The Talented Miss Farwell Page 10

  Just then the swinging kitchen doors blew open, and in came a very tall woman in a white tux shirt and twisted bow tie. Her exasperated glance fell on all of it—the children, Becky’s full napkin, the banging of heels on a metal counter.

  “Go,” she said, pointing to a back room.

  “But Mom, we—”

  “No ifs, ands, or buts. We had an agreement.”

  “She took food,” the boy pointed out.

  “Hey!” Becky protested.

  The tall waitress gave Becky a quick once-over. “Would you do me a solid?” She tucked her tray under her arm and began to repin her hair, a pale fuzzy cloud. “You’re a gallery girl, right? Help them get set up in there with like a game or something?”

  “Uno!” the little girl cried. “I can do my own hand.”

  “We have Battleship too,” the mom said firmly, cutting off the boy’s objection. She pushed the platter of food toward Becky. “Did you see David Armstein out there? Or Patel what’s-his-name?”

  Becky was distracted by the tall woman’s whirl of action: put down her tray, wipe her daughter’s nose, peer out the door’s porthole, muttering to herself. And how did this waitress mom know the names of two top dealers, whom Becky herself had been hoping to sight?

  “Ten minutes.” The woman wheeled on Becky. “Take the food with you. I just need one shot at . . . Half an hour, tops. Kids, show this nice lady how to play Chutes and Ladders. In the back.”

  “We could take this whole platter?” Hmm, not bad.

  “Mom.”

  “Paul. I will bring you a 7UP, I swear by all that is good and holy. Give me just a few more minutes.” With that, the ostrich-like mom took up her tray with a flourish, and backed through the swinging doors.

  The girl tucked her coloring book under her arm and waited expectantly. The boy—Paul—arced himself off the counter. They were both so much shorter than Becky expected.

  “Chutes and Ladders is the dumbest,” Paul said. “Let’s play Uno.”

  Because she was still hungry, because she had time to kill before Fleshman, and mostly because she wanted to sit down and take off her heels, Becky ended up playing an hour of Uno—no real Spanish was required, it turned out—and beating the kids an average of four games to one. They ate all the quiche and the cheese cubes, and then the girl—Frieda, five—put the lettuce on her head for a hat. Becky learned they lived in New Jersey but their father was in Colorado, they had a pet guinea pig named Franklin because the other guinea pig (Francis) had died in the summer but they couldn’t bury Francis in the backyard because it was shared with the other townhouse residents and Mom said they couldn’t. Also—Paul crawled over to whisper this wetly—some of them had dogs and a dog would probably dig up a buried guinea pig and—

  “All right, I get it,” Becky said.

  Their mom worked in an office sometimes, doing something (her children were weirdly ignorant about what), and also waitressed for a catering place. Their babysitter had bailed at the last minute—“Because she’s a space cadet,” Frieda reported gravely—and so they’d been dragged a long way in the car to the event tonight.

  “That’s not fair!” Paul exclaimed. Becky had played a well-hoarded Draw Four.

  “Completely fair.” Frieda had wandered over to her stack of art supplies, so Becky was playing her hand as well. Paul grumbled, then took his turn. She stopped his move. “Save that one. Wait for when I’m closer to Uno, and then use it.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” But then he leaped up, scattering the pile. “Frieda! What are you doing, dummy? She’s going to kill you!”

  Instant tears, a sudden tussle, and more noise than Becky could handle. She separated the children, soothed Frieda’s wailing—how did parents stand that sound?—and eventually found the source of the problem: the five-year-old, coloring with her crayons (scribbling, Paul spat), on papers she’d pulled out of a black, ribbon-tied portfolio. Becky gently removed them from the child’s sticky grasp. They were copies of a résumé, she saw. And stacked behind those in the portfolio were photographs of photographs, thumbnail images and blown-up shots and installation views, all of which Becky immediately removed, lifting them high above Paul’s reaching arms. “It’s okay, I’m allowed. This is your mother’s? She’s an artist?”

  “She taked pictures of me too,” Frieda insisted.

