The Price of Inheritance

by Karin Tanabe

  Now, even when the art market, especially American decorative arts, was shaky, I was still managing to bring in big collections, and that was partially because my late grandfather was Marlin Everett, whose grandfather first came to Newport for the summers after his father made a pretty penny in New York working in steel manufacturing. He, along with Andrew Carnegie, was a key investor in the mass production of American steel through the Bessemer process, brought over from Britain. My grandmother, Virginia Everett, served as chair of the Red Cross Ball three times in a row. I liked to think it wasn’t the only reason I was at Christie’s, but I knew it helped. At all the major auction houses, your relationships mattered enormously. They cared about your last name, your mother’s maiden name, your parents’ bank accounts, how many millions your grandparents had, and where your biological tentacles reached all over the country. They asked you about private club memberships, university club memberships, and when they were done grilling you, they did it all again in French, and maybe Italian or Mandarin, too.

  Just before my first day of work, when I was deciding on which black dress out of fifteen nearly identical black dresses to wear, a family friend who had worked at Christie’s but had left to run a gallery put her hand on my shoulder, pointed to the plainest one, and said, “It’s not Vogue. It’s brain wars.” She sat down on my bed—thin, polished, a patrician profile and professionally straightened hair—and kicked off her Prada loafers. “People don’t collect bags; they collect foreign languages, dialects, degrees, and academic papers. They know everything about their collectors—their favorite foods, their birthdays, what perfume they wear, how their parents died, any diseases in the family that might kill them off and when. I can tell you the projected life expectancy for every cancer diagnosis. You have to know which collection could move when and be in front of it. At Princeton you were very smart, but at Christie’s you’ll feel awfully stupid. Good luck.” I had eaten three Sprinkles cupcakes and cried that night. And she had been right, in a way. Every person at Christie’s had gray matter for days. They argued in Russian, coaxed clients in Japanese, and did interviews for Le Monde while walking around the Met with former spies who were now premier experts on Fabergé eggs. But that wasn’t all. Your academic knowledge of art was impor­tant, but equally important was your ability to get close to the right people and schmooze. Some hated that reality, but I thrived on it. Except for right now.

  On my way home, I tried counting how many auctions I’d attended since I started at Christie’s. My department, American Furniture and Decorative Arts, was small, but going to auctions of any kind—numismatics, weaponry, wine, ceramics—was encouraged and I’d been slipping in and out of them for a decade. Auction day should no longer be intimidating, but when it was mine, it was—every single time.

  My professional integrity, and possibly my career, was on the line. If the desk didn’t make the guarantee, the sale would become known as the greatest missed opportunity our department had ever had. If it went past $12.1 million, it would be our most important sale in the past twenty years. I felt strangled by the pressure but there was nothing I could do now but chew handfuls of Klonopin, freebase espresso, and cry in the fetal position. The catalogues were printed, we’d shown the works, the sellers were ready to buy, and all I had to do was carry on getting dressed, dry my hair, finish putting on makeup, and pray for my anxiety to fade away. Holding on to the towel rack, I looked at myself in the mirror and flashed a big fake smile. Why were my teeth so small? I looked like someone who only ate candy and had rotted away her bicuspids. And my eyes were very brown, a unique shade of polluted swamp brown. I picked up my brush and straightener and ironed my blond hair to near perfection. My hair was long and extremely light, which was good for being spotted in a crowd or attracting men with a love of Renaissance fairs or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I once went out with a photographer who loved to take my picture and yell, “You’re so elfin! A woodland sprite goddess!” He didn’t seem to mind that my coloring was Children of the Corn, and neither did anyone at Christie’s. I did everything that I could to stand out, to be memorable, the one people called when they wanted to break records. I’d even had a perfume mixed by the most famous nose in Grasse, which was partially made from ground money in several global currencies. “You will actually be wearing the smell of money,” he’d announced, and I’d been spraying it on religiously for a decade. Some might call it over-the-top; my boss deemed it ingenious.

