A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,132

to burn.

Elm could not have cared less about meeting someone’s relative (she of all people knew that blood ties were expendable), but the art rag she wrote for was interested in an interview. She considered approaching him now, but he opened his mouth and swore loudly, “Motherfuckers.”

“Shhh,” his girlfriend said again.

Moira gasped. “Mummy, who is that man?”

“I don’t know.”

“He said ‘motherfucker.’ ”

“Don’t, Moira, your brother will repeat it.”

“Muddah-fakkah, muddah-fakkah,” Aiden said.

“Stop it,” said Moira. “It’s a bad word.”

“What is?” Aiden asked.

A representative from the auction house approached the foreign man and his girlfriend. “Mr. Connois? Welcome. We’re very happy to see you. Come this way.”

“Go ahead with Mary,” Elm said. She reached down to kiss and hug her children, a drawn-out ritual that they all respected, one that would seem from the outside to be excessive. By the time she’d hugged them and given Mary some money, Connois and his girlfriend had gone inside.

“Ow, wait, there’s a rock in my shoe.” Karen pulled on Gabriel’s arm, and he stopped to support her as she fished something from her platforms. “All right then, that’s better.”

As they continued toward the auction house, Gabriel could feel Karen’s steps begin to slow. Or was it his reluctance that was slowing them down? “We should have take a taxi,” he said.

“Taken. No, it’s all right.”

In contrast to the crowd he feared, the pavement outside the auction house was nearly empty. There was only a woman and her kids, the oldest a teenage hippie, the youngest not more than a toddler. How old were they? He should know these things, start paying attention. The woman was hugging and kissing each one in turn as if she were going on a long trip.

He sighed. “Why do I say yes to this thing?”

“Shhh,” Karen said. “They’ll hear you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Of course you do,” Karen put her hand on her stomach, a signal to Gabriel that he should practice his “worldly selflessness,” one of the personal tenets he’d adopted during the course at the Spirit Lotus London Meditation Center.

Appearing at this auction was part of the elaborately complicated deal he’d worked out with his gallery. Someone owed someone a favor, and thus Gabriel would show up, do some interviews, perhaps create a little buzz around an otherwise lackluster auction in a sluggish economy. In return, the gallery owner would place a painting of Gabriel’s in the collection of a well-known connoisseur. That would drive up the price of his work, especially when the gallerist created an artificial scarcity of work, storing Gabriel’s canvases in a warehouse in Slough and allowing only a select few to purchase them.

Favors. This was how the art world worked. How the world worked, in fact. Since he met Karen, he felt like he’d grown taller, able to view the world from a higher perch. He could see the way mutual interdependence created intimacy, not vulnerability. He could accept a favor knowing that the bestower was acting out of self-interest. That was only natural. He could return the favor with his own motives securely considered. The Ngagpa had shown him this. His motives, for the first time, were clear: in three months Karen would have his baby, and he felt like the owner of a special secret.

What had not changed was the fact that he did not enjoy being paraded about like an accordion monkey.

They looked at the program posted in the window. “They bollixed your age again,” Karen said. “You’re fifty-five here.”

“Motherfuckers.”

“Shh. Don’t worry. At least they’ll say you look ten years younger.”

Gabriel laughed and they went inside.

Elm took her place with the rest of the press corps, who were few at this low-level auction. She didn’t recognize the other woman there, but nodded to the slouchy, overweight visual arts lackey of the Guardian. It must be a slow news day for him to appear here. The lights flickered once, twice, silencing the polite English crowd.

This auction was a sad simulacrum of what had been only a few years ago. Not only were fewer pieces making their reserves, but fewer pieces were even going on the market, when investors knew they wouldn’t get top dollar selling them. There had been some fire sales (Lehman Brothers divested itself of an amazing collection, and some bankrupt investment bankers liquidated trophy pieces), but other than that, writing about the art market took all of Elm’s imagination, and not a little bit of invention.

The auction began with the crack of a gavel. Elm watched dispassionately as the sparse