Portrait

A brood parasite of unknown breeding, I was delivered to a halfway house of maladjusted halfsiblings and the unwanted strangers paid by the state to rear us. They preached hellfire and advised us to live life crawling on our bellies.

They understood hunger as a spiritual instrument and bruises a form of instruction. I was more anonymous parcel than infant. I had no biological claim to the nest, only hunger, and my need was larger than my host could answer, and so I ate them out of house and home the way a thing eats that has never been taught to stop, and then I moved on, as such things do.

I never confused superstition for wisdom. What I understood early, without assistance, was that nearly all things spoken are nonsense, and that those who take action, those who do not first ask permission, are the ones on whom fortune ultimately shines. I found where what I needed was and I simply took it. I watched with patient redtail eyes where money congregated and I positioned myself accordingly.

Uncle Samuel taught me the first principles of valuation in the back room of his shop, which stood three blocks from the boardwalk, close enough that when the wind came off the sea you could smell salt and frying oysters and blown sand collected in the doorways. A small, precise man, he ran the neighborhood and wore the same expression whether he was being lied to or told the truth, which is the most useful expression a man in our profession can cultivate, and which I studied and grew to surpass.

Tourists came in sunburned and gin soaked, carrying broken glasses and damp wallets, asking where they could buy batteries or sell an engagement ring without questions. Locals arrived knowing the counter and not expecting much having given up hope of ever reclaiming the objects they brought in. The pawn business was in how you managed both kinds of inventory: what the people brought in and what those people themselves were worth.

A young drifter brought in a butterscotch Telecaster once, trying to appear indifferent, which is always the tell.

“Custom Tele,” he said.

I turned it over. Wrong screws. Wrong tuners. Dead tone pot. Headstock impersonating a ‘52 reissue on a kit body.

“Two hundred.”

“It’s worth eight.”

“It was, before it was decapitated.”

He muttered to himself and began filling out the paperwork. People who curse to themselves are already selling. I held my tongue and let him keep what remained of his pride. I had it on the floor for six hundred inside of a month.

In this work you learn a thing’s actual worth and you hold that knowledge still inside you. Let the mark talk, eventually they arrive by their own effort at the number you had from the beginning. I have never found a more honest description of commerce, nor of most arrangements.

I will tell you what I am not, the list is short and the entries more instructive.

I am not the tourist who lines up in the heat to purchase the sensation of having experienced something. I am not the laborer who mistakes routine for virtue. I am not the sentimental who assigns value by feeling rather than function. I will never be made a sap.

I occupy a position no different than winter or disease that ends the weakest of the herd. My office is as the mushroom that binds itself to dying matter in the dark. Both take what the living have finished with. I have never found this comparison unflattering. The bear does not apologize for hunger. The mold does not explain itself. We operate according to our nature, which is honesty, a virtue most people spend their entire lives avoiding.

Currently a woman I have been observing has separated from her husband twice already in the span of twenty minutes, once at a souvenir stand crowded with polished shells and once again near the arcade where children moved among machines with the distracted urgency of insects.

People reveal themselves through what they stop paying attention to. I found her small departures encouraging. Unguarded confidence and attention directed elsewhere have always furnished me with opportunities. The husband proved the weaker prospect, possessing a watch of respectable quality which he touched unconsciously.

The season had nearly exhausted itself and the boardwalk had taken on a feverish quality of celebration approaching its conclusion. Musicians occupied the corners where foot traffic slowed and performed for tips from beneath striped awnings. Fortune tellers rented certainty by the quarter hour. Caricaturists sold distortions people were pleased to mistake for likenesses. The throng moved about, purchasing experiences as though memories could be manufactured to specification.

In these times crowds become dense enough that attention disperses into the general mass and individual movements lose their significance. A man may pursue his interests on such a night with very little concern for observation.

The lesson extends beyond commerce. I killed a man during the chaos of last year’s crescendo. I followed him home and ended him while last year’s festivities outside smothered the noise of his struggling.

I had expected the act to constitute a threshold, some new register of experience. Instead, there had been a clean transaction, then nothing. I was the same and hungry in the same way, nothing changed.

Currently the couple I follow had been loitering at a pretzel stand. I waited. They moved farther down the boards, and I followed at the appropriate distance. Then they joined a long line gathered along the south rail overlooking the water.

The line interested me less than the reactions of those leaving it. A line merely indicates desire. Desire is common. What was unusual were the people emerging from the front of it, each carrying a sheet of paper and wearing an expression I could not immediately account for. It looked less like they had received a drawing than an appraisal or talisman.

The couple moved off down the boards and took a seat after ordering at a coffee stand.

I found the line a convenient means to maintain proximity to them.

I joined it.

Here was an impressive lineup of out of towners waiting to pay for their likeness to be rendered in charcoal. To my surprise the artist was a girl, perhaps eleven years old seated on a stool with a drawing board balanced across her knees. Beside her sat a coffee can for money. Around her stood a woman with a flat attentive expression and a man who managed the crowd and answered questions. The artist worked quickly. Her eyes moved over her subject in a rapid series of assessments and then her hand followed with admirable authority.

The first subject I observed was an older woman whose face made me think her simple and durable. When she had received her portrait, the woman stared at it as a dream unexpectedly remembered. Her companion went pale when his chance came to study the work.

A broad man in a fishing shirt began laughing before the portrait was fully turned around. The laughter died abruptly. He stared at the paper another moment, folded it twice, and walked away without another sound.

Next a woman accepted her portrait and stared at it for a long moment. Nothing in her expression suggested pleasure or disappointment. It was the look of someone reading a letter written in a language she had forgotten she knew. At length she folded the paper carefully and walked away without showing it to her husband.

I took the stool when my turn came.

The artist looked at me and began her assessment, the same rapid movement of the eyes I had watched her perform on every previous subject, and then the movement slowed. She went over my face again. Then again. Her hand, blackened with coal dust, remained still.

Behind me the line shifted.

The woman standing behind her moved uneasily.

The quiet moment began to stretch into something more uncomfortable.

Still, she continued to study me. Her young face regarding me as if I were an insect.

I became aware, with a clarity that had no recent equivalent, that I was being appraised, not observed, not read, but appraised, turned in the light, examined for the difference between what I presented and what I actually was, which is a procedure I had performed on countless objects across my own counter.

I felt anger gather, ambient like weather.

She dropped her eyes to the paper and began drawing something and stopped and looked up and drew again and stopped and frowned at the page as though the instrument were behaving incorrectly. The crowd behind me grew quiet. I kept still, and she kept looking over but found no position I could take to her liking. She was trying to understand something about me. She was trying to find something.

She bent back to the page and finished quickly.

Then she turned the drawing around.

The face she had drawn was plainly rendered, the lines uncertain in places and revised in others, a simple child’s drawing. Not a skilled portrait in the way the others had been skilled. The face she had drawn wore a round angry expression, the sort produced by disappointments too small to justify tears and too large to ignore. Only this insulting expression and empty space where the rest of a person ordinarily resides.

“I couldn’t find the rest of you.”

I placed money into the can without looking at her family and walked back to the pawnshop having lost track of the couple I had been following.

I have known appraisers whose judgment failed, and this child is clearly among them, whatever her reputation along the boardwalk, whatever a line of credulous tourists may suggest about her talent.

The picture is in my pocket; I would like to throw it away but find myself unable to. Again and again, I find myself studying the image.