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movement. Tanya stood poised, listening, when her heel slipped off the dais, and she clumsily fumbled the phone, dropping it over her counter, where it swung by its cord. Tanya held up her hand to the auctioneer, as if asking for a time-out. This produced the kind of laugh one hears in a restaurant when a waiter drops a stack ofplates. She pulled up the phone and stuck it to her ear. Then, raising her finger as if to make a point, Tanya said meekly, “Fifty-five.”
    A paddle was raised in the center of the room: “Sixty.” Then, the pall broken, there were raises and reraises, taking the picture to eighty-five thousand, after which there was again, in the room, stillness. But this time the auctioneer didn’t show a detectable squirm. Rather, he turned his body fully toward the phone and waited patiently. “Ninety,” relayed Tanya. Then, turning his body back to the floor as if he were on a spindle, he stared into the face of the floor bidder, whom Lacey could not see. “Will you make it ninety-five?” The ninety-five came and went, the picture crossing a hundred, edging further from Tanya’s prediction and more toward Lacey’s. The auctioneer brought the price up and up and finally, when he felt there was no more, said, “Last chance… selling, then, at one hundred fifty thousand dollars.” Smash. He looked over at the phone. “Paddle number?”
    And Tanya replied, “Five oh one.”
    Lacey was elated and disappointed. She had won her self-imposed contest, one in which she had enrolled, without her knowledge, only one other contestant, but she had hoped the picture would land on her magic number, one hundred seventy thousand, making her victory more memorable.
    After the sale, she blitzed back to the office, trying to make her absence less conspicuous, and she was already in place when Cherry came out of the elevator. Cherry saw Lacey, an armload of superfluous papers held against her stomach, and said, “Good one, Lacey, you hit it.” Lacey was thrilled that her guess had even been remembered, that her plan for professional notice had succeeded, and especially pleased that Tanya Ross had to witness her win.
    “I was a bit over, but I thought it was a good picture,” said Lacey, feigning modesty.
    “What do you mean?” said Cherry. “You hit it within a few thousand.”
    “How?” said Lacey.
    “The buyer’s premium, twelve percent added on,” said Cherry.
    The addition of the buyer’s premium streaked in like a come-from-behind win at a horse race. Lacey felt like a prom queen, even if no one else in the office felt it was that much of a triumph, as numbers routinely bounced around the staff for weeks prior to an auction. But Lacey knew that she was firmly impressed on Cherry’s cortex and that above the name “Lacey,” whenever it slipped across her consciousness, was a shining gold star.

11.
    LACEY’S BANK ACCOUNT—a parental send-off for her life in New York—had halved in the two years she had worked at Sotheby’s. New York was cruel to cash reserves, and her Sotheby’s check, even with the routine raises, failed to replenish the pot at the same rate of depletion. Lacey always had magic happen to her at moments of financial crisis, but New York now seemed to vex her. She didn’t believe in guardian angels, except for the guardian angel of her own self, and usually she laid the groundwork for financial salvation way in advance, and often in such unconscious ways that she didn’t even know she was doing it. Her independence kept her from friends offering money, but her cleverness kept it sputtering in. But the past few years were unusually fallow.
    My own life was on a gentle gradient moving quietly upward. My contributions to art magazines—I wrote the capsule reviews, usually unsigned—gave me a life and got me out of my apartment, and I found myself with continuing work. There were also relationships, almost romantic, that seemed to lack ignition. My style is courtly, which fails