“All his stuff is driving me crazy. I’ve got to move on, honey.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see if I can get down there tomorrow. You’ll feel better when it’s all tagged.”
“I’m sorry about … you know.”
I didn’t know. “Sorry?”
“About making you say who you are. I know your voice.”
“I know you do.”
“You’ll always be my little girl.”
“Not for the rest of this week,” I said. “I’m your auctioneer.”
She was silent for a moment, weighing her desire for emotional leverage with me against her desire to get rid of Daddy from her life. Daddy won. “I can live with that,” she said.
I was careful to give her a courteous close and then pushed the phone disconnect button, and though I’d committed to doing one unpleasant thing, I’d deferred another. It was better to tell her about Missy face to face anyway.
I stretched out on the couch, wanting to doze, and as soon as my legs moved I wanted Alain. I got up on my knees so I could see the answering machine, though I’d checked it when I got in, and there were still no messages, and I lay back down again. I didn’t want to start second-guessing last night, but questions naturally arose. Did I do enough to let him know the kiss was right? Had he reconsidered the act for himself?
I looked to the clock over my fireplace. It was a gilt-bronze Louis XVI mantel clock, but it didn’t make a sound. I’d gotten it cheap because the insides were hopeless and I’d had a quartz movement put in and my clients would be appalled at that but it kept better time than anything they owned in a pristine state.
It wasn’t even noon. I had no reason to panic. I lay back. I was sleepy. I drew my arms to my chest and held in them that sweet, transitory emptiness that sometimes comes at the cusp of a love affair. A man you want exists in the world and you’ve not yet held him but you will and so you hold the emptiness for a time and it is precious in its nascence.
And the phone rang. I sat up. It was past one. The phone rang again and it was at my feet and I found it in the pillows and answered. “Yes?”
“I waited to call only because I imagined you’d be sleeping.”
It was Alain.
“I was.”
“Just now?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It was the best way to wait for this call.”
“For me, it was not to sleep.”
“All night?”
He hesitated. “I exaggerate.”
I laughed. “I’m glad to hear you admit it. I don’t want any sap between us.”
“Sap?”
“Too sweet. Too cute. We should have no sentimentality.”
“Good. But sentiment, yes?”
“Sentiment, yes.”
“Then I will say to you that the kiss was splendid. For you, as well?”
“It was splendid.”
“Good.” He sounded relieved.
“We can do that again,” I said.
“Very soon. But I have a meeting with Grumman. For one of my other businesses. I leave this afternoon and I’ll be on the Long Island until Tuesday.”
“I have to go to Houston,” I said. “I won’t be back until the end of the week, I’m afraid.”
“This will be a test of our no-sentimentality rule,” he said.
“Oh fuck that,” I said. “Let’s be sentimental.”
“Very well. I will not sleep at all until we kiss again.”
“Good.” I tried to think of a sentimental thing to say. I couldn’t. Finally I came up with “I won’t kiss any man until I kiss you.”
“Is that sentimental?”
“No.”
“I’m feeling a little bit vulnerable now,” he said.
“All right … The memory of our one kiss is worth more than all the other kisses of my life.”
“Much better. I will carry that thought through my sleepless nights.”
“Au revoir, Alain.” And this felt legitimately sentimental, speaking French to him. I was from Texas.
“Bon voyage,” he said.
The first word spoken from the moon was “Houston.” I was proud of that as a girl of eight. As troubling as this trip was, when my plane came in over the piney woods north of the city I watched the familiar crawl of green below and felt a little rustle of pleasure to be back. I liked this city. I liked its cranks and mavericks and its unzoned sprawl and its nighttime landscape of lights and smoke out east through Channelview and beyond and I liked its salt marshes and bayous and its summers as hot as Cairo’s and I liked its high-rise sculpture—especially that—a dozen or more of the most stunningly beautiful skyscrapers in the world. I rented a Sebring convertible at the airport and turned south on Highway 59, which was torn up like it always seemed to be, and I put the top down in spite of the slow traffic and the late afternoon heat, and I popped in a Dixie Chicks tape and off in the distance the skyline rose from absolute flatness into the subtropical haze.