  Becky sat on a radiator and paged through the acetate sheaths. The photos were staged stills of men and women, utterly ordinary suburban types, clothed in robes and holding strange objects as if they were scepters. Posed against garage clutter, country kitchens, all with mesmerizing ambiguous expressions: resigned, lightly humiliated, shyly proud.

  “That one’s my soccer coach,” Paul said, breathing into Becky’s ear.

  “How large does she print these? In what editions?” Both kids stared blankly—of course—so Becky rummaged to find their mother’s CV (her name was Tracy Moncton), skipping past a carefully typed and Xeroxed artist’s statement (“At the juncture of domestic realism and fantasia, my work seeks to uncover hidden conflicts in hierarchy and chaos, gender roles and the Green World, structuralism and—”) to skim the relevant info in her bio and background. Hunter College, then a year toward an MFA at Columbia, unfinished, group shows at UMass, RISD, and a church on Staten Island.

  Becky went back to the photos and was holding one up in the weak overhead light when Tracy Moncton herself reappeared in the kitchen.

  The kids ran to plow into their mother, who had a coat over one arm and two glasses full of amber liquid pinched in one hand. She kissed the tops of their heads, glanced at the open portfolio in Becky’s lap, and handed her one of the glasses.

  “Lagavulin. I owe you several, but Ahmad could only slip me two. All right, gang, let’s get this stuff picked up. I’m Tracy, by the way. The total stranger who had you babysit my kids.”

  “Reba,” Becky said. “Are these—”

  “And all for nothing,” Tracy went on, nudging over the stack of Uno cards with her foot. “Nobody out there. Low men on the totem pole.” She took a big drink. “Where do you work again?”

  “No, I . . . Who’s your dealer? What kind of lab do you use?”

  Tracy laughed tiredly. She took the portfolio off Becky’s lap and put it in a bag, along with picture books and reusable water bottles. Frieda clung to her arm, sucking her thumb and whining softly. Becky checked her watch—too late for Fleshman.

  “How about some dinner?” She saw Paul’s eyes light up and added, “My treat. I’m only in from Chicago until tomorrow and I collect . . . Well, I don’t have any photographs yet, but I’d love to learn more about your process.”

  Tracy, squatting on her heels, gave a sharp look up. “My process, huh.”

  “How about pizza?”

  “Yes! Pizza!”

  “We have to get back. It’s late, and the bridge traffic will be a nightmare.”

  “Mom!”

  But Tracy wouldn’t hear any protests, from either Paul or Becky. Who couldn’t stop staring at this frizzy-haired waitress, her long limbs and practiced movements, the way she scooped up kid debris and deflected Frieda’s tantrum and drained her scotch. She was so—so—regular. She could have been any mom in front of Pierson Elementary, sharing a cigarette with a friend and keeping an eye on the time. Working the second shift at Smiley’s Diner. Where did she come up with these visions? The soccer coach under a dulled ornate crown, a Wiffle ball balanced on his wide-open palm?

  Becky ran through all the artists she’d met—for no more than a minute or two—at Yoshi’s in Chicago, those Mac and his crowd tolerated but mostly ignored. Had any of them been this normal? Had any of them been moms?

  “Do you have a card?” Their coats were on, and Becky’s energy surged.

  “Ha.” Tracy produced a postcard from a tote bag full of them. “Take three. Take thirty! God knows I couldn’t give them away out there. Come on, kids. Thanks again, um—”

  “Reba,” Becky supplied, scanning the postc
ard announcing open studio dates and hours. When she looked up, they were gone.

  That night, her last in New York, Becky waved off the cabs lined up on Lafayette and began to walk north, crossing all of Houston’s lanes and wandering side streets near NYU until she figured out how to get to Third Avenue. From there, it was only a mile or two back to Fernanda’s, and Becky barely felt the heavy night wind pushing her this way and that, block after block.

  A fantasy bloomed. What if she stayed? What if she started over here in New York? What if her art buying and selling could sustain itself, without the constant tension that came with the Activity? Without the Activity?

  Becky walked fast past shuttered storefronts, paint stores and health food stores and nail places. She avoided the crazies talking to themselves, the garbage blowing up and around the curbs. Traffic swept past her and blew her hair forward.

  God, what would it be like. To live only one life. To just be . . . who? Reba, she supposed. No more Becky Farwell, Pierson protégé, star citizen, beloved small-town wunderkind.

