Unbecoming (13 page)

 • • • 

Kendall was tiny, shrewd, and oddly maternal toward both Jezzie, who often came to their room to flop on her sister’s bed and whine, and Lana, Kendall’s loose-cannon best friend. Lana Blix-Kane was rich and terrified of being ignored. Grace couldn’t see that then, only luxurious confidence. No matter what Lana did—guzzled vodka until she passed out in a strange apartment, spent thousands in a single shopping day, bought a puppy on Saturday and returned it on Monday morning—she was unpunished and unchanged, as though her parents had also bought her an
undo
button.

Grace met Lana her second night in New York. Lana came in with Kendall, but she didn’t introduce herself. She sat on Kendall’s bed and slumped back with fatigue.

“Mmm, you,” she said to Grace. “You’re a
serious girlfriend
.” She turned to Kendall. “Right?”

Kendall shrugged. “You’re the expert.”

“There’s this, like, ether of contentment,” Lana said. “Like a house cat.”

Grace opened her mouth to protest, but she didn’t know what to say.

“I mean, you are obviously a fish out of water here,” Lana said. “But you probably don’t even know that. So you must have a boyfriend. Know what I mean? Well, probably not, right? You wouldn’t.”

Lana wore her fine blond hair impossibly teased, and Grace would later learn that if Lana had not just rolled out of bed, she worked hard to look as though she had. Her nail polish was always chipped, her eye makeup smudged and flaking. “You want to look like you’re just getting home from a really good time,” she once explained as she came at Grace with a clotted mascara wand, trying to fix her. But for now, all Grace knew was that Lana looked like she really had just come home from a really good time.

Grace squinted, buying time. She didn’t yet know whether she cared if this girl liked her or not. “What about me? Aside from the hand-me-down bag.”

“Your hair!” they said at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed, adoringly, and Grace felt a pang of jealousy ring from deep within.

“You have girlfriend hair,” Kendall said. Her voice, deep and dry, was disconcerting coming from such a small person. “It’s so long, indicating resistance to change, and thus monogamy.” She sipped coffee from an enormous camping thermos. Her own hair was dark and short, as if she wouldn’t let it tether her to anything.

“Fair,” Grace said.

“Two,” Kendall said. “It’s very brown.”

“So brown,” said Lana.

“Not hazelnut, not toasty clove or whatever. Just plain brown. It’s not a color anyone would dye their hair,” Kendall said. “It
screams
nature.”

“But nature whispers,” Lana said. “
Nature
,” she hissed. “What I was saying: You have virgin hair.”

“Oh, no,” Grace said, blushing. “I’m not a virgin.”

Kendall shushed her with a hand. “It’s, um, school picture ready. And if you came all the way from backwater mystery or wherever and didn’t change your hair—”

“You’ve probably had the same boyfriend for, like, three years,” Lana finished.

“Unless he’s some old creeper,” Kendall said, raising a finger. “Who’s into
virgin
hair and Peter Pan collars.”

“He’s not,” Grace said quickly. She was ready to shock them. “He’s my husband. And we’ve been together for six years.”

Lana’s eyes went wide. “You’re
married
?”

“His name is Riley, and he’s a sophomore in college.”

“Where?” Kendall asked.

They would know too many people at Harvard, Princeton. “The Sorbonne,” she said.

They demanded evidence. Grace brought over her new laptop and settled between them on the bed. She showed them photos of her and Riley together until they looked seasick.

“They don’t make ones like that up here,” Kendall said when they had finished.

“You sound so surprised,” Grace said.

“I just thought you’d be with someone really, I don’t know, serious-looking.”

“Seminary student,” Grace added, but their faces showed no recognition. She tried again: “Eagle Scout?”

“It’s so fucked up that you’re married, though. Are you, like, hard-core Christians?”

“No,” Grace said. “We knew we’d spend the rest of our lives together, so why not? But it’s a secret. No one knows.”

Kendall nodded, uncomprehending.

“Who’s that guy?” Lana pointed to the last photo, in which Riley, Greg, and Alls were fishing from the Kimbroughs’ dock on Norris Lake.

“That’s Greg, one of Riley’s friends since they were little kids.”

“He looks like a glazed doughnut. A fat baby-man,” Lana said. “Look at those blond wisps.”

“He pulls the crust off his sandwiches,” Grace said.

Lana pointed again. “And that one?”

“Alls. His best friend.”

