Betsy noticed the sheets first, which were dark and flannel, and completely unfamiliar. Is that . . . plaid? she thought, recognizing how odd it was for her to be asleep on top of a bed made with a combination that she found so offensive. She struggled to focus her one opened eye, which felt heavy and crusted at the edges.
That usually meant that the previous night involved too much bourbon and a couple of lint-covered pills that she found buried in a pocket. She scanned the room for familiar details: the IKEA school clock on the wall that she loved but Gavin hated because of its faintly perceptible ticking, the chipped, black dresser she found on the street when they first moved into their place on the Bowery, the fraying, stuffed armchair in the corner that was always piled high with their rumpled clothes. When she spotted nothing she recognized, a shot of adrenaline coursed under her skin, and it took her roughly twenty seconds to execute her quick escape. She checked to make sure she was still wearing the last article of clothing she remembered putting on (a vintage sundress, which was cheery enough to draw disapproving glances from her colleagues, even under a prim beige cardigan), scanned the bed to see if there was another occupant beside her (there wasn’t), and surveyed the rest of the sad studio. Despite her panic about waking up, again, in a stranger’s apartment, she couldn’t stop her mind from wandering back to her favorite moment of Wall Street, ca. 1987. Whenever she saw an “exposed brick wall,” she thought of Daryl Hannah’s withering critique, and remembered what an impression that movie made on her. It was when she first realized that New York was amazing, which she now realized was not the intended moral of the story. There was no time to consider the profound impression Gordon Gekko left on her young mind, and the ripple effects that would push her toward this place, through uncertain waters, and eventually to this weird little hovel of an apartment, whose current occupant was unknown. She spotted an asymmetrical slice of light under the crooked bathroom door and knew her next moves had to be stealthy and swift. Betsy scooped up her shoes and her bag, which were dropped on the floor next to the bed, and as she stooped down she realized, to her horror, that it was actually a futon, and raced out of the battered front door down far too many flights of stairs. Betsy burst past a row of neglected mailboxes in the vestibule and out onto a sidewalk. She identified her whereabouts instantly by smell alone. In the far–West Village, one avenue from the Hudson River, the pre-dawn sounds and odors of slaughterhouses at work on a muggy summer morning were unmistakable. She checked her watch. It was nearly 5:00 a.m. She remembered it was Saturday.
As she trotted east, she raced through all of the pertinent details of the situation: Gavin was out on Long Island, fishing in Montauk with a few of his friends. It was way too early to call and check in, and if he had called the house the night before and left a message on the machine, Betsy would claim that she missed it because she was out, and she crashed at Jessica’s house, again. She had stayed in town to finish the October auction catalogue before it shipped to the printer, one of a small, skeleton crew left behind while the rest of her higher-ranking colleagues scattered to other less aromatic, or more pleasantly fragrant, end-of-summer vacation spots. She imagined all of them putting distance between themselves and oppressive Manhattan, on small prop planes, or jitneys, or gleaming wooden speed boats with tiny American flags flapping at the stern. Jessica was visiting her family in Martha’s Vineyard, but Gavin didn’t know that. Maine and Nantucket and the homes-behind-the-dunes across Long Island didn’t reek of animal parts and sun-warmed garbage, or oily water stagnating in gutters. She and Gavin had ventured out to some of these places, for weddings and long weekends, and were amazed by the crispness of New England, the brisk sweater-across-the-shoulders evenings, its polished, rust-free boats, and utter lack of rowdy, beer-soaked beach bars.
Betsy had spent most of her summer-Friday evenings working on a fall sale of modern prints, poring over every book she could find about the artists. She was deep into research on a series of Frank Stella prints, dizzy from the rainbow bright optics, feeling as wonky as an irregular polygon after filling her brain with as much information as she could before her colleagues suspected that she didn’t really know what she was talking about.