A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,86

ties every day. He had come to the auction house as an accountant, but was quickly encouraged to enroll in the auctioneer education department. Unlike a typical lackadaisical Tinsley auctioneer, he had his own gregarious, untraditional patter. He recognized important auction attendees, studying pictures of bidders and price lists before the auction, but never let on that he prepared obsessively. His shoes bordered on boat wear, and his sunglasses were eternally in his breast pocket. He had studiously floppy hair in the early Beatles style and was attractive, with high cheekbones and a lopsided dimple. Ian had had an enormous crush on him for a year, though no one was ever able to figure out his sexual preferences. He flirted indiscriminately with young and old, men and women (dogs, even), and after Elm had declared him asexual, Ian had corrected her: “Omnisexual.”

“What’s that?”

“Kind of like pansexual, you know, but instead of having desire for all types of sexual experiences, omnis just use sex, or the threat of it, to get what they want.”

They were having a martini lunch, an occasional ritual on slow Fridays. She leaned over and sipped her full drink. “I guess,” Elm said. She had had a bit of a crush on Petr too, the harmless fluttering she associated with the second decade of marriage. Just enough to make coming to work interesting, but nothing she would ever act on. She called these crushes “ab rollers,” mostly futile exercise to keep the flirt muscle tight.

“Plus, I saw him in the bathroom”—Ian leaned closer, a sign that he was about to make a vulgar statement—“and, shall we say, it’s all bluster.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to look at each other in there.”

“I snuck a peek.”

“Are we talking gherkin, Fruit Roll-Up, or Second Avenue Deli pickle?”

“What’s a Fruit Roll-Up?”

Elm sighed. Sometimes Ian’s youth was tiresome. “A snack.… It doesn’t matter.”

“Normal, I guess, small size.” Ian cast his eyes about the room, looking for a comparable object. “Um, like if you rolled up that cell phone.”

Elm nodded, though she had no idea what this would look like. After that discussion, though, her ardor for Petr had waned to a trickle then dried up completely.

Now, though, she could see Petr’s appeal, and the way both sexes responded to him. The attendees were beginning to relax: shoulders slumped, legs slack. There were genuine smiles appearing on the faces of bidders, not just grimaces of concentration. Petr had been a good hire, had shaken up the image of staid Tinsley’s and injected it with a bit of youth and iconoclasm.

The bidding reached its estimated $135,000. Lee’s representative bid again, and the bidding stalled at $140,000. Then a new bidder at the back of the room raised her paddle, and Petr squinted into the lights to see her. He must not have known who she was, a certain blow to his ego. A dark horse, bidding the price up to $145,000. Petr acknowledged her as the “woman in the blue suit toward the back.”

Then Relay raised her paddle for $150,000. This was a bit uncouth. No one liked a buyer to sweep in at the end of a bid. Elm found herself silently critiquing Relay’s outfit—Ann Taylor Petites for sure, pearls as accessories. Were you allowed to wear pearls without irony anymore?

Apparently, Petr knew her, because he supplied her name on the first bid. But Elm guessed that as a Lacker, Relay had been around art royalty since she could be relied on not to drool on it.

Between volleys, Relay hunched over, leaning on her elbows. She bid by raising the paddle high, like a cat springing to action. When Petr awarded her the drawing, at $207,500, Relay looked estatic, beaming like a child who finally got the pony she’d been begging for.

Then Indira’s Mercat, the crown of Elm’s contribution to the auction, made its appearance. The audience gasped. It was indeed beautiful; the texture of the pastel glinted in the stage lights. The woman’s eye, the dog’s tail, the blue sky, the scales of the fish for sale glistening. It was a magnificent lighting display and Elm was proud at having orchestrated the arrangement with facilities. If she’d left it up to them, they’d have just shined a fluorescent bulb straight at it like they were interrogating a prisoner.

The woman in the blue suit who bid on the first sketch raised her paddle, and now Petr, who had learned her name in the interim (his staff was nothing if not competent and swift,