Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  But ultimately this Grace was just a reflection in a mirror. In reality there was tit-tape sticking the bodice to her chest so Grace didn’t flash her Love Kylie bra at the wrong moment, while her feet were being crunched into a shape they weren’t meant to go by her peeptoe heels. It wasn’t very feminist, but Grace fervently believed that a girl had to suffer to look this good.

  The phone suddenly rang and Grace’s stomach slam-dunked at the prospect of what might happen in the next few hours, but as long as she kept it light and frothy and managed not to say anything stupid, what could possibly go wrong? Grace scooped phone, lippy and purse into her vintage clutch bag and at precisely 8.01 p.m., the lift doors swooshed open and she stepped out into the lobby to find Vaughn waiting for her.

  chapter six

  Vaughn was a little taller and leaner and scarier than she remembered. Maybe it was the slim-cut charcoal suit and black shirt, which made him look grim and forbidding. Or maybe it was just the way he stared at her, head tilted, without saying a word.

  ‘Hey, it’s me,’ Grace said uncertainly as her eyes swept over Vaughn’s unsmiling face. Considering she’d been wearing Primark and tear stains the only time they’d met, maybe he didn’t recognise her.

  ‘I know it’s you,’ he murmured, stepping forward to graze her cheek with a barely-there brush of his lips. Grace took a hasty step back to get away from him and the faintly disconcerting scent of limes.

  She was meant to be light and frothy, not skittish. Grace clasped her hands in front of her and gave him a cool smile, even as her heart thumped out a warning tattoo. ‘Do you want your contractually obligated drink first or do we have to be at this exhibition thingy soon?’

  ‘Drink first, exhibition thingy second,’ Vaughn decided, finally smiling as he spread his arms expansively. ‘So where are you taking me?’

  Somewhere she could put the bill on her room tab and swear blind, even under the toughest interrogation, that he was a fashion PR. Grace pointed at the stark metal steps. ‘Hotel bar,’ she said firmly.

  Vaughn’s hand was already curving around her elbow so he could guide her up the stairs as if she was a delicate flower of a girl who couldn’t walk unaided.

  ‘How did you get that cut on your cheek?’ he asked as they walked into the lounge.

  Grace marched determinedly to the bar, ignoring the plump, cosy sofas and chairs in favour of hauling herself up on to one of the stools. ‘There was this whole thing with a box of costume jewellery,’ she said vaguely. ‘It looks worse than it is. What do you want to drink?’

  It wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t quite so bad as they sipped vodka martinis, so dry that the first taste made Grace’s tongue recoil in horror. If she was light and frothy, then Vaughn had decided to be charming and urbane. They talked about the weather because they were English people abroad. Then they talked about New York. Vaughn mentioned an apartment with a view of the park and an ancient next-door neighbour who was one of the Kennedys and never went out without her sable coat, ‘even when it’s ninety degrees humidity like today’.

  And Grace told him the thing she liked most about New York so far. Which had been her first glimpse as she drove along the BQE and looked over the water to see the tiny island of Manhattan, rising up from the Hudson like some mythical, enchanted forest of skyscrapers and neon.

  Grace was just munching on the three olives she’d begged from the barman in a futile attempt to mop up some alcohol, when Vaughn slid gracefully off the stool. Not that he had far to slide.

  ‘Shall we?’ he said, taking her arm again and this time it didn’t feel so strange. Besides, men with good manners who held doors open for you and walked on the road side of the pavement were a dying breed.

  There was one startling moment of damp heat as they stepped outside before Grace was nestled in the back of a sleek expensive car on soft leather seats with the air conditioning turned up so high that she could feel goosebumps hatch along her arms. Vaughn slid in next to her because he had a driver. An actual driver. In an actual uniform. Man, if the folks back home could see her now.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, a hint of suspicion creeping into her voice because she hadn’t entirely ruled out the human-trafficker idea.

