“As it's inflatable, it relates to our experience of being alive and having to breathe,” is how the artist put it. “It's a symbol of life,” the artist said. He was referring to a basketball suspended in the center of a fish tank. Suspended, or was it floating? Whatever it was it appeared to be mocking you. It appeared to be shouting. The auctioneer thought the basketball was simply the expression of a certain raw male lust. A cute girl similarly suspended might have been too on the nose.
The artist was proud of the work’s wit, its technical audacity. It isn’t easy to suspend a basketball in the center of a tank. The process required precision, and science. The auctioneer was proud that this tank would fetch upwards of fifteen million dollars for his sale, so for the auction house where he was newly installed in a highly visible role. Fetch is a term only art world people use. People didn’t always use the word fetch when referring to art. Rembrandts and Cimabues didn’t fetch. It was a word that went well with others which had become common, though. Fortune, for example.
“Fifteen million dollars,” said the artist. “Yes,” said the auctioneer. “A small fortune.”
The auctioneer’s estimate was backed up by data—and perhaps a little arrogance. He was a millennial, he shot for the stars, impatient, fierce. He was amused at the artist’s awe. He believed that if the artist had passed through the doors of wonder into cynicism, his response to hearing “fifteen million” simply might have been, “Low or high?” He didn’t understand that the artist had in fact passed through those doors, that you don’t always end up at cynicism. Sometimes you end up at wonder.
At the center of the art world is the auction house. And at the center of the auction house is the auctioneer. A successful sale can be secured by one masterpiece but it can also be secured by one auctioneer’s charisma, his appetite for risk. This sale would likely be the latter. Its outcome might set the future value of things suspended in tanks but it absolutely would set the future value of the auctioneer. He had handpicked each piece. He had spoken to each artist and made multiple studio visits, Bushwick to Berlin. (He preferred Bushwick.) He had insured each lot not only via sexy social media plays but also via what the house called “guarantees.” He had taken a Russian collector heliskiing in Japan to seal the deal on his basketball.
“You won’t regret it,” the auctioneer promised, as their chopper descended into snow.
“What about Putin?” the Russian asked, laughing. “Can your man suspend Putin in a tank?”
The auctioneer could handle his own in the altitude.
In addition to the tank, the selection of lots included a plastic frog nailed to a cross and a child-sized statue of Hitler kneeling in prayer. The auctioneer explained to guarantors for those pieces that the frog was “Christ, of course.” Nuance wasn’t his thing. He explained why the Hitler must be shown facing away from the viewer. “So as you approach, you look down on him, that bastard.” The auctioneer’s grandparents had fled Communist Hungary for France in the forties, hiking over icy mountains to the Danube. His parents later returned, taught math in a small town near Budapest, tore each other up with addiction and argument. Which is to say, a big struggle begat a little struggle begat a boy who dreamed of living in America, struggle free.
This was only the auctioneer’s second sale but he had made quite a name with the first. He had gone to artists he liked and asked them to create new works on a theme which he refused to reveal until the evening of. “No catalog, no pre-press,” he had promised everyone, and everyone believed him. “No hype.” Only the absence of hype became the source of hype itself and the result was a record for the house, a promotion for the new kid. Though he wasn’t new or a kid, was he. He was only a newly known commodity in an increasingly commoditized market. The theme of that sale had been I Want It.
So the house had heavily hyped his second sale, why not. They called it “a capsule,” which made women think of pills and men think of spaceships. “It means highly curated, don’t be silly,” said the CEO, in response to the auctioneer saying the word capsule was pretentious. The auctioneer objected to words he found fancy. “Like which words?” the CEO said, open to placating his star. “Like curated,” the auctioneer answered, disdainfully. “You’re the curator, you idiot,” the CEO said.
