Emma's Table (3 page)

He'd seen her turn up in chinchilla as late as May.

Emma began to click across the room, heading straight for him. Her shoes looked brand-new to him. Benjamin looked down guiltily at his own, brown leather like an ugly tiger cat—scuffed-up patches of brown and beige, mysterious patches of black. He was beyond a shine.

Benjamin felt a little warm. He began unbuttoning his winter coat. She always made him nervous at the start.

“Morning, Benjamin,” Emma called, smiling when she reached him, just inside the front door still. She was always friendly and nice—until she wasn't.

He checked his wristwatch right away, afraid he'd heard a curt note in her voice. “Am I late?” he asked. He knew he was on time, a little early even, but he felt jittery all the same. He liked to get off on the right foot.

“Not at all,” she said, smiling still, but there was no warmth in it at all.

He felt a flash of annoyance then—first at her, then back
at himself. He knew he wasn't late. And he knew even better that he'd been foolish to think he might beat her here. Emma's idea of nine o'clock was eight thirty to the rest of the world. Or quarter to nine, he thought, at the very latest.

She reached out and touched the sleeve of his coat. “You're right on time,” she said, squeezing his forearm a little. Benjamin felt the silver fur against the back of his hand, softer than human hair by far, softer almost than skin. He felt some of the heat that was gathering inside him begin to dissipate. Emma readjusted the fur around her shoulders, lifting it up and drawing it in close, as if she'd grown chilly, standing so close to the door.

A black leather bag peeked out from beneath the fur.

I knew it, he thought. He took pleasure in how well he'd come to know her.

An old woman walked up to them then. “You're Emma Sutton,” she said loudly, an unmistakable thrill in her voice, “aren't you?” She sounded as if she were speaking to the Virgin Mary—or to Katie Couric, he thought, at the very least.

Emma nodded.

“You're much prettier in person,” the woman said, smiling sweetly.

Emma looked back at her through squinted eyes. “Thank you,” she said, smiling tightly. She looked straight past the mixed message, but turned her back on the old woman as quickly as she could.

Benjamin loved moments like these.

“So what's the concept?” he asked, surveying the circle of old furniture; it looked a little battered to him. “Are we buying something?” he asked, slipping an arm from the sleeve of his coat, just making conversation.

He watched her face contract in a flash, all her handsome features squeezing shut—eyes and mouth and brow in a fist—and just when he'd thought it was safe too. Benjamin felt a catch in his throat; he knew he was in trouble. Emma glared at him—in the general direction of his chest, it seemed. He thought it might be his sweater, at first, looking down at the offending wool.

“Come with me,” she said, refreshing his memory of what her curt voice sounded like. She led him off to a private room.

He felt sorry for upsetting her and frightened for himself.

But as he trailed behind her, crossing the room, he began to cast off those crumbs of fear—like Hansel in the forest. She's just being ridiculous, he thought. Anyone who heard me is going to see her bidding in five minutes anyway. He noticed the complimentary coffee table in the corner of the room. He longed for a cup, but thought better of mentioning it at the moment.

Another flash of annoyance coursed through him: he decided he was entitled. “Do you mind if I get a coffee?” he asked, feeling defiant.

“In a minute,” she said.

He supposed he could wait.

Emma led him to a deserted office in the back—just a few makeshift desks with wooden tops and filing cabinets underneath for legs, those ergonomic chairs that promised no more backaches, and an old fax machine. It was a marked contrast to all the fancy brass and glowing wood in the exhibition room.

It was a relief to him.

She extended a bidding paddle toward him once they
were safely inside: a white rectangle the size of two Visa bills laid one on top of the other, and just about as thin. There was a small white handle protruding from the bottom, and three red numbers—one, six, eight—painted on both sides. It felt like a challenge to him, the way she handed it over, as if she were offering him a gleaming saber from a velvet-lined case. He knew he was supposed to take it from her, but he didn't.

“I want you to bid on a Nakashima table for me,” she said.

He didn't know what a Nakashima table was.

