Роберт Батлер - Fair Warning

"She hated Daddy by the time she was forty," I said.

"Calm down," Missy said. "Drink some green tea. It's like a sedative."

"And he hated her."

Missy looked away, her mouth tightened into a thin red line.

Okay. I felt guilty for rubbing this in. I'd arrived a couple of times myself at something like hatred for the man I was living with. In another era, I might have already gone ahead and married each of them-Max and Fred-and it would have been no different for me than for Mama.

I followed Missy's eyes across the room. She was looking at no one, she was just getting pissed with me, but there was a man leaning across a table for two touching the wrist of the woman he was with. He was talking quickly, ardently. I looked away, conscious of my own wrist. Whose gesture was that from my own life? Either Max or Fred. I twisted my mind away. Who cares which one? I thought. Whoever it was would say, Amy, Amy, Amy, you get so logical when you're angry. And yet the touch on my wrist meant he still thought I was a quaking bundle of nerves beneath the irrefutable points I'd been making against him. All he had to do was touch me there and he'd wipe the logic away and prevail. But no way, Mister. I never lost my logic in an argument, even though sometimes there were tears, as meaningless as getting wet for somebody you're just having sex with. I'm crying, I'd say to him, but don't you dare take it wrong, you son of a bitch. It was Max.

"I've got to go," my sister said, and I looked at her a little dazedly, I realized, and we both rose and we hugged and kissed on the cheek. We split the bill and my half of the tip was six dollars and twenty-five cents. I watched her gliding away out the door and then I stared at the money in my hand.

~

The auction business is built on the three Ds: debt, divorce, and death. The next morning Arthur Gray sat me down in his office with WQXR playing low in the background-some simpering generic baroque thing was going on-and he fluttered his eyebrows at me over the quarter of a million I'd gotten for the worst Renoir oil he'd ever seen and then he sent me off to an estate evaluation on Central Park West. The death of a reclusive woman who apparently had had an eye for Victoriana. Her only son would meet me.

The doorman had my name and I went up in an elevator that smelled faintly of Obsession and I rang the bell at the woman's apartment. And when the door swung open I found myself standing before Dark-Eyes.

I'm sure I let the creature beneath the auctioneer show her face in that moment: the little half smile that came over Dark-Eyes told me so. The smile was faintly patronizing, even. But I forgave him that. I was, after all, making myself a gawking fool at the moment. The smile also suggested, I realized, that he had requested me specifically for this evaluation. I focused on that thought, even as I put on my professional demeanor.

"I'm Amy Dickerson," I said. "Of Nichols and Gray."

He bowed faintly and he repeated my name. "Ms. Dickerson." He was a little older than I thought, from close up, and even handsomer. His cheekbones were high and his eyes were darker than I'd been able to see from the podium. "I'm Trevor Martin. Mrs. Edward Martin's son."

"I'm glad," I said, and to myself I said, What the hell does that mean? "To meet you," I added, though I fooled neither of us. I was glad he was here and I was here. The only thing I wasn't glad about was that his name was Trevor. It was a name made for a rainy climate, and spats.

"Come in," he said, and I did and I nearly staggered from the Victorian profusion of the place. The foyer was stuffed full: an umbrella stand and a grandfather clock and a stand-up coatrack and a dozen dark-framed hunting scenes and a gilt-wood-and-gesso mirror and a Gothic-style cupboard and a papier-mâché prie-dieu with shell-inlaid cherubs and a top rail of red velvet, and Trevor-I had to think of him as that now, at least till I could call him Dark-Eyes to his face-Trevor was moving ahead of me and I followed him into Mrs. Edward Martin's parlor-and my eyes could not hold still, there was such a welter of things, and I went from fainting bench to pump organ to the William Morris Strawberry Thief wallpaper-the walls were aswirl with vines and flowers and strawberries and speckled birds.

"I don't know where the smell of lilacs is coming from," he said.

I looked at him, not prepared for that cognitive leap. I looked back to a mantelpiece filled with parian porcelains of Shakespeare, General Gordon, Julius Caesar, Victoria herself threatening to fall from the edge where she'd been jostled by the crowd of other white busts.

"It's always in my clothes after I visit here."

"What's that?" I said, trying to gain control of my senses.

"The lilac. I never asked her where it came from, but now when I'm free to look, I can't find it."

"You must miss her," I said.

"Is that what I'm conveying?" His voice had gone flat.

I didn't even know myself why I'd jumped to that conclusion, much less expressed it. Maybe it was all her stuff around me. See me, love me, miss me, she was crying, I am so intricate and so ornamented that you can't help but do that. But Trevor clearly had seen her, and whether or not he'd loved her, I don't think he missed her much. Evidently he heard his own tone, because he smiled at me and he made his voice go so soft from what seemed like self-reflection that my hands grew itchy to touch him. "That must sound like an odd response," he said. "How could an only child not miss his mother?"

"I can think of ways."

He smiled again but this time at the room. He looked around. "Do you wonder if I grew up amidst all this?"

"Yes."

"I did."

"And you want to get rid of it."

His smile came back to me. He looked at me closely and he was no Trevor at all. "Every bit of it," he said.

~

That first day I sat at a bentwood table in the kitchen and he would bring me the things he could carry-a sterling silver biscuit box and a cut-glass decanter, a coach-lace coffee cozy and a silver-and-gold peacock pendant, and on and on-and I would make notes for the catalog description and I would give him an estimate and he never challenged a figure, never asked a question. At some point I realized it was past two and we ordered in Chinese and he had already rolled the sleeves on his pale green silk shirt and we ate together, me using chopsticks, him using a fork. In the center of the table sat a spring-driven tabletop horse-racing toy with eight painted lead horses with jockeys that circled a grooved wooden track. He had just put it before me when the doorbell rang with the food.

We ate in silence for a couple of minutes, a nice silence, I thought-we were comfortable enough with each other already that we didn't have to make small talk. Finally, though, I pointed to the toy and asked, "Was this yours?"

"Not really. It was around. I never played with it."

"Weren't you allowed?"

"How much will we get?" he said.

"Toys aren't a specialty of mine. I can only get you into the ballpark."

"Close enough."

"I think the estimate would be around three hundred dollars."

"And you'd work the bid up to six."

I looked at the row of jockeys. "We've got a couple of regulars who play the horses. And more than a couple are still kids at heart."

"You're scary sometimes, Amy Dickerson, what you can pick up in people." He was smiling the same smile I'd taken for self-reflection.

"This might be true," I said. I was up to my elbows here in mothers and children and my own mother thought the same thing about me, expecting all the good men in the world to be frightened away. Looking into Trevor's dark eyes I felt a twist of something in my chest that the cool and collected part of me recognized as panic.

"I mean that in an admiring way," he said.