The Talented Miss Farwell Read online

  “Ken,” Becky said low.

  “Our figures show—”

  “And I’m telling you, there are no stop signs on our beltway roads, and it’s a safety issue we’ve brought up time and time again. One of the many safety issues . . . What?” This was to Becky, who was standing now, close to his chair.

  “Do you need a copy of this?” Hugh said, confused. Looking back and forth between them.

  “No,” Becky said smoothly. The main thing was to get Ken out of the room. “We’re good. We always appreciate any funds we can get, Representative.”

  Ken stared at her. She had to physically steer him out of the conference room, his body heavy and slack with confusion.

  “I’ll let you two get your stories straight,” Hugh called after them, chuckling. “Always nice to visit, though!”

  Somewhere between the conference room and the car he figured it out. “Fifty-eight hundred,” he said.

  In Becky’s mind a voice screamed, Yes! Only fifty-eight hundred!

  “You processed that deposit.”

  “Okay. Look.”

  “Fifty-eight hundred. It never went into Roads. We went over those accounts at the council meeting, last one of the summer. I remember because you did a riff, you said—”

  “Listen, Ken—”

  “‘What did the stop sign say to the yield sign?’”

  Becky said nothing.

  “‘I don’t know,’” Ken recited slowly. “‘They were talking in sign language!’ It killed. Dumbest joke possible, and they all laughed. Then you told the one where, how does it go . . .”

  “Don’t. Let’s just talk for a minute.”

  “How does it fucking go, Becky!”

  She took a deep shaky breath. They were on the lower level of the parking lot. “A car slows down at a stop sign but doesn’t stop. A cop sees him and pulls him over. The cop says . . .”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “The cop says, ‘Why didn’t you stop?’ and the man says, ‘I slowed down, it’s the same thing.’ The cop starts beating him with his nightstick. ‘All right, so now tell me if you want me to stop or slow down.’”

  For a moment Ken just stood there staring at her. Becky held his gaze, nervously, but he only turned and walked fast to their car. Her car.

  “You drive,” Becky said. She handed him the keys, and pulled out her phone, hectically pressed buttons and the screen to load the bank website.

  Ken jerked them forward and sideways out of the lot’s turns and into the maze of streets hugging the capitol.

  “Here!” Becky held the phone up to him. “See the transfer here? Fifty-eight hundred, right now. It says pending but it will be through by, by, Wednesday morning. End of day tomorrow, maybe!”

  He wouldn’t look. Straining over the steering wheel, cursing the one-ways only she knew how to navigate.

  “It was a temporary thing. I just needed to cover . . . It will never happen again. Ken, you know I’m good for it. Ken! Where are you going?” They were heading the opposite direction from the highway entrance. Becky put her hand on the door handle. Was he taking her to the police station?

  “I need to go back to the hotel,” he said. Still wouldn’t look at her.

  “All right. All right. Good idea. We can talk it out. I can explain it, explain everything.”

  She tried to, a fast jumble of small truths and wide-ranging lies, a messy mix that came out nothing like the thousands of things she’d mentally rehearsed for a moment like this. (Although in all those practice scenarios she hadn’t pictured herself thrown around her own car in the passenger seat while Ken drove like a madman.) Yes, she had diverted those funds. She would never do something like that unless it was an absolute emergency and—yes, she had always meant to pay them back. And she had, right now! But honestly, would that $5,800 have made a dent in the access road nightmare? No! He had to know that. She’d known it and that’s why . . . She’d gotten in over her head. On a personal matter. An urgent personal matter. A mistake, she’d made a mistake. She would do anything to make this up to him. She’d double the repayment. She’d fund those signs herself! He had to know she’d do anything for Pierson, anything!

  As soon as Ken screeched into the Hampton Inn, he flung himself out of the car. Becky had to turn off the engine, take the keys. When she got into the lobby Ken was at the front desk, explaining he’d forgotten something in his room, could he have the key card back, so sorry about this. Because they were regulars, the woman behind the desk didn’t blink. Ken took off down the hall and Becky, grabbing her own key card, chased after him.

