At the Auction House
My pleasure in the auction might have come down from my childhood, when I used to daydream about making something from nothing, or rather, about how a modest thing could be transformed when placed in the right surroundings. The auction fueled an old flame in me. I often made a beeline for the clothing racks near the antiquarian books, and one day, tucked amid some taffeta opera gowns, I came across a long cut-velvet dress the color of eggplant. It was studded with burn-holes—the mark of a dozing smoker—but the fabric was marvelous, the backing softened by wear, the nap quietly lustrous. I bid $10, already pleased with the pillows I would make out of the yardage, and the next day called the automated auction results line and discovered that the dress sold for $250. Perhaps to a drag queen in a dishabille mood.
That kind of near-miss begins to eat at you. I’d noticed that in the back aisles, where the stuff got quirkier, the shoppers turned furtive. You tried not to linger too long in front of something you wanted, lest you telegraph its worth, and yet who could resist peering over the shoulders of other browsers, gauging a piece through their eyes? Once I fell in behind two young men who had stopped in front of a small oil painting.
“Do you like it?” the tall one asked his partner. “It could go in the hall.”
The shorter one studied the painting. “I like it,” he finally replied. “It’s not necessary.” He was holding the bidding sheet—the voice of restraint.
The taller man laughed. “I think it’s necessary!” But after he paused a little longer, he agreed to move on.
Once the couple had moved a respectable distance away, I scrutinized that painting—a muddy art-school exercise hung on a wall of such stuff—trying to decide if they had passed up a masterpiece.
But the auction held more than the lure of a marvelous find. I went there out of some fascination with the past. And not just the general past but the particular, not the mass-production chinoiserie chest but the faded prescription for Valium tucked in its drawer—the dates and drams of someone’s old anxieties. One auction employee told me that the dressers and side tables arrived directly from the apartments of the deceased, which is why they could possibly still hold a pair of sunglasses, an old birthday card: the grieving were too dazed to empty the drawers. She’d heard of secret panels with love letters sealed inside, attorneys who came in searching for a second will. “One woman came looking for her parents’ wedding rings,” she told me. “They’d left them taped to the bottom of a drawer.” Suddenly, the room seemed to hold an eerie pall: the sagging couches still bearing the impressions of bodies, the rows of dead TVs with fingerprints around the dials.
After that, my interest in the auction began to change. I spent less time bidding, and more time marveling at lots I would never buy, like the endless rack of size 2 satin cheongsams, each with a pair of matching doll-sized pumps slung over the hanger in a plastic bag, the wardrobe of a diminutive and wealthy Chinatown matron, I guessed. I was searching for a hint of the former owners’ lives. Once, in a curio corner filled with carved butter churns and spinning wheels, a small steamer trunk caught my eye. Lined in tattered linen, letting loose a musty smell, the trunk held a single sheet of yellowed newspaper: the front page of the San Francisco Daily News from Thursday, September 14, 1922. Slugged in between the news stories were one-inch accounts of defiled women, this one filing for divorce from an adulterer, that one’s grim fate fitted into a brief headline: “Wed in Night, Left in Morning.” I was stalled there, turning the friable paper in my hands. “City Blamed for Hetch Hetchy Crash” was the big news of the day, and beneath it was an account of men trapped in the Argonaut Mine, and a diagram of the rescue effort, with sketches of the tunnels and dotted lines marking the daily excavation goals. “It is not known if the search is for survivors or bodies,” the copy read, and I was caught by the suspense of a disaster that had resolved itself three-quarters of a century before.
It was that same morbid tug that one day landed me in a room at the south end of the warehouse, a room full of cages, each about the size of a dog kennel, each of which held a collection of miscellany, sold as a single lot: a set of chipped Christmas china; the lifetime’s subscriptions of one hunting man, back issues of Ball Powder Loading Data and The Fouling Shot. Next to these was a cage of small faded boxes that looked at first glance like cartons of staples. They turned out, on closer inspection, to be music rolls for a player piano, the collection of some recently departed soul who favored a blend of German polkas and Hawaiiana, among them “Dreamy Maui Moon,” “Rule, Meine Seele!” by R. Strauss, and “Chong (He Came From Hong Kong),” which was helpfully labeled “a foxtrot.” Missing from this lot was the player piano itself, which must once have held pride of place amid commemorative steins and hula girl paintings.
I hooked my fingers through the cage, breathing in the sour paper smell and imagining a certain evening: the widower in his tweed coat, carefully threading the roll and then escorting his dead golf partner’s wife to the center of the living room. It must have been a moment so sharp—his unexpected blush of hope, the surprising dryness of her palm—they might have thought it would leave a mark on the very objects around them. But our things go on without us, losing the hidden significance that made them dear. It occurred to me that I came to the auction for precisely this: to witness the litter of particulars, passing from one life to the next.
Lisa Michaels, contributing editor to The Threepenny Review, is the author of Split: A Counterculture Childhood. She lives in Seattle.
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