Movie Stars

Cancel My Reservation

1

ON HIS WALK, CHUCK PASSED A CHURCH. HE SAW SOME BIRDS. He didn’t know what kind. They were brown, pecking at something — what do birds peck at? seeds? — on the lawn. He caught himself thinking, They have their mouths open! Indeed, when the birds turned to him with their frozen faces, not eating but not closing their mouths, they looked dumbstruck and evil. But birds have beaks, not mouths. Upon reflection.

He was not good with details. He had even become fat without knowing it. Thinking back, he really couldn’t imagine not noticing that his clothes were so tight, not wondering why he had to wear his shirts untucked and unbutton his pants, why he didn’t wear a belt anymore and his knees hurt so much, why it was hard to rise from a crouch and how come he had so much trouble breathing and broke the toilet seat.

He didn’t know the right name or purpose of anything in nature. He saw a bank of flowers, the kind he wrongly called coolers — grape coolers, cherry coolers, vanilla coolers — bright and cheap as candy, trash flowers, pretty as paper stars or costume jewelry, the kind of flowers you might find planted in black plastic drums near the gas pumps. He saw an embankment of them ashen, crumpled, bubble-gum colors chewed up, sucked out, and discarded by the heat.

His scratchy shirt was long-sleeved and hot. It was early in the morning and already miserable in the sun. Saints used to wear scratchy shirts — hairshirts, right? It was good for you. It made you stop concentrating on your thoughts and opinions, that was probably the gist of it.

He kept walking to the old graveyard.

Used to be you couldn’t go in: too many bums waiting to cut your throat. So said the pro-gentrification forces on local talk radio. Now it was safe to look at the old headstones. They were good for a laugh.

Leak. Hope. Luckie. Shedden. He thought those were pretty funny names to see on tombstones. He planned to jot them down on a pad when he got home. Later he’d show it to somebody for a conversation piece. He was sad to have lost touch with Donny. Donny loved wordplay.

He saw a tombstone that said Stocks. That was only funny depending on the stock market.

Not everything was funny. He saw a black log, dead or burnt, part of a tree that had come through the ground, come out of somebody’s head and knocked aside his granite lozenge. He saw four stubby matching stones in a little parade. Their squat bases said: Mama. Papa. Honey. Me.

One squirrel grabbed a twig from a clump of plants with purple leaves, took the purple leafy twig to the top of a grave to chew.

Angry squirrels romping. Owned the place. Probably had it to themselves for fifty years or something, except for the bums. He guessed the squirrels weren’t so tough anymore. Too bad, you squirrels and bums. The rich people are taking over.

The walk helped him think. Chuck went home and got really drunk and booked a first-class round-trip airplane ticket from Atlanta to LAX and back. It cost nearly a thousand. For sixty bucks more he could’ve upgraded to a plan that allowed him to change his flight or cancel his trip, but however drunk he was he wasn’t that drunk. Not hardly.

2

Donny and Chuck had reconnected on Facebook. At first it was okay with Donny. Chuck made a friend request and Donny complied. He didn’t see why not. Chuck showered him with private chat messages right away.

Hi, it’s Chuck. Remember me Donny

hey man long time hows it been goin

My wife passed away.

did not know you were married congrats

Yes, but she passed away.

sorry

Hey aren’t we lucky we turned out to be the wrong age to be in any wars? At least we got that going for us, haha

That was sad about Chuck’s wife passing away. Donny found out that Chuck had had two wives, and both of them had passed away, which was twice as sad. Maybe it was exponentially sad. Donny couldn’t believe Chuck had married hot-to-trot Shelly Riviera straight out of high school. Donny had moved out of the district halfway through his junior year, but he still remembered the name Shelly Riviera. He wasn’t sure if he was putting the right face and body with the name. He was thinking of some hot girl he had permanently in his head.

Chuck had an estranged son. Donny found out everything about Chuck. His favorite canned soup. Chuck told stories about his two wives and how sexy they had been when they were alive and all their sex things.

Sometimes Donny got hard and secretly beat off, Chuck none the wiser. Or maybe Chuck was egging him on. Who was in charge here?

Soon he didn’t want to see Chuck around Facebook anymore. He was so tired of Chuck and Chuck’s crazy stories and opinions. He was scared of how much he was beating off these days. He was too old for such horseshit. He told Chuck he had a fatal disease and couldn’t chat anymore.

Chuck’s private messages became devastated. He wanted to know whether it was cancer.

no its none of the big ones you never heard of it

Donny realized that the only way to make the story stick was to leave Facebook altogether. He deleted his account and it was a great relief. He found that he didn’t miss Facebook at all.

The only thing that concerned him was his lie about dying. Donny couldn’t recall any specific examples, but he had a strong feeling that he had lied a couple of times before and the lie had always come true. Had he maybe lied about being poked in the eye with a stick? And then had something happened to his eye at the beach? Or was that somebody else?

3

It was Chuck’s first time in first class.

A woman behind him was talking loudly about a person who was a “dick.”

Across the aisle a man referred to the spare tire around his middle as “this fucking thing.”

They should call it First Crass, ha ha, thought Chuck.

But seriously, why were people so crass?

He didn’t care too much because of all the pills he had taken. He could stretch out his legs while the nice people brought him drinks.

He looked down at his loafers and remembered how his second wife had always made him wear shoes with laces. He said, “I was never any good at tying my shoes,” and she said, “I wouldn’t go around admitting that either.” And he said, “What do you mean either?” And she laughed and said, “I don’t know.”

Chuck laughed too. They laughed a lot. Veda didn’t want kids. Neither did Chuck. He already had one, and look how that turned out. It was a racket. But he brooded about what she said: “I wouldn’t go around admitting that either.” Freudian! What was the other thing? There was some other thing about Chuck that shamed Veda, something she never told him, something she nursed deep inside.

Then she got the terrible virus that improved their relationship but weakened and killed her. She left him a good bit of money and a big life insurance policy, about which he hadn’t known. He cashed her substantial retirement account and his too when he quit his job. He had not expected to live very long without her.

The money was running out, but he kept spending it however suited him. Most of the time he couldn’t think of anything, which was why it had lasted.

They gave him a good hot breakfast in first class, with a real fork and knife. They gave him his choice of cookies.

Chuck drank and took pills and lived all the time in a fog that wasn’t too bad. He had mostly crushed down his emotions. He hadn’t had a normal thought in two solid years. But these new pills the doctor had given him for the airplane didn’t work. The plane seemed to slow down at weird times in the middle of the air.

Chuck was scared.

________

4

Chuck’s knowledge of Hollywood geography was based on snippets of things he had heard on television. He ended up way out in Burbank, a fifty-dollar cab ride from Beverly Hills, where he had business.

But he liked the hotel. His stay was going to cost him a thousand, but what the hell. Seemed like everything about California cost a thousand. He had a thousand to spend on his official business, too.

