The Drifter(60)

As she trotted east, she raced through all of the pertinent details of the situation: Gavin was out on Long Island, fishing in Montauk with a few of his friends. It was way too early to call and check in, and if he had called the house the night before and left a message on the machine, Betsy would claim that she missed it because she was out, and she crashed at Jessica’s house, again. She had stayed in town to finish the October auction catalogue before it shipped to the printer, one of a small, skeleton crew left behind while the rest of her higher-ranking colleagues scattered to other less aromatic, or more pleasantly fragrant, end-of-summer vacation spots. She imagined all of them putting distance between themselves and oppressive Manhattan, on small prop planes, or jitneys, or gleaming wooden speed boats with tiny American flags flapping at the stern. Jessica was visiting her family in Martha’s Vineyard, but Gavin didn’t know that. Maine and Nantucket and the homes-behind-the-dunes across Long Island didn’t reek of animal parts and sun-warmed garbage, or oily water stagnating in gutters. She and Gavin had ventured out to some of these places, for weddings and long weekends, and were amazed by the crispness of New England, the brisk sweater-across-the-shoulders evenings, its polished, rust-free boats, and utter lack of rowdy, beer-soaked beach bars.

Betsy had spent most of her summer-Friday evenings working on a fall sale of modern prints, poring over every book she could find about the artists. She was deep into research on a series of Frank Stella prints, dizzy from the rainbow bright optics, feeling as wonky as an irregular polygon after filling her brain with as much information as she could before her colleagues suspected that she didn’t really know what she was talking about.

Thanks to a little boost from Jessica, who was now high on the chain in Client Services, where she was determined to stay even after she found a rich husband, and wasn’t embarrassed to admit that her goals had been modified slightly, Betsy was promoted to a more senior position in her department. Prints was still the shabby cousin to Post-War and Contemporary Art, or any kind of painting, really. Even still, every time she discovered the price of a coveted item, the fact that it was beyond her reach, that all of it was beyond her reach—most of them more than her rent—filled her with doubt about her choices and a sense of defeat.

She left the office at around 8:30, so confused by the psychedelic midcentury time warp she had been in for the last few hours that she wasn’t certain of the day, the month, or even the year. After a head-clearing stroll through the city on a sweltering summer night, she remembered. It was August 1995, almost exactly five years since Ginny died.

Like Betsy, Ginny would have been twenty-five, about to turn twenty-six, with a job of some kind. Betsy imagined her living in the South somewhere, though she couldn’t place her anywhere precisely. Betsy often wondered what would have become of her friend if she had lived. When she pictured Ginny at twenty-five, she imagined her somewhere lovely, surrounded by fabric samples and paint chips, pinning images to mood boards in an interior design office, debating the merits of brushed nickel or chrome hardware. If she weren’t already married, she would have been engaged, though God knows to whom. Betsy had to stop and imagine herself erasing her mind, to actually picture herself with a chalkboard eraser wiping all of her dreams about Ginny away, to push the beautiful bleakness of a life never lived out of her mind. It hurt just to think about it, so she rarely did. Better just to try to piece together her own messy life, starting with last night.

Betsy had a vague memory of wandering south on Madison Avenue, wondering which of her favorite dives she’d end up in that night: Siberia Bar in the 50th Street subway station, Smith’s in Hell’s Kitchen, any of the dark, depressing holes near Penn Station. Every once in a while, she and Gavin would splurge on two martinis at Bemelmans after a movie at the Paris, or order rare steaks at Les Halles, share a bowl of pasta and a bottle of red wine at Gino’s and fool themselves into thinking that they’d become real New Yorkers. But when Betsy was alone, she would explore a different side of the city she was growing to love. She would buy some fancy Fantasia Lights at Nat Sherman and then scour the city to find the dankest, cheapest bars she could, park herself on a stool, and sit, hunched over a Jameson on the rocks.

Had she been to any of her favorite places the night before? She rustled through her bag as she walked to dig for clues, a receipt, a matchbook, any kind of breadcrumb she could follow that would help solve the mystery. But she came up short. She remembered a pool table, someone daring her to try to smuggle the cue out of the bar in the back of her dress, the angry bar manager asking her to leave, and finding it all hysterical. After that, she went blank.

In the hazy light of dawn, she attempted to distract herself by watching the other people milling about on a Saturday, which amounted to a couple of joggers, some small groups of two or three stumbling guys making their own messy walks home from the night before, and a single, dedicated hooker.

It had been close to six months since she had woken up on a strange couch, four months, minimum, since she was shaken back to consciousness in the backseat of a cab by a driver demanding his fare. Technically, she was only lying to Gavin about her whereabouts, not exactly cheating, though it felt to her like an equal betrayal. What’s worse is that she thought, obviously incorrectly, that she had made progress.

A year or so earlier, when Gavin started working a crushing graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour news network, their conflicting schedules took a toll. They both found themselves with many unoccupied hours, post-work, which, needless to say, they didn’t always fill with sushi-making classes and gym time. While they never discussed it directly, Betsy sensed that Gavin hadn’t been the poster boy for fidelity, either.