The Talented Miss Farwell Page 18
“Fine, then. See you Monday.” Finishing her voice mail to Ken, she hung up with a satisfying clunk. Now she could sleep. They’d have to use more than new-model computers to take her down. She was Becky Farwell, quicksilver, out-thinker, king.
22
Pierson
Milan, Paris
Pierson
1997–1998
Ken was notorious for his attention fluctuations. Though no one at Town Hall doubted his energy and commitment, at times he visibly wilted under the strain of the job, the deficit, the constant barrage of bad budget news.
“Golden boys weren’t meant for this,” was Ingrid’s take.
“It’s the twins,” Becky said. “Can you imagine coming home to that amount of whining, crying, the noise and the mess and the—”
“Gee, Becky. No, I can’t possibly contemplate what that kind of challenge and exhaustion would look like.”
Becky subsided.
Sometimes in meetings you got the sense that Ken was only half-present, listening but not really, adding oddly off-tone filler phrases like “now you’re talking” after an underling delivered some boring update. You could catch him twirling a pen for minutes on minutes, in a helicopter way he must have perfected in junior high school: flicking it with his forefinger to spin around the base of his thumb. It drove Becky crazy.
But she could never get comfortable with his dreamy out-of-it mode because the other half of the time he went super mayor on all of them: bursting with energy, revisiting plans and projects from months ago, remembering details and asking for revisions. Aides would scatter, the janitor sigh. Everyone stayed late, doubled their output. No one was safe when Ken revved his engine full speed.
One thing Ken never interfered with was Becky’s careful sorting of the mail. By now she’d been picking up Town Hall mail for years, letting everyone believe it was a kind of quirk, part of her rock-solid morning routine: super-sized coffee at Smiley’s, post office as they were unlocking, pulling into her Town Hall spot by 9:30 latest. No one saw the essential step in between, where she culled the mail for any Midwest Credit Union or any other bank envelopes related to the Activity and swept them into an unmarked beat-up accordion file that lived under the passenger seat of her car. Currently she owed Pierson around three million. But holding steady! And she would close it, thanks to a plan in the works that would actually take advantage of the art market’s plunge and recovery.
Around this time Becky began to get up earlier and add more driving to her morning rounds. She liked it. She liked spiraling in widening circles through town, through the outskirts along Route 4, even picking up interstate connector 52 to go by one of the southeastern farms by the airport. In town she’d drop gears mid-turn, because she knew before it came into view how steep the hill on Nachusa was, or the way the pavement had tree-buckled on Brinton Ave by the river. She could do all of it, shift and decelerate and meet a stop sign with one perfect beat of motionlessness, before zooming on, while she sang along with Pam Tillis or Trisha Yearwood. Silently she’d run through a kind of tour monologue, touching on one house or the next, remembering for herself who used to live there and who before that, and what church they went to, and which kids had raised hell and where someone’s pickup had run right over someone else’s flower bed on which year’s July Fourth, make that early-morning July fifth.
As if someone else were in the car with her (no one else was ever in the car), hanging on her every word, the scandals and the sorrows. Becky peering above the steering wheel or craning her head back as the landscape flashed by. At times muttering questions and then correcting herself, occasionally laughing when she lit on a particularly juicy anecdote.
Every so often she’d wind up back at County Road M, pulling up in front, two wheels in the gully. Get out and stand against the open car door, arms and chin resting on the roof panel. The sun would be pushing up from the wide empty field across the roadway behind her, warming her shoulders and neck, glinting opaque off the farmhouse’s front windows.
On these drives she passed dozens of barns owned by neighbors and strangers: tall prairies, low milking, double level, hay door, livery style. How many, Becky wondered, still held mowers and seeders bought from her father?
Even parked directly in front of their property—her property, she still had to remind herself—she couldn’t get a sightline on her own barn. It pleased her to linger out front anyway, on those early mornings. Reassuring herself of what couldn’t be seen or known or even guessed at. Just another barn. After a few moments she’d tap her car, all right, so that’s that, one more errand ticked off the list. Time to pick up the mail and start the day’s work.
