The Talented Miss Farwell Page 19

  Becky took a roundabout way to the ladies’ room, all the better to see and be seen. The powder room was crammed, and after washing her hands Becky had to elbow her way to some mirror space. Annoyed at the way her jacket tugged at her arms when fixing her hair, she shrugged it off, to instant gasps and shrieks of approval from the row of women: As per the stylist’s firm instructions, Becky wore her YSL sheer blouse as designed—with no undergarments whatsoever. She laughed appreciatively and did a little shimmy in response, then, jacket on, she made herself go back to her group. A thread of disappointment unraveled—was this to be it, then? No one else to find? There had been talk of John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, and their people, coming tonight. But it appeared only the usuals were here. Had the evening’s peak already passed?

  Back with her rowdy group, Becky drank more and listened in and stewed. Darker thoughts began to descend: nine hundred percent profit was something, but why couldn’t it have been one thousand percent? One thousand percent, now that had a ring to it. Also, as far as she could tell, the buyers of her lots weren’t anyone of note, and the auctioneer had rushed to hammer on one of the Tillmans. Could have squeezed another ten percent for sure.

  She also had a shaky developing awareness that her windfall wouldn’t be enough to save Pierson. Not yet, not entirely. The cash she’d acquire in exactly thirty-five days, as stipulated in her consignor contract, would first take a brutal percentage hit for taxes, devastating no matter how good the deal. Next she’d have to take care of several of the Art Barn’s builders who had allowed her a line of credit, now long due. Also American Express Gold had called twice last week, which meant that the other cards were full and at their limit. She’d bought pieces on agreement, there were bills for shipping, and certainly half a dozen other pressing claims on the money. All of that took priority over Pierson, Becky realized. For her own safety.

  After that, what was going to be left? At the end of the last quarter, Pierson’s total deficit was at nearly three million dollars. Becky had imagined she’d plug so much back in from this win—carefully, strategically—that she could bring them up to even.

  For some time a woman’s voice had been building, over and above the restaurant’s din. Becky became aware of it only when she realized the woman was talking to her. Or at her. Shouting, almost, in a half-laughing way that bordered on hysterical: “And she just sits there, la di da, acting like nothing. Like nothing!”

  Becky stared up in shock. “I’m sorry, do I—”

  The woman was in her late fifties, well dressed but clearly drunk. Red-faced and wet-mouthed. Pushing back at friends who were desperately trying to tug her away. “What did you want with those pieces? You flipped them without a—”

  A male companion took the woman’s arm, spoke sternly close to her ear.

  “I don’t care. I don’t care!”

  “Oh dear,” Waverly murmured.

  One of the woman’s friends leaned past the fracas to whisper to Becky. “One of her good good friends owned Madeabout Gallery, where you bought the Tillmans. They closed the next year. Anyway, I’m very—”

  “I didn’t flip anything!” Becky said this first to the woman accosting her, and then to the table at large. “Those pieces—”

  “Don’t explain yourself,” Waverly exclaimed. “Piss off now, darling.”

  “I hope you’re happy with yourself,” the drunken woman spat. Some people laughed.

  The maître d’ arrived, the woman was drawn away by her friends, and Becky tried to calm her thudding heart.

  “Bye bye,” Waverly sang. A sympathetic stranger leaned over to ask Becky if she was all right. The maître d’ came over to apologize. I’m fine. Please, it’s fine. How had her triumphant night gone awry? Everyone was now staring at her, but for the wrong reasons.

  After a few jokes—That lady had forty pounds on our Reba, it wouldn’t have gone one round!—people moved on. The party swallowed up the moment and soon it seemed as if it had never happened.

  Except Becky felt she sensed a change. No longer was her group waiting for her comments, response, insight on whatever the topic was. They’d split apart into twos and threes, gathering on the bench or standing nearby. Were they talking about her? Were they reflecting that she had, in fact, flipped those works in an ugly way? That she was a speculator, an investor? Or worst, an outsider.

