The Price of Inheritance (9 page)

My stomach was churning. It was all here, in front of me, the demise of my career. Louise was mentioned by name and so was I, along with Nicole and Erik. It made us out to all be at fault, not just me, which meant that they wrote the article before they knew I had been exiled from Christie's. Had there been a follow-up? Not in the
Baltimore Sun
. The story hadn't been picked up by the
Times
but the
Washington Post
gave it a few inches and every inside art publication had run it or linked to it, which meant everyone in my industry knew about it. And unfortunately, those were the only people I cared about and the only ones who could give me a job.

There was no way my department, my former department, was going to recover from this quickly. It wasn't just the one piece; the Hugh Finlay table was poison to the whole estate. And still my mother was convinced that someone from Sotheby's or Bonhams was going to sprint to me at the Vollinger Gallery, hand me a big fat contract to sign on the line, and say, “Welcome to the family, little one.”

I slowly wove through the city blocks home and my mother opened my door before I reached it. She had on her navy blue shift dress, a Chanel copy she'd had custom made in the Garment District, which she'd been wearing with sensible kitten heels and a double strand of pearls for the last decade. Her dark hair was arranged in her perfect helmet of success. She looked at me and said, “Vollinger Gallery. You have no choice. Please get ready.” So I would die in public. I'd probably be stoned. Louise surely had Nicole pushing around a wheelbarrow full of boulders just in case she ran into me and had to kill me like in “The Lottery.” I put on a black sleeveless dress, which I'd found in a ball on the floor, no makeup, and motorcycle boots. I looked unpolished, unkempt, un-Christie's, which is what I was. I was accepting my fate.

The Vollinger Gallery was the best American furniture gallery in New York City. If you weren't buying American furniture at auction or from a private dealer, you were buying it from Vollinger. I sat against the leather seat of the cab and mentally went through a checklist of who could be there. Louise could definitely be there, if she wasn't too busy wading through the mess I'd left her. David Marcham could be there, too. He might slap me on the back and thank me in front of everyone for taking out his competition so publicly and swiftly.

We arrived on the early side, which was good and terrible. It was good because there were fewer people milling through the five floors of the nineteenth-century town house on East Eighty-Fourth Street, and bad because the few people who were there were all looking at the door anticipating who might arrive next.

None of them was expecting me.

Rebecca Wall was the manager of the gallery and was so tall you almost wanted to ask her what the air was like up there. She also had one of those pan-British accents that made you think she was raised between London and some former British African colony like Malawi. She had a perpetual tan and always wore her hair in a topknot like she wanted to conduct electricity. She saw me when I walked in and actually put her hand on her heart.

Marisa Irving, another gallerina and the manager of the well-known Steiner Gallery, moved briskly toward Rebecca in her over-the-knee Louis Vuitton boots to talk about one thing: the ignoramus that was I.

“This is really fun, Mom. What's next, lethal injection?” She shut me up with a flick of her wrist and gave the room her best academic smile, a little sincere, a lot more menacing.

I stood in the corner with her and watched everyone who dealt with American furniture walk in except Louise, Nicole, and Erik.

I knew that normally one of them would have made it. Probably Louise. But they were surely still at work dealing with the aftermath of the auction. Within the next five minutes, they would know that I was there. Someone would text them and preface it with “Guess the buffoon who just walked in??!!”

I leaned over to my mother and whispered, “I need to leave. Where is the door? I can't be here.”

“You are a very smart woman. Just persevere. Smile. Let them see that what happened is no big deal. Nothing to gawk at. People will take cues from the way you present yourself.”

It was at that moment that my own mother abandoned me. Without warning, she beelined out the door and left me standing there, exposed. Within seconds, a group of five women, the dreaded gallerinas, rushed over to me.

