Unbecoming (17 page)

“So what do you think you’ll take on after the show?” she finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, once you’ve painted every building in Garland . . .”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Well, I’ve been thinking about going bigger or smaller.”

“Like bigger canvases?” Her mind filled with a vision of life-size brunch awnings.

“No—well, maybe. That could be cool. But I was thinking about trying interiors.”

“Interiors?”

“Yeah, rooms. The insides of rooms.”

“Like this room?” She looked around at the pine paneling on one wall, the dusty electronics, the coffee table piled with junk mail and idle sketches. It could be interesting.

“Yeah, just regular rooms. Some fancy rooms, some crappy rooms.” He laughed. “Like this room. And I hadn’t thought about size yet, but life-size rooms would be pretty dope.”

“Ones you could almost step into. Like a really old-fashioned virtual reality.”

He squeezed her foot. “That’s kind of a sweet idea.”

Grace was getting excited. What he was describing sounded ambitious. “There’s this book I had to read for school, Baudrillard? He said we make fake realities to avoid the real one, the
real
reality. Hyperreality. That society is a prison and we make these fake mini-prisons to hide that from ourselves, like Disney World—”

“Whoa,” he said. “Hold up. Don’t come at me with a bunch of jargon and French guys.”

“What? We’re just talking about ideas, what you want to say—”

“And anyway,” he said, “whatever I do next depends on Anne. If she sells all my stuff and wants more, I’ll make more.”

“Well, you can’t just paint houses forever,” Grace said. “Not unless you’re
saying
something about, you know, the endless—”

“I’m not saying anything, Grace.” An edge had crept into his voice.

“Not that you have an agenda, but a purpose, a kind of reason for—” She stopped to choose her words. “I’m just saying that maybe after this, you might want to try something more—”

“More New York.” He nodded. “That’s what you mean.”

“No, it’s not. But don’t act like you didn’t want me to go there. You wanted me to go there, for us.”

“Not if it’s going to turn you into a snob.”

“I’m not turning into—”

The front door slammed and Alls tromped in, still wearing his white pants from fencing practice. Grace had been relieved, this weekend, to find herself mostly untroubled by Alls. She’d wanted to come
home
, after all, and Riley and the Grahams were home. That the pull of home was more powerful than any other felt profoundly reassuring.

He was breathless. “Don’t stop fighting on my account,” he said. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

“We’re not fighting,” Grace said.

Riley raised his eyebrows, looking at the floor.

Alls looked from Riley to Grace, grinning. “I’m going to New York,” he said.

“What? Why?” Riley asked.

“Nationals,” he said. “They’re at NYU this year. You may not know this, Gracie, but your school is a big deal in fencing.”

“Haven’t you only been fencing for, like, a month?” Riley asked.

“A year,” Grace said. There was no reason for Riley to get bratty at Alls. “And he’s already headed to nationals. Congratulations!”

“I got really lucky. I’ve been killing it the last month or so, and I thought I had a chance, and then today one of the juniors fucked up his knee.”

“Lucky you,” Riley said. Grace pinched his ankle.

“I mean, I’m sorry about his knee. But he can go next year.”

“When is it?” Grace asked.

“December tenth to thirteenth,” he said. “But they can’t keep us locked up the whole trip. You’ll show me a good time?”

“You bet I will,” Grace said, regretting the phrase’s blowsiness even as it left her lips.

“You bet she will,” Riley said, his voice clipped and transparently pissed. He lifted her ankles from his lap, stood up, and stalked into the kitchen.

Months ago, before she’d left Garland, she’d worried that Riley would see the gathering, darkening cloud of lust that followed Grace around all the time, threatening to burst. But he couldn’t see that, only that Grace was walking and talking beyond his gaze and its particular tastes.

Alls was embarrassed. Grace shook her head:
Don’t worry.
But she was worried, about Riley. A relationship that had grown up in a single cozy zip code was being asked to stretch hundreds of miles. If only Riley were coming to New York instead. She could take him to some galleries and show him what she was talking about. He needed new, jittery, excited ideas, not more house paintings. And she hoped, meanly, that Anne Findlay wouldn’t sell a damn thing. That would be better for him, in the long run.