  “Horseshit.” This from grizzled Jimmy Roth, who dragged a chair up to her. “Hope you weren’t taking any of that seriously.”

  “No, I don’t think so. But—”

  “Nobody likes that kind of resale profit. Doesn’t look good for everyone who came before. Don’t worry if you get the cold shoulder. They’ll come back around.”

  “All right,” Becky said uneasily. Who did he mean by they?

  “I gotta push off. But I’ll call you, next week. Couple ideas we can maybe get together on. Will you be back at Christie’s next month for the Continental silver? I’m hearing a lot of talk about the preview. Why don’t we take a stroll through it, put our heads together on a few offers?”

  “Continental silver. That’s . . . antiques.”

  “Bet your ass it is. Furniture and decorative arts, that’s where the real money is. If you know what you’re about. I’ll call you.”

  Jimmy Roth patted Becky on the shoulder and snaked his way out of the restaurant. For some time Becky couldn’t move. He thought she wanted to buy and sell turn-of-the-century tea services. Snuff boxes. Grapefruit spoons.

  When she came to herself Waverly was gone and the table was filled by people she didn’t know. Becky caught herself tearing up, woozy from lack of sleep and all the champagne. And from hunger; she hadn’t eaten all day. Not a single entrée had come for this table, which didn’t surprise her; she knew that power move of never eating in front of people you did business with. She’d used it a hundred times, showing up for lunches and asking only for water with lemon.

  “Excuse me,” she called sharply, stopping a waiter in his tracks. “Menu, please. And can you lay a place setting . . . there.” She pointed to a round corner table with a view out the window.

  As soon as she was resettled, water and silverware, a fresh napkin snapped out and laid on her lap, Becky began to place her order. First she wanted to hear about the oysters, Blue Point and West Point and Du Jour. Half a dozen, please, with an icy martini, gin, twist.

  Out on Spring Street couples passed by, going east, going west. A man lounged against the bodega and smoked cigarette after cigarette. People came up from the subway stop, went down into the subway stop.

  Becky ordered wine, ordered salad, ordered the braised short ribs. She cut careful bites and chewed slowly. She had cheese with the last of her wine and a glass of Muscat with her caramelized banana ricotta tart.

  She paid the check and added a thirty percent tip. And then she stood, took off her jacket, and walked the length of the restaurant in her see-through blouse, nipples hard against the soft sheer fabric.

  Outside in the windy New York night, she reluctantly put her jacket back on. In the restaurant’s small foyer had been a basket with cellophane-wrapped cookies and she’d rifled through to find the best-looking one. She planned to eat it in the cab.

  24

  Pierson

  2000

  “This is for flats,” Becky told a middle-schooler, yanking away the bin before the girl could dump in an armload of buckled low-heel loafers that someone should have purged from her closet a decade ago. “Don’t you know what flats are?”

  “They’re like party shoes?”

  “They are not ‘like’ party shoes, you mean they are a type of party shoe. But flat! These have a heel.” Becky took away one of the girl’s horrible old-lady loafers to show her. “And they’re not party shoes. Put them in women’s casual.” She pointed with her elbow to a table across the room.

  Ingrid looked up from a mountain of tangled dirty sneakers. “Pretty sure we don’t have to subdivide by kingdom, phylum, species.”
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  “If we do this, we’re doing it right.” It was a gloomy October Saturday, their second year organizing the Sole2Sole shoe donation drive, and both Becky and Ingrid only now remembered why last year they’d sworn not to do this event again. A low-level smell filled the church basement, made worse by the humid rain smacking at the few and ancient windows. Ingrid had brought muffins, but even the kids turned them down. Senior citizens and PTA moms grimly dumped out box after box of used shoes into a growing hill in the middle of the room.

  TJ whirled from bin to bin, carrying one light-up sneaker protectively. As he came close to Becky she fished around in the sneaker bin, found the matching shoe and held it out to him. TJ took it with a grin that made Becky reflexively smile back.

