Lush Lives E-Book

J. Vanessa Lyon

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

For artist Glory Hopkins, inheriting her aunt's Harlem brownstone feels more like a curse than a blessing. But when she stumbles into Parkie de Groot, a savvy auction house appraiser, her unexpected windfall begins to look more promising as they form an immediate but undeniable connection. But complications soon arise: between Parkie's struggle to overcome the heartache of past romances and Glory's all-consuming artistic ambitions, secrets begin to be kept. And the deeper they dig into the mysteries of the inherited house, the more fraught their relationship becomes . . . An evocative love story set in the high-stakes art and auction worlds in New York City, Lush Lives is about smart, driven women unafraid to take risks and fight for what they love.

Leseprobe

Praise forlush lives

‘A vibrant, sexy, queer contemporary romance’

—Book Riot

‘[A] swoonworthy romance . . . [Lush Lives] is also a sumptuous story about the complicated costs of ambition’

—Electric Literature

‘Lyon’s hot, perceptive novel grapples with navigating interracial relationships and issues of authenticity and selling out . . . an unerringly satisfying read’

—Booklist, starred review

‘Lyon writes a compelling and sexy story of the lives of queer women, both past and present, grounded in the beautifully drawn atmosphere of Harlem. The novel successfully blends real and speculative history to evoke what may hide in the silence of historical records’

—Library Journal, starred review

‘With prose that turns on a dime from blistering to sensual . . . [Lush Lives] is a treat’

—Publishers Weekly

‘Insightful, brazen, and groundbreaking in its vivid portrayal of boundary-pushing characters who rarely get the spotlight, Lush Lives is the total package — a sexy queer romance with substance’

—Camille Perri, author of When Katie Met Cassidy and The Assistants

‘With a singular voice, Lyon weaves an unforgettable romance in the elite art world, one full of tenderness, fierce hope, and self-empowerment’

—Ashley Herring Blake, author of Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail

J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of The Groves (an Audible Original) and Meet Me in Madrid, under the pseudonym Verity Lowell. She is an art historian, former appraiser and occasional curator who teaches at a New England liberal arts college.

First published in the United States of America in 2023 by Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove AtlanticThis paperback edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2024 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © J. Vanessa Lyon, 2023

The moral right of J. Vanessa Lyon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Epigraph courtesy of Jennifer Tseng.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 066 1E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 067 8

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UKOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To my own great-great aunt,JAG officer Lt. Colonel Lucille Caldwell(1909–1978)

Sudden Onrush of Affectionate Feeling an erasure of Nella Larsen’s Passing

A queer outpouring of pent-up,Terrible, wild, queer, peculiarCaressing. Those queer eyes!Black, strange, languorous eyes,Set in that ivory face.Easy on the eyes.Queer prick of satisfaction.A kiss on her dark curls.A queer choking in her throat.Shunned fancy.Queer & black,The feeling passed.She could not define it.I am so lonely, she thought.She was bound to her.Queer to thinkOf never seeing her again.

—Jennifer Tseng

Chapter 1

Glory was determined to make it, and she had. The appraisal of at least some of her great-aunt Lucille’s things would happen today, before another week, or month, slid by. Now that she was here, though, taking a seat in the cramped little vestibule felt like a punishment. Like being sent to the principal’s office. Or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The arrangement of the reception area at the top of the stairs was haphazard. More musical chairs than the first impression a pretentious New York auction house should want to make. Maybe it was always this way, but Glory had a feeling the close quarters were even closer today because it was a “Walk-In Wednesday.” Free appraisals. Drop-ins welcome. Welcome to wedge yourself into a corral of orphaned antiques with a bunch of other hopeful strangers sitting knee to knee. She looked for an indication that the place was worth the wait but found instead, randomly stacked on the hunter green walls behind the mismatched chairs, a dozen ostentatiously framed but indisputably crappy Victorian landscape paintings, each with its own brass plaque and metal-shaded light. The floor, a checkerboard of buffed black and white, seemed to dare her to cross its gleaming surface.

However claustrophobic, the foyer of Madeline Cuthbert Auctioneers LLC was appropriately intimidating simply for being what it was—a gateway to the kind of old Manhattan firm with unpaid interns and tastefully hand-drawn advertisements in the style of a New Yorker cartoon. A business that sold mostly dead white people’s valuable things to the mostly white people who wanted to buy them. Glory knew she had every right to be there. But even as she was announced by a two-toned door chime, the receptionist, a dark-rooted twentysomething engrossed in her multiple screens, failed to register her presence. She hadn’t even looked up when Glory repeatedly excused herself to take the only open seat in that steerage-like space. There was no choice but to balance the heavy liquor box she’d been carrying on her lap.

Once she was settled, legs together, elbows tucked tight at her sides, Glory cast a furtive glance at the seven or eight other people around her. They might have been nice enough, nodding and rolling their eyes in shows of camaraderie. But she wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Or any talk. Unlike her mother and sister, she didn’t feel compelled to make people comfortable through the performance of neutral chatter. Everyone was busy anyway. Some were texting, others reading. One, a middle-aged man in a sweatshirt, was clipping his nails into the soil of the potted ficus beside him. Snap, snap, snap.

The room was windowless, warm, and stuffy. As soon as Glory’s rear hit the seat cushion, she’d wanted to lay her head down on the box and sleep. This was her own fault, really. For painting through the previous night and into the next afternoon, forgetting that today was the only day you didn’t need an appointment for a free appraisal. By the time she’d remembered, traffic was too bad to get anywhere fast by calling a car.

In a matter of minutes, she had dropped her paintbrushes into a coffee can of turps and thrown what she hoped were several representative specimens from the estate into the first container she could find, a Johnnie Walker carton left over from the wake. Then she’d rushed out of the house without a coat and hustled over to 116th to take the train downtown.

