An Object of Beauty: A Novel (21 page)

We walked around Chelsea for a while. I was trying to make headway with Tanya Ross, who was clearly friends with Jonah Marsh, and Lacey, not knowing to what degree Tanya was a friend, was staying in Jonah’s sight, crossing his field of vision whenever Tanya got his attention. Then there was a discussion of food and drinks. Lacey declined, peculiarly, saying, “No, I’m meeting a friend.” The group mentioned Cia, a sushi bar around the corner. “Oh, jeez,” said Lacey, lying, “that’s where I’m meeting him.”

I was relieved that the evening wasn’t over, because I wasn’t ready to give up on Tanya Ross. It was obvious to me that Tanya was not Pilot Mouse’s date, because she had clearly warmed to me and she didn’t seem duplicitous, unlike Lacey. She asked what I did, and when I told
her I was a freelance art writer, there was no ho-hum blankness that overcame her. Instead she responded with, “Oh, how interesting!” No one had ever said that to me since birth. She even had the courtesy not to ask if I was published, so I volunteered that I wrote regularly for
ARTnews
, and for gallery catalogs. And when I told her I wrote an essay about the rare bird Arthur Dove for the Whitney show, her face brightened and she said, “I read that. I think.”

At the restaurant, there was a seating war that appeared casual but if diagrammed would have looked like an Andy Warhol dance-step painting. With me across from Tanya, Lacey positioned herself so that every time Jonah looked at her, he was forcibly looking away from Tanya. With the seating chart done, Lacey excused herself from the table and walked toward the phone with a small swing of her hips.

Patrice Claire sat in his Carlyle paradise, which had so quickly turned itself into hell. There was nothing with which to uplift himself; the repair was out of his control and completely in Lacey’s. He had canceled Le Bernardin, but this was not an act of power, it was one of grief. Lacey had said she would call. Did she mean tonight? He had ordered room service to keep him close to the phone. When it rang, he felt a surge of hope that he resented in himself. It was Lacey.

“I’m
so
sorry. I wasn’t sure if you meant tonight. We never set a time… I’m downtown at Cia. I ran into an old friend. He’s great. Come down. I need to see you.”

“I’ll find it,” said Patrice.

Patrice was used to the steadfast responses of paintings, not the unpredictable responses of people. A discussion of a picture was a conversation of ultimate complexity and intrigue, irresolvable and ongoing. A conversation with Lacey was the same, except the picture did not
strike out at him. He fantasized that he and Lacey would have a lifelong conversation—also irresolvable and ongoing—because their common subject would be a route to each other. He was stable and sane, an avid art enthusiast with the same mutant gene as the stamp collector, the coin collector, or the model train freak—except that there were glorious buildings erected solely to house and protect his objects of interest, objects that commanded the attention of scholars, historians, and news bureaus, giving undeniable proof that they were worthy of devotion. But because the objects of his adoration were inert, he was unaccustomed to mood swings. Especially volcanic ones that took place over a few seconds. He was angry that Lacey had canceled, unhappy that he would be seeing her in a group, disturbed that her old friend was male—yet he was eager to see her.

Instead of the serenity and anticipation with which he would have arrived at Le Bernardin, he arrived at Cia with anxiety and vulnerability. He was too old for this place. It was a different crowd, with different slang and different references, a crowd ignorant of the nomenclature of the uptown art world. He did, however, understand sushi.

He passed through the bar, and thankfully, it was an art bar and not a sports bar, so he wasn’t the shortest male in the gauntlet. He looked around the darkened restaurant when he heard Lacey shouting from the murk, “Patrice!”

From my seat, I watched as Lacey ran up to Patrice, delivering an affectionate hug that seemed to me exaggerated. She took him to the group and introduced everyone, at least everyone she knew, and except for me and Tanya, whom he knew, there were lackluster hellos.

Lacey squeezed back into her slot across from Pilot Mouse, with Patrice having to turn sideways to sit down. She seemed genuinely in love with Patrice, and genuinely trying to rekindle Jonah’s fleeting interest of three years ago. Looking back, I think that both behaviors were valid. To her this was natural, to Patrice it was unsettling, to me it
was bewildering, and to Tanya Ross, who had matured normally, it was creepy. Tanya occasionally looked at me with an expressionless stare that I knew signified disgust. Although it seemed that Jonah Marsh was with Tanya tonight, I did notice his eyes glancing over to Lacey with metronomic regularity.

As I reached over to refill her sake glass, Tanya looked at me oddly and said, “Have we met?”

“I would have remembered,” I flirted.

“You look familiar,” she insisted, and she sat in silence for a minute, trying to work it out.