Chuck liked that there was a drugstore across the street. There were lots of things across the street. It was a good location. You could go across the street and get anything, even a cat from the pet store. Chuck traveled light, and he liked the easy access to necessities. His terror of airplanes had kept him out of the air for a while. He knew about the latest measures — that he would have to take off his shoes and belt, for example. He practiced taking off his shoes and belt at home and got really good at it. But he didn’t want to be held up in security by some zealot who thought his bottle of shampoo was explosive or his phone might trigger a bomb. So he didn’t bring a phone. Why would he need one? People just thought they needed stuff. Chuck had seen a commercial where a guy bragged about his Kindle being like “a thousand books in your back pocket.” Only a moron or an unimaginably perverse monomaniac would need a thousand books in his back pocket. A thousand books in your back pocket was not a good thing. One book at a time in your back pocket was plenty. Zero was also good. Hotels supplied free shampoo, soap, shower gel. They would give you a toothbrush and toothpaste if you asked. Anything else he needed, Chuck could get at the drugstore.

Chuck was hungry for dinner at three thirty in the afternoon because of the time difference. He went to the “bistro” across the street. It was empty that time of day, but open. Chuck ordered roasted chicken and French fries. He sat at the bar, a black cloth napkin on his lap. A guy in a burgundy apron waited on him. A guy with a Russian accent popped up from the back and made genial, lewd comments about life. Chuck ordered some rosé and the Russian complimented him on his selection then loudly cursed the man in the apron, who had disappeared. The man in the apron came back. A third guy showed up. Everybody stood around doing nothing.

His first wife Shelly had worked in restaurants, and Chuck knew it was unusual for people who worked in a restaurant to stand around doing nothing. Wasn’t there silverware to roll? The Russian guy told the other two he would get dinner for them. He got on the phone and loudly, almost abrasively, ordered a pizza and two chicken parms from some Italian place. Chuck thought that was interesting, but who cared? His roasted chicken was good when it came out. It looked like a picture. When the third guy carried it over to him, he stopped on the way and showed it to the man in the apron, like it was something special. Was that a sincere move or showmanship? It was like neither of them had ever seen a chicken before. Had no one ever ordered the chicken before? They seemed so amazed. Chuck was in a blur from the airplane booze and airplane pills and regular booze and regular pills. He dug in, breaking through the gorgeous, shiny skin.

Back at the hotel, Chuck used his key card to get into the “Business Center.” It was some closet with a tiny wastebasket and a computer. Chuck guessed that business centers had atrophied since the last time he had been in one. Everybody was his or her own business center now.

Chuck signed into Twitter and announced to his followers that he was in L.A. He’d sure love someone to show him the ropes.

He was surprised to get a direct message right away with a phone number from Maria Garey, whom he didn’t remember following or being followed by.

He called her from his room. Probably nobody used in-room telephones anymore. The hotel was going to love Chuck so much. He felt happy to make them happy. He felt like maybe they would give him special treatment because he was such a big spender.

Chuck and Maria caught up a bit, exclaiming how great it was to hear each other’s voices, how they couldn’t believe each other remembered each other, how of course they remembered each other, are you kidding? Maria remembered that Chuck had married Shelly Riviera. Chuck had to tell her Shelly was dead. Maria was so sorry. Chuck said it was okay. It happened a long time ago, when they were young. It was sad that Shelly had died young, but they had been having difficulties. She died in a small plane crash, taking flying lessons from her clandestine lover. There had been a lot of anger mixed up with the grief. Chuck was too young to be a husband and he was a terrible father, but being so young and resilient and selfish at the time had helped him heal. Maria said that was great, all that stuff about the healing and everything.

“Their skeletons were mingled,” said Chuck.

“Oh no!” said Maria.

“So you live out here?” said Chuck.

“I’m just off Beverly Glen.”

“Is that near Beverly Hills?” said Chuck. “I have to be in Beverly Hills tomorrow.”

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

“Well, they both have ‘Beverly’ in the name,” said Chuck.

“What are you doing out here?” said Maria.

“Do you remember Donny Billings?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, well, he left in eleventh grade, was it? He had big ears and freckles.”

“I just don’t know.”

“Brillo pad hair?”

Maria made a noise like she didn’t remember.

“Dark red, but like a Brillo pad. They called him Brillo Head. Do you remember the guy, Brillo Head, they said he tried to choke himself with his mother’s bra?”

“You’d think I’d remember something like that,” said Maria.

“That’s Donny, anyway. He’s real sick now.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Maria.

“Yeah, he’s, uh, they don’t think he’s going to make it. I was going to send him a ‘get well’ thing, and I remember he always liked Bob Hope. So I was going to send him this, like, Bob Hope thing.”

“That’s cool,” said Maria.

“Yeah, so they’re doing this auction of Bob Hope’s personal effects.”

“I want to go!” said Maria.

“Do you really?”

“It sounds cool.”

“It’s tomorrow afternoon.”

“I can’t do tomorrow afternoon.”

“That’s too bad,” said Chuck. “Well, it’s on Saturday, too.”

“Saturday might happen,” said Maria. “Let me check into it. I’m having some people for dinner Friday night, tomorrow night. You should definitely come. What time is your auction over?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been to one.”

“Well, here, let me give you my address.”

She gave him her address.

“Just come over when it’s done, or call me or whatever. I’m making red beans and rice. It’s kind of loose.”

“So what are you doing out here?” said Chuck.

“This is embarrassing, but I’m a writer on a TV show,” said Maria.

“Why is that embarrassing?” said Chuck.

“It’s not,” said Maria.

“What show?” said Chuck.

“Elevated Feelings,” said Maria.

“I don’t know that one.”

“It has a cult following. It’s quite popular, actually. The New York Times called it one of the top twelve programs of the year three years ago.”

“Is it on one of those pay stations?”

“Oh, no, it’s just basic cable.”

“I liked it better when there were just three channels.”

“That was a long time ago,” said Maria.

“Yes,” said Chuck. He was falling asleep.

“I’m glad there are more channels, or I’d be out of a job.”

5

It must have been 1979 or ’80, because Donny hadn’t moved yet. There were three channels on TV. Chuck always liked to talk about how much better things had been when there were just three channels on TV. A kid was forced to grapple with cultural objects no kid today would ever discover. Kids today had too many choices, and as a result their worldview was paradoxically and oppressively narrow. They could watch Finding Nemo over and over. There were channels with nothing but cartoons. A kid in the 1970s would find himself watching Harold Lloyd on a Sunday afternoon — a silent, black-and-white movie! Unthinkable now.

