Unbecoming (18 page)

Grace slipped the tiny spoon and the four others just like it into her pockets. They weren’t worthless to her.

 • • • 

The sheer amount of stuff in New York had begun to overwhelm her. She had always liked things, the specialness of unusual things, like Mrs. Graham’s little spoons and the horse-cameo bracelet Riley had given her, which was as interesting as it was ugly. But here, there was so much finery to name and quantify. That’s why people brought in Donald, the truffle hog, to sniff out hidden valuables so they could insure them. Grace hadn’t realized what a narrow slice of the economy she had grown up in until she had been begged for a dime on the sidewalk and then, ten seconds later, stood in a penthouse taking notes on a piece of lumpy pottery that cost more than a year of her tuition.

Grace could think of better things to do with that kind of money than go to private college. There were the people on the sidewalk, for instance. But when Grace walked around her new city and saw the panhandlers—the runaway teenagers with cardboard signs and skinny dogs, the Vietnam vets with swollen eyelids and no teeth, the man who once stood outside her dining hall with two small children and asked her if she would smuggle out some bagels for him in her backpack—she did not really
consider
them. To do so would be to admit that they were people like her, and at eighteen, she was unable or unwilling to do that. Clearly, most other people didn’t think of the poor as real; they walked around them. Grace had snuck out a dozen bagels in her bag for the man outside the dining hall and pointedly handed the sack of food to his young son. She resented the man’s exposing his children to the severity of their need. He should, she felt, have protected them.

She didn’t think of that man again until about a year later. She was nineteen then, penniless in Prague with only a stolen oil painting she couldn’t sell, and her pickup English tutoring had all but evaporated. Her only remaining client asked her one day to meet him at his home. On the subway, she knew. She knew what would happen. And when he locked the door of his apartment behind her, poured her a glass of water, and then shoved her over the back of his couch and offered her ten times her hourly rate to hold still, she said yes. To say no would mean what, to be raped? But she might have said yes even if it had not. She needed money. For the four minutes he fucked her, she stared at the blank black screen of the TV and her disbelieving face in the reflection. She thought of the rich people and their rugs and vases, what they could buy for her now, and then she remembered her snooty charity, handing the sack of bagels to the little boy instead of his father. All she needed now was to pay rent and feed herself, only herself, and here she was, allowing the formerly unthinkable.

It was perhaps peculiar, then, that when Grace was working for Donald, she didn’t resent the stuff itself. She loved the stuff; it gave her such a thrill to know the history, value, and intimate details of things when their owners did not.

The owners she either envied or despised. A man in Tribeca had Donald and Grace appraise his collection of “rare African masks.” His interior designer had bought them as a collection so that the client could be a collector. Grace was offended by how little he knew about them. The masks weren’t even African; they were Guatemalan animal masks from the 1970s. Writing the report was painful; she hated to educate him. She wanted the man to go on telling his guests about his African mask collection until he could be humiliated, to his face, by one of his own.

13

G
race didn’t see Alls the first day he was in New York. The fencing tournament ran from eight in the morning until ten that night, and she was grateful he was tied up; she was trying frantically to catch up on her neglected course work, writing final papers and cranking out forgotten assignments for partial credit. She’d been too busy with Donald to notice how far behind she had fallen. She was always studying, just not the right material. Now she learned that cramming didn’t work with Roland Barthes and Judith Butler. You couldn’t just watch the movie.

“What do you mean, you’re too busy?” Riley protested that night. “You wouldn’t be too busy if
I
came up.”

“That’s not the same thing at all.” She felt her face reddening and was glad he couldn’t see her.

“Make time,” he said. “If
your
best friend came to visit—”

“I wish you would,” she said, and then she was embarrassed.

She and Riley almost never talked about school anymore. The long distance forced her to narrate her life to him, when before he had experienced it with her, and this in turn forced her to choose what was worth telling. And after Thanksgiving, she knew not to highlight the differences in her life in New York—her work and her education. She should focus on what they shared. But then what had been the point of her coming here, besides getting away from Alls?

