Chuck imagined Bob drinking Campari and soda with Richard Nixon. He passed a vegetarian sandwich shop wedged into a corner and, some minutes later, a stray juice bar. Chuck was on the wrong street for booze.
He took some turns to a promising joint with weird architecture, winding and white. It was shaped like a corkscrew, or the famous California ghost house with the hallways that shrank and the stairways to nowhere. Inside was white too. Good, there was a bar along the back. A notable percentage of the lunch crowd consisted of strenuously tanned old men in the company of much younger women.
There was no bartender. Chuck sat at the empty white bar and checked out the shining bottles. Sparse and standard. This was not a place where people went for serious drinking. There were a couple of okay gins. A tattooed gal in a black tank top showed up to help him. He could tell she wasn’t a bartender. She seemed to be juggling the whole place, “in the weeds,” a phrase he knew from Shelly. He heard Shelly’s voice saying it. Unlike Shelly, this young woman had never heard of a martini.
“You mean an apple martini?” she said. It seemed like a dated reference for one of her tender years. Chuck explained about gin.
The old man at the two-top behind him was telling his would-be starlet about roughage. “You don’t need it; you’re skinny,” he said to her. Next thing you know, he was really doing that classic old chestnut about starting out in the mailroom, the one where his spunk got him into the office of the studio chief.
In the corner, alone, on a white leather banquette, a “faded beauty” was talking to herself.
Chuck felt kind of thrilled. But the server took the unopened bottle of gin somewhere out of sight. To secretly ask her manager how to make a martini? Chuck watched signs of frost vanishing from the waiting martini glass she had produced and abandoned.
He occupied himself considering the stem. Stems were different in California. This one was like two stems that arched away from one another, then joined at the top, leaving an ovular sliver in the middle. It was such an intelligent glass, but nobody knew how to pour a martini into it. The night before, he had downed a subpar, sticky-sweet Manhattan in the lobby bar of his hotel, and the stem had been like a prank you’d order from a comic book, curving away from the hand of the drinker, so you’d grab for it and it wouldn’t be there. Your drink was floating in air with a breath of magic it didn’t deserve. Were these stems a metaphor?
After a while Chuck left a fiver on the bar. He wasn’t robbing her of trade. No one had been waiting for his barstool. But he left the money anyway because it was what Shelly would have done. Shelly was always kind to others whose position she had shared. She was always kind, period. Think of all those boys she had let feel her up. She had picked herself a lulu of a husband, a peacherino, a real dud. He felt himself rubbing his dry bottom lip like a drunk in a movie.
On the way out he saw the girl working the patio. She apologized like she was going to cry. He said consoling things.
8
When Chuck found the auction house again, the first person he saw inside was a slouched old professor lurching around in houndstooth. That’s more like it, he thought.
They gave Chuck paddle 187, police code for murder.
He sat near the front, sweating like a pig in his blue velvet jacket, looking at that loose thread on his arm.
A nice couple sat next to him, the man in a baseball cap and camo shorts. His curly-headed old wife was dressed up and twinkling, all chestnut hair coloring and tasteful eye makeup and charming crow’s feet and high pink cheeks. He liked seeing old guys with cool old wives. It didn’t make him feel bad.
Behind him, two men had an affectionate discussion about their friend who had “died the right way, without a clue.” One of them, changing the subject, said, “We had a dispute with a Japanese company.” Like the geezer in the houndstooth, it was snug with his expectations. It was what he wanted to hear.
A sporty young fellow with ruddy cheeks and tousled golden hair arrived, a Dorian Gray type, or an older Tom Sawyer, or maybe Tom Sawyer grew up to be Dorian Gray. He talked to a woman in tinted glasses about an entire estate someone had consigned to him, and how he in turn had consigned it in parcels to various auction houses. He also attended auctions like this one to buy things for clients.
“I have literally shopping lists people give me,” he said. “Literally, ‘I want a thing that’s horizontal with stripes.’”
The man in camo shorts — who, like Chuck, was eavesdropping — leaned forward and asked vaguely, “Are you a professional?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” the young man replied. “I’m an art advisor.”
The man who had had a dispute with a Japanese company was describing in elaborate detail an old editorial cartoon about the Clinton sex scandal.
There was lots of teasing and laughing, a building, carnival energy as more people came in and time for the first gavel drew near. The art advisor struck up a fast friendship with Camo Shorts and his sweetly smiling wife. He moved back a row to sit next to them. He talked about the drab town where he had grown up (“Everything was olive”) and how happy he was now.
Chuck counted twenty-one chairs in front of him, only three of them filled.
He looked behind him. The last two rows were completely full. Was there some advantage to being in the back?
The auctioneer rapped the crowd to order. His gavel had no handle. It was a hunk of wood he clutched in his fist. It was loud and scary but didn’t seem to bother anyone. His expert banging accomplished nothing. People chatted on their iPhones, loose and rowdy, roaming around. The auction-house workers on their phones and computers were just as lively and loud. The family of the guy just in front of Chuck came in — wife and daughter, from the looks of them. They had a smelly doggie bag for their man. Civilization had collapsed, and this confident little rooster of an auctioneer with his pearly monuments of teeth was not going to save it. As the wife and daughter settled in, the husband and father gesticulated frantically about something and the auctioneer, who was taking bids on “two green lacquered Chinese-style game tables,” paid him no mind at all. There were no quiet people in gray suits making tiny movements.
Chuck bid on an acrylic cocktail table, just to see what it felt like. It was terrifying. He raised his paddle for two fifty, but someone else must have bid at the same time, because the auctioneer looked straight at Chuck and called out three hundred. Chuck’s heart jumped. It was fast, like losing money at roulette. He perceived that he was at the mercy of the mercurial auctioneer. As the price of the acrylic cocktail table went up he gave Chuck knowing looks and beguiling grins, trying to persuade him to shoot the works, openly giving the sucker the hard sell, not like the auctioneers in movies, who were dour as undertakers. Chuck felt it, he felt the sway, but kept his paddle in his lap.
Chuck had a thousand dollars he could safely spend. He meant to use it all on Donny’s Cancel My Reservation pot if necessary. Yes, he would secure that first, then spend anything that happened to be left in the kitty on himself. He was already getting off track. Human greed, Chuck had it. The pot wasn’t scheduled to come up for bidding until the next morning. Chuck shouldn’t even have been in the auction house. He told himself it was research, a stakeout.
This is for you, Donny, came the grand thought.
He didn’t flinch through the polar bear ice bucket and two Tiffany decanters, one etched with a facsimile of Bob Hope’s autograph. He was stoic. This wasn’t about him. Chuck had a higher calling.