The music began very softly, like waking slowly from a deep sleep, and Alain’s voice came into my head even more softly. “It is a lover’s song of parting,” he said. He was suddenly beside me, and from the surge in my chest—part surprise, part relief, part downright scrabbly lust—I moved slightly, though without looking at him, and his lips touched my ear and they lingered there briefly, the words ceasing—it had become a kiss—and the saxophone sighed its shaggy-voiced sigh. “At daybreak,” Alain whispered. “Aubade.”
I turned my face to him now and he was still very close, smelling not of cologne but of the sun and the sea. “Hello,” he mouthed, and I shaped my mouth to the same word, and the music went on, the violin and the saxophone speaking to each other, and even to my untrained ear—I knew little, formally, of music, though I’d studied hard for this auction—to my ear, the music sounded very formal, given what an aubade was, and given what a saxophone was. This was an instrument that had been branded obscene at the turn of the century, too guttural and low-class-sensual for a refined sensibility. And here was Ravel, the neoclassicist, making it refined even in its regret that daybreak had come. Then the two voices fell together more avidly—allegro—and Alain and I were still looking at each other and the violin went silent and the saxophone rasped on and the feeling of it got a little out of hand and then there was serious ardor, the lovers touching, and sure enough the violin rushed back in and Alain’s face moved sharply toward the music and he smiled—a lopsided, faintly surprised smile—and I looked to the violin and the saxophone, too, and the sounds were looping and twining and they were not classical at all, they were guttural and low-class-sensual. I turned my face slightly to Alain and he knew at once what I wanted and he bent forward and put his ear next to my mouth and I whispered, “They’re not parting. They’re making love.”
He lifted his face and looked at me and he smiled. “So they are,” he said, touching his lips to my ear again. “I did not know Maurice had it in him.”
And then I realized why this piece had not come to light before.
When the music had ended, Alain took my hand in his and gave it a brief, gentle squeeze, and then I was on stage and the lights were bright and everyone was focused on me. And I began, still conscious of the place where his hand had touched mine, as if he and I had just had sex in a public place and no one had caught us, no one knew, and I thought how fine a collection I’d made for myself—this collection of hands.
And I was good that night, very good. I sold a Cyrill Demian Flutina, the early-nineteenth-century ancestor of the accordion; a piccolo harp; a dozen letters of encouragement from Toscanini to an aspiring, though ultimately undistinguished, conductor; a working manuscript of John Cage, which I first portrayed, to the delight of a crowd turned out for an impressionist, as ten blank pages, co-opting any negative feelings about him and then going on to build the case for his profound influence on twentieth-century music. I sold the hell out of all of them—and fifty-some-odd other lots, as well—with the Cage manuscript going for six times the estimate. And then it was time for the “Aubade for Violin and Saxophone.”
I looked around the room, and bid paddles quivered. There were representatives from major music libraries, universities, and a couple of museums, and my book before me on the podium had bids that already quadrupled the consciously low estimate of twenty thousand that we’d put on the manuscript. I was going to have fun. But first—planning anyway to play a silence while a Brazilian-rosewood harmonium was being toted off—I made a point of finding Alain in the crowd. He was sitting next to Arthur off to my right and I fixed on him and gave him a tiny nod, which he returned.
I began. “The next lot is not simply a previously unknown piece of music by Maurice Ravel, it is a previously unknown Maurice Ravel. He is linked with Claude Debussy as the two titans of musical impressionism, but to a careful ear the two men are so very different. And I mean the two men. Debussy was the sensualist. Ravel was the traditionalist, the man of the mind. Until tonight. This piece of music in Ravel’s own hand, a thing which someone in this room will soon own, is an image of the secret Ravel. The saxophone that he made speak here was the voice of a sensual man, a passionate man.” I looked at Alain. “Who knew Maurice had it in him?”
The crowd laughed. The bidding began. And we ran and ran to a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars, and I gaveled it down. It was a very good price for a thing that had no clear market equivalents to affix its value. The crowd knew it was a good price, with a wave of admiring oohs rippling through as testament to that. But at that moment I could only think how weirdly relative the values of things were. I felt the shadow of the tritely corpulent bather in the tiny, third-rate Renoir and the shadow of the man I’d showed off for that night. It had sold for seventy-three thousand dollars more than this thing that seemed to me much more precious.
