Abandoning the pillows, Mark retreats farther back to a box of new inventory. A cache of rubbery, handmade insects. Harris has made a case for their playfulness, their novelty, for the arthropod silhouette’s outpacing the antler and the owl. Each piece is lovingly painted, some in iridescent shades of blue and green that to Harris are reminiscent of Fabergé. The insects were supposedly created as part of some larger installation that was gunned down by the town, and Harris is hopeful that their notoriety will appeal to customers. The people here love a conversation piece, a flash of rebellion on their own terms. Mark lifts a smooth-domed beetle from the box, Aegean blue, its underside so realistically ridged that he shudders.
After the statutory period of quiet browsing, Harris straightens himself in the window and addresses the customers in a creamy baritone.
“That’s a nineteenth-century Russian sleigh bed,” he says, stepping toward the couple with a shuffle in his gait that means his knees are hurting again.
The blonde exclaims in delight, and the dance begins: Harris’s lavish descriptions and the customers’ musical declarations, as if each object were hand-curated just for them.
“Oh, yes, I knew you’d find that. It’s a Zapotec blackware olla pot. We were in Oaxaca last year, but didn’t have enough room in our suitcases to bring back everything we wanted.”
Here in the store, lined with wood wainscoting like an aged oak cask, objects from around the globe radiate casual exoticism. Harris’s offhand way of cataloging them is designed to flatter, presuming the customers’ shared worldliness. Oaxaca—naturally. He won’t mention the security guards at the hotel. He won’t mention the beggars on the street, the women with their snaking braids and smudged children. He won’t mention the way he’d haggled with the vendor in his oversized sun hat, Mark cringing at his side; the way he’d gallantly conceded the last few pesos before tucking the rest back into the money belt under his shirt.
Oaxaca had been a turning point for Mark. Coming up the jet bridge at Newark behind Harris and his engorged suitcase, he’d felt that he was walking against a reverse magnetic current. The car service had picked them up and squired them back into this softest pocket of the continent, this deepest pouch of forgetfulness. They had closed the door of their house, unloaded their bags, and re-canopied themselves in the safe tarpaulin of their lives.
Since then, Mark has suffered from a dissonant feeling, something like the antipathy of adolescence. He remembers the first time he’d been nettled like this: during a childhood trip to Jamaica, when his family had driven through a shantytown, past cornrowed, bright-uniformed children walking barefoot on the side of the road—and his mother had locked the car doors.
“Oh yes, my partner and I discovered this beauty on our trip to Brittany in ’95,” Harris is saying, stroking the top of a cherry demilune table.
He pronounces “my partner” without any meaningful beat. Mark does not look up from the box of insects. Harris is in his tangerine polo shirt today, the one he thinks makes him look preppy and straight, but which has become conspicuously tight across his belly. It seems impossible that he hasn’t noticed this, and yet there is no kind way to point it out.
While they are triangulating the demilune table, Mark slips out the back door for a cigarette. He feels an urge to call Camille, to hear her sardonic voice, something salted to neutralize the gush of self-congratulation in the showroom.
He calls, tells her about the box of bugs, plays up the bitchiness for her benefit.
“Oh, I remember those,” Camille sings. “This old man glued them all over his neighbor’s house. It was supposed to be an avant-garde installation but it turned into a big scandal. People said it was bringing down property values.”
“Of course. Well, at least they’re on consignment.” Mark pulls on his American Spirit, the mellow varietal, a half-stride toward quitting.
“Are you smoking?”
Mark exhales. “God, you people. So what?”
“Just asking. Go ahead if you want.”
Camille had been the first to leave the city. Mark and Harris followed later the same year—in the midst of the Wall Street encampments, the haphazard arrests—and joined her in the same cosmically quaint town an hour north on the train line. What incredible fortune, they agreed, that life should have washed them on this same high rock together. They would throw scandalous parties, now on ambrosial back patios rather than spongy rooftops, more Gatsby than Bright Lights. Then Camille gave birth, got divorced. Mark and Harris had never really liked her husband and toasted her freedom with a bottle of Cristal, but frolicsome times had not followed. Instead, over the course of the past year, Camille seems to have pulled away, succumbing to the plague of insecurity that besets all single women alike. Her foray into Internet dating has become something heavy, secretive. She no longer calls Mark with stories that make him laugh until he wheezes.
Harris appears in the doorway. Mark hangs up, stubs his cigarette.
“Come in,” Harris stage-whispers, “I want to introduce you to these people.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just come in.”
Inside, the customers are smiling expectantly.
“Mark, this is Gretchen and Caspar Von Mauren.”
Gretchen. Not what Mark would have guessed.
“They just bought one of those gorgeous old homes on Cannonfield and are looking for a designer.”