”
“This was my room,” Trevor said.
I turned to him, wanting to take the words back.
“It didn’t look like this,” he said, smiling.
I had a strong impulse now to lean forward and lay my forehead against the triangle of his exposed chest. But I held still. I would not push him into the rest of his life. Then he said, “Let’s leave this room for later,” and he was moving away. I followed him down the hallway and he paused at a closed door, the only room I hadn’t seen. He hesitated, not looking at me, but staring at the door itself as if trying to listen for something on the other side. I quickly sorted out the apartment in my head and I realized that this must have been her bedroom.
How long had it been since I’d made love? Some months. Too many months. One of the great, largely unacknowledged jokes Nature plays on women—at least this woman—is to increase one’s desire for sex while decreasing one’s tolerance for boring men. Horny and discriminating is a bad combination, it seems to me. And the situation before me—exceedingly strange though it was shaping up to be—was anything but boring. Still he hesitated.
I said, “This is hard for you.”
He nodded.
He opened the door and I had no choice but to step to his side and look in.
There were probably some pots and pans, a telephone and a commode, some kitchen utensils, that were not Victorian in Mrs. Edward Martin’s apartment. But almost nothing else. Except now I was looking at her bed and it was eighteenth-century Italian with a great arched headboard painted pale blue and parcel-gilt-carved with lunettes, and rising at each side was a pale pink pilaster topped not by a finial but by a golden cupid, his bow and arrow aimed at the bed. The smell of lilacs rolled palpably from the room, Trevor put his arm around my shoulders, and some little voice in my head was going, How desperate have you become?
Then he gave me a quick friendly squeeze and his arm disappeared from around me and he said, “Maybe I’ll let you do this room on your own.”
“Right,” I said, and I sounded as if I was choking.
An hour later I found him sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of coffee. I sat down across from him.
We were quiet together for a time, and finally he said, “Do you want some coffee?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks.”
He stared into his own cup for a long moment and then he said, “She loved objects.”
“That’s clear.”
“My childhood, her adulthood. It was all one,” he said softly. “She had a good eye. She knew what she wanted and she knew what it would cost and she was ready to pay it.”
He was saying these things with a tone that sounded like tenderness. On our first evening he’d taken pleasure in my being able to look inside him, but at this moment he seemed opaque. He felt tender about her shopping? But then it made a kind of sense. I, of all people, should understand his mother. I played people like her every day.
I made my voice go gentle, matching his tone. “What she saw and loved and bought, this was how she said who she was.” And a little chill suddenly ran through me. This had been Alain’s point, I realized.
Trevor looked at me and nodded faintly. “Like style. We are what we wear. We are what we hang on our walls. Perhaps you’re right. She was talking to me.”
He looked away.
And I thought: the buying isn’t the point; it’s that we understand the objects. We love what we understand. And then I averted my eyes from the next logical step. But I can see it now, replaying it all: we love what we understand, and there I sat, understanding Trevor Martin.
I waited for him to say more but he seemed content with the silence. I was not. I was doing entirely too much thinking. I said, “I’ve solved your mystery.”
He smiled at me and cocked his head. The smile was reassuring. It was okay to move on.
I said, “Her pillows—and there were a dozen of them—they all had lilac sachets stuffed inside the cases.”
“Of course. I should have realized. She slept in it.”
I found I was relieved that even in his freedom to search for the source of the scent he had avoided her bedclothes. And he had not made love to me on her bed. These were good and reassuring things. I was free now to relax with my pleasure in the way he lifted his eyebrows each time he sipped his coffee, the way he lifted his chin to enjoy the taste, the way his eyes moved to the right and his mouth bunched up slightly when he grew thoughtful, the way—for the second time—he reached out and laid his hand on mine. I was filled with the details of him. I could sell him for a million bucks. Not that I would. Clearly, part of me was beginning to think he was a keeper.
When his hand settled on my hand, he said, “I will sleep better tonight because of you.”
I looked at him with a little stutter in my chest. I’d suddenly become what my daddy used to call “cow-simple.” It was from his touch. It was from merely the word “sleeping.” It was stupid but I was having trouble figuring out what he was really trying to say.
And he let me gape on, as if I was out alone in a field, paused in the middle of chewing my cud, wondering where I was. Then he said, “The mystery. Solved.”
“Of course,” I said.
When this fifth workday was done, for the fifth time he walked me to the door and thanked me, rather formally, for all that I was doing. Tonight I stopped and looked into his eyes when he said this. “I’ve enjoyed your company,” I said.
“And I’ve enjoyed yours,” he said.
That’s all I wanted to say. I turned to go.
“Amy,” he said.
I turned back and my instinct said this was the time he would take me into his arms. My instinct was wrong. Was this another trend for the forty-year-old woman? Horny, discriminating, and utterly without sexual intuition? He simply said, “I’ll see you down.”
We went out the door together and along the hall and I pushed the down button on the elevator and a spark of static electricity bit at my fingertip. That was it, I thought. I’ve now discharged into the electrical system of the building elevators whatever it was I was feeling a few moments ago.
The doors opened. We stepped in. The doors closed. We were alone, and maybe the elevators did suck up the charge that was between us, because we descended one floor of the ten we had to go and Trevor reached out and flipped the red switch on the panel and the elevator bounced to a stop and a bell began ringing an
d he took me in his arms and I leaped up and hooked my legs around him as we kissed. He pressed me against the wall and he did not make a sound.
The next day I leaned into the tinted window of Arthur Gray’s limo and faced the rush of trees and light standards and, eventually, industrial parks, along the Long Island Expressway. I never had understood what men saw in lovemaking in a standing position. Though Trevor had been strong enough, certainly, to hold me up without my constantly feeling like I would slip off him. He was silent, but he did not cry out, Oh Mama, which would have been much worse, under the circumstances. We’d not had a proper date. We’d never even gone out for a meal. But that sounded like my Mama talking. I was well-fucked and unusually meditative.
When we were on Highway 27, out among the potato fields and vegetable stands and runs of quaint shops and approaching East Hampton, Arthur finally roused me from going nowhere in my head. He said, “Amy, there’s one more item that I want you to put on your list. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“It’s the special request I mentioned on your machine.” Arthur was shuffling his feet and talking all around something and he’d finally gotten me interested, even suspicious.
“What are you talking about, Arthur?”
“A dinner with you.”
“With me?”
“At Fellini’s. In Soho. They’ve already donated the meal, with wine. Dinner for two with the most beautiful auctioneer in New York.”
I was silent. This was really troubling for a reason I couldn’t quite define.
“Come on,” he said. “Think of the whales.”
“This is for whales? I thought it was for a disease.”
“Whales get diseases, too. The point is that your mystique, which is considerable, is Nichols & Gray’s mystique, as well. Give somebody a dandy candlelit dinner. For us. Okay?”
There was no good reason to say no. I liked whales. I liked Arthur. I liked Nichols & Gray. But there was suddenly a great whale of a fear breaching inside me and falling back with a big splash: I was going to have to sell myself.
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