“I’m after depth, not breadth,” Grace said, blocking Alls from her mind. “I’m not collecting baseball cards.” Riley had been sixteen when the first hair on his chest appeared, and Grace had been first to notice it. She watched his freckles fade and reappear every summer. She was finely attuned to his satisfaction, anger, embarrassment. She knew the exact moment before he came.
“Good luck on your dissertation,” Jezzie said. “Sounds super fun.”
Lana’s ankle twitched. Grace sighed. “You’re sure she’s okay?”
“She is now,” Jezzie said. “But only because we were there.”
Grace reached over and pulled the band of eyelashes from Lana’s shimmered-up eyelid, a caterpillar from a petal. Grace trusted nobody except for Riley, not even herself.
? ? ?
The next week, at work, Grace received an auction catalog and invitation from Phillips de Pury, the swanky auction house on Park Avenue. The auction was a Friday evening sale, half-commerce and half-party. The catalog promised Cecily Brown, Georg Herold, Ryan McGinley. The glossy, oversize pages showed furious paintings of tangled bodies at a lawn party-cum-orgy; sculptures of bent-over ballerinas made of wooden lathes, painted pink; photographs from a road trip taken by rich, skinny, naked twentysomethings. And Grace had received an invitation. How had the people at Phillips de Pury mistaken her for one of them?
“Oh, that happens all the time,” Bethany said. “When you register for any of the auction record websites, your name gets dropped into their piggy banks.”
“It’s not a real invitation?”
She looked up over her glasses. “Um, no, it’s a real invitation. It’s a public auction.”
“You should go!” Donald hollered. “Get dressed up, take a girlfriend! You’ll have a blast!”
Bethany rolled her eyes. “I mean, if you’re interested in contemporary.” She glanced at the catalog’s cover, a pornographic neo-Expressionist painting by Marcus Harvey called Julie from Hull. Then she looked at Grace and her tweed miniskirt and vintage blouse with the ironic Peter Pan collar. Grace wasn’t dressing like a girl from Garland anymore.
“God,” Donald moaned, suddenly wistful. “What it must be like to be young and beautiful in New York City.”
11
Just before Thanksgiving, Kendall overheard Grace on the phone with Riley, cooing how she couldn’t wait to see him.
“Isn’t it, like, three a.m. in France? Are you going to Paris for break?” she asked Grace.
The Sorbonne, right. Grace turned away in case her face was reddening. “No, just home. Riley’s coming home.”
“Just for Thanksgiving? Is he not coming in December?”
“He’s probably home for the rest of the year. His mom is really sick.”
“Oh my God! What’s wrong with her?”
“Breast cancer,” Grace lied. “It looks really bad.”
She flew home the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. They had told their parents that she was coming in Wednesday evening. Riley picked her up at the airport, standing at the curb next to his old green Volvo. She ran to him and he hoisted her up by her butt. She split her jeans wrapping her thighs around him, and the cold rushed at her skin as they laughed and clutched at each other. He set her down on the trunk of the car and pressed his forehead to hers. She wanted to get her whole body inside his, held tight beneath his skin. He drove, and Grace kept her hand on his thigh, her nails crooked into the inseam of his jeans.
When they pulled off exit 227 to Garland, he took a turn that she didn’t recognize.
“Aren’t we going to your house?”
“Going a different way,” he said. “I don’t want to risk anybody seeing us at a stoplight. Got to keep you a secret.”
When he pulled up to the light at Dunbar Road, where they had no choice but to funnel into the only route home, he looked to his left and right and behind him, then reached over and gently pushed Grace’s shoulder down.
She hunched but turned her face toward him. “Are you kidnapping me? Are you going to transport me across state lines for sex purposes?”
He nodded and pressed his lips together. “There’s nothing I’m going to do to you that isn’t for sex purposes,” he said. “You’ll have to escape out the window when you’re sick of me.”
“In a hundred years,” she said.
“Won’t be long enough.”
She sat up and brushed the hair out of her eyes, but she slunk down low. She didn’t want anyone to see her either. “We’re disgusting,” she said. “We must make people so completely ill.”
“It’s not our fault,” he said. “We can’t help what we have.”
Sitting in his car with her knees against the glove box and her spine bent deep into the seat, she may have looked helpless, but she felt superior to the people she couldn’t see riding in the cars around them.
Riley pulled up to the house on Orange Street, clapboard with chipping peach paint, a color out of place anywhere but in a nursery. The porch sagged in the middle and there were several crumpled beer cans in the front yard, one perched in the crotch of the struggling apple tree as though it were growing there. Wet and wrinkled junk mail was plastered to the front steps. In the front window, a faded devil mask grinned out at the street, a leftover from Halloween. The front screen door was busted through the bottom half, where someone had probably kicked it. Grace had never seen a place as dear.
Together, they hurried up the front walk and inside, through the dark living room with its curtains always drawn, past the horrible bathroom, and up the stairs. He slammed the door behind them. Grace kicked off her sneakers and Riley ran to the stereo to turn on some privacy music. The bass line shook the desk lamp and Grace started to laugh. She heard hooting from the kitchen: They knew what that music was for. Alls was down there. She swallowed.
“My wife,” Riley murmured, “you better not make any plans this week.”
“Quit bossing me around,” she said. She pushed him down on the bed and he pulled on her belt loops. Every drop of confidence she had missed in New York was here, waiting for her. She had left it all in his bed.
She straddled him and rocked back, pulling off her sweater and T-shirt together, and she shuddered when he slipped his hands over her breasts, his palms almost floating over her nipples. She fell forward and pushed into his hands, and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, nosing down her neck. She slid her hand between their bodies, down his fly. He groaned and shook his head. Not yet. He rolled her onto her back and pushed her thighs apart. She laid her hands on his shoulders, waiting and aching, and then, when she expected to feel his tug on her waistband, she felt his warm breath through her underwear, his thumb pulling it aside, and then his slow licking and licking. She had forgotten about the rip in her jeans.
? ? ?
Grace woke up in the middle of the night with Riley’s bent knees crooked inside hers. She pulled on a dirty T-shirt from the floor. It smelled like green-top Speed Stick, Volvo, sweat, and turpentine: her husband. She went down to the kitchen for a glass of water and when she came back upstairs, she saw the canvases, more than a dozen of them, leaning against the wall just outside his door frame, all facing the hallway wall. Her heart quickened a little with excitement. His show at Anne Findlay would begin just after Christmas, the gallery’s slowest time of the year. His work would go on sale along with the holiday decor and discontinued electronics. Lana had told Grace that in New York the slow season was summer, when the city emptied of rich people.
Grace knew that she should wait for Riley to show her. She should let him pull out the canvases in the order he wanted and point out the details he wanted her to see, but she couldn’t wait. She had learned, from all her silent Saturdays looking at artwork by herself, that she could see better alone.