The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  “Again, hilarious.”

  “I know. But we’re gonna be alright, B.”

  Betsy suddenly recognized a perfect opportunity for total reinvention. After walking fifteen blocks in the wrong direction, she spotted a Kinko’s, slid her floppy disk into the hard drive of a ten-dollar-an-hour PC, and edited her résumé. With a few clicks of the keys, she metamorphosed into Elizabeth Hammond Young, a self-possessed woman who’d never once drank a pinkish Everclear-infused beverage from a trashcan. Debra wasn’t going to tell her what she could and couldn’t have, what she did and didn’t deserve. She moved the cursor over to the line about the sorority and pressed the delete button repeatedly until the evidence was destroyed. She printed out twenty copies and vowed to get a job before she had to make more.

  After a drug test scare and a bottle and a half of Goldenseal, Gavin got a job as a camera assistant on a new cable news show. Betsy, on her way toward becoming Elizabeth, was down to her last three résumés. She spent all of her free time uptown, wandering through museums, starting at the top of the Guggenheim and winding her way down, then moving onto the Met or the Whitney. On an unusually warm and breezy March afternoon, she decided to skip the subway and head down Madison Avenue, peeking in the windows as she went. Near 71st Street, in the window of a shop filled with three-foot stacks of hand-knotted Persian carpets in every size, she noticed a small sign that read Sales Assistant Position Available. Inquire Within. She slid a résumé out of a folder in her backpack and walked inside.

  “Gavin, I got a job!” Betsy shouted over the traffic noises into a pay phone at 72nd and Lexington. “It’s at a fancy shop on Madison, working for a rug dealer.”

  “A what dealer?” he said.

  “A rug dealer, not a drug dealer. It pays in cash, you know, under the table. The owner seems a little sketchy, but I’ll just be answering phones and stuff. Now that I’m describing it to you I’m realizing I may as well be working for a drug dealer, but it’s a job.”

  Gavin sang “Let the River Run” from Working Girl into the phone, and they celebrated with Indian takeout and a bottle of cheap champagne.

  Three months later, she was sitting at her desk with one hand cupped around a hazelnut coffee from the deli on the corner, paging through the New York Post with the other, feeling as employed as she ever had. Hazelnut coffee had become her new obsession, and she had one for breakfast and lunch because it was all she could afford, even though she was almost certain it was the source of some significant gastric distress. Regardless, she lost eight pounds on her new regimen and had no plans to stop. When she looked up, she wasn’t entirely surprised to see a couple of serious-looking men in dark suits walking through the door, carrying badges that identified them as IRS officers, since her boss had been dodging their increasingly persistent phone calls since the day she’d started. In a rare prescient moment, she stashed the Rolodex on the desk into her backpack. The next day when she showed up for work, the door was padlocked.

  About a week later, she downed a double espresso and worked up the nerve to spin through the contact cards and start calling some of the designers she had met at the shop for job leads. One of her favorites, Kenneth Marks, a small, pinched decorator who was constantly taking $30,000 rugs out on memo and hauling them to Litchfield County for a particularly indecisive client, said he would put in a good word for her with the human resources department at an esteemed auction house.

  “Wear something nice, Elizabeth,” said Kenneth.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, glancing down at her Levi’s, realizing that she was still wearing the white, ribbed tank top she’d slept in.

  “I mean, not that ratty Muppet-fur sweater that you wear every day, and those shoes,” he added.

  Betsy looked toward the pile of shoes near the front door and found the offending footwear, black loafers with large, square block heels. She could feel her face burn hot with shame.

  “Look, you’re well-spoken and you’re smart. You can be charming, when you want to be. And you’re sort of blonde, which helps. I know you don’t think people notice or care that you walk around with that red backpack and rotate the same three work outfits,” he said, “but . . .”

  “But what?” Betsy’s face burned a little more, but with pride this time. That Kenneth thought she was smart came as a pleasant surprise. Ever since she arrived in New York, Betsy found herself constantly on the verge of apologizing for going to a state school, in the South no less. Whenever she would meet someone and the talk would start about where they went, usually in that coded, subtle way of naming the location of the college rather than its name (New Haven not Yale, Cambridge not Harvard, Philly not Penn), or dropped references to boarding school and summers spent in Maine or on Nantucket, Betsy would notice her pulse quickening a bit in anticipation of her end of the conversation. She would avoid talking about it, if she could. If someone pressed the issue, she would have to explain, again, why she went to school in Florida to some guy who felt superior to her because he grew up riding the train into town to chain-smoke at Moran’s, or some other date-rapey bar on the Upper East Side. The truth was, when she was in high school, she didn’t realize she had options. Money was tight. The guidance counselor at her high school was brain-dead. She got in, with a little scholarship money. She went. The end. “What is it? But what?”

  “But people do. They notice. I think it’s time for you to break out that emergency credit card and use it to buy some heels, a decent coat, and maybe even a bag. It doesn’t have to be Hermès, just something spunky. Because it is. An emergency.”

  She took Kenneth’s advice and headed to Bloomingdale’s on 60th and Lexington, but even after the splurge—the slightly stumpy Charles Jourdan heels, green Coach bag, khaki blazer, and button-down shirt (which she scored for a steal in the boys’ department) that she wore with a black stretchy skirt she bought in 1987 for a high school choral performance—she felt conspicuous. When she arrived at the strange little gazebo filled with stacks of catalogues off of the lobby, the three women standing behind it, each wearing a different jauntily tied silk neck scarf and a sleekly tailored navy jacket, looked at her like they had just heard the best joke ever told.