Though he hadn’t fled Hungary through snow away from fascists he had left Eastern Europe at sixteen, which some might consider rash. He considered it a cure. In Rome, he discovered art and the Borghese Gardens; Rome was the start. The end, after Florence and Paris and Berlin, after London and Amsterdam, Houston and Marfa, was Manhattan. In an interview at a Chelsea gallery, he described his reaction to seeing the Sistine Chapel: “I just knelt down and wept.” The story was true, actually, and it belied his real gift, which was empathy. As he moved from assistant to auctioneer and from that first gallery to a second, then on to the auction house, he operated on the principle that what mattered was only moving forward, only acceleration. In his more grandiose moments he thought he might make a difference. He began to see himself as a kind of Robin Hood, a commoner with an uncommon skill. If this occasionally meant selling a frog on a cross at the price of a Park Avenue penthouse, so be it.
He admired the people he met through work but was adamant in his view he wasn’t one of them. Collectors were sources of information, and occasionally of pleasure. Colleagues were instructors, travel companions, options for advancement. Friendship—he felt admiration for his artists, but they weren’t exactly friends. And girls. Well, The One hadn’t come along but when she did he was quite sure she’d prefer Cimabue to a frog on a cross.
He had taken the title for the sale—our experience of being alive and having to breathe—from what the artist had said about the basketball. The artist was fanatical about sports, had season tickets and had once sold a set of lithographs inspired by NCAA brackets. He told the auctioneer the idea for the tank came from watching a player make the perfect three-point shot, “that moment the ball leaves your hands and you know it’s going in, the moment the experience shifts from anticipation to joy.”
“Anticipation to joy,” he repeated.
“Fifteen million,” said the artist, and laughed.
Once upon a time, marketing art was looked down on. Once, the point had been keeping crowds away from rooms filled with fine art.
Now Sotheby’s had become Madison Square Garden, speaking of basketballs. And so perhaps this auctioneer had entered this world at the very moment when his unalloyed temperament would be appreciated. At least, this was what he told himself to make it all right, to make the excess (and his actions to tame or enflame it) bearable. He told himself he was exactly where he was meant to be.
His insistence on simplicity in all areas of his life, which wasn’t simple, was a source of amusement to others. I know you prefer burgers but I need you to fly to Paris for pressed duck—that’s the kind of thing the CEO would say. His mother would have said it isn’t easy adhering to one church while living on the altar of another.
The sale was set for five o’clock on a Sunday evening in late spring, a time when young mothers would be bathing children. Young mothers weren’t the market, though. Anyone outside the market who tried to get in and see the show would be sent home with clear, elegant condescension.
At half past four the auctioneer had not arrived and no one could reach him. At ten to five the head of the house was in a panic, throwing phones and demanding answers. The sale could proceed without the auctioneer, there was an understudy, but the crowds had come to see him as much as they had come to see art. They expected him to take his place by the phone bank where assistants managed calls from Geneva or Shanghai. The rumor was that the auctioneer would one day run this house. The rumor was that he’d been hired by a Chinese dealer. The rumor was that he was engaged to a pop star.
“Just get him here now,” the CEO told his deputy.
“He might be at the beach,” said one of the assistants.
“Traffic,” said another one.
At five past five everyone was seated, waiting. The little Hitler had been set on the stage, facing away from the viewers.
On the eastern end of the southern shore of Long Island there is a surf break, which was once pristine, known only to locals. Over the prior year it had become popular, or unbearable, depending on your point of view. The auctioneer’s view was somewhere in the middle. He wouldn’t quite quit it for the crowds; this was his beach after all, though the noise from the hipsters was a bore. He had taken what money he’d earned selling art and put it into a small cottage near the dunes. Once it was furnished he put new money into surfboards and spearguns and wetsuits—the serious stuff of ocean lovers. Newer money went into a vintage Land Cruiser, into an ice chest the size of a coffin for fresh catch. The most recent money went towards a small fishing boat, then into buoys that lit up at night to attract, or illuminate, prey.
