An Object of Beauty: A Novel (19 page)

Talley looked into Eduardo’s face and knew that neither he nor Gayle was likely to get his attention to look at transparencies. He would call Eduardo’s curator tomorrow and make the pitch. The curator in Eduardo’s case was a smart coordinator only, as Eduardo made all the final decisions with an uncharacteristically sober acuity. The group was then led around for a tour of the house, which was a showcase and had been meticulously detailed. Even the light switches were period and flawlessly installed; it was as though a heavenly contractor had floated in, waved a wand, and perfected every corner. In the bedroom, a surprising and satisfying art reference library was arranged alphabetically in a splendid Nakashima bookcase. Nakashima, who elevated the craft of driftwood furniture from beachside tourist shops to high art, was now being rediscovered after a lengthy fallow period, with Flores leading the way. Over the bed hung a Wilfredo Lam, the Cuban painter
who was a Picasso acolyte but distinguished himself with a unique, surrealistic diversion from Cubism.

“Cubanism,” joked Flores, indicating he was not as potted as he looked.

“Where the hell do you find one of those?” said Stirling, asking the question aloud that was on Talley’s mind.

“Where’d we get that?” said Eduardo, looking around.

The other question that was on Talley’s mind was one that only Stirling could answer: “What can it be like to sleep with Blanca?” Talley stood behind her and stared at her bare neck when he was supposed to be looking at the Lam.

The narrow hallway forced them to line up, Gayle shoulder to shoulder with Eduardo, squeezing Talley to the rear, making him leave the
room last. But he could still hear her remark to Eduardo: “You know what would look good in the guest bedroom? Pilot Mouse! I have some transparencies I was going to show to Dean Valentine, but I’ll show them to you first.” This remark was intended to get Flores’s blood flowing, as Dean Valentine made every other contemporary collector a pretender. Hinton Alberg’s collection of seven hundred paintings seemed paltry compared with Valentine’s twelve hundred. His sweet-science combination of a keen eye for new work and a vacuum cleaner mentality meant he got everywhere first. He once sneaked into a Manhattan art fair a day before it opened by disguising himself as a janitor in order to get first crack at the best in the show. But Talley thought Gayle had misjudged her man. Flores never thought of himself as a competitor; he just liked art.

Initiation,
Wilfredo Lam, 1950
72.8 × 66.9 in.

Dinner was called. The service was stealthy and invisible; new plates were slipped in like playing cards. The conversation was exclusively about art, not so much art as spiritual metaphor, but art as advanced thing, with beauty being an asset like the sleek lines of a Buick: a really nice thing to have, but it still had to get you there. Gayle Smiley perked up at every mention of artists she represented and fell into irritated silence when any other artist was mentioned, including Goya. Talley scored points by mentioning Gober’s playpen, but he still didn’t understand what it was.

Gayle was more like a great basketball player than an art dealer: she unfailingly covered her man, making it impossible for Talley to throw him a pass. However, Talley knew that there would be a moment after dinner when Gayle would have to go vomit, leaving her man wide open. When she left, precisely after dessert, Talley took Flores aside and said, “I like the new direction. I left a transparency of a Pilot Mouse picture next to your bed. There could be some fakes out there, so be careful. This one is genuine. I’m assuming the Lam’s not for sale, but if it ever is…”

Dinner wrapped up with everyone in a stupor, and Talley made his
way to the hotel on foot, whistling drunkenly in the balmy night, one hand in his pocket, the other dangling his coat over his back with one finger like Sinatra. Back in his room, the phone rang.

“Hey, you in?”

“Yes, darlin’, come on up.”

A few moments later, Cherry Finch was at his door, and soon they were tugging at each other’s clothes. These rendezvous remained undisclosed even to their closest friends, and their total discretion meant that they could go on forever.

PATRICE CLAIRE was in Paris alone, and he didn’t know why. Every bistro lunch, every café dinner, every evening engagement, would have been better with Lacey present. He wanted his social group to meet her, to like her, to see her as he did, as an extra measure of sunlight in the room. He knew she would stand up to his friends’ rigid appraisals, because Lacey never tried to impress with manners; she impressed with wit and daring. He could imagine his stuffiest Parisian cohort tilting back on his heels, trying to get a wider look at her. Patrice wanted Lacey’s take on everything in his world: what was the best food, which were his best clothes, what was his best quality.

It was eight a.m. in Los Angeles, eleven a.m. in New York, and five p.m. in Paris. Barton Talley was boarding a plane at LAX, and Patrice was calling Lacey at the gallery, his first communication with her since the rapturous Carlyle night. Donna put him through upstairs, announcing who it was. Lacey bowed her finger on the extension button.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Thinking about your dick,” she said. Somehow, this was a more welcome response than if she had said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” They talked for one hour, ending with phone sex that was as frustrating as it was fulfilling. Lacey’s palm gripped the front of her chair as she rubbed against her wrist, her other elbow on the desk with the phone held under her hair. Afterward, she walked down the
gallery stairs with a just-fucked look so evident that it made Donna wonder if a deliveryman had slipped by her.

Patrice had promised to be back in New York in two weeks, but Lacey knew he would be there by Thursday, so she kept her evenings open.

Talley stopped by the gallery after his plane landed. He looked exhausted, so she postponed until tomorrow the grilling she was about to give him. If he was going to be dragged off to jail, she thought he should be freshly shaven.

I SHOWED UP at Lacey’s that night at eight p.m. She was making pasta for Angela, Sharon, and me, the recipe for which she had gleaned from
The New York Times Magazine
, and tossing together a clarifying drink called an Aviation, which has to be made in a batch because after the first one you’re too drunk to make any more.