All through the seventies Chuck had watched something called “The Big Show,” an afternoon movie franchise on the local CBS affiliate. They were mostly black-and-white. The weatherman introduced them. There was one about a giant tarantula. A Tarzan movie came on most Fridays. Chuck remembered one with these two supple trees growing side by side. The natives would bend the trees toward one another and bind them. They tied some safari dude’s legs to the trees, one to each tree. Then they cut the rope and the trees whanged away from one another. You just saw the tops of the trees flying in opposite directions but you heard the guy go Eeeeeeyaaaawwwww and knew he had been ripped in half, down the middle, wishbone style. It was intense.

By the time Donny and Chuck were juniors, “The Big Show” had some competition on Channel Ten. It was this thing called “Movies 10,” and it was too cool to have a host. There was just an animated opening graphic, some psychedelia on a cherry-red background of a guy with a movie camera disintegrating into cubist components. Then the movie would come on. Hipper stuff than “The Big Show” could get: Harry and Walter Go to New York, The Hot Rock, Popi, Where’s Poppa? The Pink Panther, The Choirboys, Cotton Comes to Harlem, California Split, Super Fuzz, Freebie and the Bean, Uptown Saturday Night, Little Murders. Heavily edited, most of them, but they made you feel you were getting away with something.

Donny was absent for a few weeks and everybody said he had tried to strangle himself with his mother’s bra. Donny had no father and a strange mother from Germany. Once Chuck had gone over there for lunch and she made tuna salad with pineapple rings on it. They kept the house dark.

Homeroom signed a card for Donny. Chuck volunteered to take it over.

Donny opened the door and seemed glad to see him. The house smelled funny.

Donny invited Chuck in. He said Cancel My Reservation was just coming on “Movies 10.”

Donny’s mother and sister were gone, so Donny had the house to himself. Chuck thought that was odd. He was kind of nervous. Donny was apparently a maniac of some sort, though he appeared calm and peaceful. Chuck saw a full glass of Coke sitting on the carpet near the TV. The cola itself had a bluish slime growing on its flat, calm surface.

They watched Cancel My Reservation and Donny made a lot of insightful comments about Bob Hope’s career. Chuck looked back on it as the first time he had ever heard anyone make insightful comments.

Chuck had never thought about Bob Hope one way or another. In those days, Bob Hope was just vaguely around, like the human appendix or lichens.

But Donny said things like, “Bob Hope and Eva Marie Saint are really good together. Can you believe she was with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Cary Grant in North by Northwest and now here she is in this? You could argue that it places Bob Hope in the lineage of those titans, each representing a perfected but very different acting style. Or you might study Eva Marie Saint’s talent for reacting. It’s honest and true and puts her leading men in stark relief.”

Later: “This is the most recent Bob Hope movie and it came out almost ten years ago. He’s washed up in the movies. Can you believe this came out the same year Al Pacino revolutionized cinema acting forever in the Oscar-winning production of The Godfather?”

When the cameos by Flip Wilson and Johnny Carson came up, Donny laughed with wise appreciation and said, “This is commentary on Bob Hope’s earlier movie career. A fitting elegy.”

Chuck still remembered him saying that: “A fitting elegy.” That’s when he knew Donny was special, smarter than anybody else. Put it together with the attempted suicide via his mother’s bra and you really had something in this Donny.

Plus, the things he said were true. Bob Hope and Eva Marie Saint were good together. They had a natural rhythm just like an old married couple. Chuck watched close after Donny said it, and he learned what marriage was that day, he really did.

Man oh man! That Donny.

Before one football game, Shelly Riviera had gone in the band room closet and let all the willing male band members feel her up, one at a time. The percussionists were first in line, followed by some of the cockier trumpeters who could hit the high notes. Girly instruments like woodwinds hung around on the fringe, not really knowing what was up. Chuck was third clarinet. He squeaked constantly. The first two clarinets were girls, which made Chuck a figure of some fun. This guy Damon who sat behind him used to take his lyre — a clamp for holding music during marching season — and attach it painfully to Chuck’s earlobe, drawing blood. Damon once paid his own sister Tracy to sit on Chuck’s lap and squirm lasciviously when the band bus broke down. She kept half-rising, pretending to look for something in the overhead compartment, and then she’d sit down and squirm some more. Damon and those guys were sitting in the back of the bus laughing. Chuck didn’t get the joke. He thought it was the best night of his life until the band director broke it up. Damon was later electrocuted when trying to cut the wires on the band room clock.

It was Damon who maneuvered Chuck into line to feel up Shelly Riviera in the dark. She was wearing her band jacket and her frilled dickey with nothing underneath. Ominous tubas hung in dull cyclopean glints on the wall, waiting for concert season, when they would replace the cruder sousaphones.

Later Shelly told him he had been the politest boy to feel her up by far. He had been trying to channel the weary Bob of Cancel My Reservation.

A climactic scene of that movie involved the weaponizing of Eva Marie Saint’s leopard-skin bra. Much business occurred with the bra. The bra was important to the plot. Characters examined it, pulled and fondled it, discussed and fretted over it. What an awful coincidence. Later Chuck realized that life is nothing but an awful coincidence. Without being too obvious, he kept an eye on Donny, who seemed to thoroughly relish the bra scene with no sign of troubled reflections. Whatever had been wrong with him, Cancel My Reservation made Donny feel better.

6

The back wall of the auction house was a dark, creamy orange on which Bob Hope’s name was spelled out in sparkling golden paint with black accents.

Chuck was two hours early for the auction. Not many were so green. Only two of the folding chairs were occupied, to his surprise, by a heavy man in a neon pink Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a heavy woman wearing pajama pants and a surgical mask. For the first of many times, it was brought home to him with a thud that he was not Cary Grant in North by Northwest. He pegged a Christopher Hitchens lookalike with a parboiled face as serious competition, bent in mindful fury before the reception desk upon which his catalog was helplessly splayed. Even this man was dressed down, though his T-shirt was somber and advertised a highbrow museum exhibit.

Chuck had tried to dress up. He was in a blue velvet jacket with a loose string on the sleeve he couldn’t stop looking at but was too afraid to pull.

Feeling self-conscious, Chuck headed straight for the back corner, where a horribly ugly Leroy Neiman painting hung in waiting.

Shelly had loved Leroy Neiman. She had also become obsessed with tanning later on. He never figured out Shelly.

Neiman’s style made Chuck think of somebody weak trying to stab you to death.

Shelly liked this series Leroy Neiman had done for the Olympic Village, mostly showing athletes stretching and preening, but there was this one of a tiger crouched to spring with flashing eyes. “To fire them up,” Shelly said. She had bought a cheap print of it and hung it over their bed. “For inspiration,” she said.

The painting of Bob Hope was so godawful Chuck couldn’t stop looking at it. Was that an oak tree? Why was it purple? Did golf courses usually have huge old oak trees standing right next to the tee? Chuck didn’t know anything about golf. But where was that ball coming from, what physically impossible angle?

The worst was Bob Hope’s face.

