An Object of Beauty: A Novel (17 page)

Lacey crossed her arms and looked up at the Matisse. “Wrong time of day,” she said.

Busying himself at his desk, he said, “Well, take a last look because it’s leaving. Sold it this morning.”

“Oh, who bought it?” said Lacey.

“A European,” said Talley.

“That’s specific,” said Lacey.

“A Western European,” said Talley.

LACEY WAS SURE she was going to open the wrapped picture, but she would let several weeks elapse without drama to make Talley believe that the matter was a blip, now forgotten. Auction season was settling upon Manhattan, so there was much to be distracted by. Patrice Claire invited her to the previews, and Lacey decided she couldn’t avoid Sotheby’s forever, so she made the trip on her lunch break, understanding that it would be Sotheby’s lunch break, too, and perhaps she would not run into those she would rather avoid. As she stepped out onto the tenth floor, she saw a newly promoted Tanya Ross leading clients around the room. Lacey was not and never had been unnerved by her—she only resented her for being competent, nice, pretty, and prim. When Patrice, reacting to her “Ugh,” asked her why she didn’t like Tanya, Lacey said, “Because I’m a petty person.”

They turned the corner into the main gallery and saw, in the premier spot where a 1909 Picasso had hung last week before selling for eleven million dollars, the Warhol
Orange Marilyn
, a silk screen done in 1964. While the Cubist Picasso had gravitas, the
Orange Marilyn
had exuberance: it was as though a fruit-hatted Carmen Miranda had just shown up at a funeral.

However opposite these pictures were, they both worked as historical objects, and they worked as objects of beauty. While the Picasso was deep and serious, the Warhol was radiant and buoyant. The Picasso
added up to the sum of its parts: artistic genius combined with powerful thought combined with prodigious skill combined with the guided hand equals masterpiece. The Warhol was more than the sum of its parts: silk screen, photo image of popular actress, repetitive imagery, the unguided hand, equals… masterpiece.

Woman with Pears,
Pablo Picasso, 1909
36.25 × 28.875 in.

“How,” said Lacey, “can an artist have no effect on you for years and then one day it has an effect on you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Warhol. I’m a proud owner, you know. A small flower picture, but still…”

“Darling, I call that the perverse effect. Those things that you hate for so long are insidiously working on you, until one day you can’t resist
them anymore. They turn into favorites. It just takes a while to sort out the complications in them. Those artworks that come all ready to love empty out pretty quickly. It’s why outsiders hate the art we love; they haven’t spent time with it. You and I see things again and again whether we want to or not. We see them in galleries, we see them in homes, we see them in the art magazines, they come up at auction. Outsiders see it once, or hear about it after it’s been reduced to an insult: ‘It’s a bunch of squiggles that my kid could do.’ I would like to see a kid who could paint a Jackson Pollock. In a half second, any pro could tell the difference. People want to think Pollock’s not struggling, that he’s kidding. He’s not kidding. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.’ ”

Marilyn,
Andy Warhol, circa 1964
40 × 40 in.

“And I thought you were just in the service industry.”

“That’s my night job,” said Patrice.

They stopped at Sant Ambroeus for a panini at the bar. Patrice set up a dinner with her the next night at the Carlyle. “I’m leaving in four days, Lacey.”

“Oh,” she said with an edge of disappointment. “When are you back?”

“It depends on how the auction tomorrow night goes.”

They ate their sandwiches, and Lacey left for the gallery. Patrice stayed seated and watched Lacey through the glass window as she spoke with a young man on the street whom she seemed to know. Lacey was so vital with him, so animated, that Patrice wondered if she was as vital and animated with him. This moment, innocuous as it was, functioned as an ax blow to a tree: it didn’t knock him over, but it left him less steady. Then he was invited to join a Minnesota collector and Larry Gagosian at their table, where they would engage in a conversation about art so lustful that an eavesdropper would assume they were three randy guys discussing babes.

At the gallery, Lacey stopped by the front desk for messages. Donna, who had unveiled a new, unbecoming hairdo, handed her a few, and Lacey read them as she climbed the stairs. One was from Hinton Alberg, inviting her to join them for cocktails after the auction on Thursday. And one was from her old boyfriend Jonah Marsh, asking her to call back. Lacey hadn’t thought of Jonah Marsh for three years, and she guessed he had heard she was with Talley now, and would he look at my paintings? Lacey threw the message in her lowest drawer.

Talley summoned her into his office. “Eduardo Flores is going to be in Los Angeles next weekend, so I’m flying out with a shitload of transparencies,” he told her. “You’ll have to hold down the fort. The town will empty out after the auctions, so I think you’ll be fine. Just remember, ‘First, do no harm.’ ”

“And if I sell anything, do I get a commission?”

“You won’t sell anything.”

“I’ll settle for five thousand on every million dollars I sell.”

“Oh hell, all right.”

LACEY ARRIVED AT the Carlyle for her dinner with Patrice. Her salary at Talley’s had given her not only a living wage, but enough spare money, if there is such a thing, to keep her well clothed without having to dip into her reserves. She looked elegant enough that she could move across the lobby without a disapproving head turn, and in fact she got a few approving, inviting, head turns. Elegance in the Carlyle lobby was common, but
youthful
elegance was not.

She went to the desk and asked for Patrice Claire. The clerk rang the room—after getting her full name—then pointed to the elevator. The operator pulled aside a brass folding gate and cranked an iron lever around to 21. His head tilted back and he looked just above her eye line during the ascent. The elevator landed, and the operator did a precision adjustment to ensure there was no fault line between the cage and the hallway floor. “To the right,” he said.