Jessa took Becky to the European fashion shows for two weeks at the end of February, 1997. Becky told Town Hall simply that she was on vacation out of the country—Ken was too frazzled to inquire much further, and in any case the office was getting used to Becky’s odd hours, often away for days at a time, then working straight through several weekends. To Ingrid, she told a closer version of the truth: Europe, with a friend who also liked art, on her dime.
They were in Milan for Gucci, McQueen, Margiela—plus a host of smaller group shows—and then went to Paris for Dior, Balenciaga, and a Comme des Garçons set that included otherworldly garments by Rei Kawakubo, stuffed in odd lumps and elongated in strange places, that seemed made for beings other than humans. Jessa grimaced and sighed throughout, but Becky was so entranced she had tears in her eyes.
“That show was ridiculous,” Jessa said crisply, over tea after. “Those clothes were a gimmick and anti-woman.” Jessa didn’t drink, not a drop, and not because she was in AA either. She just couldn’t stand the stuff and never had. So in Italy they sampled espresso in every hotel and café, and in Paris Jessa brought Becky to exquisite, jewel-box teahouses where they drank tisanes from paper-thin bone china.
“Don’t you wonder what they would feel like, though? To wear?” Becky’s head was still swirling: the model swathed in a fire-engine-red sheath with a pillow curving around her hip. The one in marigold with a stuffed tail!
“No, I do not. And I’d throw myself in front of you if you tried to buy something from that line.”
“Oh, buying,” Becky scoffed. You couldn’t actually buy those pieces. (Could you?)
In terms of buying, she mostly lived vicariously through Jessa, who came regularly to “the shows” and was one of those women who bought “for the season”—a series of shockingly well-made outfits for day and night, for every occasion. Becky followed her to fittings and showings and underwear measurements, she took deliveries at their hotels and hung bags on top of garment bags in her own closets when Jessa’s overflowed. She herself bought sparingly but expensively (it was impossible to buy other than expensively): a pair of softly gleaming McQueen boots that came to just above her knees; a Prada trench in muddy green; and a white pantsuit by Ann Demeulemeester that made her look, Jessa said, like an angel in a rock-and-roll band.
The other thing Becky liked about Jessa was that she never once tried to set her up. In fact, they rarely talked about love or sex at all, which was fine by Becky since those topics made her squirm. And she detected a slight pain in Jessa every time her husband came up, so she steered the conversation quickly away whenever that happened.
Midway across the ocean on their night flight from Paris, Becky woke next to Jessa frowning in sleep, shoulders hunched and arms tightly folded. She quietly unlocked her seat belt and reached into Jessa’s bag on the floor, then carefully draped the pashmina across the older woman. Jessa gave a breathy sigh and turned her head the other way.
Pierson High School’s track was a disgrace: pitted, torn up, hopelessly out of compliance with the sport association’s requirements. So on Memorial Day weekend, Becky led a twenty-four-hour relay to raise awareness and funds for the track team—after quietly seeding the initial $10,000 herself.
They had a good crowd throughout the day, and even the first part of the night went smo
othly: the teenagers loved running laps in the dark, hooting across the track, and chowing down on snacks in between turns. But as it got later, people slipped away. Flashlights dropped to the grass, the volunteer who was keeping track of laps on a borrowed whiteboard disappeared to the porta-potty and didn’t come back. Becky, fueled by coffee in a thermos, went around nudging drowsy teenagers in sleeping bags, cajoling parents who were over it, and—worst of all—taking turns with the baton herself. Huffing around the track at 3 am was not how she’d envisioned this night.
Luckily, by dawn some energy returned to their small group, thanks to reinforcements by parents and younger siblings who showed up with hot chocolate and boxes of doughnuts. The kids set up some quickie 4 x 100 relays, which sped things along. And as Becky had arranged, the local photographer came for the big finish at noon, complete with about half the school band (on summer practice hours), a bunch of donated hoagies and Gatorade, and a grateful speech by the high school track coach. All of it raised a couple thousand more for the leveling and resurfacing. They really needed a new set of stands too. So Becky would still quietly need to make up the difference later.