Not that Riley noticed what she left out. He had his own distractions: Anne Findlay had sold nearly half his paintings by the second week of December. He was over the moon.

On Thursday after work, Grace made her way to the athletic complex to find Alls. He’d said he had a lot of downtime, hours spent waiting to compete, and she expected to find him among the dozens of fencers stretching against the walls or clustered in packs around outlets, tapping at their laptops. She wandered up and down the halls looking for the Garland fencers. When she found them and asked after Alls, a boy in headphones and wrist supports inclined his head toward the middle of the gym: Alls was competing now. The whole town had attended the Ravens’ basketball games. Now Alls was fencing in nationals, and not even his own team was watching.

She spotted the Garland coaches first, one close to the mat and another farther back, taking notes. Only a handful of other people were watching. The two masked fencers dressed in white scuttled up and down a length of the mat, and not until he was right in front of her did Grace know which one was Alls.

She recognized his body, the way he moved. He bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he were keeping a beat, while the other fencer’s stance was low and deliberate, like that of a crab. They moved to the left a few feet, then right, the distance between them unchanging.

The coach with the clipboard saw Grace watching and beckoned for her to come closer. Alls’s opponent lunged forward and Alls rushed him, flicking the tip of his foil at his opponent’s hand. The score was 3-0. The coach clapped lightly and leaned over to Grace.

“You a fencer?”

“No,” she said. “Just watching.”

“You picked a lousy one to watch,” he said quietly. “He’s cleaning this guy’s clock.”

He meant Alls. “That easy?”

“This poor kid’s made of wood, learned from a book.” Then he nodded toward Alls. “See, he never shows you what he’s about to do. I can’t even tell half the time, and I taught him.”

Grace watched Alls’s shoulders flex under his jacket as he raised his foil and lowered it, dashed forward in a blur of limbs and clipped his opponent’s hip, then his shoulder: 4-0. They each made a tight loop, and Alls cracked his neck from side to side. The boys faced each other again. Alls looked weightless, his muscles tense and alive.

“Because he doesn’t stop moving?” Grace asked.

“See how quick he responds? You can’t surprise him.” He shook his head. “And you can’t tell what he’s going to do until he does it—no patterns, no hints.”

The timer showed just under a minute left, but Alls didn’t want to wait. He shot forward and closed three feet in a split second, then doubled back as his opponent lurched forward to meet him. He thrust his foil toward Alls’s chest, but Alls arched backward, and the other boy, caught in his own momentum, was still pulling back his foil as Alls’s darted to touch his belly.

Alls flipped off his mask and looked for his coaches, who were clapping. Grace waved.

He came over to hug her. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight.” He was barely out of breath, but she smelled the sweat on his neck and quickly pulled away.

“Just for a minute,” she said. “I’m actually on my way to work.” This wasn’t true. She had planned on showing him around after he was finished, but standing with him there in the gym, too far away from the house on Orange Street, too far from Riley, she felt jumpy and unsettled. She heard a bell of warning sound within her.

“Now? Well, see you tomorrow then?”

“Definitely.” Grace was already moving toward the door. “I’ll call you in the morning,” she called over her shoulder.

She went home. A couple of hours later, Riley called her, furious. She promised to make it up tomorrow.

 • • • 

The next morning, Grace called in sick. Alls met her in the lobby of her dorm. She took him upstairs and introduced him to Kendall, whom she had instructed not to talk about Grace and Riley’s marriage. She wasn’t used to asking people to keep her secrets, because she wasn’t used to telling them.

“Your dorm room has its own bathroom,” he said while Grace dug around her desk for a subway map.

“It used to be a hotel,” Kendall said. “So how’d you do last night?”

“I made it to the semis and then got raked by a kid from the Air Force Academy.”

“And you just started last year?” Kendall gaped. “That’s kind of amazing.”

“But I’ve hit the curve. The guy who won my event has been fencing since he was six.”

“What were
you
doing when you were six? Catching crawdads or something?”

