THE TWINS
Horse’s leg
The twins were a final purchase.
A dealer friend of mine lay on his deathbed. Bald, pale, and breathing with difficulty, he had asked me to help him with one final deal. He had a family heirloom - a large Victorian taxidermy panorama (said to have been assembled by an ancestor) that needed to find a home. I had driven down to his family’s place at the shore to look it over, and we spent one last afternoon together. He knew he was close to the end, and his doctors had told him that the cancer was no longer responding to treatment. Still: he wanted to at least make it to the Spring, and to one final Brimfield: to set up one last show one last time.
Almost a year before that final meeting he had shown me a grossly enlarged lymph node and a white spot in his throat that had been diagnosed as malignant. He was planning to start treatment after he got back from a show he had scheduled for the next week. That was my friend down to the ground: one of those dealers for whom the business was everything; he was as hardcore as they come. Criss-crossing the country, from the Northeast to the South and West, from New Jersey to Massachusettes to North Carolina to Texas and back all year every year, he was indefatigable. He never missed a show. He was boisterous and engaging, with a steady sales patter, a quick wit and an ear for a terrible pun.
We had gotten up to our share of mischief over the years, concocting ridiculous schemes and bending a few rules. He had a great eye for the whimsical, the bizarre and the ridiculous, and he always picked up a few real treasures along the way. One day he called me over at a market and said: “Hey Evan - have I got a leg for you! A really beautiful leg! Wanna see a leg!?” And it was a beautiful leg: a 19th century skeletal mounting of a horse's foreleg that stands about as tall as I do, with impressive iron work running through the carpal bones and the elbow joint. It still stands in my library - one of my treasured possessions.
My friend had managed to make it through two Brimfields while battling his cancer. Visibly weakened by the treatments, he would set up at our local market in the dead of that Winter, curled up in his car with the engine running, and with his tables full. He had more recently packed up a bunch of large boxes and scheduled a show in Los Angeles when he realized that, finally, he could go no further. As I sat on the edge of his bed we talked about his final illness: the pain evident in his raspy voice, his shortness of breath. “I can’t even stand up any more. I’m too weak to get out of bed.” My friend told me that there was one last drug the doctors were going to try, but it was a long shot.
As a three-time cancer survivor myself I know that, while sympathy is so very appreciated, real engagement can often feel even better; anything to take one’s mind out of the body (if only for a short while). "What’s in all these boxes?" I asked. “That was supposed to be my LA show” he said: “The one I didn’t make." So we unpacked those boxes and sorted through the objects from his final curation. He told me about all the pieces, and where he had acquired them sounding, for a little while, a bit more like his old self. The Twins lay wrapped in an old shirt, packed away in the final box. They were just the kind of thing he would pick up: enigmatic, bizarre and whimsical. “How much?” I asked. He gave me a price. I didn’t haggle. We shook on it. I packed them up, told him that I loved him and that I’d find a home for his piece.
It took me a few weeks, but I finally did find a customer for the panorama. As it happens my friend died not long afterwards.
I still think about him often: I miss his hearty greetings, his ridiculous banter and his whimsically weird eye. But every dealer will have their final sale; goodness only knows what mine will be.