I drove on and was happy when the traffic eased and I could get up some speed and let the hot wind blow my hair and I sang along with the Dixie Chicks about wide-open spaces and I thought of that hot Sunday afternoon when our city was hailed from the moon. My daddy jumped up and saluted the TV even though he’d been grumbling that it wasn’t a man from Texas who’d be the first to set foot there—he’s from goddam Ohio, Daddy said more than once about Neil Armstrong, I’ve been to Ohio and the sun doesn’t even shine there for months at a time—and Missy’d gotten bored long ago and wasn’t even in the room. This was my time at the center of things, though I was sharing it with the little overstuffed figure in black and white on the TV screen. But I still felt I was at the center because almost at once Daddy looked around for me and I jumped up beside him and he put his hand on the top of my head and he said, “There we are, Amy, out there in space. You and me and the whole world.” And I thought, You and me. Yes. But not the whole world. It’s just you and me. I reached up and put my hand on top of his. I’d do something important someday too, I thought. I could be the first person to raise cattle on the moon.
Now I was on I-10 and curving around Houston’s wonderful big buildings and I loved the Philip Johnsons the most, of course, the red granite Bank of America Center with its three vast serrated gables and its Gothic spiky finials and then Pennzoil Place crouching nearby, its twin glass trapezoids barely separated, bronze and slick, shifting as I passed, seeming to touch, seeming to become one, parting again, and the other buildings, as well, a muted gray Pei now called the Chase Tower, the curved blue glass prow of the Enron Building, and out ahead, away from downtown, the great solitary lift of the Williams Tower, another Johnson, with a pyramid on top, an art deco homage in glass to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, and this building used to be the Transco Tower, and the Bank of America Center used to be the NationsBank Center and before that the Republic Bank, and I gritted my teeth in envy. Of course, these great and lovely objects were bought and sold in a different way, but still I ached to auction them, to put Philip Johnson’s eight-hundred-foot late-twentieth-century Gothic monument before a group of those who loved it as much as I and to articulate our shared passion and urge them on and on to express their regard, to bid for it, more and more, to proclaim the value of this wonderful thing.
I went down Shepherd and into River Oaks and along to our gated street and now my feelings about Houston began to grow more complex, moving under the canopy of oaks and elms through the landscape of my childhood, and I stopped at last in front of our house, and it struck me, looking at its long front veranda and its onion-domed tower and its cedar fish-scale shingles, how Missy had moved seventeen hundred miles away from Houston and then found her own version of our childhood home, though hers at least was authentically from the nineteenth century and this one was built by some oil magnate in a burst of nostalgia in the early twenties.
I pushed the button and waited for the car’s top to co
me up from behind me and then put me in its shadow, and I secured it tight and I sat for a time in the car and I didn’t want to go in. But Mama appeared on the front porch and she waved and I sucked it up and got out. “Hello, Mama,” I called, moving to the trunk, my voice sounding small and muffled among the trees and the wide lawns, a thing that made me feel like I was still a child.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she called in return, staying on the porch, waiting for me to come to her.
Which I did, rolling my suitcase, and I went up the steps and we kissed on the cheek. “Missy’s getting a divorce,” I said.
I hadn’t meant to spring the news on her that abruptly. I regretted it at once but she didn’t react the way I’d expected. I thought for sure I was in for a long session of having to both speak for Missy and defend myself for my malign influence on my little sister, meanwhile plucking Kleenex for Mama to sop up her tears. But instead, Mama went steely hard and simply said, “What is it. Another woman?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Missy?”
“Probably at home.”
And with that, Mama flew off into the house.
I stood on the porch for a few moments more with the clear conviction that I’d overlooked something important. I thought I knew my mother well enough to accurately predict her behavior in a family crisis. Obviously not. What I did know for sure, however, were the smells of this porch—cedar and damp wood and faint whiffs of rust and car exhaust. They reassured me. I picked up my bag and stepped inside.
