Unbecoming (14 page)

On the second day, she arrived a bit early. She returned to the stepladder. Bethany came in, threw down her bag, and groaned as though she’d been saving it since she woke up.

“I forgot you would be here,” Bethany said.

“I started yesterday.”

“I know.”

Grace was on the top step and Bethany hadn’t raised her eyes above Grace’s knees. “Donald asked me to alphabetize the books,” she said. She heaved the acid-rotted volume in her arms into place. “I’m on Wegner, Hans.”

Bethany nodded slowly. Evidently, she wasn’t one to smile out of politeness, but coming from the South, Grace took this for seething hostility. She could tell Bethany didn’t like her, but she wished the woman would just fake it, like a normal person.

Grace’s left knee twitched and Bethany blinked. “Tell me when you’re finished,” she said. “I’ll teach you how we work.”

The work was called
comps.
Grace’s job was to value the client’s things (vases, paintings, rugs, silver) by finding comparable things that had been sold within the past few years, either retail or at auction. Bethany started her with easy ones, B-list twentieth-century American artists. First Grace would read the specs as noted by Bethany or Donald:
Jerome Myers, drawing, 1908, Ashcan School, 11 by 16 inches, no damage, tenement motif
. Grace crawled around the Internet looking for matching specs on gallery or members-only auction-house websites. Sometimes she ran into “price upon request” and had to call the galleries on the phone. She made these calls in a quiet, downturned voice, trying to smother her accent.

When she turned in her first report, Bethany skimmed the thirty pages of comps, changed a few of Grace’s words for prissier ones, and circled some typos that made Grace cringe.

“This is fine,” Bethany said. “On Monday I’ll give you a new one.”

Grace liked the work. It was easy to tell when she’d found the right answer, and she got to look at art all afternoon, even if at first it was all smudgy Ashcan snores. She felt a prickle of guilt at that particular judgment, trying as she was to reconcile all her new opinions with the reality of Riley’s artwork. After her failure to explain Lana’s video and her reaction to it, she had kept her burgeoning art criticism to herself.

Private
from
him felt wrong; private used to mean
with
him. They talked every night for an hour (or until Kendall came back), everyday talk but laced with the mournful mating calls of the newly separated. Afterward, she usually went to the bathroom and cried at how far away she felt.

Grace worked for Mauce three afternoons a week, at first. When she got her first paycheck, she bought a few of the textbooks she’d been reading only at the library, as well as some dark nail polish of her own.

 • • • 

By October, Bethany was giving her more interesting work. One week Grace was given an assortment of French botanical watercolors, which required anxious, stammering phone calls to Paris in her high school French. Another week she got a man’s personal collection of watches.
Given
and
got
were Bethany’s words, but Grace quickly adopted them. Given and got described her temporary relationship to these things she didn’t own and never touched—for the short time she worked on the botanical prints or the watches, they were hers.

The watches belonged to a man named Andrew F. Pepall. He had purchased one each year since 1959, some new and some as antiques. He had kept meticulous records with receipts and notes for five- or six-year stretches, and then the notes would disappear, and Grace had only photographs to identify the watches. Pepall lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he had mailed Mauce seven rolls of film documenting his collection chronologically by the year purchased.

Over time, Pepall had grown to favor brushed gold faces and reptile bands, but his taste sometimes changed abruptly before circling back to the stately. In 1966, he’d become interested in calendar watches. Grace was particularly taken with a romantic 1940s Jaeger-LeCoultre with illustrated moon phases on the dial. The year after, he bought a 1946 Pierpont that displayed even the days of the week. Grace adored the watches’ delicacy and fine workings, their quietly haughty attitudes. She felt an odd sense of gratitude toward Pepall for exposing her to such things, as though he had taken her under his wing of good taste.

“Who is that sad old man?” Kendall asked from her bed in their dorm room. She opened a new bottle of water and sucked the whole thing down in one breath, the plastic constricting in her hand. Lately she had been taking Lana’s Ritalin as a study aid and lying immobile with her textbooks for hours at a time. Now she stared at the online video streaming on Grace’s laptop screen as if she’d be tested on that, too.

“Andrew F. Pepall,” Grace said. “He’s giving a speech at his retirement dinner.”