  Maybe, she told herself, pausing to study the inscrutable menu in the window of a Chinese takeout place. A single breeze of possibility blew through her mind. She caught its scent, what life here would be like: light and free. Excited, she kept walking north.

  That energy was partly why she went to bed with Fernanda later, acceding to the woman’s frank need and smooth arms and murmured Portuguese endearments. It was easy to give when you were caught up in a dream.

  It was also why Becky took one additional step before heading to LaGuardia the next day. She rode all the way out to Tracy Moncton’s small shared studio on the far west side of Manhattan, having carefully prepared her pitch. She looked carefully at the woman’s work, past and present. There were a few others there for the studio visit, presumably for wine and cheese, but Becky ignored them. It didn’t faze her that Tracy’s studiomates were amateurs of the worst landscape kind, or that Tracy herself had overdressed in a sadly desperate suburban-housewife style: pumps and silvery stockings, turquoise acrylic sweater. Becky studied the woman’s equipment, her portfolios; she used a loupe to go through slide after slide. She shut Mac’s warning voice out of her head and questioned Tracy closely about her rent, lab, film.

  At the end of the visit Becky put forward her proposal. She’d heard of arrangements like these but never thought she’d be interested herself. A few minutes later the two women shook hands on a deal that would have Becky—Reba—fronting a thousand dollars a month for overhead (including babysitting, which Tracy insisted cost ten dollars an hour; highway robbery, if you asked Becky), in exchange for first option on any new work and a fifty percent discount. As Becky carried her suitcase downstairs, mindful of the Cassatt treasure wrapped snugly within, she heard Tracy shriek with jubilation.

  Becky made it to her flight just under the wire, but this time she knew what to do. She held Mary Cassatt securely on her lap and watched the metal-colored Long Island Sound tip sharply and recede beneath her window. In the quiet of climate control the numbers she had committed to came back with icy clarity, standing out in relief against the grayish clouds: now one thousand more per month to her overhead. Add that to one mortgage plus one rent, her car payment, the impossibly high but necessary entertaining costs, and the hundred other fees and expenses that came with collecting. Becky traced the figures on the inside of her window with a fingertip.

  Say she did sell everything she had. Even the best-case scenario resale of all her pieces wouldn’t set her up for more than the smallest fingerhold in the New York scene. And then what? She’d stand around galleries, not buying, not dealing, while the invitations dwindled and the opportunities evaporated. Would she have to live in Queens?

  Becky shook her head and held the Cassatt closer. Numbers never lied. New York was impossible. Even if she could guarantee her past skimming would never be uncovered, how else, where else would she be able to fund her art collection, keep it going? No, back to Pierson it was.

  11

  Pierson

  1989

  In the photo, Hank Farwell stands so straight he’s pushing his chest out farther than his chin. Beside him, Jean Dore is calmer, more at ease even with the round bouquet she has to hold. One side of her hair is tucked behind her ear, a casual mistake perhaps, given the formality of the photo, but Becky always loved that detail. She wished the photo wasn’t in black and white, so she could examine the exact coloring of her mother’s hair at that age, twenty years old, and compare it to her own at almost twenty-five.

  Hank had kept this photo framed on the mantle, but he also had a crumbling white satin book with a dozen other photos from their small, family-only wedding in 1959, at a church in neighboring Dixon, where her mother had grown up. As a girl Becky used to page through the stiff curling photographs, searching for hints of what her mother had been like. The smiles were so forced, the poses so standard, that it was impossible to tell.

  Hank used to say that he could instantly distinguish which photos were from before the service and which after. “Pale as a ghost,” he’d say, pointing to his face in the earlier ones. Becky didn’t really see a difference. “There, see—by then it was all official and I got my color back.” The new Mrs. Jean Farwell had the same smiling complexion in every photo. But only in the one on the mantle had she unthinkingly tucked back her hair in that girlish gesture. So this was the one that Becky now kept at home on her dresser—in Pierson, that is, not the Chicago condo.