  “Ken! Wait a minute. Ken, please!”

  But he wouldn’t wait, he wouldn’t look at her. Slipped into his room and shut the door fast, in her face. Ignored her knocking, then her pounding. What was he doing? Was he calling the police? Should she try to run?

  Eventually she went into her own room and climbed onto the still-unmade bed. Huddled there, ear to the wall. Nothing for a long while, and then rustled movements she couldn’t parse. As soon as his door opened Becky sprang to her own door. Ken was disappearing down the hallway in his running clothes.

  Becky slowly backed into her room. A gaspy, panicky laugh, relief, bubbled up in her. He was going for a run! The police weren’t on the way if he was going for a run! She walked from the window to the bathroom alcove, and around the bed. Playing it out in her mind. He knew she took the money, he saw she returned it, and he was now out for a run.

  Ken wouldn’t turn her in. He couldn’t because—according to his own moral calculus, which she knew almost as well as her own—he’d done wrong too. That night on the hotel grass, the way he’d leaned down and kissed her. He’d crossed a line, presumed too much. If he pulled the trigger, pressed charges, Becky knew Ken wouldn’t be able to withstand all of the public fallout for her crime—her fifty-eight-hundred-dollar crime!—without also remembering his own misdeed. He might even convince himself that one had led to the other. And even if she never told anyone what he’d done, especially if she never told anyone, the fact of his leaning down and kissing her would drive him crazy with self-loathing.

  When Ken got back from his run, Becky came out to the lobby and saw him slow to a stop in the parking lot. She raised an arm and after a moment, he returned her wave. Acknowledged her.

  Right then, Becky swore to herself—the only person who mattered—that she would find a way to pay it back. This couldn’t go on much longer. She was forty-four. Ken had had his glimpse. She would need to be more careful now than she ever had been. But she would make it right, for Ken, for Ingrid, for Pierson.

  If she got this last set of paintings, she would have enough. And as soon as she had enough, she’d dismantle everything and pour all the money back.

  30

  Pierson

  2011

  In the last phase, Becky worked harder than she’d ever worked before. She had two extra phone lines put in at the farmhouse, and the international deals had her up at all hours of the night, as she sold and traded endlessly in order to finance what she hoped would be her final big buys. In the Art Barn she had put together completed sets of works that focused on method and mode: preliminary sketches in graphite, in crayon, in ballpoint. She had sets defined by genre and image and era: every photorealist painting of a seated older woman who was a relative of the artist, completed in the year 1999. Textile wall hangings but only single-color by heterosexual male artists of the American South.

  Becky had lived for the intensity of these searches, one-upping herself for every challenge she set. So much mental effort, so many variables to consider, so many hours and hours of research and phone calls and bids and failed bids and reversals and . . .

  Sometimes she’d drive home from Town Hall in the middle of the workday, dizzy from fatigue, and fall hard asleep for an hour or more, shoes on, keys in the door. She ate three-course meals before dawn, drank four pots of coffee a day, and lost all sense of when a bowel movement might occur. A
lthough her mind stayed sharp, the toll was taken on her skin: dermatologist after dermatologist couldn’t cure the hives on her throat, the rosacea behind her knees, the delicate rash in the folds of her eyelids. Though meticulous facials and pricy skin creams meant she could hide most anything. Sometimes, clumps of red hair would come out in the shower, and that did scare her into a week or two of vitamins, brisk morning walks, spinach in her salads.

  The chest pain, though, was what worried her the most, and therefore what she paid attention to the least. Others noticed, she could tell, when a wince seized her, cut her off mid-sentence. She took to knocking her sternum with a fist, shaking a bottle of Tums, which allowed people to commiserate about acid reflux. But it wasn’t acid reflux.

  Becky had come around to panic attacks in theory except—this was the weird part—now the pain in her chest sometimes started as a poker in her back, or a burning low sore throat. Her bad thoughts and feelings about getting caught, more frequent than ever since Ken caught her in Springfield, only sometimes overlapped with these pains. One type of distress might set off the other, or might occur a few hours later, and who could tell how, or if, they were related? Terror and chest pain chased each other night into day, day into night.

