Unbecoming (16 page)

“God,” Donald moaned, suddenly wistful. “What it must be like to be young and beautiful in New York City.”

11

J
ust before Thanksgiving, Kendall overheard Grace on the phone with Riley, cooing how she couldn’t wait to see him.

“Isn’t it, like, three a.m. in France? Are you going to Paris for break?” she asked Grace.

The Sorbonne, right. Grace turned away in case her face was reddening. “No, just home. Riley’s coming home.”

“Just for Thanksgiving? Is he not coming in December?”

“He’s probably home for the rest of the year. His mom is really sick.”

“Oh my God! What’s wrong with her?”

“Breast cancer,” Grace lied. “It looks really bad.”

She flew home the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. They had told their parents that she was coming in Wednesday evening. Riley picked her up at the airport, standing at the curb next to his old green Volvo. She ran to him and he hoisted her up by her butt. She split her jeans wrapping her thighs around him, and the cold rushed at her skin as they laughed and clutched at each other. He set her down on the trunk of the car and pressed his forehead to hers. She wanted to get her whole body inside his, held tight beneath his skin. He drove, and Grace kept her hand on his thigh, her nails crooked into the inseam of his jeans.

When they pulled off exit 227 to Garland, he took a turn that she didn’t recognize.

“Aren’t we going to your house?”

“Going a different way,” he said. “I don’t want to risk anybody seeing us at a stoplight. Got to keep you a secret.”

When he pulled up to the light at Dunbar Road, where they had no choice but to funnel into the only route home, he looked to his left and right and behind him, then reached over and gently pushed Grace’s shoulder down.

She hunched but turned her face toward him. “Are you kidnapping me? Are you going to transport me across state lines for sex purposes?”

He nodded and pressed his lips together. “There’s nothing I’m going to do to you that
isn’t
for sex purposes,” he said. “You’ll have to escape out the window when you’re sick of me.”

“In a hundred years,” she said.

“Won’t be long enough.”

She sat up and brushed the hair out of her eyes, but she slunk down low. She didn’t want anyone to see her either. “We’re disgusting,” she said. “We must make people so completely ill.”

“It’s not our fault,” he said. “We can’t help what we have.”

Sitting in his car with her knees against the glove box and her spine bent deep into the seat, she may have looked helpless, but she felt superior to the people she couldn’t see riding in the cars around them.

Riley pulled up to the house on Orange Street, clapboard with chipping peach paint, a color out of place anywhere but in a nursery. The porch sagged in the middle and there were several crumpled beer cans in the front yard, one perched in the crotch of the struggling apple tree as though it were growing there. Wet and wrinkled junk mail was plastered to the front steps. In the front window, a faded devil mask grinned out at the street, a leftover from Halloween. The front screen door was busted through the bottom half, where someone had probably kicked it. Grace had never seen a place as dear.

Together, they hurried up the front walk and inside, through the dark living room with its curtains always drawn, past the horrible bathroom, and up the stairs. He slammed the door behind them. Grace kicked off her sneakers and Riley ran to the stereo to turn on some privacy music. The bass line shook the desk lamp and Grace started to laugh. She heard hooting from the kitchen: They knew what that music was for. Alls was down there. She swallowed.

“My wife,” Riley murmured, “you better not make any plans this week.”

“Quit bossing me around,” she said. She pushed him down on the bed and he pulled on her belt loops. Every drop of confidence she had missed in New York was here, waiting for her. She had left it all in his bed.

She straddled him and rocked back, pulling off her sweater and T-shirt together, and she shuddered when he slipped his hands over her breasts, his palms almost floating over her nipples. She fell forward and pushed into his hands, and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, nosing down her neck. She slid her hand between their bodies, down his fly. He groaned and shook his head. Not yet. He rolled her onto her back and pushed her thighs apart. She laid her hands on his shoulders, waiting and aching, and then, when she expected to feel his tug on her waistband, she felt his warm breath through her underwear, his thumb pulling it aside, and then his slow licking and licking. She had forgotten about the rip in her jeans.

