(King Midas)

The first thing anyone saw when they entered Harriet Karp’s apartment was the looming Ramone. He stood to the left of the door in front of long rosewood shelves divided into cubicles. Some of the cubicles were empty, others contained the evening bags of the women Harriet invited.

Ramone took Sarah’s coat, reached for her green lizard bag and gave her a numbered ticket as one would do in a cloakroom.

Sarah then looked, as everyone before and after her would do, into the long glass cases that divided the foyer. The pin lights recessed into the ceiling picked out the first pieces of the collection.

“Mr. Ransom!” Ramone said with approval as the curator from the Metropolitan Museum slid in and flung off his scarf.

Corbett Ransom, known as “Barefoot” because he always wore Belgian shoes and walked through a room in a silent light-footed way, looked hard into the cases and then looked away.

“Barefoot! you know Sarah of course,” Harriet said dancing forward in a Turkish caftan designed to hide how thin she had grown. Sarah was still clutching her ticket because now she had nowhere to put it.

“Child, I cannot wait for tonight!” Ransom said, averting his eyes from the cases and noticing that, in the months he had not seen her, his hostess’s hand had turned into a  claw, brown and thick- veined with all the age spots merged. It enraged him that she was wearing a gold fillet on her brow and a third century B.C. golden hair ring, both pieces  suspiciously like those unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann and misnamed The Gold of Troy.

She was frailer than ever, however, which pleased him, for, along with the curators from the Getty and Kay von Biblowitz from the San Antonio Museum, he was waiting for her to die.

On the third Tuesday of every other month Harriet had a dinner party and screened a new movie. Her guests were widows like herself, staid older couples and always one of the three curators who were in pursuit of the collection. She suspected them all—new friends, old friends, ancient bodies with money but no interest in artifacts, the friends of friends. Anyone might dip into the cases and come up with a Greco Roman shard or fragment, a cylinder seal or golden belt buckle, a coin, a perfume bottle etched and paled by time.

Sarah knew this well and knew this was why Harriet never gave anyone  the real tour of her collection or pointed out a new addition or explained anything except to the curators, the scholars and historians who already knew and looked at her showing off with patient indulgent smiles. These she admitted one at a time, occasions for which she hired security and turned on the hidden cameras.

Each time she came here Sarah got slightly angrier at the mistrust until one time she would decide never to come again. Yet, as a divorcee, and an ever poorer one, she had very few such invitations, very few chances to be among people who had known her forever so she would not have to explain herself at all.

She knew, too, the history of the collection for she had been at school with Harriet, who had majored in art history. Right out of Wellesley, she had married Russell Karp, the heir to an old and immense fortune and, on their wedding trip to Italy and Greece, had begun to collect. In Pompeii and Paestrum, they had bought the first pieces, some of which were fakes, some of which were looted, all of which were minor.

Bewildered and in love, Russell had whirled around with Harriet who wanted this and then that and then more and he began to want the treasures, too, lured by the chase and capture, the secret transactions. All his family’s business instincts emerged as he stood, his face aflame, trying not to show too much emotion over a find. With almost limitless money and no children to distract them with the present, they had built the collection that now possessed its remaining owner.

What Sarah knew and few others guessed was that Harriet Karp had stopped eating. Once plump and matronly, she had been taken by the shapes on the vessels. Surrounded by these god bodies in their windblown draperies, those nude ephebes, her friend had turned from food as though she might will herself back into youth and an immortal beauty that had never been hers. All food tasted to her like brass. It sat in her intestines like stone.

Before she walked into the noisy blur up ahead, Sarah allowed herself to look into the cases. On the attic black-figure and red-figure vases youths were wrestling or racing, thick-thighed naked runners chased and mated with others. There were heads with tight marble curls, empty eyes with pupils drilled or undrilled above smashed noses. There, too, were footless warriors and gods with draped torsos, some with wings, some bearing shields and spears. Musicians played pipes and lutes so Pan and the satyrs might dance. Most were broken, battered and time-beaten like Sarah. She, however, unlike many of them, had an impeccable provenance.

The glass cases continued on from the foyer into the noise ahead, lining the laquered navy walls of the drawing room, winding round the dining room. Serpents rampant, sphinxes couchant, bronzes, marbles, terra cotta, gold. Suspicious characters had opened the earth for Russell and Harriet, plundered tombs to release the spirits of the long dead into captivity on upper Fifth Avenue.

Ah, there they all were, Sarah’s old crowd, with Barefoot already among them, tilted slightly back on his soft shoes as he dodged the evening breaths of the rich old men.

All the women were better dressed than she, for Sarah had recycled her Blass evening suit yet again and tried to disguise it with a paisley throw bought from a street vendor on Third Avenue.

From the cases against the reflecting walls, Egyptian eyes watched, Greco Roman statues reclined, young bodies that did not need to rest leaned on plinths. With Etruscan smiles and ancient lidless eyes they watched the old among the old and stayed young and slim and gods forever. A beauty, probably Aphrodite, her braids set by time to her tiny head, her face unrepaired among the repaired faces, faced a laughing woman with lipstick on her teeth.

