Fair Warning

by Robert Olen Butler

  “And you were just walking by. Like in your schoolboy days.”

  “Yes. Just so.”

  I nodded at Alain and wished he’d go away. My focus on him drifted. I looked out toward the front of the restaurant and a vaguely familiar figure was approaching the bar. Vague because the face was obscured by a trilby hat pulled down low and by his body being angled away, awkwardly. Alain said something I missed. I looked at him again, though I was feeling an oddly morbid intuition about the figure at the bar.

  “What was that?” I said to Alain.

  “Did he stand you up?”

  The man at the bar was peeking this way from under the brim of his hat.

  “No,” I said. “I wasn’t stood up.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  I was good at identifying people from a distance. It was part of my job. This guy was making a serious effort not to be recognized.

  “Yes, I see,” Alain said. “You weren’t stood up.”

  “And what do you think that means?” I said.

  “Did you … Could that …”

  Alain was off balance, groping around for words, a state I’d not seen him in. But I couldn’t concentrate on enjoying that. I was distracted by the man in the trilby hat.

  Alain suddenly laughed loud. The man at the bar looked toward the sound and he showed a little too much of his face. It was Trevor.

  “You bid for yourself,” Alain said.

  I focused intently on Alain now. I’d not spoken with Trevor since the auction. He didn’t yet know he’d been dumped. For a moment I was glad that Alain was here. If Trevor was so curious, let him think he’d been outbid by this handsome, distinguished, expensively clothed and coiffed man with an elegant way of shaping his words before him with his hands as he spoke, and with something else, a je ne sais quoi. Why was I suddenly angry at Arthur? I was. But I wasn’t, surely. For Arthur, I realized, it was a thing more like jealousy. In fact my anger was for Trevor. More so now, with him spying on me. I was angry at Alain too, it occurred to me. Neither of them should be here.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve got to leave now.”

  “Surely not,” Alain said, his hands spreading before him. And then they dropped to the table as if they’d been shot. “I have spoiled your moment,” he said.

  I grabbed my purse and rose. “Not at all. You’re absolved of all guilt.” I made a little cross in the air before him, a gesture that surprised the hell out of both of us. I hadn’t even noticed how his hands moved when he talked, not till a few moments ago. “I have to go.”

  And I went. Along the tables and into the bar and Trevor was using the same hunch-up tactic that Alain had used earlier and I almost passed him by without a word. Perhaps it would have been best if I did. But I didn’t. I veered over to him and leaned close to the back of his head. “Buona sera,” I said. “None of your fucking business. Grazie. Arrivederci.”

  He did not even turn around.

  I often don’t know where I am in the streets of New York. I can find my way up or down or across or whatever, but for all the attention to the detail of things in my work, I’m vague about the streets of the city. I like that. I went out of Fellini’s and I walked up the island for a time and then across and then back down a ways. Not that I wasn’t taking it all in. It was a spring night. I spent a few minutes checking my back, not for muggers—Giuliani had made all this more or less safe again—but for Alain or Trevor or whoever else, Arthur or John Paul Gibbons or the young Mover and Lifter with bad skin who always gave me a wink when he passed me at the office—the two boys at Fellini’s had made me paranoid for a few minutes—but the paranoia didn’t last, and after those few minutes of checking my back and seeing—thank god—no one I knew, I relaxed. I was happy to find that the pleasure I’d felt when I first sat down alone at the dinner table tonight had returned. It was a late spring night and I was alone in the streets of New York City. Drifting. A long row of quiet terra-cotta and brownstone, shadows of sweetgum and ginkgo and honey locust in the spill of streetlight on the stoops. Lit panes of tableaux: a wall of books, a dragonfly Tiffany lamp, a jumble of sedately partying bodies with laughter and a Sidney Bechet soprano sax riff coming out to me. Another street, a clinking of glasses, hands held across a sidewalk table, Marilyn Monroe edged in red neon, a bookstore window full of Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle and a hello from the doorway. A corner, a Korean deli, cut flowers spilling out the front, and I went in and filled a plastic box with dollops from the round-the-clock buffet—I was still hungry—a pound and a half of sesame noodles and spicy tofu and sweet-and-sour chicken nuggets and three-bean salad and gyoza and seaweed and stuffed grape leaves and samosa and coleslaw. And then I took a cab home, my snack in my lap. I was happy again.