  ‘Chelsea,’ Vaughn sighed. ‘I always end up in Chelsea in some poky little gallery drinking rancid white wine. Now, there are some things you need to know.’

  He started to give her a rundown on his resumé. A gallery in London. A gallery in New York. Up-and-coming artists ‘nurtured and mentored’, as if they were little furry pets who’d been abandoned by their birth mothers and had to be bottle-fed by Vaughn. ‘They’re so needy,’ he complained. ‘Especially the older ones. The younger ones have business managers before they’ve even graduated.’

  When he wasn’t hand-rearing artists, he bought and sold art for private clients and collectors, and advised several museums and national galleries. He obviously did it very well, if the chauffeur-driven car and the whimsical purchase of Marc Jacobs bags was anything to go by.

  Grace cast her mind back to her Art History A-level, but all she could remember was the drone of Mr Mortimer’s voice as she’d ignored the words in her textbooks and looked at the pretty pictures. Vaughn must have noticed the rising panic she was giving off like white noise because he gave her a reassuring smile and squeezed her fingers so briefly that when she looked down at his hand, it had already gone. ‘The whole world seems to know that I’m in acquisition mode at the moment so I need you to do one thing for me,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I won’t have to bid on anything, will I?’ Grace asked uncertainly.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Vaughn said. ‘If I get cornered by the gallery owner or, God forbid, the artist and his agent, you have to rescue me. I’ll tap my chin and you can come rushing over and spirit me away.’

  Actually, that sounded like fun. She could even use a foreign accent and play up the part of the spoiled girlfriend. ‘I can do that,’ Grace grinned, turning to him. ‘I give really good glare.’

  ‘You do,’ he agreed. ‘But when you smile properly, then you’re very beautiful.’

  They were already nudging into 23rd Street so Grace didn’t have to reply. The car pulled up to the kerb and instead of scrambling out like she normally did, Grace waited for the driver to open her door and as she stepped out, Vaughn was there to take her arm again and carefully lead her up the six steps to the gallery entrance.

  The second that they entered Blax Gallery, the excited hum of opening night became an expectant silence, as if someone had suddenly pressed a cosmic mute button. Grace looked up and saw a sea of curious faces, sliding right past her to fix on Vaughn.

  ‘Anyone would think they’d never seen an art dealer before,’ he muttered in her ear, his hand around her wrist as he strode into the room. ‘Let’s be daring and actually look at the art.’

  ‘Are you well known?’ Grace ventured, stepping around a rapier-thin blonde woman who was making absolutely no attempt to stop staring at Vaughn and get out of her way.

  ‘I’m very good at what I do,’ he said simply. ‘And that has its advantages and disadvantages.’ They were fighting through the jostling epicentre of the crowd now to get to one of the far walls so they could look at the pictures. Vaughn grabbed two glasses of wine from a waiter holding a tray aloft and handed one to her. ‘Remember if I make the signal, you’re to come and extract me,’ he warned her before he was swallowed up into the gaping maw of the throng, leaving Grace on her own and utterly out of her depth. There was only one way to get through this and it wasn’t sober.

  Vaughn was right. The wine was gross. It left an oily aftertaste in Grace’s mouth as she squinted at the tiny pictures hanging on the wall. They were bigger than postage stamps; not as big as an iPod shuffle. With all the art groupies milling about and push, push, pushing because they were New Yorkers and it was their God-given right to annexe as much space as they could, it was hard to get a proper look. Grace even resorted to
elbows when she was boxed in by two plastic-faced trophy wives screeching about the macrobiotic diet responsible for their size double zero figures.

  Vaughn was really tall. She hadn’t realised that before, because when you were five feet three inches everyone was tall - but she could see wheat-coloured tufts of hair bobbing above the crowd and she made sure to keep him in her eyeline as she replaced her empty glass with a full one. He might claim to hate snobby art openings but Vaughn sure knew how to work a room: shaking hands, kissing cheeks, face all smiles as he clapped a short, sweaty man in glasses on the back.

