Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  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.

  “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

  When 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.