  It was brilliant, what she’d made in the Art Barn, even if no one else would ever know. But it was time, more than time, to give it up. All she had to do was complete this last project. Complete the completing.

  Miles Green, Self-Portrait at the Docks, 18 by 20 inches, watercolor, 1934–1935. A young black man, staring out of the canvas, cigarette lodged in the right corner of his mouth, its single smoke plume obscuring one eye. The other eye leveled straight at the viewer, giving nothing away. Behind the man, washy gray water, green-brown hulk of a crate, slats of a pallet. Ambiguous time of day.

  Becky couldn’t stop thinking about it. Night and day, she saw the man—Miles, as she thought of him—with his back to the Delaware, smoking, daring anyone to come for him. She wanted this painting more than she’d ever wanted anything, even that Eric Fischl at her first Art Expo, even the Caitriona Molloy she’d screwed the Babies over for.

  For more than a year she hunted down the Green watercolor portraits, four of the five that existed. One by one she got her trophies, clearing a wall in the central room in the Barn to make way. There was much less interest in the watercolors than in Green’s later oil work, but this group had been surprisingly hard to find and buy. Two retired dealers (New York and Paris), an African-American literacy foundation in Georgia, and the provost of Howard University: each had owned their Green watercolor since purchase. Each transaction took months, for Becky to procure the right introductions, get to know the owners, travel to and from various cities during negotiation.

  Miles Green’s later work, the 1950s civil rights paintings, were wall-sized oils in museums around the world, action scenes of horrific violence and chaos: clashes between protestors and police, tear gas, dogs, water cannons spraying with a heavy brutal sting. These were canonized works. They were studied in art history, history, social studies, black studies, cultural studies. Green’s own story—son of Pennsylvania sharecroppers, self-taught while working as a postal carrier, worked his way into a long series of teaching appointments, met MLK, met RFK, loaned his images and time wherever they could help the movement, death by heart attack in 1981—cemented his reputation. The watercolor owners could ask what they wanted, and they did. She paid it.

  But the Docks portrait remained at large. This stupid, maddening square of canvas, this missing piece, wouldn’t let her go.

  Greta Dreiser, the director of Philadelphia’s American Museum, had declined to speak with Becky over and over, despite Becky calling in favors from every connection she knew they shared. When Ms. Dreiser finally consented to a phone call, she refused to answer any questions about Self-Portrait at the Docks: Why hadn’t it been on display in over a decade? Could the museum show the terms of purchase? What would it take for an offer to be considered? At this, Ms. Dreiser simply hung up the phone.

  The Green family was spread across the Eastern seaboard, and consisted of at least ten middle-aged sons and daughters from Miles’s three wives. Most—but not all—were involved in the Miles Green Foundation dedicated to managing the artist’s works, holdings, and rights issues. The foundation’s executives coolly informed Becky they had no comment on the terms of purchase for Docks and in any case they discouraged museum sales whenever possible. It was impossible to approach the matriarch, Miles’s widow: she was legendary for imperiousness, capriciousness, venom. And closely guarded by all her children. So Becky began to work her way through the Green siblings and grandchildren (writers, actors, one was an art director at ICP), traveling to New York, DC, Philadelphia, and the Connecticut suburbs at least nine times over a period of three months. She took them to dinner, to coffee, to baseball games. She learned their favorite foods, writers, their children’s names, pet peeves, schedules, college teams. It didn’t help that she was white, of course, while she tried to make inroads in these most elite black communities, but the Greens were familiar with the art world’s asks.

  She was absent from Pierson so much that a rumor started, which she didn’t discourage, that she had a new boyfriend somewhere out East. When she was in the office she watched Ken carefully, though it didn’t appear as though he meant to do anything different. He still ate lunch with her several times a week, sharing takeout in the conference room with anyone else who wanted to join them. She’d doubled down on all covert procedures, even making herself wait a long three weeks after Springfield before putting one dollar through the Activity. But she couldn’t wait longer than that, and carefully, slowly, and thoroughly she restarted the fake invoices and diverted funds.