Lucille had been dead for close to six months. But only a few weeks ago had Glory found the energy to unlock the door to the attic at the top of the brownstone’s spiraling staircase. Knowing that her great-aunt had died in her own bed, Glory couldn’t easily get herself to enter Lucille’s second-floor apartment, let alone that spidery storage space where she seemed to have secreted away the most personal belongings from her past.

It was sad and unnerving to think about a lonely woman’s last breath being taken in what was now Glory’s house. It couldn’t have been the first time someone died there, and Glory didn’t believe in ghosts. But she did respect the mysterious power of places and things to retain vestiges of the people who possessed them, to radiate the almost palpable charge of their previous owners’ feelings. With limited experience in the world beyond her home, her great-aunt Lucille had surrounded herself not with people but with objects. If she’d made a museum of her life, Glory was now its reluctant curator.

To Glory’s right, a woman, carrying a logo’d purse that wasn’t quite deep enough to conceal her offering of an ornate silver candelabra, rose when beckoned. She’d hardly been there long enough to do the paperwork. But just like at the DMV, there didn’t seem to be any rationale behind the auction house’s intake process. After filling out the questionnaire they’d been given, the people in chairs were definitely not being called in order of arrival. It all seemed arbitrary. Completely at the whim of the gossip girl behind the desk. This would-be greeter had barely offered a thank-you when Glory returned her clipboard. But she did seem to be reading the completed forms. And by some dubious algorithm, she also seemed to have determined the likely return on time invested in those who were seated in her midst.

One by one, almost everyone was instructed to proceed to a room down the corridor where a specialist in X or Y or Q would be happy to reveal their fate. By 4:45, even the brown-haired brother-and-sister-looking couple with the plastic laundry hamper (who had arrived long after Glory) were directed to see someone down that hallway. Only fifteen minutes remained, and Glory could officially feel her blood coming to a steady simmer. She didn’t like to make a scene, but she hated to be ignored.

A door slammed somewhere deep in the building’s bowels.

Minutes later, the nail clipper, making a hurried exit, nearly tripped over Glory’s boots on his way out the door. Chin to his chest, he muttered a slew of obscenities as he walked by her, still carefully guiding his submission—something thin and rectangular wrapped in a striped bedsheet—through the door to the lobby. Once he was gone, the receptionist glanced up from her computer, mechanically sweeping the room like a Cylon.

Only two contenders remained. Aside from Glory, Cuthbert’s other potential client was a pink-faced, expensively suited older man who had placed a large, faded-turquoise Tiffany box on the chair next to him as if it were his companion.

“Sir, if you’d like to go ahead,” said the receptionist in the most dulcet of tones. “Just down the hall to the right, our specialist in decorative arts will see you.”

“No, no,” said the fellow in pinstripes, waving his hands. “I believe this young woman was here before me. I’m a retiree with a punch bowl. I can come back another day if need be.”

Glory was relieved to be able to return the man’s empathetic smile.

The girl at the desk raised her barely there eyebrows. As Glory set the box on the floor, a few stray beads of dried paint popped off her gray coveralls. She suddenly realized her hands, too, were stained with still-moist oils. Come to think of it, she more or less reeked of minerals and solvents.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the receptionist said merrily. “I didn’t see you. How can we help you today?”

Before Glory could answer, a woman around her age, maybe a little younger, emerged from the mysterious hallway. She had to be close to six feet tall, and she wore a tailored navy skirt suit over a kelly green, nearly see-through chiffon blouse with a flouncy bow. She walked over to the receptionist and leaned the silver-handled walking stick she’d been using against the edge of the desk. While the woman was making a series of rapid entries on her clipboard, a thick lock of her strawberry blond—or was it more like French ochre—bangs kept getting in her eyes. Each time it did, she pushed out her lower lip and blew it off her forehead, not seeming to care if her professionalism took a hit.

“I’m sending three and four to Nicholas,” the woman said, evidently referring to the numbers assigned to the prospects she had already seen. “Is anyone else good for me?” she asked, turning to the odd couple still sitting there. The redhead gave them a disarmingly friendly smile. Her tone and the mischievous look in her eyes were sexy and suggestive, and Glory found herself hoping she was their intended target.

“I was just, um, determining that,” said the receptionist. “This . . . woman hasn’t told me what she brought in.”

“Because this woman’s presence wasn’t even acknowledged until this nice man pointed it out,” Glory said. “Even though she was here first.”

The tall woman’s smile disappeared and her green eyes, trained now on the receptionist, went cold. She came Glory’s way and stuck out her left hand.

“Parkie de Groot,” she said solemnly, as Glory stood. “I’m so sorry. Please accept our apologies, I can’t imagine how that happened. There’s no excuse for it. But if you still have time for an evaluation, we do, too.”

Glory nodded. The woman’s name was ridiculous in a way that seemed almost strategically engineered to offset her good looks. But her sincerity was a nice surprise. TBQH, the Parkie package as a whole was worth waiting for. In the first place, those hips.

She shifted her weight from one stockinged leg to the other. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve got? It’s not as if anybody here goes home at five.”

Glory thought better than to respond to that request, so she bent down and hefted her box onto the chair. She flipped open the cardboard flaps, but as soon as she had, a wave of embarrassment overtook her and she immediately wanted to close the box back up. This initial surge of discomfort was followed by the more unseemly feeling of being ashamed to be embarrassed to begin with.

These were her family’s things, not hers. If what was in the box wasn’t valuable, it shouldn’t reflect on Glory—though she couldn’t help feeling it would.

The redhead looked so eager. Standing there with her eyes darting from Glory to the open carton. Glory thought about telling her to forget about it. She could come back another Wednesday. In a dress. Freshly showered. With the good stuff.

Under the auction house’s harsh lights, Lucille’s things now seemed woeful in a way Glory imagined they might not seem if she were white with a social registry name. And it was worse with the eyes of the old man and the receptionist now upon her, in addition to the interested gaze of Miss de Groot, who looked on encouragingly as Glory pushed aside the loose balls of crumpled newspaper shoved into the box for protection.

