Tedrowe, Emily Gray - The Talented Miss Farwell by Tedrowe Emily Gray

Author:Tedrowe, Emily Gray [Tedrowe, Emily Gray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Custom House
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

17

Pierson

1991–1993

This was when she could have stopped. Cut her losses and gotten out. In the aftermath of almost being exposed by Phil, Becky felt an exhilarating relief, an almost holy sense of having been spared. Anyone knew a gift like that was the final one, a sign to hang it up and be thankful. That, plus the fact that the art market was still a smoking cratered wreck.

Not to mention then the overwhelming triumph—temporary, but nonetheless—of Planting Day, the town’s buoyant spirits, the high-fives in restaurants and even church . . . She’d done it, she’d shored up Pierson (if not the riverwalk), and did she mind the constant congratulations, the tangible results of coming through as the hometown hero they all wanted her to be? Not in the slightest.

One summer evening in late July of 1991 she arranged for a surveyor to come out for a few hours, to walk the property behind her home, taking measurements and soil tests and knocking stakes into the overgrown grass. They went around and around Hank’s old barn, grasshoppers bouncing up and down in the dry heat. She broke the lease on the Chicago condo, paid fees, boxed her art, and transported it all to County Road M, leaving it stacked in as many unobtrusive places (basement, laundry room) as she could find. She told Mac she was looking for something better, and he bought it. He was too busy with his own drama—sales halt, inventory overload, fights with longtime friends—to care. Becky took bids on rebuilding her barn, and pined for the art that had to be hidden away—for now—and waited.

Ingrid gave birth again, a girl this time, named Rachel. Becky bought too many diapers of varying sizes, came over all the time with takeout, and let TJ wreck her nerves with his screeching and banging (Ingrid and Neil seemed immune by this point).

“Don’t say it,” Ingrid groused. Walking Rachel around and around to get her to sleep. Becky folded baby laundry and mimed a zipping motion to her lips, but really: what had they been thinking?

“One time! One lousy time he didn’t pull out. And I—”

“Okay,” Becky said. “You can stop right there.”

“You,” Ingrid sang to her baby, “are a terrible mistake.” But she was blissful, fooling nobody.

If Ingrid noticed that Becky was more willing to come over in those first crazy newborn months, or wondered why her friend wasn’t as busy as always, she never mentioned it. There was too much to do and too little sleep on which to do it.

By January 1992, Becky’s architectural firm had finished plans for the remodel. They’d need to wait to begin excavation until spring came, but that was fine because she barely had money to cover the drawings and blueprints anyway. All of it, this crazy Art Barn dream, was loaded onto her credit cards, whose sky-high limits had been built over years of outrageous art world charges and payments. She still read Artforum the day it arrived and she still went into the city for openings and parties, but it was merely to keep a hand in.

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