Still, it was good for morale. There would be a nice article and some great photos. And she even might have lost a couple pounds, given all that running. Becky lounged on the grass with an ice pack under her achy Achilles tendon, watching little kids race each other down the home stretch, straining like Olympians to break the tape.
In November 1997, Becky took $27,000. In December, $38,550. And in January 1998, she took $52,243.
Pierson’s deficit in 1997 ran to $532,000. Additional cuts the council announced over two budget seasons included Police Department K9 purchases ($6,000), Sewers and Sidewalks ($10,000), Fire Department radio equipment ($1,000), and the park cemetery ($2,000). The local swimming pool stayed dry for the third year in a row.
It couldn’t be helped. Still, it hurt Becky to see the blows Pierson kept taking, and in a bizarre way it hurt her when no one figured out what was going on. Did no one love this town the way she did? Enough to pay attention, to dig deep for answers? Every budget they didn’t investigate made her disappointed—angry, even—on their behalf.
She had created a series of private rules, a form of tithing. For every dollar she took, ten percent had to go back into the town in some way—through profits she made, or through her own personal account, or through time and energy and her own ingenuity. Also, if any of her acquired pieces shot up in value, ten percent of that had to go back into Pierson, even if she didn’t sell. (That was a killer, given the market rebound.) Whenever Ken had that look—that beaten-down look—she took on extra work to lighten his load, and she had to find a way to pass the credit on to someone else. Whenever a storefront closed on Main, she redirected all her spending to the other businesses on that street, buying unused tanning hours and all sorts of hardware products she didn’t need. At the end of every Friday she checked the total in RF Capital and whatever the cents number was—sixteen, ninety-four, thirty—that’s how many good deeds she had to do the following workweek for coworkers and neighbors. Compliments, advice, plum assignments, picking up tabs at restaurants and bars, even leaving anonymous bags of groceries on front porches.
But this piecemeal approach was nothing more than a finger in the dike, she knew. If she could only catch her breath and have some time to think, she could finish putting it together, the big plan—the major sale, the deal of all deals—that would let her pay it all back. New York, it was going to happen in New York. One fell swoop, and it would be over.
23
New York City
1999
Becky walked into Balthazar the biggest winner of the night, and everyone knew it. She’d arrived on the late side, half by design and half because of some consignor paperwork and conversations with officials at Christie’s. In the cab ride downtown from Rockefeller Center she’d had plenty of time to revel in her success and also to practice, in the darkened back seat, the exact faux-modest tilt of the head she’d execute as congratulations burst forth from all quarters of New York’s hottest restaurant.
Her entrance didn’t disappoint. One well-judged pause at the host stand allowed everyone in the bar to turn and see her: Reba Farwell, in a YSL black silk suit and four-inch Jimmy Choos, her shining red hair swept to the side and tumbling down to one shoulder. The art crowd was well into the night’s dissection of auction minutiae, and several people at the bar did, in fact, break out into light applause. Gratified, Becky waved them off. Quickly, the maître d’ ushered her toward the back of the room, where a large group buzzed anxiously around a table. She took her time, though, in that glorious walk across the golden-lit restaurant, lightly touching red leather banquettes as she passed them, glimpsing all the beautiful people doubled in burnished mirrors tipped from the walls. Heads turned, gazes lingered appreciatively, voices murmured. Becky soaked in every iota. She wanted that walk to last forever.
When Becky finally arrived at the table full of top dealers and collectors, Waverly Brant announced, “Holy shite-a-mighty, the conquering hero.” Her hoarse British accent lifted above the fray. “Now we know who gets the bill!”
People laughed and lifted their champagne glasses her way. One was thrust into Becky’s hand. Two young blondes gushed about her shoes, obliging her to lift a silky pant leg so they could get a better look. David and Joan, art advisers for Merrill, called out warm congratulations. Sebastian from that Luxembourg consultant firm, Gail and her husband (buyers from LA), and that one TV producer whose name Becky could never remember were all effusive with praise. Also crammed in their banquette area were dealers and collectors Becky knew by face but had never met, and some whom she recognized from the front section tonight at Christie’s. These people watched her curiously, half-smiling, not as effusive as Becky’s friends.