Bob’s eyes had never been like that, so open and guileless. Neiman hadn’t even managed to get the nose right, a feat any boardwalk caricaturist could have achieved. The most fearful impact was reserved for the mouth. This Hope wore the smile of an insane idiot. It felt like Neiman thought he was doing Hope a favor, smoothing him out, redacting his guarded smile and replacing it with something more palatable for public consumption. He had edited Hope, bowdlerized him. It was an insult. Bob was a cool customer, and Neiman couldn’t understand it.

But it kept Chuck staring long enough that his outrage turned to something else. Maybe it was the fact that he had walked in just minutes ago and still felt fraudulent and out of his element. Maybe it was the pills. Chuck suddenly understood what Leroy Neiman was trying to get across: This is how happy Bob Hope felt playing golf. And it was all the more touching and humane for Neiman’s incompetence. Insight married to incompetence! The consolations of art!

Bob had lived for a century, but now he was just as stone dead as Shelly Riviera or poor Veda or Kurt Cobain. Life’s fleeting pleasures are the most important things, whispered the horrible Leroy Neiman painting of Bob Hope playing golf.

Chuck had left his catalog, for which he had paid one hundred dollars plus ten dollars shipping and handling, back in Atlanta. It was too bulky and awkward to carry on the plane. He found the real stuff in display cases lining the rooms of the auction house more compelling. Things he had flipped past on paper glowed at him now. He wanted to bust out Bob’s “Studio Del Campo Enameled Copper Dishes” and lick their deep colors like candy.

He searched unsuccessfully for Bob Hope’s ice bucket with the silver-plated polar bear on top. It was part of lot 21, the first thing he had marked down as a possible score — for himself or Donny, he couldn’t decide. He knew what he had to get Donny: the dusty Native American pot, possibly imitation, set atop a modernistic, sickly bulging metal pedestal that shone like a mirror. The pot and pedestal didn’t go together. Like Bob Hope and Eva Marie Saint! But they made it work by force. Chuck thought Donny would appreciate the tension. The pot had two handles that looked like squat, unsatisfied arms, hands on hips. It was a gruff dirt-colored pot with a lid like a frumpy hat. The plaque on the pedestal said, “From the Cast and Crew of CANCEL MY RESERVATION, 1971.”

Everything had a plaque on it. Give Bob Hope an oversized pewter boot for his birthday, make damned sure to weld a plaque to it. Bob Hope had so much stuff he needed plaques to keep everything straight. What a life.

Another ice bucket, a cunning red apple with an incomprehensible brass plate screwed on: “TO BOB HOPE WITH BOUNDLESS THANKS FOR MAKING LIGHTS ON THE BENEFIT IN THE BIG APPLE.” Making lights on the benefit? It had looked so nice in the catalog, ripe and polished plastic. In person it was a shabby apple, hardly able to support the mighty nonsense inscribed upon it.

Things that looked bad in the catalog looked good in real life, and vice versa. That was meaningful. Chuck had learned at least one important thing and there was still more than an hour to go before the auction started. He was never going to find that silver polar bear. It could have been in one of the cases behind the set of long, draped tables they were using as a phone and computer bank. Some workers were already there, blocking his view, getting set up to take phone bids and monitor the live online action. Chuck had seen it all.

What would Bob drink?

7

He strolled around Beverly Hills. It was too hot for his jacket but Chuck wanted to have class. Everything here was a clothes store. He saw a handbag the color and texture of a baby chick and thought of Shelly. The doors to one store opened as he walked past and a scent wafted out like the world’s biggest perfume ad in a ladies’ magazine. The window displays of Beverly Hills were freaky and oblique. Halved and mounted silver spheres. Looked like stuff you’d find in Bob Hope’s house. Bob was ahead of the times. He had so much acrylic furniture.

Chuck imagined Bob drinking Campari and soda with Richard Nixon. He passed a vegetarian sandwich shop wedged into a corner and, some minutes later, a stray juice bar. Chuck was on the wrong street for booze.

He took some turns to a promising joint with weird architecture, winding and white. It was shaped like a corkscrew, or the famous California ghost house with the hallways that shrank and the stairways to nowhere. Inside was white too. Good, there was a bar along the back. A notable percentage of the lunch crowd consisted of strenuously tanned old men in the company of much younger women.

There was no bartender. Chuck sat at the empty white bar and checked out the shining bottles. Sparse and standard. This was not a place where people went for serious drinking. There were a couple of okay gins. A tattooed gal in a black tank top showed up to help him. He could tell she wasn’t a bartender. She seemed to be juggling the whole place, “in the weeds,” a phrase he knew from Shelly. He heard Shelly’s voice saying it. Unlike Shelly, this young woman had never heard of a martini.

“You mean an apple martini?” she said. It seemed like a dated reference for one of her tender years. Chuck explained about gin.

The old man at the two-top behind him was telling his would-be starlet about roughage. “You don’t need it; you’re skinny,” he said to her. Next thing you know, he was really doing that classic old chestnut about starting out in the mailroom, the one where his spunk got him into the office of the studio chief.

In the corner, alone, on a white leather banquette, a “faded beauty” was talking to herself.

Chuck felt kind of thrilled. But the server took the unopened bottle of gin somewhere out of sight. To secretly ask her manager how to make a martini? Chuck watched signs of frost vanishing from the waiting martini glass she had produced and abandoned.

He occupied himself considering the stem. Stems were different in California. This one was like two stems that arched away from one another, then joined at the top, leaving an ovular sliver in the middle. It was such an intelligent glass, but nobody knew how to pour a martini into it. The night before, he had downed a subpar, sticky-sweet Manhattan in the lobby bar of his hotel, and the stem had been like a prank you’d order from a comic book, curving away from the hand of the drinker, so you’d grab for it and it wouldn’t be there. Your drink was floating in air with a breath of magic it didn’t deserve. Were these stems a metaphor?

After a while Chuck left a fiver on the bar. He wasn’t robbing her of trade. No one had been waiting for his barstool. But he left the money anyway because it was what Shelly would have done. Shelly was always kind to others whose position she had shared. She was always kind, period. Think of all those boys she had let feel her up. She had picked herself a lulu of a husband, a peacherino, a real dud. He felt himself rubbing his dry bottom lip like a drunk in a movie.

On the way out he saw the girl working the patio. She apologized like she was going to cry. He said consoling things.

8

When Chuck found the auction house again, the first person he saw inside was a slouched old professor lurching around in houndstooth. That’s more like it, he thought.

They gave Chuck paddle 187, police code for murder.

He sat near the front, sweating like a pig in his blue velvet jacket, looking at that loose thread on his arm.

A nice couple sat next to him, the man in a baseball cap and camo shorts. His curly-headed old wife was dressed up and twinkling, all chestnut hair coloring and tasteful eye makeup and charming crow’s feet and high pink cheeks. He liked seeing old guys with cool old wives. It didn’t make him feel bad.

