The Talented Miss Farwell Page 22

  $5,000

  Donation, Arts for All (J. Scanfield)

  May 29, 2006

  $19,000

  Corn (c. 1935), Grant Wood, 9 1/2" by 7 1/2", graphite on paper, private sale (J. Scanfield.)

  Jessa’s husband left her in February for a trust-funded preschool teacher who was twenty-eight years old. “I’m lucky,” she said, “that he managed to hold it to that. Just one decade older than our son, maybe that was his red line.”

  Becky heard the anger and fear behind the statement, though. She tried to be chipper about it—Jessa would be better off! Hadn’t this been kind of what she’d wanted, after all?

  It turned out that this was not at all what Jessa had wanted. Her phone calls from New York turned desperate, agonized, especially once things turned ugly and public, with the husband screwing her from real estate to custody to assets. Becky, full of distaste for all things emotionally dramatic, kept trying to offer concrete solutions when it seemed like all Jessa wanted was to unload her fear and pain. That’s what your Upper East Side friends are for, Becky wanted to say but didn’t. Because one by one these society matrons edged away from Jessa too, afraid to take sides. Soon Becky heard that Jessa was struggling, whatever that meant in New York society, and couldn’t keep up with her many social obligations.

  “Thank you, darling. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

  “It’s nothing.” Becky held her cell phone between shoulder and chin, sorting papers at her desk in Town Hall. She’d purchased a table for some fundraiser Jessa was connected to and had hoped it would pass unnoticed, but Jessa had found out, had called to thank her. Becky mm-hmmed through a long story about this charity’s board members icing Jessa out at the last meeting, and then another about how the ex-husband was getting married in some bullshit barefoot-on-the-sand island wedding and any minute now Jessa expected to hear that her sons would have a new baby half-sibling.

  “So anyway, I can’t wait,” Jessa finally wrapped up. “Don’t even think about a hotel. We’ll stay up late and eat all the calories afterward and I promise I won’t make you talk to a single person not at your table.”

  What? Oh. “Actually, I can’t make it in.” When Jessa didn’t respond, Becky hurried on, “I’m swamped next week, I’m completely swamped. But you know Julie Vrettos, right? Multimedia, won the . . . whatever it’s called, the grant from Dia. She’ll bring a great group, I’m sure. Liven up the thing, that’s for sure!”

  Becky hoped Julie’s friends would keep it relatively tame for Jessa. Julie herself seemed tame enough—brainy, quiet, conceptual. Becky had been supporting her for less than a year. But who knew what kind of hangers-on she might round up for free food and booze.

  “Oh, of course. Of course, darling.” Why was her voice so tinny and small?

  “I’ll call Julie tonight. I’ll tell her absolutely no drugs and no drama. And if I even hear one word about—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jessa said, now crisp and loud. “That doesn’t matter at all.”

  Soon, Jessa had to put her apartment up for sale. Becky watched through the industry news and gossip as she began to sell off piece after piece of her collection, even her beloved Regionalists. Becky continued to write checks whenever she found a charity Jessa sponsored, but the only thing she heard from Jessa was a prompt polite thank-you on a thick creamy notecard.

  Becky waited to see what would happen with it, waited as long as she could, and then offered aggressively on the Wood. Corn was a piece she knew Jessa loved dearly, was one of the first she’d owned, had planned to give her son. Becky offered again, and again. She saw through the sales reports how Jessa’s collection was decimated, scattered piece by piece in a way that made her cringe. The numbers alone told how bad things were; Jessa was selling everything she could. Except for a few holdouts, including Corn.

  When Jessa finally agreed to sell she had a broker finalize the transaction, and Becky paid less than half of what the piece could have brought in over time, through a proper auction.

  Becky arranged to pick the piece up a month later, when she was in New York. At Jessa’s Upper East Side building, a young woman let her in, not Jessa (as Becky had hoped and feared) or either of her children (as she’d dreaded). The girl, harried and in dusty jeans, was overseeing movers, the screech of a tape dispenser echoing through the bare halls. She had Becky initial the purchase agreement and handed the piece over, tired, no flourish.