I looked to Alain, and he brought his hands up in silent applause for me. Arthur noticed the gesture and joined him. How much had I paid for the other men in my life? How much would I pay for my Frenchman with the sharp mind, the good suit, and the ex-dockworker hands?
But there was more to sell. There was some movement around the back fringe of the crowd, and I said, “The real collectors are all sitting still right now.” There was a little ripple of self-appreciative laughter at this from the chairs and some of the movement stopped at the edges. “I’m not trying to shame those of you who are slipping out. It’s a disappointment to lose the Ravel manuscript, but you can still redeem the evening. Here’s lot fifty-nine, for instance.” I looked to the turntable and one of the Nichols & Gray young men was just pulling back. There, in the spotlight, lay a lute.
One of the things I love most about my job is the research. Though I richly enjoyed listening to a wide range of music, I was not the least bit musically inclined, and until the week or two before the music auction I knew little or nothing about many objects revered by musicians and collectors of musical things. This lute, for instance, would have seemed odd and pudgy to me. As I considered it on that night, it still did, I suppose, on a gut level, with its bulging, pear-shaped body and stubby neck with the pegbox bent back at a ninety-degree angle. But now, I turned to my room full of acquirers and said, with sincerity, “What a beautiful thing this is, an important example of the resurrection of a venerable sound in the history of music. There may be only two dozen reasonably whole Renaissance lutes still extant. And those have been altered, damaged, or they’re of atypical size. This lute is one of the very first of Michael Lowe’s reconstructions, from 1975, based on Friedman Hellwig’s research and the use of X rays to examine existing examples. Made of heartwood yew with maple strips and ebony in the soundboard—and, of course, a beautifully rendered, perforated-rose sound hole sitting at its center—this is a thrilling meditation on the late-sixteenth-century work of Vendelio Venere. Who’ll begin at one thousand dollars?”
The estimate was twenty-eight hundred dollars and there were no book bids and I had to hope for a couple of actual lutenists out there, perhaps with an oddball feel for modern history. They seemed to be there: two paddles went up almost simultaneously, from two bidders previously unknown to me, a shaggy-haired young man and a severely bunned middle-aged woman. I let Mr. Shaggy have the benefit of the near tie. “One thousand to you, sir,” I said, and then I looked in Ms. Bun’s direction and said, “Who’ll make it eleven hundred?” And she did.
I played the two up to twenty-one hundred and Shaggy faded and another woman near the front on the left came in and we went exactly to the estimate—two thousand eight hundred dollars—and the new woman dropped out and I thought we were going to come to a close. “Can I have twenty-nine? Twenty-nine hundred? The bass strings on this beauty are red, like the original, but Signor Venere used mercuric sulphide to achieve that effect and slowly, unwittingly, poisoned his customers. Mr. Lowe, I’ve been assured, has used lead oxide, first cousin to rust, and you can play this lute for decades in safety.”
The cro
wd laughed. “Surely we have more than three lutenists out there. Michael Lowe is already universally understood to be one of only two or three fathers in the rebirth of the lute.”
A paddle went up from a jowly, gray-haired man down near the front. “Twenty-nine hundred,” I said. “Three thousand?”
Ms. Bun hesitated only a moment and she lifted her paddle. “Three thousand,” I said.
These two dueled up to thirty-five hundred and Ms. Bun dropped out and my instincts told me it was over. “Thirty-six?”
No one moved.
“Three thousand six hundred dollars?”
Nothing.
I gave the lute a last look. “And all the music comes out through that exquisite rose,” I said, speaking of the sound hole, and my voice was full of tenderness. This seemed—and it was—more an observation for myself than another bit of sales patter. The crowd was still. “Fair warning,” I said, and instantly I saw a flickering off to my extreme right. I turned.