Barefoot was noticing a tiny new Sphinx couchant and craving a closer look as he picked a piece of molasses bacon from the silver tray.

“Very tasty,” he said looking into the eyes of the waiter whose shining curls suggested Attic perfection.

Over her shoulder, Harriet watched him see the sphinx and then quickly approach her. She stumbled a bit and clutched onto Ramone, the descendant of Mamelukes, who stood like a sarcophagus by her side.

Ransom was waiting for her to lead him right to the sphinx. She would, for her favorite sport was to play her suitors against each other.

“I just showed her to Kay,” she said knowing she was ruining his evening, “I told her how much fun it was to outbid the Getty for the Crater. This is my favorite sphinx.”

“Her favorite sphinx.” Barefoot wanted to strangle her with the gold beads too ancient to wear or maybe whack her with one of the plinths. Instead, he smiled with his dark unrepaired teeth. Somehow he had not heard that she got the Crater, too.

The collection was not complete. It would never be complete as far as Harriet was concerned. She was about to buy a townhouse and was thinking of installing the Karp collection there to spite them all in perpetuity.

She waved off the waiter, pretty as Apollo, with his tray of stuffed baby potatoes and dabbed her mouth as though she had eaten.

Since Harriet lost interest in food, she never varied her Tuesday menus which were arrested in the 1950’s. Coulibec of salmon or rack of lamb with broccoli mousse, an aspic ring filled with crabmeat, something high and white with molten chocolate inside. All carried in and out by the Olympus waiters who ignored the artifacts but eyed bracelets and rings as they lowered the dishes.

Harriet looked at Barefoot on her right and thought of him naked, his drapery slipped onto an iliac crest sheathed in fat. On her other side, plump Orla was scraping the potato crust off the pale pink fish, pungent and tasteless as ever.

Harriet stood to thank everyone who had surrendered their purses and picked at her smothered fish in order to feel some connection with twenty-first-century humanity displayed among the ancient world. She knew the evening would end with another addition to her most secret collection

Ransom, still annoyed, was feeling highly obliged. The charm pulled from his Georgia clay, the learning taken from his Ashmolean years, and the blood of tent preachers mingled and tingled as he rose.

“Ah’ve just seen the most recent glories in the next room. A magnificent Sphinx—we note the nervous detail of the hair– has been joined by a weary Hercules and the Crater. Once again we are privileged to witness treasures tonight in these private rooms. Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Etruscans, the nomadic tribes have fed their wares into the cases around us. Anatolia, Cyprus, works from the Neolithic earth all picked out by the wise eyes of the late Russell and Harriet here.”…

He looked down at her as, with a wave, she bid him not to go on so.

The waiter removed Harriet’s plate where everything had been sculpted together into a butte.

Gall rinsed through her mouth as she rose to lead them into her screening room where, despite the newness of the movie and the unchallenging food many of the guests promptly fell asleep.

Barefoot sat in the dark nursing an annoyance which rose to fury, and then the fear that he was losing the collection after all.

“Fuck!” he whispered.

“Pardon?” said Sarah who really had read about the movie in the monthly magazines she used to break up her days.

“Quiet!” came a hissing.

The lights over the cases having dimmed, the movie continued.

A Roman agita gripped Ransom who slumped lower in his chair. After a brief restorative nap, he looked around and decided he really must splash some water on his face.

Harriet, who always sat in her uncomfortable Orkney Island chair in the back near the door was waiting to make her move. This was her favorite part of these evenings, almost as much fun as watching the curator’s face as he hovered over the sphinx. She heard and felt the small stirrings of the older crowd, her dear friends trying to understand the two cowboys in love.

Better than outbidding someone richer or a museum, better than getting a shady dealer to lower his price again, was this, her little private game. Though she thought of the little gods and broken bits as her progeny, they had not proved to be enough and, thus, the secret collection in the vault in her closet, the lineup of little feminine objects, worthless to all but her. Her souvenirs, as she thought of them, her secret from Russell, who would have been appalled. Good.

Now was the time. Silently she slipped from the room.

She heard the help cleaning up in the kitchen and knew Ramone was with them, his tuneless voice lifted in after party song.

She tiptoed to the rosewood cases, looked at the purses, and chose a pale green lizard one, quite worn. She had no idea whose purse it was nor did it matter. She took it down and opened it and took out a lipstick, put it back and removed a silver edged comb. Yes, that would do.

Then slowly, at a scuffling sound from the doorway, she turned.

It was Barefoot on his silent maroon shoes. Barefoot, with his curator’s eye. Barefoot, now daring to smile his alligator smile for he knew, if he behaved, the Karp collection someday would be his.

“Goodnight,” he whispered and bent to kiss her dry old hand, folded hard around Sarah’s silver-edged comb.

 

BACK TO CONTENTS