for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.
That was how it had started; that was how Hobart and Blackwell, after languishing for years, had begun under my beady auspices to turn a profit. But it wasn’t just about money. I liked the game of it. Unlike Hobie—who assumed, incorrectly, that anyone who walked into his store was as fascinated by furniture as he was, who was extremely matter-of-fact in pointing out the flaws and virtues of a piece—I had discovered I possessed the opposite knack: of obfuscation and mystery, the ability to talk about inferior articles in ways that made people want them. When selling a piece, talking it up (as opposed to sitting back and permitting the unwary to wander into my trap) it was a game to size up a customer and figure out the image they wanted to project—not so much the people they were (know-it-all decorator? New Jersey housewife? self-conscious gay man?) as the people they wanted to be. Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set. The trick was to address yourself to the projection, the fantasy self—the connoisseur, the discerning bon vivant—as opposed to the insecure person actually standing in front of you. It was better if you hung back a bit and weren’t too direct. I soon learned how to dress (on the edge between conservative and flash) and how to deal with sophisticated and unsophisticated customers, with differing calibrations of courtesy and indolence: presuming knowledge in both, quick to flatter, quick to lose interest or step away at exactly the right moment.
And yet, with this Lucius Reeve, I had screwed up badly. What he wanted I didn’t know. In fact he was so relentless in sidestepping my apologies and directing his anger full-bore on Hobie that I was starting to think that I had stumbled into some preexisting grudge or hatred. I didn’t want to tip my hand with Hobie by bringing up Reeve’s name, though who could bear such a fierce grudge against Hobie, most well-intentioned and unworldly of persons? My Internet research had turned up nothing on Lucius Reeve apart from a few innocuous mentions in the society pages, not even a Harvard or Harvard Club affiliation, nothing but a respectable Fifth Avenue address. He had no family that I could tell, no job or visible means of support. It had been stupid of me to write him a check—greediness on my part; I’d been thinking about establishing a lineage for the piece, though at this point even an envelope of cash placed under a napkin and slid across the table was no assurance he was going to let the matter drop.
I was standing with my fists in the pockets of my overcoat, glasses fogged from the spring damp, staring unhappily into the muddy waters of the Pond: a few sad brown ducks, plastic bags washing in the reeds. Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors—in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever—but my mother’s bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message: EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going without lunch when she needed the price of a museum pass at MoMA or a movie ticket at the Paris Theatre. Further along, past the Pond, where the path turned empty and dark, was the unkempt and desolate patch of ground where Andy and I had scattered her ashes. It was Andy who had talked me into sneaking over and scattering them in defiance of the city rule, scattering them moreover in that particular spot: well, I mean, it’s where she used to meet us.
Yeah, but rat poison, look, these signs.
Go on. You can do it now. No one’s coming.
She loved the sea lions, too. We always had to walk over and look at them.
Yeah but you definitely don’t want to dump her over there, it smells like fish. Besides it creeps me out having that jar or whatever in my room.
vi.
“MY GOD,” SAID HOBIE when he got a good look at me under the lights. “You’re white as a sheet. You’re not coming down with something?”
“Um—” He was