enough with this going-once, going-twice routine

[Coffee Break]

Hello everyone. I encountered this expression, "enough with this going-once, going-twice routine", but am struggling to understand it. Could you please let me know what it means in the following sentences:

I couldn’t wait for our ride downstairs to be over. But I also knew that our remaining minutes were numbered, and never wanted these to end. I would have wanted her to press the stop button as soon as the doors had closed and say she’d forgotten something, and would I mind holding the door for her. Who knows where all this might have led, especially if some of her friends spied me waiting for her by the open elevator door—Just take off your coat and enough with this going-once, going-twice routine. Or the old, jiggly elevator could stop between floors and trap us in the dark and let this hour be a night, a day, a week, as we’d sit on the floor and open up to each other in ways we hadn’t done all evening long, in the dark, for a night, a day, a week—to sit and listen to the sound of the superintendent banging away at cables and pulleys and not care at all, seeing we were back to Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” and Rilke’s Nikolai Kuzmich, who ended up with so much time on his hands that he could afford to squander it as much as he pleased, in big bills or small—spend, spend, spend, and like him I would ask time for a huge loan and allow this elevator to be stuck forever.

- André Aciman, Eight White Nights, First Night

This is a novel published in the United States of America in 2010. This novel is narrated by the nameless male protagonist. The protagonist meets Clara at a Christmas party in Manhattan. Here, when the protagonist is leaving the party, Clara suggests that she would walk him to the nearest bus station. In the elevator going down to the lobby floor, the protagonist wishes that the elevator might stop here and prevent them from going anywhere so that they might stay alone in this elevator box forever.

Here, I wonder what the underlined expression means.
By "going", I first thought of an auction, where people offer prices for an object and the MC announces "Going—going—gone!" with three times of hammering to announce that the object is sold, but I still cannot grasp what this "going-once/twice routine" might mean.

My vague guess is that, because the protagonist announced that he must leave this party several times during the party (wishing that someone might stop him), so it might be referring to that fact, though I am not sure.

I would very much appreciate your help.

 

[Skrej]

You're on the right track with the auction metaphor. Their refusal to act on their mutual attraction to each other is comparable to an auction when the winning bid is obvious. Even when everyone knows the outcome, there's still the formality of giving final notice that the bidding is about to end. and the remote chance that something will change last second.

 

[Tarheel]

@Coffee Break Please note that the box is called a car. Also, people bid on items at an auction.

 

[Coffee Break]

@Skrej and @Tarheel,

Thank you very much for the explanations!
I learned that the elevator is referred to as "car" rather than "box", and that people "bid" on items, all thanks to you.

So it is indeed related to the expressions used in auctions, "Going—going—gone"!
And the narrator is saying that one should stop with that routine of saying "going" once and "going" twice as one does in auctions.

But this is just my small question, but would "going" here mean that one is being selected as a romantic partner of someone and a final notice is being given before that person is selected? Or would that simply mean that one is leaving the party to go somewhere...? I wonder why it is described as "going routine", like it is one habitually does.

 

[emsr2d2]

For info, it's a "lift" in BrE, not an "elevator" and we don't use any word after it.

 

[Tarheel]

@Coffee Break Since he's talking about what happened in the elevator, it is, I think, about their relationship.