Behind him, two men had an affectionate discussion about their friend who had “died the right way, without a clue.” One of them, changing the subject, said, “We had a dispute with a Japanese company.” Like the geezer in the houndstooth, it was snug with his expectations. It was what he wanted to hear.

A sporty young fellow with ruddy cheeks and tousled golden hair arrived, a Dorian Gray type, or an older Tom Sawyer, or maybe Tom Sawyer grew up to be Dorian Gray. He talked to a woman in tinted glasses about an entire estate someone had consigned to him, and how he in turn had consigned it in parcels to various auction houses. He also attended auctions like this one to buy things for clients.

“I have literally shopping lists people give me,” he said. “Literally, ‘I want a thing that’s horizontal with stripes.’”

The man in camo shorts — who, like Chuck, was eavesdropping — leaned forward and asked vaguely, “Are you a professional?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” the young man replied. “I’m an art advisor.”

The man who had had a dispute with a Japanese company was describing in elaborate detail an old editorial cartoon about the Clinton sex scandal.

There was lots of teasing and laughing, a building, carnival energy as more people came in and time for the first gavel drew near. The art advisor struck up a fast friendship with Camo Shorts and his sweetly smiling wife. He moved back a row to sit next to them. He talked about the drab town where he had grown up (“Everything was olive”) and how happy he was now.

Chuck counted twenty-one chairs in front of him, only three of them filled.

He looked behind him. The last two rows were completely full. Was there some advantage to being in the back?

The auctioneer rapped the crowd to order. His gavel had no handle. It was a hunk of wood he clutched in his fist. It was loud and scary but didn’t seem to bother anyone. His expert banging accomplished nothing. People chatted on their iPhones, loose and rowdy, roaming around. The auction-house workers on their phones and computers were just as lively and loud. The family of the guy just in front of Chuck came in — wife and daughter, from the looks of them. They had a smelly doggie bag for their man. Civilization had collapsed, and this confident little rooster of an auctioneer with his pearly monuments of teeth was not going to save it. As the wife and daughter settled in, the husband and father gesticulated frantically about something and the auctioneer, who was taking bids on “two green lacquered Chinese-style game tables,” paid him no mind at all. There were no quiet people in gray suits making tiny movements.

Chuck bid on an acrylic cocktail table, just to see what it felt like. It was terrifying. He raised his paddle for two fifty, but someone else must have bid at the same time, because the auctioneer looked straight at Chuck and called out three hundred. Chuck’s heart jumped. It was fast, like losing money at roulette. He perceived that he was at the mercy of the mercurial auctioneer. As the price of the acrylic cocktail table went up he gave Chuck knowing looks and beguiling grins, trying to persuade him to shoot the works, openly giving the sucker the hard sell, not like the auctioneers in movies, who were dour as undertakers. Chuck felt it, he felt the sway, but kept his paddle in his lap.

Chuck had a thousand dollars he could safely spend. He meant to use it all on Donny’s Cancel My Reservation pot if necessary. Yes, he would secure that first, then spend anything that happened to be left in the kitty on himself. He was already getting off track. Human greed, Chuck had it. The pot wasn’t scheduled to come up for bidding until the next morning. Chuck shouldn’t even have been in the auction house. He told himself it was research, a stakeout.

This is for you, Donny, came the grand thought.

He didn’t flinch through the polar bear ice bucket and two Tiffany decanters, one etched with a facsimile of Bob Hope’s autograph. He was stoic. This wasn’t about him. Chuck had a higher calling.

The auctioneer worked it. He was a balding superhero, one of those little guys who pack a punch — Doll Man, Ant-Man, the Atom. The hair left him was darkly metallic and wavy.

He smoothed over his keen, professional aggression with jokes. Once there were some end tables no one was bidding on and he said in a mock wheedling tone, “Come on, it’s Bob Hope!” Everybody laughed. But somebody took the bait.

He laughed too, and openly, at his task of making a Native American — themed golf award sound alluring. “That’s unique: I didn’t know Kachinas golfed.”

For five chairs with upholstery so remarkably unappealing that the room fell silent in zonked-out awe, he said, “You can have four people over if you’re single.”

He was playing with their sadness.

A few lots later, in a searing flash of instantaneous buyer’s remorse and what felt like incipient diarrhea, Chuck gave in and snagged some poorly punctuated linen bar towels (THE HOPE’S BAR, they said) and “two unmarked Far Eastern metal ashtrays.”

Dizzy and guilty, brooding about what he had done, he had to step out for some air. The bamboo and wicker and rattan, forests of it, had begun to blur together.

Now he had absolutely no more than seven hundred dollars left to spend on Donny. Still, it was more than enough for the pot. Nobody would want that pot, would they? Why would anyone want that lousy pot? He sat on a low wall in the bleak, paved-over courtyard. People didn’t care about Bob Hope. They were going for the furniture. “A lacquered animal hide console table with Asian style feet.” What was that? It could have belonged to anybody. What were Asian feet? Well, they were something that had people peeling the big bills off their rolls. Memories, on the other hand, were cheap as dirt. Three C-notes for the ashtrays in which Bob Hope had personally stubbed out his cigarettes. And they came with Lucite coasters and glass toothpick holders thrown in. Nobody cared. Who but Chuck would bid on that gross pot from the spidery corner of Bob Hope’s library? It would be a steal. Now Chuck had Bob Hope’s bar towels and that’s all there was to it. What’s done is done, like buying a first-class ticket with no refund.

He poked his head back in the gallery. His auctioneer was gone. A lanky farm boy with a saucy forelock he kept pushing out of his face had taken his place. He was sepulchral and at the same time his voice would crack like an adolescent’s. Maybe he was an apprentice. The main auctioneer sat nearby, resting and watching thoughtfully. The new guy seemed nice, but the spell was broken.

Chuck walked around Beverly Hills, killing time until it was late enough to get a cab to Maria’s. At the corner of Beverly and Dayton, a passing guy asked his friend, “This is where that movie star committed suicide?” Or maybe he was saying it, not asking. That’s how people said things, as Chuck had begun to notice. It wasn’t his world anymore. He knew how Bob Hope felt.

9

It was somebody’s birthday. Chuck never got a grasp on whose.

There was an NPR commentator who knew everything about tequila.

A woman in a scarf worked for a foundation.

A dignified person with a neatly pressed shirt and cotton-candy swirl of distinguished gray hair buttonholed a former scientist turned filmmaker (who kept calling himself “a former scientist turned filmmaker”).

An otherwise nicely dressed man from Harvard walked around barefooted as an ape. Well, the guy had respectable feet. They were evenly ruddy, with smooth, glossy nails. They were too small for the guy, his feet were, but that made them even more precious. They were the feet of a faun. It was worse than going around naked. Chuck and Veda had been at a pool party with one casually nude guest and everyone pretended not to notice her coppery tuft glaring at them.