When the drinks had taken effect, I was treated like the gay friend, privy to all gossip, allowed to hear the girls’ most detailed sexual experiences. I even found myself retorting with catty comments that I imagined a stereotypical gay invitee might interject amid the squeals and coughing fits generated by spit takes. Lacey detailed the earlier phone encounter with Patrice and then would repeat it this way: she would say, “It was an ordinary, boring day, except for the…” then she would mouth the words
phone sex
. “Yes,” she would go on, “except for the [mouthed]
phone sex
, it was a very ordinary day.” Once, the phone rang during dinner. Lacey looked over at us and said, “That must be my
phone sex
.” This sent us into fits whenever we could work “phone sex” into the conversation, and things got sillier and sillier as all of us contributed, intoning the unimportant words at full volume and finishing the sentence by mouthing the last two words only: “Now where did I put that
phone sex
?” We were aching so much that we imposed a moratorium on saying “phone sex,” which, like an Arab/Israeli cease-fire, took longer to take effect than it should have.

During an interlude of sobriety, figurative only, we each filled in the others on our lives. Angela, the most practical of us, was likely to be married within the year and living in Seattle. Sharon had fallen in love with a downtown theater actor and was focusing on theater fund-raising so her boyfriend would have a place to act. And I had broken through at
ARTnews
magazine with an article on Jeff Koons’s relation to Pop Art, where I made the case that Pop had become a genre unto itself, like landscape and still life, and was therefore no longer ironic by definition. I didn’t get to explain the premise of my piece to the women, because my floor time had been cut short by a contest to see who could say the word
dirigible
without laughing.

Angela and Sharon shuffled out when the evening had deflated like a whoopee cushion after the joke’s over, and I lingered because Lacey indicated for me to linger. She wanted to get my take on the Vermeer situation, and I sat rapt as she unfolded the story. She really didn’t need me to hear it, because she never asked me what to do, and I had no clue what to tell her. I did think that it was symptomatic that her life fell naturally into states of intrigue, while I was always moving in a world where nothing changed.

Lacey finally arrived at the conclusion that the only questionable evidence was the Vermeer in the bins and that everything else could be explained as being on the right side of the law. This frustrated her. She wanted to go into work tomorrow steaming, but she couldn’t quite. She finally found an angle that could work her up into a frenzy.

Tuesday morning she left a note on Barton Talley’s desk: “I need to talk to you.” Each word was underlined for emphasis. An hour later, Barton appeared at her office door with nonchalance, not picking up on the underlining.

Lacey looked up. “Oh,” she said, “I need to see you.”

“That’s what the note said,” Talley responded.

“In your office,” she commanded.

Lacey was trying to funnel her energy into one pure welder’s arc of white heat that would sear Talley’s forehead, but she kept feeling herself slipping back into unwelcome calm.

“Sit down,” Talley invited her.

Lacey, thinking she was being stern, said, “I’d rather stand,” then she sat down.

“Look,” she said, “why didn’t you go to Boston?”

“When?”

“When you sent me.”

“Lacey, do you realize you work for me, not the other way around?”

“You used me.”

“You work for me. I’m supposed to use you.”

“You used me in an off-contract way.”

“We don’t have a contract.” Talley’s responses were all said with a half-smile that indicated to Lacey he considered this repartee and not grounds for dismissal. So she went on.

“Why didn’t you go to Boston?”

“I told you, I was trying to avoid a certain group of trustees.”

“Okay, so that’s bullshit. Next.”

“Uh, you go next.”

“As long as I’ve known you, you have never been shy, perturbed, or cowed. An art dealer doesn’t live on tact. You sent me because of the two men. You wanted me to carry something back that you didn’t want to be caught carrying back.”

Talley got up, walked to the office door. “I didn’t know what it would be,” he said, and then he closed the door. “Do you know what it was, Lacey?”

“They showed it to me before they sealed it,” she said.

Talley paused and thought over this statement, assigning numeric value to its possible truth. The number came up low.

“No, they didn’t,” he said.

“I steamed it open,” said Lacey.

“Do you know what it is?”

“I think I do.”

“It was like sending back a finger of a kidnap victim. Grotesque. I didn’t expect it.”

“And the two men?”

“FBI.”

“Oh, good.”

“Why ‘Oh, good’?”

“Because if they were the crooks, you’d probably ask me to sleep with one of them. Wouldn’t you.”

There was a second of silence, then they both broke into laughter.

“Wouldn’t you, you fucker!” said Lacey, simultaneously screaming and muffling her own voice.

“Only off-contract,” Talley said.

Then Lacey got serious. “Don’t mistake this smile for ‘problem solved.’ I don’t want to be the dupe who gets ten to twenty.”

“We wanted evidence that they had the pictures. The FBI guys acted as go-betweens to the thieves. I was expecting a photograph of the painting next to today’s paper, something like that. But these jerks are not us. They don’t handle with care. I didn’t know they were going to deliver that night. I got a call and told them to give it to you. I didn’t realize you were Nancy Drew.”

“And why you?”

“It started years ago when I was in Boston. I was the expert; I had written essays on the Vermeer. The FBI came to me to authenticate if the situation ever came up in New York. The thieves tried contacting the FBI years ago, but the agent couldn’t confirm that the picture they let him glimpse was the real thing, and the deal fizzled.”

“So none of the pictures have been returned,” Lacey said, which was her own test of authenticity.

“No. These pictures probably won’t be returned until the next generation. Deathbed confession sort of thing.”

Lacey had heard nothing but plausibility, yet everything Talley was saying was rendered implausible by the corpus delicti in the bins, and she didn’t know how to handle it. But directness had worked so far, so she decided to produce the body. She stood up.

“Sit, just sit,” she said to Talley, and she left the office. She went back to the bins, looked at the slot where the Vermeer still dumbly sat. She pulled it out and grabbed a box cutter on the way back to the office.