The little blue vase is going up up up: $5,000, $50,000, $150K. The auctioneer, a coiffed grey-haired woman in black, scans the crowd, her crisp hand gestures never missing a beat.
“Are we all done?”
We’re not done. After a heart-stopping pause bidding continues, the auctioneer drawing buyers in by name. “Thank you Joe. This one’s for you Taylor. With Louise now for $200,000.”
I hadn’t been planning to watch the auction but I couldn’t help getting drawn in. I don’t know much about the art world, mostly by choice. But I do understand that in this world value has no fixed point. An auction is about desire; the hammer price simply the sum you’re willing to pay to slake your thirst.
After the little blue vase sells for $300,000 the auctioneer lets out a laugh, tells the room to take a break and take a breath.
The next item, a little blue jar, fails to sell at all, and I shut the laptop. I cannot allow myself to spiral into either fantasy or despair.
Paul and I want to buy a house, but of course this is a terrible time to buy a house and, even if it wasn’t, we don’t have enough money to buy a house, not really – not one that would come free of mouse poop, fabric wiring, and suspicious stains – so I decided to try and sell a painting.
It’s a beautiful painting, and that’s not just my opinion. When I sent a photo off to the auction house that’s what they said: “This is a beautiful ink and color work on paper.” It’s large, in the classical Chinese bird-and-flower genre, and estimated to be from the late 19th century — or maybe the 16th century? This was never quite clear. Regardless, it hung in my parents’ upstairs hall until they downsized ten years ago and it came to live in Chicago with me. My sister and I drove it across the mountains and plains in a U-Haul full of boxes of silver, a set of Wedgewood “Devon Rose” china, an early American cradle, several dinged-up midcentury chairs, the buffet that sat in our dining room, and the rocking chair I was nursed in.
I’d been planning to truck all this stuff across the country on my own but when I arrived in Seattle that November to pick it all up my sister had other plans. It wasn’t safe to drive over the mountains by myself, she said, and she was coming with me. As we slid down the snowy pass through the Coeur d’Alene Mountains toward Missoula I had to concede that she was right.
When I took the painting off the wall of my apartment ten Novembers later it still bore the red dot I’d stuck on it on the day we prowled our parents’ house staking claim to fifty years of accumulated stuff. I liked the painting as much for its reminder of my childhood home as for its delicate aesthetics. Birds and flowers are considered auspicious in Chinese art, a blessing on the home – something I learned later but perhaps intuited at the time.
But when Paul and I got married he brought with him some birds and flowers of his own, painted by a friend he’d met teaching art in Alaska. That ink on paper work now hangs by our bed and well, maybe two birds and two flowers were unnecessary? I didn’t want to be greedy with the auspiciousness.
I’m not particularly attached to the painting, not in the way I felt about the rocking chair or the Devon Rose. It had been acquired by my father’s parents sometime in the 1950s or 60s, when my Episcopal bishop grandfather was at the height of his powers. For a time, back then, my grandparents lived in style – first in a grand home owned by the church in Seattle and then a still-grander London townhouse, also owned by the church. They traveled the world, but the only property they ever owned was a small cottage in upstate New York, where they retired in the early 70s a scant year or two before Pops quite suddenly, unexpectedly, died.
Abruptly widowed, my grandmother sold the little cottage and moved back to Seattle, where three of her five children and their young families lived. She was installed in an apartment overlooking the new I-5 freeway downtown, and the painting, along with some other pieces of Asian art, was installed with her. It hung in her apartment until she died in 1985 and it made its way to the hallway between my bedroom and the upstairs bathroom I shared with my sisters.
I have few memories of my grandfather: he lived across the country and I was just six when he died. But I have his books and I have his legend: a prolific writer, a quick thinker, a man of God prone to dark depression who was embedded in the high church but also dedicated to exploding its pretense and prejudice.
