During rare pauses, she checked her phone for messages from George and Sara. Nothing. And nothing from Jacob either. Twisting in front of the hallway mirror, she reseated the bobby pins that kept her blond hair up off her shoulders. She liked the way her neck looked in the golden light by the door. An elegant extension of her one bared shoulder. She hoped it wasn’t too much. Abeba had said only to look nice, but Irene had sensed an implication that she not look nicer than the guests. Juliette then added that it was important to look hip, which Irene took to mean young, vital, and strange. Therefore: cerulean leggings, crochet sweater dress, peacock feather necklace, and a braided skinny-belt. Irene hoped these projected the artistic, professional image specified. Every job had its uniform.
She checked her eye shadow, which made her irises look a shade darker, almost black instead of blue. She rubbed at a spot beneath her left eye that had been there for a month now but had only recently begun to feel sore. Buzz went the door, and she was off to collect a giraffe-print bolero from the next artist or heiress to stagger in on midnight-black stilettos.
The K Gallery’s annual holiday party at the Waldorf Astoria was always an impressive affair. All year Irene and her friends looked forward to this night, the second Friday in December. Not that they didn’t go out other nights, not that living in the city wasn’t sometimes glamorous, but never anything compared to this. There were seventy-eight people on the exclusive guest list, and renowned chef Marc Herradura was catering. Honest-to-God movie stars attended. Last year they’d seen that guy from The Office, and the year before that, Cyndi Lauper! This was that other New York: always around them but never visible. For this one night it belonged to them too.
Even with the first big storm of winter going on outside and flights canceled at JFK and LaGuardia (only Newark soldiered on), they had nearly full attendance. All day the gallery’s owners, Juliette and Abeba, had been commanding Irene from one end of Manhattan to the other. They’d thrust her into snow-capped cars in Chelsea with a wrought-iron baboon skeleton (a steal at just $300,000) whose shrieking head had extended dangerously out the window into traffic. Wearing a pair of Abeba’s oversize duck boots, Irene had sloshed across the posh lobby of the Lexington Avenue hotel, aching under the weight of a moldy yam encased in bile-green polypropylene (starting at just half a million).
Five years ago, when she’d first begun working at the gallery, Irene had gotten a thrill simply from being near such valuable art, but by this point she was considering telling the driver to take her and the oversize photograph of Trisha Birch’s genitals (one million flat) to the George Washington Bridge so she could hurl it out into the Hudson. Or maybe she would just keep going. On and on, out of the city. With the money this one photo was worth, Irene could paint all day and all night for another twenty years. Or start her own gallery. Or institute a progressive artists’ colony where young dreamers could take up their own work. She could help them avoid the eighteen-hour days, the perpetual temper tantrums, the name-dropping, the ego trips, the talentless and tormented. Except that, of course, outside New York City, the Trisha Birch photographs were more likely to get her arrested for indecency than for theft. Maybe in L.A., she thought. Maybe in London. Maybe on Mars, or Neptune.
Juliette and Abeba were not terrible bosses, but they had all the fussiness of artists without the brilliance. They had an eye for slick marketing and could start a trend like nobody’s business. But the higher the K Gallery climbed in the Chelsea scene, the more Juliette and Abeba drank sickening amounts of Campari and spoke of selling everything and setting sail for the Marquesas like Gauguin. Rule one of living in the city, Irene had learned — as soon as you got there, you had to begin threatening to leave. She was theoretically putting money aside for a trip to France from which she privately imagined she’d never return, though it seemed like the same $350 or so kept entering and exiting her savings account; meanwhile the trip got more expensive and the exchange rate got worse and the gallery took up more time.
Still, it was, as they said, a living, and far from a bad one. Even when she’d had to examine Teacup Yorkie feces to see which should be threaded alongside diamonds on a necklace for the Bryant Park show. Even cataloging seventeen years of Percy Bryson’s toenail clippings. But she had legit benefits and enough money to pay for a cramped studio apartment on East Fourth Street, where she could paint at night without disturbing a roommate. Plus she wasn’t starving. If not trips to France, her paychecks covered a vintage dress or two and movie tickets and bar tabs and green tea smoothies.
Buzz! At last it was them: George Murphy and Sara Sherman.
George wore a wide smile and a black pinstripe suit. Was it new? It was. Sara had gotten it for him last week at the Macy’s pre-Christmas sale, to wear to his postdoc interviews. Irene kissed his cheek and inspected his penny-coppery hair; it needed cutting. Irene could never resist the urge to ruffle his head lightly, for luck.
“We made it!” George announced. His cornflower-blue eyes met the room over Irene’s shoulder and then fixed on her. When he spoke to her, or to anyone, they never drifted an inch. His three favorite words were, “Did you know—” and after saying them, he had a way of lowering his voice as he told you something terrific about some distant galaxy he was researching out at the North Shore Observatory, as if Andromeda B were a restaurant you might want to check out sometime. He seemed to want nothing more than for others to find him handy to have around. Swiftly, he could explain to you: the mechanics of an elevator, the science behind a hailstorm, or the electric spark between your fingers and the fringe of your dress. A good Catholic boy from Columbus, someone had raised him right; George Murphy was attentive in a city of the attention-deficient, and for this he was always looked after.
“No one’s ever on time to this thing,” Irene said. “Here, give me your coat.”
But George was already hanging it up by himself.
Sara slid in for a kiss from Irene. “Some big accident on the LIE,” she explained. Irene told her she looked stunning, and Sara said she must be mental; she’d come straight from the gym and was sure that she must reek, but of course she did not. Her long purple dress was discreetly sequined. Raven-haired and slender-jawed, Sara forever made Irene itch to break out her charcoals and sketch dark, elegant lines. No matter that she was technically not of the artsy crowd at this party — inside an hour, half the people there would believe Sara was the one throwing it. She’d glide from one conversation to the next, sometimes drawing one or two along with her until no one was a stranger to her, or to anyone, anymore. “Did you know” were also Sara’s three favorite words, followed not by a fact but by a person. She always knew someone you knew: a girl in your prom limo, your YMCA summer camp counselor, the barista at the coffee shop you frequent, a man you met at that bar in Chiang Mai, the boy whose hand you held on a third-grade field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Some people never forgot a face; Sara never forgot a connection.