  •••

  Twenty Rockefeller Plaza: the intimidating address where Christie’s has ruled the auction world since it moved out of its smaller Park Avenue offices in 1997. My workday, getting ready for the evening sale, was going to be hell. But at least hell was located in a very nice building. At first, I had trouble associating Rockefeller Plaza with anything but ice-skating in December and the country’s best Christmas tree, but after I first walked into the Christie’s office in 2004, a nervous college intern, Rockefeller Plaza would mean nothing to me but Christie’s. I was destined to become one of those high-powered, brilliant women who threw out words like “figural marquetry techniques” before heading off with my fellow artistic geniuses to the Waldorf Astoria to drink highballs and discuss the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. “It’s awfully awful!” I’d say before handfuls of millionaires stopped by our table for fashionable tête-à-têtes.

  “Good evening, Carolyn. Happy Chippendale Day,” John, the building’s head of security, whispered to me with a smile as I finally made my way from our offices to the auction room, checked in, and tried not to faint directly into his arms.

  “Yes! It’s going to be exciting,” I said, unbuttoning my blazer.

  “You’ll be fine and it will be exciting,” John replied, and I tried to smile in agreement. He was right, it would be exciting, because I was going to die. “It was art that killed her,” they’d declare before speedily donating all my organs to people with apartments full of West Elm bookcases.

  Deciding not to check in with our chairman, but go straight to the auction, I walked inside and headed for the very back, where it was standing room only. My colleague Nicole Grant, a direct descendant of Ulysses S. Grant and junior specialist in American furniture, was already there, leaning nervously against the wall. She waved me over with a polite twist of her thin wrist.

  “Carolyn, it’s time,” she whispered as I made my way through the crowd. “Your crowning moment! You look beautiful. Like you’re made of snowflakes. Are you nervous? Don’t be nervous, because I’m nervous for you. I’ve been scoping the crowd for half an hour and there are some major players here. Victor Wong. Peter Rensselaer from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I think I saw Bridget Donahue, too. How come you didn’t come down early?”

  “Because I would have marched up to every single person and demanded to know their net worth. I am not sane right now. I can’t be trusted in a public place.”

  Nicole smiled supportively.

  “I think you’ll at least match. Twelve-point-one million.”

  “You know I can’t have it just match,” I said, trying to keep from shrieking. Nicole was the most junior person in our small department but she understood the stakes. If the price for the Chippendale didn’t exceed its previous selling price of $12.1 million, my brilliant moment would be stained forever with the words “Americana worth nothing. Sell immediately. Economic downturn proves fatal. Carolyn Everett to blame. Will be beheaded at dawn.” And all those trips trying to rationalize with a very eccentric seller would be for naught. Though we’d been preparing this auction for months, each lot would get only thirty seconds to five minutes of bidding time—an exceptionally short amount of time for someone to spend $12.2 million—and the whole evening sale would last just over two hours.

  I stood motionless next to Nicole as the remaining potential bidders filed into the room. The noise of the crowd swelled as we approached the start of the auction—the chatter and air kisses, the adrenal
ine increasing everyone’s pulse. The first lot of the day, a sideboard built in Newport by the school of Thomas Howard Jr., went on the auction block and Nicole and I listened as the lower-dollar bids rose past the reserve and then finally neared an end. We always packed the front of an auction with some of the more valuable pieces, then moved to lower-priced objects before the high-dollar pieces. The prices rose and fell like a heart monitor, but you had to warm people up and get them ready to empty their wallets with a little help from the civilized thrill of the chase.

  One more sideboard, an end table, three desks, and two sets of priceless side chairs, which suddenly had prices, were sold. Eight lots down, twenty-one left, but suddenly no one cared about anything except the Super Bowl of American decorative arts, Lot 30.

  The esteemed Olivier Burnell was calling the auction, something he’d been doing for Christie’s for the last twenty-three years. I half listened to him as he finished Lot 29, and then I sucked in my breath and held on to Nicole’s wrist for support as he announced either the apex or downfall of my career, lot number 30.