The gallery girls of New York are like starving attack dogs in really nice clothes. All have legs for days and glasses so edgy you wondered why they didn't just strap two paperweights to their faces with some hooks. I knew most of them, I was friends with a few of them, and I didn't want to see any of them. But as these girls appeared next to me with dinner-plate eyes and their fingers poised to text everyone my reaction, it was clear that I had no choice. They were going to stone me.

“Carolyn Everett! I can't believe you're here! I'm going to blog about this immediately,” said one named Jacqueline, grabbing me by the elbow and pouting like a model who eats only baby carrots and laxatives.

“Bold. Extremely bold move, Carolyn,” said her friend Kira.

I hated my mother. Hated. How could she leave me like this? She knew this was going to happen. She was probably standing outside watching me from a window in some form of sadistic parenting.

“How much Xanax are you on? Can you see me? Do I look like a cartoon character?” said Kira.

“I wouldn't be able to walk,” said Jacqueline. “I'd be too distraught. Someone would have to push me in a delicate chair. Not like a wheelchair but maybe a Chippendale fauteuil with small sliding disks on the bottom.”

“Are you thinking about rehab?” Kira asked. “I know a few places that will let you in to rest even if you don't have a valid addiction. But if you play your hand right, you could just convince everyone that your mistake was due to an innocent little meth problem.”

Wait, a meth addiction was better than making a mistake? The girls waited for me to reply and all I could say was, “I hate my mother.”

They shook their heads in agreement and started swapping stories of their crazy childhoods. Who needed a family? I could be like Mowgli the jungle boy and live in the forest and befriend ants. I did not need to be exposed to this slow, female torture.

“You really picked
the
party to come to,” said Kira. “Everyone's here. Lots of nonfurniture people. Do you know Michael Ando from Christie's Tokyo? He's upstairs. And Max Sebastian from Sotheby's London. Do you know him? He's very good-looking, for someone so terribly old. He's right over there with that thief of an art dealer Greta Merch.” She waved her wrist toward the windows.

“How old is he?” I asked, looking at the man regularly called the silver fox of the art world.

“Fifty. Halfway dead.”

Max Sebastian looked very much alive. He was a pleasant-looking fifty, wearing age in a way that caused people to say, “If that's what fifty looks like . . .” But despite the comfort of his looks, he had a standoffish quality that made him just right to be a department head.

“Miller McCarthy is here, too. Sotheby's. Impressionism,” said Kira, pointing at a wisp of a woman in a cape and riding boots.

“Why is she here?”

“She's here because Max is here. Oxbridge connection. Max is here because Francie Aldridge is here. Francie is here because Louise was supposed to be here and you're here to show all these people that you're a real tough cookie, right?”

I wanted to punch her.

The girls finally left me to fight back my rage, which I had to do with twice as much strength when I spied David Marcham walk through the door. Instead of ignoring me, as he should have done, he walked right over with a big, expensive smile.

“Hi, Carolyn. How are you?”

“I've been better,” I said, deadpan.

My mother might not understand my level of mortification, but David did.

“Pretty brave of you to come out here. Especially to this,” he said, motioning to all the women in the room. “It's full of hawks.”

What was I going to say to that? My mother made me? I was planning on throwing myself off a building but this seemed like a more uncomfortable way to die?

“Well, I guess I used to be one of them.”

“A hawk,” he said, smiling. “Yes, you were. Ruthless even. And very good at your job. One of the best I've seen in that department at Christie's, maybe ever.”

“Thanks,” I said, genuinely appreciative of his compliment. The only nice thing I had heard lately was when I walked out of the shower and my mother said, “You stink less than you did fifteen minutes ago.”

“Why are you here?” he asked.

That was a very good question.

“I don't know,” I said, biting my bottom lip. Why was I there. “I guess I'm hoping that eventually I can do something else. Find another job.”

“Ah, I see,” he said, cutting me off before I could embarrass myself even more. “I doubt you want my advice but I'll give it to you anyway.”

I looked at him expectantly. Hopefully his advice was “Run, don't walk to Sotheby's; there's a desk waiting for you.”

He smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder, not condescendingly but more as a person who didn't want me to end my life on a cold gray night in January in New York.

“Go do something else for a while. Take a break. The art world can be very unforgiving.”

Yes, it could be. It was being unforgiving right now in the form of a slightly balding man in a very expensive suit. But what else could I do?

I let my evening finish on that note and left the gallery without another word. By the time I reached my apartment I was crying again. My mother walked up to me and apologized.

“I was only trying to help, Carolyn. I call it modern parenting for the unconventional child. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to embarrass you.”

“It's okay,” I said, running my hand across my tears and smearing them across my face. “I wish you hadn't left me there.”

“I know. But no one was going to talk to you if I was standing there.”

“That would have been nice.”

“Did you speak to anyone interesting?”

“David Marcham.” I put my hand up to caution her from doing leaps in celebration. “It went terribly. He suggested I leave the auction world altogether.”

“He's an imbecile.”

“Not exactly. Though I've never liked him very much. All that showboating on
Antiques Roadshow
. It's weird.”

The next morning, my mom packed her things, made sure my cabinets were well stocked with food, poured the rest of my vodka down the sink, and gave me a hug.

“You don't need me anymore, do you?”

“It's not that I don't need you, it's just that I don't need this right now. My old life is not mine anymore.”

“Don't you want it back?”

“I don't know. Maybe. I mean yes, but not today. Not right now. I tried to get back on the same track and I just can't. No one wants me right now.”

“Well then, they're idiots! Pea-brained fools,” said my mom, giving me a stiff hug before she reached for her bag.

“Don't be a stranger,” she said, doing her walk-away-and-wave move. I heard her soft steps down the carpeted stairs. Soon she would be at Penn Station on a train back to Boston and she'd think about how different the two of us were after all.

I'd only been rid of my mother for ten minutes when Alex called. She'd probably called him on her way out and told him to contact me immediately so I didn't run out to buy more vodka to mix with my tap water.

“I'm worried about you,” said Alex. “I'm very, very worried about you. But I figured you needed your space. So I gave it to you. And then your mother called and said you have had all the space you can handle, so I called. Are you feeling better now?”

“A little,” I said, lying.

“Would you like to see me?”

Did I want to see Alex? That was a very good question.

“I'll take your silence as a ‘not right now,' ” said Alex diplomatically.

“Carolyn?”

“Yes,” I said, apologizing for the long, awkward pause.

“I'm sorry that happened to you.”

“Do you know everything?”

“Well, not everything, but I read the papers and Nicole called me and your mother called me, so I guess I have a pretty good picture of it all.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said, trying to fight back the distinct sound of shame in my voice. “I know how much you care about our shining careers. How much we both do. We always planned to be such big New York success stories and now I've written that other kind of story. The kind where the heroine dies penniless and forgotten.” I was crying again.

“Carolyn, stop. You made a mistake. Big deal. It was about time you made a mistake.”

“Time I made a mistake? Do you take some perverse enjoyment in watching me fail?”

“No, but you never fail. You didn't fail now. I think it's good for people sometimes, for things to go wrong. It builds character. And you, you've just never really done anything wrong. You graduated summa cum laude from Princeton. You were in Ivy Club, you got a job at Christie's before you even graduated, and you were the youngest person to ever hold your job there. You're a wunderkind. It was time for you to mess up.”

“What should I do, Alex?” I said, my voice tired and gravelly.

“Why don't you try something else? You've only done one thing your entire professional life. Even when we were in high school you wanted to work for an auction house. There are millions of other jobs in the world. Try one.”

“ ‘Try one.' You make it sound awfully easy. Which one should I try?”

“I don't know. Stockbroker, tightrope walker, teacher, parachutist, lawyer, cosmonaut. You're a smart girl, Carolyn, and you need a break right now. From me, from New York, from art and auctions, and frankly, from yourself.”