 • • • 

Grace woke up in the middle of the night with Riley’s bent knees crooked inside hers. She pulled on a dirty T-shirt from the floor. It smelled like green-top Speed Stick, Volvo, sweat, and turpentine: her husband. She went down to the kitchen for a glass of water and when she came back upstairs, she saw the canvases, more than a dozen of them, leaning against the wall just outside his door frame, all facing the hallway wall. Her heart quickened a little with excitement. His show at Anne Findlay would begin just after Christmas, the gallery’s slowest time of the year. His work would go on sale along with the holiday decor and discontinued electronics. Lana had told Grace that in New York the slow season was summer, when the city emptied of rich people.

Grace knew that she should wait for Riley to show her. She should let him pull out the canvases in the order he wanted and point out the details he wanted her to see, but she couldn’t wait. She had learned, from all her silent Saturdays looking at artwork by herself, that she could see better alone.

She could always pretend, tomorrow, to be surprised.

She crept into the bedroom and took his cell phone from his desk. She could use it as a flashlight. She turned around the first canvas and shone the little blue swatch of light at it, moving the light up and down and around. The house was one she recognized, an old Victorian, redbrick, with a turret in the front and tulips up the walkway. The next painting was the downtown block where Norma’s Sunday Grill was. Wrought-iron tables. Menus. The painted cursive on the windows. Grace grimaced and flipped back a third canvas. This one was the library, omitting the ugly 1980s addition.

She put his phone back. Carefully, she lowered herself into bed. His arms tightened around her and she blinked in the dark. Last week, Lana had shown her a work in progress, a video she had shot the night before. She’d had her nipples pierced on the Bowery in the middle of the night, wasted and alternately puking and laughing, propping her head up with her hand. The piercer was a fat old punk with graying temples and a pointy goatee. Jezzie had gone with her to film the piercing. The next day, Lana had watched the video hungrily, bent over Kendall’s desk, soaking her breasts in Dixie cups of warm salt water. “I like to plan things,” she had told Grace, “and then get too fucked up to know what I’m doing. Then I have to watch the film to find out what happened to me.”

Maybe Riley was making an ironic critique on the predictability of small-town life, the sweetness of it. The staleness of it. There were no people—maybe he was speaking to some kind of emptiness. Or the opposite—that the buildings themselves were the characters. She clutched at meaning. Maybe he’d left off the library addition to comment on the rose-colored-glasses vision of Garland’s citizens, and not because it would ugly up his nice painting.

Process
, he had said. Grace had seen a show a few weeks ago of quick, unimpressive sketches of a haystack, like Monet’s haystacks, all done with black marker on cheap computer paper. The artist was in the gallery’s back room, robotically sketching these hundreds of haystack drawings littering the gallery, gleefully proving how an image’s fame made it into an impotent cartoon.

 • • • 

In the morning, they ate old cold leftover pizza with hot sauce. Riley liked green Tabasco but had bought a bottle of Cholula for Grace and presented it with much fanfare. She asked him about the show. When would she get to see what he’d been working so hard on?

“A lot of it’s already at the gallery.” He peered at a plate to see if it was clean enough.

“Already?” She felt hopeful and relieved. What was upstairs had not made the cut.

“Yep.” He came up behind her and squeezed her sides. “That’s my big news. Surprise! She’s putting me up in December.”

“What? Why?”

“Why do you think, smarty-pants? She thinks she can sell it. She saw what I was working on and said she wanted to put me up in a big month, not a small one.”

“Wow,” Grace said. “That’s wonderful.”

“It is. It is fucking
wonderful
.” He turned her around and pulled her close. “Grace, this could be—
will be—
the beginning of my real career. Not a favor, not a ‘student’ show. She thinks she can sell me as a real, working artist.”

“That’s fantastic,” she said, turning her face up to kiss him. “I’m so happy for you.”

Riley grinned wildly, a little boy on Christmas Eve. “I wanted to see your face when I told you.” He was watching her closely, and she beamed back at him, putting her arms around his neck.

“So when can I see?” she asked him. “I want to see everything you’re working on.”

 • • • 

Grace wished that when they’d gone to Anne Findlay that afternoon, Riley had unveiled an investigation into perceptions of change in familiar public spaces. That he had taken hundreds of photos of familiar buildings, places he walked by every day, and mounted them on boards at angles just improbable enough to make the familiar unfamiliar. That he had braced up these assemblages with concrete blocks, two-by-fours, and wooden pallets, creating rooms and tunnels within the gallery walls that allowed people to walk through these semi-familiar spaces, noticing here what had changed too slowly and incrementally for them to notice in the real world.

