TEN DAYS BEFORE INGRID’S WEDDING, Becky drove to O’Hare and parked in the windblown long-term lot. She dragged her suitcase onto the airport shuttle, checked in quickly, and was at her gate three and a half hours before departure, time which she spent reading Art in America and then ARTnews, in between intense study of every gate agent and disembarking passenger. At precisely forty-five minutes to boarding Becky carried her luggage into the largest stall of the women’s room, where she rapidly changed out of a boat-neck, gathered-waist jacquard print dress, pearl string necklace, and open-toe bowtie pumps. She folded these and expertly repacked them, including her nude hose. When she exited the stall, slightly red-faced, she wore high-waisted black silk slacks and a cropped zip-up thin black leather jacket. She dunked her head briefly under a rushing faucet and then immediately patted her hair dry with a small hand towel produced from her purse. Six brushstrokes and a squirt of hairspray and that perky bouffant was now a modern, slicked-back fall. Makeup she’d deal with on arrival.
Back at the gate, a boarding delay was announced. Harried stewardesses conferred, a long line formed at the counter. Lightning flared about the grounded planes. Becky asked someone where the cafeteria was and got a blank look. She ate a carton of yogurt while sitting on her suitcase and read headlines at a newsstand.
At last the plane boarded. Becky didn’t notice the uncharacteristic quick movements up and down the aisle, the curt intercom announcements—all business, no jokes—or the thwacking gusts against the rising plane. She was slightly disappointed when no carts of food or drink came by, and only a little startled the time they hit an air pocket so hard that her view of the cabin bounced, and several overhead bins slammed open. This wasn’t much different from riding in the pickup bed; whenever Hank went over a road rut she’d popped into the air.
“I’ll help you with the oxygen mask,” she told her seatmate, a college-age boy who had slept through the safety presentation, and was now clutching his Walkman.
He just stared at her. Oh well. Becky went back to ARTnews, glancing up only when another wave of gasps interrupted her. When they touched down, once, and then again, a hard slam, she cheerfully joined in the applause, thinking it was too bad the thick storm clouds had blotted entirely the New York lights.
Becky stepped quickly past the captain’s area on her way off the plane, where one stewardess had her arm around another, crumpled and crying. She hurried around the slowpokes on the jet bridge, unable to contain her excitement any longer. Flying on an airplane for the first time had been interesting, but now Becky was in New York.
Although she had assumed her host would be long asleep—after the delays and the taxi line, Becky didn’t reach the third-floor walkup on the corner of Thirtieth and Park Avenue South until after midnight—Fernanda Ebersole yanked the apartment door open just as Becky fumbled quietly with the keys Mac had given her. Giant wineglass in hand, music blaring, Fernanda ushered Becky into a living room where half a dozen people were smoking, arguing, and in the case of one couple, passionately kissing. Even over the course of the next three days in Fernanda’s guest room Becky never quite got the full story of how Fernanda and Mac knew each other. When she wasn’t hosting late-night dinner parties Fernanda was on the phone in Italian or Portuguese or French, pulling the long cord with her into the bathroom or kitchen, tangling it on armchairs and toppling lamps.
Whatever Mac had told Fernanda about her, Becky was able to come and go as she pleased, with no other requirements than to join the living room party as often as she could, as a source of witty remarks and an appreciative audience of catty gossip and fashion world scandal. (Fernanda did something in PR for one of the Italian houses. At first sight, in her sweeping floor-length caftan and silk turban, Becky would have pegged her for early forties. Making coffee in the late morning, first cigarette between her lips . . . fifty or upward, for sure.)
On her way downtown that first Friday morning—it wasn’t even 9 am and she would find that no galleries opened before 11—Becky reflected that, on the whole, no matter how friendly her host seemed, she would rather have stayed in a hotel. That delicious anonymity, the chance to be alone and drop the thousand minute arrangements of face and voice and body position, the ones she had to instantly assume for other people. The chance to be away, for a few expensive hours, from other people!
But Mac had insisted, because Fernanda was an essential acquaintance for Becky. There must be a benefit to him, Becky speculated, in her staying there. So she had acquiesced, as she acquiesced to almost all Mac’s directions. Not that he approved of her going to New York. Overpriced, overhyped. Why bother when one could scheme a beautiful collection right from the shores of Lake Michigan? Had she never heard of a fax machine, darling?