  Corrine Green Garland, an exec at ColorComm, listened without judgment and said she had no interest in persuading American to sell any of her father’s work. Gregory Green, an orthopedist and professor of medicine in Philadelphia, gave Becky twenty minutes in between classes at Perelman, and laughed: I stay out of that as much as I can, nothing good can come from me in Berta’s business. Roberta Green had an assistant take Becky on a tour of the Green Foundation offices and gave a pro forma response that all museum holdings were to be treated under the original terms of sale. No, she would not care to hear Becky’s pitch. No, she did not care to meet to discuss further. Jim Green couldn’t be found; Freda Green Johnston was in the hospital from diabetes complications; Jan Green grew so suspicious of Becky she had a lawyer send a cease and desist.

  She sent flowers and made donations to charities. She slept with an ex-husband of one of the daughters even as she doubted his shady claims of influence at the Foundation. Becky knew she was pushing all the limits: she’d sold off as many other items as she could to fund this pursuit, she let all the other opportunities, other artists she might come to love, slip away. She stopped making the rounds, attending the shows, cultivating the future. One by one she burned through art world connections and influencers, and any dealers who might help, her biggest bluest chips.

  You sure, Reba? She could hear the unspoken question behind every call, every searching conversation. These were the big players, people at Emmerich and Boone and Saatchi. It had taken years to build up these relationships and you only got one ask of this magnitude. Green was a master, to be sure, but . . . all this for one lesser portrait? In watercolor? Becky would laugh a bit, passing it off as whim, eccentricity. In any case, none of them could make it happen, and she’d cashed in every connection.

  One evening in the United Club at Philly International Becky idly leafed through a left-behind issue of The New Yorker, stopping for some reason on what seemed like a medical article called “The Itch.” Halfway through, with a growing horror of recognizing herself, Becky stuffed the magazine into her purse. She finished it on the plane.

  The article, written by a surgeon, was about people who suffer from repeated, continuous itching in one spot with no apparent cause, a kind of neuro
logical oddity. Nothing alleviated the maddening sensation, no drug or procedure. The sufferers exhausted practitioners, got labeled mentally ill, tied themselves up at night to prevent damaging their skin with endless scratching. One woman scratched at the side of her head so intensely that one morning she woke up leaking fluid from the area. The clinic doctor who examined her immediately called for a transfer by ambulance—the woman had scratched through her skin to brain matter.

  Late that night Becky lay in bed and sobbed. What was it like to have just your one regular life and to be content? She was almost forty-seven years old and she had so much and it was never enough. Sometimes after she got a cherished painting up on her wall the sense of satisfied quiet that welled up inside, the only peace she ever knew, didn’t last a week. Sometimes it didn’t last an hour. Behind any happiness Becky could always feel the monster ready to awaken, ready to make her burn with longing and need.

  It was Pierson that gave her the key to getting Docks. A Pierson wedding, one she never would have found time to attend if she hadn’t been, in fact, the officiant. Mrs. Fletcher, now retired, had somehow extracted a promise that Becky would run the show when her son got married, if he ever got married. Becky had no memory of agreeing to this. It was half a joke; Robby was always falling in and out of love with one woman or another. But the joke was on Becky, because Robby found the real deal with an actor named Tim and on an October Sunday in 2011, there she was at the front of First Presbyterian reading out a short speech she’d come up with on a San Francisco red-eye twelve hours before. It was Pierson’s first gay civil union, the church was full and buzzing, and Becky couldn’t help smiling back at Mrs. Fletcher beaming with joy in the front row.

  (She tried to repress the sting of the story about the photographer, who wanted to get shots of the happy couple and their families down by the Rock River earlier in the day, per Pierson tradition. By the time everyone had gathered at the Galena bridge, the photographer and his assistant had called it off. They’d taken one look at the abandoned riverwalk and determined there was no angle that could avoid its decrepitude.)