Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  “You can get a dog tattoo,” she said, wishing he wouldn’t be so serious, not alone with her like this.

  “It’s really strange to see you without him,” Alls said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “You, too.”

  She hurried to think of something else to say. “I worry about him,” she said. Not true, not the way she’d said it.

  “You should. He’s so fucking tense without you.”

  She covered her mouth to hide her smile. “He is painting a lot.” This was an inside joke. They all knew that Riley didn’t jerk off. His friends had deduced it from his suspicious lack of masturbation jokes over the years, and they teased him about his snobbery. “Master Riley doesn’t care for domestic automobiles, cheap sandwich bread, or self-pleasure,” Greg would say in a mangled British accent. Riley didn’t argue.

  “The other day he blew up at me for throwing a ball against the ceiling,” Alls said now. “He said I was leaving marks.” Grace was laughing silently, so hard that she couldn’t breathe, and Alls kept on. “But then he left this art book in the bathroom—”

  “No, no, don’t tell me—”

  “Open to this page with a painting of a naked woman—who’s the guy who does the slits for eyes?”

  “Modigliani,” Grace wheezed.

  “Greg comes crashing down the stairs holding this book, screaming that it broke Riley—”

  “Stop, you can’t tell me this.” She pulled herself together, suddenly alarmed—not about the possibility of Riley jerking off to a picture of an oil painting, but that she and Alls were laughing at him like this, without him, alone together. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”

  “No,” he said. “About this auction.”

  “I’m sorry I was weird about it,” she said. “I’m glad you’re coming, really. It’ll be nice to get some fresh eyes on all the madness up here.”

  “You think you’re losing your Southern ways?” He had affected a bloated George Wallace accent. Displaced southerners were so quick to ape their own stereotypes. She did it too.

  “You’ll see,” she said, unsure of what, exactly, she wanted him to see.

  “I’ll try not to embarrass you,” he said, and she knew, unhappily, that he meant it.

  • • •

  Toward evening, Alls went back to his team’s hotel to clean up, and Kendall and Grace got dressed for the auction. Jezzie lent Grace a black wool dress, sharply tailored, with a pencil skirt and a deep keyhole back. Grace had not known black wool could be sexy. When Kendall fastened the small hook at the back of her neck, Grace looked like everything she wanted to be.

  “Where do you wear this?” she asked Jezzie, who was wearing a bustier and leather shorts.

  “Temple,” she said with a shrug.

  Grace pulled on her boots, approved by both Schraders. Kendall drew black liquid eyeliner along Grace’s eyelids with a steady hand, flicking her wrist at the edge to make a cat eye.

  “No jewelry,” Kendall said. “This look is all about the architecture.”

  Grace reached for her red lipstick and Kendall shook her head. “Bare. Like you’re not trying so hard,” she said, a bit impatiently. She tousled Grace’s hair. “There. Like a sixties Bond girl, precoital. One of the smart ones from the beginning of the movies.”

  • • •

  Phillips de Pury was on Park Avenue and East Fifty-seventh. A security guard opened the glass door for them and nodded toward the elevator. Already, everything was different from what Grace had pictured. In movies, art auctions were held in windowless, wood-paneled rooms where a few hundred people were arranged neatly in chairs before a man in a bowtie, who looked out over his nose at a sea of waving paddles. Phillips de Pury was a two-story chamber with marble floors, steel beams, and a loud echo. Voices rumbled in a low, knowing chorus of brazen opinions and echoing, throaty cackles. She thought of the doughnut fellowship hour held in the undercroft after mass at the Grahams’ church and looked nervously at Alls, but Kendall had him by the elbow. He was laughing, too, at something she had said.

  The pieces up for auction hung on the walls or sat on fat white columns. People weaved between them, hugging each other and gesturing with their wineglasses. A woman with a spiked crest of silver hair debated quietly with her husband over whether a McGinley would be an appropriate wedding gift for their niece.