There were more and more barbs in Mac’s assessment of Becky’s purchases, her deals. And the whole “I made you, sweetheart” routine, with its required deference, was getting old. It was a relief to be away from that, Becky thought now, reversing direction and walking quickly back along the same block. She hadn’t yet figured out the subway, and she’d be damned before she’d be a rube asking for help, so her MO was to walk swiftly and confidently in the general direction of where she wanted to go, even if that meant missed turns and repeated changes of course.
On her map, the map in her purse that would not be brought out, Becky had used a ruler and colored pencils to grid the area bounded by Fourteenth and Canal, Greenwich and Avenue D. At least ninety galleries worth visiting clustered in that space, so thirty a day, about four hundred twenty minutes viewing time (once she realized operating hours), meant she had fourteen minutes allotted to each space. Not including bathroom breaks.
Except Becky spent nearly three hours in the very first gallery she entered that morning. She couldn’t resist, she refused to check her watch, even as her face got hot and her inner voice screeched that she was making the rookiest of all rookie mistakes: falling in love with the first thing seen. Because Becky had fallen in love with the six canvases—oil, pastel palette, abstract images of boxes on top of boxes. Every physical indicator was going off like an alarm: shallow breathing, prickly armpits, the inability to stop pacing. She just wanted to look at them, to look and look and look.
Becky summoned all her acquired skills as a collector when she sat down with the owner to learn about the pieces and the artist. All of what she heard only added to her conviction. The artist, as the gallery owner explained, was Peter Wand, a fiftyish classically trained figurist based in Zurich, who had been on the outskirts of the Ab Ex movement, had one solo show in Lausanne (not that that mattered), used to be married to Patricia Nadal (again, irrelevant). Poised for a breakout. He’d delivered this series only last week, no promises but the Voice had been considering a major profile and space was already lined up for a quarter column ad buy in Artforum.
Becky drank deeply from her glass of Perrier. For less than ninety thousand she could buy all six works. Ship them home, sell four—already her mental Rolodex was throwing off potential buyers—and watch Wand’s star go up. This was it, the find. The one she’d make her name on.
“May I use your phone?” How was her mouth so dry? The owner graciously set her up at his own desk and then excused himself.
It took Becky three tries to dial the right number. She couldn’t see straight for the sheets of pastel bricks raining down her mind, and the dollar calculations, and her brute force of want.
Mac was cheerful, at first. Happy to hear of her excitement. He claimed he’d even heard of Peter Wand, and listened to Becky spew all her disjointed thoughts and plans. He waited until she was finished, and then he gently, very gently, dismantled every angle of her idea. Becky had to grip the strange desk to absorb the blow: Mac’s utter dismissal of Peter Wand’s worth and work. How limited the market was for late Ab Ex, the way the line and color screamed Twombly derivative, a dozen more reasons a buy of that magnitude was premature, a bad investment, off the mark.
In an instant Becky saw all her idiot enthusiasm for what it was: naïve inexperience. How far she still had to go to catch up with someone like Mac, who could call on decades of deals and trends before putting a play into action. Who did she think she was? Thoroughly chastened, she tried to thank him. Mac brushed it off. Even, perhaps, forgiving her for going to New York, without him.
The next afternoon Becky took a seat in a bright second-floor library at Swann Auction Galleries on East Twenty-Fifth. She’d been downtown all morning trying to make up for yesterday’s folly, cramming in as many galleries as possible, and she’d take another taxi back to SoHo afterward. But for now, she tried to take slow calming breaths in the peaceful space, the rows of folding chairs slowly filling in, the light-wood lectern awaiting the auctioneer. She didn’t know what to do with the paddle, white card stock printed with the house’s blue S logo, that she’d been handed after checking in. Hold it on her lap? Dangle it by her side? Sit on it? Becky noticed one woman fanning herself with casual aplomb.
As soon as the auction began, however, she forgot her unease. Staff set up each work—from the lot “Selected Sketches, 19th Century”—and carefully adjusted the lighting before the grandly mustachioed auctioneer rapidly detailed artist, style, background, quality, provenance, and highlights. Whistler, Bellows, Lewis, Léger. Becky craned and peered, trying with no success to see behind the curtain to the next work. Finally, finally, the small page was set up for all to see. The drawing was exactly as perfect as in the catalogue where she’d clocked it over a month ago. It hit her all over again: the insouciant curve of the line, the spiky end of one charcoal edge, the ideal balance of white space and plain coal-colored sketch.
