Fake, page 18
I nodded, hoping my pieces were already waiting in the Florence Wake booth, as Leah had promised they would be. “I’m the gallerist for Florence Wake,” I said, but the woman stared at me blankly and made no move to check her clipboard.
“Do I look like I work here?” she huffed as she turned on her heel.
Of course, I’d missed the check-in counter directly in front of me, which was staffed by two attractive women dressed in smart jeans and blazers, leaving me to wonder what exactly was insulting about looking like somebody who worked here.
I approached the desk. “I’m Emma Caan, with Florence Wake?” Though I cringed to hear myself say it as a question, the women both straightened when they heard the name of the gallery.
“Identification, please,” one of them said in barely accented English while typing on an iPad. She then handed me a map of the convention center and a badge to get through security each morning of the fair. “Your delivery arrived yesterday, so it should be in your booth,” she continued, handing me back my driver’s license. “Love your jeans,” she added. I tried not to smile as I realized Lenny might be right—the more you stood out with how you looked in the art world, the more people thought you mattered.
The convention center stretched out ahead of me. The size of an airplane hangar, it was filled with booths made from walls that stretched three quarters of the way up to the ceiling. The atmosphere felt like that of an ER, but the emergency was art, with people walking urgently in couture instead of scrubs, orders being shouted at deliverymen instead of orderlies, dragging carts brimming with packages instead of pushing gurneys. A variety of languages blended together in a frenetic hum, until a single voice hooked my attention from somewhere over my left shoulder. “Emma?”
I spun around. “Jeremy!” I said, more excited to see him than I’d ever thought I would be. We hugged warmly, allaying my fears that there was any friction between us, and made small talk about my new position at the gallery, what I thought of Hong Kong so far, and how his family was doing.
“Oh! You know who I saw in my hotel?” I asked.
“Who?” He leaned in close, and I knew he was expecting me to name a celebrity.
“That consultant you hired!”
I figured Jeremy would share my amusement or already know he was there, but he just blinked, blank-faced. “Who?”
“The youngest consultant! I forget his name. The one who did my exit interview.”
Jeremy nodded slowly. “Small world. Look, I have to run. But,” he said, placing a hand on each of my shoulders, “take care of yourself, Emma.” He gave them a small squeeze and stepped to the side to keep going.
I bit my lip, realizing that it might have seemed insensitive to bring up the consultants called in to rescue Jeremy’s company from crisis, and watched him weave through the packages marked FRAGILE, sidestepping a beautiful woman who strutted past him and nearly bowled him over, and dissolve into the crowd.
The woman seemed to be waving directly at me, though. “Your fucking phone has been off!” she shouted, and several people turned toward her.
As she approached, I could see Jules’s broad, toothy smile. She wore a black jumpsuit with large cream-colored buttons, and white sneakers with a silver star on each side. It looked like she’d walked through mud in her shoes, a choice I assumed was intentional, and she’d slung a large slouchy bag over one shoulder. She kissed the air on either side of my cheeks, presumably in an attempt to preserve her shimmering makeup.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m here to hang with you! Duh!” Jules still looked like the effervescent, striking creature I had admired on my phone, but in person, her manner seemed contrived—almost like a performance. Still, part of me was exhilarated to be seeing her show live. “I love your outfit. Cara Delevingne grunge vibes!” she said, linking her arm in mine. “I can help you set up the booth. It’ll be fun!”
Unsure what I’d done to warrant her help but thrilled to have it, I checked the map, and we followed it to booth 442. There, we were met with three white walls surrounding a pile of boxes, all marked FRAGILE I understood why everybody in the convention center seemed to be barely holding it together. We had approximately twenty-seven hours to assemble a gallery from scratch. I snapped to action and grabbed the box cutter someone had left on the floor for me. “I’m so glad you’re here to—” I began.