  “Can I say hi?” Becky asked tentatively. “Is she in?”

  “She’s in Florida,” the girl said. “I’ll text her you were here.”

  Becky nodded slowly. She took in the apartment’s empty walls. “Are the other works—the art, I mean . . . have they all been sold?”

  The girl held her gaze evenly. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Becky took her cue and left.

  In the elevator she untaped the cardboard envelope and peered in at the piece. Plain, dry, but strong. She didn’t love it. She could maybe conjure up admiration. But she owned two graphite realistic pieces exactly this size depicting wheat and soybean plants (by nobodies) so to complete the set she needed corn. If it had to be this one, it had to be this one, no matter how overpriced, given Wood’s name value.

  Surely Jessa would understand. If she could only see the three perfectly matched pieces hanging in Becky’s Art Barn . . . a barn, after all. Grant Wood himself would have appreciated that.

  “Ma’am?”

  Becky realized the elevator had reached the lobby; the doorman was waiting for her to exit. She sorted quickly through the torn wrapping, the tape, looking for something from Jessa—a note, her signature, even one of those fancy notecards with a scribbled “Fuck you.” But there was nothing, only the art.

  Date

  Paid

  Notes

  April 9, 2008

  $13,500

  Pierson Junior/Senior Prom

  $15.90

  Smoothie King (Ingrid)

  Becky was on a karma high. Neither the school nor Town Hall had any idea that this year’s prom would have been impossible if she hadn’t covered it. Somehow they fell for yet another I juggled the accounts to find extra—which amazed her, because if anyone had the slightest inkling of how much these vendors charged, they’d never believe Town Hall could fund what she pulled off. More likely, they were all too grateful to closely examine what went into prom.

  Becky didn’t care. She wanted to do this for Pierson, dammit. Every outrageously overpriced item—even mediocre DJs made a killing this time of year—Becky happily took care of out of her own secret funds. Real flower displays? Sure. Laser light show? Absolutely. Giant piñata filled with candy and prom 2008 spelled out in green and white, above a plastic rendering of a Pierson Pirate? Hell yes. The best part was cutting ticket prices—both individual and couple!—by fifty percent, ensuring that about twice as many kids got to go.

  The Monday after the dance Becky was dying to hear how it went. She drove to Ingrid’s around lunchtime and leaned on the doorbell with extra zest.

  “What?” came a crabby shout from inside. When Ingrid opened the door, wearing fuzzy slipper–style boots and a hooded sweatshirt, she said, “Oh. Hi. Come in, I guess.”

  “Good day to you too, Mrs. Yesko.”

  “Don’t mess with me, I’m having a day.” Ingrid dropped onto the lower step of her staircase and put her forehead on her knees. Loud TV noises came from up above. “There was a mix-up with TJ’s caregiver schedule so Roz didn’t show this morning, so now I can’t take my mom to the hair appointment I said I’d take her to, plus I said we could run her errands after, and I have to get to the store myself, we barely have any food in the house . . .” She raised her head. “What are you doing now?”

  “Me?” Becky hadn’t gone to sleep yet, after many hours of calls to Tokyo and Hong Kong, followed by paperwork in the Art Barn. Nothing on her schedule at Town Hall until 3 pm.

  “Forget it.”

 
; “No! I mean, yes, of course. What’s the plan?”

  Several hours later they were still on the road, having crisscrossed town four times already. When Ingrid had laid out the itinerary—hair appointment for her mother, Costco out on Route 9, TJ’s physical therapy—she meant to drive them all in her minivan. But Becky quickly convinced her that it would be more efficient for her to be the chauffeur while Ingrid did the shopping and ushering. (She also couldn’t bear the idea of Ingrid’s stained crumby van interior.) Fine, Ingrid said, tiredly.

  Becky quite liked chatting with Mrs. Beanton, even if she had to shout over her shoulder at the little old lady buckled up in the back. And TJ was easy as long as he had his music and headphones. By early afternoon they had returned Mrs. Beanton to her home, unloaded the groceries, and dropped TJ at his appointment at a therapy center in a strip mall on Gregerson Avenue.