  Even standing in the center of my apartment, which was too quiet and fraught with associations. There were four messages on my answering machine. I ignored them for a while. I sat on the stool at my pass-through and ate my dollops, starting off keeping them separate, carefully moving from one to the other, managing the sequence of tastes, but eventually just mixing them all together, speeding up. Eating too fast. Old habits die hard.

  I started trying to guess the four. Trevor. It took all this to make him call. Alain. I left him abruptly and it was possible he wasn’t a jerk and he was concerned. But did he know my home phone number? Of course. He was about to buy the whole company, me included. Yow. That thought stopped me. I was still up for sale.

  My plastic box was empty and I didn’t remember taking the last bite.

  I got up, approached the machine, the red 4 burning brightly in the dark. Trevor. Alain. Probably Arthur—I hadn’t seen him today, my first opportunity since the charity auction. He had to be curious. In fact, I was surprised he hadn’t shown up casing Fellini’s, as well. Arthur would be on the machine. And my mother was due.

  I got three out of four. Trevor’s voice was odd. He seemed very stiff, not used to talking to the machine. I thought of his mother. Surely she’d always resisted these machines. And Trevor one day would regret selling all her stuff. He’d start collecting his own Victoriana, end up sleeping with lilac sachets. “Amy,” he said. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t what you thought. You’ve touched every object around me, finding its value. Come touch me again. You found a flaw, but my value isn’t ruined. Please at least call me. Let me explain.”

  He took another breath after that, as if to say more, but what I touched was the erase button and the nasally fussbudget of a man who lived in the machine said, “Press erase again.” I did and he said, “Message erased,” and I felt good.

  Then there was Alain. “I hope I did not cause you some distress. I stopped in to Fellini’s on the way to my apartment because I’d heard of the place from the auction, yes, but I did not know you would be there. Forgive me for intruding.”

  That was the end of the message and I found myself waiting for some little something more. Would you give me a call? Hope to see you again. At least, Perhaps we’ll run into each other at Nichols & Gray. Something. But this was fine. He was probably having a drink or whatever with Arthur.

  Next was Mother. “Honey, I was just sitting here worrying about you. I hope you’re out having a good time all these nights. It’s lonely here. Houston just keeps on growing. I talked with Missy today. She seems so happy in her life. Do you still give her a call? We’re both so proud of how busy and important you are, Sweetie. Please call me when you have a chance. I love you to smithereens. Bye now.”

  This was pretty typical of her phone talk to me. She was better in person. Just as disapproving, ultimately, but a little less obvious about it. I pushed the erase button. Sometimes you can just tell by hearing a couple of people speak that they’re right for each other: I suddenly thought about getting Mama together with the nasally fussbudget asking me to push the button again.

  The idea passed and I did what he said and I expected to hear from Arthur next, but this time I was wrong. It was Missy.
“Hi Amy. I just want to apologize for my attitude at our last lunch. Maybe this guy is the one you’ve been waiting for. Didn’t I have an intuition something like that about Jeffrey? Try to find him, why don’t you. Go for it. And listen, in the meantime, why don’t you come out this weekend? The girls haven’t seen you in a while. Jeffrey either. We’d all love to have you. Please come.”

  “Missy, you jerk,” I said softly to the machine.

  I threw myself onto the couch and I wasn’t quite sure who I was mad at. Missy was clueless. She bitched at me when I was looking for support and supported me only after I’d moved on. But how could she have expected that in the less than two weeks since our lunch, Dark Eyes would have gone from anonymity to soulful confidences to a fuck in an elevator to the revelation of a fatal flaw to the great Dumpster of Doomed Relationships? And whose fault was that? Mine, sure. I was clueless too. Had Trevor been that hard to read? And he was clueless. Right then. Sitting in his mama’s apartment waiting for me to return his call.