“Don’t touch anything yet!” Jules warned, and pulled out a camera and tripod from her large bag and set them up toward the entrance of our area. “Look horrified!” she commanded, but before I had a chance to adjust my expression, there was a flash, and she was looking at her camera. “Perfect!”
“I don’t have time for this!” I huffed, plunging the triangular razor of the box cutter into the first piece of cardboard, slicing carefully as not to damage the art. Jules stood over me, snapping pictures with her phone as I continued, and I found myself more annoyed than awed by her. “Can you help?” I finally asked.
“Florence didn’t pay a boatload of money for only a pop-up. She invested in this fair to sell art. What you’re doing is like . . . an eighth of the battle. I’m helping with the rest. But I don’t need to post. I can help unpack instead,” she said calmly, like I was an unreasonable child.
I shook my head in disbelief. How could she not appreciate how much work there was to be done?
“Relax, babe. I’ll call my friend to hang everything once you decide where it all goes. That’s the hard part, anyway.”
I spent the next few hours carefully extricating paintings from layers of packaging and protection and leaning them against the walls where I thought they should hang. Jules had disappeared at some point, and while I relished the break from her chatter and camera flashes, I needed someone else there to tell me it would be fine. Though I had arranged my own art for final showings in college and had been in my fair share of galleries and museums, I had never been in charge of a project of this size. There was an undeniable therapy in creating something from nothing but an accompanying anxiety that I was getting it entirely wrong. I took a step back to view my progress.
Something felt off to me, so I shifted the works around until I was satisfied with the logical flow, then positioned a metal sculpture by one of our newer artists right off the center of the room, focusing the attention of any viewer toward the easternmost wall, where I had placed Fredrick Thomas’s not-yet-sold paintings. I was crouching at the base of the sculpture when Jules returned.
“I come bearing lunch . . . and another set of hands,” she announced proudly, holding up a large brown bag in each hand.
My breath caught as I stood and looked up to see Ryan Parker, just as handsome as he had been at the cocktail party, in a black crewneck sweater, fitted jeans, and black sneakers. “Ryan, Emma. Emma, Ryan,” she said as she waved her finger in the air between us. I waited for him to mention that we had met, but he didn’t.
“Thank you! I don’t know how I would have hung all this myself!” I went to shake his hand, but he leaned in and hugged me, sending a small pulse of heat across my abdomen.
“Well, then, I’m going to be your new favorite person. As long as you know where you want everything, we’ll have this done before you know it,” he said, and winked, making my insides tighten. I expected somebody who looked like him to be somewhat aloof and withdrawn—but he was engaged and animated, with a certain magnetism drawing me toward him.
“Before we start hanging anything,” Jules said, calling our attention back to her, “we need sustenance.” She arranged a few of the empty boxes I hadn’t yet cleared, forming a makeshift table, and laid out enough dim sum for ten people. Chili oil was poured in a shallow container, chopsticks were placed strategically, and spring rolls were misted with a spray bottle she had in her massive bag because it made them “glisten in the shot.”
“Can you let me know if you’re going to destroy any of the other food so I can taste it before you do?” I asked her, and Ryan snorted. I made a mental note to play up the sass.
By the time Jules commanded us to “dig in,” I was salivating. I sat cross-legged on the floor and was shoving a room-temperature pan-fried dumpling in my mouth when I heard Jules pleading with Ryan to take her picture.
“Fine!” he said, sounding exasperated but good-natured, and grabbed the camera she held out to him. “I’m not eating this stuff anyway. My mother is doing keto, so now I am, too, because . . . I’ve let myself go,” he said, slapping his rock-hard stomach.
“His mother is Sharon Parker,” Jules said to me. “The fashion model,” she elaborated, seeing my confusion. “The first-ever Black model to close the Dior show in Paris?”
I plastered an impressed look on my face. “So, you can’t eat any of this?” I asked Ryan after I swallowed.
“Nope, it’s all yours,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “Jules only pretends to eat while people take pictures of her.”