But that was not her husband’s artwork. That was Isidro Blasco, an artist whose work, about his block in Jackson Heights, Queens, Grace had seen the month before. She had read about the show in an
Art in America
that Lana had left in their room. “A strength of Blasco’s approach,” the critic wrote, “has been the emotional restraint behind its formal innovation, conveying not destruction but disorientation, the unsettlingly simultaneous expansion and compression of space that the urban dweller experiences.”

Riley Graham’s work at the Anne Findlay Gallery was very pretty. Findlay must have had a buyer in mind for each and every piece: the owner of the property painted in it.

 • • • 

The night before Thanksgiving, the Grahams always ordered Chinese. Dr. Graham or one of the boys drove to Whitwell to pick up their order. Riley didn’t want to leave Grace, but Mrs. Graham shooed him off. “Go with your father and Jim,” she said. “Leave Gracie here with me. I’ve missed her too, you know.”

Mrs. Graham was mixing sausage stuffing with her hands and couldn’t hug Grace properly. “Oh honey,” she said. “You’re all skinny! And I look like an old kitchen hag. Lipstick me, would you?” She nodded toward the microwave. She kept a gold tube of her lipstick in a big seashell on top of it, with recent receipts and pocket detritus. Grace uncapped the lipstick and, giggling, clumsily applied it to Mrs. Graham’s puckered lips. The whole house smelled like sausage and celery. Really, the whole neighborhood did.

“What can I do?” Grace asked, tying on a striped apron. “Sweet potatoes?”

“Done. Can I put you on pie? The dough’s chilling. We’re doing pumpkin, pecan, and broccoli quiche.”

“Quiche?”

“Colin’s bringing a girl, some little thingie he met at physical therapy. And she’s a
vegetarian
.
I was worried she wouldn’t have enough to eat, so I was going to do the stuffing vegetarian—”

“Oh no,” Grace said.

“Oh no is right. You’d have thought I threatened Tofurky. So, broccoli quiche. Colin said it was silly, though. You can’t win!”

“But it will mean a lot to her,” Grace said. “That you went to the trouble.”

“Well, I bought the things and I made extra dough, so we might as well.”

Mrs. Graham never fully put away the Thanksgiving groceries. She bagged them by dish and set the bags on the dining room table or in the fridge, if they included any perishables, sometimes several days ahead. Grace found the pie bag and started to mix the pumpkin filling, following the recipe on the back of the can, while Mrs. Graham asked her questions about school and filled her in on the local gossip. She seized on the New York art galleries when Grace mentioned them; she wanted to know everything.

“Isn’t that wonderful,” she said when Grace described an installation made of old film. “And you can walk right inside it?”

When Riley and his father and brother got back with the food, they sat on the floor of the family room and passed around the cartons. Grace, full of fried food and sticky sauce, remembered when Lana had compared her to a house cat. “An ether of contentment,” she had said. Grace felt it keenly now. She caught Riley’s eye and smiled. She thought of the girl Colin was bringing tomorrow and hoped she was awful.

After dinner, Grace pulled the pies out of the oven, slid the quiche in, and set the timer for Mrs. Graham. Riley was restless, itching to get out of there and back to the house. He went out to the car to wait, and Grace wiggled into her shoes and struggled with her jacket’s zipper, which kept catching her hair. She heard Dr. Graham on the stairs. He always clattered down in a two-step rhythm, like a horse. He had an envelope in hand.

“Give this to Riley, would you?” he said.

“Sure,” she said, tucking it into her jacket pocket. “Thank you.”

“He mentioned he was running low on supplies, and I know this show means a lot to him.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Good to see you, sweetie.”

“You too,” Grace said. She pushed open the front door. “It’s good to be home.”

 • • • 

The day before Grace flew back to New York to finish the semester, she and Riley were lying on the couch watching
The Sopranos
and drinking heavy hot toddies of orange-spice tea and bourbon. The house was quiet except for the TV and the sounds of their sipping, and Grace was trying to find a way to ask Riley about his artwork that didn’t make her sound as though she doubted him.