She could always pretend, tomorrow, to be surprised.
She crept into the bedroom and took his cell phone from his desk. She could use it as a flashlight. She turned around the first canvas and shone the little blue swatch of light at it, moving the light up and down and around. The house was one she recognized, an old Victorian, redbrick, with a turret in the front and tulips up the walkway. The next painting was the downtown block where Norma’s Sunday Grill was. Wrought-iron tables. Menus. The painted cursive on the windows. Grace grimaced and flipped back a third canvas. This one was the library, omitting the ugly 1980s addition.
She put his phone back. Carefully, she lowered herself into bed. His arms tightened around her and she blinked in the dark. Last week, Lana had shown her a work in progress, a video she had shot the night before. She’d had her nipples pierced on the Bowery in the middle of the night, wasted and alternately puking and laughing, propping her head up with her hand. The piercer was a fat old punk with graying temples and a pointy goatee. Jezzie had gone with her to film the piercing. The next day, Lana had watched the video hungrily, bent over Kendall’s desk, soaking her breasts in Dixie cups of warm salt water. “I like to plan things,” she had told Grace, “and then get too fucked up to know what I’m doing. Then I have to watch the film to find out what happened to me.”
Maybe Riley was making an ironic critique on the predictability of small-town life, the sweetness of it. The staleness of it. There were no people—maybe he was speaking to some kind of emptiness. Or the opposite—that the buildings themselves were the characters. She clutched at meaning. Maybe he’d left off the library addition to comment on the rose-colored-glasses vision of Garland’s citizens, and not because it would ugly up his nice painting.
Process, he had said. Grace had seen a show a few weeks ago of quick, unimpressive sketches of a haystack, like Monet’s haystacks, all done with black marker on cheap computer paper. The artist was in the gallery’s back room, robotically sketching these hundreds of haystack drawings littering the gallery, gleefully proving how an image’s fame made it into an impotent cartoon.
? ? ?
In the morning, they ate old cold leftover pizza with hot sauce. Riley liked green Tabasco but had bought a bottle of Cholula for Grace and presented it with much fanfare. She asked him about the show. When would she get to see what he’d been working so hard on?
“A lot of it’s already at the gallery.” He peered at a plate to see if it was clean enough.
“Already?” She felt hopeful and relieved. What was upstairs had not made the cut.
“Yep.” He came up behind her and squeezed her sides. “That’s my big news. Surprise! She’s putting me up in December.”
“What? Why?”
“Why do you think, smarty-pants? She thinks she can sell it. She saw what I was working on and said she wanted to put me up in a big month, not a small one.”
“Wow,” Grace said. “That’s wonderful.”
“It is. It is fucking wonderful.” He turned her around and pulled her close. “Grace, this could be—will be—the beginning of my real career. Not a favor, not a ‘student’ show. She thinks she can sell me as a real, working artist.”
“That’s fantastic,” she said, turning her face up to kiss him. “I’m so happy for you.”
Riley grinned wildly, a little boy on Christmas Eve. “I wanted to see your face when I told you.” He was watching her closely, and she beamed back at him, putting her arms around his neck.
“So when can I see?” she asked him. “I want to see everything you’re working on.”
? ? ?
Grace wished that when they’d gone to Anne Findlay that afternoon, Riley had unveiled an investigation into perceptions of change in familiar public spaces. That he had taken hundreds of photos of familiar buildings, places he walked by every day, and mounted them on boards at angles just improbable enough to make the familiar unfamiliar. That he had braced up these assemblages with concrete blocks, two-by-fours, and wooden pallets, creating rooms and tunnels within the gallery walls that allowed people to walk through these semi-familiar spaces, noticing here what had changed too slowly and incrementally for them to notice in the real world.
But that was not her husband’s artwork. That was Isidro Blasco, an artist whose work, about his block in Jackson Heights, Queens, Grace had seen the month before. She had read about the show in an Art in America that Lana had left in their room. “A strength of Blasco’s approach,” the critic wrote, “has been the emotional restraint behind its formal innovation, conveying not destruction but disorientation, the unsettlingly simultaneous expansion and compression of space that the urban dweller experiences.”
Riley Graham’s work at the Anne Findlay Gallery was very pretty. Findlay must have had a buyer in mind for each and every piece: the owner of the property painted in it.
? ? ?
The night before Thanksgiving, the Grahams always ordered Chinese. Dr. Graham or one of the boys drove to Whitwell to pick up their order. Riley didn’t want to leave Grace, but Mrs. Graham shooed him off. “Go with your father and Jim,” she said. “Leave Gracie here with me. I’ve missed her too, you know.”
Mrs. Graham was mixing sausage stuffing with her hands and couldn’t hug Grace properly. “Oh honey,” she said. “You’re all skinny! And I look like an old kitchen hag. Lipstick me, would you?” She nodded toward the microwave. She kept a gold tube of her lipstick in a big seashell on top of it, with recent receipts and pocket detritus. Grace uncapped the lipstick and, giggling, clumsily applied it to Mrs. Graham’s puckered lips. The whole house smelled like sausage and celery. Really, the whole neighborhood did.
“What can I do?” Grace asked, tying on a striped apron. “Sweet potatoes?”
“Done. Can I put you on pie? The dough’s chilling. We’re doing pumpkin, pecan, and broccoli quiche.”
“Quiche?”
“Colin’s bringing a girl, some little thingie he met at physical therapy. And she’s a vegetarian. I was worried she wouldn’t have enough to eat, so I was going to do the stuffing vegetarian—”
“Oh no,” Grace said.
“Oh no is right. You’d have thought I threatened Tofurky. So, broccoli quiche. Colin said it was silly, though. You can’t win!”
“But it will mean a lot to her,” Grace said. “That you went to the trouble.”
“Well, I bought the things and I made extra dough, so we might as well.”
Mrs. Graham never fully put away the Thanksgiving groceries. She bagged them by dish and set the bags on the dining room table or in the fridge, if they included any perishables, sometimes several days ahead. Grace found the pie bag and started to mix the pumpkin filling, following the recipe on the back of the can, while Mrs. Graham asked her questions about school and filled her in on the local gossip. She seized on the New York art galleries when Grace mentioned them; she wanted to know everything.
“Isn’t that wonderful,” she said when Grace described an installation made of old film. “And you can walk right inside it?”