“I really have no idea if any of this is even worth showing you,” Glory said apologetically as she pulled out a tarnished coffeepot engraved with Lucille’s geometric initials.

The redhead’s face fell almost, but not quite, imperceptibly. She sat down stiffly in the neighboring chair.

“May I?” she asked.

Glory handed over the coffeepot.

“How stylish,” she said, sounding almost as if it were an insult. “So. This is a very nice piece of 1930s silver plate. But being plate, it’s not something we would normally offer at auction. Most of what we sell from this period is sterling, or of that grade. You know, Jensen, even Spratling, Christofle. French Deco is sort of our signature. But yours is attractive, isn’t it? Looks like it was well loved.”

What a condescending little . . .

“Is there anything else you’d like me to see?” the obnoxious woman named Parkie asked, handing back the coffeepot.

Glory set down her stylishly worthless piece of nothing and felt around for the scrapbook and French enameled boxes and porcelain vases she had also packed. Not only was this a waste of time, it was humiliating. The redhead was acting as if, obviously, Glory had heard of those Deco designers—she had. But then she also implied Glory couldn’t tell silver from silver plate—she couldn’t.

Still.

“Anything else? I mean, nothing that’s worth your time,” Glory said.

“I don’t know about that. I saw on the questionnaire your great-aunt lived in Harlem? Was she there a long time?”

“A century, basically.”

When Parkie whipped her ponytail around to see if Glory was serious, there was real curiosity in her eyes, like a kid about to hear a ghost story.

“No way.”

“Yep. Lucille’s parents died young. She and her sister inherited the same brownstone where they grew up. They stayed on the second floor and rented out the apartment downstairs. According to family legend—which is basically stories my grandfather told my dad because, as someone new to the family, he believed them—a few famous people lived in the rooms downstairs. Possibly, though no one can prove it, Cab Calloway when he was home between gigs. Duke Ellington came by for parties, supposedly.”

“Holy shit. That’s amazing,” Parkie said.

“Amazing isn’t worth much, I guess.”

Across the room, the phone rang. The receptionist answered, closing her eyes after enduring the first few seconds.

“So sorry to interrupt,” she said when the noise of a muffled diatribe had ceased. “Parkie, I have Madeline from Miami and she’s wondering if you have a sec to update her on the Flagg estate.”

Parkie straightened in her chair at this announcement, and Glory could almost see the anxiety start to seep out of her scarcely visible, increasingly colorless pores. When Parkie turned to get up, her flashing eyes met Glory’s and both of them looked immediately away, as if they’d been privy to something they shouldn’t have.

“Ms.? I’m sorry, I don’t think I got your name,” Parkie said, pretending to look for it on her clipboard.

“Gloria Hopkins.”

With the receptionist watching, the redhead was back in customer-service mode. Glory had liked her better when she let her patrician but pliant features show how she really felt. Excited, annoyed, flustered. And, it seemed to Glory from the way she’d listened when she talked about Lucille, interested.

“Perfect. Miss Hopkins, again, I’m really so sorry for what happened before. I’m afraid I have to return this call from my desk. But if you’d like to leave the box and your number with Olive here, I promise to have whatever else you brought in evaluated and call you myself with the results. Would that work?”

“That would work,” Glory said. “Thank you, Ms. de Groot, I appreciate it.”

Glory would appreciate it even more if Parkie de Groot was the kind of woman who popped up on one of the apps she’d been meaning to get serious about, though she wondered if the appraiser’s chilly magnetism would come across digitally. For the briefest moment Glory considered asking Parkie for her number—in case she had any questions in the meantime. But she had her business card now, so asking for her cell might seem too thirsty. Better to wait until the redhead made the next move.

Parkie was on her feet now.

“Well, have a nice evening,” she said.

“I will if you will,” Glory replied inexplicably.

“With this call I’m about to do, not likely.”

And with that, Parkie adjusted her flouncy bow against her chest and smoothed her pencil skirt over her shapely hips, only to disappear down another mysterious hallway, leaving Glory, the nice old man, and Olive, the prejudiced receptionist, to conclude the business of the day.

Chapter 2

Parkie headed around the corner wondering if today would be the day. She could hear the voice of her old boss—not Madeline but Parkie’s direct supervisor—as if it were last week. Which it practically had been. “We arrive at zee hour de la poulet danois, no?” he would taunt Parkie over the partitions of her cube. It was a diet disguised as a breakfast game of chance of Parkie’s own devising, but he was the one who christened it “Danish chicken.” The rule was that she could get a Danish, her favorite, only when the mock Starbucks a few feet from Cuthbert’s entrance had the cherry kind. This was hardly ever the case by the time Parkie was sent down there. After she’d finished her emails and calls. And primarily to pick up a couple of her superior’s favorite chia-hemp maple drops, which looked even more unappetizing than they sounded.

Today, alas, was not to be the day. Today she played Danish chicken and lost.

Parkie filled her travel mug, leaving room for the consolation of extra cream. She placed it carefully upright in her Studio Museum tote bag, between her water bottle and rarely read novel, and sent herself back to work with no dessert.

Parkie wished the woman with the unsellable coffeepot had seen her Studio Museum tote bag. Was that so wrong? She was hot. Alluring in a still-waters-run-deep kind of way. The tote bag could have broken the ice. Could have given them something to talk about besides how impossible it would be to sell the woman’s estate at auction or anywhere else if the worn-out plate pot was the best she could do. Parkie couldn’t very well tell her she “loved” Harlem. Or that the contemporary artists she followed were mostly Black. There wasn’t a way to say it that didn’t sound gross.

Parkie hit the wheelchair door button with her elbow and entered the lobby, where Vince, a guy maybe in his sixties with a face like a boulder and a bald head under his porter cap, shot her a grin.