He experienced the money as equally freeing and constricting. He’d developed an almost pathological need to spend cash the minute he made it. “It doesn’t bite,” his first boss had said, placing a paycheck into his palm. But the auctioneer wasn’t sure. He thought it might bite. Later he would believe it might eat him alive. And while people might say he was a playboy, the same people who might say, “Well, who besides a playboy sells million-dollar fish tanks while owning only two suits?”, the people were wrong. That they misread him was part of his power. He wasn’t a playboy. He was an introvert, an autodidact, a seeker. He was a salesman. He could sell ice to Eskimos. Which in a way is what he did.
Increasingly, he longed to escape what he felt was a cage of I Want It. Everyone else seemed to be climbing inside it, baiting him to follow with sugars and lures. Sometimes he wondered why he didn’t want what everyone else did. Sometimes he worried about his exit from the cage. And so, on the Sunday of the sale that would solder his reputation, which happened to be his birthday, he decided to give himself a gift. He decided to say, on this one day, No. No, cage. No, people. He decided to walk away and see what happened. Rash—cure?
He had woken at dawn and gone down to the beach with his board. After an hour in the ocean, the logical plan would have been to shower and change, then drive to town. Plan, ha. Instead, he spent the morning fishing alone and going over his choice in his head.
“It’s scary, isn’t it,” he’d said to an intern on Friday, when she bent to touch the little Hitler’s head.
“Sublime,” she said. All the interns talked like that.
“What does sublime mean?” He actually wasn’t sure.
“Terror and beauty in equipoise. When you feel fear, but also pleasure.”
He disagreed. He didn’t see beauty or terror. He didn’t experience the sublime when looking at art. He often experienced sadness, but never terror, and not quite what he would call pleasure. Friday night he’d taken one last walk through the house, tied a ribbon around his iPhone, and left it on the intern’s desk.
At half past five, everyone was waiting, a little restless. An assistant set something down on the CEO’s desk. She’d removed the ribbon.
“Is that,” he said.
“His phone.”
“I find this outrageous.”
“It’s actually kind of typical,” said the assistant, with equal parts admiration and fear.
Sharks migrate for many reasons. Sometimes migration paths are defined by an instinct to protect the pups, to give birth in safe, warm waters. Sometimes the paths are defined by locations of prey. And occasionally paths are purely random. Certain sharks mock their trackers, going confidently off course. A great white once wound up in Newfoundland, a place no one would describe as either safe or warm. The auctioneer would say migrations “might look like a Mondrian” but “can also look like a bad Pollock.” Rather than Mondrian and Pollock, he had framed maps of shark migrations hung on his walls. As a boy on the Baltic, his mother would walk the beach with him looking for sharks’ teeth. “Don’t grow up and teach math,” she would say.
He knew the blacktips migrated en masse in predictable patterns up the East Coast in late spring, which is to say right around the week of the sale. He’d been following the blogs and learned that this year they were coming up early, a result of rare cold fronts down south. Seen from the air the migration is an army of ants under blue glass. Seen from a wakeboard it’s slightly more sinister.
Blacktips’ teeth aren’t designed for eating humans, though, we’re not talking about Jaws. If you like sharks, you will want to be on a wakeboard when they come through. Or in a small boat, at night, near illuminated buoys.
“Wait, are you meant to be at work?” said the girl, a question less about work than about how much time they would have. He had seen her here and there on spring weekends, she was a Barnard professor, a fact she wore lightly. She stayed at her parents’ place down the road and her parents were never there anymore. She was standing on the dock when he came in that Sunday and he’d asked her home. As he cooked she sat on his couch, cross-legged in her swimsuit, the catalog for the sale on her lap. He didn’t answer her question. She held the catalog above her head, and turned it in his direction. “Is this you?” It was a full-page photograph of him so yes, obviously, was the answer. She had never seen him dressed up.
He was slicing fish, removing the bones.
“God, what’s this,” she said, looking at another page.
This amused him. A part of him still wanted to impress, to be loved, doesn’t everyone. A part of him was flattered by her interest in art he himself felt insecure about. And the irony of her interest in the art and his interest in her, and the fact that tomorrow he might no longer be in the art world, wasn’t lost on him. He told himself to keep breathing, and stay focused on the tasks at hand.