12

W
hen Grace returned to New York, Kendall happily agreed to attend the Phillips de Pury sale with her. She said drunk commerce was her favorite kind and let it slip that this would not be her first art auction. Grace couldn’t have been wholly surprised—she had asked Kendall to come as a part of her ongoing cultural tutoring. But such indications of their very different frames of reference were constant, and they had begun to chafe at Grace in a way she had not expected. If Kendall had been Swedish or Pakistani or Zimbabwean, Grace was confident they would have delighted in discussing their cultural differences, in “unpacking” them, as her professors were always harping on her to do. But they did not. Was it because the differences in her upbringing and Kendall’s were impolite subjects to discuss? Or because interclass curiosity went only one direction? Aside from some passing amusement over Southern naming conventions (“You tell me a name, I guess the gender, and the loser takes a drink”), Kendall’s interest in where and how Grace had grown up was limited to general bafflement and occasional caricature.

Grace absorbed what she could and muted her ignorance about what she couldn’t. When she reported excitedly that the dining hall now had spicy mayo on the sandwich bar five days a week, she learned that Kendall had not set foot in any of the dining halls. She did not even know where they were. All freshmen had mandatory meal plans, and yet Kendall’s parents gave her a weekly allowance for food. Grace omitted, then, her discovery that they had reduced security at the exit of one dining hall, making it easier to sneak out an extra sandwich or bag of bagels. Instead, she performed her disbelief, placing her hands on her hips and saying, “Well, I never!” in an exaggerated accent.

 • • • 

In early December, Donald took Grace on an estate appraisal, her first. An old lady had died, leaving behind the penthouse where she had lived for the past fifty years and its contents. A distant cousin had flown in to
execute
the estate, a word Grace found increasingly apt.

The apartment building was a 1950s brick box, glazed white in part to reflect any snatches of sun onto the gray buildings around it.

“Oh my God,” Donald said as he and Grace walked down the hall from the elevator. “Can you even imagine what this place is worth? And she bought it in the sixties.” He cackled and knocked on the door.

The apartment was dark and crowded with broken furniture, books, and ornaments, and the air was stale and still. They were on the twenty-fourth floor, and it smelled like the windows had not been opened in decades. The distant cousin was a woman in her fifties wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt. Her husband answered the door and then darted back to his wife, who stood across the living room on the other side of the sofa.

“We got in yesterday,” the man said. “We live in Houston. We only have two days.”

“This is really a—we didn’t know her well,” the woman said. “I know it sounds awful, but I only met her a few times, when I was just a kid.”

“We just want this done as simply as possible,” the man said. “I have to be back at work on Wednesday.”

Donald nodded. “Got it. Right off the bat, it doesn’t look like there’s anything difficult to deal with here. It looks like, you know.” He shrugged. “Junk.”

The couple’s shoulders fell in relief. Grace didn’t understand. How could
that
be what they wanted to hear?

“Where should I set up?” Grace asked, unfurling the laptop cord.

“I doubt we’ll need that,” Donald said. He turned back to the couple. “I know a great broom cleaner. If it is all junk, I’ll give you her card and she’ll be here by six with a crew of four. In twenty-four hours the place will be totally hollow.” Donald smiled, and the couple smiled back.

Taxes, right. They’d make a fortune selling a penthouse in the East Eighties, but they didn’t want to fool around with its contents.

“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” the man said, and he and his wife left the room. Usually, the clients watched, protective of their belongings.

Grace felt the heavy loneliness in the room. Someone had died in here only a few weeks ago. Her collection of paintings and drawings covered the walls and leaned up against them. But then Grace noticed that there were no photographs on display, and the paintings and drawings were mostly reproduced landscapes of old European streets and cathedrals.

“She doesn’t have children, or anyone?” she whispered to Donald.

He shook his head. “I think there was a longtime maid, but she’s moved out now.”

