She began to look for a part-time job and to reform her appearance for New York. She middle-parted her hair and sprayed it with Kendall’s various glosses: Shine! Glass! Mirror! She bought draped, slinky knits from the ten-dollar stores on Fourteenth Street and painted her nails the same metallic black that Kendall painted hers. Lest Kendall charge Grace with imitating her, she waited for Kendall to make the suggestion. She always did, and Grace was grateful for her diagnoses.
When Grace got an interview for a position as an art appraisal assistant, she bought an eight-dollar polyester blazer at Goodwill. She tried it on for Kendall that night, shrugging it on and sticking her arms out.
“Jesus,” Kendall said. “That is repugnant. Do you want to borrow something?”
The seams dimpled, but Grace hadn’t thought it was that bad. She happily let Kendall reconstruct her into what Kendall called “Grace 2.0.” When Kendall got to Grace’s shoes, she bit her lip and sighed. She wore two sizes smaller than Grace did, so she couldn’t save her there.
The next day, Grace rode the 6 train uptown from their dorm to the East Sixties, a part of the city she had not yet had any reason to see. On the train she stared at her shoes, twelve-dollar ballet flats in imitation patent leather with ragged bows. They looked like children’s shoes, first Communion shoes. It was raining, and the gum around the sole had begun to give up. The sole drooped open at the toe like a mouth.
Grace knew that no one would hire her in those shoes.
When she got off the train, she ran down the block through the rain hoping to find a shoe store. Every block in Manhattan seemed to have a shoe store, a nail salon, and a bank branch. She found one and headed straight for the back, where any sale racks would be, and there she saw a pair of boots standing tall among the other shoes. They were black calfskin, almost knee-high, with zippers running up the outside. They had heels high enough for a subway rat to run under. The boots were 60 percent off and still two hundred dollars. She had never had shoes half as expensive. They would wipe her little bank account clean. She remembered the photos of the office she had seen on the appraiser’s website: the giant windows, the glass-fronted bookcases, the long brocade curtains that puddled on the floor. These boots could get her this job.
She dropped her plastic flats in the trash can on the way out. She wasn’t used to wearing heels and felt herself walking differently, like a racehorse stalking to the gate. By the time she stepped out of the elevator on the ninth floor of the office building, Grace had become a different person. The door read MAUCE FINE ARTS APPRAISAL in gold stick-on lettering. She rang the bell, smoothed her hair, and rubbed her lips together.
He pulled the door open and looked her up and down. “Nice boots,” he said. “Donald Mauce.” He opened his mouth wide enough to fit a whole egg in it. He was tall and very thin, with pale, waxy skin and wet eyes. His sparse silver mustache flared out over fleshy lips. Grace was reminded of a white catfish she’d once caught at Norris Lake. “Bethany will be here in a sec. She’s our vice president, just ran out for soup.”
Donald sat down behind a green metal desk and gestured for Grace to sit in a rusted chrome chair in front of it. This was not the office in the pictures, but a single stale room. Donald’s desk was piled with papers and receipts surrounding a plastic barrel of peanuts. She could smell the shells in the trash can. She felt him looking at her, grinning, and she dropped her eyes to her boots on the stained carpet. She’d worn a black dress and lipstick, downtown-college-girl red.
Donald asked her about her art history classes, how she liked school so far. He asked where she was from and she told him Tennessee.
“Oh, wow,” he said, leaning forward on his desk. “What’s that like?”
The door hinge whined, and a woman stepped in with a deli bag. “You must be the new girl,” she said. “I’m Bethany.” She smiled barely, as though it hurt. She wore tinted eyeglasses and white running shoes with her office pants. Her hair was a beige mushroom.
Donald nodded. “We’re just getting to know each other.”
He gave Grace the job. She left with a handful of peanuts and two Sotheby’s auction catalogs on nineteenth-and twentieth-century decorative arts. He winked at her and said there would be a quiz.
9
Grace spent her first day working for Donald Mauce alphabetizing his bookshelves. Bethany was out and Donald didn’t know how to teach her anything. He sat at his desk, reading and leaning back in his squeaking chair, as Grace heaved the books around on a stepladder in front of him. Yellow dust flew up from pages and she coughed. Donald packed up at four. He said he had a wine group at six and if he was late they would start without him. What was Grace’s favorite wine, he asked. Whiskey, she said, and he horse-laughed and shook his head. Very clever, very clever, he said. She learned never to make even a small joke around him. He would embarrass it with appreciation.
On the second day, she arrived a bit early. She returned to the stepladder. Bethany came in, threw down her bag, and groaned as though she’d been saving it since she woke up.
“I forgot you would be here,” Bethany said.
“I started yesterday.”
“I know.”
Grace was on the top step and Bethany hadn’t raised her eyes above Grace’s knees. “Donald asked me to alphabetize the books,” she said. She heaved the acid-rotted volume in her arms into place. “I’m on Wegner, Hans.”
Bethany nodded slowly. Evidently, she wasn’t one to smile out of politeness, but coming from the South, Grace took this for seething hostility. She could tell Bethany didn’t like her, but she wished the woman would just fake it, like a normal person.
Grace’s left knee twitched and Bethany blinked. “Tell me when you’re finished,” she said. “I’ll teach you how we work.”
The work was called comps. Grace’s job was to value the client’s things (vases, paintings, rugs, silver) by finding comparable things that had been sold within the past few years, either retail or at auction. Bethany started her with easy ones, B-list twentieth-century American artists. First Grace would read the specs as noted by Bethany or Donald: Jerome Myers, drawing, 1908, Ashcan School, 11 by 16 inches, no damage, tenement motif. Grace crawled around the Internet looking for matching specs on gallery or members-only auction-house websites. Sometimes she ran into “price upon request” and had to call the galleries on the phone. She made these calls in a quiet, downturned voice, trying to smother her accent.
When she turned in her first report, Bethany skimmed the thirty pages of comps, changed a few of Grace’s words for prissier ones, and circled some typos that made Grace cringe.
“This is fine,” Bethany said. “On Monday I’ll give you a new one.”
Grace liked the work. It was easy to tell when she’d found the right answer, and she got to look at art all afternoon, even if at first it was all smudgy Ashcan snores. She felt a prickle of guilt at that particular judgment, trying as she was to reconcile all her new opinions with the reality of Riley’s artwork. After her failure to explain Lana’s video and her reaction to it, she had kept her burgeoning art criticism to herself.
Private from him felt wrong; private used to mean with him. They talked every night for an hour (or until Kendall came back), everyday talk but laced with the mournful mating calls of the newly separated. Afterward, she usually went to the bathroom and cried at how far away she felt.
Grace worked for Mauce three afternoons a week, at first. When she got her first paycheck, she bought a few of the textbooks she’d been reading only at the library, as well as some dark nail polish of her own.
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