Cat King Image

The Elvis picture is a coveted collectible in Leland Gaunt’s shop, but its importance lies less in its image than in the contest it creates. Myra Evans and Cora Rusk both want it; Gaunt exploits that rivalry, sells the picture to Myra on terms she can scarcely bear, and then makes her possession conditional on doing him a favor. When Cora later learns the picture is gone, Gaunt redirects her longing toward Elvis’s sunglasses. The picture becomes a hinge in his market of desire: acquiring it feels like winning, but the purchase opens the way to manipulation.

The picture and its competing claims

Myra comes to Needful Things on impulse after a call from Cora, approaching the shop furtively because she fears her friend would never speak to her again if she knew why Myra had come. The shop’s sign says it is open by appointment only, and Myra has none; she nevertheless advances toward the door, wearing large sunglasses and telling herself that caution is warranted. Her secrecy makes the picture more than a casual purchase before she has even seen Gaunt.

Cora and Myra’s rivalry centers on who saw the picture first, but Myra knows that the priority dispute is beside the point. She imagines it hanging above Cora’s mantel, between Cora’s ceramic Elvis figure and porcelain Elvis beer stein, and feels a knot of distress at the prospect. Cora has an established collection and once saw Elvis perform at the Portland Civic Center. Myra’s desire is therefore sharpened by the prospect of seeing her friend possess one more Elvis object, not simply by the picture in isolation. Myra mutters that it should be hers, summons her courage, and knocks.

The picture’s value is emotional and competitive rather than practical. Gaunt’s shop contains both apparent treasures and ordinary goods, yet no item has a price tag. The absence of fixed prices allows the value of an object to emerge through the customer’s attachment and willingness to pay. In Myra’s case, the image becomes a measure of what she believes Cora already has and what she herself must claim.

Myra’s purchase and Gaunt’s leverage

When Myra reaches the shop, Gaunt has the picture in hand. She reacts with an overwhelming cry, and he calmly takes the picture away from her. As she begins to rise after it, he tells her to sit; she remains frozen, and Gaunt makes the terms plain: if she ever wants to see the picture again, she must stay seated. The object’s sudden removal changes the encounter from browsing to dependence. Myra’s sweating, shaking body conveys how quickly her desire has outrun deliberation.

Gaunt invites her to name a price. Myra offers forty dollars, then raises her offer to eighty when Cora protests that Gaunt would sell it to her. Gaunt sets the price at exactly twice that amount: $160, and assures Myra that her personal check will be accepted. She cries that she cannot pay without her husband, Chuck, killing her. The sale is thus not a simple exchange at a displayed price; Gaunt lets Myra reveal her attachment and then converts it into a sum that produces distress as well as possession.

The shop’s posted policy makes the transaction’s one-way character explicit. Gaunt declares, “I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS OR MAKE EXCHANGES CAVEAT EMPTOR!” The warning frames the store’s deals as the buyer’s responsibility, even while Gaunt controls the conditions under which his customers encounter and obtain what they want. In Myra’s case, the no-return rule deepens the significance of a purchase made under emotional pressure: she cannot simply undo the claim she has made on the picture.

After Myra has secured the picture, she clutches it to her bosom. Gaunt’s next move shows that he has not treated the sale as the end of their dealings. He asks whether she knows Henry Beaufort, who tends the bar at the Mellow Tiger, and tells her that he wants her to play a trick on him. Myra knows who Henry is, though she has never been inside the bar. The picture is the bait that draws her into Gaunt’s further request: her access to what she wants comes paired with a demand to act against someone else.

Cora’s loss and the redirected desire

Cora enters the store determined to buy the picture, only to learn that it has already been sold. Gaunt says the buyer was an out-of-state woman whose car had an Oklahoma plate, concealing Myra’s identity behind a false account. Cora responds with anger and genuine distress; only when told the picture is gone does she understand how badly she wanted it. The sale changes the picture from an available collectible into a lost object, and the concealment prevents Cora from immediately confronting the friend who obtained it.

Gaunt does not leave Cora with the loss. After serving another couple, he returns with a small lizard-skin spectacles case and opens it to reveal dark-gray aviator glasses. Cora recognizes their supposed connection to Elvis, and Gaunt confirms that they are “The King's sunglasses,” one of sixty pairs, and supposedly Elvis’s favorites. Cora buys them for $19.50, then accepts Gaunt’s offer to provide information for a surcharge. The episode repeats the structure of the picture’s sale in altered form: an Elvis collectible answers Cora’s disappointed desire, while Gaunt’s sale leads into another paid exchange.

The picture’s disappearance therefore redistributes, rather than ends, the competition. Myra gets the image but becomes entangled in Gaunt’s demand; Cora loses the specific object but buys a different Elvis relic and agrees to hear Gaunt’s information. The two women’s attachments take different paths through the same shop, where scarcity, personal meaning, and the seller’s control turn collecting into leverage.

Collecting, price, and manipulation

The Elvis picture belongs to a wider set of objects that Gaunt presents as both collectible and unusually charged. He discusses the rarity and future significance of a 1956 Sandy Koufax card, and offers Brian Rusk a piece of wood said to come from Noah’s Ark while carefully qualifying what can be claimed about its origin. Such objects derive value from stories of scarcity, authenticity, memory, and celebrity. The picture’s power over Myra and Cora fits this pattern: what matters is not an ordinary use for the object, but the promise attached to owning it.

Gaunt’s method joins an apparently open market to intensely personal pressure. His shop has no price tags, and he professes a belief in free trade; yet customers do not arrive as detached negotiators. Myra measures the picture against Cora’s collection, while Cora’s distress reveals the intensity of her own attachment only after the sale has closed. Gaunt can therefore present the exchange as a voluntary purchase while making desire itself the mechanism that drives the price and secures further compliance.

The picture’s decisive function is to make possession feel like relief and victory, then expose the cost hidden inside that feeling. For Myra, owning it gives Gaunt an opening to enlist her against Henry Beaufort. For Cora, losing it sends her toward another object and another bargain. In both cases, the Elvis image is not merely a collectible in the background of the action: it is the instrument through which Gaunt turns rivalry into an ongoing transaction.