  “Lot number thirty is the Nicholas Brown Chippendale. The Mahogany Block-and-Shell Carved Desk-and-Bookcase,” he said calmly, his perfect British accent pronouncing each word as precisely as a translator. “Showing on your far right and as described and illustrated in your catalogues. Lot thirty,” he repeated. Without pausing for breath, he started the bidding.

  “Now five million dollars to start. Five million. Five million dollars.” I crossed my legs so tight that my right ankle started to seize and I accidentally kicked a bald man in front of me so hard that he jumped up like he’d been launched out of a cannon. Olivier almost mistook him for a bidder. “So sorry,” I muttered quietly just as the auctioneer’s voice rose and sped up like a posh version of a man selling a pig at a county fair.

  “Five million five hundred thousand . . . six million now. Six million dollars . . . six million five hundred thousand. Against you here at six million five hundred thousand . . . now seven million dollars. In a new place with Michael now.”

  Olivier pointed to one of the Christie’s employees taking phone bids on the far right-hand side of the room.

  “The gentleman in the center. Now on this telephone here. Now in the room, this side,” said Olivier, pointing. “New bidder now in the room at eight million five hundred thousand, against the telephones now, gentleman’s bid here,” he said, moving his eyes expertly across the crowd.

  “Against you Agnes now,” he said, looking toward the phones at one of our Russian speakers, who was covering her mouth with paper to make her conversation totally anonymous.

  “In the saleroom, and against you here,” said Olivier as Agnes’s bidder kept going against the room. “Now yours here up front at eight million five hundred thousand,” said Olivier as the bids sailed past $9 million.

  Olivier swept his arm across the space where two different men in the center left of the room were bidding. Another phone bidder went up with a colleague who spoke Mandarin, and then the bids moved quickly back to the crowd. While some governments had strict laws about keeping their country’s heirlooms at home, the United States didn’t care. If you had money, you could buy our stuff and take it out of the country, even if you lived in Sichuan Province.

  “In the room now at nine million five hundred thousand dollars,” Olivier declared quickly, scanning for new hands. I needed just three million more. A tiny, paltry little three million. I closed my eyes, praying that when I opened them a passionate billionaire with five black AmEx cards and tears of joy in his eyes would appear and announce his love for eighteenth-century American furniture. Instead, I opened my eyes and felt like I’d developed cataracts. Nicole looked at me like I was taking my final breaths.

  “Are you okay?” she said, leaning over and gripping my right hand. “Are you always this hot?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. Poor circulation due to childhood illness. Polio,” I whispered back.

  “You had polio?” she said, clearly imagining my painful childhood spent as a clone of FDR.

  “Sorry, not polio, I meant pox. Like chicken. Chicken pox.”

  My tongue now had a mind of its own. Next I was going to declare myself the illegitimate ruler of France. I felt one step away from a supersonic meltdown. And, as Nicole soon pointed out, a real problem with hives.

  “You look like you have enormous hickeys all over your face,” she said, physically recoiling.

  “I know, I know,” I said, reaching in my bag and taking out my foundation. “It will go down as soon as this auction’s over.” I opened my purse again and popped three Benadryl and did a few of the breathing exercises that I’d learned in my Virgin Airlines Flying Without Fear class during a work weekend in London. When I’d paid the £300, the teacher said I would learn lessons to carry me through all the stages of life, and he was right. Now was I supposed to hold my breath and puff up like a bird? Or was it slow and rhythmic stomach breathing? I tried both and the result made me gasp for air like a scuba diver with the bends. Nicole grabbed my hand again and I began to calm down and itch less, but it all started again when Olivier reached $10 million, and there was silence in the room.

  I held my breath until Michael’s phone bidder bit on the bid.

  “Raise your hands, raise your hands!” I quietly pleaded to everyone in the room as the bids went just past $11 million. I needed to shatter records. I wanted my name in the papers and on the pages of Art in America. I’d even had a new head shot taken last week by one of Annie Leibovitz’s minions.