  Vaughn didn’t look like he needed rescuing; he looked like a man who’d executed a sneaky cut and run on her. During the third glass of wine, which was becoming more palatable the more that she drank, she saw him press a finger to the cleft in his chin. He did it so casually that at first Grace thought it was an involuntary gesture. But then he did it again, eyes scanning the room. Besides, the woman clinging to his arm didn’t look like she had much truck with personal space boundaries.

  Grace took a step towards them. In her head she had a Russian accent all good to go, but as soon as she opened her mouth, she realised that it sounded more Mumbai than Moscow so she settled for giving Vaughn a sharp poke in the ribs with her clutch. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said plaintively. ‘You promised me dinner.’

  Vaughn’s eyebrow winged all the way up to the ceiling as he slowly tried to raise the arm that the other woman was clamped to. Reluctantly she let go, so he could wrap it around Grace’s waist and pull her gently towards him. ‘There you are, darling,’ he said. ‘I’d almost given up on you.’

  OK, she was halfway to hammered, which had to be why Grace leaned against Vaughn and brushed a proprietorial hand over his jacket lapel. The woman, another emaciated forty-something in an understated black dress with hair practically the same colour as Grace’s Marc Jacobs bag, smiled thinly. ‘I don’t think you’ve introduced me to your new girl.’

  New girl? Did she think Grace was an office junior that Vaughn had taken on to help with the filing? Grace looked pointedly at Vaughn in the hope he’d correct the woman pretty damn sharpish. Instead he said, ‘Deirdre represents Ben Myers.’ Who the hell was Ben Myers? ‘Deirdre, this is Grace, she’s in fashion.’

  Grace extended a hand and had it almost crushed between Deirdre’s skeletal fingers. ‘What do you think of Ben’s work?’

  Deirdre asked, gesturing at one of the micro-sized portraits on the wall behind them.

  The seconds passed with agonising slowness - only Vaughn’s thumb rhythmically stroking the indentation of her waist anchored Grace to the spot. ‘Well, they’re kinda small, aren’t they?’ she said finally.

  ‘That’s because they’re miniatures,’ Deirdre sniffed. ‘Ben’s reclaiming them as a vibrant twenty-first-century genre.’

  Whatever. Through the alcoholic haze, Grace dimly remembered an essay she’d written on The Practical Uses of Painting Before the 20th Century. ‘But, hey, weren’t miniatures meant to be carried about?’ she asked. ‘Like, they were the camera phones of the olden days, y’know?’

  She was slurring her words, but Vaughn’s hand was still smoothing down the material of her dress so he couldn’t be that pissed off with her, even though Deirdre looked like her face had just been coated in hydrochloric acid.

  ‘And your point is?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Well, they’re just, like, really small.’ Grace tried to tap the tip of her nose and nearly poked her fingernail in her eye. ‘I had to get that close to work out what was going on, and—’

  ‘Look, Deirdre, if Ben started to work on a larger scale, I’d love to have another look,’ Vaughn added. ‘But Grace is right. Can you imagine any gallery letting the public get so close to the exhibits? And we both know that most private collectors prefer something a bit more showy.’

  Deirdre gave Grace an all-encompassing once-over. ‘I’m giving you the opportunity to get in on the ground floor,’ she said, though her gimlet gaze was still locked on Grace, as she paused deliberately. ‘After all, you have a wonderful talent for . . . smoothing out the rough edges.’

  Somewhere in there was a major diss aimed directly at Grace, as if Deirdre had X-ray vision and could see right through Grace’s borrowed finery to the tit-tape that was holding her dress together. Grace longed to shut her down, even opened her mouth - but the hand at her waist administered a warning pinch and when she looked up, Vaughn was smiling tightly.

  ‘That’s very sweet of you, Deirdre,’ he said with a careless shrug. ‘But I’m going to have to pass. I have my hands full at the moment.’

  ‘Well, you’re letting go of a wonderful opportunity,’ Deirdre hissed, before striding off with her nose in the air.

