by Karin Tanabe
It was? Of course it was. We walked outside, through Rockefeller Center, taking in the fresh night breeze. It was September in New York and the air was filled with the last traces of summer. I inhaled deeply, something I hadn’t done for six months, and felt like everything in my life was going right. Better than right, it was perfect. Sure, I was technically single but occasionally sleeping with Alex, my ex-boyfriend from boarding school who was only balding on his left side, and both my parents had actually called me by the wrong name last week, even though I’m an only child, but all that seemed completely irrelevant now. I’d get Alex some Rogaine and buy my parents a few bottles of ginkgo biloba. I, with a little help from a 250-year-old company, had just gotten someone to spend $12,500,000 on a desk.
CHAPTER 2
I didn’t head home after celebrating that night. Instead, I went downtown to Alex’s apartment on Lafayette Street. He had one of those super-fancy elevators that drops you in the middle of the living room and his doorman knew me, so he didn’t have to come to the door to let me in. I walked into his place, took off my shoes, and let my cold feet touch the shaggy white rug that sat like a docile animal under his coffee table.
I was about to wrap it around myself when my phone started to buzz in my pocket. I reached into my coat and smiled when I saw Jane Dalby’s name on my screen. Of course she was the first to call and congratulate me, because the Dalbys were first at everything.
During my childhood in Newport, the Dalby family lived in the much larger house, the parent house to my family’s carriage house, on Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s most famous street. “Dalby in miniature,” my grandmother used to say of our house, but it was more like Dalby in minuscule. Like most of Newport, they spent much of the year outside of Rhode Island (in the Dalbys’ case it was in Boston, overlooking the Charles), but from June to August and many weekends on either end, they were in Newport. There were two Dalby girls, very pretty and smart, with thick brown hair with blond streaks framing their faces and Irish Catholic roots. I went to Princeton with Jane, though she was a year above me, and her sister, Brittan, was a freshman when I was a junior. I told my parents I went to Princeton because they were alumni, but it was really because Jane was there. I could leave Rhode Island, but there was no way I was leaving the Dalbys.
I pressed accept on my phone and Jane’s voice pulled me out of my reminiscing.
“You did it, Carolyn! I just heard!” Jane screamed into the phone from her palatial house in Newport. This year, she was spending the winter there with her husband, Carter, and a partially blind Labrador who won best in breed at Westminster a decade ago.
“You were so worried, but I was right, of course.”
I smiled. She was right. Just like she’d been right when she said I should dump that prick Chris Walters at Princeton because he was cheating on me with a slutty cross-country runner who ate breakfast in a sports bra and when she said I shouldn’t dye my hair red because I would look like a lost Irish dancer.
“Are you thrilled? You better be.”
“I am happy,” I said, laughing. And I was.
“What did Alex say?” Jane asked. She had gone to high school with us, too, and we’d boarded in the same dorm for the three years we had overlapped at St. George’s. I was one of two kids who lived in Newport year-round who boarded. Alex was the other.
“I haven’t told him yet,” I admitted, not disclosing that I was currently doing snow angels on his rug.
“But I did have a big celebratory dinner with my colleagues and I even got a text from my mom that was three whole sentences long.”
“Amazing!” said Jane, knowing full well that from my mother, not exactly a verbose or supportive woman, that was equivalent to a ten-page letter, salty tears, and a dozen roses.
“Now go wake up Alex and tell him the news. He’ll flip. Love you, and congrats,” Jane said before hanging up the phone. I missed having a house full of Dalbys next door.
I put my phone and keys on the table, took my blazer off, hung it in the hall closet, and walked over to the bedroom. Alex was covered in blankets and I could only see a few strands of hair sticking up from under the quilt, refusing to be hidden with the rest of him.
I took my clothes off, folded them, put them on the leather armchair next to the bed, and got in next to him. He didn’t budge. It wasn’t until I put my arms around him and started tugging at his thick chest hair that he woke up.
“Alex. Alex . . . ,” I whispered, trying to get him to look at me. “It sold for twelve million five hundred thousand dollars. We broke the record for a single piece of American furniture. I’m so relieved. I can’t even explain it. I can finally take a deep breath again. There is oxygen left despite what I kept telling you about fraudulent science and our impending doom. All those nights chewing my nails—my hands really—until my fingers looked like strips of bacon. It was all worth it. I was terrified, but it actually happened. Twelve five. I’m in shock. But happy shock.”
Without turning around, Alex kept his eyes closed and mumbled, “I’m so happy for you,” then fell immediately back to sleep. I wasn’t going to try to wake him up again. His snores, which sounded a little fake, signaled he was in deep hibernation, but I wasn’t about to sleep. So he didn’t have a marching band to congratulate me. Or even a hug. Anything really except some garbled sleep talk, which I forced out of him. I wasn’t the kind of person who needed her ego stroked and handed enormous gold trophies and monogrammed cakes. But still, a little congratulatory screaming and fainting with pride would have been nice. I grabbed his iPad from his nightstand and googled “Nicholas Brown Chippendale.” It was already on Twitter and the important art blogs. I knew that on Sunday, it would be somewhere in the New York Times Arts section. I would scrapbook it, laminate it, and possibly sleep with it under my pillow for the next decade.
