hand, grimaced, handed it back. “There’s a guy over on the boardwalk who will fix it for twenty-five bucks. I went to him last month. Right near the Taj Mahal. Or what used to be the Taj Mahal, at least. Hey, are you okay? No offense, but you look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”
“Hangover.”
“Ah. You’ll learn not to go out before you open.”
“It’s been a shitty morning either way.” I told her about running into Brittany in the back hall.
“She’s a total twat. Ignore her. They’re like children. Just can’t listen to their bullshit. You’re the one with the power and don’t forget it. You can pack their books with appointments if you like them, or if they piss you off, then you can punish them for it.”
“What’s the deal with that older guy who comes in and cleans and like takes the recycling out? He refuses to talk to me.”
“You mean Luis?
I nodded. “I tried to talk to him like three times and he’s totally ignored me.”
“Well, he’s deaf. And mute. And he doesn’t use sign language, but he can read and write. Sometimes I think he pretends to understand less than he does—he’s smart enough to tune all of us out.”
“Oh—that explains it.” But I felt even worse than before. No wonder he didn’t like me, yammering on and on at him, oblivious.
“You’ll see. He’s really observant—he notices a lot about people. Once, when I couldn’t find Carrie, he could tell I was looking for her and he pretended to put a finger down his throat.”
“Wait, why?”
“Oh, you don’t know yet. Well, you would have found out soon enough anyway. She’s bulimic. She uses that bathroom right next to her office. It’s pretty disgusting.”
“So what has he noticed about you?” I couldn’t help myself. I was so curious about Emily, about what she was doing here. It seemed like my chance to ask more.
“Oh, probably that I’m a sinner, like my parents said when I left. Good as dead as far as they’re concerned.” She was smiling, but some of the mirth left her voice. “What about you? Your parents like your ex?” She gestured to my shattered phone.
“How did you know …”
“Come on. I could tell you were seriously pining when I came up to the desk. Let’s hear it. What’s the deal there?”
“He … well.” I fumbled for the right words. God, how to describe what it had really been like? The recording of Ramona and Matthew in bed. The nude she painted of him, him looking smug, imperial, in an Eames rocking chair, every inch the enfant terrible. The text messages I sent. Matthew, where are you? Matthew, what’s going on?
“He slept with someone else. She’s a painter,” I said. “She was someone I was hoping to represent at the gallery where I worked. Matthew was—is—one of their clients. He’s a sculptor. Quite well known, actually.” Something I had thought about a lot over the past few weeks was how Matthew had never wanted for anything—not attention, not money, not admiration, not fame. How it made sense that he thought he could do what he did and that I might stay. I thought of his mother, a tidy, brisk woman in her sleek, modern house nestled in the woods of New Canaan. The summer place on the cliffs of Newport. The father who flew in from London every few months, who hid his fondness for red meat and gin in bespoke Turnbull & Asser. It had been a part of my initial attraction to Matthew—not necessarily the money, but the self-assurance it gave him. The unassailable confidence touched his every movement, from the way he hailed a cab to the way he peeled an orange.
I remembered when I first started at the gallery, the clichés that were being bandied around about Matthew Whitehall, the twenty-nine-year-old wunderkind. The rising star. I had been skeptical until I saw one of his newer pieces, a bronze of a couple embracing—there was an athletic quality about the way Matthew had rendered them, something nearly violent, that I found captivating. The articulation of their tendons, the definition of their muscles, the sense of the energy coiled in their limbs, as though they might just as soon launch themselves at one another and collide. I studied the piece until I felt something else—the rubber-band ping of attention directed toward me. I looked to see Matthew across the room, his eyes on my face. The knowing way the corners of