After everyone else had gone home, Grace checked the Albemarle Record. Nothing. She took out her Mont box. She began to painstakingly sand down the layer of gold lacquer that she had applied the night before so that it was just a warm metallic film that revealed the layer of silver lacquer below. She moved her fingertips across the wood lightly. If she went too deep and broke through completely, she’d have to do the whole layer over.
Three and a half years ago, she had thought the solution to all her problems was to disappear with Riley, somewhere enviable and romantic and far away, somewhere like Paris, thinking that if they could just be alone together, without interference from anyone back home, they would be happy again. His love for her, abundant as it was, would make up for everything she had left behind, and her love for him—if not as potent as it once was, at least as rigorous—would always keep him close to her. He’ll never leave you, Alls had said. And now here she was, alone in Paris in a room full of antiques (the likes of which she could not even have imagined then), fearing that he would find her, that she would finally be alone in Paris with her husband.
Three silent years stood between them. She imagined that with each passing month, he tapped new reserves of rage. But those were the admissible fears. Uglier by far was the fear that he had forgiven her. She could see him convincing himself that they’d merely hit a rough patch. He would appear one day out of nowhere, yet another of his grand gestures, ready to be loved again. Finally, there was the fear of his eyes on her, of seeing in them a reflection of a girl she’d left in America.
It could have been worse, she reminded herself. If they’d found the painting he would have gotten ten years, twenty. Or he would have turned her in. She reached back and touched her bald spot, smoothing the hair down over it.
Just after nine, Grace was sanding the corners of the box, the places most vulnerable to too much pressure, when the sun went down all at once in a way that always spooked her. The windows became black rectangles, blurry feet passing across them.
Then she saw his feet. Standing, heels to the window. He was leaning against the building. Those were his feet. His shoes, canvas slip-ons with the heels tamped down. His ankles, the left one knobby from spraining it playing pickup basketball. His calves, long and taut, the red-gold hair she would know anywhere.
She pushed against the floor and rolled her chair back into the shadows, away from the windows. The casters on the concrete floor were loud, a rattling cough.
He couldn’t see her. She was in the shadows all the way back to Amaury’s corner.
She pulled her feet into her chair and her knees up to her chest. He couldn’t see her. He would have to lie down on the sidewalk to look in. A cigarette butt landed on the sidewalk and the left shoe ground it out. Riley had never smoked cigarettes, but she had to remember that she didn’t know him anymore.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the feet were just some kid’s, some kid in slip-ons with the heels flattened. The ankles and calves looked plain and strange. They were not his, and he was not hers.
IV
New York
8
In August, Grace’s father demanded to drive her to New York. She wanted Riley to drive her, but his classes began the same week. The trip was the most time Grace and her father had ever spent alone together. “Listen,” he said in West Virginia. “I know you’re sure you want to do this. But if it ever gets to be too much—”
“It’s just college,” she said.
“If it ever gets to be too much, don’t be afraid to come home.”
She rolled her eyes toward the billboards. “Thanks, but I think I’ll be okay.”
He squinted. “Of course you’ll be okay. I never said you wouldn’t be okay.”
Grace and her father huffed up to the fifth floor of the dorm and shuffled past the loud families. In Grace’s assigned room, a girl sat on one bed. Her hair was electric blue at the scalp and shining black below her ears. She wore white fake eyelashes and a T-shirt that read FUCK A MUSICIAN.
“Are you Kendall? I’m Grace.”
“Gra-a-ace,” she said. “Grace from Tennessee.” She extended a hand with a different snake ring on each finger. “What’s your thing? What are you working on?”
“Probably something in art hist—”
“I’m doing ‘Bewildering Desire: Hentai and Idée Fixe.’” She laughed. Grace’s father was struck mute, reduced to a porter. “You’ll become one of us sooner or later.” She looked at the quilted floral duffel bag that Grace had dropped on the floor. “Maybe later,” she said.
Grace’s father glanced at her shirt and reddened. “So you’re a musician?”
“No,” she said.
“Kendall’s from Staten Island,” Grace said, trying to change the conversation.
“Um, Long Island,” she said. “But we lived in Manhattan until last year. Our dad still does. And I’m Jezzie. Kendall’s my little sister. Oh my God—me, Kendall! That is too funny. She’s currently napping elsewhere. Big night. I’m just back here for nostalgia reasons.” She paused. “I do some theater,” she said.
“Is Kendall a—is she an actress too?” Grace’s father asked.
“Ha ha! Oh my God, you are charming. No, she’s business school. Big desk, dolla-dolla-bills, all that.” She stood up and hoisted her bag to her shoulder. “But I must leave you now,” she said, collapsing her knees together as if she had to pee and frowning like a party clown.
? ? ?
Kendall was tiny, shrewd, and oddly maternal toward both Jezzie, who often came to their room to flop on her sister’s bed and whine, and Lana, Kendall’s loose-cannon best friend. Lana Blix-Kane was rich and terrified of being ignored. Grace couldn’t see that then, only luxurious confidence. No matter what Lana did—guzzled vodka until she passed out in a strange apartment, spent thousands in a single shopping day, bought a puppy on Saturday and returned it on Monday morning—she was unpunished and unchanged, as though her parents had also bought her an undo button.
Grace met Lana her second night in New York. Lana came in with Kendall, but she didn’t introduce herself. She sat on Kendall’s bed and slumped back with fatigue.
“Mmm, you,” she said to Grace. “You’re a serious girlfriend.” She turned to Kendall. “Right?”
Kendall shrugged. “You’re the expert.”
“There’s this, like, ether of contentment,” Lana said. “Like a house cat.”
Grace opened her mouth to protest, but she didn’t know what to say.
“I mean, you are obviously a fish out of water here,” Lana said. “But you probably don’t even know that. So you must have a boyfriend. Know what I mean? Well, probably not, right? You wouldn’t.”
Lana wore her fine blond hair impossibly teased, and Grace would later learn that if Lana had not just rolled out of bed, she worked hard to look as though she had. Her nail polish was always chipped, her eye makeup smudged and flaking. “You want to look like you’re just getting home from a really good time,” she once explained as she came at Grace with a clotted mascara wand, trying to fix her. But for now, all Grace knew was that Lana looked like she really had just come home from a really good time.
Grace squinted, buying time. She didn’t yet know whether she cared if this girl liked her or not. “What about me? Aside from the hand-me-down bag.”
“Your hair!” they said at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed, adoringly, and Grace felt a pang of jealousy ring from deep within.
“You have girlfriend hair,” Kendall said. Her voice, deep and dry, was disconcerting coming from such a small person. “It’s so long, indicating resistance to change, and thus monogamy.” She sipped coffee from an enormous camping thermos. Her own hair was dark and short, as if she wouldn’t let it tether her to anything.