The Drifter(57)

Once, she waited three hours in the foyer of an apartment that belonged, at least for the moment, to a woman in the middle of a high-profile split Betsy had read about in the Post. She sat quietly through the woman’s personal training session and an eighty-minute massage, waiting on a stiff bench near the front door, on the receiving end of some wilting stares from the domestic staff. Her supervisor instructed her to not come back until she held a signed contract to sell a coveted, million-dollar Jasper Johns painting. When the woman finally broke down and signed it, she sent Betsy out of the door with not only the contract, but the actual painting, which she then transported back to the office in the back of a cab wrapped in a packing quilt, chewing on her nails over every bump and pothole.

Another advantage was that Betsy was a fast learner without much of an ego, so she figured out which brand of black tea one of her supervisors preferred (PG Tips, never Lipton) and would raid six different delis to find the right kind of potato chips for another one. Things were relatively quiet in the Prints and Multiples department, which was nowhere near as glamorous as Jewelry, or as cutthroat as Impressionist Art, and only the tiniest bit more exciting than Watches, or the lower-priced Decorative Furniture and Interiors Sales. On occasion, she was invited to attend the pre-sale previews and then the sales of major works in the evenings, to mingle with the bidders and collectors. When the gavel dropped and a Matisse cutout sold for over $13 million, chills shot down her spine. Her gut ached with envy when a David Hockney drawing would sell for $6,000, which may as well have been $13 million, given what she and Gavin were living on. Every piece was out of their grasp. Betsy was aware that she was granted the privilege of attending evening events only because she didn’t have chubby legs, and qualified, in the most perfunctory way, as eye candy. She was a clumsy flirt, always concerned that she had nothing to say to the silver-haired men who circled her colleagues. When the pressure was on for her to make small talk with important clients, Betsy tried to channel the ballsy confidence of Caroline, who would act like she owned the place, or the full-blast charm of Ginny, who showered everyone with compliments until they loved her. Just imagining what they would do somehow soothed her.

Jessica had become the closest imitation of a best friend Betsy found at work. They’d run out for coffee and whisper about an assistant in the Rare and Collectible Wine department who was fired for sending a town car to the wrong address to pick up her boss during a snowstorm, forcing her to stand in the taxi queue at the Waldorf, shivering in her evening gown, for forty-five minutes. She was still an assistant, but Betsy was convinced that Jessica was secretly running the place, since she knew every major collector and gallery owner by name and moved with a grace that Betsy envied.

She knew what it was like for the other cataloguers who often cowered and hid from the more elitist specialists. Senior Client Services “administrators” weren’t exactly open to socializing below their ranks, either. They were the ones who got to rub shoulders with the big bidders because they never threatened to expose them for not knowing much about what they were waving their paddle at. But the brains of the operation were also, oddly, expected to look the part, as if having even one employee in Payless shoes would cause the stock of the whole lot to drop. Jessica was ascending the ranks, booking cars that drove to the right addresses, using college and family connections to bring in millions in inventory, and knowing the right places to order minimal floral arrangements to thank clients with loose purse strings. At work, “Elizabeth” devoured as many books as she could about contemporary painting, printmaking, lithographs, and twentieth century art, shocked by how little she had learned in college. At home, she drank Pabst Blue Ribbon with Gavin, and scoured The Village Voice for every cheap event they could attend in town—free concerts, gallery openings, walking tours, even following every subway line to the very last stop just to get out and explore. Eventually, her boss handed her some actual work, researching the lots that were never worth more than a couple thousand dollars, the grunt work than no one else was interested in. She made calls to dealers and specialists, nervously scribbling and messily erasing notes until she had to print a fresh copy of her research and start again. Betsy was proud of her newfound diligence, how careful she’d become as a full-blown adult. She’d become so terrified of making a mistake, which now meant wearing the wrong shoes, missing an exhibit at the Whitney, or admitting to falling asleep during subtitled movies, and she found the perfect spot to feed and exercise that worry. After every auction that Elizabeth catalogued, she and Gavin celebrated with dinner at Great Jones Cafe, which reminded them of when they were first together, their twenty-four hours in New Orleans.

The culture at the auction house felt uncannily familiar. She was not the center of attention, but she was close enough to the spotlight to feel its warmth. Betsy was surrounded by women and a few conceited men destroying one another for sport, sort of like a redo of college with more expensive haircuts and proper handbags. The difference was that among the hallowed halls, important leather chairs, and gleaming overhead lights, there wasn’t a single shadow, no place to hide.

Mostly, Betsy smiled shyly, kept her head down, and tried to stay invisible. She was almost at the end of her third winter “up north” and spent most of the coldest nights on a bar stool, nursing a whiskey, reading a book. Gavin worked most evenings, and occasionally she would get bored and antsy. One of Gavin’s coworkers had given him the number of a nameless guy who would deliver weed, whatever you wanted, really, to your front door. She and Gavin were assigned a code, seventy-nine. They would dial the number to his pager, tap in seventy-nine when prompted, and he would arrive with a tackle box full of goods in about thirty minutes like a Domino’s pizza delivery man. She and Gavin liked to call him Ian after Ian MacKaye. He showed up one day, on a referral from one of Gavin’s late-night work buddies who managed his off-hours work schedule with a speed addiction, wearing a Minor Threat T-shirt. Gavin pointed out the brilliant irony of a drug dealer wearing the T-shirt of a band led by MacKaye, a well-known proponent of the straight-edge, sober lifestyle.