“How does it stay suspended?” she said. “I failed physics.”
He put down the knife and looked out the window. The clouds were coming in fast. A thunderstorm means a clear night later, with stars.
“How much time do you have?” he asked her, which made her heart skip, she knew he didn’t mean the time it took to explain suspension.
When the Russian called to check on the sale, around five fifteen, he was told about the auctioneer’s absence. “Will he be fired?” he asked.
“Yes, barring an act of God.”
The evening had started slowly. If the audience sensed something wasn’t quite right they didn’t show it, things proceeded, it turned out the auctioneer wasn’t indispensable at all. Each item hit then exceeded its estimate. There would be no need for the guarantors. As the hammer set to lower at a price of sixteen on the final lot, the tank, an assistant in the phone bank raised her hand. This was the drama of the thing.
“Thirty-four,” she said.
And the audience roared.
“Thirty-four,” said the understudy auctioneer.
“Of course, thirty fucking four,” said the CEO.
Thirty-four was the bid by the Russian, the one who’d hired the helo at Niseko. He wasn’t reckless; he’d already secured a third buyer at an even higher price. Thirty-four wasn’t the value of the tank. It wasn’t the value of anything. Thirty-four was a signal and an inside joke, known only to a few in the room. “Spasibo,” the Russian had said, on hearing the price of an act of God. Only rather than the Russian word for thank you, the intern had heard him say, “It’s possible.”
When the tracking sites said the blacktips were gathered off Montauk, right at that beach, the auctioneer had led the girl back to the water. They’d walked down the wet dock and untied his boat. The stars were out and the ocean was calm. She was also calm, a temperament he wasn’t used to, one he’d become conditioned against, almost suspect of, one he craved.
“This,” said the teacher, looking up at the sky.
When they reached the buoys he cut the motor and led her to the stern.
“Salt water weighs more than fresh water,” he said quietly.
“Salt, what?”
“It’s heavier,” he said, bumping his hip gently into hers, leaning a little out over the side. “That’s how the ball stays suspended. The water is layered, salt on the bottom and fresh on the top.” He used his hands to show how the layering works, moving one from her waist to her shoulder then up to her mouth, a tap at her lips. “Here, and here, and here,” he said, before pulling back. “The light has to be controlled, and the temperature. The water has to be readjusted frequently. It’s quite an operation.” Something was certainly about to happen when the boat rocked, sending them slipping across its floor.
“Whoa, welcome,” he said. He wasn’t talking to her.
I am exactly where I am meant to be.
As the girl caught her breath the auctioneer thought about his birthday, how he felt old at thirty-four, how he had neglected to call his mother, neglected to fill her in on his recent success and so now wouldn’t have to post her on his imminent failure. What would she think about all of this, who he was now, would she be proud or appalled? Perhaps she would ask why he was still running. On the beach when he was little they’d collect the teeth then throw them back into the sea. His mother was fearless, but trapped. What he wanted was never to be trapped, and here he was in the open ocean, at night, unmoored. This is what he was thinking as the girl stood up, slipped her shirt off, and climbed up onto the edge of the boat.
“I’m not sure about that,” he said.
Blacktips aren’t Jaws. They moved away as she hit the water, they don’t like the light anyhow and commotion incites their instinct to flee. The elaborate system he’d set up to illuminate sharks was now only illuminating her. “Come on,” she shouted. “What are you afraid of?”
Back in town, the auctioneer’s iPhone still sat on the CEO’s desk. Throughout the night it exploded with text bells, emails, incoming calls. A spectacular sale set up by an auctioneer who never arrives, of course, people said, sly trick. The sale wouldn’t inspire a firing it would jet propel a rise. The CEO would later say, “Even if you beg me to fire you, I can’t.” Which was true. The auctioneer would return to work. The intern would save the ribbon. He would lose touch with the professor and so lose touch with whatever wire she had tripped in him. Was it wonder? It wasn’t cynicism.
