BY EARLY 1991, CRISIS GRIPPED Pierson. Although the financial situation was nowhere near as bad as it would become in a few years, the budget-cut pileup had reached critical mass—broken playground equipment and mail gone missing and forced police retirements—at least in the eyes of the citizens. The local paper’s editorials grew more pointed, and although they generally followed Becky and Ken’s script by blaming Governor Thompson and the Illinois legislature (even, at times, Mayor Daley or President Bush), suspicion was tightening around even the beloved “Pierson Pair.”
The tipping point was petunias.
Ken, still enough of an outsider, had little compunction in canceling the annual Petunia Festival. When you couldn’t afford new textbooks or toilets in the elementary school, who cared about flowers?
“Aren’t they kind of garish, anyway?”
Becky shot him a warning don’t go there look across the conference table. Too late. Aggrieved council members spoke over each other, praising the petunia’s hardiness, its long bloom phase, the subtle differences in shading from grandiflora to milliflora to wave variations. Becky knew what the bottom line was, under the committee outrage. The Petunia Festival wasn’t just a time-honored summer tradition, it was the main tourist attraction of the year, bringing in an annual average of four hundred thousand in visitor business. Merchandise, food sales, entertainment. But what did that matter if they didn’t have the funds to outlay for the mammoth necessary preparations: bids for landscape firms, the tools and contracts and equipment and inevitable overruns.
Doodling a petunia in her notebook—anyone raised in Pierson knew one when she saw it—Becky thought about money too. Her Activity account was out. Run dry, scraped clean. For the past few months Becky had been on a buying binge. Art world prices fell by the week, and she scooped up everything she’d ever had an eye on. She knew she should rein in her spending, but she couldn’t. Everything was so cheap! All the names, every phase, every dream buy now a possibility. In the past six months she’d acquired pieces from artists who were laughably out of her league. She bought early works and canvases with paint still drying. All you had to do was hesitate for an iota, and a seller would lop off another ten percent. In fact, the hardest part was getting a hold of anyone. Gallery after gallery shuttered; dealers disappeared, their answering machines so full they weren’t accepting any new messages. Friends, other collectors, warned her to stop but if the whole system was going down in this market “correction,” then for the sake of sweet baby Jesus, Becky would own a Rauschenberg. If only for a short time.
The other problem was space. A lack of cubic square feet. Crated art all over her Chicago apartment, when the condo was where she was supposed to view the art, to show it. She could keep pine boxes in Pierson, for Christ’s sake. But she was maxing out: both bedrooms, the combination living room/dining area, the small foyer, and even the kitchen were all covered with paintings. She’d even had to slide stacked canvases under both beds. Only minor works, a lesser Kline and a Barrett add-on from a package deal earlier in the year—but it was still far from ideal. Her cocktail party guests laughed when they saw the crammed space, joking they had the same disease, but she knew that all these wealthy collectors—acquaintances, business contacts, all of them calling her “Reba”—displayed their own works throughout giant suburban estates.
How long could she sustain this? She owed six thousand to her condo management, and the dunning letters left in her mailbox were getting serious. She should stop opening those.
“Maybe our superhero will rush in and save the day at the last minute.” This voice, sing-songy and nasal, belonged to Phil Mannetone from PR and Communications. Overgrown Neanderthal mouth-breathing Phil. Always in her business, acting like he was in on some kind of joke. Across the conference table he gave Becky a long, loaded smile. “Becky, you always seem to find funds somehow. Somewhere.”
Ken snorted. “If anyone can price out what’s needed from this quarter, they’re welcome to try. But in lieu of any—”
“I’m not talking about the budget,” Phil smoothly interrupted. “Not the official one, anyway. Just wondering if Becky could work her magic and find a little extra somewhere.”
“If only I could,” Becky said. You fucking nitwit, don’t you think I would? She hadn’t sold a piece in months, so there was no magic to be worked. No “miracles” of “juggling the accounts” to come through for Pierson, and without those regular infusions of her payback, people—like Phil fucking Mannetone—were obviously starting to notice. If only the market would come back! If she could just buy a little time, art sales would resume—they had to!—and then she’d be able to keep the worst at bay.
“This isn’t on you, Becky,” Rhona Lear said, and shot Phil a dirty look. “It’s on all of us.”
“Thank you,” Becky said. “But Phil does have a point. Maybe there is a way. I’m spitballing here, but what if we . . . did it ourselves?”
Then she was off and running, the other council members eagerly taking up her idea and fleshing it out. What if they reclaimed the Petunia Festival as a fundraiser for the town? Leverage petunia nostalgia into a do-it-yourself planting weekend this spring. Start a pledge drive for planning logistics. Lean on small businesses for donations for publicity. Bring in the League of Women Voters, the Girl Scouts, the local press. Who needed landscapers when nearly everyone’s neighbor was a proud gardener with years of experience? True, it would be nothing like past years and the revenue would certainly be smaller . . . but there would be petunias. And concessions.
