It was Damon who maneuvered Chuck into line to feel up Shelly Riviera in the dark. She was wearing her band jacket and her frilled dickey with nothing underneath. Ominous tubas hung in dull cyclopean glints on the wall, waiting for concert season, when they would replace the cruder sousaphones.
Later Shelly told him he had been the politest boy to feel her up by far. He had been trying to channel the weary Bob of Cancel My Reservation.
A climactic scene of that movie involved the weaponizing of Eva Marie Saint’s leopard-skin bra. Much business occurred with the bra. The bra was important to the plot. Characters examined it, pulled and fondled it, discussed and fretted over it. What an awful coincidence. Later Chuck realized that life is nothing but an awful coincidence. Without being too obvious, he kept an eye on Donny, who seemed to thoroughly relish the bra scene with no sign of troubled reflections. Whatever had been wrong with him, Cancel My Reservation made Donny feel better.
6
The back wall of the auction house was a dark, creamy orange on which Bob Hope’s name was spelled out in sparkling golden paint with black accents.
Chuck was two hours early for the auction. Not many were so green. Only two of the folding chairs were occupied, to his surprise, by a heavy man in a neon pink Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a heavy woman wearing pajama pants and a surgical mask. For the first of many times, it was brought home to him with a thud that he was not Cary Grant in North by Northwest. He pegged a Christopher Hitchens lookalike with a parboiled face as serious competition, bent in mindful fury before the reception desk upon which his catalog was helplessly splayed. Even this man was dressed down, though his T-shirt was somber and advertised a highbrow museum exhibit.
Chuck had tried to dress up. He was in a blue velvet jacket with a loose string on the sleeve he couldn’t stop looking at but was too afraid to pull.
Feeling self-conscious, Chuck headed straight for the back corner, where a horribly ugly Leroy Neiman painting hung in waiting.
Shelly had loved Leroy Neiman. She had also become obsessed with tanning later on. He never figured out Shelly.
Neiman’s style made Chuck think of somebody weak trying to stab you to death.
Shelly liked this series Leroy Neiman had done for the Olympic Village, mostly showing athletes stretching and preening, but there was this one of a tiger crouched to spring with flashing eyes. “To fire them up,” Shelly said. She had bought a cheap print of it and hung it over their bed. “For inspiration,” she said.
The painting of Bob Hope was so godawful Chuck couldn’t stop looking at it. Was that an oak tree? Why was it purple? Did golf courses usually have huge old oak trees standing right next to the tee? Chuck didn’t know anything about golf. But where was that ball coming from, what physically impossible angle?
The worst was Bob Hope’s face.
Bob’s eyes had never been like that, so open and guileless. Neiman hadn’t even managed to get the nose right, a feat any boardwalk caricaturist could have achieved. The most fearful impact was reserved for the mouth. This Hope wore the smile of an insane idiot. It felt like Neiman thought he was doing Hope a favor, smoothing him out, redacting his guarded smile and replacing it with something more palatable for public consumption. He had edited Hope, bowdlerized him. It was an insult. Bob was a cool customer, and Neiman couldn’t understand it.
But it kept Chuck staring long enough that his outrage turned to something else. Maybe it was the fact that he had walked in just minutes ago and still felt fraudulent and out of his element. Maybe it was the pills. Chuck suddenly understood what Leroy Neiman was trying to get across: This is how happy Bob Hope felt playing golf. And it was all the more touching and humane for Neiman’s incompetence. Insight married to incompetence! The consolations of art!
Bob had lived for a century, but now he was just as stone dead as Shelly Riviera or poor Veda or Kurt Cobain. Life’s fleeting pleasures are the most important things, whispered the horrible Leroy Neiman painting of Bob Hope playing golf.
Chuck had left his catalog, for which he had paid one hundred dollars plus ten dollars shipping and handling, back in Atlanta. It was too bulky and awkward to carry on the plane. He found the real stuff in display cases lining the rooms of the auction house more compelling. Things he had flipped past on paper glowed at him now. He wanted to bust out Bob’s “Studio Del Campo Enameled Copper Dishes” and lick their deep colors like candy.
He searched unsuccessfully for Bob Hope’s ice bucket with the silver-plated polar bear on top. It was part of lot 21, the first thing he had marked down as a possible score — for himself or Donny, he couldn’t decide. He knew what he had to get Donny: the dusty Native American pot, possibly imitation, set atop a modernistic, sickly bulging metal pedestal that shone like a mirror. The pot and pedestal didn’t go together. Like Bob Hope and Eva Marie Saint! But they made it work by force. Chuck thought Donny would appreciate the tension. The pot had two handles that looked like squat, unsatisfied arms, hands on hips. It was a gruff dirt-colored pot with a lid like a frumpy hat. The plaque on the pedestal said, “From the Cast and Crew of CANCEL MY RESERVATION, 1971.”
Everything had a plaque on it. Give Bob Hope an oversized pewter boot for his birthday, make damned sure to weld a plaque to it. Bob Hope had so much stuff he needed plaques to keep everything straight. What a life.
Another ice bucket, a cunning red apple with an incomprehensible brass plate screwed on: “TO BOB HOPE WITH BOUNDLESS THANKS FOR MAKING LIGHTS ON THE BENEFIT IN THE BIG APPLE.” Making lights on the benefit? It had looked so nice in the catalog, ripe and polished plastic. In person it was a shabby apple, hardly able to support the mighty nonsense inscribed upon it.
Things that looked bad in the catalog looked good in real life, and vice versa. That was meaningful. Chuck had learned at least one important thing and there was still more than an hour to go before the auction started. He was never going to find that silver polar bear. It could have been in one of the cases behind the set of long, draped tables they were using as a phone and computer bank. Some workers were already there, blocking his view, getting set up to take phone bids and monitor the live online action. Chuck had seen it all.
What would Bob drink?
7
He strolled around Beverly Hills. It was too hot for his jacket but Chuck wanted to have class. Everything here was a clothes store. He saw a handbag the color and texture of a baby chick and thought of Shelly. The doors to one store opened as he walked past and a scent wafted out like the world’s biggest perfume ad in a ladies’ magazine. The window displays of Beverly Hills were freaky and oblique. Halved and mounted silver spheres. Looked like stuff you’d find in Bob Hope’s house. Bob was ahead of the times. He had so much acrylic furniture.