Роберт Батлер - Fair Warning

"Sixty from Mr. Gibbons," I said, thinking, If she is his type, then I'm shit out of luck. All my life I've been in desperate pursuit of exactly the wrong kind of butt.

And sure enough, Dark-Eyes bid seventy. I was happy for womanhood in general, I guess, if this were true, that men were coming back around to desiring the likes of this plumped-up pillow of a young woman but I was sad for me and I looked over my shoulder at her and my auctioneer self said, "Isn't she beautiful?" and my voice betrayed no malice.

John Paul took it to eighty and Dark-Eyes took it to ninety while I paused inside and grew sharp with myself. You've become a desperate and pathetic figure, Amy Dickerson, growing jealous over a stranger's interest in the image of a naked butterball. "Ninety-five to the book," I said.

And there was a brief pause.

I swung back to John Paul. A man like this-how many times had he merely seen a woman across a room and he knew he had to get closer to her, had to woo and bed her if he could? Was I suddenly like him? "A hundred? Can you give me a hundred? No way you people are going to let a Renoir go for five figures. You'd be embarrassed to let that happen."

John Paul raised his paddle. "A hundred thousand to John Paul Gibbons."

The bid had run past the order bid in my book and a basic rule for an auctioneer is to play only two bidders at a time. But I didn't want to look at Dark-Eyes again. I should have gone back to him, but if he had a thing for this woman who looked so unlike me, then to hell with him, he didn't deserve it. If he was bidding for it-and this thought made me grow warm again-if he was bidding for it merely out of his responsiveness to me, then I didn't want him to waste his money on a second-rate piece. "One ten?" I said, and I raised my eyes here on the right side and another paddle went up, about halfway back, a woman who lived on Park Avenue with a house full of Impressionists and a husband twice her age. "One ten to Mrs. Fielding on the right."

She and John Paul moved it up in a few moments to the estimate, one forty. There was another little lull. I said, "It's against you, Mrs. Fielding." Still she hesitated. I should turn to my left, I knew. Dark-Eyes could be waiting to give a bid. But instead I went for all the other Mrs. Fieldings. I raised my hand toward the painting, which sat on an easel behind me and to my left. My auctioneer self said, "Doesn't she look like that brief glimpse you had of your dearest aunt at her bath when you were a girl? Or even your dear mama? Her essence is here before you, a great work of art." But the other me, with this left arm lifted, thought-for the first time ever from this podium, because I was always a cool character in this place, always fresh and cool-this other me that had gone quite inexplicably mad thought, My God what if I'm sweating and he's looking at a great dark moon beneath my arm?

This man had gotten to me from the start, unquestionably, and this thought snaps me back to the trendiest Italian restaurant in Manhattan, where I sit now waiting for my pasta. There are impulsive attractions that make you feel like you're in control of your life somehow-here's something I want, even superficially, and I'm free to grab it. Then there are the impulsive attractions that only remind you how freedom is a fake. You might be free to pursue your desires, but you're never free to choose them.

And I had no choice that morning. I lowered my arm abruptly in spite of the fact I hadn't sweat from nerves since I was sixteen. But I'd already made my selling point. I'd stoked the desire of others and Mrs. Fielding took up the pursuit, as did another wealthy woman for a few bids and then another-I played them two at a time-and then it was one of the monied women against a little man who dealt in art in the Village and should have known better about this piece, which made me wonder if he'd had a life-changing glimpse of his corpulent mama at her bath, but that was the kind of thing my auctioneer self rightly ruminated on during the rush of the bidding and I had more or less put Dark-Eyes out of my mind and we climbed over a quarter of a million and my boss was beaming in the back of the room and then it stopped, with the little man holding a bid of $260,000. "It's against you," I said to the woman still in the bidding. She shook her head faintly to say she was out of it.

There is a moment that comes when you've done your work well when the whole room finally and abruptly goes, What the hell are we doing? I knew we had reached that moment. But I would have to look back to my left before I could I push on to a conclusion.

"Two sixty," I said. "Do I hear two seventy? Two seventy for your sweet Aunt Isabelle? Two sixty then. Fair warning."

Now I looked to him.

His eyes were fixed on me as before and then he smiled, and the unflappable Amy Dickerson, master auctioneer, suddenly flapped. I lost the flow of my words and I stopped. It seemed that he was about to raise his paddle. Don't do it, I thought, trying to send a warning to him across this space. I wrenched my attention away and cried, "Sold! For two hundred and sixty thousand dollars."

I normally use the lull after the gavel, while the lot just sold is taken away and the next one set up, to assess certain buyers that I've learned to read. One woman who sits perfectly still through the bidding for items she has no interest in will suddenly start shuffling her feet when something she wants is about to come up. Another starts smoothing her hair. One distinguished retired surgeon, who always wears a vest, will lift up slightly from where he's sitting, first one cheek and then the other, as if he's passing a perfect pair of farts. But on that morning I was still struggling with an unreasonable obsession. I thought of nothing but this complete stranger and I finally realized that the only way to exorcise this feeling was to confront it, but when at last I worked up the courage to look once more to my left, Dark-Eyes had gone.

~

"I was relieved," I told my sister the next day at a sushi lunch. "But damn if I wasn't wildly disappointed as well."

"So?"

"So? There sat a man like John Paul Gibbons and I'm suddenly acting like his dark twin sister."

"Is John Paul still after you?"

"You're missing the point," I said.

She shrugged. "I don't think so. You're forty, Amy. You're single. It's hormones and lifestyle."

"Yow," I cried.

"Did you get some wasabi up your nose?"

In fact I was merely thinking, If you hadn't gone back for your dolls and your clothes I wouldn't be sitting here with you once a week out of familial devotion listening to your complacent hardness of heart. Though I realized, trying to be honest with myself, that my alternative today-and most days-was eating lunch on my own, bolting my food, avoiding the company of men who bored me, a list that got longer every day, it seemed. I resented her stumbling onto a half-truth about me and so I leaned toward her and said, "You're thirty-six yourself. You haven't got much longer to be smug."

"That reminds me," Missy said. "Jeff mentioned he saw a poster up in Southampton for the charity auction you're doing."

"How does what I said remind you of that?" I put as much muscle in my voice as I could, but she looked at me as if I'd simply belched. She wasn't going to answer. She had no answer. I knew the answer: her loving husband was her shield against turning forty. Right. Maybe.

"Mama said she hoped you'd call sometime," Missy said.

I was still following the track under Missy's surface. Mama-still living on a street with a gate in Houston-thought that a beautiful woman like me, as she put it, was either stupid or a lesbian not to have been married when I hit forty. And she knew, as God was her witness, that I wasn't a lesbian.