The house was dim—it had always been dim, the Queen Anne windows smallish, really, and each one covered with heavy dark drapes—and I looked around trying to put on my professional persona, trying simply to see the objects. Usually when major things in a house don’t go together, you call it eclectic. But here, now, my impression was of schizophrenia. Even in the staircase hall where I stood. I hadn’t recognized it before, but there were my mother’s objects and my father’s objects, side by side, distinct and unassimilated. A tulipwood marquetry console table against the wall, and hanging over it a mirror framed in scab-red mahogany carved full of dragons. A John Ellicott grandfather clock with applied color engravings of drastic biblical events—Adam and Eve slinking out of the garden, Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus ascending into heaven—and nearby, hanging over the doorway to the parlor, a great rack of Brahma bull horns. The clock was ticking loudly and Mama’s voice was coming from the back of the house, talking emphatically into a phone. “Missy … Missy … Stop crying and listen to me now,” she was saying.
As surprised as I was by how Mama was reacting to all this, I had no energy at the moment for figuring it out. I shut off her voice, left my bag by the door, and moved beneath the horns and into the parlor. There hung Daddy.
Almost life-sized. Over the fireplace. He’d gone to New York sometime in the early eighties—six or eight trips, maybe more—to sit for his portrait. Stand, rather. The painting was meticulously representational, posing him full length with one arm akimbo, like an eighteenth-century duke. He wore cowboy boots with the brass tips glinting at the toes, faded jeans, a denim shirt buttoned at the throat with a black bolo tie, and his ten-gallon hat sat on a table next to him. He’d gone out there thinking to hire Leroy Neiman or Peter Max, but he decided that to be au courant meant to let go of center stage. He didn’t want the portrait to be about the artist’s techniques but about him. Fair enough. So he found a relatively unknown hyper-realist with a sense of humor and this painting certainly put Daddy at center stage. His sandy hair, barely going white at the sideburns and the eyebrows, was slicked back, and his wide-set dark eyes were fixed on the viewer, and his square chin was faintly stubbled and cleft like Cary Grant’s. It was Daddy there, no doubt about it.
I could still hear Mama’s voice from the other room, though it was just a cajoling murmur now, not words, but it made me wonder why this portrait still hung here. Of course, she’d lived with the moose head till I’d given her a reason to dispose of it. But Daddy himself, I figured she’d have at least taken it down and stuck it away somewhere.
I returned Daddy’s gaze for a moment and then tried to look away. It wasn’t easy. I felt my eyes filling with tears and I couldn’t let go. He hadn’t been dead for all that long, after all. I remembered standing in this room—when? a few years ago, after I’d gotten going at Nichols & Gray, after Missy’d had Maggie but before Molly—Missy maybe was even pregnant, at the time—yes, I’d looked over to the window seat and Missy was there, beginning to show, her hand on her belly. It was Christmas. The first one in some years when we’d all been together. Daddy was quizzing me about my work. I was on Mama’s Queen Anne walnut settee and Daddy was in his wing-back pony-skin chair. I’d long ago disappointed him. I’d finally found some people outside the family to make over me for how cute I was and how pretty and I’d collected enough of those responses in my head that I finally believed it and so I went east and I was pretty enough to want to make something of that and I put on other people’s clothes for pay and I swung my newly washed hair for the cameras and I took on other people’s names and lives on summer-stock stages and that was all a great mystery to Daddy.
I turned my eyes to the settee now and it looked the same as it always had, upholstered in pink-flowered brocade. When I’d sat there that Christmas, I’d already come to essentially the same conclusion as he. Those things I’d been doing were a frivolous waste of my life. So he was asking me about being an auctioneer, and pretty quickly he started to like it, I think. I took you to your first auction, he said. Yes you did, I said. I remember that, I said. Missy gave me a dark look from the window.