  I pressed my eyes shut. This was the wrong way to think of all this, I knew. I was happy just a little while ago. Walking alone in the night. A clinking of glasses. Hands held across a table on the street. I’d turned to look as I passed. A car honked somewhere. His hand was on top of hers, there alongside the basket of bread sticks. Trevor was done with. What was the point of an active ill-feeling? We’d had a good moment. His hand falling gently on top of mine with my head still sprocketing faintly from his mother’s toy. If I owned myself now, I owned every good moment, no matter what happened before or after. I looked at Trevor’s hand on mine and it was a large hand, with a faint scar, like a question mark, between the first and second knuckle. The center of his palm was soft. Max’s palm was rougher. Not rougher, exactly. I shifted on the couch now, turned a little on my side, flexed my legs beneath me. Max’s palm wasn’t rough. It was tight. Nice tight, like his back muscles when his arms were around me. But he could be gentle with these palms. I let myself go to nipple-memory. Max would lay his tight palms on my breasts and my nipples would lift to him, he’d let my nipples do the pressing. I could not think of the moment when Trevor touched my breasts. There was no such moment. I regretted that. I would like to have a memory on my nipples of his soft palm. But there was his palm touching the back of my hand while eight metal jockeys looked on. Fred’s palm was soft, too, like the silk of his nightshirt. He’d run his palm lightly across the tip of my nipple, and it was the brush of silk, faintly cool, a spun thing, not flesh at all. And Fred’s fingers were long. He played the piano some and I’d imagined when we were together—after he’d spoken once, dismissively, of the lessons he’d taken as a boy—that his teacher, a woman, had held his boy’s hands in hers and envied how long these fingers were already. Fred’s fingernails were elongated, too, the shape of oval-cut diamonds.

  What mood was this that had come upon me? There were, inside me, the precisely delineated memories of the hands of other men, as well, I realized. More vivid than faces. What was the thing Alain had said? The rich variety of life? I was, it seemed, a collector.

  When I finally encountered Arthur, Wednesday morning, I’d just stepped into the elevator and he tried to make a U-turn when he saw me. No one else was coming or going at that moment. I held the door and said his name, once, sharply.

  He stopped and turned back to me sheepishly. “Hello, dear,” he said. “I was just going to … ah … check something with the security fellow over there.”

  I knew the real problem. “Come on, Arthur, you don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  He made a vague gesture toward the heavyset man in a uniform reading the Daily News at the front-lobby desk. “Well, perhaps it can wait.”

  “Arthur.”

  “All right.”

  He stepped in.

  I wasn’t critical of his little lie. After all, the last time we’d been together I’d threatened to grab him by the throat and throw him to the ground. Arthur clearly took my threat seriously. I liked him for that.

  I pushed our floor button and the doors closed and I said, “I’m sorry I threatened you, Arthur.”

  “What’s that? No, no. All is forgiven. Never taken seriously, really. You’re a rascal, Amy. You got Trevor Martin’s name out of me. But he didn’t win, did he? Not at all. Someone in the book? Yes?”

  “Arthur you’ve gone straight to stage three this time, talking like a Dickens character. You’re under a lot of stress.”

  “Yes I am, as a matter of fact. Your Mr. Bouchard is a hard bargainer.”

  “My Mr. Bouchard?”

  “He adores you. That’s clear.”

  The elevator stopped and the door opened on our suite of offices. Arthur stepped briskly out. I followed, but he was already striding away. “Must run,” he said.

  “To phone the desk cop?”

  Arthur wobbled his head in response as he receded as if to say, Oh you know that was a lie.

  I was left with Arthur’s impression that Alain adored me. I suppose there was a flicker in me that suggested he adored- me adored me. But that was gone instantly—the comment had been linked to hard bargaining, and I understood it to mean I was a greatly desirable asset. Alain was going to have to deal with that eventually. I needed an offer, money, a stake in the new company. Something.

