The auctioneer worked it. He was a balding superhero, one of those little guys who pack a punch — Doll Man, Ant-Man, the Atom. The hair left him was darkly metallic and wavy.
He smoothed over his keen, professional aggression with jokes. Once there were some end tables no one was bidding on and he said in a mock wheedling tone, “Come on, it’s Bob Hope!” Everybody laughed. But somebody took the bait.
He laughed too, and openly, at his task of making a Native American — themed golf award sound alluring. “That’s unique: I didn’t know Kachinas golfed.”
For five chairs with upholstery so remarkably unappealing that the room fell silent in zonked-out awe, he said, “You can have four people over if you’re single.”
He was playing with their sadness.
A few lots later, in a searing flash of instantaneous buyer’s remorse and what felt like incipient diarrhea, Chuck gave in and snagged some poorly punctuated linen bar towels (THE HOPE’S BAR, they said) and “two unmarked Far Eastern metal ashtrays.”
Dizzy and guilty, brooding about what he had done, he had to step out for some air. The bamboo and wicker and rattan, forests of it, had begun to blur together.
Now he had absolutely no more than seven hundred dollars left to spend on Donny. Still, it was more than enough for the pot. Nobody would want that pot, would they? Why would anyone want that lousy pot? He sat on a low wall in the bleak, paved-over courtyard. People didn’t care about Bob Hope. They were going for the furniture. “A lacquered animal hide console table with Asian style feet.” What was that? It could have belonged to anybody. What were Asian feet? Well, they were something that had people peeling the big bills off their rolls. Memories, on the other hand, were cheap as dirt. Three C-notes for the ashtrays in which Bob Hope had personally stubbed out his cigarettes. And they came with Lucite coasters and glass toothpick holders thrown in. Nobody cared. Who but Chuck would bid on that gross pot from the spidery corner of Bob Hope’s library? It would be a steal. Now Chuck had Bob Hope’s bar towels and that’s all there was to it. What’s done is done, like buying a first-class ticket with no refund.
He poked his head back in the gallery. His auctioneer was gone. A lanky farm boy with a saucy forelock he kept pushing out of his face had taken his place. He was sepulchral and at the same time his voice would crack like an adolescent’s. Maybe he was an apprentice. The main auctioneer sat nearby, resting and watching thoughtfully. The new guy seemed nice, but the spell was broken.
Chuck walked around Beverly Hills, killing time until it was late enough to get a cab to Maria’s. At the corner of Beverly and Dayton, a passing guy asked his friend, “This is where that movie star committed suicide?” Or maybe he was saying it, not asking. That’s how people said things, as Chuck had begun to notice. It wasn’t his world anymore. He knew how Bob Hope felt.
9
It was somebody’s birthday. Chuck never got a grasp on whose.
There was an NPR commentator who knew everything about tequila.
A woman in a scarf worked for a foundation.
A dignified person with a neatly pressed shirt and cotton-candy swirl of distinguished gray hair buttonholed a former scientist turned filmmaker (who kept calling himself “a former scientist turned filmmaker”).
An otherwise nicely dressed man from Harvard walked around barefooted as an ape. Well, the guy had respectable feet. They were evenly ruddy, with smooth, glossy nails. They were too small for the guy, his feet were, but that made them even more precious. They were the feet of a faun. It was worse than going around naked. Chuck and Veda had been at a pool party with one casually nude guest and everyone pretended not to notice her coppery tuft glaring at them.
Chuck was out of his league. His feet were a disaster. He thought they were what kept him from falling in love again.
Maria gave everyone champagne to toast the elusive birthday. No, not champagne. “Sparkling wine,” as she correctly said.
Maria lived down a mysterious winding lane that was gravelly and bereft of streetlights and seemed to split and double back on itself as it went along in deadly and unexpected hillocks. The cabbie had a tough time finding her house, which was a towering box of corrugated metal with an orange door. Chuck got out disoriented and stumbled around until he heard Maria calling to him from a balcony. Just feet away, the cabbie had pulled over and whipped it out to pee in the street. It seemed feasible. The dream road was loomed over by fantastic mismatched buildings, and worldly restraint didn’t matter.
Sparkling wine hit Chuck’s empty stomach. He kept proudly admitting he didn’t know anything. No one was impressed by the saintly depths of Chuck’s ignorance.
They were waiting for someone else to arrive before they could eat. It was killing Chuck. He was conscious of Maria’s vibe from the other room, where she was slicing up tomatoes and stirring the pot. He wanted go in there and lean against a counter and catch up, maybe pick up something with his fingers and eat it. There was an open box of fried chicken just sitting there from a no-frills Korean place in a strip mall a few miles away. And Maria was tall and gorgeous, born in Vera Cruz. But somehow Chuck was tangled up in this sophisticated living room conversation, where the guy who knew everything about tequila made a speech describing each of the two hundred varieties of agave plant, only one of which could be used to make tequila. It seemed rude to get up and leave. Occasionally someone would squeeze in a word about his or her own fucked-up specialty.
Somebody said, “Of course, everyone thinks that Al Gore saved the world, but they’re wrong.”
Chuck guffawed. Guffawed was an accurate description. “Wait!” he said. “Wait! Wait! Everybody thinks Al Gore saved the world?” Then he said something like, “Haw, haw, haw.” Everyone stared at him.
“Well, some of us lefties do,” the woman in the scarf ventured at last.
Chuck had stepped in it. He was a lefty! Chuck was a lefty all the way. But he couldn’t say it now.
The missing person showed up and the table was set.
Chuck fingered the gold threads in his pleasantly rugged napkin. Real gold, maybe. He had a thimble of the fine tequila the NPR man had brought. He wondered whether “notes of vanilla” would be a correct thing to say about it. He kept his yapper stapled.
Maria and the man with the wire-rimmed glasses and cotton-candy hair seemed to be in some kind of fancy wine club together — a club of two. Maria brought out a white wine she had been saving for him. It looked kind of brassy when she poured it.
“It’s a funny color,” said the thoughtful, quiet man, who was across the table from Chuck.
“It’s old!” Maria said defensively. Chirped defensively.
The chicken was bleeding but Chuck didn’t care. He sloshed himself a glassful of the rusty wine and started gulping it, only later stopping to think it wasn’t for him. His tongue couldn’t register how special it was.
Maria had made an incredible salad with raw corn.
“It was so sweet I didn’t want to do anything to it,” she said.
Chuck wished he could be like that, to know when not to do anything to some corn, to instinctively know that Christmas lights in different colors were “tacky” for reasons normal humans could never understand.
Maria sweetly tried to include him in the conversation, asking about the auction.
“Oh, ha ha, there was this horrible Leroy Neiman painting,” Chuck said.
The quiet person across the table stopped him. “I happened to be at Leroy Neiman’s ninetieth birthday party,” he mouthed. “He was a sweet guy.”