When Caroline got a call from an old boss asking if she was available tomorrow for a gig, she was gratified to tell him that she was simply too busy with a commission.
"For a
museum
", she emphasized.
He was not, as she'd hoped, impressed. In fact he didn't acknowledge it at all, and responded by offering her a slightly higher hourly rate, in cash, under the table.
The last time she worked for him was almost five years ago. So, she figured he was pretty desperate to be calling her up. She demurred, but didn't outright refuse, until he was sputtering with frustration and had doubled her old rate. It had been a fun exercise in negotiation tactics until she thought about her current financial predicament.
It was August. She hadn't sold anything since the sculpture that Margot and Arthur bought in June, and the next installment for her museum piece was going to be paid upon delivery, in the fall.
Her savings were dwindling. Rent was due. She realized that she couldn't reasonably turn down the guaranteed income. She frowned.
The next day at 7:30 AM she found herself on East 88th Street, looking up at the ornate limestone facade of a pre-war apartment building.
Sometimes the business of restoring high-end ornamental plasterwork brought her to fancy buildings in other neighborhoods, but most often the clientele seemed to reside here, on the Upper East Side. Five years ago, her only way of getting into apartment buildings like this had been through this job, as "the help".
The other worker on the job reminded Caroline of herself back then: fresh out of art school, scrounging together a full-time wage between 4 part-time jobs, exhausted, earnest, clueless.
Jett was 23 years old and, like many of their peers, identified as non-binary. Jett had stringy red hair that fell into their eyes in a trendy kind of bowl-cut. Their eyebrows were bleached, and their lanky, rail-thin frame was littered with tiny stick-and-poke tattoos.
The two of them spent the day together mostly in silence, due to the heavy respirators they had to wear on the job. Side by side, they carved painstaking details into freshly plastered crown moldings in the powder room of the duplex apartment.
On their lunch break, Caroline ran out to get an eggplant parmesan sandwich from an upscale supermarket nearby. When she returned and unwrapped it eagerly, she ended up offering half to Jett, who had brought only an apple and had a hollow look to their already angular face. The food enlivened Jett considerably.
Jett began to tell Caroline, in great detail, about their undergraduate thesis project. They spoke in the monotonous art-theory jargon that insecure artists sometimes use to sound intimidating, but Caroline knew it was probably out of insecurity. From the description, Caroline wasn't sure what it was that Jett actually made-- was it a performance? An installation? Until finally they pulled out their phone to show her their instagram. Their work, as it turned out, was taking nude photographs of their similarly androgynous, tattooed, and thin friends. She couldn't see how these related to anything Jett had said, but decided to save the critique for another day.
When Jett finally asked Caroline about her work, she was far more humble than she had been on the phone the day before.
"Right now, I'm working on a marble sculpture."
After the convoluted theorizing about their own work, Caroline was surprised that Jett seemed most curious about the more pragmatic elements of Caroline's work.
"How do you like... afford making work like that?"
"In this case, someone else is paying for the materials, so that helps."
"Who's paying for it?"
"Er, well, it's not a person, it's more.. Of an institution."
"Like a gallery?"
"It's... a small museum, actually."
For the first time that day, Jett smiled. "No cap?"
"No cap," Caroline smiled back.
Jett was looking admiringly at Caroline. "Wow. That's awesome." They paused, but it looked like there was something still on their mind. Caroline tilted her head and raised her eyebrows, but stayed quiet until Jett spoke.
"Can I ask you something though?"
"Of course."
"If museums are buying your work, why are you, like, here then?"
Caroline laughed nervously, so Jett laughed too-- overeager to be liked by the older artist, even though it had been an honest question.
In truth, Caroline didn't really have a good answer. "Making a living off selling your art isn't easy," she sighed. Jett nodded as if Caroline had dispensed some particularly sage advice. Caroline shrugged, and took a long drink of water.
Why was she here?
It was absurd. Their job was to decorate a ceiling that someone might appreciate while they sat on the toilet. If she could just sell another sculpture, she'd make more money than both their wages combined. Worse, that amount of money was little more than pocket change to people like the owners of this apartment.
By the time she left for the day, she and Jett now followed each other on instagram, her neck hurt, and strange little underused muscles in her sides were sore.
To add insult to injury, it was still hot outside at 8:30 PM. As she walked, rivulets of sweat and plaster dust began to flow, running down her nose and into her eyes, stinging. She tried to wipe them away with the back of her hand, but there were flecks of plaster all over her arms that she'd missed when washing up. Filthy, in a sweaty tank top and dirty cargo pants, she felt conspicuous and out of place.
Luckily, the population of the Upper East Side had mostly emptied out. Everyone who could afford to live here could also afford to leave in August.
So she hurried down Madison Avenue until she hit a busy intersection. As she waited for the traffic lights to change, she willed herself to imagine a bracing cold shower that would wash this day away. Then she noticed two well-dressed women headed her way across the street. One of them looked exactly like Margot.
It was a mirage, surely, borne of heat, exhaustion, and the dwindling daylight. Because she knew that Margot and the rest of the family were not in the city but at their house in Quogue.
(The first few mentions of "Quogue"-- the town where Arthur & Margot spent most of the summer-- went totally over Caroline's head. She wasn't even sure how it was spelled. She was from New Jersey, not too far away, and of course she knew about The Hamptons, but particular knowledge about each of the towns and villages was not a part of her education. Now, it seemed, she was in remedial rich-people geography.)
Margot's doppelganger and her companion looked refreshed and air-conditioned. The companion was wearing a long white dress with shirt sleeves, immaculate and gleaming. Her platinum blonde hair was pulled into an improbable, elegantly composed pile on top of her head.
"Margot" sported a beige linen dress that clung precisely to her narrow torso, and yet there was not a single spot of sweat where skin contacted fabric. She even wore her signature hairstyle- a more subdued shade of blonde pulled back in a neat, severe ponytail. It was a very convincing likeness.