“And he is?”

“An oncologist noted for his valuable contributions to the study of fatal bone marrow suppression from chemotherapy. I’m researching his watch collection at work.”

“What the fuck.”

“I just wanted to know what he was like, apart from his watches.” Grace’s explanation sounded even weirder out loud than it had sounded in her head.

“It’s not the years in your life that count,” Doctor Pepall read from his note card. “It’s the life in your years. In cancer treatment, we must remind ourselves of that every day.”

“No offense,” Kendall said, “but it’s kind of fucked up for you to stalk him like that.” She screwed the plastic top onto the empty water bottle and tossed it toward the wastebasket, but the bottle bounced out. Grace noticed her watch slip on her wrist. Cartier Miss Pasha, stainless steel, worth about three grand in mint condition. Her heart quickened with the thrill of recognition.

 • • • 

In November, Donald began to talk of taking Grace along with him on outcalls. He brought friends and colleagues back to the office for no purpose she could discern, except to test her ability to socialize with noxious people. Why else did they come all the way up to the ninth floor if Donald was meeting them for lunch four blocks away?

Craig Furst was about thirty, just over five feet tall, open-pored and tan. He wanted to specialize in Indonesian and Malaysian antiques, he said, but the market wasn’t there yet. He came by at least once a week, sometimes unannounced, to talk to Donald. Donald would hold up a finger to say he was on the phone, and Craig would set his briefcase down by Grace’s desk and unwind his linen scarf, his leather-and-clove cologne wafting out over them.

“I’m just back from Thailand,” Craig said one afternoon. “I got some
great
shots.” He took out his laptop and opened it on Grace’s desk, pushing her keyboard to the side. He began clicking through slide shows. “Isn’t that fabulous?” he asked.

“Wow,” she said, trying to sound appreciative but noncommittal. Bethany wanted her report on Nicolai Fechin within the hour.

“I’m giving a talk in Miami next month,” Craig said. “West Javanese vessels and pots. It’s going to be a real stunner.”

“Cool,” Grace said. “That’ll be so great.”

He put a hand over his mouth, his pose for thinking hard. “What does Donald have you doing then, I wonder? I could really use a helper. Do you enjoy Miami?”

Donald appeared then with his coat on, and Grace was spared having to answer.

When they left, she groaned. “Oh my God,” she said. “Do I
enjoy Miami
?”

“Hmm?” Bethany’s desk chair backed up to Grace’s, but she didn’t turn around.

“How many photos before you say you have to go to the bathroom?”

“Sorry,” Bethany said wearily. “I wasn’t listening.”

Grace knew that Bethany, silent and reproachful behind her, thought she’d encouraged Craig. But how? Grace had tried to brush off Bethany’s obvious dislike, and yet she found herself wanting to please her the same way she used to want to please her teachers, so often women of mothering age. Grace wasn’t sure how many children Bethany had, but she was certain that at least one of them was a teenage daughter a few years younger than Grace. She’d heard them on the phone, but Grace could also sense the daughter in the way Bethany looked at her, searching for clues and warnings about the years ahead.

Craig made sense to Grace in a way Bethany did not. Over-fragrant and cloying, accessorized and faintly leering, he
looked
like someone who would sidle up to you with his card and offer his expertise on insuring your collection of daguerreotype erotica. But Bethany, whose only decorations were the small cross pendant that hung over her turtlenecks and a plain gold wedding band? This business depended on ornament and excess. It made no sense that someone so resolutely undecorated would devote herself to it.

But Bethany looked at her as though Grace were a whore who didn’t know it. She possibly believed Grace’s naïveté was cultivated. Bethany was from Queens.

 • • • 

Grace hadn’t expected to be lonely. She’d thought loneliness was just a word for being alone and wishing you weren’t; she’d forgotten the sucking thinness of it. She hadn’t been lonely since she’d been a child—untethered, floating around other people like a ghostly houseguest.

In class, she watched her fellow students perform their garbled interpretations of Derrida and Foucault. It wasn’t theater school, but they were all there, she saw, to learn how to act. Everyone, whether from Singapore or Oregon or New Jersey, had come to Manhattan to transform, and each day they tried on their costumes, testing their characters in the classroom before they tried to pass in the real world. They were prototypes of New Yorkers.

