When Riley and his father and brother got back with the food, they sat on the floor of the family room and passed around the cartons. Grace, full of fried food and sticky sauce, remembered when Lana had compared her to a house cat. “An ether of contentment,” she had said. Grace felt it keenly now. She caught Riley’s eye and smiled. She thought of the girl Colin was bringing tomorrow and hoped she was awful.
After dinner, Grace pulled the pies out of the oven, slid the quiche in, and set the timer for Mrs. Graham. Riley was restless, itching to get out of there and back to the house. He went out to the car to wait, and Grace wiggled into her shoes and struggled with her jacket’s zipper, which kept catching her hair. She heard Dr. Graham on the stairs. He always clattered down in a two-step rhythm, like a horse. He had an envelope in hand.
“Give this to Riley, would you?” he said.
“Sure,” she said, tucking it into her jacket pocket. “Thank you.”
“He mentioned he was running low on supplies, and I know this show means a lot to him.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Good to see you, sweetie.”
“You too,” Grace said. She pushed open the front door. “It’s good to be home.”
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The day before Grace flew back to New York to finish the semester, she and Riley were lying on the couch watching The Sopranos and drinking heavy hot toddies of orange-spice tea and bourbon. The house was quiet except for the TV and the sounds of their sipping, and Grace was trying to find a way to ask Riley about his artwork that didn’t make her sound as though she doubted him.
“So what do you think you’ll take on after the show?” she finally asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, once you’ve painted every building in Garland . . .”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Well, I’ve been thinking about going bigger or smaller.”
“Like bigger canvases?” Her mind filled with a vision of life-size brunch awnings.
“No—well, maybe. That could be cool. But I was thinking about trying interiors.”
“Interiors?”
“Yeah, rooms. The insides of rooms.”
“Like this room?” She looked around at the pine paneling on one wall, the dusty electronics, the coffee table piled with junk mail and idle sketches. It could be interesting.
“Yeah, just regular rooms. Some fancy rooms, some crappy rooms.” He laughed. “Like this room. And I hadn’t thought about size yet, but life-size rooms would be pretty dope.”
“Ones you could almost step into. Like a really old-fashioned virtual reality.”
He squeezed her foot. “That’s kind of a sweet idea.”
Grace was getting excited. What he was describing sounded ambitious. “There’s this book I had to read for school, Baudrillard? He said we make fake realities to avoid the real one, the real reality. Hyperreality. That society is a prison and we make these fake mini-prisons to hide that from ourselves, like Disney World—”
“Whoa,” he said. “Hold up. Don’t come at me with a bunch of jargon and French guys.”
“What? We’re just talking about ideas, what you want to say—”
“And anyway,” he said, “whatever I do next depends on Anne. If she sells all my stuff and wants more, I’ll make more.”
“Well, you can’t just paint houses forever,” Grace said. “Not unless you’re saying something about, you know, the endless—”
“I’m not saying anything, Grace.” An edge had crept into his voice.
“Not that you have an agenda, but a purpose, a kind of reason for—” She stopped to choose her words. “I’m just saying that maybe after this, you might want to try something more—”
“More New York.” He nodded. “That’s what you mean.”
“No, it’s not. But don’t act like you didn’t want me to go there. You wanted me to go there, for us.”
“Not if it’s going to turn you into a snob.”
“I’m not turning into—”
The front door slammed and Alls tromped in, still wearing his white pants from fencing practice. Grace had been relieved, this weekend, to find herself mostly untroubled by Alls. She’d wanted to come home, after all, and Riley and the Grahams were home. That the pull of home was more powerful than any other felt profoundly reassuring.
He was breathless. “Don’t stop fighting on my account,” he said. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“We’re not fighting,” Grace said.
Riley raised his eyebrows, looking at the floor.
Alls looked from Riley to Grace, grinning. “I’m going to New York,” he said.
“What? Why?” Riley asked.
“Nationals,” he said. “They’re at NYU this year. You may not know this, Gracie, but your school is a big deal in fencing.”
“Haven’t you only been fencing for, like, a month?” Riley asked.
“A year,” Grace said. There was no reason for Riley to get bratty at Alls. “And he’s already headed to nationals. Congratulations!”
“I got really lucky. I’ve been killing it the last month or so, and I thought I had a chance, and then today one of the juniors fucked up his knee.”
“Lucky you,” Riley said. Grace pinched his ankle.
“I mean, I’m sorry about his knee. But he can go next year.”
“When is it?” Grace asked.
“December tenth to thirteenth,” he said. “But they can’t keep us locked up the whole trip. You’ll show me a good time?”
“You bet I will,” Grace said, regretting the phrase’s blowsiness even as it left her lips.
“You bet she will,” Riley said, his voice clipped and transparently pissed. He lifted her ankles from his lap, stood up, and stalked into the kitchen.
Months ago, before she’d left Garland, she’d worried that Riley would see the gathering, darkening cloud of lust that followed Grace around all the time, threatening to burst. But he couldn’t see that, only that Grace was walking and talking beyond his gaze and its particular tastes.
Alls was embarrassed. Grace shook her head: Don’t worry. But she was worried, about Riley. A relationship that had grown up in a single cozy zip code was being asked to stretch hundreds of miles. If only Riley were coming to New York instead. She could take him to some galleries and show him what she was talking about. He needed new, jittery, excited ideas, not more house paintings. And she hoped, meanly, that Anne Findlay wouldn’t sell a damn thing. That would be better for him, in the long run.
12
When Grace returned to New York, Kendall happily agreed to attend the Phillips de Pury sale with her. She said drunk commerce was her favorite kind and let it slip that this would not be her first art auction. Grace couldn’t have been wholly surprised—she had asked Kendall to come as a part of her ongoing cultural tutoring. But such indications of their very different frames of reference were constant, and they had begun to chafe at Grace in a way she had not expected. If Kendall had been Swedish or Pakistani or Zimbabwean, Grace was confident they would have delighted in discussing their cultural differences, in “unpacking” them, as her professors were always harping on her to do. But they did not. Was it because the differences in her upbringing and Kendall’s were impolite subjects to discuss? Or because interclass curiosity went only one direction? Aside from some passing amusement over Southern naming conventions (“You tell me a name, I guess the gender, and the loser takes a drink”), Kendall’s interest in where and how Grace had grown up was limited to general bafflement and occasional caricature.
Grace absorbed what she could and muted her ignorance about what she couldn’t. When she reported excitedly that the dining hall now had spicy mayo on the sandwich bar five days a week, she learned that Kendall had not set foot in any of the dining halls. She did not even know where they were. All freshmen had mandatory meal plans, and yet Kendall’s parents gave her a weekly allowance for food. Grace omitted, then, her discovery that they had reduced security at the exit of one dining hall, making it easier to sneak out an extra sandwich or bag of bagels. Instead, she performed her disbelief, placing her hands on her hips and saying, “Well, I never!” in an exaggerated accent.
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