“Making moonshine in an old boot,” Alls said, and Kendall laughed ferociously. In Garland, Grace might have rolled her eyes. Here, his presence was so surreal and discomfiting that she could only stare at his feet. Kendall seemed to have arranged herself yogically, her shoulders thrust back as if in mid-stretch, her thighs splayed apart.

“So,” Alls said, “what are we doing? What are we doing
tonight
?”

“Well, I’ve got all day to hang out, but then tonight I have to go to this auction.” She didn’t look at him. “Sorry, it’s sort of work related.”

“What kind of auction?”

“Art. Paintings and photography.”

“You should come,” Kendall said. “I’m going too.”

“Well, I don’t know if—I mean, I just have one invitation.” Alls was wearing a GC sweatshirt and a Carhartt coat. He’d make Grace look country by association.

“It’s open to the public,” Kendall said.

A certain public. “But he’d need clothes—”

“It’s fine,” Alls said, giving her a wary look. “I’ll do something else.”

“No, it’s not that,” Grace said. “My work is kind of weird—”

“Seems pretty important,” Alls said. “Seems like you’ve got a real important job.”

“You’re coming,” Kendall said. “I’ll borrow a jacket for you.” She licked her lips and started texting. “So not a big deal. Then we can all party after.”

Alls didn’t look at Grace. “Cool,” he said to Kendall. “Thanks a lot.”

“I just hope you don’t get bored,” Grace said.

 • • • 

That day, Grace and Alls zigzagged the city until she had shin splints. She threw everything at him: bubble tea, Gray’s Papaya, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario video installations, the trapeze school by Chelsea Piers, white ghost bicycles with memorial plaques, Ernesto Burgos’s cast-iron bathrobes, rugelach, beef-head tacos. They counted French bulldogs, double strollers, and people wearing underwear outside their clothes. She kept them busy, always moving, and she talked too fast, as if she really were a tour guide.

They took a picture of themselves to send to Riley. They talked about him all the time, as if he would join them later. Riley would like this; he would laugh at that. He was all they had in common. But picking through the construction debris along the High Line, ducking to spy into the apartment windows below, Alls was the one standing next to her, laughing, rubbing his hands together to keep them warm. They shared a cigarette and a flask of Old Overholt as they looked down at the cobblestones, watching people shop, and Grace ran out of things to say. She had been careful not to let that happen—space in the conversation felt dangerous, like the heavy stillness just before a thunderstorm. She realized she was gripping the rail.

“Do you . . . do you like it here?” he asked her, as if they had just met.

“Here, New York? Yeah. It feels so big, and—I don’t know. Like everything here is more important. Like even buying toothpaste is somehow more special here than anywhere else.” He winced, but she went on. “Like something’s happening, and I’m just part of it.”

“You feel both more and less important?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Like I’m less in charge of my life, really, but the life is more interesting.”

“Why do you want to be less in control of your life?”

Don’t you?
she thought.
You trust yourself to steer this rig?

“I didn’t. I mean, that’s not why I came here,” she said, though she could hardly tell him why she had. “But it does make you feel smaller, which is a relief in some ways. When you screw up, it seems less terrible. All these people, everybody screwing up.”

What was she talking about? In Garland, she was practically camouflaged by Riley. She’d been greedy for the disguise. And yet, sometimes the weight of Riley and herself seemed to rest on her alone, as if
she
had become their scaffolding. She’d been the creeping ivy that needed a brick wall to grow along at first, but now the brick would crumble without it.

“He told me he got a tattoo,” she said. “But he won’t show it to me.”

“It’s Marmie,” he said. “Running down his forearm.”

“
What?
Like, her name?”

“No, a picture of her. He drew it after she died. She’s running, kind of a trot. It’s not bad, but it’s
huge
,” Alls said. “He regrets it already.”

“It’s sweet though,” she said, and he nodded.

“You never screw up anymore,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Did you grow up, or what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugged. “When you’re a kid you do what your friends do; you think you’re all the same. But at some point you get that you’re not. You see the lines. There’s nobody standing behind you to smooth things over. You can’t do what they do. So now I don’t.”