  Now, this October Sunday morning, Becky and Ingrid were midway through the reception for Ingrid’s wedding to Neil “She Actually Said” Yesko (as was piped in frosting, under a busty rendering of Ingrid, on his bachelor party cake). Becky was crammed next to the bride in the ladies’ room of the Amber Gate Banquet Hall on Timber Creek Road, west of Brinton. She held up layers and layers of itchy crinoline and slippery satin, her eyes shut as demanded.

  “Don’t look,” Ingrid snapped again. “Don’t look!”

  “It’s not the looking,” Becky mumbled.

  “Shut up! I can’t help it! That’s so mean!”

  “All right, all right, I was just kidding.”

  Silence again in the bathroom. Through the walls they could hear the raucous talk and burbled bass from the reception.

  “When they say ‘morning sickness’ they make it sound so petite and dainty,” Ingrid complained. “And all anyone ever admits to is throwing up! Nobody but me gets the trots, apparently.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Becky had heard this speech before. It was their third emergency rush to the bathroom since the service. Ingrid claimed no one knew the reason for the suddenness of the date, and her parents had been happy enough to save money with a brunch reception, so Becky kept quiet about how the other bridesmaids had guessed the truth right away.

  “Neil’s haircut looks nice, doesn’t it? I like it longer in back like that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you tell my aunt was avoiding my mom the whole weekend? We told them there’d be a champagne toast. It’s not my fault they’re all born-agains.”

  “The groomsmen have been pouring shots of Jim Beam in the coat room.”

  “I’m sure Aunt Christy’ll do penance for all our souls.” Ingrid let out a sigh, her forehead on the heels of her hands. Becky, who had opened her eyes, adjusted her friend’s tilted headband, silk flowers on elastic. “All right. I guess we can go.” Ingrid stood and the two of them began the process of rolling the girdle back up her thighs and stomach. Muffled in a face-full of dress, Ingrid said, “Also, Mayor Ken Doll has probably sent a search party for you. Ow.” The band on the Wonder Shaper had snapped back.

  “Sorry. What are you talking about?”

  “Following you around like a lost puppy. ‘Becky, I need your opinion on what house to buy.’ ‘Becky, I need your opinion on what pants to wear. And don’t mind my wife over here at table three, or our twins at home.’”

  “You’re the one who invited them.”


  “They weren’t supposed to come! Jesus H., as if I didn’t have enough stress without worrying which relative is going to say something to insult brand-new Mayor Ken Doll Brennan. Mayor Bren Kennan!” Ingrid laugh-burped, washing her hands. Becky knew she’d had a bit more than the “just for toasting!” pink champagne. They met eyes in the mirror.

  “‘He was like the country he lived in,’” Ingrid intoned, quoting one of their favorite movies. “Come on. You know it.”

  “‘Everything came too easily to him.’” Becky obliged with the rest of the line from The Way We Were. “But Redford is a stretch, even with the hair.”

  “It’s not the hair, dummy. It’s the golden boy aura. Okay, it’s the hair too.”

  “Hmm.”

  In truth, Becky didn’t want to talk about the new mayor, an eager-beaver type who had already cornered her twice during hors d’oeuvres. She was stretched to the limit at Town Hall right now, between the increased focus of her new promotion and trying to make up the difference in several accounts she’d borrowed from too heavily in the past two months—to furnish the new Chicago apartment, to transport and install her many pieces there, and to throw several open houses aimed at cultivating top-end buyers and dealers. She was fighting to put back as much as she could, not knowing how closely this new mayor would be scrutinizing the finances.

  Ingrid had been studying Becky in the mirror above the sink. “What about Adam Murphy? He is at your table, after all.”

  “Murph plus three other horny single guys. I wonder how that happened.”

  Ingrid began a lilting “Well, you never know . . .” But a fierce look from Becky shut her up. They left the ladies’, Ingrid’s dress squishing through the door. “Just be careful about him, okay?”

  “Please. Murph wouldn’t know how to—”

  “Not Murph, Mayor Ken,” Ingrid hissed. “He’s got his eye on you and I don’t like it.”

  For a second this caught Becky off guard. An anxious flare sounded deep inside her, a kind of muffled sonic boom. Had she underestimated golden boy Ken Brennan? Was he smarter than he seemed? She mustered a smile and found a distraction.