The sheer amount of stuff in New York had begun to overwhelm her. She had always liked things, the specialness of unusual things, like Mrs. Graham’s little spoons and the horse-cameo bracelet Riley had given her, which was as interesting as it was ugly. But here, there was so much finery to name and quantify. That’s why people brought in Donald, the truffle hog, to sniff out hidden valuables so they could insure them. Grace hadn’t realized what a narrow slice of the economy she had grown up in until she had been begged for a dime on the sidewalk and then, ten seconds later, stood in a penthouse taking notes on a piece of lumpy pottery that cost more than a year of her tuition.
Grace could think of better things to do with that kind of money than go to private college. There were the people on the sidewalk, for instance. But when Grace walked around her new city and saw the panhandlers—the runaway teenagers with cardboard signs and skinny dogs, the Vietnam vets with swollen eyelids and no teeth, the man who once stood outside her dining hall with two small children and asked her if she would smuggle out some bagels for him in her backpack—she did not really consider them. To do so would be to admit that they were people like her, and at eighteen, she was unable or unwilling to do that. Clearly, most other people didn’t think of the poor as real; they walked around them. Grace had snuck out a dozen bagels in her bag for the man outside the dining hall and pointedly handed the sack of food to his young son. She resented the man’s exposing his children to the severity of their need. He should, she felt, have protected them.
She didn’t think of that man again until about a year later. She was nineteen then, penniless in Prague with only a stolen oil painting she couldn’t sell, and her pickup English tutoring had all but evaporated. Her only remaining client asked her one day to meet him at his home. On the subway, she knew. She knew what would happen. And when he locked the door of his apartment behind her, poured her a glass of water, and then shoved her over the back of his couch and offered her ten times her hourly rate to hold still, she said yes. To say no would mean what, to be raped? But she might have said yes even if it had not. She needed money. For the four minutes he fucked her, she stared at the blank black screen of the TV and her disbelieving face in the reflection. She thought of the rich people and their rugs and vases, what they could buy for her now, and then she remembered her snooty charity, handing the sack of bagels to the little boy instead of his father. All she needed now was to pay rent and feed herself, only herself, and here she was, allowing the formerly unthinkable.
It was perhaps peculiar, then, that when Grace was working for Donald, she didn’t resent the stuff itself. She loved the stuff; it gave her such a thrill to know the history, value, and intimate details of things when their owners did not.
The owners she either envied or despised. A man in Tribeca had Donald and Grace appraise his collection of “rare African masks.” His interior designer had bought them as a collection so that the client could be a collector. Grace was offended by how little he knew about them. The masks weren’t even African; they were Guatemalan animal masks from the 1970s. Writing the report was painful; she hated to educate him. She wanted the man to go on telling his guests about his African mask collection until he could be humiliated, to his face, by one of his own.
13
Grace didn’t see Alls the first day he was in New York. The fencing tournament ran from eight in the morning until ten that night, and she was grateful he was tied up; she was trying frantically to catch up on her neglected course work, writing final papers and cranking out forgotten assignments for partial credit. She’d been too busy with Donald to notice how far behind she had fallen. She was always studying, just not the right material. Now she learned that cramming didn’t work with Roland Barthes and Judith Butler. You couldn’t just watch the movie.
“What do you mean, you’re too busy?” Riley protested that night. “You wouldn’t be too busy if I came up.”
“That’s not the same thing at all.” She felt her face reddening and was glad he couldn’t see her.
“Make time,” he said. “If your best friend came to visit—”
“I wish you would,” she said, and then she was embarrassed.
She and Riley almost never talked about school anymore. The long distance forced her to narrate her life to him, when before he had experienced it with her, and this in turn forced her to choose what was worth telling. And after Thanksgiving, she knew not to highlight the differences in her life in New York—her work and her education. She should focus on what they shared. But then what had been the point of her coming here, besides getting away from Alls?
Not that Riley noticed what she left out. He had his own distractions: Anne Findlay had sold nearly half his paintings by the second week of December. He was over the moon.
On Thursday after work, Grace made her way to the athletic complex to find Alls. He’d said he had a lot of downtime, hours spent waiting to compete, and she expected to find him among the dozens of fencers stretching against the walls or clustered in packs around outlets, tapping at their laptops. She wandered up and down the halls looking for the Garland fencers. When she found them and asked after Alls, a boy in headphones and wrist supports inclined his head toward the middle of the gym: Alls was competing now. The whole town had attended the Ravens’ basketball games. Now Alls was fencing in nationals, and not even his own team was watching.
She spotted the Garland coaches first, one close to the mat and another farther back, taking notes. Only a handful of other people were watching. The two masked fencers dressed in white scuttled up and down a length of the mat, and not until he was right in front of her did Grace know which one was Alls.
She recognized his body, the way he moved. He bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he were keeping a beat, while the other fencer’s stance was low and deliberate, like that of a crab. They moved to the left a few feet, then right, the distance between them unchanging.
The coach with the clipboard saw Grace watching and beckoned for her to come closer. Alls’s opponent lunged forward and Alls rushed him, flicking the tip of his foil at his opponent’s hand. The score was 3-0. The coach clapped lightly and leaned over to Grace.
“You a fencer?”
“No,” she said. “Just watching.”
“You picked a lousy one to watch,” he said quietly. “He’s cleaning this guy’s clock.”
He meant Alls. “That easy?”
“This poor kid’s made of wood, learned from a book.” Then he nodded toward Alls. “See, he never shows you what he’s about to do. I can’t even tell half the time, and I taught him.”
Grace watched Alls’s shoulders flex under his jacket as he raised his foil and lowered it, dashed forward in a blur of limbs and clipped his opponent’s hip, then his shoulder: 4-0. They each made a tight loop, and Alls cracked his neck from side to side. The boys faced each other again. Alls looked weightless, his muscles tense and alive.
“Because he doesn’t stop moving?” Grace asked.
“See how quick he responds? You can’t surprise him.” He shook his head. “And you can’t tell what he’s going to do until he does it—no patterns, no hints.”
The timer showed just under a minute left, but Alls didn’t want to wait. He shot forward and closed three feet in a split second, then doubled back as his opponent lurched forward to meet him. He thrust his foil toward Alls’s chest, but Alls arched backward, and the other boy, caught in his own momentum, was still pulling back his foil as Alls’s darted to touch his belly.