  The auctioneer wore a white shirt unbuttoned to his sunburnt chest. He took his place at the podium, and Grace expected people to quiet and settle into the Louis Ghost chairs scattered around the room, but the chatter only dimmed slightly. A man of a type she had begun to recognize, probably a decade older than she was but a decade younger in appearance, pushed around a chrome drink cart stacked high with oversize glossy auction catalogs, each as heavy as a high school yearbook.

  “Lot one,” the auctioneer said. “Untitled, David Salle. We’ll start at ten thousand. Do I have ten thousand?”

  The screen next to him displayed numbers spinning upward in rows of different currencies, fast as a slot machine, as he pointed around the room. Some people carried on conversations, standing in groups or turned around in their chairs, as if this were only a cocktail party. The painting went from $10,000 to $120,000 in about six seconds. Grace’s heart sped up. Alls took the seat next to hers, his legs splayed wide as if he were on the couch at home.

  “For one hundred and twenty thousand? Do I hear a penny more?” The auctioneer made a joke off-mic into his cupped hand, and the people in front laughed. “Sold for one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars.”

  The crowd applauded. To Grace’s left, two men in their midforties wearing matching navy sport coats, jeans, brown oxfords, black glasses, and salt-and-pepper hair kissed each other and then clapped with everyone else. She wanted to be them, superior in both their love and their taste, and able to act on it. She looked past Alls to Kendall, who was at the side of the room with an older couple, perhaps friends of her parents.

  Grace realized that Alls was watching her. She expected him to open his mouth and say, “Scoot over,” or “I’m hungry,” something familiar from the house on Orange Street.

  “You’re sweating,” he said.

  • • •

  After the auction, Kendall took them to a party at a friend’s parents’ apartment. A dozen people lounged on three couches, drinking and smoking. Grace read the spines of the books on the shelves and Alls followed behind her, too close. They drank vodka tonics out of coffee mugs. Whoever had grown up in that apartment was worried about breaking the good glasses. Kendall made sure everyone’s mug stayed full, and when Alls sat down on the couch, she promptly snuggled in next to him and flopped her head onto his shoulder. Grace had never seen Kendall like this. Drunk, sure, but not desperate. “Some little thingie,” Mrs. Graham would have said. “Some little trampette.” Kendall whispered to Alls with her lips pushed out, a floppy pout that made her look doped up with novocaine.

  If anything happened between Kendall and Alls tonight, Riley would be delighted with Grace. He would be as pleased as if Grace had set it up on purpose. And as for Grace herself, well. The picture of Kendall and Alls together, making out on the couch where they sat now or even later, in Kendall’s bed—Grace would not be able to rid herself of such an image. Her stomach rolled just thinking about it.

  Now Kendall had her hand on Alls’s thigh. In the gap between two songs, she heard Kendall speaking. “So sad about Riley’s mom,” she said. Grace couldn’t hear the rest, but she saw Kendall’s lips, something-something-Paris.

  No, she begged. Not that.

  Alls’s head twitched, and then he caught Grace watching.

  “You ready?” she mouthed.

  He cocked his head toward the door, and she nodded. He asked Kendall if she wanted a refill, and she smiled and stretched like a cat, nodding yes.

  “What’s wrong with Riley’s mom?” he asked in the elevator.

  “I can’t talk about it,” she said, looking up toward the mirrored ceiling. He
raised his eyes to hers in the reflection.

  “You told your roommate.”

  “That’s different, she doesn’t know him.” In the mirrored elevator, there was nowhere to look away.

  “Does he also not want you to tell anybody he lives in Paris?”

  “What?” Grace shook her head. “She’s thinking of someone else.”

  “You don’t know anyone who lives in Paris.”

  “You don’t know everyone I know,” she huffed.

  He groaned. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop. You told her Riley went to college in Paris. She said so. You must not have caught that part.”

  Grace felt her throat closing up, like her own body was strangling her. “It wasn’t—I didn’t—” So many feeble starts, but nowhere to go.