  In the nick of time I caught myself mumbling audibly. I’d just come into view of Lydia and I didn’t want her panicking over my sanity. She was hunched over the computer. I slowed as I neared, hoping she wasn’t porning on the Internet or playing solitaire. I liked Lydia. I liked her pessimism, somehow. I wanted her to do well in her job, in her life, in contradiction of all her worst expectations. I wondered if that kind of success would make her miserable. I stopped at her desk. She surely knew I was nearby but she had not altered her demeanor one bit for me. This emboldened me to look at her computer screen and she was piecing together a boilerplate solicitation letter for me. “Good,” I said.

  “What’s good?” she said, not looking up at me.

  “Ah … Well, good, yes.” I sounded like Arthur in my awkwardness. But I didn’t want to tell her, Good you’re not goofing off so I won’t have to start working myself up to fire you. “Good work,” I finally said. “You’re getting that solicitation letter done.”

  “Lousy work,” she said. “This stuff stinks.”

  This time she didn’t ask if she was free to speak her mind. I was touched at her trust in me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “If you can improve on any of it, give it a try.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I might.”

  She hunched forward again and I glanced at her desktop, and there was a five-by-seven color photo half tucked under her folded New York Times. It was a child. Lydia and I had not gotten this far yet. It might be hers. It might not. I was about to slip away into my office. Lydia sensed it.

  “Call slips in the middle of your desk pad,” she said.

  “Thanks, yes,” I said, but something about the pudgy fingers splayed there near the Times made me say, “Lydia, is that your baby?”

  “Are you looking at the picture?” she asked without turning. She was moving text around on her screen.

  “On your desk,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  I picked the photo up.

  I had a nightmare once. I was behind the podium, ready to start an auction. I didn’t know of what. Sometimes I have nightmares based on that alone. I’m about to start an auction and I realize I’ve failed even to find out what’s being offered. I know nothing about the stuff and I’m like an actress who forgot to learn her lines, a dream I also have now and then. But in this particular nightmare it didn’t bother me, not knowing the offerings. Instead, the problem was that I looked out at the bidders and they were all babies. Every chair in the room—and the room was deep, going back into distant shadows—every chair had a baby sitting in it and eve
ry baby was focused intently on me and I couldn’t read their faces at all. And this terrified me. They all looked alike. Poochy cheeks, wide eyes, wispy-haired pink domes. You can read an adult’s personal subtext, hidden agendas, secret cravings, but a baby’s face is as fundamental and uninflected as poop and pee.

  In short, my nightmare was made up of baby’s faces that looked exactly like the face in this picture. Not that I didn’t have a warm, kootchy-under-the-chin feeling, as well. The baby was adorable. It was dressed in black and had tiny bloodred earrings in its pierced ears. “She’s wonderful,” I said.

  “Her name is Winter.” Lydia had turned away from the computer and was looking up at me now.

  “Is she a happy baby?” I was wondering if Lydia’s gloom was strictly Goth-cultural or if it was somehow genetic.

  “So far.”

  “That’s good, yes?”

  Lydia knew what I as driving at. “It’s good to be happy. I’m happy, Ms. Dickerson,” she said, her mouth turned down, her eyes lifted to me like Mary suffering at the foot of the cross.

  “Are you with Winter’s father?” I asked, figuring the speaking-your-mind thing could go either direction.

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, she’s beautiful.”

  “Do you have any children, Ms. Dickerson?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Lydia sounded disappointed, like she’d hoped I’d be a source of firsthand advice.

  “My sister has two girls I’m very close to. I know what it’s all about.”

  “I get so angry at some things,” Lydia said. “Like mosquitoes, for instance. I just want to stay in the city because if you go out to where there’s trees and water and stuff, these monsters are all around in the air trying to suck her blood. It’s like a vampire thing. But I get scared even worse than at the movies, ’cause it’s your baby they’re after. Not even the scariest movies send the vampire after a baby.”

  I looked at Winter. She was smiling, showing two tiny teeth. I could understand Lydia’s concern, creatures after this baby’s blood.