Restoration (12 page)

To keep focus, I wrote down the hammer price of each item as it was sold. Buyers who looked as though they couldn’t afford the three-wing special at Popeyes casually dropped thousands on silver teaspoons. They moved this money simply by blinking their eyelids. Lots came and went so quickly I had a hard time keeping up, and whenever
I failed to record a sale Rhys brought her mouth to within an inch of my ear and whispered the figure. After a while I began to lapse at my job for the chance to hear her voice speak a number.

It was around one o’clock when contents from the Louisiana Room came up for sale, and the intensity of the action immediately picked up. Porters trotted out the offerings and held them under spotlights that made the paintings burn with color. Now applause could be heard when the hammer came down, and winning bidders pumped their fists and hugged spouses and friends. I wondered why buying a painting inspired such passion when bidders who were buying furniture reacted with hardly more than a yawn. But then I flashed to something Rhys had said when I first met her: art collectors were hunters, enslaved by desire that swelled their appetites and engorged their private parts. At the time it had seemed an incredible claim, but now I knew it was true. Short of scouting around and checking crotches, I did notice that many of the bidders looked as though the competition was taking a physical toll on them. They wrung their hands together, chewed their lips, beat their shoes against the floor and squirmed in their chairs. Nerves had some gorging on the jambalaya, poboys and muffulettas for sale in the rear of the gallery, and others chain-smoking cigarettes outside.

As the sale of the Walker approached, the place grew more crowded. Except for a reserved section in front, the seats filled up and suddenly it was standing room only. People were three deep lining the back wall, and past the gray glass I could see dozens more loitering outside. The painting was exactly ten lots away when a wave of excited whispers swept the gallery and Tommy Smallwood came striding up the middle aisle. The girl from the preview followed close behind him. In recognition the auctioneer nodded and gestured with his gavel.

As Smallwood neared the front of the room, a woman in a yellow dress came up from her chair and stepped out into the aisle. Her black hair hung down to her shoulders in a dense, brittle sheet, and she wore a mustache almost as heavy as a man’s. She planted noisy kisses
on both sides of Smallwood’s face, then proceeded to trip and fall as she started on her way back to her chair.

Rhys put her mouth against my ear. “Hairy Mary,” she whispered.

I shrugged.

“Mary Thomas Jones, Smallwood’s conservator.”

The auctioneer’s hammer cracked against wood. “Lot number three hundred eighteen is the monumental William Aiken Walker cotton kingdom painting in the hand-carved, hardwood exhibition frame. Ladies, do we have the phones ready? Everybody ready on the phones?”

Seconds later the bidding had already eclipsed the painting’s estimated value. Mary Lou Cohn, sitting in the row ahead of us, put up a spirited battle but dropped out when the money shot past $160,000. She lowered first her paddle, then her head. Up to this point she and Smallwood had been the only bidders, but now three others, all on telephones, entered the fray. A gaggle of young women seated at a table near the auctioneer’s lectern communicated with the phone bidders, and served as conduits to the action, their voices crying out “Bid!” and pushing the money upward. For his part, Smallwood simply sat with his paddle raised. He showed no expression except perhaps of boredom. The girl, whose perfume I could smell from thirty feet away, sat studying her fingernails. The bidding climbed in increments of $10,000. At $200,000 one of the bidders dropped out, leaving the contest to Smallwood and two others. At $230,000 a second was gone, and now it was between Smallwood and one other. The shout of “Bid!” was slower in coming, as the buyer on the phone seemed to deliberate each step upward. The auctioneer tried to coax the competition to continue the fight, saying things like “You’ll rue the day” and “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity shall surely be lost,” but finally, at $280,000, the gavel came down and Tommy Smallwood the victor stood to wild applause. He bowed and waved and shook hands as he made for the exit, the girl following.

“Have you done the math?” Rhys whispered to me.

I shook my head.

