The Mussel Bed Waltz

I'd been auctioning things for twenty-seven years, and I can tell you that every room has a sound to it, a kind of hum you learn to read the way a farmer reads weather, so when I stood on the stage of the Grouse Creek Opera House with my little gavel and called out lot number one, I heard right away that this room had a drip in it. A slow, patient drip, coming from somewhere up in the wing, hitting the floorboards with a tick that carried clear across the empty seats. Cassie Mathews had brought her clients in at two o'clock on a Tuesday, and there we all were, a woman who wanted an opera house and her husband who wanted her to want something cheaper, and me doing my best to make a hundred and ten years of dust sound like opportunity.

"Lot one, ladies and gentlemen, the grand hall itself, and I do mean grand, look at that ceiling, you will not find pressed tin like that anywhere else in the county," I said, and I spread my arm at the ceiling the way I do, and the drip went tick somewhere behind me, steady as a metronome. I'd learned a long time ago that you don't fight a sound like that, you fold it into your rhythm, so I let a beat pass after each figure, let the drip land in the pauses. Some auctioneers fill every silence. The good ones let the room breathe.

Cassie stood down front with her clipboard, thirty-five years old and sharp as a tack, and she'd known Myra and me for a good ten years now, ever since she staged that lakeside cabin we nearly bought and then wisely didn't. "The cooler up in the wing is original to the nineteen-thirties retrofit," she announced to her clients, "and yes, it does drip, and no, it is not haunted, I've had three separate people check."

"That's what somebody haunted would say," the husband muttered, and his wife laughed, and I saw Cassie's jaw tighten in that way she gets, and I got back to the numbers before I laughed myself.

Now, Myra. My wife of thirty years, fifty-two years old, mussel farmer, the strongest pair of forearms in the county and the hands to prove it. She'd come along to help stage the place, the way we help Cassie with the odd property, and she'd wandered off during the bidding the way she does, poking around back stage where the old costume trunks live. I kept half an ear on her the way you do after three decades, that low-grade attention you don't even notice anymore, like the sound of a creek behind the house.

The clients went back and forth, the wife wanting it and the husband doing arithmetic out loud, and I got them up to a figure that made Cassie's eyebrows do a small, private dance, and then I called a break, because a good auctioneer knows when to let a number sit. That's when I looked across the stage and saw my wife.

She'd found a fan in one of those trunks. A folding fan, bone handles, yellowed with age, painted with little violets, and she stood there in the dusty wing light opening it with a flick of her wrist and fanning herself, slow, like a woman in one of those movies where nobody says anything important out loud. Then she looked up, caught me watching, and held the fan so it half covered her face, just her eyes over the top of it, and I'll tell you flat out that after thirty years of marriage that look still landed somewhere in my chest and bounced down.

I walked over, trying to look like a man with professional business on his mind. "Where'd you dig that up?"

"Bottom of the trunk, under forty years of mothballs and a hat with a pheasant on it." She opened the fan again, fanned herself, watching me. "Somebody's best Sunday fan, probably. Somebody sang in the choir and fanned herself through the long sermons."

"It suits you," I said, and meant it more than I'd planned to.

"You think?" She fluttered it once, quick. "Feels good, actually. This stage gets warm with all that talking you do."

Well, the drip got worse before it got better, which is the story of every cooler ever bolted to a wall. About the time Cassie's clients were coming back from their walk-around, the drip found a second rhythm, and then a pipe joint somewhere gave a groan like an old dog getting up, and a dark spot bloomed across the floorboards by the wing with real ambition. Cassie called somebody, and the somebody was Damon Goldman, who plays poker with me every other Friday and has for five years, and he said he could be out by six but the fix would take the evening, and nobody should drive the canyon road home in the dark while a cooler bled all over a historic landmark.

So that was that. The clients went home to think about their number, Cassie went home to her notes, and Damon went up into the wing with a flashlight in his teeth and a vocabulary he kept mostly under his breath. Which left Myra and me in an empty opera house with a couple of lawn chairs Cassie had left for staging, a cooler slowly ruining a floor, and a long night ahead of us.

We dragged the chairs out onto the stage, facing the empty house, and shared a thermos of coffee she'd had the sense to bring, because after thirty years the woman knows I will forget food, water, and occasionally my own name when I'm working. The drip had settled back to that slow tick, and Damon's pipe wrench clanked now and then up in the dark like distant church bells.

Myra fanned herself with the violet fan. "Henri," she said, in the voice she uses when she's decided something.

"Mm."

"Dare you."

I looked at her. She was smiling behind that fan, just her eyes, same as before. "Dare me to what, exactly? I've known you since you were twenty-one, woman, your dares have a track record."

"Court me." She said it plain, the way she says everything. "Tonight. Right here. Like we've never met. Like you're some fella at a fair and I'm some woman you've got your eye on, and you've got to work for it." She snapped the fan shut and pointed it at me like a schoolmarm with a ruler. "Rules are, you don't get to use anything you know about me. No talking about the mussels, no talking about the kids, no talking about the mortgage. You start over. Stranger."

"And the fan?"

"The fan's the signal. You see me open it, that means keep going. I close it, that means back off and try again some other way." She smoothed her skirt, and I want to tell you, a fifty-two-year-old woman smoothing her skirt on the stage of an opera house is a more dangerous thing than any twenty-year-old I ever met, because she knows exactly what she's doing. "Well? Scared?"