  Betsy had thought that Kenneth was being charitable when he sent her in for the interview. Once she passed through the gleaming brass doors into the marble lobby, past the guard in the weird gilded cage and up the important stairs, she was struck by the swirl of officious-looking mean girls filing through the turnstiles in the lobby, and she realized that Kenneth must have detected that glint of uncertainty, even a smidge of self-hatred, in her eyes. He must have known that Betsy was hungry to prove something. He may also have suspected that Betsy had a secret, though he couldn’t possibly have guessed what it was. “How may we assist you?” asked the tallest of the three, who had the curious posture of an ostrich and Princess Di hair.

  “I’m here to see Cheryl, in human resources,” Betsy said. “I’m here for an interview.”

  She heard a snicker from somewhere in the back, behind a wall paneled with gleaming mahogany.

  “Certainly, miss, I’ll take you back to Ms. Morgan,” said the youngest-looking one of the three, who had lank blonde hair to her shoulders. Her scarf was covered with perky seashells. Once they rounded the corner to a long, carpeted hallway, her voice dropped to a hushed tone.

  “Oh God, just ignore them,” she said. “They’re impossibly mean. There’s a girl who works here who’s from England and so posh. I mean, they’re saying that she’s a Windsor, like, she’s related to the Queen. And Bea, the big one, tortures her so much that she sucks her thumb in the break room. She’s twenty-two! I’m Jessica, by the way.”

  “I’m Bets. . . . Elizabeth. Elizabeth Young,” Betsy said.

  “I know who you are. Kenneth told me to look out for you,” she added, glancing over her shoulder to see if anyone was within earshot. “Here’s the deal: When you get into the interview they’re going to ask you if you’re married, and
what you do on the weekends, and even though it seems like it’s illegal or something you have to answer them. Just make it all sound really fabulous even if it’s a big fucking lie. I live in Connecticut with my parents in my childhood room with a canopy bed, but they’d have to beat that information out of me. I’m a Catalogue girl. Most of the people in that job are just aiming to get into Client Services so they can meet a rich husband. I’ve got bigger plans. You’re interviewing to be an assistant in one of the departments, and then maybe you’ll be promoted to junior cataloguer. I think that’s a better fit?” Jessica said, as her eyes scanned Betsy from head to toe.

  “And listen, if you get the job, do yourself a favor and buy yourself a nice bag. It’ll take you a year to pay it off but it’s worth it.”

  She knocked on the door to Cheryl’s office and mouthed “Good luck,” and then slid back down the hall. Betsy clutched her new Coach saddlebag reflexively, worried that it was too late to return it.

  Jessica disappeared silently down the plush carpeted hallway.

  Betsy remembered nothing about the interview, aside from the fact that she thought she blew it. Later that night at Cedar Tavern on University Place, she and Gavin sat up front in the window, which, on that chilly spring night, was fogged around its perimeter like a Maxwell House commercial. She told Gavin about horrible Princess Di and about Jessica from Connecticut, and that she hoped she would get the job just so she could be her friend.

  Much to her surprise, “Elizabeth” got the job, on a provisionary basis. She had three months to prove herself. When she walked into the building the first day, she had a vague idea that working there was a rite of passage for twentysomethings who spent their teen years on horseback and tennis courts and summer holidays in Europe, like Caroline, not her. And there was scarcely an hour that passed at her new job when she didn’t think of her old friend. Betsy knew she didn’t belong there just by eavesdropping on the women who handed out catalogues at the front desk, and the more experienced women who escorted VIPs through the auction previews. They were whispering about handsome divorcées with impressive collections of post-war art, what Yoko Ono was wearing when she came to meet with the contemporary art specialists about selling pieces in her collection. They memorized the gossip columns like they were racing forms and exchanged cookie recipes. Betsy’s time was spent behind the scenes, researching and cataloguing prints, lithographs, and lesser paintings for upcoming sales. She was also out of her depth with the department specialists, all experts in their fields and haughty in their own right. She wasn’t as certain of her place there as Jessica, whom Betsy quickly realized was a sort of snake charmer, fearless and smiling in the face of viciousness and capable of winning over even the most bloodless of their colleagues.

  Betsy was also worried that someone would find out, at any moment, how little she remembered of the tedious art history classes she’d taken, the hours she’d spent nodding off to the sound of her professors droning on about Medicis and encaustics. Betsy loved the way the art made her feel but was lousy with details. Her only defense was preparation, so she read for hours, watched, and learned. She just wanted to press her nose against the glass and peek in for a while, never expecting to survive, there or anywhere, for long.

  CHAPTER 15

  CONFESSIONS

  February 2, 1993

  Two years later, no one had caught on to the fact that she didn’t know what she was doing, and she was beginning to think that was how the whole system worked. On some level, everyone was faking it, at least a little, pretending like they knew what they were doing until they didn’t have to pretend anymore. Betsy’s job wasn’t exactly the lowest on the food chain, but most days still involved stuffing envelopes, running out for sandwiches, or schlepping around town to pick up signed contracts from clients, who were often reluctant to put their prized possessions on the auction block. Sometimes, the sellers just grew tired of the pieces, and treated their collections as a living thing that needed to grow and change. Most were forced to liquidate out of necessity: a nasty divorce, a death in the family, bankruptcy. Betsy was oddly at ease in the midst of this kind of crisis, almost relieved, actually, to see that other people suffered, too. She was learning not to be so naive, and that even if a life looked perfect from the outside, it didn’t always stand up to closer scrutiny.

  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.