Unbecoming (15 page)

“What are you wearing?” he would ask her at the end of a halfhearted extrapolation of Susan Sontag or Clement Greenberg. “I want to see you. Or at least picture you.”

If Kendall was out, Grace could humor him. “I’m in bed,” she would say, making up something about her unbuttoned jeans and yanked-up tank top, her underwear or lack thereof. It was always a lie. Every night she slept in an old T-shirt of Riley’s, stretched and faded, with holes in the armpits.
GARLAND MIDDLE SCHOOL TRACK AND FIELD,
it read across the front. On the back
: GO STARLINGS!
She also wore his shorts. She’d snagged two pairs of his boxer briefs before she left Garland.

“Are those
his
?” Kendall had accused her upon barging into their bathroom, where Grace stood brushing her teeth in the sagging shorts. “That is gross and possibly creepy.”

Grace bent to spit out her toothpaste. Kendall was a rich New Yorker and Grace was not. Kendall had friends, and Grace did not. But Grace had something Kendall did not.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Grace said.

10

A
t home in Garland, Riley seemed to be holding up his end of their bargain. Infinitely patient, he would spend weeks building a house on his canvas, brick by single brick, the Tupperware lid he used as a palette on one knee, a joint resting lightly on the rubber edge. From the calmness in his voice, she could tell right away when he was painting.

One of his mother’s friends, Anne Findlay, ran a small local gallery, and she had offered to put up Riley’s work in January, her slowest month. She’d never shown a student before. “It’s kind of good that you’re not here,” he said to Grace. “I have literally nothing to do but go to class and paint for this show.”

Grace’s mind was wallpapered with the diverse and ambitious artwork she had seen in the past three months, but she funneled her still-unspoken doubts about Riley’s subject matter into concern that he might run out of buildings. “You could paint something else,” she said. “You know, branch out.” She didn’t know how to pose her questions so that they didn’t sound critical.

“Nope,” he said. “I only paint what I know.” He inhaled sharply. “It’s about the process. I’m going to paint this whole fucking town.”

Process! Painting the entirety of their small southern town! This was something she could say to Lana when asked about Riley’s artistic “interests.”
Process
, Grace imagined saying.
Outsider art and changing small-town landscapes.

“Have you found our New York gallery yet?” They played this game now, the same way they used to walk around Garland and pick out their dream house. “The one that peddles the toothless and shoeless southern Gothic movement?”

She pictured his careful canvases of Queen Anne mansions with brass plaques from the historic society. “Hardly,” she said.

“Whoops, gotta go,” he said, his rounded, graceful drawl contorting into something backwoods. “Alls is here and we’re gonna go romance some livestock.”

He’d never met a cow in his life, and his hillbilly shtick was a new thing. He’d never done it before she left for New York. “Wear a clean polo,” Grace said. “You don’t want to scare them off before you get to first base.”

“I love you,” they said together, a timing they’d perfected as children. They’d never grown out of it.

 • • • 

Grace skipped class to take the train to Chappaqua with Donald for her first outcall. He had been hired by a widow who lived with her adult daughter in a 1950s Tudor revival. Grace remembered some boys in peacoats she had met at the party Kendall threw in their room, the way they said they were from Chappaqua with their chins out, as if it deserved a reaction. But Grace didn’t think this house, clad in thin stucco and fake leaded glass, was anything so special.

Inside, the house was carpeted, with low ceilings. The walls were papered in a dank blue damask. The widow, Debbie something, immediately sat down on a couch as if just letting Grace and Donald in had exhausted her. Her daughter, Nicole, had picked them up at the station. Now she stood with her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed at Donald.

“Where should we set up?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nicole said, unhappy to see them and unwilling to hide it.

Grace sat down in a lumpy slipper chair and opened the laptop, her knees tightly together beneath it. In Garland, no one would ever have someone into their home without offering something to drink or asking how their drive was. Was this a Chappaqua thing or a northern problem in general? And, she scolded herself, just what did she mean by comparing anything to Garland, as if it were someplace to brag about?