Becky’s cheeks grew warm as she worked, up at the whiteboard scribbling down all the ideas and plans and numbers and dates. With all hands on deck they could just about pull off a “planting day” event with a kickoff in early April, to make sure this summer’s Petunia Fest would happen. Phil Mannetone sketched out press releases and a pitch for local TV, the picture of enthusiasm, but Becky knew there was trouble. He was trouble.
Three months ago, she’d come in late one morning to find him strolling around her office in front of her desk. He had some pretense of a letter he wanted to get her opinion on, but he was looking at the things in her office—her leather coat and her objets and the fresh flowers delivered weekly. And then at her, in a way no one else did: speculative, interested. What was it he’d said? “Someday you’ll have to show me how you do it, Becky Farwell.”
The council meeting rushed ahead with plans and decisions, infused with positivity for the first time in months. Only Becky grew quiet, glancing up now and again at Phil Mannetone. Sorting through what she knew about him outside of this room, his family, his home, his routines and habits.
Three weeks later she was standing in the freezing wind on a makeshift press stage while Ken wrapped up his speech for the two press reps and a smattering of citizens, more than Becky had expected for a March Friday with snow in the forecast. “Why didn’t we do this in the auditorium?” she hissed at Ingrid, who needed her full attention to hold back the thirty kids onstage—a Boy Scout troop and some matching local Brownies—from playing their part too early.
“You wanted that big finish,” Ingrid whispered. “Graham, if you’re going to rip the bag you can’t hold it. TJ, hold my hand. Here’s my hand.”
“Petunias,” Becky called into the mike, as soon as it was her turn, after the cheers for her had finally quieted. “Are one of the country’s most recognizable flowers. And although they are known to be the most beautiful”—unfortunately this set the small crowd into applause, muffling her point—“they are one of the hardiest, too!” She hurried on to the plan: reclaiming the annual Petunia Festival as a fundraiser for Pierson, using volunteers for the planting and maintenance and a local pledge drive to boost the summer tourist business.
“We thought about cutting it—as I know you know, Pierson has been going through a hard time lately—but like I told Mayor Brennan, Pierson doesn’t need pity . . . it needs petunias!”
This line killed, of course. It would headline tomorrow in the paper. Ingrid fought valiantly to hold back the troops while wrangling her giant toddler. She gave Becky a look: Jesus, hurry up.
So instead of outlining what it all meant dollar to dollar, or how next month’s “Planting for the Future” event would kick off a town cash drive to repair or replace services—it was all in the press release anyway—Becky gave the nod. More or less in sync the kids tore open their decorated brown paper lunch bags and began to toss handfuls of seed—bird seed, not petunias, but the effect was the same—in the direction of the rutted dirt behind a park bench.
It worked. Warm murmurs and genuine applause spread through the crowd, and Becky stepped away from the mike filled with pride from a thought-through plan well executed. Mayor Ken smiled and waved, bird seed in his hair. Ingrid gave her a long one-armed side hug and Becky didn’t pull away. People still cheered, even the reporters.
Who needed Springfield? Becky thought, face flushed in the cold. Why should anyone count us out?
Forgetting, for one moment, that without Springfield she had no enemy for the budget shortfall. Without Springfield, and the political strands of truth and untruth and half-truth she wove together, she would have nothing, no money in the secret account, and no way to cover up what she needed to do. (It didn’t matter that she currently didn’t have any money in the secret account.)
Becky watched the gritty seeds skitter off into the cutting spring air. The levers in her mind worked frantically to balance guilt with energy, recognition with effort. She herself was the cause of the pain she worked so hard to remedy. But who could say where the town would be without her? All the work for this planting fundraiser: the idea and the number crunching and the late-night planning . . . it was exactly what she would have done if the town was truly in the hole. Which it was! Couldn’t one make up for the other, karmically or morally or whatever? Like a kind of equation where one complex function Xs out another and replaces it, after a lengthy series of twists and reversals?
“You okay?” Ken said, when she took a wobbly step back.
Sure, sure, of course. Becky smiled for the cameras.
One week later, Becky held the door of their cab for Monty Dubner, some jackoff from Connecticut who owned a part-share in the Tremen Gallery in the West Loop. Only after significant name-dropping—and hints that they could come to some other arrangements without Tremen knowing—had he agreed to come to her place in the city to pick up the Caulfield oil she was selling to him at a ridiculous fraction of the nine grand she’d paid for it last year.