“Are you leaving?” he asked, his insides mixed up like a complicated cocktail: one part dread, another part hope.

“Not at all,” she said. “But you'll draw less attention than I will.”

Benjamin was confused.

“We won't be sitting together,” she told him, in a tone of voice that suggested that
this
was the piece of information—the not-sitting-together part—that was supposed to help him make sense of the story. It didn't. He felt prickly heat at the nape of his neck, the beginnings of moisture at the peaks of his brow. It made him nervous not to follow her precisely.

“We'll get a better deal this way,” she said, sounding impatient.

It doesn't take her long, he thought.

Benjamin took the paddle from her outstretched hand. It was lighter than he expected, made of balsa wood maybe, or even lighter still—the kind of wood he used to make model airplanes when he was a boy. He couldn't begin to account for how burdensome the thing felt in his hands.

“You'll do fine,” she said, smiling warmly. She always smiled once she'd gotten her way. He must have looked nervous still. “Honestly, Benjamin,” she said, “I've seen half-wits do it.”

Twenty-five dollars an hour began to seem like chicken feed.

Emma told him the lot number of the table: “Twelve thirty-three,” she said, as if it were the departure time of some commercial airplane. She insisted that he write it down. His heart dropped as he comprehended it—when he realized he'd have to sit through twelve hundred pieces of furniture. He was only slightly relieved when she informed him that the auction began with Lot 1000. Two hundred and thirty-three pieces of furniture still sounded like an awful lot of furniture to him.

She showed him a picture of the table in the catalog—“To avoid any confusion,” she said. He feigned nonchalance, but looked very closely. He studied the lots that came before it too, hoping he'd remember them later, like warning bells chiming in advance.

Maybe I
can
do this, he thought, a silky ribbon of confidence swirling through the fear. He was going to make her proud.

“It all moves very quickly,” she warned.

He really did need that coffee though.

Then she told him how high he was entitled to bid: “Up to seventy-eight thousand dollars,” she said.

“What?” he cried. He had absolutely no idea.

Emma grabbed him roughly by the arm.

He didn't make another peep.

That's twice my salary, Benjamin thought—on an annual basis, as if he needed to clarify. He knew that Emma was rich. Everyone knew that. She was Emma Sutton, for Christ's sake. But she'd always seemed so sensible to him, especially where money was concerned—not at all the kind of person to frit
ter it away. Of course, everything has to be perfect too, he thought, balancing out his understanding of her as if he were sitting on a seesaw: wanting to please her, on the one hand, and disapproving of such terrible waste, on the other.

Benjamin looked up.

She was waiting for him to compose himself again. She looked as if she wanted to stare the silliness right out of him.

“Ready?” she asked, a little smugly.

He felt as exposed as a little boy fresh from his soapy bath. He nodded silently, and looked straight into her eyes—just the way she liked. He hoped nothing too terrible had shown.

She explained a few more things to him: described the bidding increments—in hundreds, then five hundreds, then thousands. She stressed that he wasn't
required
to spend seventy-eight thousand dollars—as if I were an idiot, he thought—only
entitled
to, if the bidding ran that high.

Benjamin kept nodding.

But he couldn't get those seventy-eight thousand dollars out of his head. He laid them down side by side with his own prospective earnings for the day—two hundred dollars, cash. And he'd thought he was doing well too.

“I need to take care of something now,” she said, disengaging from him and walking away. He heard her heels tapping lightly against the concrete floor. She stopped and looked back at him, over her shoulder. “You'll sit on the left side of the room,” she said. “Understood?”

Then she took a few steps more, and turned back again. “Facing the auctioneer,” she told him, “of course.”

Of course, he thought.

Benjamin nodded one last time, and watched Emma walk away for good. He followed her to the doorway of the little
office. She was heading straight for the table where people were picking up their bidding paddles. He watched her move to the front of the line.

Of course, he thought. She was taking out an insurance policy on him then, getting herself another paddle, in case he screwed up. Benjamin felt as disposable as the painted balsa wood in his hands—as flimsy as a model airplane and just as worthless to the woman who was walking away.