Chuck was out of his league. His feet were a disaster. He thought they were what kept him from falling in love again.

Maria gave everyone champagne to toast the elusive birthday. No, not champagne. “Sparkling wine,” as she correctly said.

Maria lived down a mysterious winding lane that was gravelly and bereft of streetlights and seemed to split and double back on itself as it went along in deadly and unexpected hillocks. The cabbie had a tough time finding her house, which was a towering box of corrugated metal with an orange door. Chuck got out disoriented and stumbled around until he heard Maria calling to him from a balcony. Just feet away, the cabbie had pulled over and whipped it out to pee in the street. It seemed feasible. The dream road was loomed over by fantastic mismatched buildings, and worldly restraint didn’t matter.

Sparkling wine hit Chuck’s empty stomach. He kept proudly admitting he didn’t know anything. No one was impressed by the saintly depths of Chuck’s ignorance.

They were waiting for someone else to arrive before they could eat. It was killing Chuck. He was conscious of Maria’s vibe from the other room, where she was slicing up tomatoes and stirring the pot. He wanted go in there and lean against a counter and catch up, maybe pick up something with his fingers and eat it. There was an open box of fried chicken just sitting there from a no-frills Korean place in a strip mall a few miles away. And Maria was tall and gorgeous, born in Vera Cruz. But somehow Chuck was tangled up in this sophisticated living room conversation, where the guy who knew everything about tequila made a speech describing each of the two hundred varieties of agave plant, only one of which could be used to make tequila. It seemed rude to get up and leave. Occasionally someone would squeeze in a word about his or her own fucked-up specialty.

Somebody said, “Of course, everyone thinks that Al Gore saved the world, but they’re wrong.”

Chuck guffawed. Guffawed was an accurate description. “Wait!” he said. “Wait! Wait! Everybody thinks Al Gore saved the world?” Then he said something like, “Haw, haw, haw.” Everyone stared at him.

“Well, some of us lefties do,” the woman in the scarf ventured at last.

Chuck had stepped in it. He was a lefty! Chuck was a lefty all the way. But he couldn’t say it now.

The missing person showed up and the table was set.

Chuck fingered the gold threads in his pleasantly rugged napkin. Real gold, maybe. He had a thimble of the fine tequila the NPR man had brought. He wondered whether “notes of vanilla” would be a correct thing to say about it. He kept his yapper stapled.

Maria and the man with the wire-rimmed glasses and cotton-candy hair seemed to be in some kind of fancy wine club together — a club of two. Maria brought out a white wine she had been saving for him. It looked kind of brassy when she poured it.

“It’s a funny color,” said the thoughtful, quiet man, who was across the table from Chuck.

“It’s old!” Maria said defensively. Chirped defensively.

The chicken was bleeding but Chuck didn’t care. He sloshed himself a glassful of the rusty wine and started gulping it, only later stopping to think it wasn’t for him. His tongue couldn’t register how special it was.

Maria had made an incredible salad with raw corn.

“It was so sweet I didn’t want to do anything to it,” she said.

Chuck wished he could be like that, to know when not to do anything to some corn, to instinctively know that Christmas lights in different colors were “tacky” for reasons normal humans could never understand.

Maria sweetly tried to include him in the conversation, asking about the auction.

“Oh, ha ha, there was this horrible Leroy Neiman painting,” Chuck said.

The quiet person across the table stopped him. “I happened to be at Leroy Neiman’s ninetieth birthday party,” he mouthed. “He was a sweet guy.”

Chuck’s soul froze up in horror.

“He’s fascinating, of course,” lied Chuck.

“Lee painted some real crap,” said Leroy Neiman’s friend.

“No, no,” lied Chuck. “No, no.”

“I was so privileged to be at his ninetieth birthday. You know, most of his birthday parties Lee invited only women.”

The table chuckled at the venerable rascality of the incorrigible Leroy Neiman.

10

Maria had seemed excited about the auction. She had promised to be in Burbank by 9 a.m. sharp to pick up Chuck. He stood there waiting. A Ford Focus arrived. Someone stepped out of the driver’s seat and peered. She was long-legged and dark like Maria, but much younger. She wore something fashionable that resembled a bellhop uniform from a 1960s science fiction movie. Chuck took one step in her direction. She examined him inquiringly. He pointed at himself. She raised her perfectly waxed eyebrows over her round black-lensed glasses in response. He crept closer to the car like a deviant.

“Are you…?” she said.

Chuck said he was Chuck.

“I thought so. Get in.”

Chuck got in. So did she. She turned down the radio and put it in gear.

“Where’s Maria?” said Chuck.

“She’s sorry. She couldn’t make it. She sends her apologies.”

“Are you…?” said Chuck.

“Oh, I’m…”

“Are you her daughter?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I am. Angel.” He realized that she wasn’t calling him an angel, she was saying that her name was Angel. “Now, where are we going again?”

That morning the auction started with a pair of “Venetian Painted Blackamoors.” Chuck apologized. “Bob Hope wasn’t a racist,” he said. “I guess everybody had some Venetian Painted Blackamoors.”

“No bigs,” said Angel. She was the understanding type.

“Will there be food?” she had asked him on the way. He had said no, so they stopped and he got her a breakfast burrito to go. But he was wrong. There was a pyramid of bagels and a much larger crowd than yesterday’s attacking them. At the feet of the Ichabod Crane type next to Chuck languished a paper plate scattered with crumbs, a smeared black paper napkin, a plastic cup with a dribble of OJ left in the bottom, a torn cellophane peppermint wrapper.

Memorabilia seemed to be running higher today, and there was more energy, a wild rumble of nattering that never stopped. A fellow manning the phone table shouted like a revivalist, giving a spine-tingling “YAH!” or “YUP!” whenever an internet customer gained the top bid.

The Cancel My Reservation pot came and went in a breathtaking shaft of anticlimax, rocketing past him to $1,200. Chuck was astonished and crushed. Angel could see it. “You should have gone for that three-hundred-dollar little table that was really ugly,” she said. “Or his old boot brush. That was a keeper.” She found the whole thing amusing and, apparently, absurd. She was drawn nevertheless to a pair of lush, worn, burnt-orange velvet armchairs, susceptible as anyone to the intimate guile of the bantam auctioneer, though she dropped out quickly, shutting down his seduction with such deftness that Chuck could see the wonder and respect glimmer in his cagey eyes.

As the auction went on and Chuck made his bereaved and hesitant failures, she kept solemnly tapping the catalog photo of Bob Hope’s grungy boot brush and raising her eyebrows suggestively. It worked every time and he couldn’t help laughing, down as he was in spirit. She smelled like a bubble bath and made the hairs stand up on his arms. He couldn’t think.