“With the nine percent sales tax and ten percent commission for
a hammer price over fifty grand, he just paid more than three hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars. That’s double the previous auction record for the artist. If my numbers are right, he’s paying about eight thousand three hundred dollars per field hand. Just think, Jack, real slaves didn’t cost that much.” She gathered up her personal items and nodded toward the door. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We stepped outside as Smallwood came roaring down Magazine Street in a Jaguar convertible with the top down. He was wearing a touring cap and mirrored sunglasses, and a long blue scarf—the same blue as the car—trailed in the cool air behind him. The girl sat next to him, her face tilted upward to catch the afternoon light. “I hope you crash and die,” Rhys shouted after them. She caught the look on my face and said, “He’ll get
Beloved Dorothy
, too, Jack. It makes me sick. He gets everything.” She raised a fist and waved it at him. “You get everything, you bastard!”

“Come on, now. He can’t get everything.”

“He gets everything he
wants.
That makes it even harder to take.”

After a long walk uptown we stopped in at Casamento’s Restaurant, an old seafood eatery near the corner of Napoleon Avenue. We sat at a booth in the front room and ordered beer and oysters on the half shell. Rhys was still talking about the auction and the sale of the Walker. “Because Mary Lou had promises from local museums and collectors not to chase the painting, the phone bidders likely would’ve been from out of state. Attend enough auctions and you learn who’s on the phone just by how they play the game. That last bidder
felt
like Alfred West, the dealer from Charleston. The way he hesitated before each bid? That’s typically his MO. You think he’s struggling to keep up with the action—that he doesn’t have the money—and that’s what he wants you to think. You think he won’t answer and then he does, often at the last second when the auctioneer’s about to drop the hammer. It demoralizes the competition, except of course when the competition is Tommy Smallwood.”

“Alfred West plays possum, does he?”

“Possum is a pretty good way to describe it. Other buyers bid
quickly because they want the competition to think they’re prepared to answer at any price. That’s the most common strategy. But the truth is, most bidders have a set amount in mind and don’t go over it. Anybody can get carried away and pay more than they intended to, but for big-ticket items most of the bidders are pros who rarely make mistakes. In the case of Alfred West, he went as high as he could on the Walker, knowing that to go higher was foolish because it meant eliminating the likelihood of making a profit on the painting for a very long time. West is in business. Tommy Smallwood is in love.”

“Love makes him stupid.”

“Yes, exactly. In Smallwood’s mind, paying too much is not nearly as painful as losing a painting because he offered to pay too little.”

Our order came and Rhys prepared dipping sauce in a couple of soufflé cups, mixing ketchup, horseradish, lemon juice and Tabasco. I poured the beer into glasses, the frosty heads rising up and tipping over the rims. We ate for a while without saying anything, then Rhys pushed her plate to the side and leaned back in her seat. “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” she said.

“Okay.”

“It’s personal. It’s not about paintings or auctions or anything like that. It’s about me, Jack.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“My mother’s mother… my maternal grandmother?”

“Yeah, what about her, Rhys?”

“Jack?”

“Go ahead. What is it?”

“Well, she was African American.”

“Your grandmother was African American?”

“Right. She was black.”

“That means you’re black, too.”

“Right. I’m black.”

“You’re black? Get out of here.”

I looked at her, appraising her every feature, including, this time, the color of her skin. It was crazy. The woman was fairer than I was.

Put our forearms side by side and mine was darker than hers. It had to be a joke, and an unfunny one at that. Blame the beer, I thought. Blame the auction. Blame Tommy Smallwood. There was no way. “Sorry, Rhys,” I said, “but you’re white.”

“I’m black, Jack.” She was staring at me now with an intensity that made me uncomfortable. It was as though she was looking for evidence of rejection or disapproval on my part. “Want to see my birth certificate?”

“You carry around your birth certificate?”

“No, but I could get it, if you need proof. You don’t believe me, do you?”

“No, I don’t. How can you be black, Rhys? I mean, look at you. It’s ridiculous.”

“My grandmother was a little darker than I am, but she wasn’t really black, either. And yet she was still black, if you know what I mean. She was a person of color. Or what some would’ve identified as an octoroon, which by definition means one-eighth black. The truth is, she had even less black blood than that. I think if you broke it down she was like one-sixteenth black, and even at that percentage she didn’t look it. When she was seventeen years old she gave birth to my mother. The father, as I always understood it, was white. And they weren’t married. Laws in Louisiana at the time forbid interracial marriage. Follow me so far?”

