An Object of Beauty: A Novel (13 page)

IT WAS THE coldest day of February when Lacey flew to Atlanta for Kitty Owen’s funeral. This conjunction of dire events was not Lacey’s world crashing down around her: her grandmother, at ninety-six, was old enough that it felt as though her death had already happened even before it happened, and Lacey’s release from Sotheby’s was quiet enough and even accompanied by a vague but believable letter of recommendation from Cherry Finch. She told her family in Atlanta that she was moving to a gallery, which was true—that is, if events that have yet to happen but probably will can be counted as true.

Lacey’s parents, Hart and Meg, were intelligent and cultured, two qualities that ride along effortlessly in households where the discussion of art is routine, though it’s difficult to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg. The memorial was sensible, held in their living room in the early afternoon, with people speaking solemnly about the departed; a delightful letter was read aloud, written seventy-five years earlier from Maxfield Parrish to Kitty, and the Parrish print was featured over the fireplace. The early dark of the afternoon segued into cocktails after the children were trundled off. Hart and Meg had been the ones to attend to Kitty during her waning years, and the estate was passed down to Meg, though there was a will to be discussed, essentially a dispersal of gifts to friends and family.

As Lacey wandered around the house she grew up in, each bit of
décor provoked in her waves of either affection or revulsion. The sixties modern stand-alone record player, bought as furniture and now used only for its radio, repulsed her. It had become an antique in her lifetime and had no mystique for her. But she felt an affection for the old records she discovered still stacked inside it, the ones she had played with microscopic precision, laying the needle in the groove like a skilled DJ. She held the jacket of the sound track to
Xanadu
next to her nose and inhaled it as though it were a madeleine, then removed the disk and saw written on the sleeve in her own hand, “Property of Lacey Yeager, age 10.” There were antique dishes and silver plate place settings, there were framed paintings that Lacey now knew were worthy only of a junk shop, there were reproductions of famous paintings that showed her parents’ good taste. Their furniture was in the style of Danish Modern: pieces that had never been near Denmark, and had been manufactured in the sixties, one decade too late to benefit from a growing craze for authentic fifties furnishings.

Lacey liked her parents, especially her father, but couldn’t trace her character to either one of them. Her father’s gentleness made her wonder where she got her mean streak. Her mother was practical, but hardly a prototype for her scalpel personality. Lacey was, however, bused as a child to a tough school. She’d often had to defend her modestly better financial status, exemplified by a pretty dress or lunch box depicting the latest TV fad. The usual options for coping were stoicism or aggression, but Lacey chose another: cunning. It had been cultivated from her childhood reading of age-inappropriate literature, encouraged by her mother and book-learned aunts. In children’s literature, the clever foxes were often the bad guys, but Lacey never thought so.

Meg took Lacey into a side bedroom. “Lacey, Mom left a little will.”

“I don’t want anything,” said Lacey. “You keep it.”

“No, sweetie, it’s not money. She wanted you to have the Parrish
print. She said you’re the one in the family who looks most like her and you should have it.”

Lacey sat on a divan with a look of shock on her face, which changed into a suppressed laugh. “Oh, that is so sweet,” she said. “I’ll keep it forever; I want you to know that.” No one at that time knew that her response, which sounded like gratitude, was infused with relief.

Lacey took the print back to her new apartment and shuffled a few things around on the walls until it finally found a home low on the wall, beside her bed. She poured herself a glass of wine, sat in her sole bedroom chair, and stared at the picture, thinking that she had experienced incredibly good luck.

BY THE LATE 1990s, artists’ output ranged from the gigantic to the minuscule, from the crafted to the careless, the thoughtful to the thoughtless. Richard Serra made art measured in tonnage, while Tom Friedman carved his self-portrait on an aspirin. Work ranged from macho to fey, regardless of the sexual preference of the artist.

Pilot Mouse edged into the art scene when he spray-painted black bats on walls and doorways around various neighborhoods. He parlayed these art attacks into money by following Jeff Koons’s and Damien Hirst’s template—and, incidentally, Rubens’s and Rembrandt’s: he maintained an art factory. The studio, a derelict warehouse teeming with volunteer assistants, produced paintings and sculpture, and in spite of excoriating critical response, the market responded with cash.

His breakthrough had come when collector Hinton Alberg, the American equivalent of the dynamic English collector Charles Saatchi, swept through a modest downtown show and bought every one of Mouse’s paintings. The paintings, in retrospect, weren’t that good, but when Hinton Alberg bought them out, they suddenly
became
good. The theory of relativity certainly applies to art: just as gravity distorts space, an important collector distorts aesthetics. The difference is that gravity distorts space eternally, and a collector distorts aesthetics for only a few years.

But this purchase was not what made Pilot Mouse a star. It was a
revelation, made a few weeks later, that guaranteed he would have at least a decade of tenure as an art star. But to explain it, it is necessary to know a little bit about the eccentricities of Hinton Alberg.

Untitled,
Tom Friedman, 1994
.25 × .375 × .375 in.

Alberg was a collector with a quick purse, which delighted those on the receiving end of things. He donated to the most offbeat art functions, as well as to MoMA, Dia, and the Whitney, and therefore had made himself essential to the goings-on of New York art culture, both newfangled and old established. He had a body shaped like a bowling pin and would sometimes accidentally dress like one, too, wearing a white suit with a wide red belt. His wife, Cornelia, was thin where he was wide, and wide where he was thin, so when they stood side by side, they fit together like Texas and Louisiana. There was always a buzz when he entered a room, a buzz that could be described as negative.

There was a certain unfairness to the bad buzz because Hinton Alberg had at least a sense of humor where his collecting was concerned.

