I decided not to think about it right away. I couldn’t. I had work to do. And another party to go to. Not a party for me. I wouldn’t even be part of the festivities. I’d be invisible. That’s my job, what I’m paid for. And when I’m doing it right, hardly anyone even notices me.
I am a society columnist. I write about product launches. I write about fundraisers. The occasional wedding. Book launches, gallery openings, fashion shows. Really, wherever the rich and beautiful might be found in the greatest abundance, that’s where I’ll be.
I write about them. I take pictures. In the morning they read about themselves. The more influential among them support the paper—tell their companies to buy ads, tell their friends how great we are, because look what good taste we had in including them. That is the function of the society column, full stop. My column serves no purpose beyond public relations. Not really. And honestly, for this job the bar is pretty low.
I stopped at home. Changed. A pretty dress. High heels. My evening bag, which is a tiny clutch. But there was a pretty serious digital camera slung over my shoulder. An SLR. Always ready for me to pull forward at a moment’s notice to grab the shot I want.
Yeah sure, I could use my smartphone for taking pictures. My competitors all do. But I want to be the best at my job. The best in the whole country if I can. And why? Because this job is not enough. If I can be the very best, I hope I will move forward. I will move to another job at this same paper. Or at a different paper. But I’ll get to be a real reporter. And the pictures I take will matter more than they do now. Quite a bit more.
Lately I’ve been using a short lens with a fixed focal length. When I throw it wide open, it’s at f/1.4, which means that in normal light, only the teensiest bit of an image is in focus. Everything beyond the focus point looks soft and somewhat dreamy. It’s a creative choice not everyone would make. But imagine this. You open your morning paper, check the society column, and those beautiful people? They seem even more beautiful. The photos of them are artful—that’s what I’m going for. Good enough isn’t good enough. I want everything I do to be extraordinary. It has to be. It’s a high-water line, and I don’t hit it every time. But I think I have to try.
I don’t kid myself—my column isn’t news. But I have a job in an industry that is dying. That makes me one of the lucky ones. It also makes me one of the ambitious ones. They don’t always cancel each other out. Even so, not everything is about ambition. Things can sometimes be very simple. There are times when I am laser-focused on being the best that I can be. At other times, my needs are pretty basic. So it wasn’t long before I was on a different mission, thanks to Erica’s news. I knew I had only a limited amount of time to find a desk for what was to become my home office.
I’m lucky in another way too. I have a place to put a desk. Not everyone does. My apartment is in a nice part of the city. It is beyond what I could actually afford in this city, but I inherited it from a loving grandmother with both money and foresight.
As she got older and began to suspect the way my life would go, she thought I was the one of her grandkids who could use her apartment. Rather than the cash she was planning to leave the others. After all, I was a girl. And I showed every sign of not spending the energy she thought I should in looking for a husband. She despaired of me ever making anything of myself. And she thought that at some point I’d need a place to hang my hat. It’s not a big apartment. But then, I don’t have a lot of hats.
The apartment is on the west side of Vancouver, just a few minutes from the offices of the Vancouver Post by car. A few more minutes by bike and a good hour if I put rubber soles to pavement and walk. Though now that I no longer had a reason to go there every day, I was planning on doing that less often.
The apartment is bright and sunny, though small by anyone’s standards. In truth, there isn’t much room for new office furniture. Also, the apartment is pretty retro by virtue of having been decorated by my grandmother many years ago. So I needed a desk that would fit the decor. Not so old that was it was actually antique, but old enough to be cool. And since the newspaper had given me some money for the purpose of outfitting my office, I decided to take a good look around and get exactly the right desk. I wanted it to fit in but be functional for me as well. And for once, I wouldn’t even think about the cost. I wanted something really special.
So I checked the usual places for people in my age group, but I decided I didn’t want a desk that arrived home flat and in a box. There were a number of very cool stores specializing in midcentury-type furniture. But I decided retro and new would make everything else in the apartment look shabby. I couldn’t afford to redecorate the whole place just because I needed a desk. Then I thought of buying something used, and I started checking auction catalogs. It didn’t take long before I found something that seemed perfect.