Donald Mauce was the worst imitator of all. The photo of the Mauce Fine Arts office that Grace had seen on the website—the brocade, the velvet, the Chippendale chairs—actually depicted the study of the British novelist Anthony Powell, circa
A Dance to the Music of Time
. Upon closer inspection, Grace saw the little dog napping on the corner of the rug.

“My niece did the whole website,” Donald told Grace one Monday morning. Grace was now working some mornings too, when class was just lecture and she knew she wouldn’t be missed. “I’m a huge fan of Anthony Powell, hence the homage.”

“It’s pronounced
Poe
-el,” Bethany said.

“Have you tried these?” he said, holding up his half-eaten bear claw. “Truly the sine qua non of Danishes. How was your dinner party? Did you go with the rioja?”

The Friday before, he’d grilled her about her weekend plans, hoping to hear something wild and young. He was lonely, she knew. Donald was a widower, and he had no children, which Grace found to be a relief. She didn’t have to comport herself as someone’s child. He didn’t see her that way. Grace told him a friend (one of Kendall’s, of course) was making paella. Grace wasn’t even sure she was invited, but she felt obligated to give him something. Just the word
paella
had been enough to cue a breathless wine advisory.

“No,” she told him now. “A cabernet, I think. We just cooked with it. It was pretty gross.”

“Cooked with it? In
paella
?”

Bethany put on her headphones.

“She couldn’t get a big enough pot, so they made something else.”

“But it wasn’t good? Did you take it back to the store? All wine should be drinkable!”

Grace shrugged. “No, we just—”

“Was it spoiled?” He looked genuinely concerned, as though the wine had come from his own vineyard. He crossed his arms. “Or too much citrus? Too much wood? Oak?”

“I don’t know,” Grace said helplessly. “It was just really cheap and dusty.”

“Dusty, like an earthy ground?”

“No, the bottle was dusty.”

“Okay, but the bad taste—was it creosote? Maybe an undertone of petrol?”

“Donald,” Grace finally said in a frustrated apology, “I’m eighteen. Wine doesn’t taste like wood and lemons to me. It just tastes like wine.”

His phone began to ring. “In Europe you’d be an oenophile by now,” he argued. “Just be honest with yourself. No need for discomfiture. Ask yourself: What are these flavors to me? What in my life? It can be anything!”

Grace was sorry to disappoint him. She felt more comfortable around Donald than anyone else she’d met—he was even more clueless than she was. But how? He was in his sixties, she guessed. He’d had plenty of time to assimilate, and he certainly tried: He belonged to a dozen wine, cheese, symphony, and gardening groups, all promising to cultivate him.

“No,” Donald brayed into his telephone. “Down the block, kittywampus from the Guggenheim!”

Bethany pulled off her headphones, the cartilage pinchers people wore for jogging, and rubbed her red ears.

“Where is Donald from?” Grace asked her quietly.

“Indiana,” Bethany said. “Ohio? One of those. He moved here three years ago.”

Grace remembered her interview, the way Donald leaned forward when she said she was from Tennessee.
What’s that like?
It had been his best performance.

“He used to be an insurance appraiser,” Bethany said, watching Grace from the corner of her eye. “A company guy, the one who came out after a flood.”

“Not French watercolors and portraits of gentlemen.”

“Not quite,” Bethany said, smiling a little as she turned away.

Grace had taken Bethany for only one kind of snob, the woman who sneered at pretty young women for trying to be prettier, and assumed that she had fallen into this line of work—a former church secretary responding to an ad or something—but now she wasn’t sure.

“How did
you
end up here?” she asked, shuffling through her papers as though she weren’t really listening.

“I was finishing my dissertation, and I lost my funding,” Bethany said. She didn’t turn around.

“You want to be a professor?”

Bethany picked up the phone. “I need to call my sitter,” she said. “Let me know when you’re finished with that pottery.”

 • • • 

When Grace chatted with Kendall about work or talked to Riley about school, she let all the personas—hers, her classmates’, Donald’s—stand without scrutiny. If she believed in their acts, they might believe in hers, and so, in turn, would Riley. She refused to admit her loneliness to him.