“Yeah, I follow you.”

“My grandmother lived her life as a black woman, and without the requisite identity crisis that often tormented people who looked like she did. She wasn’t one of these
passe-blancs
you hear about who move away and integrate into society as whites. She was a strong person—a strong
black
person. And she raised an equally strong person in my mother.”

“Is your father white or black?”

“He’s neither and he’s both. He’s what my mother is and he’s what I am.”

“In other words, he’s a black guy with blond hair and green eyes.”

“They’re hazel,” she said.

“Hazel eyes.”

“They still live here, in Tremé, if you’re interested in seeing them for yourself. Robert and Beverly Goudeau. Big French Colonial that’s been in my dad’s family for something like two hundred years.”

“Rhys, I’m not sure what to tell you. A part of me still doesn’t believe you.”

“A part of you? What part would that be? Obviously not your head.”

“You’re black?”

“I’m black.”

“I could give a shit what race you are. What if I put it to you that way?”

“You would make a mistake not to care about race,” she said. “There is no bigger issue in my life.”

“There are far bigger issues in mine.”

“That’s because you’re white,” she said. She let a minute pass for the words to penetrate. “Jack, did you notice how many African Americans there were in the auction house today? Every one of the porters was black. Every one of them. But count me out and there wasn’t a black person in the gallery.”

“I didn’t notice. I wasn’t thinking about what color everybody was. I was more concerned with how much money they were spending. Besides, maybe there were blacks in the crowd like you, Rhys. White people who are actually black but don’t look it.”

She took a sip of beer and the head left suds on her upper lip. “My grandmother died when I was eight years old, but my memory of her is vivid. She was a pretty lady, always wore gloves and a hat, flowery dresses, all this colorful Bakelite jewelry. She definitely had a style about her. She’d come over sometimes and sit in the kitchen with my mother and drink iced tea. She always brought me a present—a box of crayons or a picture book, something to encourage ‘creative expression,’ as she called it. One day I overheard her tell my mother that I took after my grandfather. My mother hadn’t known him either. She said, ‘Does she look like him?’ And my grandmother answered, ‘No,
Beverly, she looks like
me.
But she’s sensitive and she has talent, like he did.’ That was as much as she ever said about him, that he was sensitive and had talent. Well, what kind of talent did this sensitive man have, Grandmother? Was he a surgeon who could repair broken bones? An accountant who could balance somebody’s books? I never knew his name, and neither did my mother.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Yes, I guess it doesn’t. But it was never a huge factor in my life because it’s just how things were. My grandmother felt compelled to protect his identity for some reason. And because of that I knew she loved him. I used to ask my mother about him and she would say, ‘Sure, it might’ve been good knowing who he was. But it might’ve been bad, too.’ Then she’d say, ‘Rhys, darling, you have to know for certain that you’re ready to accept the bad if you intend to go chasing after the good.’”

“Maybe when your grandmother said you had talent like he did it was her way of saying he was an artist.”

She smiled and took another sip of beer, capping it off with a sigh. “Interesting you would say that, Jack. Because sometimes when a New Orleans painting comes into the studio by an artist from the time when my grandfather would’ve been a young man I wonder if it came from his hand. I want to assign it to him, especially when the painting’s beautiful.”

“What was your grandmother’s name?”

“Jacqueline. Jacqueline LeBeau.”

“Beloved Jacqueline,”
I said with a laugh.

“Find that one and I’d kill to get it. Tommy Smallwood would never make it to the auction preview. I’d have snipers on the rooftops, ready to pop him as soon as he came cruising along.”

We paid the bill and started walking back toward the auction house, pausing along the way to look in the windows of antique stores, junk shops and art galleries. We stopped at one and I waited until Rhys turned away from the window. “You ever go out with a white guy?” I said.

“I’m not sure I should answer that, Jack. It’ll only lead to something else, to the next question.”