11

There was a lunch break between the morning and afternoon sessions. Angel and Chuck walked to a Beverly Hills deli with an aged clientele. He had chopped liver and explained things. The hours were running out. The last of the lots were coming up, and only a few remaining items would do for his sick friend. He couldn’t afford a single distraction. His goal required all his concentration. Had she seen how expensive everything was today? It was crazy.

“I know, you kept saying, ‘That’s crazy!’” she told him.

“I did? Out loud?”

“Uh, yeah. Like nine times.”

“How mortifying,” said Chuck. “But I mean, somebody bought Bob Hope’s Webster’s Dictionary for two hundred dollars. It’s a Webster’s Dictionary. That’s crazy.”

“Well, you were really going for that shitty box,” she said.

She meant the small crate of roughly joined planks, stamped all over with DANGER! LIVE INDIA MONGOOSE: THE SNAKE EATER. “When box is opened,” the catalog declared, “a spring mechanism releases a furry tail and loud noise.” It was listed adorably as “BOB HOPE NOVELTY TRICK BOX.” Chuck was sure he had the only legitimate reason to bid on it, and found his deadened capacity for amazement jolted back to life when it swiftly rose in price and, like everything else, out of his range.

“You’re getting this dude a gag gift, right?” said Angel. “So I think it would have been hilarious if you got him a gag. I mean, a gag gift that’s a real gag? Hi-lare.”

Chuck was bewildered and hurt. How was something from Bob Hope’s home a gag gift? He hadn’t thought of the box like that. He knew that Donny, lying there on his deathbed, would have gotten a real kick from handling this rare old piece of crude machinery that Bob had used to lay a cornball shock on the jaded partygoers of Palm Springs. Donny would think of some tough guy like Robert Mitchum whipping back his hand in fear and everybody having a snort of hooch and laughing about it around the old acrylic cocktail table. Chuck hoped it wasn’t heart trouble, though Donny would appreciate going out that way, mortally stunned by Bob Hope’s novelty trick box. Chuck had missed out on that frosted glass Christmas tree. It hadn’t seemed worth paying attention to. But it came with a note from Mitchum, which Chuck had noticed too late. That old softie, that big lug, giving Bob a Christmas tree. Who would have expected such tenderness and sentimentality in such a mismatched pair? They were just like Chuck and Donny.

“A Bob Hope fashion award. That’s a gag gift,” Angel said.

Chuck couldn’t explain to her why a Bob Hope fashion award, which indeed he had bid on for Donny, wasn’t a gag gift.

“Do you even know who Bob Hope is?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” she said. “Hey, look. I have a friend who likes to dress up like a teddy bear and put on a diaper and wet himself.”

“Okay,” said Chuck.

“I drew a picture of him with a Hungarian flag as a diaper, and I posted it to my tumblr,” said Angel. “I started getting all these angry comments, like, this is disrespect to Hungary or whatever. And I was like, ‘Whatevs’ or whatever. I was like, ‘My friend is from Hungary and he loves this picture.’ So you see?”

Chuck didn’t see. He didn’t see at all. She was speaking gibberish. Or he was. He looked across the booth at her and was flooded with feelings. It wasn’t fair that Maria had to get older, replaced by this newer, firmer model, wearing clothes that might have been manufactured before Maria was born. People died and clothes lived forever? Something. Time had gone and got fluid on Chuck. He was one of those movie ghosts who doesn’t realize he’s dead until somebody points it out. His head swam and he must have looked a wretch. Angel reached across the table and touched his ghostly hand.

“The keychain was cool,” she said, trying to make him feel better.

He pulled his hand away.

“The keychain was not cool. Twenty-two hundred for a keychain. I’m starting to feel like there’s something bad in the world.”

“Any kind of membership card is cool,” she said. “It said on it that all theater managers should extend every courtesy to Bob Hope and his party.”

Chuck had to laugh, imagining Bob Hope fishing around in his pockets for his keychain so he could get into a movie for free. She really understood nothing about Bob Hope’s place in the world. Soon she and her kind would be the only ones left on earth, a race of long-legged eternally youthful superbeings who smelled invigoratingly of soap.

“I have to go back alone,” he said, signing the receipt for lunch.

“Well,” she said, “give me a hug.”

She stood up. He gave her a hug. He squeezed her too tight. He couldn’t help it.

He watched her leave, a glimmering alien pharaoh’s daughter parting a sea.

Chuck went into the deli bathroom, where he saw a stooped nonagenerian in a black suit. Chuck slipped past him into the stall and heard him out there knocking things over in big, chiming crashes. When he came out the old man was funereal as ever, bent over the sink, giving his crooked, lavender hands a slow and proper bath that never ended. Nothing Chuck could see was out of place.

12

The auction house was a riot of cold cuts. Why did Chuck keep missing the free food? He returned to his seat. Things tumbled from the mouth of the man seated just in front and to the left of him: particles of bread; the pale, curled sliver of a sickly tomato; two confetti scraps of lettuce. The sloppy eater turned around to stare, his irises so round and dark he looked like a cartoon character. Eventually, once the auction was underway again, he moved on. A worker in a dark blue uniform jacket cleaned up most of the mess. This place was like a soup kitchen.

Chuck dozed and had a vision of big ants crawling on a windowpane and a blue jay eating purple dragonflies, only its beak was broken. He woke himself up with a yell and found he was bidding on seventy swirled goblets, yellow and green. He bid some more. He drove up the price with what felt like horror and pulled out just in time to lose.

He glanced over minutes after losing a crystal ice bucket and saw it in the cabinet at the end of his aisle, so much smaller than he had thought, and wondered if he were really as coarse as he seemed, judging worth by size. In Atlanta in the early ’90s, Veda had taken him to the birthday party of Ronnie Rude, a man with Down’s syndrome who worked carrying ice in a bucket from table to table at the Clermont Lounge.

The Clermont was a kind of seedy club with weathered strippers who threw glitter and sang “Happy Birthday” to Ronnie Rude, and the glitter fell on the sad cake in the dark.

As its part of Atlanta had become gentrified, the Clermont had maybe turned ironic, a gag, a novelty trick box, maybe overvalued by nostalgists and underground purists, or maybe its reality was insulted by slumming yuppies from Buckhead. Now they were turning the adjoining flophouse into a boutique hotel. Veda would have been appalled. Supposedly there were plans to keep the Lounge intact — a living historical exhibit, the Colonial Williamsburg of despair. Chuck wondered what people were willing to pay for things, and why. He was fascinated by those who knew which kind of trash was the good kind, like Maria with her cheap but excellent bleeding fried chicken from a grimy storefront, and the authentic pig’s foot he had seen bobbing around when she stirred her red beans and rice. It was a mysterious talent. Veda had always been very big on “authenticity,” but Chuck hadn’t thought about it much since she’d stopped being around.