Eight Slim Carrot Sticks

GRACIE'S MOTHER—TINA SANTIAGO—SNEAKED OUT
of her bedroom and crept down the hall, a lithe jungle cat making its way through a grassy clearing. She was an elegant young woman of twenty-seven, small and thin, with long dark hair and black Latin eyes. She navigated those floorboards expertly too, avoiding all the regular creaks, placing her feet so quietly down.

She made it to the kitchen, undetected.

She wanted one strong coffee, at least, before she had to face the day. Saturdays were for cleaning house and paying bills—worrying over which checks to write and which to leave for later. She had to make sure she'd have enough to cover the rent when it came due.

Tina had been up for a long time that morning—lying in bed and listening to her daughter plod down the narrow hall, get to work on her Valentine cards.

It was a small apartment, and the walls were thin.

But it was more than that: Tina was like a radio tower where her daughter was concerned, searching out signals of any kind. She was afraid she lacked the normal quotient of motherly instinct. She'd had the girl when she was so young, after all—only a girl herself. She rarely just
knew
what Gracie was feeling—at least not to the extent she thought other mothers did. So she watched her like a hawk instead, trying to ferret out what she could, imagining how her daughter really was.

She heard her playing in her bedroom then.

Tina was grateful for these few extra minutes of peace and quiet. She'd slept so poorly the night before, tossing and turning for stretches at a time—dozing for a minute, then waking with a start. She'd met with Benjamin Blackman after work, the social worker from Gracie's school, and she'd relived the meeting for most of the night, turning it over and over in her worried mind, her stomach growing spikier and sour. Blackman covered the same old ground, his agenda nearly identical to their first meeting. He called it a “progress report,” but Tina was hard-pressed to see the progress: Gracie was just as withdrawn as before, just as fat too, and the playground bullies who made her life so rough weren't being any nicer.

“I hope we can avoid drastic measures,” Blackman told her, looking down into his notebook as he spoke. He was always on the verge of writing something down, his shiny black pen forever hovering above the page.

He never looks at me, she thought—not anymore.

Tina had no idea what a “drastic measure” might be. Her daughter was only nine years old, after all, and her tormenters weren't much older. Still, she'd been afraid to ask him, sitting at Blackman's beat-up desk, in his tiny office right next
to the gym. They couldn't be good, she supposed, whatever they were—and what was worse, Tina suspected that Blackman would move heaven and earth to make sure they rained down on her, drastic measures like pellets of hail. He'd made it perfectly clear—in his look and his voice—that he blamed her for all of Gracie's troubles.

But I'm not to blame, she thought, fussing with her old coffeemaker, heaping spoons of coffee in. Am I?

 

Benjamin had behaved much differently toward her at the start, and Tina couldn't help but think their relationship might have taken a friendlier turn. It was just after Christmas, and she'd been called down to the school: some older boys had been caught teasing Gracie on the playground. Tina took an hour off from work. She remembered sitting on the long wooden bench outside the principal's office, waiting for Mr. Spooner to finish with another parent inside.

“So what did you do?” she heard.

It was a man's voice, speaking to her. He was sitting on the bench too, just a few feet away. Handsome, she thought—thirty or so, with dark brown hair and a clean white shirt.

Tina didn't know who he was, or what he meant by his question either.

“To get sent down here?” he added. “To the principal's office?”

He smiled at her then. His teeth were white, and his eyes as green as her father's old Buick.

“Spitballs,” she answered, smiling back.

Tina watched the man's eyes lingering on her, his book lying open in his lap. Not leering, she thought—not at all. It was more appreciative than that. It had been a long time since
Tina crossed paths with a good-looking man. She hoped he'd keep looking at her.

“How about you?” she asked him, in return.

“Smoking in the boys' room,” he said, with a smirk.

But Tina knew already that he wasn't a bad boy at all.