So intent on managing her unaffected business mode (desperation had an odor and she was, in fact, desperate to sell), Becky didn’t notice the way Ronan at the door didn’t look at her when he buzzed them in. If she’d been half a second faster off the elevator, Monty going on about his kid’s snowboarding camp in the Alps, she could have seen the new fixture on her door first, and at least had a chance of bluffing it off.
But instead they were taken by equal surprise by the padlock and corresponding orange notice (like the ones the city slapped on cars getting the boot): SEE MANAGEMENT FOR ACCESS.
“Fuck.” Humiliation blared in Becky’s ears.
Monty reached over to flick at the ugly, cheap padlock. “Technical difficulties, huh.”
“It’s a mistake. I’ve been having an ongoing disagreement about a board policy that . . . Just stay here for one minute. I’ll get it sorted.”
“Stay here?” Monty laughed, glancing around the narrow condo hallway.
“You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll meet you in the lobby in five minutes.” She strode back to the elevator and slapped the down button.
“My next appointment is in forty-five.”
“There’s coffee downstairs,” Becky said smoothly. There was no coffee, as far as she knew. They rode down silently. As soon as she pointed Monty toward a configuration of black leather couches, Ronan hurried around the doorman kiosk.
“Miss Farwell, I wasn’t supposed to—”
“Ronan! What the fuck,” she hissed, crossing the lobby.
“I know,” he said miserably. Last Christmas she’d given him—and each of the other guys—five hundred in an envelope and a bottle of Courvoisier.
Right then a short pants-suited woman came striding out of the property management’s office, calling her name. Becky went to her in an icy fury, hoping that Monty was far enough away not to hear. “Unlock my apartment right now! Can’t you see I have a business—”
“Please follow me,” the woman said. A security guard appeared behind her and Becky whipped past both of them into the office.
For eight or ten trying minutes she beat her head against the joint stupidity of the woman, the property company, and the rent-a-cop who stood around like his numb presence meant anything at all. Why couldn’t they see that if she could get into the apartment, she would be able to sell a piece (or three) and get the money to give them for the piddling back rent everyone couldn’t shut up about! A man with a checkbook was literally waiting in their overdesigned lobby and—They were going to hear from her lawyer. Today. In an hour. But for now if she wasn’t given access to—
Changing tactics suddenly, Becky stormed out of the office. Ignored the woman calling her name. At a glance she saw Monty riffling through a magazine, so she had some time. Maybe.
“Call Jorge for me,” she whispered to Ronan, who’d certainly overheard all of what had gone on in the office. “Tell him to meet me upstairs.”
He paused, but nodded.
In the hallway outside her apartment, Becky paced. Counting down the minutes she had—fewer than what she needed, likely—before the office woman and the guard found her. Counting up the possible dollars she could get from Monty.
Finally! Jorge, with a bolt cutter. She scrounged the only cash on her—fifty bucks—and passed it to him after the one hard clunk that snipped off the cheap lock.
“Not me,” he said, when she tried to thank him. He backed away fast to the freight elevator.
And then she was in, rushing through the darkened rooms and the furniture covered with sheets to protect it from sunlight and fading. She didn’t have long. As if the place was on fire, Becky raced through it, making snap decisions based on split-second calculations: price paid, price possible, what she could carry in her arms right now. She gathered paintings and shoved them into a grocery bag. She threw a T-shirt over a forty-pound galvanized-steel sphere and hoped it wouldn’t break her purse. Voices from the hall made her freeze, but they faded past her door. Hurry, hurry!
She left with the door carefully closed and the broken lock dangling. Took the side stairs down three flights and then the freight down to the basement level, after which she jogged up one full flight, weighed down with art in bags and under both arms, and peered through the cracked lobby door over by the mailboxes. Surely she’d be able to catch Monty’s eye and direct him to—
But the lobby was empty. Ronan caught sight of her and winced. Get out of here, he mouthed.
But where’s— She motioned toward the leather couches.
He shook his head. Gone.
Becky wilted then, legs buckling. She had to rest against the door jamb so she wouldn’t drop all the pieces onto the floor with a clattering thump. Why couldn’t anything ever be easy? Why was she living life backward, with all the room in the world in her empty home out in Pierson, and this tiny overflowing treasure chest locked away from her?
Monty never returned any of her calls, but Becky caught a cab and managed to sell whatever she could to whoever she could find at a loss she couldn’t think about. By next month it was all smoothed over with the property managers. Back rent paid, fees paid, three months’ advance rent paid, plus a thousand-dollar donation to the office “slush fund” to compensate for “any inconvenience.”
She’d skated through. But for how long? In the back of her mind all through that late winter Planting Festival work, Becky knew it couldn’t continue. Her apartment as an art safe house, this racing in and out of the city, the juggling of funds, the placating of idiots who could nonetheless bring her down. Something had to give.