Bethany put on her headphones.
“She couldn’t get a big enough pot, so they made something else.”
“But it wasn’t good? Did you take it back to the store? All wine should be drinkable!”
Grace shrugged. “No, we just—”
“Was it spoiled?” He looked genuinely concerned, as though the wine had come from his own vineyard. He crossed his arms. “Or too much citrus? Too much wood? Oak?”
“I don’t know,” Grace said helplessly. “It was just really cheap and dusty.”
“Dusty, like an earthy ground?”
“No, the bottle was dusty.”
“Okay, but the bad taste—was it creosote? Maybe an undertone of petrol?”
“Donald,” Grace finally said in a frustrated apology, “I’m eighteen. Wine doesn’t taste like wood and lemons to me. It just tastes like wine.”
His phone began to ring. “In Europe you’d be an oenophile by now,” he argued. “Just be honest with yourself. No need for discomfiture. Ask yourself: What are these flavors to me? What in my life? It can be anything!”
Grace was sorry to disappoint him. She felt more comfortable around Donald than anyone else she’d met—he was even more clueless than she was. But how? He was in his sixties, she guessed. He’d had plenty of time to assimilate, and he certainly tried: He belonged to a dozen wine, cheese, symphony, and gardening groups, all promising to cultivate him.
“No,” Donald brayed into his telephone. “Down the block, kittywampus from the Guggenheim!”
Bethany pulled off her headphones, the cartilage pinchers people wore for jogging, and rubbed her red ears.
“Where is Donald from?” Grace asked her quietly.
“Indiana,” Bethany said. “Ohio? One of those. He moved here three years ago.”
Grace remembered her interview, the way Donald leaned forward when she said she was from Tennessee. What’s that like? It had been his best performance.
“He used to be an insurance appraiser,” Bethany said, watching Grace from the corner of her eye. “A company guy, the one who came out after a flood.”
“Not French watercolors and portraits of gentlemen.”
“Not quite,” Bethany said, smiling a little as she turned away.
Grace had taken Bethany for only one kind of snob, the woman who sneered at pretty young women for trying to be prettier, and assumed that she had fallen into this line of work—a former church secretary responding to an ad or something—but now she wasn’t sure.
“How did you end up here?” she asked, shuffling through her papers as though she weren’t really listening.
“I was finishing my dissertation, and I lost my funding,” Bethany said. She didn’t turn around.
“You want to be a professor?”
Bethany picked up the phone. “I need to call my sitter,” she said. “Let me know when you’re finished with that pottery.”
? ? ?
When Grace chatted with Kendall about work or talked to Riley about school, she let all the personas—hers, her classmates’, Donald’s—stand without scrutiny. If she believed in their acts, they might believe in hers, and so, in turn, would Riley. She refused to admit her loneliness to him.
“What are you wearing?” he would ask her at the end of a halfhearted extrapolation of Susan Sontag or Clement Greenberg. “I want to see you. Or at least picture you.”
If Kendall was out, Grace could humor him. “I’m in bed,” she would say, making up something about her unbuttoned jeans and yanked-up tank top, her underwear or lack thereof. It was always a lie. Every night she slept in an old T-shirt of Riley’s, stretched and faded, with holes in the armpits. GARLAND MIDDLE SCHOOL TRACK AND FIELD, it read across the front. On the back: GO STARLINGS! She also wore his shorts. She’d snagged two pairs of his boxer briefs before she left Garland.
“Are those his?” Kendall had accused her upon barging into their bathroom, where Grace stood brushing her teeth in the sagging shorts. “That is gross and possibly creepy.”
Grace bent to spit out her toothpaste. Kendall was a rich New Yorker and Grace was not. Kendall had friends, and Grace did not. But Grace had something Kendall did not.
“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Grace said.
10
At home in Garland, Riley seemed to be holding up his end of their bargain. Infinitely patient, he would spend weeks building a house on his canvas, brick by single brick, the Tupperware lid he used as a palette on one knee, a joint resting lightly on the rubber edge. From the calmness in his voice, she could tell right away when he was painting.
One of his mother’s friends, Anne Findlay, ran a small local gallery, and she had offered to put up Riley’s work in January, her slowest month. She’d never shown a student before. “It’s kind of good that you’re not here,” he said to Grace. “I have literally nothing to do but go to class and paint for this show.”
Grace’s mind was wallpapered with the diverse and ambitious artwork she had seen in the past three months, but she funneled her still-unspoken doubts about Riley’s subject matter into concern that he might run out of buildings. “You could paint something else,” she said. “You know, branch out.” She didn’t know how to pose her questions so that they didn’t sound critical.
“Nope,” he said. “I only paint what I know.” He inhaled sharply. “It’s about the process. I’m going to paint this whole fucking town.”
Process! Painting the entirety of their small southern town! This was something she could say to Lana when asked about Riley’s artistic “interests.” Process, Grace imagined saying. Outsider art and changing small-town landscapes.
“Have you found our New York gallery yet?” They played this game now, the same way they used to walk around Garland and pick out their dream house. “The one that peddles the toothless and shoeless southern Gothic movement?”
She pictured his careful canvases of Queen Anne mansions with brass plaques from the historic society. “Hardly,” she said.
“Whoops, gotta go,” he said, his rounded, graceful drawl contorting into something backwoods. “Alls is here and we’re gonna go romance some livestock.”
He’d never met a cow in his life, and his hillbilly shtick was a new thing. He’d never done it before she left for New York. “Wear a clean polo,” Grace said. “You don’t want to scare them off before you get to first base.”
“I love you,” they said together, a timing they’d perfected as children. They’d never grown out of it.
? ? ?
Grace skipped class to take the train to Chappaqua with Donald for her first outcall. He had been hired by a widow who lived with her adult daughter in a 1950s Tudor revival. Grace remembered some boys in peacoats she had met at the party Kendall threw in their room, the way they said they were from Chappaqua with their chins out, as if it deserved a reaction. But Grace didn’t think this house, clad in thin stucco and fake leaded glass, was anything so special.
Inside, the house was carpeted, with low ceilings. The walls were papered in a dank blue damask. The widow, Debbie something, immediately sat down on a couch as if just letting Grace and Donald in had exhausted her. Her daughter, Nicole, had picked them up at the station. Now she stood with her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed at Donald.
“Where should we set up?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nicole said, unhappy to see them and unwilling to hide it.