LILY
I GOT THE INTERVIEW ATthe spa for one reason: my father worked as an electrician at the casino before he died and people still remembered his name. My mother made a phone call to a friend of Dad’s from the union, who put in another call to the facilities manager, who forwarded my résumé to the hiring manager, Deidre. We set up my interview for a Friday morning, two weeks exactly since I boarded a Greyhound bus from Port Authority and got off in Atlantic City, my eyes red from crying, my suitcase filled with a few things from the apartment I’d shared with Matthew. My future, which had once felt sturdy and assured, a ship I was steering, revealed itself to be much more fragile than that: a candy dish that I had mishandled. Now I was sweeping the pieces back into my hands, trying not to get cut.
The day of my interview, I stopped at the bar near the penny slots. It was only 11 a.m. but the bartender didn’t bat an eye when I ordered a vodka and soda. A slumped-over man two stools away glanced at me in a slow, side-eyed way that reminded me of a lizard, and the sweat from my palms left a stamp on the bar top. Already slot machines whirred around us. The lights’ glow brought out the crevices around gamblers’ mouths, the circles under their eyes, the sagging skin around their chins. Every nowand then, some coins crashed out a metal chute or a cocktail waitress clicked by in her heels with a tray of screwdrivers, but mostly there was just the empty, meaningless dinging and the lethargic dim of a large room designed to keep out natural light.
The vodka stilled my nerves, which had been shot since I left the city. I checked my emails while I sipped my drink and saw that another blogger had written me, to ask for a comment on Matthew. I deleted the message. I had plenty to say about Matthew, but those were private, jilted thoughts, and I figured the only way I could salvage even a shred of dignity from the whole situation was to say nothing. The art world loved nothing as much as a controversy, but I’d retreated home for a chance to be someone else—a reprieve from humiliation as the central fact of my life. The week before I’d clicked on a link someone sent me to an article inJezebel, only to be greeted with a photo of myself crying, my mouth hanging open in a dumb gape, mascara running down my cheeks in thick rivulets.Is This Art?the titled asked. I closed the browser window before I could read another word.
The vodka was cheap and had a sharp, medicinal taste, but soon enough its blunting warmth crept into my throat. I wasn’t worried about the job interview, but it was unsettling to be in Atlantic City again—coming home had filled me with an inarticulate dread. It was in the atmosphere, suggestive and hazy. In the feral cats that flattened themselves to shimmy through gaps in boarded-up storefronts. In the empty casinos that loomed along the boardwalk with darkened windows and chains slung across their doors. It was in the patrons lugging their oxygen tanks behind them on little wheeled carts, clear tubes running into their noses, and the tattered posters on the telephone poles pleading for information about a missing teenage girl. The entire town was like a dreamscape tilted toward nightmare.
I wanted a second drink but knew that would likely lead to a third, and whatever pity was being extended to me would evaporate if I showed up to the interview drunk. And, as much as I hated to admit it, I needed the job, needed the money if I was ever going to start over. It was only my second week back home, living with my mother again, and I had already resolved to stay only as long as it took to save up for my first month’s rent and security on a new place back in New York. By my math, if I scrimped, I could be back in the city by September. I tried not to imagine where I’d end up—a dingy sublet, a windowless closet, mice scrabbling in the walls. But I thought that even the worst of my options would feel like a small success.
I signaled for my check, and as I thumbed through my cash I stopped to finger the two-dollar bill I kept behind the plastic pane that held my driver’s license. I took it out and laid it on the bar. My father had always carried it, claimed it gave him good luck.
The edges of the bill were velvet between my fingers, though now one of the corners was missing. On the back, where it showed the Trumbull painting of the Declaration being signed, my father had drawn a lightning bolt above Ben Franklin’s head, though now it was covered with a splotch of dried glue.The guy did a lot for electricity, my father used to say.I owe him.When I was little it had made me so proud—to look across the water from our town three miles to the south and know that my father helped make Atlantic City glow.
I loaned the bill to Matthew for good luck before his last interview withArtforumfour months ago, and I didn’t see it again until it turned up in the center of a collage in his last show. I was charmed that it seemed to mean something to him and pleased with my own magnanimity. But underneath it all, maybe I felt a change in my grip on him. Maybe I thought that two-dollar bill bought me what I shouldn’t need to purchase: His loyalty. His love.
In the collage, he had included it among a recent dry cleaning ticket, an electric bill, a hair tie, a grocery list on the back of an index card:bread avocado butter lettuce detergent. Layered underneath were slices of a photo of us. I recognized it right away—it was the first picture we had ever taken together as a couple, on the rooftop of a new hotel in DUMBO, the lights of the city sparkling behind us. I found a sliver of the image that contained my eye, another of Matthew’s mouth, my fingers on the stem of a glass, a slice of Matthew’s forehead. All the meaning and glitter obscured by the drudgery of daily life. It was a bad, crude piece, which only added to the insult—it only becameartafter I tore the bill away, hands shaking with rage, leaving just a corner, a single filigreed2, behind. I read later that it was one of the first pieces to sell. People said I must have been in on it.
If only that was true.
I slapped a ten on the bar top and slid the two-dollar bill back in my wallet, climbed down from my stool. A woman at a slot machine behind me mumbled a curse as she watched the numbers spin and, one by one, roll to a halt. Her expression shifted, her dumb, openmouthed hope contracting into grim disappointment. She shoved more coins into the machine like she was trying to teach it a lesson.