“No jackpot today, huh?”

“No joy.”

“So, uh, Miss de Groot,” he said, after chivalrously yet unnecessarily coming around to call the elevator. “I hear from a little birdie you got an auction on the way. About time, am I right?”

The elevator descended with its usual pre-opening jitters.

“Mr. Sweeney, that depends,” Parkie said. “Maybe so. Maybe no.”

*

Parkie’s first big break at the auction house came in the form of the Flagg estate. In order to start at Cuthbert’s the previous year, she’d happily departed the commercial gallery world—where her duties were mainly coffee runs, educating her brainless managers, and chatting up the older, mostly male tech moguls and investment bankers who could afford the art. None of it was unexpected in a position for which the primary qualification was “an excellent memory for faces.” The title on her new business card was “junior specialist.” At the time, she’d thought it sounded unquestionably more impressive. A vast improvement on “gallery assistant,” even if the gallery—yes, it was that one—was a huge name.

The gallery position was one of those first real jobs well-connected girls like her often fell into a few years out of college when they were finished waiting tables or being baristas, skills she, too, had long-ago acquired. Someone from her parents’ life had made a call, and before she knew it, she was moving into a junior one bedroom near stodgy Yorkville and trying to take the train to midtown every morning. And taking the train was trying. Ultimately, the absence of elevators that reliably worked rendered public transportation impossible for someone who couldn’t climb long flights of stairs. This made the Upper East Side a pretty ridiculous place to live. But that was another story—one that began her deeply dependent, even codependent, relationship with Lyft and Uber. If you’re disabled in NYC, you better have money.

But where most of her friends had either moved on or moved up from their entry-level jobs, Parkie had made the gallery her personal purgatory. For three years. She’d told herself that the contacts and proximity to big-name artists would give her the knowledge she needed to run a gallery herself someday. Meanwhile, she’d mainly spent her free time going to bars and brunch with the other disaffected kids in her circle and, with exasperating regularity, striking out on dating sites where people either wanted to hold hands and light candles or not speak before, during, or after sex.

But that was then. The job at Madeline Cuthbert Auctioneers, though slightly peripheral to the gallery dream, was an overdue vertical career move. She was pushing twenty-nine and she had a lot of lost time, and raises, to make up for.

And yet, as Parkie quickly learned, she’d accepted a job with little room for upward mobility. Her department head at Cuthbert’s was a fellow named Armand Villars de La Mortemart. La Mort, as everyone called him, was in charge of “Contemporary.” To Madeline, this meant everything made between 1945 and now, except photography, which had its own specialist. Although he seemed as comfortable chatting up the guys from shipping as the billionaire consignors of prestigious estates, Armand was said to be a self-exiled French noble, next in line for a château and a title. He wore bespoke suits tailored in a style that was slightly too young for a man in his early fifties, and his careful, haughty manners and short temper made working for him a roller coaster—though an often entertaining and always educational one.

Like so many people there, Armand seemed to know everything. Not only about artists and their genealogies from Cubism to Pop to K-art and Adrian Piper but also about the finer points of furniture and jewelry, even couture, which, except for certain Met Gala standouts, he considered faddish.

Parkie liked being Armand’s lieutenant and she’d gotten very good at it. At this point in her career, however, she’d been wondering what to do to get noticed on her own and how she might get promoted. There could be only one senior specialist in Contemporary. There was only one La Mort.

Until, quite unexpectedly, something happened.

About ten days ago, Parkie had arrived at work with what Armand termed “the most creative pairing you Americans ’ave ever made”—the toasted bagel and lox she customarily brought him on Fridays—to find a Post-it note stuck to her computer monitor.

“Family emergency. Returning to Foix. Flagg is your golden ticket. Don’t f*ck it up!”

Parkie dropped her cane in the blue-and-white Chineseexport porcelain umbrella stand beside her desk. Just last month she’d found it tied with a big yellow satin bow and waiting for her, a thoughtful gift from Armand to celebrate her one-year anniversary at Cuthbert’s. Now here she was, unwrapping Armand’s bagel and sliding his requisite chopped red onions into the wastebasket with her finger, careful not to lose all the capers. She sat down to collect her wits and took a warm, cream-cheesy bite.

The Flagg estate. Managing a big account and generating huge results were how you got ahead at any auction house. But Cuthbert’s was small enough, “nimble” enough, as Madeline liked to say, that rising through the ranks could happen pretty quickly if you got your hands on a whale. As a senior specialist, you could call the shots on your own auctions—decide how to position them. Maybe even, as Parkie had been fantasizing lately, create themed specialty sales that would appeal to more adventuresome buyers—boutique auctions with transparent titles like: Contemporary Black Artists or even 1960s Political Ephemera—and manage those with your own team. Those senior-specialist dreams might just come true if Parkie showed Madeline the money by successfully handling her first high-profile consignor.

Why, oh why, did it have to be this one?

Armand had presciently taken Parkie along for the original meeting with the estate lawyer at the Flagg family’s co-op on Fifth. She’d never been in that particular building but she had a friend who’d grown up on the twelfth floor of the only slightly less famous one next door. The Flaggs’ apartment was an opulent prewar compound with mosaicked bathrooms and staff quarters with more bedrooms than some dorms she’d been in. Even Armand was momentarily speechless when the doors of the private elevator opened.

To hear him tell it, he was not so much impressed as irked. His chief complaint was that most of the good Louis XV furniture and Georgian silver had already been claimed by the family— descendants of some robber baron or another who went down with the Titanic. When the most recent widow, Nancy Beth Flagg, died a few months earlier, the apartment’s walls were said to display a major collection of Abstract Expressionism. A zip painting by Barnett Newman, a Pollock, a handful of works by de Kooning (him, not her), a monochrome by Ad Reinhardt. This good art, however, had been quickly and gallingly entrusted to one of Madeline’s archrivals—whether Christie’s or Sotheby’s or Bostwick’s or Peacocks, nobody at Cuthbert’s had yet determined.