  “Don’t worry,” Alls said. “I wouldn’t tell him that.”

  Alls knowing she had lied about Riley was almost as awful as Riley knowing. In one way, worse: She still wanted Alls so horribly. Concentrate, she thought. They needed to get to a diner. They needed to sit on opposite sides of a big white table under fluorescent lights and drink Coke. Grace would flap at her pit stains and Alls would say stupid things about the artwork at the auction, and everything would snap back into place. The auction. Someday it would be her and Riley there, buying, selling, whatever. They would win and they would squeeze hands, kiss.

  Outside, she and Alls walked a yard apart, Alls following Grace to the subway, though she wasn’t certain exactly where the nearest station was. Almost no one else was out on the Upper East Side. A man in a trench coat, his face tight and shiny, wove unsteadily down the sidewalk behind them like a toddler learning to walk.

  “Hey, Nebraska,” he called. “Nebraska, you slut.”

  Alls grimaced and took her arm, and they walked faster.

  “I know what those slutty boots mean, Nebraska. Is that where you’re from? Or fucking Ohio?”

  Grace stopped and turned around. “Get the fuck away from me.”

  The man laughed to himself and then pulled out his cell phone, as though he’d forgotten that Alls and Grace were standing there and that he had been harassing her. He mashed some buttons and groaned.

  “You done, man?” Alls said. “You need to turn around, go the other way now.”

  The man stepped forward, casually, easily. “Who’s this, your brother? Your brother come up from the farm?”

  “I told you to get back from me,” Grace warned.

  “I’ll tongue-fuck you till you can’t breathe,” he slurred quietly. “In your little boots.” He stepped into the light from a street lamp and seemed to wilt there, his body slumping forward. Grace grabbed Alls’s elbow and they stomped down the sidewalk, Grace’s heels hitting the concrete hard enough to send shocks up through her shins, her thighs, into her hips.

  “Has that ever happened before?”

  “I’m not usually out so late.” Usually she was on the phone with Riley by now. Boys never seemed stupider than when they were surprised by the bad behavior of other men. “But it’s not exceptional,” she said. Part of her felt grateful. The man had shaken her up. She felt less vulnerable now, less caught.

  On the subway, they kept a seat between them until they hit Grand Central and the train grew crowded. When he slid over toward her, she felt the tiny hairs along her forearms stand up, as if they were somehow reaching for him.

  They should call Riley. They should have called him already, could still call. She felt an ache deep in her insides that was not allowed. You’re drunk, she thought to herself. But she wasn’t, not really.

  She did not say anything when they passed Twenty-third Street, the stop for his hotel, and he didn’t seem surprised when Grace stood up at Astor Place. He followed her up the station stairs and they crossed Fourth Avenue. Neither said a word.

  When they stepped into the fluorescent light of the dorm, Grace signed him in. They waited for the elevator, and once inside, they leaned against the back wall, away from each other. She wondered what he was thinking right then. Stop it, she told herself. They were just going to talk. They’d had a thousand late-night boozy talks, usually with Riley there too. A girl in pajama pants got in on the second floor holding an Amélie DVD and then got off at the fourth. The doors opened on the fifth floor and they walked down the hall to Grace’s room.

  “I should leave this jacket for your roommate,” he said when Grace opened the door.

  “For Kendall, right.”

  He draped the jacket on the back of Kendall’s desk chair and then sat on the bed. Grace’s bed. She didn’t turn the lights on. Instead she sat down on the bed next to him.

  “Riley,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “We should call him and tell how our day was, what we did.”

  “We should,” he said.

  “We could call him right now. But maybe—”

  “It might be weird,” he said. “That we’re, you know, just here. By ourselves.”

  “Drunk,” she said. “Drunk after the rich-people art party.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Me neither,” he said.

  “Do you want a glass of water?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That would help.”

  She filled up the jar from her desk with water from the bathroom and they passed it back and forth.