“They have super-weird names down there,” Kendall said to her. “Last names as first names—what’s the one you told me yesterday?”

“Tipton Hartley,” Grace said. “Goes by Tip. ‘Just-the-tip’ Hartley.”

They laughed, all together this time, and it felt good to Grace.

“Wait, tell me another,” Lana said.

“Um, Malone.” Grace said. “Vines.”

“
Vines?
” Kendall howled, and Grace felt a weight lift.

“Tell me about Allllls,” Lana said. “I like him. He looks disturbed.”

“He’s not disturbed, he’s just had a hard time.” She swallowed. “It’s short for Allston, Allston Javier Hughes.” She didn’t want to talk about him, so she told them about the Kimbroner instead.

 • • • 

Lana was an artist. Kendall mentioned it in passing, in the same tone she might say someone was a Pisces or ten pounds overweight. Not in the reverent way people talked about Riley.

The previous year, when Lana was only seventeen, she’d gotten one of her videos into a Chelsea gallery group show. Her piece was a three-minute loop of Lana, naked and sick with the flu, lit in gauzy, softly glowing peaches and pinks. She blinked wet lashes up close to the camera lens and licked her chapped lips until they glistened. Too congested to inhale through her runny nose, she breathed audibly through her mouth. At two minutes, Lana hacked up phlegm and spat, strings of saliva clinging to her chin. At two and a half she stood up, weak and unsteady as a fawn, her naked body rising through the frame in fluid latitudes. Knees shaking, she turned and walked away from the camera until the whole length of her body filled the frame, and she disappeared through a doorway. Seconds later, she could be heard retching into a toilet.

The video had been pulled from the show on its second day when a critic discovered the naked subject had been only sixteen at the time of its filming. The gallery could have been charged with distributing child pornography, which had seemed to be Lana’s intention. Grace wanted so much to ask her about the video, which both fascinated and troubled her, but she was worried her questions were too basic. When she finally did, Lana nodded as though she’d been asked these same questions a thousand times. “I’m interested in ‘prettiness,’ debasement, and self-objectification,” she said. “But subverted through entrapment and the transference of contagious shame.”

To make her art, Lana lived it, playing the dumb damsel in front of her camera as well as the director behind it. Grace thought Lana was the most calculating person she had ever met. She could hardly look her in the eye for days after seeing the video, not because she’d seen Lana naked, but because she was ashamed to have so underestimated her.

 • • • 

On Grace’s first day of Western Art I, the professor’s voice heavy in her ears, she looked around the darkened theater and saw a hundred girls like her: nails clean, notebooks out, eyes screwed up at the screen. But their hair was slicked back in ballerina buns or wild and loose, and their ears held pearls or bold feathered hoops, wooden disks. She saw that they all wanted to be versions of the same thing, only they were so much further along.

Grace began to spend her Saturday afternoons wandering around Chelsea galleries, taking notes on free postcards and press releases. She ignored the heavy ache in her legs as she wound her way up metal staircases that looked as though they went nowhere promising. She learned to push through unmarked metal doors into spaces two stories high, white and hollow, that housed what she had begun to realize were ideas. Art was not there to look nice. Art was there to scratch at people’s brains, to help ideas find traction in metaphor that they could not when made explicit. She was exhausted with thinking and with unlearning so much of what she had thought before.

She returned to her dorm at dusk, her brain abuzz. When she saw something and really got it, she knew it, she
felt
it, and it thrilled her to slip into the crawlspace of someone else’s mind.

Though she couldn’t quite position Riley’s careful oils of historic buildings among the work she saw now, she assured herself that this was only because she didn’t know why it so compelled him or what his intentions were. How could she? She hadn’t known enough to ask. She was only just learning about art and intent. It didn’t matter if Riley’s paintings looked sedate, as long as the idea behind them was not. That mystery excited her too: that Riley had ideas that were still opaque to her, corners of his brain still unexplored.

She tried to explain Lana’s video to him on the phone. She couldn’t bring herself to show him Lana’s naked body, a jealousy she knew would please Lana to no end. “But where is the skill?” Riley asked. “Anyone could make that.” Anyone couldn’t, Grace tried to explain. Only Lana could make her art because it was her idea. Then Grace changed the subject. Maybe it just didn’t translate into words.

