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  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 the
ir 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.