“I eat!” Jules protested with a pout that evaporated as soon as Ryan readied the camera. She threw her head toward the sky, taking large, slow, toothy bites of bao buns while he snapped away.
“Enough!” Ryan declared, taking a seat on the floor next to me. Jules had, as Ryan predicted, stopped eating and begun reviewing the pictures as soon as the camera stopped clicking.
I caught him looking longingly at the egg roll in front of me, so I picked it up, dipped it in duck sauce, and took an enormous bite. “So good,” I moaned through a full mouth.
“I hate you,” Ryan said plainly, our eyes locking in a way that made me find our interaction less funny and far more exciting.
“Get a room, you two,” Jules said, and rolled her eyes. My cheeks reddened, but I felt exhilarated that she could also sense the taut air between me and Ryan. “He’s the world’s biggest flirt,” she warned with a raised eyebrow. “Don’t worry, I’m tagging you in everything,” she added, looking back at her phone.
I took a large bite of something labeled har gow, then swallowed it. “Okay, seriously,” I said, “I was sort of trying to mess with you, but this dumpling is incredible!”
“Oh, fuck it,” he finally said, playfully grabbing for a har gow and shoving it in his mouth.
“Jesus Christ, Ryan. You have the self-control of a toddler,” Jules snapped.
He looked quickly at her and then back to me, then shrugged and took an egg roll. “She’s right. But you, Emma, are a bad influence,” he said with a smirk before popping it in his mouth and rising to study the walls.
“How do you and Ryan know each other?” I asked Jules, worried that there might be more to her warning than I’d thought.
“Her older brother is my best friend from boarding school,” he said before she could answer.
“Ryan is my honorary big bro.” Jules smiled at him fondly, and I inwardly rejoiced at the platonic nature of their relationship. “He used to take care of me when I was studying at the Sorbonne, but he’s still in Paris running a hedge fund and being an international playboy, and we never see him anymore except when he graces us with his presence in New York for work or Christmas.”
I spent the next few hours yelling some iteration of “a little to the left” or “a quarter of an inch higher” at Ryan and Jules as they held the art up against the wall. Jules complained several times that she hadn’t signed up for “manual labor,” but she heeded my instructions nonetheless and even corrected some of the pictures unsolicited, which I found particularly endearing. With a few breaks to walk around and see how other people were progressing, we were done by six o’clock, and we stood back toward the entrance and assessed our work.
“It’s good,” I confirmed, wondering if I should ask Ryan to reverse the two paintings that I had switched four times already.
“I’m not moving those two paintings again,” Ryan said, as if reading my mind. “This place looks great,” he promised, then took my hand and squeezed it, his touch sending an electric shock up my arm.
“What the fuck? You have more than four thousand followers, Emma! You’re blowing up,” Jules said incredulously. She was laughing, but I heard a subtle bite to her tone. “And I’m losing followers every day since Instagram changed their algorithm. No offense, but it’s sort of bullshit. Oh my God, I just had the most amazing idea!” She looked up from her phone. “I’ve never been able to get into the Down the Rabbit Hole party before . . .”
“My buddy from business school went two years ago and said it was the best party he’s ever been to,” Ryan said. “But I have no way in. I’ve been working so hard for the past few years that I’m completely out of the scene here in Hong Kong.”
“Not you. Emma! Pleeeease? You owe us!” she wheedled, gesturing to the art on the walls. “It’s an Alice in Wonderland party, and it’s supposed to be a-maz-ing . . .”
I registered the practiced tone of her voice and knew she hadn’t just had the idea. She had shown up that morning to help me with a goal of attending the party. I almost respected the long game, and I wouldn’t have minded reciprocating the favor, but she had misjudged me if she thought I had any way to get us invited.
“I didn’t even know about the party. I’m definitely not invited,” I admitted sheepishly.
“Can’t Leonard Sobetsky help?” she blurted out.
