“Greg comes crashing down the stairs holding this book, screaming that it broke Riley—”
“Stop, you can’t tell me this.” She pulled herself together, suddenly alarmed—not about the possibility of Riley jerking off to a picture of an oil painting, but that she and Alls were laughing at him like this, without him, alone together. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”
“No,” he said. “About this auction.”
“I’m sorry I was weird about it,” she said. “I’m glad you’re coming, really. It’ll be nice to get some fresh eyes on all the madness up here.”
“You think you’re losing your Southern ways?” He had affected a bloated George Wallace accent. Displaced southerners were so quick to ape their own stereotypes. She did it too.
“You’ll see,” she said, unsure of what, exactly, she wanted him to see.
“I’ll try not to embarrass you,” he said, and she knew, unhappily, that he meant it.
? ? ?
Toward evening, Alls went back to his team’s hotel to clean up, and Kendall and Grace got dressed for the auction. Jezzie lent Grace a black wool dress, sharply tailored, with a pencil skirt and a deep keyhole back. Grace had not known black wool could be sexy. When Kendall fastened the small hook at the back of her neck, Grace looked like everything she wanted to be.
“Where do you wear this?” she asked Jezzie, who was wearing a bustier and leather shorts.
“Temple,” she said with a shrug.
Grace pulled on her boots, approved by both Schraders. Kendall drew black liquid eyeliner along Grace’s eyelids with a steady hand, flicking her wrist at the edge to make a cat eye.
“No jewelry,” Kendall said. “This look is all about the architecture.”
Grace reached for her red lipstick and Kendall shook her head. “Bare. Like you’re not trying so hard,” she said, a bit impatiently. She tousled Grace’s hair. “There. Like a sixties Bond girl, precoital. One of the smart ones from the beginning of the movies.”
? ? ?
Phillips de Pury was on Park Avenue and East Fifty-seventh. A security guard opened the glass door for them and nodded toward the elevator. Already, everything was different from what Grace had pictured. In movies, art auctions were held in windowless, wood-paneled rooms where a few hundred people were arranged neatly in chairs before a man in a bowtie, who looked out over his nose at a sea of waving paddles. Phillips de Pury was a two-story chamber with marble floors, steel beams, and a loud echo. Voices rumbled in a low, knowing chorus of brazen opinions and echoing, throaty cackles. She thought of the doughnut fellowship hour held in the undercroft after mass at the Grahams’ church and looked nervously at Alls, but Kendall had him by the elbow. He was laughing, too, at something she had said.
The pieces up for auction hung on the walls or sat on fat white columns. People weaved between them, hugging each other and gesturing with their wineglasses. A woman with a spiked crest of silver hair debated quietly with her husband over whether a McGinley would be an appropriate wedding gift for their niece.
The auctioneer wore a white shirt unbuttoned to his sunburnt chest. He took his place at the podium, and Grace expected people to quiet and settle into the Louis Ghost chairs scattered around the room, but the chatter only dimmed slightly. A man of a type she had begun to recognize, probably a decade older than she was but a decade younger in appearance, pushed around a chrome drink cart stacked high with oversize glossy auction catalogs, each as heavy as a high school yearbook.
“Lot one,” the auctioneer said. “Untitled, David Salle. We’ll start at ten thousand. Do I have ten thousand?”
The screen next to him displayed numbers spinning upward in rows of different currencies, fast as a slot machine, as he pointed around the room. Some people carried on conversations, standing in groups or turned around in their chairs, as if this were only a cocktail party. The painting went from $10,000 to $120,000 in about six seconds. Grace’s heart sped up. Alls took the seat next to hers, his legs splayed wide as if he were on the couch at home.
“For one hundred and twenty thousand? Do I hear a penny more?” The auctioneer made a joke off-mic into his cupped hand, and the people in front laughed. “Sold for one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars.”
The crowd applauded. To Grace’s left, two men in their midforties wearing matching navy sport coats, jeans, brown oxfords, black glasses, and salt-and-pepper hair kissed each other and then clapped with everyone else. She wanted to be them, superior in both their love and their taste, and able to act on it. She looked past Alls to Kendall, who was at the side of the room with an older couple, perhaps friends of her parents.
Grace realized that Alls was watching her. She expected him to open his mouth and say, “Scoot over,” or “I’m hungry,” something familiar from the house on Orange Street.
“You’re sweating,” he said.
? ? ?
After the auction, Kendall took them to a party at a friend’s parents’ apartment. A dozen people lounged on three couches, drinking and smoking. Grace read the spines of the books on the shelves and Alls followed behind her, too close. They drank vodka tonics out of coffee mugs. Whoever had grown up in that apartment was worried about breaking the good glasses. Kendall made sure everyone’s mug stayed full, and when Alls sat down on the couch, she promptly snuggled in next to him and flopped her head onto his shoulder. Grace had never seen Kendall like this. Drunk, sure, but not desperate. “Some little thingie,” Mrs. Graham would have said. “Some little trampette.” Kendall whispered to Alls with her lips pushed out, a floppy pout that made her look doped up with novocaine.
If anything happened between Kendall and Alls tonight, Riley would be delighted with Grace. He would be as pleased as if Grace had set it up on purpose. And as for Grace herself, well. The picture of Kendall and Alls together, making out on the couch where they sat now or even later, in Kendall’s bed—Grace would not be able to rid herself of such an image. Her stomach rolled just thinking about it.
Now Kendall had her hand on Alls’s thigh. In the gap between two songs, she heard Kendall speaking. “So sad about Riley’s mom,” she said. Grace couldn’t hear the rest, but she saw Kendall’s lips, something-something-Paris.
No, she begged. Not that.
Alls’s head twitched, and then he caught Grace watching.
“You ready?” she mouthed.
He cocked his head toward the door, and she nodded. He asked Kendall if she wanted a refill, and she smiled and stretched like a cat, nodding yes.
“What’s wrong with Riley’s mom?” he asked in the elevator.
“I can’t talk about it,” she said, looking up toward the mirrored ceiling. He raised his eyes to hers in the reflection.
“You told your roommate.”
“That’s different, she doesn’t know him.” In the mirrored elevator, there was nowhere to look away.
“Does he also not want you to tell anybody he lives in Paris?”
“What?” Grace shook her head. “She’s thinking of someone else.”
“You don’t know anyone who lives in Paris.”
“You don’t know everyone I know,” she huffed.
He groaned. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop. You told her Riley went to college in Paris. She said so. You must not have caught that part.”
Grace felt her throat closing up, like her own body was strangling her. “It wasn’t—I didn’t—” So many feeble starts, but nowhere to go.