I hadn’t been inside the casino since the new tower had been completed. The ground floor of it was made up of a long, tunnellike hallway that curved around a swimming pool, which was capped off by a glass dome that was filled with rattan cabanas and lounge chairs, lush with imported palm trees and hibiscus. The casino had named it the Swim Club. Even from the outside, it reeked of something saccharine and something chemical: piña colada mix and chlorine, suntan lotion and canned pineapple. The cocktail waitresses wore aqua bikinis and delivered brightly colored drinks on wicker trays. The spa was just across the hall, the entrance a metal door installed in floor-to-ceiling plate glass. Maybe it was the effect of that quick drink, but between all the glass of the Swim Club and the spa’s façade I was reminded of an aquarium, and I had the slightly unnerving, claustrophobicfeeling of being underwater and being watched. I looked up to the ceiling, found the glossy eye of the nearest security camera, jerked my gaze away.
The spa door looked heavy but was light when I pulled on the handle, and I staggered back as it swung open. I looked up to the camera again, knowing my every misstep was being transmitted, recorded, noticed. Before Matthew’s show, it might not have bothered me in the same way, but now the cameras felt pointed, their gaze transformed from omniscient and impersonal to invasive, judgmental.
Unlike the casino floor, with its layers of stimulation—chiming machines, clicking poker chips, dizzying spin of roulette wheels—there was a chastising hush in the spa. I was immediately conscious of the way my cheap polyester dress swished as I walked. I had left the city in a rush, not bothering to take much, and so the only interview-suitable clothes I had were things I’d left at my mother’s years ago. I could’ve brought more from New York—the Alexander Wang cocktail dress Matthew bought me for my birthday, the Rachel Comey oxfords I treated myself to after my first raise—but the morning I left I’d looked into my closet and everything seemed like the wardrobe for a play I’d never even seen.
In the lobby of the spa, a tall blonde woman about my age stood behind a long, brushed steel desk. There was a partition of frosted glass behind her, and combined with the bank of lights that shined down from the ceiling, it seemed as though she were on a stage. She had a dancer’s posture, shoulders back, chin high, her spine pulled up out of her hips. The kind of grace that looks effortless but demands great strength.
She looked up and offered me an obliging smile. “Are you checking in for an appointment?”
Her hair fell over her shoulder, and it was so shiny it practically gave off a glare.
“Hi. Um, no. I’m Lily Louten. I’m here for an interview with Deidre. We have an eleven-thirty?” I hated the way I sounded—as uncertain as someone trying out a foreign language.
“Sure. I’ll let her know you’ve arrived. Please have a seat.” She gestured to a gray slipper chair against the wall. There was a coffee table in front of it—more brushed steel—and a spread of fashion magazines arranged in a fan on top. Next to the magazines, a single white orchid drooped in a pink glazed pot. I sat and tried to smooth over the wrinkles in my dress. The blonde woman—Emily, according to the name tag clipped to her lapel—picked up the phone, saidmmhmm, andyes, of course,several times, then clicked the receiver down again.
“She’s ready for you. I’ll walk you back to her office now.”
I followed Emily behind the glass partition, into a boutique, where I caught a look at my face in a vanity mirror. The circles under my eyes were inky and jarring. My pores were gaping and dark. I immediately felt revealed, embarrassed. Emily, perhaps sensing this, stepped over to a row of lipstick testers and plucked one between her fingers.
“Here. Deidre has this thing about wanting staff to wear at least three types of makeup on their shift. You should go in there looking the part, right? Try this one.” Emily held a tube out to me, the silver case as sleek as a bullet. I turned the tube until the lipstick swiveled out, a pinkish red. Philip Louis, my old boss, always said he preferred a clean look for his gallery girls, and so I never bothered with more than a swipe of taupe eye shadow and a bit of mascara.
“Go ahead,” Emily prompted. As I leaned in and traced my mouth in a shaky scrawl, her eyes gleamed with amusement. Or maybe it was annoyance. Up to a few weeks ago I would have said I was good at reading people. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Emily tore a tissue from the vanity and held that out to me, too. The color bled onto my skin and I looked like a child whohad just eaten a Popsicle. The red made my exhaustion more pronounced, brought out my tired-looking skin, my puffy eyes. Her expression was still inscrutable. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or being kind. She had stepped close enough that I saw there was a spatter of freckles, softened by foundation and powder, across the bridge of her nose. “Good girl,” Emily said, taking the tissue from me after I blotted what I could of the mess. “Now let’s get this show on the road, huh?” She had a slight accent that emerged then, a Midwestern pull on her vowels. I wanted to ask her whatshewas doing here—at the spa, at the casino—but she had already turned and started to walk away.
Emily led me down a hallway that was as bright and sterile as a hospital. We passed through a small room that she called the color dispensary, which was filled with shelves of boxed hair dye. Rings of fake hair hung from hooks on the walls, swatches in every color from bleach blonde to blue-black. The ammoniac smell in the air and rows of small brushes laid out to dry next to the sink reminded me of Ramona. I wondered if she would still use the small room in Matthew’s studio. Maybe now that she had made a name for herself she would rent a studio of her own. An old factory building with huge windows that flooded with light every morning. Exposed brick, wide plank wood floors.Fuck her, I thought. But I still couldn’t make myself believe I really meant it.
Emily stopped so abruptly that I bumped into her back. My hands went out in front of me automatically and I felt the knobs of her spine through her jacket. Blood bloomed in my face, and I pulled my hands back as though I’d touched something hot.
“I’m … God. Sorry,” I stammered.
“Relax, okay? I just wanted to warn you, she’s a bitch to everyone, so don’t take it personally. I’m cutting my hours this fall so I can take more classes, so you’ll be picking up the slack a few days a week—she needs you. But this location has been underperforming since we opened, and it’s her head on the chopping block, so she’s wound especially tight right now. Heads up.”
I must have looked pathetic, terrified. I wanted to ask her what, exactly, was so bad. What was I getting into? But she jerked her head in the direction of another door, paused in front of it, and rapped on the frame. A weary voice permitted us to come in.