For a moment I didn’t comprehend what had happened. There was Arthur. Next to him, Alain was gone, a bidding paddle floating in his place. Then I realized that he himself had registered to bid and he was suddenly after this lute. The paddle came down and Alain was looking faux-somber. I set aside my surprise and said, “Three thousand six hundred dollars to the gentleman on my right.”
I looked out at the others. I could not imagine Alain playing the lute, not with those hands, though a lute’s strings are meant to be plucked, not strummed like a guitar. I suppose a question should have arisen in my mind about whether to gavel this lot down quick, now that my future boss and future lover wanted it. But no such question arose. I said, “Until Michael Lowe made the object you see here, the true and original sound of music by Dowland and Vivaldi and Bach had been lost to the ages. Then it was found once again. History is being made all around us, every day, ladies and gentlemen. Who’ll bid thirty-seven hundred dollars?”
I looked at my last bidder, the jowly man down front. I’d noticed, in his earlier run of bids, slim hands, long fingers. He was a musician. I said, “At the preview, some of you may have heard this instrument plucked. She sang beautifully, I’m told. She’s among the oldest of the playable lutes in this world and her tones are only now coming into maturity.”
Jowly raised his paddle. “Thirty-seven,” I said.
In the brief moment it took me to turn back to Alain, his paddle was already up. “Thirty-eight,” I said.
And the two men rushed up to forty-four hundred before Jowly stopped. I’d sensed his hesitation instantly and I raised my focus to the others. To rearrange and refresh the bidders’ thinking, I occasionally tuck away a bit of Shakespeare, twisting his words to my own purposes, and so now I said, “Gloucester sneers at Richard the Third, ‘He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute.’” I’d thrown it out there without planning how to make it persuasive, but improvisation exhilarated me when I was at this podium. I looked at the object and I was focused on it and open to the flow of words that always seemed to come to me when I needed it—in short, I was in what the athletes call the zone—and I said, “You’re bidding for a sweet icon of womanhood—see the rose in her center, and see her belly swollen with your love child.”
This selling point surprised even me. The crowd laughed, especially, I think, my regulars, and it was no coincidence that I now noticed John Paul Gibbons about halfway back on my left. He’d suddenly sat up straight.
“She’s worth forty-five hundred,” I said.
Not that there was any sensible reason for people to bid their money for an object as a result of what I’d just said, but two paddles went up, John Paul’s included.
I glanced at Alain and he angled his head to the side with a little smile.
I pointed to John Paul. He was currying favor. And this was just pocket change for him. “Four thousand five hundred dollars to a regular.”
Alain flashed his paddle. “Forty-six hundred,” I said.
John Paul flashed.
Alain flashed.
John Paul flashed.
Alain seemed to hesitate. I looked at him. He was smiling a faint, aren’t-we-having-covert-fun-together smile. “It’s against you, Monsieur Bouchard. Will you bid five thousand?”
He gave me a faint nod and lifted his paddle.
I turned back to Monsieur Gibbons. He seemed to be hesitating, as well. He’d come to his senses. I said, “John Paul, I bet you’ve got your high school guitar tucked away in a special place to play for a special lady. But I’ll tell you a secret I bet no woman has yet told you. You need gently to pluck, not strum. The lute, John Paul. The lute’s the thing.”
My regulars were laughing again, though with a surprised edge—Amy Dickerson has gone this far, at last—and the new-comers were beginning to figure out that laughter was okay and they joined in. I wished John Paul was closer because I could swear he was blushing. He kept his paddle down. He had no choice but to drop out. I’d overplayed my hand. But I didn’t care. “Fifty-one hundred? No, John Paul? You’ll stay with strumming? Anyone? Fair warning.” I scanned the room once and then hammered down the gavel. “Sold,” I said. “To Monsieur Bouchard for five thousand dollars.”
I gave him a last look.
He pursed his lips ever so slightly as if he were kissing my ear.
After the last item of the music auction had been sold and the crowd had applauded briefly, and the slow, shuffling exodus had begun, I moved across the dais to my right and Arthur came up and Alain lingered below.