The two of them chatted for a few minutes more—all bubbly and crisp. She thought he might ask for her number—hoped he would, in fact—but the principal interrupted them, opening his door before they got that far.

“Mrs. Santiago?” the principal said, looking straight at her.

“Yes,” she answered, standing up.

She turned to the younger man to say good-bye.

“You're Gracie's mother?” he asked, from his seated place on the wooden bench. He looked barely able to contain his surprise.

“This is Benjamin Blackman,” the principal told her, “the school's social worker. I've asked him to join us.” Tina was pleased to shake his hand. She'd be only too happy to continue their conversation inside, but Benjamin seemed to change on a dime. In a matter of seconds, he turned chilly and cold. He'd met with Gracie several times already, it turned out, and it was obvious—to Tina anyway—that he liked her a lot. He praised Gracie's intelligence and her sly sense of humor. Tina liked him even better then. She felt doubly confused by his sharp change toward her. It was as if he stopped liking her the moment he found out she was Gracie's mother.

She had experience enough with men to know that plenty of them shied away from women with children, but that didn't make sense to her—not where Benjamin was concerned.

He works in an elementary school, she thought, for Christ's sake.

Tina sat down at her kitchen table, sipping at the large mug of coffee, then putting it down. She folded her arms across her chest—as if she were chilly, or needed protection. She rubbed her hands against her soft flannel sleeves, her flesh and blood like a chafing dish beneath, keeping the cotton warm.

She wondered about Benjamin Blackman—for the ten thousandth time—but Tina couldn't work it out.

 

EMMA SMILED IN APPROVAL AS SHE WATCHED THE
Asian man take his seat—on the right side of the room, of course—facing the auctioneer. Everything was falling into place that morning. She made her way back to the row of chairs where he was sitting, toward the back of the tidy grid. It wasn't far from where she would have sat on her own, even if there'd been no tiny Asian to contend with. Emma took a seat exactly three chairs to his right.

Close, she thought, but not too close.

She liked to keep her competition in view.

Emma knew with certainty that the man was watching her then, as she crossed her long legs and feigned ignorance of him. She
was
Emma Sutton, after all, and a trimmer, prettier Emma Sutton at that. She'd lost fifteen pounds in that federal lockup—what with all the time in the world for exercise and the hideous prison food. It was a hell of a way to lose it, she thought, but she was glad of the outcome all the same. She'd managed to keep the weight off too, those terrible middle-aged pounds that no high-end spa or personal trainer had ever come close to eradicating. She'd assumed they were hers for life, and the mere thought of them, shed as neatly as a snake's scaly skin, gave her something like hope for the future.

Emma looked at her neighbor, who seemed a little startled by her still. There was hardly a man or a woman alive who didn't know who she was, who wouldn't be a little rattled by her appearance in the flesh. But there are more than enough bidders for me to sit here, she decided, and not so many that anyone would take either of the empty chairs between them.

It was all working out fine.

She slipped the chinchilla from her shoulders and settled it on the nearer of the empty chairs between them. She placed her large handbag on top of the fur and reached in for her copy of the auction catalog and the extra bidding paddle—just in case.

She only needed to wait for her moment, but Emma was too impatient for that. As soon as the man looked back at her, she smiled at him sweetly, then turned away fast, before he had the chance to do much of anything in reply.

“No one likes a girl who comes on strong,” her father always said.

Just then, a young man—about Benjamin's age—began to make his way to the dark-stained podium at the front of the room. He was wearing a bright green shirt with fat candy stripes and a loudly patterned tie. Emma took a moment to imagine precisely what an auctioneer
ought
to be wearing.

He's too young to be the auctioneer anyway, she thought. He must be a technician, for the microphone perhaps.

But when a tepid smattering of applause broke out for the boy in the fat candy stripes, Emma was forced to admit that he was the auctioneer after all. Probably some kind of auctioneer-in-training, she feared. She pictured them slogging through the lots, one by one—like a pair of green rubber boots inching through thick garden mud.

Emma liked an auction to move like the wind.