The desk I settled on was Danish modern. The catalog said it had been owned by Morrison Brine, a well-known Vancouver architect who had recently passed away. I liked the desk’s smooth golden lines. And I liked the fact that it was a piece of furniture with some history. Best of all for me, it was exactly the size I needed. It would fit into the small available space between where I prepared my food—the kitchen—and where I sometimes consumed it—the dining area.
Not only was the desk the right size. By some strange coincidence, the auction estimate was for exactly the funds I had available—eight hundred dollars. Which was a lot for me to spend on a desk. It would take all of the money the paper had given me for outfitting my home office and a few hundred of my own loot on top. Even so, I wanted it and I set out to have it.
And I know a little bit about the way auction estimates can go. Quite often, auction items don’t meet their estimates. And the desk wasn’t in perfect condition. I went to the auction house to inspect it. There were a few scratches and some imperfections in the varnish, as well as some scars where someone had tried to open a locked drawer. I knew the scratches would be under my laptop when I was working on it, so what did I care? And there again, that perfect size. I’d brought a tape measure to be sure. I measured the desk again to confirm that it was just right. It seemed to me that it was meant to be my desk.
On the day of the auction, I took my seat at the back of the room and settled in to acquire my desk. This would be the first time I’d ever tried to buy anything at auction. I couldn’t believe how excited I was.
I had to sit through a lot of other things before they got to my desk. I didn’t have to sit there for the whole day though. It wasn’t one of the big-ticket items they were holding until the end.
I sat there on my hands and just watched. I sat on my hands. We’ve all seen auctions on television where someone scratches their nose and ends up spending half a million bucks on a vase. I didn’t have half a million bucks kicking around for a vase or anything else, so I thought I’d better not scratch my nose. Of course, as soon as I had that thought, my nose got incredibly itchy.
So I sat there. On my hands. And waited for what seemed like an endless number of items to get sold. Although I have to acknowledge that it seemed like an even longer time because my nose got itchier and itchier.
But the watching was interesting. An ancient Incan vase went for practically nothing. It didn’t make sense to me that a vase more than three thousand years old would fetch so much less than the really ugly one that followed it. That one was made in the late twentieth century and looked like something from a garage sale. Then another vase, this time from ancient Peru. Three hundred and fifty bucks. I had to hold my hand down so I didn’t bid. It seemed like a really good deal. So very old. So crudely beautiful. But I didn’t raise my hand. I needed all my loot in case the desk went for a higher-than-expected price. I wanted the desk that badly.
On and on the auction went. And then, finally, it was time for lot 164. I sat up straighter.
The auctioneer described the desk as a piece of midcentury Danish modern furniture designed “in the style of Grete Jalk.” This didn’t mean anything to me, but I took it to mean that though the desk was not quite a museum piece, it was close. I started to get worried. If the desk was a collector piece, it could go for a lot more than the estimate. I sat tight and hung on.
According to the auctioneer, good old Morrison Brine had sat at the desk for all of its years. Plotting or phoning or doodling. Probably not designing, as it wasn’t big enough for that. But it was a desk that had often been at the center of inspiration. I liked the feeling of that.
Sitting at the back of the room, I’d been looking the crowd over since I got there. The whole time, I’d been trying to figure out who looked like a collector who might end up competing with me for the desk, and who looked like a regular desk buyer. The person who put the first bid on my desk was not one of the people I would have marked as competition.
He did not look like a collector at all. Not to me anyway. I could tell he was tall even though he was sitting down—something about the distance between his shoulders and where his butt nestled against the chair. I had a sense that when he stood up he’d be over six feet tall. He had dark hair falling over his bronze forehead in a way that kept drawing my eye. I remembered those details not only because he was a remarkably handsome man, but because there was something familiar about him. I couldn’t quite place him, but I kept looking at him and wondering.
He started the bidding at two hundred dollars. I bid two fifty. He bid two seventy-five. I went right to three. We went on in that fashion for a couple more rounds, until he bid right up to eight hundred, the estimated price. Then he turned around and looked back at me. He didn’t seem like someone who’d let a little thing like money stop him. So I threw in what I figured would be my last bid, eight fifty. It was over my budget, but I knew it didn’t matter anyway. I could have bid a thousand and he would still have gone higher. As I placed my bid, I resigned myself to a life with a less interesting, still-to-be-discovered desk and sighed.
