Grace sat down in a lumpy slipper chair and opened the laptop, her knees tightly together beneath it. In Garland, no one would ever have someone into their home without offering something to drink or asking how their drive was. Was this a Chappaqua thing or a northern problem in general? And, she scolded herself, just what did she mean by comparing anything to Garland, as if it were someplace to brag about?
“I’ll just walk around your house and inventory your collections,” Donald said. “Grace, my assistant, will take notes on the computer.” He picked up a small statue and turned it over to look at the bottom. “Jade,” he began. “A jade sheep statue, Chinese, probably Qing, probably late nineteenth or early twentieth, sleeping sheep, wooden base, rosewood.” Grace tried to keep up, typing as he talked. He took a tape measure from his pocket and stretched it first top to bottom and then around the statue. “Nine inches plus a two-inch base, sixteen-inch circumference. Picture?”
Grace handed him the camera, and he photographed the statue from each side.
Debbie took her hand from over her mouth. “My husband gave me that. For our tenth anniversary.”
“It’s a great piece,” Donald said. “Good color, good feet. Did he buy it in the States? How much did you get it for?”
“No,” she said. She didn’t look at him. “We lived in Mukden—Shenyang—for two years, in the late seventies.” Her voice cracked as though he had forced these details out of her.
Donald nodded. The daughter turned and walked out of the room without comment, and it dawned on Grace that it was upsetting to these women for Donald to be there, weighing anniversary presents in his hand. And they didn’t even know that it was the teenager sitting on the couch who would suggest prices for all their family treasures.
Donald leaned over a vase next to the jade sheep. “Jar,” he said. “Chinese, porcelain, rosewood cover. Double happiness motif, top-heavy hourglass shape, flared rim.” He ran his pinkie along the edge of the lid. “There’s some slight chipping along here.” He turned to Grace, clasping his hands behind his back. “Condition: good.” He looked at Debbie and smiled.
Grace followed him from room to room, filling up pages with hastily typed notes. She cataloged vases, boxes, ceramics, furniture, books, rugs, drapes, paintings, prints, and finally jewelry, which felt far too personal and intrusive. Everything had a story, whether Debbie told it or not. Donald and Grace finished the downstairs in two and a half hours.
“Should we call in some sandwiches?” Donald asked Nicole, closing a music box on the nightstand in the master bedroom. “It’s getting close to lunch.”
“There’s a deli a few blocks in,” she said, “if you need to take a break.”
“Oh, we’d lose too much time. I was thinking you could just order some delivery.”
She shook her head. “We’re not really hungry.”
Grace looked at the carpet, mortified. Her secret gratitude toward Donald for his poor manners, his obliviousness of his own social ineptitude, was wearing thin. She watched him leave his smudgy fingerprints all over Debbie’s things, cringed at his carelessly probing questions, and she was embarrassed to be associated with him.
At the station, Donald told her that he wasn’t coming. He had a dinner date with a woman who lived in Scarsdale. “We’ve been corresponding online,” he said. “Her screen name is ‘Floria T.’ She said I was the first one to get it.” He waited for Grace, but she shook her head. “Tosca? No?” He gaped. “Well then, I wish us both luck.”
On her way back to Manhattan, Grace listened to her messages, both from Riley.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said. “My crit was crap, as usual. Josh showed off a heartwarming nude portrait of his younger siblings, and Jessica Sunshine painted a forest scene with glitter snow and, no joke, feathers glued to the trees. And then I got reamed for not doing anything playful with materials in my Fiske Tobacco Warehouse piece.” He inhaled. “Not my favorite day, this day. On the other hand, if these people actually liked my work, that would be worse. And then I thought, you know what, man? Grace is up there, being all smarty-pants with fancy folk—”
The message cut off, but another one began. “What I was saying is after a day like today, and Greg put empty beer cans back in the fridge because the trash was full, and you’re not even here? Alls keeps saying you’ll cut your hair and leave me for a professor. And my mom wants your dorm address; she wants to send you something. I’ll be around until seven or so and then we’re going to Ryan’s to watch the game. Love you a thousand.”
The man next to Grace shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and she realized that she’d begun to cry. She called Riley, but it was already seven thirty, and there was no answer. She opened her Critics in Context course pack and tried to concentrate, and when a fat tear splashed across a photo of Slavoj ?i?ek’s shaggy face, she was glad she had the sense to laugh at herself, just for a moment. The man in the seat beside her drew his arms across his chest.
Riley called her back as the train was leaving Bronxville. She could hear a chorus of groans in the background and guessed he was standing in Ryan’s kitchen, his back to the TV. She could see him hunching over and covering one ear to hear her.
“How was it?” he said. “Was it a castle?”
“No, just a house.” She thought she heard Alls talking to someone. “It was very weird, going into some stranger’s house and touching all their stuff while they just stand there, watching.”
“Are you crying?” he asked her.
“Riley! Don’t say that in front of people!” She pictured boys’ heads turning around from the couch.
“Sorry,” he said. “Hang on.”
She heard the screen door slam and then he was in the backyard. She tried to explain how unsettling it had been, but Riley couldn’t see what the fuss was about.
“Darlin’,” he said, “you’re making too much out of this. How was class? Don’t you have class on Tuesday morning?”
“Fine,” she lied. “Good. Taste is class. The Real is not reality. I am a social construction.”
“All cats are black in the dark,” he said. “Can I call you later?”
? ? ?
Around two in the morning, Kendall and Jezzie came in with Lana passed out between them. They’d lugged her out of the elevator and down the hall, and now they had her slumped on Kendall’s bed. Grace was cross-legged in bed with her art history book.
Kendall stumbled out of her heels and sat down on the floor, leaning against Lana’s dangling shin for support.
“Jesus,” Grace said, getting up to peer at Lana. “Is she okay?”
“Poor baby,” Jezzie said. “She looks like a melting sex doll.”
“That’s what she wants,” Kendall slurred. “I worry, you know?”
“How much did she drink?” Grace asked.
“Three vodka sodas,” Kendall said. “Same as me. Three is the magic number.”
A strip of false eyelashes was crawling up Lana’s left eyelid. “Are you sure?”
“Somebody put something in her drink,” Jezzie said. “She’ll drink anything if it’s a gift.”
“Jay,” Kendall mumbled. “It was Jay. Or Marwan, that shit-show.”
“She went out with Jay last week,” Grace said. “She said she liked him.”
“She does like him,” Jezzie said.
Kendall nodded. “She just doesn’t know him.”
“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Grace said.
Jezzie, suddenly sober, gave her a disbelieving side-eye. “Do what?”
“Deal with these guys,” she said, shrugging. “All these creeps you don’t know. I’d just stay home.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Kendall said. “You’d talk to creeps too, to find the semi-creeps.”
“You’re still with your middle school boyfriend.” Jezzie snorted. “Your whole worldview is crippled. It’s like you never stopped playing with dolls or something. We’d die of boredom, being you.”