The next evening was Saturday, and quickly noticing that I was a tad pissed by his nonreaction to my big life-changing news the night before, Alex promised to take me to a celebratory dinner at my favorite restaurant in New York, Daniel, on East Sixty-Fifth Street.
During our first few years in New York, Alex and I tried hard not to be together. He had dated a series of emaciated blondes who worked in marketing or magazines and he found them all fascinating. Or so he would always tell me when I’d run into him with someone I was considering dating. But no one ever really stuck besides me, and vice versa. We’d try dating the right people, spending a few months imagining them as our better halves, and then call each other after we realized they weren’t up for the challenge. Even when we weren’t officially together, Alex was always there for me as the essential New York plus-one, or if I just wanted a warm bed to sleep in, with clothes on or off. Were we crazy about each other, or were we just used to each other? It was a question I thought about a lot, but it didn’t keep me from calling him in the middle of the night, wandering to his house when I’d had too much to drink, or opening my door for him when one of his dates got a little too excited about his parents’ money. “State school gold digger,” he’d say pouring himself a scotch, which he’d brought with him. Sometimes I chided him, sometimes I ignored him, and other times I went to bed with him because it was what I’d been doing since high school. We had ease, and that often mattered more to me than romance.
When Alex came up, he gave me a kiss and an Edible Arrangement, which I much prefer to flowers because flowers are just elegant vessels for bugs to enter your home and stay forever. I once had giant red ants invade my kitchen and I swear they rode in on a large, comfortable sunflower.
I was happy. Happier than I’d been in months, years maybe. When we were outside, I started to do an adult version of skipping down the sidewalk. I had energy, life, joie de vivre.
“What are you doing?” said Alex, speeding up to keep up with me, his stiff brown leather dress shoes creasing slightly at the toe.
“I’m walk jumping,” I
explained between bops along the sidewalk.
“Good Lord,” said Alex, clearly still entrenched in his conservative New England ways. “Isn’t there some ADD medicine you can take?”
The thing about Alex was that he wasn’t exactly comedian funny. Or funny at all. Actually, I once presented him with a drawing of a funny bone and suggested that he have it inserted by a doctor. He did not heed my advice. But he was very successful, was kind when no one was looking, and was incredibly sexy. Take-your-underwear-off-with-his-teeth sexy. We’d met when we were fourteen, when we were both at freshman orientation for boarders at St. George’s. Though we’d grown up in Newport, we didn’t know each other until we went to school together. Alex had kissed me three weeks into the year and declared that I looked like a fragile rose. That won me over a little and when he whispered in my ear that his mission in life was to give me an orgasm, that won me over entirely.
It’s not that Alex didn’t like going a little bit crazy. He did. We were once reprimanded in Vegas for jumping into a lazy river while wearing wooden shoes after a “going Dutch” party. But sometimes he didn’t like my extremes. My nerves around auction time, my need to be very successful at everything I gave a morsel of energy to. I knew he wanted me to be steadier, more stable, just like him and his emotionless family.
I looked at Alex, still so perfectly handsome. His skin and his hair and his eyes all matched, almost an identical golden taupe, which didn’t make him striking, but he was very good-looking without the shock value. He was a bulky six feet tall with muscles that refused to be well defined but were somewhere under there. He ran track in high school and college and told me he always liked sports better when you didn’t have to rely on idiots. “I’m not a team player,” he’d once said after he won the 400-meter dash. “That’s why I always win.” He was pleased with the way he looked, and the haughty way he acted, and so was everyone else, including me.
When we got to Daniel we both forgot that he actually wanted a different version of me, the me that existed before I had my dream job, before I understood what real pressure was. Instead we ate, talked about people we knew from home, and kept floating down the line of shared experiences. We would always be connected because of school, because of Newport and falling in love there when we were very young, and for now, that was good enough.
After dinner, Alex suggested that we go back to his apartment, take off our underwear, and drink heavily. I thought that sounded like an exceedingly good idea. It took us a few minutes to grab a cab and I hid my face in Alex’s navy blue blazer, letting the soft material rub against my made-up face.
“After you, star of the art world,” he said, opening the cab door for me; I swooned just a little as the air caught his brown curls and they fell across his forehead. Well, on the right side of his face, anyway.
“Star, you say?” I asked him, trying to keep the conversation on the topic of my life-changing accomplishment. “So you’re proud of me, then?”
“You sold a twelve-and-a-half-million-dollar table,” said Alex, whistling under his breath. “And frankly, it’s not even attractive. I’m impressed. You should be a criminal. People will buy and sell anything when they see that angelic face,” he said, squeezing my cheeks like a lemon.
Maybe he could tell I was annoyed by his comment and he wanted me to calm down, or maybe he just knew how to turn me on after fifteen years of turning me on, but he put his lips next to my ear and said, “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I want you naked for the next twelve hours.” The cabdriver was thrilled to get rid of us.