  Before Ingrid could get back into the car, Becky jumped out. “Want to get some lunch? My treat.”

  “It’s almost two,” Ingrid said.

  “Coffee, then.”

  “We’ve been drinking coffee all day.” It was true. They’d gone through the Dunkin drive-through twice.

  Becky scanned the strip mall. “Smoothie King?”

  Ingrid shrugged. “They’re basically milkshakes, but whatever.”

  She perked up a few inches into her Strawberry Kiwi Breezy Blast with a Wellness Shot. Becky had the same thing except with an Awake Shot. They sucked out of the giant plastic cups and strolled under the dripping awning that ran alongside the storefronts, Kay Jewelers, Frum’s Cosmetic Dentistry, a copy center.

  Finally Becky had a chance to ask the question she’d come over to ask in the first place. “How was Rachel’s time at prom?”

  Ingrid snorted. “That girl is grounded for the next two weeks and if she even looks at me wrong I’ll double it. She got dropped home at one am by some boyfriend on the baseball team. No phone call, no nothing. We specifically said—”

  “Right, but how was the dance?”

  “I get it, she’s got a rough deal in the family with all the attention going to—” Ingrid nodded her head toward the therapy clinic as if TJ could hear them. “But this acting out! It’s a bad teen movie cliché! You should have heard what she muttered when her dad said she smelled like beer.”

  “Did the DJ do the thing where he—”

  “Becky! I have no idea about the damn prom. I’ve been coughing for ten days, we got some crazy letter from a creditor when I know I paid that bill, I have the carbon check copy, and now my daughter probably lost her virginity in the back seat to some JV shitbox who plays second base.”

  Becky took a deep breath and refused to allow herself to make the obvious second base joke. “Sorry. I know how much you have going on.” Her tired friend. No amount of prom magic could erase those faint purple shadows under Ingrid’s eyes.

  Ingrid tossed her near-empty smoothie cup into a metal garbage can. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been so nice and I took up your whole morning. It’s just . . .” She waved her hand at the therapy center. “I better get in there to check in with his team.”

  Twenty minutes later Becky was nodding off in her front seat. The rain had stopped and a gray fog had rolled in. George Strait’s new mega-single “I Saw God Today” woke her up. She wondered if Ingrid thought it was too cheesy or if it got to her the way it was getting to Becky, annoyingly enough. She changed the station.

  TJ emerged and stopped right in the doorway. Not wearing his headphones. Stubborn and grouchy in his baggy sweatshirt. From this distance he looked like a regular eighteen-year-old kid out for errands with his mother. But then he wouldn’t move. Becky watched as Ingrid slipped past him in the doorway, motioned to him, coaxed him to keep going even as he stonewalled her, began to flap one hand against his thigh.

  Was that Anne Murray on the radio? Becky straightened up. You never heard her anymore. This must be a new version of her cover of the Beatles’ “You Won’t See Me”; another woman’s voice was alternating on the verses, aching and smoky. Who was that? Ingrid would know. They’d had a love-hate relationship with “Harmony” when it came out. Becky remembered Ingrid sobbing through embarrassed laughter during “It Happens All The Time.”

  She lowered the window. Ingrid had both hands in TJ’s, talking to him calmly, occasionally touching the side of his face.

  Becky turned up the volume, hoping that her friend could hear it.

  Ingrid paid no attention. She took baby steps backward, softly leading TJ down the sidewalk in a slow moving dance.

  Date

  Received

  Notes

  September 29, 2008

  $4,500

  Community grounds maintenance, annual

  $6,080

  Streetlight reinstallation

  $980

  Computer equipment

  Becky leaned into Ken’s office doorway. “Ready when you are.” They had an 11:30 with Accounts Payable.

  “You following this?” he asked, so she wandered over to peer at the Tribune homepage on his computer.

