Alls flipped off his mask and looked for his coaches, who were clapping. Grace waved.
He came over to hug her. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight.” He was barely out of breath, but she smelled the sweat on his neck and quickly pulled away.
“Just for a minute,” she said. “I’m actually on my way to work.” This wasn’t true. She had planned on showing him around after he was finished, but standing with him there in the gym, too far away from the house on Orange Street, too far from Riley, she felt jumpy and unsettled. She heard a bell of warning sound within her.
“Now? Well, see you tomorrow then?”
“Definitely.” Grace was already moving toward the door. “I’ll call you in the morning,” she called over her shoulder.
She went home. A couple of hours later, Riley called her, furious. She promised to make it up tomorrow.
? ? ?
The next morning, Grace called in sick. Alls met her in the lobby of her dorm. She took him upstairs and introduced him to Kendall, whom she had instructed not to talk about Grace and Riley’s marriage. She wasn’t used to asking people to keep her secrets, because she wasn’t used to telling them.
“Your dorm room has its own bathroom,” he said while Grace dug around her desk for a subway map.
“It used to be a hotel,” Kendall said. “So how’d you do last night?”
“I made it to the semis and then got raked by a kid from the Air Force Academy.”
“And you just started last year?” Kendall gaped. “That’s kind of amazing.”
“But I’ve hit the curve. The guy who won my event has been fencing since he was six.”
“What were you doing when you were six? Catching crawdads or something?”
“Making moonshine in an old boot,” Alls said, and Kendall laughed ferociously. In Garland, Grace might have rolled her eyes. Here, his presence was so surreal and discomfiting that she could only stare at his feet. Kendall seemed to have arranged herself yogically, her shoulders thrust back as if in mid-stretch, her thighs splayed apart.
“So,” Alls said, “what are we doing? What are we doing tonight?”
“Well, I’ve got all day to hang out, but then tonight I have to go to this auction.” She didn’t look at him. “Sorry, it’s sort of work related.”
“What kind of auction?”
“Art. Paintings and photography.”
“You should come,” Kendall said. “I’m going too.”
“Well, I don’t know if—I mean, I just have one invitation.” Alls was wearing a GC sweatshirt and a Carhartt coat. He’d make Grace look country by association.
“It’s open to the public,” Kendall said.
A certain public. “But he’d need clothes—”
“It’s fine,” Alls said, giving her a wary look. “I’ll do something else.”
“No, it’s not that,” Grace said. “My work is kind of weird—”
“Seems pretty important,” Alls said. “Seems like you’ve got a real important job.”
“You’re coming,” Kendall said. “I’ll borrow a jacket for you.” She licked her lips and started texting. “So not a big deal. Then we can all party after.”
Alls didn’t look at Grace. “Cool,” he said to Kendall. “Thanks a lot.”
“I just hope you don’t get bored,” Grace said.
? ? ?
That day, Grace and Alls zigzagged the city until she had shin splints. She threw everything at him: bubble tea, Gray’s Papaya, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario video installations, the trapeze school by Chelsea Piers, white ghost bicycles with memorial plaques, Ernesto Burgos’s cast-iron bathrobes, rugelach, beef-head tacos. They counted French bulldogs, double strollers, and people wearing underwear outside their clothes. She kept them busy, always moving, and she talked too fast, as if she really were a tour guide.
They took a picture of themselves to send to Riley. They talked about him all the time, as if he would join them later. Riley would like this; he would laugh at that. He was all they had in common. But picking through the construction debris along the High Line, ducking to spy into the apartment windows below, Alls was the one standing next to her, laughing, rubbing his hands together to keep them warm. They shared a cigarette and a flask of Old Overholt as they looked down at the cobblestones, watching people shop, and Grace ran out of things to say. She had been careful not to let that happen—space in the conversation felt dangerous, like the heavy stillness just before a thunderstorm. She realized she was gripping the rail.
“Do you . . . do you like it here?” he asked her, as if they had just met.
“Here, New York? Yeah. It feels so big, and—I don’t know. Like everything here is more important. Like even buying toothpaste is somehow more special here than anywhere else.” He winced, but she went on. “Like something’s happening, and I’m just part of it.”
“You feel both more and less important?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like I’m less in charge of my life, really, but the life is more interesting.”
“Why do you want to be less in control of your life?”
Don’t you? she thought. You trust yourself to steer this rig?
“I didn’t. I mean, that’s not why I came here,” she said, though she could hardly tell him why she had. “But it does make you feel smaller, which is a relief in some ways. When you screw up, it seems less terrible. All these people, everybody screwing up.”
What was she talking about? In Garland, she was practically camouflaged by Riley. She’d been greedy for the disguise. And yet, sometimes the weight of Riley and herself seemed to rest on her alone, as if she had become their scaffolding. She’d been the creeping ivy that needed a brick wall to grow along at first, but now the brick would crumble without it.
“He told me he got a tattoo,” she said. “But he won’t show it to me.”
“It’s Marmie,” he said. “Running down his forearm.”
“What? Like, her name?”
“No, a picture of her. He drew it after she died. She’s running, kind of a trot. It’s not bad, but it’s huge,” Alls said. “He regrets it already.”
“It’s sweet though,” she said, and he nodded.
“You never screw up anymore,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Did you grow up, or what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugged. “When you’re a kid you do what your friends do; you think you’re all the same. But at some point you get that you’re not. You see the lines. There’s nobody standing behind you to smooth things over. You can’t do what they do. So now I don’t.”
“You can get a dog tattoo,” she said, wishing he wouldn’t be so serious, not alone with her like this.
“It’s really strange to see you without him,” Alls said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “You, too.”
She hurried to think of something else to say. “I worry about him,” she said. Not true, not the way she’d said it.
“You should. He’s so fucking tense without you.”
She covered her mouth to hide her smile. “He is painting a lot.” This was an inside joke. They all knew that Riley didn’t jerk off. His friends had deduced it from his suspicious lack of masturbation jokes over the years, and they teased him about his snobbery. “Master Riley doesn’t care for domestic automobiles, cheap sandwich bread, or self-pleasure,” Greg would say in a mangled British accent. Riley didn’t argue.
“The other day he blew up at me for throwing a ball against the ceiling,” Alls said now. “He said I was leaving marks.” Grace was laughing silently, so hard that she couldn’t breathe, and Alls kept on. “But then he left this art book in the bathroom—”
“No, no, don’t tell me—”
“Open to this page with a painting of a naked woman—who’s the guy who does the slits for eyes?”
“Modigliani,” Grace wheezed.