  The Chippendale had to break $12.1 million, a sum so insanely high that I didn’t actually grasp what it meant. Except that at minimum wage, you had to work for more than 1,600,000 hours to have enough money to buy it, which is about sixteen lifetimes.

  Olivier’s voice coming from his elegant form behind the rostrum snapped me back into the present and I touched my face to make sure my hives were still covered by my industrial-strength foundation. I heard $11 million from the phones, then $11.3 million in the room. When $11.5 million rose to $11.9 million, I froze.

  Without showing any trace of emotion, Olivier said, “Did I hear twelve million?”

  Did he? Was someone bidding twelve? It was Michael’s phone bidder. I wanted to leap over to him, steal the phone, and pledge all my white blood cells, future children, and savings bonds to that person. But I still needed it to climb.

  “Twelve-point-one, please,” I silently begged. Someone! Bill Gates! The Zuckerberg man-child. A corrupt Vatican official. Kanye West. Anyone! I needed some heavy testosterone and ego proving to start pumping through the air.

  And then, as the sweat from my palm actually dripped onto my gray dress, someone did. I saw it, from the left corner of my eye. Paddle 79 went up and no one gasped.

  “Twelve million one hundred thousand from the gentleman in the middle,” said Olivier, looking at a man who had dropped out until now. Michael flicked his hand up, the arm of his suit falling ever so slightly.

  “Michael, yours now on the phones for twelve million two hundred thousand,” said Olivier. He quickly took the bid up by another one hundred thousand. The man in the center of the room in the navy suit with silver hair lifted his paddle again and Olivier declared, “Here in the room at twelve million three hundred thousand.”

  The bidding had just hit $12.3 million, then $12.4 million, and a second later, $12.5 million. I looked out at the sea of white hair, the bald spots, and the slightly hunched shoulders in yards of Madison Avenue tailoring, and got ready for my heart to explode. Olivier looked to the phones again but Michael’s bidder had backed off. Olivier scanned the room quickly and then declared to the former bidders, “Not yours, or yours, Michael, but here in the room at twelve million five hundred thousand dollars.” Olivier pointed again at the phones for one last second and declared, “Selling this time at twelve million five hundred thousand.”<
br />
  The gavel went down and Olivier repeated, with a flick of his pen scribbling the bidder number on the thick Christie’s embossed paper in front of him, “Hammer price of twelve million five hundred thousand.” The crowd clapped, the price flashed on the large screen to his left in several different currencies, and Olivier got ready for the next sale, making no indication that he, with a lot of help from me, had just completed the highest sale for a piece of American furniture ever.

  Nicole put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed as tightly as she could and we didn’t say a word, which was good because I didn’t know what to say. I was barely ­twenty-nine years old and professionally I would never top this moment. Everything I’d done to make this happen was suddenly worth it.

  I stood through the last lots with Nicole, unable to react, unable to do more than smile and watch Olivier do his job, until the last table sold and Nicole steered me out the door to the auction prep room, where I was greeted with dignified cheers, hugs from everyone in our department, and a handshake from Christie’s CEO, Dominick Swansea.

  “We have to celebrate,” declared Nicole as we walked out of the room an hour later with our two American Furniture and Decorative Arts colleagues. It was just past 8 P.M. and I had never been happier. Not when I lost my virginity to the cutest sixteen-year-old in Newport, when I graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, or when I’d been asked to do an appraisal on Antiques Roadshow. This was my moment. I had antihistamines coursing through my veins, burn victim makeup on my face, and beads of sweat evaporating on my neck, but none of that mattered now.

  “You just changed the course of the entire auction world,” Nicole continued. “No one ever thought a piece of American furniture could hit the twelve and a half million mark, even the Nicholas Brown, but it just happened. And you helped make it happen. Everyone thinks you’re the best and you just proved them right. It’s time to raise a glass, or five, to your success.”