By October, Bethany was giving her more interesting work. One week Grace was given an assortment of French botanical watercolors, which required anxious, stammering phone calls to Paris in her high school French. Another week she got a man’s personal collection of watches. Given and got were Bethany’s words, but Grace quickly adopted them. Given and got described her temporary relationship to these things she didn’t own and never touched—for the short time she worked on the botanical prints or the watches, they were hers.
The watches belonged to a man named Andrew F. Pepall. He had purchased one each year since 1959, some new and some as antiques. He had kept meticulous records with receipts and notes for five-or six-year stretches, and then the notes would disappear, and Grace had only photographs to identify the watches. Pepall lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he had mailed Mauce seven rolls of film documenting his collection chronologically by the year purchased.
Over time, Pepall had grown to favor brushed gold faces and reptile bands, but his taste sometimes changed abruptly before circling back to the stately. In 1966, he’d become interested in calendar watches. Grace was particularly taken with a romantic 1940s Jaeger-LeCoultre with illustrated moon phases on the dial. The year after, he bought a 1946 Pierpont that displayed even the days of the week. Grace adored the watches’ delicacy and fine workings, their quietly haughty attitudes. She felt an odd sense of gratitude toward Pepall for exposing her to such things, as though he had taken her under his wing of good taste.
“Who is that sad old man?” Kendall asked from her bed in their dorm room. She opened a new bottle of water and sucked the whole thing down in one breath, the plastic constricting in her hand. Lately she had been taking Lana’s Ritalin as a study aid and lying immobile with her textbooks for hours at a time. Now she stared at the online video streaming on Grace’s laptop screen as if she’d be tested on that, too.
“Andrew F. Pepall,” Grace said. “He’s giving a speech at his retirement dinner.”
“And he is?”
“An oncologist noted for his valuable contributions to the study of fatal bone marrow suppression from chemotherapy. I’m researching his watch collection at work.”
“What the fuck.”
“I just wanted to know what he was like, apart from his watches.” Grace’s explanation sounded even weirder out loud than it had sounded in her head.
“It’s not the years in your life that count,” Doctor Pepall read from his note card. “It’s the life in your years. In cancer treatment, we must remind ourselves of that every day.”
“No offense,” Kendall said, “but it’s kind of fucked up for you to stalk him like that.” She screwed the plastic top onto the empty water bottle and tossed it toward the wastebasket, but the bottle bounced out. Grace noticed her watch slip on her wrist. Cartier Miss Pasha, stainless steel, worth about three grand in mint condition. Her heart quickened with the thrill of recognition.
? ? ?
In November, Donald began to talk of taking Grace along with him on outcalls. He brought friends and colleagues back to the office for no purpose she could discern, except to test her ability to socialize with noxious people. Why else did they come all the way up to the ninth floor if Donald was meeting them for lunch four blocks away?
Craig Furst was about thirty, just over five feet tall, open-pored and tan. He wanted to specialize in Indonesian and Malaysian antiques, he said, but the market wasn’t there yet. He came by at least once a week, sometimes unannounced, to talk to Donald. Donald would hold up a finger to say he was on the phone, and Craig would set his briefcase down by Grace’s desk and unwind his linen scarf, his leather-and-clove cologne wafting out over them.
“I’m just back from Thailand,” Craig said one afternoon. “I got some great shots.” He took out his laptop and opened it on Grace’s desk, pushing her keyboard to the side. He began clicking through slide shows. “Isn’t that fabulous?” he asked.
“Wow,” she said, trying to sound appreciative but noncommittal. Bethany wanted her report on Nicolai Fechin within the hour.
“I’m giving a talk in Miami next month,” Craig said. “West Javanese vessels and pots. It’s going to be a real stunner.”
“Cool,” Grace said. “That’ll be so great.”
He put a hand over his mouth, his pose for thinking hard. “What does Donald have you doing then, I wonder? I could really use a helper. Do you enjoy Miami?”
Donald appeared then with his coat on, and Grace was spared having to answer.
When they left, she groaned. “Oh my God,” she said. “Do I enjoy Miami?”
“Hmm?” Bethany’s desk chair backed up to Grace’s, but she didn’t turn around.
“How many photos before you say you have to go to the bathroom?”
“Sorry,” Bethany said wearily. “I wasn’t listening.”
Grace knew that Bethany, silent and reproachful behind her, thought she’d encouraged Craig. But how? Grace had tried to brush off Bethany’s obvious dislike, and yet she found herself wanting to please her the same way she used to want to please her teachers, so often women of mothering age. Grace wasn’t sure how many children Bethany had, but she was certain that at least one of them was a teenage daughter a few years younger than Grace. She’d heard them on the phone, but Grace could also sense the daughter in the way Bethany looked at her, searching for clues and warnings about the years ahead.
Craig made sense to Grace in a way Bethany did not. Over-fragrant and cloying, accessorized and faintly leering, he looked like someone who would sidle up to you with his card and offer his expertise on insuring your collection of daguerreotype erotica. But Bethany, whose only decorations were the small cross pendant that hung over her turtlenecks and a plain gold wedding band? This business depended on ornament and excess. It made no sense that someone so resolutely undecorated would devote herself to it.
But Bethany looked at her as though Grace were a whore who didn’t know it. She possibly believed Grace’s na?veté was cultivated. Bethany was from Queens.
? ? ?
Grace hadn’t expected to be lonely. She’d thought loneliness was just a word for being alone and wishing you weren’t; she’d forgotten the sucking thinness of it. She hadn’t been lonely since she’d been a child—untethered, floating around other people like a ghostly houseguest.
In class, she watched her fellow students perform their garbled interpretations of Derrida and Foucault. It wasn’t theater school, but they were all there, she saw, to learn how to act. Everyone, whether from Singapore or Oregon or New Jersey, had come to Manhattan to transform, and each day they tried on their costumes, testing their characters in the classroom before they tried to pass in the real world. They were prototypes of New Yorkers.
Donald Mauce was the worst imitator of all. The photo of the Mauce Fine Arts office that Grace had seen on the website—the brocade, the velvet, the Chippendale chairs—actually depicted the study of the British novelist Anthony Powell, circa A Dance to the Music of Time. Upon closer inspection, Grace saw the little dog napping on the corner of the rug.
“My niece did the whole website,” Donald told Grace one Monday morning. Grace was now working some mornings too, when class was just lecture and she knew she wouldn’t be missed. “I’m a huge fan of Anthony Powell, hence the homage.”
“It’s pronounced Poe-el,” Bethany said.
“Have you tried these?” he said, holding up his half-eaten bear claw. “Truly the sine qua non of Danishes. How was your dinner party? Did you go with the rioja?”
The Friday before, he’d grilled her about her weekend plans, hoping to hear something wild and young. He was lonely, she knew. Donald was a widower, and he had no children, which Grace found to be a relief. She didn’t have to comport herself as someone’s child. He didn’t see her that way. Grace told him a friend (one of Kendall’s, of course) was making paella. Grace wasn’t even sure she was invited, but she felt obligated to give him something. Just the word paella had been enough to cue a breathless wine advisory.
“No,” she told him now. “A cabernet, I think. We just cooked with it. It was pretty gross.”
“Cooked with it? In paella?”