“I went to the Basel art fair last year. Before I left, Cornelia told me to try to slow down. “ ‘Don’t buy everything, honey,’ she told me. I told her, ‘Darlin’, don’t you know I’m a
crazy man
?’ ”

He described his overstuffed warehouse, where he stored his paintings, as either “a junkyard with gems or a gemyard with junk.” But he was shy, too, so word of his humor did not leak into the main body of art society; and there was a disdain for his wealth, which was rumored to come from Cornelia’s old Detroit money.

Hinton probably had many quirks, but one was highly visible to everyone in the room. He did not drink or abuse himself with anything except food, but he had cultivated or inherited an extraordinarily developed sense of smell, which meant that food was not only devoured but inhaled. Before each meal, he leaned into his plate, sometimes putting a napkin over his head to create an aromatic bell over the food, and took deep, elongated sniffs. From across the room, it looked as though Oliver Hardy had fainted into his food. This exercise was not limited to the entrée, but was employed at appetizer, dessert, and whatever else might appear. It was considered disgusting when a plate of hors d’oeuvres was passed around standees at a cocktail party and Alberg’s nose was suspected of grazing the delectables. Once, it is said, he entered a town house off Madison and sniffed the underside of an antique Italian table.

After Alberg bought out the show, Pilot Mouse released the news that when he learned Alberg was coming to the gallery, he came in, took down every painting from the wall, turned them backward on the floor, and daubed the stretcher bars with light touches of truffle oil. He then rehung the pictures. When the story broke, Mouse spoke to
The New York Times
on the phone, saying that he was mocking collectors who bore the smell of money, by making paintings with an odor that was best discerned by a pig.

This comment made Pilot Mouse popular.

BARTON TALLEY HIRED LACEY. She was now the first person a client might see after the receptionist. She was allowed to quote prices, but only after she had judged the client not worthy of Talley. This was a shortcut to success, because what she had learned at Sotheby’s was that the Known don’t always buy pictures; it was often the Unknown who converted from lookers into unexpected buyers. She had to bone up on a new set of artists, this time ones with famous names: Renoir, Modigliani, Balthus, Klee. The bins, unlike those at Sotheby’s, were upstairs, at the end of a suite of offices, and sunlight dribbled in. She had space in one of the many alcoves, even had a private computer. Downstairs was a dimwit receptionist, Donna, who paged her for almost every question that needed answering.

There was less to do here than at Sotheby’s. Three or four pictures a month came in or went out. There were shows built from inventory, like “Renoir and His Peers,” which needed only one Renoir to ten works by anyone else who had been alive at the same time. “Works on Paper” meant anything that was on paper, regardless of theme or era. Talley also mounted the occasional miniblockbuster, all Giacometti, all de Kooning, some of the pieces borrowed from museums, some from collectors who swore their pieces weren’t for sale but who would succumb to an extravagant offer that came after Talley suggested to a client that the owner was reluctant to sell. In fact, Talley did an extensive trade in
pictures that weren’t for sale, because he understood that anything was actually for sale at some price, and it could be harder to sell something that was for sale than it was to sell something that wasn’t for sale. At least in the art business.

Lacey got used to being the front man—attending cocktail receptions, greeting clients—and found she had suitors. Too many repeat visits by a young man asking prices and wanting to be shown other pictures meant that Lacey was the draw, not the art. These were not downtown guys who wanted to fuck her and whom she wanted to fuck back. These were men with jobs who wanted to take her out to dinner and “see if it worked.” They wanted to put their best foot forward, which often meant that she couldn’t intuit who they would be when the courtesy stopped. The young men downtown were always clearly broke; the men uptown could pay for dinner on credit cards, but maybe they were broke, too.

The downtown men were tolerable because Lacey always viewed them as short term. The uptown men were intolerable because they were presenting themselves as long term. And there was always something fishy about them. She knew what a struggling artist was, she knew what a deejay was. But what was someone in finance? Her worst dates were those on which the other party tried to explain what he did, which was usually prefaced by “This is really boring, but…” and then the explanation would be reeled out in detail. Once, Lacey responded, “You lied when you said it was boring. You should have said it was beyond boring.”

There was also a humor gap. Lacey’s own wit seemed to blunt itself for lack of response. She thrived on feedback and interplay, but her lines and sparkle seemed to tumble off a cliff before arriving at their destination. The simple problem was that when she was “on,” it was a one-man show, and when she was “off,” she didn’t like herself. But she also knew that her downtown boyfriends were like her downtown furniture: in
need of upgrade. So she viewed time spent in the land of the normal as an investigation into the world of marriage-worthy men, even if she was unsure about her own interest in marriage. There must be one solid citizen who also had a spark of life, a sense of humor and adventure.

Lacey was becoming known as an up-and-comer, and her release from Sotheby’s was perceived not as a firing, but as conventional art news: who was moving from what gallery to where. People did it all the time. In fact, her position at Talley was seen as a promotion of sorts, and stories about her, stories of audacity, were transmitted along the strands of spider silk that connected the art world.

BARTON STOOD in the middle of his gallery while two art installers stared questioningly at him. He called to Donna, “Please ask Lacey to join me in the main gallery.”

Lacey, as if from the ether, said, “I’m standing right behind you.”

Barton turned. “Oh,” he said. “What do you think? Hang it here?”

“Yes, but it needs to come up a foot.”

“You think?”

“Too low,” said Lacey.

“Up ten inches,” Talley said to the installers. “And Lacey, I donated, unwillingly, to the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Sunday there’s a benefactors’ party, but it’s, shall we say, ‘open’ to the Boston Museum board, an entity I’d like to avoid until its current members are dead and replaced with bright, shiny new ones. I think I should have someone there. Can you put in an appearance for me?”