While she went through the double-kisses and breathless thank-yous and reciprocal compliments, Becky eyed out further into the room. Where were the other pockets, the more exclusive groups, the deeper sources of power? She thought she caught a few other potentials: smaller groupings, sedate, mostly male. Too secluded and far away for her to determine exactly who they were.
“You topped out over five hundred,” Waverly said, yanking Becky down to a seat next to her. “Did you or didn’t you?”
“Oh, well,” Becky demurred. You didn’t spill that easily, in front of this many people pretending not to listen.
“Six hundred? Did you make six hundred percent, you bloody bitch? Do I even want to fucking know?”
“You don’t want to fucking know,” Becky said, grinning. Her eight works tonight had each nearly doubled their reserve, and all had topped out far over the maximum estimate. She’d bought them in fall of 1990, at the market’s nadir, for about five hundred each. Given tonight’s nine hundred percent profit, and after the seller’s commission and various fees for things like transportation and insurance, Becky’s net tonight was just under three million dollars. It was going to set her free, that glorious sum. Pierson would get it all and her great and ongoing debt would be canceled.
As the champagne went around again, and their group swelled and thinned, the talk was mostly of the single mega sales, the O’Keeffe oil on board that went for nearly a million, the puzzlingly comparable two Robinson Leigh lots with wildly differing outcomes, and, of course, the night’s meteor moment, an Andrew Wyeth tempera that hammered at six million, three hundred thousand, after ten full minutes of agonized bidding. The room had erupted at that, of course.
Becky—no, she didn’t need a menu—took it all in and reflected gratefully that her own big night was carefully submerged under these standout moments. As usual, the urge to trumpet her successes from Lafayette Street to the goddamn Hudson River fought with the need to stay under the radar. This inner circle knew what it meant to resell at nearly one thousand percent and Becky had to be content with that, even if the conversation had by now flowed on to failed sales and who was slipping.
Plus, not everyone looked kindly on what she’d done tonight.
“I hadn’t realized you were collecting in Minimalism,” one acquaintance had said to her just as they were taking their seats at the auction. The woman had spoken pleasantly enough, but had leaned over to speak in a way that read as pointed. Becky’s lots, four paintings by Susan Tillman and four sketches by Tony Smith, stirred talk after Christie’s reproduced them in the catalogue and several preview reports had mentioned the “little known and unseen” works that added surprising fresh value to both artists’ oeuvres. The works were unseen because Becky had held them for nine years waiting for this peak moment. She’d bounced two checks in the process of buying them, but the dealers, so grateful at the time for any little pittance, let her scrape up the money and come back. Over the years she’d carefully monitored sales and figures for Minimalist work, she’d read articles and visited galleries and kept tallies of who was showing where. Often, she’d been tempted to break up the groups and sell the pieces separately, especially in the dicey years of building the Art Barn, when her bills threatened to swamp her. Once she’d even said yes to a particular offer for one of the Smiths, only to call it off the next day, raising the wrath of a pissed-off buyer who hadn’t done business with her since. But Becky ultimately heeded her inner call to wait, to hold on, to keep the pieces together. She was nothing if not tough and patient. (Also mutable and recklessly impulsive.)
If only Jessa were here tonight. The only one who’d known for some time what Becky was planning, she was off to St. John for most of the winter, though she’d had an orchid delivered to Becky’s hotel with an attached note reading “Git ’er done & then we celebrate.”
While Waverly told a long story about running into Jeff Koons’s ex-wife (and art partner, and former porn star) in a restaurant in Rome—most of them had heard this one before, many times—Becky scanned the room, then pretended to step away to check her phone for messages. If possible, the restaurant was even busier than an hour ago: waiters slid nimbly between tables, lifting high trays loaded with glassware. Women’s laughter rippled across the room, everyone hunched over giant plates of steak frites. Becky vaguely recognized one of the sleek petite stars of Sex and the City, a show she never watched and a phrase she found annoying. Also a musician, young and bald, whose electronica hits were all over the radio, even in Pierson. She caught the invisible glow around them, the hovering servers, the vibrating awareness of nearby diners.