“Lovely, my dear,” Arthur said. “You were in top form.” He leaned close and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You certainly squeezed our new boss for every last penny. I think he quite liked it.”
“I quite liked it,” I said.
Arthur giggled and lifted his eyebrows at me in faux shock. He said, “The man’s smitten with you, you know.”
“I know.”
“It can only help.” Then Arthur gave me our ritual post-auction congratulatory hug and he let me go and he slid off to the front of the dais where someone was motioning to him. I moved to the steps and paused before Alain, who waited below me. He lifted his hand to help me down. I took it and descended and we stood before each other, a little too close if we wanted to keep our feelings private in this public place, and we shared a nifty little I-want-to-grab-you-and-chew-on-your-face-but-dare-not gaze.
“I have a thing or two to arrange,” Alain said.
“About your lute,” I said.
He smiled. “About my lute. After that, would you like to dine with me?”
“Of course.”
And so he came to lift his glass of wine, letting it float out over the center of the table in the Yalta Restaurant in the East Village, and I lifted mine and moved it out to meet his, and we were about to drink a Bulgarian wine made from misket grapes, a thing Alain had never tried but that the waiter said was good in spite of its modest price, and he’d said yes to it without even a glance at me, a thing that pleased me, oddly, that he was ready to buy a cheap wine on a whim, for its taste, not having to impress me with his money, and he did turn to me as soon as the waiter was gone and say, “It’s all right? It sounded like fun,” and I liked him even more, and I nodded, so now we touched our glasses and Alain toasted, “To plucking.”
I said, “I’m glad you were paying attention.”
We drank, and together we studied, with serious faces, the taste of this Bulgarian misket blanc that was called “Blonde,” and it was sweetly fruity. “There’s a hint of apricot,” Alain said.
“Yes,” I said. “And the hint of an immature democracy.”
“I see what you mean,” he said. “Should we send it back?”
“No. I’m enjoying the ideological struggle of it.” I took another sip.
He laughed, softly, as a kind of afterthought. “It was a great pleasure to watch you manipulate our clients tonight,” he said.
I liked his “our.” It felt as
if he’d drawn a circle around the two of us.
I said, “I wanted more for the Ravel manuscript. It seemed such an important thing.”
“You got more than I expected.”
“Thanks for giving me an angle on it, the things you said about the secret Maurice.”
Alain shrugged. “I was sincerely surprised by the work. The few other times he’d used a saxophone, they were strictly governed by his classical sensibility. In the ‘Bolero’ he uses them.”
“I despise that piece,” I said.
His eyes widened.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s one of your favorites.”
“No. On the contrary. I despise it, too. My look was one of surprise. Our shared opinion is quite rare for laymen.”
“I have to tell you, personally, I’m relieved,” I said, and I was. “Any man who thinks ‘Bolero’ is great lovemaking music must surely be a bad lover. It’s one long male delusion about passion. Pump pump pump, slow fast faster, soft hard harder. It’s all linear and repetitive. Now I’m willing to bet you don’t make love like that, Alain.”
Alain sat back in his chair. He seemed a little breathless, though perhaps I was projecting. I was breathless, certainly. “No I do not,” he said.
We fell silent for a time, sipping at our Bulgarian wine.
“She’s not so bad, this blonde,” Alain said, pouring more for both of us.
I took up the glass and said, “I’ve been meaning to ask.”
“Yes?”
“Why that lute?”
“Ah,” he said, smiling what felt like a private smile.
“Do you play?” I asked.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I am intrigued by the lute as … how shall I say it? As an icon, perhaps. It is very feminine, as you pointed out. You know, in Flemish, the word for lute, luit, was also the word for a woman’s most tender sexual part. And in Venice, the courtesans carried the lute as a badge of their trade. Some of them were independently famous for their skill as players. And in my own country, there was a lovely woman poet, Louise Labé of Lyon, who wrote quite openly in the sixteenth century about desire and the power of sex, and one of her poems was to her lute. ‘Lut, compagnon de ma calamité, De mes soupirs témoin irreprochable, De mes ennuis controlleur véritable, Tu as souvent avec moy lamenté.’ Do you understand?”
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