Madeline (or, more precisely, Armand and Parkie) had thus been called in to hoover up the leftovers—in other words, the relatively low-value crumbs the other auction houses couldn’t be bothered with, since the real money would be made with the splashier art and antiques.

Luckily for Cuthbert’s, the Flagg place had more crumbs than a derelict Pain Quotidien.

Still, Madeline’s having saddled Parkie’s boss with Flagg struck her as something like retribution. Other than the now absent modernist paintings already stolen by their competitors, it was unclear to Parkie what in the Flagg estate warranted bringing in Armand.

When she asked him, he would say only that his best guess was, if you really wanted to extend the crumb metaphor, Madeline subscribed to the mouse-in-your-house theory: there’s never just one. If these people had such amazing mid-century abstract paintings, they probably had other, perhaps hidden, contemporary treasures—a few of which may have slipped past the fine French furniture and European dec arts experts the other houses would have sent along with the painting appraisers. Whatever Madeline’s strategy, Armand and Parkie and two other junior specialists had ended up spending a full week of twelve-hour days on the premises cataloguing every hotel ashtray and paperback book and Steuben lamp. Every gilded mirror and reproduction Ming vase. And every mediocre hunting print, knockoff cocktail dress, and machine-made rug they could get their tape measures around. The property was still being catalogued, mostly by the interns. In the end there had been so many credenzas full of matchbooks and playing cards and golf tees and boxes of expired condoms—usually tucked behind the remotes—they’d had to throw it all in bins for sorting back at the auction house. La Mort might be a thing of the past, but everyone was still talking about Flagg.

*

Parkie missed Armand. But as she approached her cube, she was glad to hear the distinctive voice, think Capote with a soupier drawl, of her favorite colleague. His name was Nicholas Burdine and he was a bearded, prematurely donnish, bow-tie-wearing millennial who had studied at Winterthur and worked after that at a small house museum in Paris. Parkie hadn’t known him well before that week at Flagg, but they knew each other better now.

At any given moment during that marathon of cataloguing, Nicholas was one of a quartet (the taciturn rugs guy was there, too) heard intoning into Dictaphones as they worked their way out of the vast apartment’s nautilus shell of chambers. Armand had assigned one of the front bedrooms to Nicholas, who, as Cuthbert’s most junior specialist in Continental Furniture, was “plum delighted” to be released from his cubicle for a week.

And now here was Nicholas holding forth from the desk across the room from hers, his round, woolly face peeking over the grid like a sheep with Shakespearean ambitions.

“And sooo . . . Friday morning of our mad dash to the finish line finds yours truly, per Armand’s orders, entrusted with the description of what the great man identified as ‘the last of the beets and bobes.’”

Everyone laughed on hearing one of Armand’s favorite, nearly unintelligible English expressions.

“Picture, if you can, little old me, adroitly crouched near the window in guest bedroom number three, holding on to a pretty—but not authentically period—leather-topped marquetry desk so I can get to this clock-cabinet thing on a bookshelf. La Mort is looming over me like the grim reaper himself. ‘Urry up. Uurry up. Vite!’ But I want. I must. Get myself a better look at this charming little instrument shoved in there between The Fountainhead and Danielle Steel. I know I should be going faster. Write it now, read it later. But it’s a sweet little revival piece. And I think it deserves its due.”

At this point, Parkie, who was coming up behind Nicholas, had appeared in most people’s sight line. She stood for a moment as they watched her watching him pantomime.

“So what do I do next?” he asked. “I pull out one of those blameless little drawers for a quick inspection.”

Parkie had to because she knew it was coming.

“A boy can learn an awful lot from the chamfering of bottoms,” she mouthed, lip-syncing her friend’s tongue-in-cheek creed.

There were howls and even a few tears from the cubes, where people were already beside themselves.

Nicholas turned around, crimson-faced.

“Don’t knock it till you try it, Parkie the Great,” he shot back.

Parkie rapped her cane theatrically on a massive crate someone had temporarily deposited in the hallway.

“Anyway,” Nicholas sighed. “I turn on my little machine and I say, ‘Item three million four hundred thousand and nineteen point five. A Louis XV–style bronze-mounted cartonnier with clock, possibly tulipwood or pearwood, nineteenth century, having a suite of seven drawers lined with marbled paper surmounted by a clockface and stamped on the interior.’ Then I go to open the clockface. And I’m still recording—I can play it for you if you hang on—and I make a noise like I just saw the ghost of Freddie Mercury and I say, ‘The case apparently hiding two red, white, and blue USB drives!’” He pauses for effect. “And then I say, ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!’”

*

Needless to say, what was on those not exactly antique data storage units had since initiated a Justice Department investigation into the dealings of Flagg Pharmaceuticals. The first scandal broke when it was revealed that the Flaggs lobbied throughout the 1990s to create a drug monopoly. Add to that raising the cost of one of their most in-demand medications, a treatment prescribed to people with HIV and other autoimmune diseases, by around 4,000 percent. Flagg’s bid to please shareholders rocketed the cost from the less than a dollar it took to manufacture a single pill to the several hundred you needed to buy one.

The second scandal came when Cuthbert’s lawyers determined that someone at the auction house had leaked the contents of the USB drives to the New York Times and The Economist, both of which picked up the story and ran, and ran, and ran with it.

But only after the auction was announced.

The same auction was now generally referred to by Cuthbert’s employees as “Parkie’s sale.” The auction of the belongings of a family who had decided to make lifesaving treatment impossible to afford for people dying from AIDS and HIV, many of them gay.

At the behest of its owners, Parkie had seen and even done some questionable stuff at the gallery. But thus far in her plodding but not-without-incident work life, she’d never personally felt so professionally fucked. These people were awful.