  “People get so worked up over these debates. Anyone in government can get up there and spout sound bites.” Plus, Obama was going to win. She knew it, everyone knew it. There were plenty of McCain supporters in town—she saw the yard signs when driving her routes—but the groundswell of excitement for their Illinois rep dominated nearly every discussion in Pierson.

  “No, I mean the Lehman stuff. The fallout. They’re saying it’s the largest bankruptcy filing in US history.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s a shitshow all right,” Becky said cheerfully. She hated when he went into a mope. It’s true her art world colleagues batted around fears about the Dow plunge and mortgage-backed securities—probably some of them had even been at Lehman’s!—but most of Pierson probably still had their money in treasury bonds and savings accounts with interest rates in the low single digits. If not under their mattresses.

  “That’s the tipping point for me.” Ken swiveled away from the computer with force. Maybe it wasn’t a mope after all. “I put in that call to the lawyer. If this thing gets worse, and all signs point to that, we can’t be late to the show.”

  Becky stepped back. Shit. This couldn’t happen. First because the whole thing was preposterous—no matter what outlier cases you could dig up, no court would realistically let them go forward with a claim to bankruptcy protection. But also it couldn’t happen because . . . she would be exposed! The mere thought of a lawyer requesting back copies of her files and budgets and accounts made Becky’s breathing speed up.

  She kept her tone light. “You’re saying we should try filing for bankruptcy, our fifteen-thousand-person municipality, because . . . a multibillion-dollar global financial firm might suck up all the available funds?”

  “One bank or business will trigger the next, will trigger the next. It’s a game of mousetrap, and everything’s connected. The courts will be overloaded, the public will turn against the very mention of bankruptcy—if we have any chance, we have to do it now.”

  “I don’t think the council will—”

  Ken waved that away irritably. “We won’t tell them anything until we know it’s possible. Until there’s a plan in place.”

  So his mind was made up. Okay. Okay, she would handle this. Becky edged back toward the door and made a show of checking her watch.

  “Let’s circle back to this. I’ll do some asking around. Quietly, of course.”

  Ken nodded. They left together for the conference room and while Ken was quiet—resigned, determined—Becky’s mind sped ahead with calculations. She’d research municipality filings right away—and there were at least three art world lawyers she could ask for confidential advice. She’d get ahead of it like she always did, through hard work and hustle. When threatened, Becky had learned to move toward the danger.

  29

  Pierson

  2009

  Ken took up distance running in a serious
way the year that he and Becky tried to file for civic bankruptcy. They traveled to Springfield together a dozen times in the summer of 2009, and his routine became rock solid: upon Sunday night arrival at the Hampton Inn and Suites on Chuckwagon Drive—a name that stopped being amusing after three or so visits—he’d toss his bags in his room, change into exercise clothes, and hit the treadmill in the gym. (Becky learned to hide in her own room during this part, after catching sight of Ken in his short shorts and soaked T-shirt one too many times.) Monday morning he’d be up and out before dawn, jogging along the paved bike paths. In the car to and from their meetings downtown and on the Monday afternoon drive home Becky heard way too much about periodized training, heel striking, and—the worst, of course—hamstrings. How could anyone say that word without flinching with disgust?

  Ken joined the Pierson Pacers, an unofficial trail running club whose off-roading excursions on Saturday mornings always finished up at Marty’s Grill for steak and eggs. He took to stretching during meetings, streaming European cross-country meets on his computer, and wearing a giant gadget watch that recorded his every step, breath, ounce of weight. If asked what prompted all this running, Ken would slap at his middle—Becky saw him do this bit a hundred times—and make a joke about middle-age flab. In truth Mayor Ken Doll only grew more good-looking into his forties, as the silver-gray spread around his temples and the lines crinkled along his smooth forehead and the corners of his mouth. Becky, who compulsively tracked her own gray every morning and night, who spent hundreds every month on rinses and highlights, whose skincare routine involved sonic brushes and microdermabrasion and eye creams made from goat semen, found it infuriating.

  Privately, all the secretaries worried about Ken’s stress levels. They said among themselves that he was approaching Kenyan marathoner commitment, and that couldn’t be good for a weekend warrior with a family.