I could see he was about to make what would likely have been the last bid, but he never got the chance. The auction room’s doors burst open and half a dozen uniformed Vancouver city policemen stomped in. Everything stopped. The auctioneer stood poised with his gavel in midair. They descended on Tall, Dark and Handsome.
I saw him see the cops. See that they were there for him. He half-rose. I thought he might make a run for it, but there was nowhere to go. All of the assembled auction-goers watched in astonishment as the guy was quickly arrested and cuffed. The officers read him his rights, then frogmarched him out the door. His dark hair kept falling over his forehead and flopping helplessly, because his hands weren’t free to push it back.
It all happened so quickly that once he was gone, we all just stood and looked around the room and at each other. Had that really happened, we all seemed to wonder, or were we imagining things?
The auction didn’t go back to normal as soon as the cops left. A murmur flowed through the crowd. No one knew quite what to do.
Once the auction started up again, the auctioneer announced that the sale of the item that had been on the block at the time of the “disturbance” would be restarted from the beginning. And that’s what happened.
When the hammer fell after the sale, the desk was mine for $575. I was pleased but also astonished. And I smiled to myself. Fate had intended the desk to be mine. Another few minutes and the tall guy would have owned the desk and been carted away to jail. I’d caught a lucky break.
My new desk. I went and looked at it again. On closer inspection and now that the deed was done, I could see it was not in quite as good a condition as I had thought. Most irritating of all, the largest drawer was locked. And it did not seem to have a key. I hoped that when I paid for the desk, the key would turn up through the auction office. But I had a feeling it would not. Partly because, as I’d noticed before, the smooth and elegant lock that held the drawer shut appeared to have been jimmied at some point. Some of the scratches were due to that.
I wanted to pay for the desk and get it home, but based on the events in the auction room, I had an important call to make first. I was pleased with myself for realizing that. Maybe I had what it took to be a reporter after all.
“Webb!” The editor of the Vancouver Post had a deep male voice. He shouted his last name as he answered. One of his habits and a nod back to a time when city editors barked first and asked questions later. Mike Webb was from the old school.
“Hey, Mike. It’s Nicole. I think I just caught a story.”
“No kidding. What have you got?” There was caution in his voice. I understood. I was not one of his reporters. Strictly speaking, the city editor was not my boss, but he was the boss of all the news. On the editorial side, nothing got into the paper without his okay. And he and I both knew I didn’t want to be a gossip columnist forever. I wanted to do hard news. And Mike wasn’t against me doing it, but, as I’d seen very recently, budgets were being cut. That meant fewer pages, which meant less room for news. And that ultimately meant that every item we ran had double freight. Space in the paper was precious, and Mike had reporters to fill the paper with stories he had assigned them. I could hear it in his voice—the last thing he needed was me sailing in there and messing with his system.
“I’m at Lively Auctions. Personal business on my own time.” Which was mostly true. “I was bidding on a piece of furniture. Suddenly cops burst in, grab a guy and take him away.”
“And no one is dead this time?”
I grinned despite myself. “No, Mike. Everyone is alive.”
“Okay, good. Murder is definitely above your pay grade.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Good. But anyway, sure. Look into this one. What harm could it do?”
I tried not to bristle at his patronizing tone. He was city editor, and he was not a chatty guy. If I wanted warm and fuzzy, I’d have to go somewhere else. A puppy maybe. Mike Webb was never going to supply it.
In the office at the auction house, before I paid, I asked about the arrest. No one knew any more than I did. But I discovered I had an even bigger challenge. There was a problem with my credit card.
“But that’s impossible,” I told the clerk. “I know I have funds available.”
The girl behind the counter looked at me with flat eyes. She’d heard this one before.
“Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t seem sorry. “I can’t help you with that, hon. You’ll have to call the company or whatever. But the item doesn’t leave here without payment.”
Since I didn’t want to make a trip back, I called my mom and made arrangements for her to pay for the desk over the phone. I’d pick up cash to repay her when I stopped at the bank to see what was wrong with my card.
Then it was just a matter of getting the desk home. Luckily for me, three nice men wrangled it into the back of my car. The piece was way heavier than it looked, they said. I thought that was funny in a way. The classic midcentury lines looked light, maybe even insignificant, to the untrained eye. But the guys who moved the desk to my car heaved and shoved as they muscled it around. Was teak heavy? I wondered. I told myself I’d look that up.