Grace had not realized that there were still live-in maids in America. She wondered when the maid had left—before or after her employer died? How long had they been together? Decades? The apartment was not clean, though Grace felt guilty for noticing. Perhaps the maid had retired and stayed on as a companion. Perhaps she had no family of her own. Had she found the woman dead? Had they known she was dying? Where had the maid gone now? She began to seem more like a widow, the more Grace thought about it.

That night, Riley would half-console, half-correct her on the phone. “She was working for ten bucks an hour, babe. Just like you, just like me.”

“I make thirteen,” Grace reminded him.

“Those three extra dollars aren’t for speculation.”

“Insight.”

“Fantasy.”

But in the afternoon, Grace’s particular discomfort was still developing. For nearly two hours, she followed Donald as he walked through the rooms of the apartment, opening and closing all the closets. “Nope, nope, nothing,” he said, thumbing through the coats and sweaters, shaking his head at the peeling vinyl chair cushions. Grace knew it was true, but she hated hearing him say it, as though the dead woman could hear him too.

“We haven’t packed anything up,” the man called from the bedroom.

“It’s all just like when we got here,” the woman said, returning to the living room, where Grace and Donald stood by a radiator. “We haven’t moved anything.”

Donald picked up a small figurine, a shimmering porcelain horse. One of the hind legs was broken off at the knee. “Isn’t this cute, like a little Lalique.” The woman shifted her weight. “But it’s broken.”

Grace knelt in front of the bookcase.
A Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes. China: In a Series of Views, Displaying the Scenery, Architecture and Social Habits, of That Ancient Empire
.
Travels from Buenos Ayres, by Potosi, to Lima.
The last was bound in marbled linen but coming apart.

“Donald,” she said. “What about the books?”

“What?” he said. “Clearly heat damaged. The spines are falling off.”

“But they could donate them,” Grace said. “Maybe a library or even—”

“Is there coffee?” Donald asked the couple. The woman nodded. “Grace, can you get us coffee?”

She stood up and brushed off her skirt.

In the kitchen, she opened the cupboard and took out a mug with a basket of flowers cheaply screen printed on the side. She found a box of sweetener packets and then began opening drawers, looking for a spoon. Every drawer was a jumbled mess. Had the cousins looted the apartment before Donald and Grace got there, was that it? And they didn’t want to pay estate taxes on all the undamaged Lalique figurines they’d wrapped in old socks and stuffed in their suitcases? Or was the resentment Grace felt of another kind, a strange identification with the dead woman or her maid? She knew she was being ridiculous: Their job was to locate items of value, and here there were none. And yet she felt sick, as though they had appraised the woman’s life and and found it worthless.

Grace heard the woman’s voice from the living room. “I really do appreciate you coming on such short notice. We’re trying to get the place on the market as soon as possible, and it’s so overwhelming with all this—all this—”

All this
what
? Grace jerked open another drawer and found it jumbled with flatware, cheap stuff with split plastic handles tangled up with some tarnished silver, as if everything had been dumped out of a box. There were some tiny spoons like the ones Mrs. Graham had inherited from her mother-in-law. She kept them in a glass on the windowsill in the kitchen. Once, dishing up ice cream for everyone, Mrs. Graham had given the regular deep and sturdy tablespoons to her boys and her husband, and then plucked out two of the tiny silver spoons for herself and Grace. She had known Grace would like them. Grace had often helped herself to a tiny spoon after that. She’d even brought one with her to New York. She ate her yogurt with it.

Now Grace picked up a spoon and turned it over. She had worked on silver the month before and learned about the hallmarks stamped into the undersides of the handles. This spoon’s hallmark was a Dianakopf, a raised profile of the goddess Diana set inside a recessed clover shape. Easy even for a novice to spot. Austrian, probably late 1800s. Grace was so pleased with herself that she knew what it was.

The woman who had lived in this apartment liked old travel books and
South Pacific
. Grace had seen the videotape on a shelf, the label homemade. She ate Ritz crackers and drank orange spice tea. Boxes of both were still in her cabinets. The novels on her nightstand were by Rosamunde Pilcher. There was a Christmas card on the fridge with a photo of a grinning, cake-smeared toddler.
Happy Holidays from the Reeses in 14E.
Did they even know she was gone?