  Becky felt uncharacteristically lighthearted. Last year’s Christie’s money was long gone. Had flown away with startling rapidity. Still, after taking care of the expenses she couldn’t put off, she’d had 75K to slip into the pension fund to make her feel, if not clean or absolved, at least a little bit better. Now she was back to basics on a smaller scale: take some, buy and sell some, plug some back in where she could. Keeping it tight to the line.

  Which reminded her, all day yesterday she’d meant to drive into Chicago, pick up a check that would cover what was a pretty ugly hole in the town’s Operations account. An oversight. She wasn’t usually sloppy. But with the shoe drive, one thing and then another kept popping up at the office and she hadn’t been able to sneak away. It would have to be next week. She could drive up Monday, get the check deposited before Tuesday’s finance meeting.

  “Five o’clock, okay?” Ingrid said, more cheerful than the host of a nine-year-old girl’s surprise sleepover should be. “You promise? Neil’ll be wrangling the grill and what are the odds this sketchy magician shows up shit-faced. Oops.” She glanced at a nearby retiree. “I really need help with the food. And the favor bags. And the games.”

  “Isn’t Rachel too old for a magician?”

  Ingrid yanked one Velcroed tennis shoe unstuck from its mate. “I don’t think some rent-a-clown is going to knock her socks off, but it’s the best I could do. With all that’s going on, I want to make her feel special.”

  “Makes sense.” Becky snapped a plastic lid onto a box filled with sorted shoes, hoping Ingrid wouldn’t trip into the latest in the school funding saga. Most of the other families Ingrid had joined up with this time weren’t even from Pierson! Ingrid had a knack for borrowing other people’s troubles.

  “Wait a minute. You brought these, didn’t you?” Ingrid held up a pair of high heels and waved them at her. She had recently taken up knitting—it’s supposed to be soothing, she said, for fuck’s sake—and now went everywhere festooned in an acrylic scarf, no matter that it hadn’t dropped below fifty degrees yet and most people still had potted plants outside. Today’s scarf was extra-long, brown and cream, made with a loose sort of weave, so that the whole thing resembled a fisherman’s net tossed over her friend’s soft rounded body.

  “These aren’t even worn, you dummy,” Ingrid said, examining the slingback Manolos. “They must have cost, what, two hundred?”

  “Hardly,” Becky said, walking around the echoing gym to flip on the hulking fluorescents. She’d paid four hundred ninety, retail. “They’re duds, they pinch.”

  “Take them to the consignment place!”

  “Should we have people start on the—” But when she turned around Ingrid had put the shoes on and was stepping around in circles to show off, arms outstretched, chinos pulled up over her knees. She danced up close to Becky, swinging the end of her scarf around in circles, and started singing the intro to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

  “Come on,” Becky said, but Ingrid lassoed her with the scarf and now they were bumping together in a silly grinding way, Ingrid laughing each time she toppled off a heel. Others were watching with smiles. Becky looked down and saw her friend’s sturdy calves, carefully shaved below her rolled-up khakis, a faint green line roping down behind a knee. Varicose veins, brought on by Ingrid’s new double shifts at the horrible giant Polish place out on 52, where one table of cheap old biddies could keep her running for ice, butter, lemons, and then tip less than ten percent. Becky could murder every one. But Ingrid was sweet to them, helping one lady to her car, chasing after another with her forgotten pierogis.

  This big dummy. Becky’s eyes filled, and in horror she gave Ingrid a hard hug. Ingrid, surprised, hugged her back, and then when Becky released her Ingrid took off the heels and rolled down her pants, and soon they were back to sorting piles.

  After a while another volunteer mom strolled over, coffee in hand, to lean a hip against Ingrid’s table and chat. While she and Ingrid talked about a school event or maybe a party Becky hadn’t been invited to, not that she would have wanted to go, Becky pretended to be absorbed in her mound of shoes while subtly studying Ingrid.

  “And then with the long weekend, we were going to drive up to Kevin’s parents’ place in Waukegan, but Sarah has a fever, so—”

  Becky hoisted the box of shoes. “What long weekend?”