  Grace was still wearing her coat, zipped up. As long as she was still wearing her coat, nothing could happen. She could smell him.

  “What do you want?”

  She shook her head in the dark.

  He turned toward her and got close. “How long?” he asked. “How long have you felt this way?”

  “We can’t,” she said, pulling away. “We can’t. We can’t.”

  “Why do you think we’re here, then?”

  “I feel sick,” she said.

  “It’s a sickness,” he said.

  “This is new,” Grace said. “This is new to me.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  She swallowed.

  “You get to be who you want,” he said. “I don’t get why you let him decide for you.”

  “Fuck you,” she said. “Don’t tell me about me, okay?”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Besides, you think this is who I want to be? This girl?”

  “Does it matter anymore?”

  “You’ve thought about this a long time,” she said.

  “Not because I wanted to.”

  She was aching and wet and didn’t miss Riley at all. Riley was a world away, a souring memory that she couldn’t catch the details of and didn’t want to.

  “We can never tell,” she said, and his shoulders collapsed. He’d expected her to shut it down. He might have been testing her, she realized, her loyalty to Riley.

  He wasn’t.

  “We can never tell,” he repeated.

  He unzipped her coat and slipped his hands inside, around her waist, clutching her as if she might disappear. She pulled him down on top of her, and his face hovered just above hers, his eyes shining in the dark. They knew, in that moment, that they had not done anything irrevocable. They could still go back. But she could feel his breath on her lips; she could taste it. Then she raised her mouth to his and breathed him in.

  And when she ran her hands up to his chest, under his shirt, she told herself that this wasn’t real. When he rolled her over him and she reached back to unclasp the neck of her dress, she knew that this could not be happening. It was not allowed and so it was not real. She slid his jeans down his thighs as if she were in a dream. She sucked on his earlobe and ran her wet fingers around the head of his penis as if she were just wondering what it would be like, to do that to him, and he pulled her dress up over her head in a blind tunnel where she floated, hoping she wouldn’t wake up. She got up and locked the door. He sat up on her bed, leaning against the wall. She climbed onto him and he cupped her ass in his hands and groaned into her neck and none of this was re
al, not the unfamiliar fingers sliding between her lips, not her sense that she’d known him always and somehow not at all, and then she sank down onto him and lost her breath completely.

  • • •

  They lay there next to each other afterward, not touching, as though by keeping still they might stop time. She saw his arm next to hers, his chest rising and falling, but she couldn’t turn to look at him directly. To do so would be to acknowledge both the sharpness and the depth of their betrayal: sharp like a cut where before there had been only an ache; deep as a sudden drop-off from shallow water.

  He didn’t smell like Riley at all. He smelled like black pepper and burning leaves.

  This will destroy you, she thought.

  She didn’t know what he was thinking, but as they lay there she felt the weight growing heavier with every second.

  When Grace finally spoke, her voice was as rough as if she had just woken up. “You need to go now,” she said.

  He didn’t answer her. Grace closed her eyes. Finally, she felt the bed move. She listened to the sounds of his dressing: legs shuffling into pants; the mocking zip of his fly; his feet shoving into shoes; the relief, finally, of his arms shrugging into his coat. When she heard the door click shut, she turned toward the wall and began to sob.

  • • •

  She had her pillow over her head when Kendall came in the next morning, but she wasn’t asleep. Grace pushed off the covers and got to her feet, wanting to pee before Kendall got in the shower.

  “God,” Kendall said as Grace passed. “What happened to you?”

  When Grace came out, Kendall was wrapped in her bathrobe, her dress slung over the back of her desk chair. Grace saw her glance at a pile on the floor and realized that it was her dress—Jezzie’s dress—lying there in a sloppy heap.

  “Oh no, sorry about that,” she said, shaking it out to hang it up.

  Kendall raised her eyebrows. “It’ll need to be cleaned anyway.” Grace must have flinched, because Kendall quickly added, “Mine too. Smoky and sweaty and disgusting.”