Getting saddled with such a nefarious client put her in the textbook definition of a double bind. Asking to be taken off the account would not only catapult Parkie out of Madeline’s good graces, it would probably mean the end of her career—a career at Cuthbert’s or anywhere else with Park Avenue clients who had also done some not-great things to make their money. Not asking to be taken off the account—going along to get along at Cuthbert’s—would mean . . . Well, it would mean making choices Parkie didn’t want to think about. And definitely not with Madeline watching her every move as if the whole thing were a protracted audition. Her version of probation. Or pledging. To Parkie, it was more like what her Calvinist forebearers called “swimming a witch.” If you sink and drown, they find you innocent. If you float, they pull you out of the water and burn you at the stake.

Chapter 3

Outside the auction house it was early-fall crisp and not yet dark. Glory thought about heading back to the nearby subway stop but decided to walk over to Seventh, where she could get the 2. It was embarrassing. Some days since moving to Manhattan she was overwhelmed by the train. She walked long, smelly blocks in the heat merely to avoid the complicated and unair-conditioned business of changing lines. Besides, when she walked, she felt a sense of rediscovery. After so long in SoCal, Manhattan was a culture shock. Dogs and their people. Daring double-parkers and the duets of taxi and truck horns. The citywide imperative to cross against the light. Enough storefronts and shoppers to make you believe retail wasn’t dead. And so much overeager, wishfully autumnal street style. Tweeds and boots and wool on a day like today, when the air had been spicy and warm. There was nothing about it like LA.

“Everything you need is in the attic,” Lucille had written to Glory in one of the few cards she’d ever sent her. One line scrawled in shaky blue fountain-pen ink on linen stock embossed with her monogram. The envelope came certified about a month before Lucille died, when Glory was still living in Echo Park, where she’d been since not finishing her MFA at Cal Academy. She had no intention of leaving the West Coast at the time and definitely no earthly idea that she would be the one—out of all of them—to inherit her prickly aunt’s New York property.

Now that she was here, it was a relief to be able to do what she wanted when she wanted, but it was lonely, too, to be in a city and not know people—to be going home to a big empty house. Riding the crowded train uptown made Glory feel even more alone. When she stepped out into the commotion on Lenox, she had a sudden feeling of confusion. The halal food truck, the silver graffiti on the boarded-up grocery store. The men of all ages gathered under the scaffolding in a pungent weedy cloud. None of this was familiar. Glory wondered if she’d gotten off one stop too soon until she realized she’d simply come up a different staircase than the one she had begun to think of as hers.

Two blocks over, the brownstone’s street was quiet as always. When she walked past the old man who sat on his stoop in the afternoons, he gave her a reserved nod, which seemed like progress. Glory could feel him watching from down the block as she once again fumbled forever with Lucille’s ancient lock to get into her own house.

It would have been nice to be glad to be home. But the house was often dark, and the air inside felt stale and heavy after that morning’s rain. Glory felt heavier, too. Like a familiar malaise was gaining on her. Like, as soon as she stopped moving, the what-am-I-doing-here dread would catch up. If it did, there was no chance of getting any work done. Any of her work done.

Maisie, Lucille’s petite tortie, another unforeseen bequest, peered around the doorjamb and rubbed her face aggressively on the molding.

“Aw, come here, Maise,” Glory called to her, squatting to extend a hand. “A girl could use a friend right now.” The cat, in response, sat down, licked her mottled paw a few times, then sashayed back down the hallway as soon as Glory stepped toward her.

“If that’s how you want to be,” Glory said. “I’m not going anywhere, and she’s not coming back. Them’s the facts. So you might as well get used to it.”

Diffident Maisie wasn’t helping her mood. And neither had the trip downtown. Glory’s back was still up from the auction house. She should have known going there in dirty coveralls with a box full of worthless tchotchkes might not end well. But she was surprised how much it pissed her off to hear Aunt Lucille’s coffeepot relegated to the shameful category of “well loved,” which was clearly no better than “nothing special to begin with,” which was not all that different from “junk.”

It might be accurate according to the auction house’s standards, but it still wasn’t true.

She glanced around at Lucille’s beautiful, timeless foyer. The powdery walls painted the shade of eucalyptus leaves. The gilt-trimmed moldings and polished marble floor. The entry was the picture of refinement, cold and a little tight but very impressive, just like Lucille.

What would the redhead have to say about Lucille’s things if she could see her house? Glory knew the big ball of anger currently lodged in her throat was just “sad pretending to be mad,” as her third-grade teacher used to scold. It hurt to acknowledge the indignity of walking into Cuthbert’s even if the good-looking woman with the kind eyes and the attitude had tried to salvage it. Glory was this close to unleashing what would have been another admittedly self-indulgent flood of all-purpose tears—for her dead aunt, for her once-again singlehood, for the career that wasn’t. But this time she didn’t let herself cry.

This time, Glory didn’t even stop in her own apartment. Instead, she went straight upstairs. There was still so much to unpack. As in actually unpack. Closets and suitcases and cupboards full of potential remained to be explored, their contents unearthed.

Pretty Parkie de Groot had no idea.

*

Half an hour later, Glory was making some headway with Lucille’s “house papers,” labeled as such and assembled by year in roughly eighty manila folders shoehorned into a two-drawer filing cabinet that lived in the little dressing nook outside the bedroom. For the ease of it, Glory pulled out one of the deep drawers and set it beside her on the floor so she could spread the contents around her as needed.

Everyone in the family knew Lucille had found a way to stealthily amass enough to live on quite comfortably for all those years. Still, when the lawyers told her there was an inheritance, Glory imagined she might receive a few thousand dollars— whatever Lucille had set aside after the bulk of her money went to the animal-shelter people. Maisie was the last of a long line of very appreciated cats. But the portion of the estate left to Glory, along with her beloved feline, turned out to be this three-story Renaissance Revival on an upscale, locust-tree-lined block near the subway. Six blocks from Morningside Park. Four blocks from Melba’s. Somebody left Glory a mansion in Harlem. It felt too good to be true even as she sat on a thick Chinese carpet on what was now her own hardwood floor. She still couldn’t figure it out.

