Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  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.

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

  11

  Just 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.”