I narrowed my eyes, wondering how she even knew that I knew Lenny. Had she somehow recognized the inside of his plane from my post? I was growing increasingly cautious of her transactional nature, but I also knew that the party would create another opportunity to hang out with Ryan. “That doesn’t sound like a party he’d go to. He’s really very—”
“Oh my God, no, he’d never,” Jules agreed. “But he can get us on the list, I’m sure.”
“When is it?” I asked.
“Tomorrow,” Jules and Ryan said in unison.
“I can ask . . .” I trailed off as I wondered if I should. Lenny had gotten me there physically, on his plane, and more broadly, with his connections, and it felt greedy to ask for more.
But Jules picked up my phone from atop one of the empty boxes and thrust it into my line of vision. I pulled up Lenny’s number, my desire to spend more time with Ryan overriding my fear of overstepping with Lenny.
“Emma!” he answered on the second ring. “How is the setup going?”
“Oh, it, um, it’s going well. We’re pretty much done.” I took a few steps away from Jules and Ryan. “Two of my friends came to hang out, and they were a huge help,” I said at full volume, knowing they could still hear me.
“That’s very generous,” Lenny said, and I heard the flat skepticism in his tone. I had spent an entire day never questioning their motive, and he seemed to know in an instant. I couldn’t ask him, then. It was too embarrassing. Too predictable. “Emma, my car is just pulling up to dinner,” he announced. “Did you need something before I go?”
I turned back to Jules and Ryan, who watched me expectantly, and mentally weighed whether it would be worse to disappoint them or annoy Lenny. My relationship with them felt decidedly more tenuous.
“Have you ever heard of a party called Down the Rabbit Hole?” I began.
“Yes, would you and your friends like to go?” he asked plainly. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining the judgment in his tone.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“No, but I think Yelena usually goes, so you’ll see her there. How many tickets do you need?”
“Three,” I said, feeling a bit childish.
“Sure. I’ll have Micaela take care of it.”
I winced at the idea of Micaela knowing I’d asked another favor from the man who freely gave so much, knowing she’d judge me for it. “How much are they? I’d be happy to . . .” I tried feebly, knowing nobody could purchase admission to these exclusive parties. The people who were invited were somebodies; their presence was their currency.
“Curtis is always trying to give me tickets to his party. Plus, he really enjoyed meeting you. He’ll be thrilled to have you. I’ll come by the booth tomorrow, but I have to run now.” He hung up before I could thank him.
Curtis is the host of the Down the Rabbit Hole party? I recalled Curtis saying he was in the business of making people happy—I just hadn’t figured him for an event planner.
I turned back to Ryan and Jules. “We’re in,” I told them.
“Emma, you’re amazing!” Ryan said, and I knew I’d have asked a hundred more favors of Lenny if it meant hearing that again. Jules just pounced on me with an embrace before pulling back with a mischievous glint in her eye.
“Now the fun part. What are we going to wear?” she asked.
Chapter
13
AGENT GARRITT:
Did you engage in any illegal activities in Hong Kong?
EMMA CAAN:
NO! Definitely not.
AGENT TILLWELL:
Do you think drug use is legal?
EMMA CAAN:
Do I need a lawyer? You said I wasn’t in trouble. This is making me feel like I’m in trouble.
AGENT TILLWELL:
You have the right to have a lawyer present. You don’t have to answer any of these questions, but again, you’re not the one we’re investigating here. We’re just trying to get our facts straight. And you’re certainly not in trouble for anything you did or did not do in Hong Kong.
EMMA CAAN:
Sorry, my reaction before was a bit of a knee-jerk one. Let me think. I took Ubers in Hong Kong. I think they’re outlawed there. And . . . I might have taken drugs at a party. Honestly, I’m not even sure what’s legal and not legal there.
AGENT GARRITT:
What drugs?
EMMA CAAN:
MDMA. At the Down the Rabbit Hole party. I’m guessing you’re aware how prevalent drug use is there.
AGENT GARRITT:
Can you tell us a bit about the party?