Of my grandmother I have more memories, though they sometimes prickle. She could be a forbidding presence, with exacting expectations of comportment. She fastidiously watched her figure, and lobbed pointed remarks at me whenever I reached for a cookie. As little kids, my sisters and I disliked spending time at her apartment. She had a small chest of coloring books and toys to produce for entertainment, but her home was otherwise child-hostile, dark and heavy in decor, with a bitchy Siamese cat and a permanent haze of smoke. We much preferred our other grandma, who lived in a little house with a yard and a swing and boxes of dress-up clothes, blocks, and dolls. That house was owned by the school where my grandpa taught English and Latin and grandma tutored dyslexic students.
When the auction house offered to include the painting in a March auction of Asian art I said sure. Who knows what might happen? Culturally rich but house poor, none of my grandparents left much for the younger generation. If the painting could help us even a little with a down payment, I thought my grandmother might be happy. I signed the papers, and pondered the paradox of upward mobility, American style – the two-sided coin that holds, on one side, that your hard work and talent will be rewarded and on the other, that you should just try to strike it rich.
With the softness of time, I have more empathy for my grandmother. She had been educated abroad, she had gone to Smith and worked as a teacher. My aunt, her only daughter, always said she should have been running a company, not church lady teas. But she was courted by my grandfather, whose letters to her are startling in their ardor, and given the limited options for educated women of her day, she signed on for life as a clergyman’s wife. My mother says not to feel sorry for her – that she had a good life – but after decades in orbit around the sun of a Great Man, to be suddenly left alone, thrust back to the West Coast to the care of inconsistent sons, must have been hard. To have had so much, but little to call your own.
By the time I tune back into the livestream they’re done with six-figure ceramics and have moved on to paintings. The grey-haired auctioneer is gone, and a younger woman in a crisp blue Oxford has taken her place. She’s not as smooth, and my heart thrums. When my bird and my flower come up she fumbles her notes.
The bidding starts at $1,000. Incrementally it starts to rise and then … it stops. The final bid falls short of the reserve price, the bare minimum below which I do not wish to trade my desire for the painting for my desire for a house.
I’m surprised by how humiliated I feel. No one is watching but the shame of my folly, to think that someone might find this fragment of my family to have value, rolls through my body hot and thick. The coin is made of lead, and the house always wins. This is the lesson of the striver.
Later my massage therapist, who is wise, suggests that the story of the painting is itself an inheritance. Love is a form of generational wealth, she observes, in the connection the knowledge that one is loved offers to the past and the foundation it establishes for an expansive future. So many people – their lives ruptured by war, trauma, displacement, enslavement – don’t have access to the story of their past, are not able to find comfort and identity there. The knowledge that someone will keep a box of toys for you, or share a drive across the mountains in the snow, tethers you to a happy story of your family. The painting is a touchstone, reminding me that I am safe. And besides, she adds, maybe your grandmother didn’t want you to sell it. Maybe this is her way of telling you to suck it up and to revel in the opportunities she never had.
It’s back on the dining room wall now. We may not have much money, but we are rich in birds and flowers.
I started writing this essay before I learned last week that our landlord wants to rehab our apartment and Paul and I have to move by the fall. The heat is on, in other words. If you like what I do here, now is a great time to show your appreciation with a paid subscription. Annual subscriptions are just $40, and I’ve added a “founders” tier for anyone feeling generous. As I said a while back, the content here is free, but level up to a paid tier and I can provide what expertise I have in return. Want something copy edited? Feedback on your book proposal? A soup recipe? I am happy to oblige! Thank you for reading and, as ever, for your support.
I so love your writing, and something lit up in me when I read the phrase, “love is a form of generational wealth”. How lucky to have such a wise massage therapist. I hope you find the home of your dreams!
Beautiful writing, as always. Boy I was hoping right along with you that the painting would turn into a fat wad of cash, and treasured forever more by the smitten buyer. Wishing you some feeling of ease and simplicity during the next months of house hunt/place hunt. As a kid I always thought it was funny that friends with grandmas had such different (often opposite!) types of grandmas-- I did, too. And was pretty well into adulthood before I realized, palm to forehead, that there are reasons for that.