Of all of them, Glory was the weakest link to Lucille. She’d always felt that way. Lucille was crotchety. Mercurial. As everybody knew, she could be downright mean. Shoes unpolished, hair not combed—jeans instead of a party dress—Glory had felt the bite of her wrath directly. And Glory’s mother, related to Lucille by blood, had endured her share of harsher blows (which, her mother being her mother, Glory figured she probably deserved). But rightly or wrongly, by the time of her death at the grand old age of 101, Lucille was all but estranged from her Hopkins kin. Which made leaving the brownstone to her youngest grandniece a real shocker.

Especially to Glory. Glory who had been sullen at family gatherings when they still lived in New York. Glory to whom Lucille had rarely spoken as an adult. Glory who had abandoned the law to become a painter, failing to succeed at even that, and disappointing everyone.

Glory sighed and returned to last year’s folder, realizing she hadn’t paid the least bit of attention to the stack of invoices and quotes she was flipping through. Homeownership was overwhelming. It might sound like everything she’d ever wanted, but having real estate in the city was not turning out to be as glamorous as it seemed. Sure, the brownstone was in reasonable condition for its age. But it was no show house—no Sub-Zero fridge, no rooftop deck, new skylights, or secret garden. No refinished floors or resuscitated plaster.

Or updated heating or bathrooms, for that matter. She was staying warm enough so far, but winter was coming.

Glory wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to afford to stay in the house. As the new owner, she would have to decide what to do with it before something she couldn’t recover from happened to the roof or the foundation. Or, she thought, as a missing pane caught her eye, before something happened to one of the lovely leaded-glass windows that were precariously adorning just about every room. Next to failing as an artist, and dying alone like Lucille, being bankrupted by the house had quickly become Glory’s worst fear.

For now, though, the brownstone would have to be home. And she wasn’t going to feel bad about it. Enough for one day, Glory decided, slipping the folder back into the drawer and muscling the drawer back into the cabinet. When she went to turn off the light, a glint of silver caught her eye and Glory noticed a group of frames she hadn’t seen before. Although there were several of them, they’d been easy to miss. Almost hidden, she thought. You had to stand directly in front of the mirror—maybe getting dressed—to know they were there.

Now here was a fun fact: Lucille had been in the army—surely a partial explanation for her no-bull, drill-sergeant demeanor. Among the suite of deckle-edged photographs, Glory could easily pick out a striking Lucille looking lipsticked and sharp in her monochrome military uniform. On either side of her, in their own frames, were faded snapshots of nurses who must have been wartime friends, in starched white caps. Larger than all these was a matted newspaper article off to the side with Lucille’s name highlighted in yellow—a story about the 404th AFS Band—the first and only all-Black women’s Army Corp orchestra. In which Lucille had apparently played the clarinet. On a base in Iowa?

And Glory thought Lucille had never left New York.

After the war, circumstances must have changed. Personal or military, Glory didn’t know. But the lean, feeble aunt she’d known as a child was nothing like the gregarious, fun-loving party-girl sister her granddad had told her father about while he was alive. That vision of Lucille hardly resembled the recluse who, according to the neighbors, hadn’t gone past her front steps for more than a few hours at a time since the early Reagan era. All those years spent living in the same apartment. No wonder her things were well worn.

The sky had gone electric pink and purple, but from Lucille’s narrow bedroom, Glory couldn’t see the setting sun. It occurred to her that in a couple of weeks the sky would be completely dark at this hour. That notion filled her with a sudden desire to catch the last of the fleeting light outside. Beyond the dusty trappings of lonely old ladies who couldn’t get past their thresholds. Into the liveliness of nature. With people and flowers and birds.

*

The top of Central Park was a straight shot down Lenox, which she was still learning to call Malcolm X. As soon as Glory crossed the boulevard at 110th, she felt like a fool for not spending more time there when winter was around the corner. But for now, and for fall, the park was almost tropically lush. The walkways were canopied by dense deciduous groves, and the tops of the emerald hedges snaking along the reservoir had been trimmed Disneyland-round. As she followed the path beside the water, Glory smiled at the many flavors of velvety coleus, a favorite of her mother’s. There were borders of pistachio cherry, watermelon lime, and one she really liked in deep ruffled raspberry trimmed with banana.

Glory had lived in Harlem until she was nine. But when her father, a sports doctor, was offered a prime position in Denver, they’d moved out west. Her parents bought a big house in a white neighborhood with broad lawns and mansions with deep, shady front porches instead of sunny stoops. Glory went from being one of the many to being the only one. Denver was where she grew up. She couldn’t remember much about her New York life before that.

A bicycle bell signaled its approach from behind, and Glory’s mind snapped back to the present. The path she was on was about to spit her onto the hustle and noise on Fifth, which was not at all what she wanted. Up ahead she saw an opening in the tall hedge, like a parted curtain. Just inside was a formal gate. And when Glory passed through the wrought iron and down a few stairs, she found herself in a park within a park. It was a modest manicured garden paved with blue slate squares. There was a shrubby, quartered flower bed and, along the periphery, several long, glossy black benches that reminded Glory of beetles. The garden’s focal point, burbling sedately on a stone base, was a figural fountain. From the shiver along her spine, Glory realized she’d seen it before.

She hated this fountain. And she thought maybe she always had. It was certainly possible—her parents and grandparents must have walked Glory and her sister, Grace, through this part of the park enough times when they were kids. It might even explain why Glory’s mother was always taking the girls to the Botanic Gardens in Denver, which didn’t feel at all like Central Park.