  The other mom, whose lips were lined two shades too dark for her lipstick, glanced over with visible distaste. “Columbus Day,” she said flatly. “Just when they get into a routine at school, the holidays start.”

  Ingrid nodded sympathetically.

  “Columbus Day?” Becky’s brain and speech couldn’t catch up.

  “Monday,” the mom said. “Aren’t you all closed, at Town Hall?”

  “No. Yes.” How had she not known? It all clicked into place, the half-heard comments she hadn’t bothered to pay attention to: Ken’s annual fishing trip with a childhood friend; Mrs. Fletcher’s “see you in a few” instead of her customary grumbling about Monday coming soon enough. Sheena asking what plans Ms. Farwell had for the weekend. “Shoe drive,” she’d muttered, thinking it was a bit much how underlings wanted to know everyone’s plans. When she’d started at Town Hall you didn’t even let on you knew your superiors had weekends, let alone breezily chat about what they were doing with them.

  But Monday couldn’t be Columbus Day, because that meant a bank holiday. And if Monday was a bank holiday, the check she had planned to deposit first thing—the check she wouldn’t have until late tomorrow—wouldn’t transfer through the accounts to hit the city’s Operations fund before Ken carefully reviewed it for their 10 am finances meeting. She needed Monday. She’d counted on Monday!

  It was 8:51 am.

  Becky started sorting shoes in double time. She heard nothing from the moving lips of Ingrid and the other mom, she didn’t even hear herself explain the sorting system to the new volunteers. She counted shoes, stacked boxes, fixed a broken packing tape dispenser one of the kids handed her, but all the while a calm and desperate reckoning took place behind her eyes. Hours, mileage, dollars; what she’d say, do, wear. The instant all of that slotted into place, a plan with a hair-thin margin of success, she began to move.

  “I got to be somewhere,” she called, running past a stunned Ingrid, slowing only to grab up the pair of Manolos, her Manolos, for her wild flight to the car.

  “What? What?”

  “I’ll call you!”

  It was 8:59 when she hit the gas in the church parking lot.

  10:42. Becky’s face against the glass door of the Stemen Gallery in River North, Chicago. open at 11 read the sign, but surely someone must be in there somewhere, in the back office? She’d never had to pee worse in her life.

  10:43. Caught sight of a police officer writing her a ticket across the street. Ran back to the car, disagreed vehemently about whether four inches of bumper sticking out into a tow zone really mattered—her damn flashers were on!—but ended up with a ticket for $140 and a stern order to move the vehicle, now.

  10:56. Circled the block three times before finding a spot on Randolph around the corner. Ran back to Stemen, Manolos on cobblestones, to find the gallery girl balancing a giant mocha latte while unlocking the door.
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  11:14. Argued with the gallery girl—after politely requesting the employee restroom—about the status of her account, her need for a check today—now—and whether it was possible to call the owner, yes, at this very moment, which was definitely not “the crack of dawn.”

  11:36. Finalized negotiations with the owner, trading a painful and outrageous fifteen percent cut on what she was owed for the ability to take a check now. Gallery girl took revenge by pausing midway to give detailed directions to a lost delivery guy who poked his head in, looking for a furniture store that used to share the building.

  11:41. Ripped another ticket from the windshield, this one for not feeding the meter, $65, and drove ten blocks in the wrong direction trying to find the entrance to 209 West.

  12:07. Inched up to seventy-five miles per hour, eyes locked on the roadway. One cop going the opposite direction near DeKalb sent her back down to sixty-nine. Fingers of sweat formed under her hair and collar and there was a tightening cinch around her middle rib cage imagining Ken’s puzzled smile, Tuesday before the financials meeting, when he was unable to square the account’s discrepancy.

  12:51. She did it! Sauk Valley Credit Union, a majestically squat beige standalone, with all the free parking one could want in the mall’s lot behind. But inside, check in hand, Becky got flattened. “Oh no, I’m sorry,” the teller said. “The branch manager already left for the day and we’re just finishing up the—”