With the desk carefully nestled into the packing materials they supplied, I drove off, my new prize sticking out of the hatch of my car.
At the other end I had arranged for Kyle to be there to help me. Considering the weight of the beast, we enlisted one of my neighbors to help get it upstairs. But it was Kyle who ensured it made the journey safely, avoiding the corners on the stairs and handling the desk with the care one gives a long-lost child.
The three of us positioned it exactly where I had envisioned. And it was perfect. It looked just right in the sunny light that floods my apartment. I was so happy.
“Good choice,” Kyle said approvingly when my neighbor was gone. “It will be a nice, bright place for you to work.”
“I think so,” I agreed. “There’s one more thing I need your help with though.”
I showed him the locked desk drawer, and he went to work. He got out a credit card and a screwdriver and did a couple of things to try to open it, but the lock didn’t budge.
“Sorry, Nic. I’m sure I can get it open, but I’ll have to come back with some real tools.”
We agreed he’d come by the following day to try to open the desk. Once he was gone I got around to the business of thinking about what my evening was going to look like.
It was Tuesday. Early in the week, but it looked to be an interesting night. There was a book launch at a wine bar out near the university and a gallery opening in the downtown core. I expected both events would be well attended and the food would probably be good.
Of the two, the one I really had to attend was the book launch. The book in question had been written by one of the Post’s reporters. Which meant there was an expectation that the paper would cover the event. After all, he was one of our own. How the book did would reflect on the paper.
The author was the paper’s wine guy, and the book was called 1,001 BC Wines. The title surprised me, as I wouldn’t have imagined there were that many, but it did mean that the snacks would be good. In my experience, wine and snacks tend to appear together at such events. I redoubled my efforts to arrive on time. I didn’t want to get there after the food had run out.
I arrived a little after seven to a surprisingly small turnout. My first clue had been the amount of parking available when I pulled up. There was lots. I parked easily and let myself into the darkened space.
As I’d expected, since the author was a colleague, I recognized some faces right away. But it’s a big paper. I’d never met the author before, and his face was unfamiliar. I let him know who I was and we chatted easily for a bit. There wasn’t a big crowd, so it wasn’t like we had to shout above the din. He was an affable guy. His name was Clark Biederman, and he looked as you’d expect a wine writer to look. He was jowly and pleasant. But he didn’t seem to have a lot of friends, though he looked like a guy who would have many. Few of them had attended anyway. Maybe he’d been flogging his book for a while and his friends were avoiding him.
Like mine, Clark’s job was one of those that had been moved right out of the office. So although both of us were full-time employees of the paper, neither of us actually worked there anymore.
Clark kept thanking me for coming and kept trying to top up my glass. And since it was very good wine, it was hard for me to resist. I did, though, because it was only my first stop. There was still a whole lot of evening to get through.
I was working. I positioned Clark in such a way that the four or six friends who had attended looked more like a backdrop of fans. Then I took a bunch of photos.
“Are you working on a book, Nicole?” Clark asked me at one point. I told him I wasn’t.
“You should think about it. It’s the one thing that makes you an expert in your field.”
I thought about that as I drove to my next event. In what field would I even want to be recognized as an expert? Choosing which invitations are most likely to produce the best food and drink? If I was ever going to write a book, I’d need to find something I was passionate about and also good at. I didn’t even know where to start.
The gallery opening proved more lively. There were three featured artists. They were young and their work was vibrant, as was the crowd. No wine this time, just funky flavors from a local nano-brewery. And since it was one I’d never heard of before, I figured one of the bearded hipster friends of the artists was probably the brewmaster.
I took photos of each of the artists in front of one of their own large canvases. While I did that, I knew my column for the next day was pretty much writing itself. The paintings would look great reproduced in color, which I knew the paper would do. The artists’ faces were eager and beautiful. And in his own way, Clark and his book and little crowd had proven to be colorful. With the rows of bottles and glasses, Clark’s happy face and his elbow patches, those pictures would be fun too.
I went home to write my column, the first time I’d truly worked in my new home-office space. And the work went easily and well. A promising start. The photos along with a few well-chosen words were easily filed, fulfilling my professional duties for another day.
A good day, all in all. And full. It was possible in that moment to think my home-based work life would be peaceful. Calm.