Glory had nothing against water features in general. But this particular fountain consisted of three bronze maidens gripping each other’s hands in a ring, maniacal grins plastered across their sharp-featured faces.

Even now, looking at it as a grown woman, she was instantly back with the mean white girls in primary school. Glory’d never wanted to go to private school in the first place, but her parents hadn’t given her a choice. Coming from the East, they were used to thinking of public schools as being dangerous and “not up to par.” It wasn’t until Grace reached high school age that their mother realized public education was almost uniformly excellent in gentrifying, boomtown Denver. The country-day girls were the ones whose parents didn’t want their babies mixing with “urban” kids like Grace and Glory. Remarkably, the children of these people weren’t all bad. Odd thing was, Glory vividly remembered the ones who were; being nasty about her hair, making her feel less-than. Implying she was out of place. Which, as she looked back on it now, coming from here in Harlem, she absolutely was.

Considering the sculpture as public art, from an artist’s point of view, she was struck by its unabashedly pornographic flavor. The sculptor apparently wanted his subjects to look like participants in some kind of flapper wet T-shirt contest. They all had on long, modest dresses—yet the fabric was slipping outrageously off their shoulders and hips, revealing shapely naked breasts, long, smooth thighs, and almost shamefully melon-like asses. Glory couldn’t believe how many young women, most of them Black women, kept taking selfies in front of it.

Three near-naked white girls dirty dancing at the edge of Harlem.

Round and round we go, Glory thought, smirking to herself as she watched from the bench. But then a picture of the redhead—tall, white as can be, undeniably handsome Parkie de Groot—appeared in her mind’s eye. It had been a while since she’d felt that kind of immediate and unquestionable physical attraction to another woman. She hadn’t liked the verdict on the coffeepot. But with her take-charge manner and businesslike ways, Parkie was nothing if not sure of herself. For someone so young, she was as self-possessed as a mother superior. Her shit seemed very much together. Was competence Glory’s catnip now? She had unfinished business with a woman she’d just met. For once, that might be a nice change.

Chapter 4

More than a week had passed, and ever since that Walk-In Wednesday, Parkie had been, as Nicholas teased her, “burning the midnight oil at both ends.” The truth was she’d been working without ceasing out of something like gratitude for not having to confess how behind she was on Flagg the day Madeline chose to check up on her. After Glory had gone and Parkie was on the phone at her desk, their connection had been terrible—probably because Madeline was on a speedboat. The call dropped while Madeline was mid-excoriation, not to be picked up again, because the next morning, she had gone on an African safari for almost a week. But Madeline was stateside now, which meant, of course, she was back in Florida.

Her call first thing was therefore no surprise to Parkie, who knew her boss would try to catch her unawares. This was why she’d come in an hour early and was able to intercept the call before Olive had even had her first Nespresso. As per usual, Madeline launched into her rant of demands without so much as a “hello.” She was never more punishing of her employees than when she returned from vacation.

“You saw the story in The Economist while I was gone?” she bellowed. “Of course you did. We all saw the story in The Economist. I’ll say this once, Parkie. Whatever is on the cover of your catalogue had better goddamned not have anything to do with goddamned Flagg Pharma. Message received?”

Parkie assured her it was.

“You’ve got to find something from before they bought the drug company. Whenever that was. And you need to be sure. When was that, anyway? I hope for your sake you’re on this.”

Parkie summarized what she knew of the ins and outs of Flagg Corp’s suspiciously timed hostile takeover of another firm in the mid-eighties.

“Great,” Madeline said, as if she’d finally been given useful intelligence. “A big-name bauble they inherited from their globe-trotting parents—or even better, their parents’ parents, the Titanic people. Just find something nobody can say they bought with the drug money.”

Parkie could hear the sound of seagulls in the background on Madeline’s end. She was always going off to Florida—she said Miami but who knew? It could be Mar-a-Lago, as some of her coworkers joked. Parkie’s family had a place on Fisher Island, and the one time she’d been down since taking the Cuthbert’s job, she found herself constantly looking over her shoulder, lest Madeline suddenly pop up like yet another Whac-A-Mole in frosted lipstick. It was just her kind of place.

“How can we spin these people?” she was asking. “Old New York? One bad apple? I don’t have to tell you we need this sale to exceed estimates. Where did they make their money originally?”

“I’ve been getting into that,” Parkie said. “They go back to New York in the eighteenth century. It’s looking like wine and rum—”

“Perfect,” Madeline interrupted. “Go with that. Everyone loves booze. Help Kiki with the backgrounder for the press kit and make it about their long-standing entrepreneurial roots in the city. How they laid the foundations for Forbes by selling the libations we all love to drink.”

“But they also, you know, sold enslaved people. That was actually their main business. And, you know, the enslaved people made the rum to begin with.”

“Did they?” said Madeline. “I guess they did. Well, shit.”

“I was wondering if the Flaggs would consider giving up on the idea of a single sale with their name on it,” Parkie said. “Couldn’t we sort of intersperse their property with other, less controversial consignments over the next few months? We have a couple of other nice sales that would work pretty well with their things.”

God. Had Parkie really suggested that? Pouring a little bad wine in with the good wine and hoping nobody would notice. It would sure make life easier for her.

“I had the same thought, of course,” said Madeline. “But the kids are really digging in their heels. They think, and I can’t say they’re wrong, they’ve got plenty of friends out there and people who admire their family as an example of the American dream. Glamour. Luxury. Town & Country. Deb balls and so forth. In their minds, it’s as big as the Jackie Kennedy sale. Or the Duke of Windsor’s.”

Parkie couldn’t refrain.

“That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Jackie Onassis was famous for actually doing admirable things in the world.”

“It’s not a stretch to them. Your clients,” Madeline snapped back.

“Your drink’s getting cold, Madster,” said a gravelly male voice on Madeline’s side.