When I woke up for work that Monday, I was ready for compliments and cheers at the office, but instead I got a call from Louise DeWitt, department head of American Furniture and Decorative Arts, at 6 A.M. sharp. She demanded that I meet her for coffee in thirty-five minutes and that I better have a bag packed because her assistant had just booked me a flight to Texas and I might have to stay for a few days. I didn’t ask any questions. I assumed that someone very rich who had important pieces of American furniture had just died. I packed a bag full of completely impractical items and jumped in a cab to the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue.
Louise had on a brown, asymmetrically cut blazer and so much jewelry I was surprised her head wasn’t weighed down. She looked like a beautiful giraffe wearing necklaces. “Carolyn, here I am!” she called out, waving both her hands, though it was perfectly clear to both of us that I could see her. Louise was in her late fifties, but she carried her age beautifully, like a woman who had always been told she was attractive, and always would be, even when the words “for your age” were tacked on to the end of the compliment.
“Thank goodness you found me,” she said, patting the seat next to her. “This place! It’s so crowded.” I had an odd feeling that this was Louise’s first trip to Starbucks, but I just smiled and murmured something about the chain being somewhat popular with New Yorkers between the ages of .001 and 110.
“I took the liberty of ordering you three coffees.” Louise informed me that none of them were decaf because decaf was for people who lived in California and ate grass. “I like what you’re wearing,” she said, eyeing me approvingly. I was wearing an outfit that I called “expensive shades of beige.” Every ensemble in my closet bore a descriptive label: “deal-making black dress tailored in Rome, the Chanel that New Englanders like, the St. John for deals with southerners, backless shirt to wear with clients under forty.” I made a mental note that Louise liked the beige.
“Carolyn Everett. A beautiful blade of wheat. That’s what you look like.” She took a sip of her coffee and looked at me with her deep-set eyes. “Did you get the plane ticket emailed to you?” She started flipping through a leather file that she’d placed in the middle of the table.
“Yes, a few minutes ago. Houston, eleven A.M. I got it, it looks great, but I’d love to know why exactly I’m going to Texas today.” I didn’t ask why there wasn’t a return flight booked.
“I figured you might!” said Louise, snapping her fingers rhythmically. “Two words. And try not to faint when I say them.”
She paused for what seemed like a full year of my life before eventually whispering a name I thought I’d never hear.
“Elizabeth Tumlinson.”
Elizabeth Tumlinson. I immediately felt faint.
“Elizabeth Tumlinson is thinking about selling her estate? Through us?” I asked incredulously.
“Right you are!” said Louise, lifting her espresso in triumph.
Elizabeth and her late husband, Adam Tumlinson, had the best collection of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American furniture in the country. Adam had made most of his money by being born to the right parents, early real estate moguls on Maryland’s eastern shore, and he’d padded it out nicely by being one of the first to see the potential in Baltimore’s many dilapidated warehouses. He flipped the old buildings into ultramodern lofts bought up by Johns Hopkins doctors. The Tumlinsons lived for many years between St. Michaels, Maryland, and the Roland Park historic district of Baltimore, then moved to Texas, where they solidified their status as the top Americana collectors. When Adam Tumlinson died last fall, my department started courting Elizabeth like she was debutante of the year. But she told us, and we knew she’d told Sotheby’s, too, that she wouldn’t think about selling even a sliver of her collection while she was still breathing and we’d have to move on from courting her to wooing her children after she passed away.
“Wait. Are you sending me to value the estate of Elizabeth Tumlinson?” I asked in disbelief. Louise couldn’t just be sending me. She never sent just one person from our team to assess an important estate. I was sure she must be coming, too. Unless Louise was having open-heart surgery at the Starbucks, there was no way she would send someone in her stead to meet with Elizabeth Tumlinson.
“I’m not sending you just to value it. I’m sending you to acquire it as
fast as you can. Nicole will be going, too,” she said, reading my mind, and noting that Nicole would meet me in Houston since she was currently in Washington, D.C., looking at an early nineteenth-century Hugh Finlay table. Why would Louise send Nicole and me? We were the two most junior members and she was the department head. Surely she wanted to meet with Elizabeth and explain that Sotheby’s was a bunch of cocaine addicts who would take a 99 percent commission.
“You need to work on your poker face,” said Louise as I pulled my hand away from my mouth.
“You want to know why I’m sending you and Nicole and why I’m not going myself,” Louise offered up, pushing another coffee in my direction. Heat and speed were the last things I needed, but I drank it anyway, afraid that Louise would change her mind about my trip if I couldn’t drink two grande coffees in ten minutes.
“I suppose I’m wondering a little.” What a lie. This was more interesting than Bigfoot or the Shroud of Turin.
“She requested you. She somehow knew—and liked—your grandmother. She knew her in Baltimore, I believe. Did your grandmother live in Baltimore?”
She knew my grandmother? How had I not figured that out? I had gone through my grandmother’s address book eight times when I first started at Christie’s, contacting everyone who might have some American-made object to sell, but I had never seen the Tumlinsons’ name. I took immense pride in always knowing a connection before Louise did. When Adam Tumlinson died, I was aware of his death before the obits were written, before the body was even cold, thanks to a doctor I knew in Texas. Louise had been the one who contacted Elizabeth, but she had been mighty impressed by my ability to hear about the death even before close family members.