"I've taken bids from men with more money than sense and women with more sense than money, and I've never been scared in a sale barn or an opera house yet." I stood up, brushed off my trousers, and gave the situation some thought, because the truth was my heart had picked up its pace and I hadn't felt that in a good while. "Give me ten minutes to get into character. And don't laugh at my approach."

"I promise nothing," she said, and opened the fan over her face again, and those eyes over the top of it were daring me twice.

So I went off behind the curtain, which was really just a dusty drop cloth on a rope, and I thought about what a man does. I was twenty-four when I met her at the county fair, and I'd made a fool of myself within four minutes, and she'd married me anyway, so the material was there. I took off my auctioneer's jacket, rolled my sleeves, ran a hand through what hair I've got left, and walked back out onto that stage like someone who'd never once seen her in his life.

Damon clanked his wrench. The drip went tick. And somewhere under the stage dust, thirty years of marriage sat up and took notice.

* * *

I came out with my hat in my hand, which I don't wear in ordinary life but which I found hanging on a peg by the prop trunk, so we'll call it a prop. I crossed the stage at a stroll, the way you do when you've spotted somebody across a fairground, and I tipped the hat.

"Evening, ma'am. Hope you'll forgive the interruption. I saw you from across the way and I told myself, Henri, you old fool, a woman like that doesn't sit alone at a fair without a reason."

The fan opened and closed once, quick, which I took for permission to continue, though she was already biting down on a smile.

"My name's Henri," I said. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure."

"The pleasure's mine, I'm sure," she said, in a voice full of mock southern bells that fooled nobody. "I'm waiting on someone, actually."

"Then I won't keep you long." I sat down on the edge of the stage, boots hanging over the orchestra pit, and patted the boards beside me. "I just figured, a fair this pretty, a night this warm, it's a shame to spend it alone. And if your fellow shows up, why, I'll shake his hand and wish him better luck than I had."

She laughed then, really laughed, the fan wobbling, and the sound of it bounced around that old opera house and came back to me off the balcony rail, and Damon hollered down from the wing, "Whatever you two are doing up there, keep it down, I can hear everything."

"Then mind your pipes and not our business," Myra hollered back, and settled herself beside me on the stage edge, close enough that her shoulder touched mine, and opened the fan, and left it open.

The fan stayed open, and I'll tell you, that little scrap of painted violets doing nothing but hanging there open over her wrist felt like more of a victory than any gavel I've slammed in thirty years. I tipped the hat again for good measure.

"So what brings a fella like you out to a fair on a weeknight, Henri?" she asked, and she was doing the southern belle voice still, half laughing at herself while she did it.

"Work, mostly. I talk for a living. Sell things. Farms, furniture, once a whole opera house not so different from this one." I gestured at the dark around us with the hat. "Course, the fella who buys a place like that usually buys it for the ghost, and the ghost usually comes free."

"And what do you do when you're not selling things you can't afford yourself?"

"Mostly I lose at cards to a man named Damon, who is presently eavesdropping on us and doing a poor job of it."

"Rude of him," she said, and Damon's voice came floatin' up out of the wing right on cue, "I can hear both my names, and neither one of you said hello."

That broke the game for a minute, both of us laughing, and she leaned into my shoulder with the laugh, which she has done ten thousand times and which felt, tonight, as though she had never done it before, and that is a strange thing to feel and a better thing than I know how to say. Then she straightened up and cleared her throat and put the stranger voice back on.

"You were telling me about your work, mister auctioneer."

"I was. And then I was going to ask if a lady waiting on a fellow who may or may not show would do me the honor of sharing a supper, because I happen to know there's a basket backstage with fried chicken in it, and a chicken eaten alone is a sad chicken, but a chicken shared is a picnic."

"Well," she said, drawing it out, "my fellow is late, and a woman has to eat."

So we fetched the basket, which Cassie had left for us that morning with a note about not letting the property show empty, and we carried it down off the stage to the front of the house, where the floor had been chalked that week for some children's program, big white squares with numbers in them running from the doors to the footlights. The hopscotch square. Myra looked down at it, and I watched her look down at it, and I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too, that our grandkids would've worn that chalk to dust in an afternoon.

"You first," she said. "You're the stranger."

"I'm not hopping in a suit jacket for any woman I met four minutes ago."

"Five minutes," she said. "And open the fan, Henri."

The fan was already open. I pointed at it. She pointed at it. We stood there in an empty opera house arguing about a fan like two people who have been married long enough to argue about anything, and I laid my jacket down on one of the folding chairs Cassie had set out, and I laid the basket next to it, and we sat ourselves down at the edge of the chalk with the chicken between us and the whole dark house facing us like an audience that had paid to see exactly this.

The chicken was still cold enough to be good. There were two paper boats of potato salad and a jar of Cassie's sweet tea and a lemon pie in a tin, and we ate with our fingers because Cassie had packed no forks, or because she'd packed forks and I couldn't find them, I never did establish which. Myra crossed her ankles and ate like a woman at a fair without a care in the world, and then she pointed a drumstick at the stage.

"So talk to me, stranger. Tell me something I couldn't guess about you."

"All right. When I was a young fella I wanted to be a preacher, on account of preachers get to talk in front of people and everybody has to listen, which is exactly the job I ended up with, just with different merchandise."

She laughed so hard she had to set the drumstick down. "You wanted to be a preacher."

"Three years of it in my head. Then I saw a man selling ponies at a fair and I understood my true calling."

"And the ponies, were they any good?"

"They were terrible ponies. Sold every one." I leaned back on my palms. "Now you. Tell me something I couldn't guess about