The young auctioneer introduced himself, his amplified voice booming all around the room. Then he announced the first lots, with just a whistling hint of the microphone complaining. It was a suite of bedroom furniture by Jean Royère: a bed and a dresser and a nice easy chair, all made of quarter-sawn oak and decorated with iron circles that were painted brick red.

They were nice enough. The paint looked original, at least.

The bidding began.

Emma watched closely as the lots went out high, all three of them—well above the estimates printed in the catalog, but not so high as to suggest auction-room insanity, or to bode ill for her Nakashima table. The young auctioneer moved briskly to a set of four wooden stools by Charlotte Perriand.

Emma checked her watch.

We might be out of here by lunch, she thought, with something like affection for the auctioneer taking hold just beneath the nubbly tweed of her suit jacket.

She looked over to the other side of the room and spotted Benjamin right away—the back of his head anyway, his dark wavy hair. He was sitting all the way up at the front, in the second row, on the aisle. She could just make out his profile: the strong nose and deep green eyes. He was a good-looking boy, she decided, as if he were just a stranger in the crowd.

She made a note to tell him about sitting farther back the next time, about trying to be invisible in these rooms. She hoped no one made too much of her speaking with him before the auction began. It would be awfully lucky if he liked this, she thought. He could be an asset to her at the auction houses—with that thrift-shop coat and those worn-out shoes.

It surprised Emma sometimes how warmly she felt toward Benjamin. He was dependable enough, she supposed, and trustworthy—nothing like those terrible young men who'd gotten her into all that trouble, the lousy accountant and that phalanx of lawyers.

She turned the bidding paddle over in her hands, raising it slowly toward her face, as if she were looking into a handheld mirror. But it was more than that, she thought: Benjamin was always looking out for her. That's what clinched it. As helpless as he was—like a baby bird practically, blind and broke and squirming in the nest—he acted as if the only thing he cared about was taking care of her. Like a little man, she decided, smiling as she shook her head at the very idea of making so much of a part-time assistant in shabby clothes.

Emma watched idly as the four wooden stools gave way to a low wooden daybed—also Perriand, according to the catalog anyway.

She doubted it. These days, if it was white oak, they called it Perriand.

She turned back to Benjamin again.

She'd decided what to do. She was going to take him on as her full-time assistant. Teach him the ropes and move him up through the ranks. She was determined to do it.

He's smart enough, she thought.

But Emma didn't complete her thought; she didn't need to. Smart, she meant, but not brilliant. Not half as talented as her own daughter, Cassy, with all the promise in the world, but none of the desire—floating from one useless job in her organization to the next, and wanting more money every time she turned around.

Oh, well, she thought—life is long.

It was an uncharacteristically mellow view for Emma. She hoped her daughter might come around, but in the meantime, she'd get Benjamin the hell out of that elementary school. It was a waste of his talent.

“The prices are strong this morning.” The voice came from somewhere close by. It took her that long to realize that the Asian man had spoken to her, unbidden—interrupting her succession plans at Emma Sutton Everywhere.

“Excuse me?” she said, though she'd heard him perfectly the first time. She looked back at him, smiling indifferently—it was one of her trademarked looks. He repeated himself—“prices,” “strong”—with just the smallest trace of an accent, wrapped loosely around his vowels. He sounded as if he were attacking an overstuffed sandwich, using his teeth to cut through the stringy roast beef.

His blue suit was immaculate.

“Yes,” she said. “But you don't often see such unusual pieces.”

They were as common as dirt, in fact. Emma could name three shops, right off the top of her head, where you could find that same bedroom suite, and several more that stocked the alleged Perriand daybed—and all at much better prices. She'd only said it to see what the tiny man would make of it.

“I see,” he said, sounding sincere.

She nodded back.

“I don't know much about antiques,” he whispered, as if it were a crime.

“Oh,” she sang. “I just assumed you were in the trade.” Emma smiled at him coyly then, as if she'd offered him a compliment—or a delicious hors d'oeuvre on a pretty lacquered tray.