 • • • 

She began to look for a part-time job and to reform her appearance for New York. She middle-parted her hair and sprayed it with Kendall’s various glosses:
Shine! Glass! Mirror!
She bought draped, slinky knits from the ten-dollar stores on Fourteenth Street and painted her nails the same metallic black that Kendall painted hers. Lest Kendall charge Grace with imitating her, she waited for Kendall to make the suggestion. She always did, and Grace was grateful for her diagnoses.

When Grace got an interview for a position as an art appraisal assistant, she bought an eight-dollar polyester blazer at Goodwill. She tried it on for Kendall that night, shrugging it on and sticking her arms out.

“Jesus,” Kendall said. “That is repugnant. Do you want to borrow something?”

The seams dimpled, but Grace hadn’t thought it was that bad. She happily let Kendall reconstruct her into what Kendall called “Grace 2.0.” When Kendall got to Grace’s shoes, she bit her lip and sighed. She wore two sizes smaller than Grace did, so she couldn’t save her there.

The next day, Grace rode the 6 train uptown from their dorm to the East Sixties, a part of the city she had not yet had any reason to see. On the train she stared at her shoes, twelve-dollar ballet flats in imitation patent leather with ragged bows. They looked like children’s shoes, first Communion shoes. It was raining, and the gum around the sole had begun to give up. The sole drooped open at the toe like a mouth.

Grace knew that no one would hire her in those shoes.

When she got off the train, she ran down the block through the rain hoping to find a shoe store. Every block in Manhattan seemed to have a shoe store, a nail salon, and a bank branch. She found one and headed straight for the back, where any sale racks would be, and there she saw a pair of boots standing tall among the other shoes. They were black calfskin, almost knee-high, with zippers running up the outside. They had heels high enough for a subway rat to run under. The boots were 60 percent off and still two hundred dollars. She had never had shoes half as expensive. They would wipe her little bank account clean. She remembered the photos of the office she had seen on the appraiser’s website: the giant windows, the glass-fronted bookcases, the long brocade curtains that puddled on the floor. These boots could get her this job.

She dropped her plastic flats in the trash can on the way out. She wasn’t used to wearing heels and felt herself walking differently, like a racehorse stalking to the gate. By the time she stepped out of the elevator on the ninth floor of the office building, Grace had become a different person. The door read
MAUCE FINE ARTS APPRAISAL
in gold stick-on lettering. She rang the bell, smoothed her hair, and rubbed her lips together.

He pulled the door open and looked her up and down. “Nice boots,” he said. “Donald Mauce.” He opened his mouth wide enough to fit a whole egg in it. He was tall and very thin, with pale, waxy skin and wet eyes. His sparse silver mustache flared out over fleshy lips. Grace was reminded of a white catfish she’d once caught at Norris Lake. “Bethany will be here in a sec. She’s our vice president, just ran out for soup.”

Donald sat down behind a green metal desk and gestured for Grace to sit in a rusted chrome chair in front of it. This was not the office in the pictures, but a single stale room. Donald’s desk was piled with papers and receipts surrounding a plastic barrel of peanuts. She could smell the shells in the trash can. She felt him looking at her, grinning, and she dropped her eyes to her boots on the stained carpet. She’d worn a black dress and lipstick, downtown-college-girl red.

Donald asked her about her art history classes, how she liked school so far. He asked where she was from and she told him Tennessee.

“Oh, wow,” he said, leaning forward on his desk. “What’s
that
like?”

The door hinge whined, and a woman stepped in with a deli bag. “You must be the new girl,” she said. “I’m Bethany.” She smiled barely, as though it hurt. She wore tinted eyeglasses and white running shoes with her office pants. Her hair was a beige mushroom.

Donald nodded. “We’re just getting to know each other.”

He gave Grace the job. She left with a handful of peanuts and two Sotheby’s auction catalogs on nineteenth- and twentieth-century decorative arts. He winked at her and said there would be a quiz.

9

G
race spent her first day working for Donald Mauce alphabetizing his bookshelves. Bethany was out and Donald didn’t know how to teach her anything. He sat at his desk, reading and leaning back in his squeaking chair, as Grace heaved the books around on a stepladder in front of him. Yellow dust flew up from pages and she coughed. Donald packed up at four. He said he had a wine group at six and if he was late they would start without him. What was Grace’s favorite wine, he asked. Whiskey, she said, and he horse-laughed and shook his head. Very clever, very clever, he said. She learned never to make even a small joke around him. He would embarrass it with appreciation.