“Mary Cassatt, early study for an unfinished drawing, mother and child theme. Initiating bids at ten, do I see ten thousand—”
Becky’s hand shot up. Without her paddle, which had slipped to the floor in her excitement. Keeping her hand up, arm extended, she groped down. The man in the next seat bent and retrieved it for her but she had no time to thank him. The bids swept ahead, eleven and now somehow fifteen, she kept raising but so did at least two other paddles. And why did the auctioneer keep glancing to his side? Who was . . . Oh. An agitated younger man taking orders from a telephone, one of several set up on a plain light-wood table.
Becky held her ground. Up, she lifted at eighteen thousand. She’d promised herself twenty would be the max, had to be the limit. But then there was still one paddle and the man on the phone and she went up again at twenty-two.
The very first time she’d laid eyes on the image she’d seen Ingrid in the drawing. Ingrid’s tired night-nurse tenderness in the easy way the mother held her baby.
Up, she flipped her paddle, answering the auctioneer’s look. Twenty-five. A long moment, would the other paddle . . . No. The room let out a soft sigh. Becky almost hovered on her seat, alight in every nerve.
Twenty-six, yes from the phone.
Twenty-seven, Becky’s paddle up.
Twenty-eight, a longer pause. The man on the phone covered the receiver with a cupped hand. His nod, to Becky’s eye, was one millisecond slower than it had been.
“Twenty-nine thousand dollars,” she called out, putting up her paddle before the auctioneer could turn to her again. That did it. When the man on the phone shook his head, face drawn, warm applause broke out in the room.
Becky nodded tightly to those in her row who leaned over to murmur congratulations. She had to hold it all in, bursting elation, body-rocking adrenaline that made her want to shriek with triumph. The underlying ripple of fear about how much more she’d spent than she’d wanted to, how very much deeper she’d dug into the hole.
Ingrid, though. The thought of Ingrid. That’s what carried her through.
Becky managed to learn the subway: people exited through the same turnstiles for entering, and sighed loudly if you dithered even a moment with your token. She fit in openings and retrospectives and ate a hot dog or a pretzel from a street cart every few hours. She even mostly recovered from the gentle sting of Mac’s correction, with those Peter Wand paintings. Becky did what Becky did best: put it behind her and hurried forward.
She redoubled her efforts at self-discipline: she checked off every gallery on her map grid, she took extensive notes, she made introductions and pacified a jealous Fernanda (You never here! I have all these for you!). She kept her mind off her bank book, which was drained because of the Cassatt. Focused instead on listening, learning, taking it all in.
On the last night she went to an event in the Puck Building on Houston Street, a dark-red structure that loomed high over its corner, marking the essential division between SoHo and everywhere else. Becky wasn’t sure who was being celebrated—a tenth anniversary for one of the nearby galleries, perhaps—or how she’d made it onto the list, but she’d changed into a Betsey Johnson black-and-purple-flowered frock, slicked back her hair on the sides, and milled around the crowded loft space holding a plastic cup of tepid chardonnay. Her feet hurt so much she couldn’t feel them anymore, and smiling enigmatically at people she didn’t know was leaching away her last bits of energy. How long ago had she eaten her last hot dog? Why couldn’t the stereo system play something other than David Byrne, David Byrne knock-offs, or David Byrne parodies? She had to find some food.
A few turns in the halls adjacent to the main room led her to a kitchen, where at first Becky thought she was alone. Alone with food, platters lined up on a long metal table—untouched mini quiches and grapes and cubes of Brie. She found a napkin and piled it high.
“You’re supposed to wait until they bring it out.” The voice came from a young boy, unnoticed until now, sitting on a dish counter and kicking his heels against the metal below.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Becky spoke through a mouthful of quiche.
“It’s six thirty,” the boy said.
“In the pm,” another voice clarified, this one from an even smaller girl, with matching brown bangs, intent on a coloring book spread open on an overturned white bucket.
“In the pm is when grownups get their food.” Becky wondered if it was time to push on to the Fleshman opening, which started at seven.
“We got pizza already,” the little girl said, frowning at her drawing.
“Can you bring me a 7UP?” the boy asked Becky. “From out there? She forgot again.”
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 postcard 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.