  ‘Was I rude?’ Grace asked Vaughn worriedly, but he was looking amused. ‘I was aiming for diplomatic but it sort of came out as rude.’

  ‘A little forthright, perhaps?’ he suggested. ‘But really, she’s so aggressive.’

  ‘I don’t know if you want to leave yet, but it wasn’t just a line. I’m starving and my stomach is making all sorts of gurgling noises . . .’

  ‘And you need food inside you to soak up some of the wine,’ Vaughn finished for her with an indulgent smile. ‘Shall we get out of here?’

  Grace tried not to loll in a drunken sprawl on the back seat of the car as they drove further downtown. Apart from the demands of her gut, she felt like the whole world was in soft focus, the bright glitter outside the tinted windows muted to a delicate shimmer, the low murmur of Vaughn’s voice as he took a call, a soothing accompaniment to the hum of the air conditioning. She really had drunk quite a lot.

  When the car stopped with a gentle lurch as a cab pulled out in front of them, it shocked her out of her stupor. Grace peered out on to Bank Street, eyes flickering in disbelief as the frontage of the Waverly Inn came into view. Owned by Graydon Carter, Editor of Vanity Fair, the Waverly Inn was so now, so hip, so on trend that even Kiki couldn’t get in. Or actually she’d been offered a table on the terrace and had turned it down because apparently the terrace was New York shorthand for social Siberia.

  Grace tried to play it cool, aware of Vaughn’s eyes on her, as they were waved past the bouncer, ushered through the bar and into the tiny inner sanctum of New York’s power players. The dining room wasn’t much bigger than Grace’s bedsit and decorated with what looked like a pile of tatty old junk; battered books, old baseball photos and some really tacky paintings. Grace knew she’d just been admitted into the Holy of Holies and she wanted to stop and drink it all in but she forced herself to keep moving. Vaughn’s hand was at the small of her back, and she was sure he could tell that she was trembling as if a whole colony of butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach as she and Vaughn were led right to the back of the room while all eyes rested upon them.

  Grace slid on to the empty banquette and tried not to bounce in excitement as Vaughn sat down opposite her. ‘Graydon lets me have his table when he’s out of town,’ he told her, not bothering to explain who Graydon was and Grace was grateful that she knew and didn’t need to ask for subtitles. There was a conveniently placed mirror next to her so she could see the entire room and didn’t have to shamelessly rubberneck the other guests to see if she could spot a stray Scarlett or Gwyneth. She’d even have been happy with a Sienna.

  ‘This is amazing,’ she breathed when the ability to speak finally came back to her. She wanted to wince at how starstruck she sounded but Vaughn didn’t seem to mind. He simply smiled and then raised his hand at someone a couple of tables across who was sitting with a woman who looked a hell of a lot like Jennifer Aniston.

  ‘The food’s good,’ Vaughn said. ‘I hope you’re not a picky eater.’

  He made ‘picky eater’ sound like code for ‘kiddy fiddler’, and Grace was pleased she could shake her head. ‘I’ll eat anything. Well, apart from artichokes.’ Now she could smell the surprisingly homely scent of food and remembered how hungry she was; her s
tomach gave another warning rumble. As a waiter had come over with the sole intention of serving them alcohol, Grace could feel herself start to relax ever so slightly.

  Dissecting and discussing the menu kept the conversation grooving along and by the time Grace had gulped down a glass of water and they were sharing a starter of crab cakes, she was beginning to enjoy herself.

  Normally Grace treated conversations as awkward silences punctuated by whatever she could think of to fill the pauses. But Vaughn chatted with a practised ease and when Grace realised that they’d lapsed into quiet, he was ready with an anecdote about a Texan oil baron who’d spent millions on a Picasso and then put his elbow through it while he was showing it off at his birthday party.

  By the time Grace’s forty-five-dollar macaroni and cheese with fresh truffle shavings was just a few smears on her plate, they were on to the subject of twentieth-century art.