He bid on a pewter ice bucket and remembered saying aloud while flipping through the catalog, “I don’t know why people collect pewter.” Now he did.

By the time the Baccarat ice bucket came along, he skipped it. He had developed ice bucket fatigue.

Behind him, a fresh and inexplicable crowd suddenly streamed in, greeting one another with excited squeals. He swooned in the hot jacket.

Around lot 576, a third set of Judith Leiber belts from the personal wardrobe of Bob Hope’s wife, Chuck realized that he had entered a pleasant state of resignation, like freezing to death. He lazily smiled as he thought, Wow, Dolores Hope sure liked Judith Leiber belts.

The woman in front of him bought some belts. The auctioneer had flashed his confident yet pleading grin at her. She was putty in his hands. Cruelly waiting for confirmation of an internet bid that would take the belts away from her, he snapped, “Chew faster!” The guy who yelled “YAH!” or “YUP!” was eating as he worked. Just jamming crackers in his mouth while he fucked with people’s dreams.

They wouldn’t even let Chuck buy Donny an “American Cinema Award.” What in the hell was an American Cinema Award? Chuck could’ve given Bob Hope an American Cinema Award. It was so generic as to be totally meaningless. This auction existed because people burdened Bob Hope with piles and piles of crap wherever he went, to get an honorary degree in Utah or wherever. Stuff with his name on it, like diamond-studded belt buckles. Cufflinks and straps of leather emblazoned with his face. A Cross pen culminating in Bob’s own miniscule head, plaques and bowls, melted-looking clay jugs, cheap trophies with detachable cowboys on top, frosted glass eagles and airplanes, Christmas ornaments and autographed globes, medallions and plaster busts, a barber pole. After a while it probably seemed more like a torture than an honor. They may as well have been gobs of spit flung in hateful rage, these treasures. Maybe it was a relief to die. The world is too full. Angel had been right about the Bob Hope fashion award, which Chuck had approached with a dumb earnestness that a member of her generation couldn’t comprehend. The Nothing American Cinema Award for Nothing went for $2,500.

Then there were the clowns.

So many porcelain clowns.

“We should get Bob a clown, he’s funny.”

How many clown figurines had been unloaded on Hope by well-meaning dolts per year? Man lives to a hundred, he can accumulate a number of unwanted porcelain clowns. At some point he had so many that people really started to think he liked them, or so went the story Chuck told himself.

After half a dozen lots of clowns, the auctioneer said, “More clowns! What a shock,” and got a nice ripple. Sotto voce, he leaned into the microphone: “How many more pages of clowns?” After that, people laughed almost dementedly, in a Pavlovian way, whenever he said “clowns,” and finally that was just Chuck. Old Chuck laughed until he cried, barely keeping it together. Hey, maybe that was normal auction behavior. No one seemed to mind.

Chuck bought Donny some porcelain clowns. They were a gag gift. Angel had nailed it again. But there was a problem when Chuck tried to check out. The reception desk claimed that someone else had won Chuck’s clowns.

He was so foggy he almost believed them. Harried superiors in headsets appeared. A chicly turned-out clerk rifled through accordion folders. At last it was determined that Paddle 188 had won the clown figurines.

“That could be a simple mistake,” Chuck said. “I’m Paddle 187.”

It looked as if negotiations were hopeless when the next person in line came up beside Chuck to engage a secondary clerk. This meticulous sport put down his paddle and Chuck saw that it was 188. The person who had been helping Chuck was ecstatic at the coincidence. She confirmed on the spot that Paddle 188 had not bid on the porcelain clowns. Chuck gave the guy a friendly nudge and said, “Ha ha, you almost got some clowns you didn’t buy!” He was rewarded with a withering squint. Paddle 188 looked like the X-Files villain who enjoyed giving haircuts to corpses.

They brought Paddle 188 a book by Phyllis Diller, one she had signed to Bob. Paddle 188 opened it up and said, “Oh my God.” Chuck glanced over and saw the full-page inscription in neat, packed lines of red ink, but couldn’t read any of it before its new owner smacked it shut.

As Paddle 188 coolly appraised a crystal urn, Chuck went for his wallet and discovered it wasn’t there.

“Oh my God!” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Even as he crouched and searched his row, even as he started back for the deli, where his mind’s eye placed his wallet on the smeared Formica, Chuck knew that Maria didn’t have a daughter.

13

He begged them. They wouldn’t fork over the clowns.

“But you have all my information already, from when I registered online,” he said. “This is for a dear friend who’s very ill. We don’t even know how long he has.”

They had no proof that Chuck was Chuck, they said. A nice security guard took pity, gave him forty dollars, and called him a cab. Chuck clammed up about how a couple of sawbucks wouldn’t get him back to Burbank. He had the idea of crashing at Maria’s instead.

He stood there waiting for the cab as the day gave way to brisk evening. The last stragglers emerged from the building, a large group all together. “Congratulations! You got some nice stuff,” said a sassy, upscale person dressed all in white, with spiky platinum hair. Her friends probably called her “a little bundle of dynamite.” She made him feel better with her electrically crackling eyes.

“I got some porcelain clown figurines!” he shouted. She and her friends were crossing the street and she looked back at Chuck with a puzzled expression. Then her crowd caught her up and they disappeared brightly down the block like the merry dead.

He turned to see Paddle 188 climbing into his cab, Chuck’s cab, and shooting off down Bedford.

He was amazed when he turned to find that the windows of the auction house had been covered in brown paper, like a shameful package. It had been accomplished swiftly and silently, with marvelous efficiency. He found a side door and walked in.

“We’re locking up,” said the nice security guard who had helped him.

“I want everybody to know this is for Donny Billings,” Chuck said.

There was a tasteful, narrow china closet with a flimsy-looking doorframe that housed a pointy trophy and some others. Chuck put his fist through the glass. Blood spurted wildly from his knuckles and wrist, splashed on the gold plate and the frosty Lalique.

Donny was going to love this.

Chuck held the three sharp prongs of the Las Vegas Entertainment Award in front of him like a dagger. Was it a crown or a jester’s hat? Chuck made for the Neiman, right for its offensive mouth. He was going to wipe the smile off of Bob Hope’s face.

They tackled him and zapped him before the damage was done. He felt the weight of a thousand bricks on his chest. He vomited up black stuff from his heart. It came out of his nose. His eyes rolled backward in his head forever.

He did not see his two dead wives making out with each other in Heaven, Bob Hope standing behind them, golf club slung scarecrow-style over his shoulders, winking in beatific lewdness.

He saw instead a montage of himself at liquor parties at which he had arrived with an empty stomach. He saw himself interrupting everybody and talking too loud and bragging about a famous punk rocker he knew. This was his life, the one that flashed. He saw himself with his greedy fist around a black plastic fork, cramming an entire serving of macaroni and cheese into his mouth at once. Decent people watched and could not believe their eyes.