Patrice opened the door, and over his shoulder, the first object Lacey saw was a small Picasso drawing: a nude reclining against nothing, all line and space, set in a dusky gold frame. He gave her a European kiss on each cheek and brought her into the small corner apartment; a hotel room that he owned. A large window looked over the rooftops to Central Park as the lights of the city beyond it were starting to twinkle on.

Lacey looked out over the city, south to the Plaza Hotel and north to Harlem, and said, “This will be a nice place to watch the apocalypse.”

She turned and looked at him up and down as he waited for her full attention. Patrice did look attractive. He had completed his transformation from the oily Euro she had met at Sotheby’s almost four years ago into an Armani guy with regular hair that no longer made her queasy to touch.

“I thought we’d eat in the room. The food is from the restaurant, and with the view—”

“Let’s go get a drink in the bar first,” Lacey said.

“But we can have one here.”

“Yes, but then no one will see how great we look.”

They walked around the block first, each proud to be on the other’s arm. The sun was just dropping, and the bedecked, bejeweled mannequins in the store windows were like saluting soldiers as they strolled in their enchanted state of opulent seduction. They walked a few blocks and asked for an outside table at La Goulue. They explained they were just going to have drinks, and even though prime dinner hour was approaching when the outdoor tables were prized, the restaurant could hardly refuse such a civility.

Like their drinks, their date was perfectly blended. Patrice, desirous of Lacey, was the subtle engine driving them back to the Carlyle, and Lacey’s nonchalant “let’s wait and see” demeanor kept the ending unknown to both of them. This was Patrice’s chance to legitimize their previous dalliances with a full courtship press.

Now, feeling the kind of euphoria that can overtake you at this time of day, at this temperature, at this level of breeze, after one drink, when the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable, Lacey and Patrice went back to the Carlyle. Patrice knew that tonight would be their first opportunity, if her signals were interpreted correctly, for real sex, real lying-down sex, not standing-up sex or sitting-on-a-desk sex.

They ordered room service, sat at their own corner table with views
across and up Manhattan, and sipped a bottle of wine until there was nothing left to do but kiss, and kiss again, for anyone with a pair of binoculars to see. Lacey led him into the bedroom, where the hotel sheets were fresh and rich, where the lighting had been preset, and where, placed opposite the bed, illuminated by two candles that threw their light upward, was the Matisse that had overseen their last coupling in Talley’s office. Patrice had bought the moment, and it had cost him six million dollars.

“So it was you,” Lacey whispered.

“With what it had seen, I couldn’t let it get away.” Then they made love.

Afterward, Lacey put on a robe that swathed her like meringue, and Patrice ordered dessert, which was wheeled into the living room while Lacey waited hidden in the bedroom. When the door shut, Lacey emerged and they sat again by the window.

“And now… ,” said Patrice as he picked up the phone. “Auction results.”

“Oh, yay,” said Lacey.

Patrice dialed someone. “How’d the auction do?… You’re kidding… Oh, really?” He covered the phone and mouthed to Lacey, “The Warhol
Marilyn
brought seventeen million dollars.”

Patrice continued on, asking other prices, but Lacey was stunned. She knew not only that the price was phenomenal, news-making, but that there would be a sympathetic rise in all of Warhol’s works and that her small flower painting had at least doubled in value while she had been in the bedroom with Patrice.

Patrice hung up the phone. “So,” he said, “there’s been a revolution.”

Lacey looked at him.

“Warhol has brought more money than an equal Picasso. The baby boomers are starting to buy their own.” What Patrice was saying was true. The vague rumors of strength in the contemporary market had
been made manifest, and contemporary art, over the next ten years, was about to inflate like the
Hindenburg
.

Lacey spent the night and left early to change clothes at her apartment. She said good-bye to Patrice with a kiss. He was flying out before lunch for Paris and had already made arrangements for flowers to be delivered to her at Talley’s, with a note that read, “I am missing you right now.” When Lacey got to her apartment, she paused in front of the Warhol. The feeling that swept over her was a bit like that of a gambler who gets lucky the first time out and leaves the table thinking, This is easy.

At work, Lacey bounced up the stairs and stiff-armed one hand on Talley’s doorway. His eyes rose, and as she fluffed her hair with the other she said to him, “You owe me a commission on the Matisse.” Then she turned and strolled down the hall, dragging her jacket by one finger before letting it fall to the floor as she turned the corner into her office.

TALLEY PACKED A BAG and flew to Los Angeles, and Lacey went to the shipping room to get an X-Acto knife. She was going to perform surgery on the unknown carton in the bins, just as she had done on the envelope from Boston. The cardboard of the box had already been reused several times, so it wasn’t likely that her tinkering would show. Donna never left her post downstairs, and Lacey was her overlord anyway, so she proceeded fearlessly, if secretly.

She turned the box upside down and sliced through the tape, then opened a flap that she bent back, revealing the framed painting inside. She pulled it a few inches from its sleeve, and even though it was now upside down, she could make out the distinct shapes of the now very familiar picture. She pulled it halfway out and bent her body sideways to make the view as upright as possible, and yes, there it was,
The Concert
by Johannes Vermeer. She slid the picture back in its case, retaped the bottom, turned the whole thing right side up, and seated it exactly where it had been. The whole enterprise had taken only a minute.