“I’ll just walk around your house and inventory your collections,” Donald said. “Grace, my assistant, will take notes on the computer.” He picked up a small statue and turned it over to look at the bottom. “Jade,” he began. “A jade sheep statue, Chinese, probably Qing, probably late nineteenth or early twentieth, sleeping sheep, wooden base, rosewood.” Grace tried to keep up, typing as he talked. He took a tape measure from his pocket and stretched it first top to bottom and then around the statue. “Nine inches plus a two-inch base, sixteen-inch circumference. Picture?”

Grace handed him the camera, and he photographed the statue from each side.

Debbie took her hand from over her mouth. “My husband gave me that. For our tenth anniversary.”

“It’s a great piece,” Donald said. “Good color, good feet. Did he buy it in the States? How much did you get it for?”

“No,” she said. She didn’t look at him. “We lived in Mukden—Shenyang—for two years, in the late seventies.” Her voice cracked as though he had forced these details out of her.

Donald nodded. The daughter turned and walked out of the room without comment, and it dawned on Grace that it was upsetting to these women for Donald to be there, weighing anniversary presents in his hand. And they didn’t even know that it was the teenager sitting on the couch who would suggest prices for all their family treasures.

Donald leaned over a vase next to the jade sheep. “Jar,” he said. “Chinese, porcelain, rosewood cover. Double happiness motif, top-heavy hourglass shape, flared rim.” He ran his pinkie along the edge of the lid. “There’s some slight chipping along here.” He turned to Grace, clasping his hands behind his back. “Condition: good.” He looked at Debbie and smiled.

Grace followed him from room to room, filling up pages with hastily typed notes. She cataloged vases, boxes, ceramics, furniture, books, rugs, drapes, paintings, prints, and finally jewelry, which felt far too personal and intrusive. Everything had a story, whether Debbie told it or not. Donald and Grace finished the downstairs in two and a half hours.

“Should we call in some sandwiches?” Donald asked Nicole, closing a music box on the nightstand in the master bedroom. “It’s getting close to lunch.”

“There’s a deli a few blocks in,” she said, “if you need to take a break.”

“Oh, we’d lose too much time. I was thinking you could just order some delivery.”

She shook her head. “We’re not really hungry.”

Grace looked at the carpet, mortified. Her secret gratitude toward Donald for his poor manners, his obliviousness of his own social ineptitude, was wearing thin. She watched him leave his smudgy fingerprints all over Debbie’s things, cringed at his carelessly probing questions, and she was embarrassed to be associated with him.

At the station, Donald told her that he wasn’t coming. He had a dinner date with a woman who lived in Scarsdale. “We’ve been corresponding online,” he said. “Her screen name is ‘Floria T.’ She said I was the first one to get it.” He waited for Grace, but she shook her head. “Tosca?
No?
” He gaped. “Well then, I wish us
both
luck.”

On her way back to Manhattan, Grace listened to her messages, both from Riley.

“Hey, it’s me,” he said. “My crit was crap, as usual. Josh showed off a heartwarming nude portrait of his younger siblings, and Jessica Sunshine painted a forest scene with glitter snow and, no joke, feathers glued to the trees. And then I got reamed for not doing anything playful with materials in my Fiske Tobacco Warehouse piece.” He inhaled. “Not my favorite day, this day. On the other hand, if these people actually
liked
my work, that would be worse. And then I thought, you know what, man? Grace is up there, being all smarty-pants with fancy folk—”

The message cut off, but another one began. “What I was saying is after a day like today, and Greg put empty beer cans back in the fridge because the trash was full, and you’re not even here? Alls keeps saying you’ll cut your hair and leave me for a professor. And my mom wants your dorm address; she wants to send you something. I’ll be around until seven or so and then we’re going to Ryan’s to watch the game. Love you a thousand.”

The man next to Grace shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and she realized that she’d begun to cry. She called Riley, but it was already seven thirty, and there was no answer. She opened her Critics in Context course pack and tried to concentrate, and when a fat tear splashed across a photo of Slavoj Žižek’s shaggy face, she was glad she had the sense to laugh at herself, just for a moment. The man in the seat beside her drew his arms across his chest.

Riley called her back as the train was leaving Bronxville. She could hear a chorus of groans in the background and guessed he was standing in Ryan’s kitchen, his back to the TV. She could see him hunching over and covering one ear to hear her.

“How was it?” he said. “Was it a castle?”