I blinked and shook off this memory. I was still staring at the settee. At least Daddy’s eyes had let me go. I deliberately avoided looking at the portrait again. But I didn’t let Daddy himself go. His den was through a door just ahead of me. I stepped forward. This was where I’d do most of my work this week. I touched the porcelain doorknob and hesitated. I was never allowed—none of us was allowed—to open this door without his express invitation. It was hard now to turn the damn thing. He was dead, I reminded myself. He died. He said at the end of his inquisition that Christmas, “This sounds like a step in the right direction,” and that was his attitude for a few more years and that was fine with me, that was enough, and then he died.
I turned the knob and the door yielded and I stepped in and it was dark. The drapes were drawn—all the heavy drapes in this house were his, I think—he would ride a horse in the Texas sun, move among his cattle, visit his wildcat sites, all in the hot sun, and his hat would grow black around the band with his sweat, but in this house he wanted only darkness and little puddles of lamplight—and the air in the room was heavy with the smell of leather and old pipe smoke and books and gun oil. I moved to the massive desk in the center of the room and groped around and found the lamp. I pulled the chain and cut a swath in the darkness with light the color of cow piss.
The desktop had some scattered copies of The Cattleman and business papers and a phone book and a coffee cup. A little chill prickled along my scalp. He’d simply stepped away for a moment and was about to stride through the door and catch me in this place where I wasn’t supposed to be. I turned. The door was closed. The room was still. I could no longer hear Mama’s voice. I was an auctioneer. I was in this house to place a value on the objects I would sell. On one wall was a massive glass case full of vintage pistols and rifles and shotguns. Those were of value. Behind me was a wall of bookshelves. Daddy had a pretty sophisticated taste for old books. Good. Things to sell. A display case of miscellaneous objects—I remembered some pre-Columbian art in there. Other things. Some old pocket watches he was proud of. I thought of Alain’s words about the collector—I own this thing, therefore I am—and I felt that chill again, as if Daddy had just put his hand on the top of my head. He didn’t stride through the door because he’d never left. I was standing here in the center of him.
Which was not where I wante
d to be at that moment. So I left his den and got my suitcase and Mama was going on and on with Missy and I went upstairs. I’d long ago accepted—indeed, embraced—the disappearance of our childhood rooms. Mine was Mama’s sewing and household accounts room, with almost none of my childhood furniture left. I’d have been hard-pressed to even pick the items out. Missy’s room was the guest room, and that’s where I went now. There was a brass bed and chintz curtains and it was all Mama. Missy, I knew, from a few unguarded words at some lunch or other, had been hurt by these transformations, but it seemed to me one of the few clearly healthy parent-child actions Mama had taken during our adulthoods.
I unpacked and came back downstairs and the two of them were still talking. I hesitated in the front hall. I could go out on the porch—that was the most obvious choice—but I had to get ready to do what I was here to do, so I stepped into the parlor once more and approached Daddy’s pony-skin chair. I didn’t think I’d ever sat in this chair before. Indeed, I couldn’t remember anyone but Daddy sitting in it. I took a deep breath and I turned around and eased the backs of my thighs up against the chair and I was nervous as hell about this, but I made myself sit down. And now I was bareback on this pony and it was running fast and after a moment I let myself look over my shoulder to the left and above the fireplace and I nodded faintly to my father. He had no choice, of course, but his face had not altered. He was letting me sit in his place.
I waited without letting myself hear any of Mama’s words. I know how I sound to myself sometimes. Much of the time, when it comes to my sister, I’m petty and jealous and stuck in a past that I should have left behind long ago. Oddly, at that moment, sitting in Daddy’s chair, it was the very echo of the past—this room; the familiar, hectoring rise and fall of my mother’s voice; the ticking of the clock—that made me regret the last chilly peck on the cheek with Missy on Sunday morning. I should have hugged her on the train platform. She’d even said “fuck.” I smiled now, sitting in this chair, at the thought of Missy cursing. Daddy would—as Missy said of Mama—shit a brick if he’d heard his little googoopoo speak those words. I should have said, when our bodies returned to our stiff, minimal-contact posture, “Fuck this, Missy, let’s hug.” She needed that a hell of a lot more than what she was getting from Mama at the moment. Or what she got from Daddy, for that matter. Neither of us chose to have him shape us the way he did.
Fair Warning Page 11