“No, just a house.” She thought she heard Alls talking to someone. “It was very weird, going into some stranger’s house and touching all their stuff while they just stand there, watching.”

“Are you crying?” he asked her.

“Riley! Don’t say that in front of people!” She pictured boys’ heads turning around from the couch.

“Sorry,” he said. “Hang on.”

She heard the screen door slam and then he was in the backyard. She tried to explain how unsettling it had been, but Riley couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

“Darlin’,” he said, “you’re making too much out of this. How was class? Don’t you have class on Tuesday morning?”

“Fine,” she lied. “Good. Taste is class. The Real is not reality. I am a social construction.”

“All cats are black in the dark,” he said. “Can I call you later?”

 • • • 

Around two in the morning, Kendall and Jezzie came in with Lana passed out between them. They’d lugged her out of the elevator and down the hall, and now they had her slumped on Kendall’s bed. Grace was cross-legged in bed with her art history book.

Kendall stumbled out of her heels and sat down on the floor, leaning against Lana’s dangling shin for support.

“Jesus,” Grace said, getting up to peer at Lana. “Is she okay?”

“Poor baby,” Jezzie said. “She looks like a melting sex doll.”

“That’s what she wants,” Kendall slurred. “I worry, you know?”

“How much did she drink?” Grace asked.

“Three vodka sodas,” Kendall said. “Same as me. Three is the magic number.”

A strip of false eyelashes was crawling up Lana’s left eyelid. “Are you sure?”

“Somebody put something in her drink,” Jezzie said. “She’ll drink anything if it’s a gift.”

“Jay,” Kendall mumbled. “It was Jay. Or Marwan, that shit-show.”

“She went out with Jay last week,” Grace said. “She said she liked him.”

“She does like him,” Jezzie said.

Kendall nodded. “She just doesn’t
know
him.”

“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Grace said.

Jezzie, suddenly sober, gave her a disbelieving side-eye. “Do
what
?”

“Deal with these guys,” she said, shrugging. “All these creeps you don’t know. I’d just stay home.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Kendall said. “You’d talk to creeps too, to find the semi-creeps.”

“You’re still with your middle school boyfriend.” Jezzie snorted. “Your whole worldview is crippled. It’s like you never stopped playing with dolls or something. We’d die of boredom, being you.”

“I’m after depth, not breadth,” Grace said, blocking Alls from her mind. “I’m not collecting baseball cards.” Riley had been sixteen when the first hair on his chest appeared, and Grace had been first to notice it. She watched his freckles fade and reappear every summer. She was finely attuned to his satisfaction, anger, embarrassment. She knew the exact moment before he came.

“Good luck on your dissertation,” Jezzie said. “Sounds super fun.”

Lana’s ankle twitched. Grace sighed. “You’re sure she’s okay?”

“She is now,” Jezzie said. “But only because we were there.”

Grace reached over and pulled the band of eyelashes from Lana’s shimmered-up eyelid, a caterpillar from a petal. Grace trusted nobody except for Riley, not even herself.

 • • • 

The next week, at work, Grace received an auction catalog and invitation from Phillips de Pury, the swanky auction house on Park Avenue. The auction was a Friday evening sale, half-commerce and half-party. The catalog promised Cecily Brown, Georg Herold, Ryan McGinley. The glossy, oversize pages showed furious paintings of tangled bodies at a lawn party-cum-orgy; sculptures of bent-over ballerinas made of wooden lathes, painted pink; photographs from a road trip taken by rich, skinny, naked twentysomethings. And Grace had received an invitation. How had the people at Phillips de Pury mistaken her for one of them?

“Oh, that happens all the time,” Bethany said. “When you register for any of the auction record websites, your name gets dropped into their piggy banks.”

“It’s not a real invitation?”

She looked up over her glasses. “Um, no, it’s a real invitation. It’s a public auction.”

“You should go!” Donald hollered. “Get dressed up, take a girlfriend! You’ll have a blast!”

Bethany rolled her eyes. “I mean, if you’re interested in contemporary.” She glanced at the catalog’s cover, a pornographic neo-Expressionist painting by Marcus Harvey called
Julie from Hull
. Then she looked at Grace and her tweed miniskirt and vintage blouse with the ironic Peter Pan collar. Grace wasn’t dressing like a girl from Garland anymore.