The party broke up, and Lacey hugged Pilot Mouse good-bye, her actions maintaining that they were just old friends, while Patrice stood by, correctly assuming that Pilot had already fucked her, or was about to again, which made him queasy. They took a taxi to her apartment, and Patrice came up for a few minutes, but this was not the end that he wanted for the night. So he made, enthusiastically, a date for the next night, but he knew Le Bernardin would be impossible on a Friday and he would be settling for a restaurant less major, less symbolic.

He had been knocked backward, but a previously untouched part of his heart kept driving him forward, fueled by fresh emotions emerging from the wound, unknown and uncontrollable. Lacey gave him a ravishing kiss good night, then he walked east to Central Park, where he flagged down a cab. On the way back to the Carlyle, his mental reenactment of their last kiss told him, yes, she loves me, and he once again saw Lacey as an illuminating white light, forgetting that white is composed of disparate streaks of color, each as powerful as the whole.

When Patrice called that afternoon, telling her the restaurant was Nello on Madison, walking distance from the Carlyle, Lacey said, “Can I shower at your apartment? I brought a change.” The idea of Lacey showering and changing at his apartment made his heart leap. This was a special gesture of ease, of closeness. Where he had been
thrown down last night, he was now proportionately uplifted. This evening was suddenly more than a date; the details bore the assumption of attachment.

Patrice opened the door after Lacey’s light rap. “Hello, lover,” she said, hitting at least three separate musical notes. Patrice, with comic timing, turned to look behind him. She kissed him hello, strutted into the apartment, and threw herself down on the sofa with a sigh of homecoming. The red lights from last night were turning to green. The bag on her arm slid off onto the carpet beside her. She pulled her knees up, draping her skirt between them as her fingers combed through her hair, spreading it out on the pillow like a peacock’s tail. Patrice sat and enjoyed the show.

“Can you see my place from here?” said Lacey.

“I don’t know,” said Patrice, “I haven’t tried.”

“Liar.”

“I’m an adult.”

“I can see the Carlyle from the park, but I couldn’t tell which apartment was yours,” said Lacey.

“Twenty-first floor. Can’t count to twenty-one?”

“I can’t see the street level, smart guy. There’s no place to start counting.”

Patrice looked at Lacey and wanted her right then, but he knew that immediate sofa sex would be an intense but short engagement, and he preferred the promise of a long entwinement between the perfumed sheets of the Carlyle’s king-size bed.

After a shared glass of wine taken from Patrice’s personally stocked minifridge, Lacey took over the bathroom while he sat in the living room and listened to the sounds coming from behind the door. When he first heard the hard rain of the shower, the image of her naked, with her hands slipping over herself, rose and stayed in his mind. He visualized every move she might make with a washcloth, until finally he
pictured her standing motionless under the rich flow of water, taking in the enveloping steam that cumulated around her like summer clouds.

The jet-engine volume of the hair dryer went on for about ten minutes, then it stopped, and there was another ten minutes of intermittent jangling. He saw a quick flash of her, nude, as she dashed across the hallway to the bedroom, where she had hung up her change of clothes. A few minutes later, she came out dressed, still pulling her hair with a brush. “When are we supposed to be there?”

“We are supposed to be there when we get there,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “but for normal people what time are we supposed to be there?”

“Eight o’clock.” Patrice liked what he saw in this snapshot. She looked sophisticated and confident. He liked that she still had a sense of the normal, and she was treating him as if they were living together. When she finally presented herself, she was wearing the amber necklace he had given her in St. Petersburg.

She leaned against the wall and snaked the amber around her finger. “Remember this? You gave it to me on the night we
got hot
.”

Madison Avenue was just beginning to flicker on. They walked down the street, sometimes arm in arm, sometimes with Lacey breaking away to physically exaggerate a point, walking backward, then slue-footing around to take his hand or slip her arm through the crook of his elbow. Her strut appropriately modified, her girlishness tempered and grown up for the richest shopping promenade in Manhattan, Lacey had artfully tailored her downtown vibrancy to an acceptable uptown chic.

Nello was filling up quickly, but Patrice had clout. After being greeted with a genuine smile and handshake from the maître d’, they were taken to a small, intimate table that was prime Nello real estate. They had a broad view of the restaurant and its select clientele, who were not the same habitués from even a few blocks down the street.
Lacey scanned the room, able to take in all the faces because of a narrow strip of mirror that ran around the entire diameter of the restaurant.

“No art dealers,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

“Art dealers don’t have dinners. They have lunches.”

“Let’s have a prosecco.” Lacey laid her calf over Patrice’s ankle.

A couple next to them was speaking French. Patrice turned and said in stern French, “You should mind your own business.”

“What was that about?” asked Lacey.

“It was about rude snobs who think that nobody in America can understand it when they are insulted.”

“You don’t look French anymore, Patrice.”

“Because of you.”

“No more skinny pin-striped suits with pinched waists in your Paris closet?”

“No more cuff links, either.”

“And Patrice, no more tanning.”

“I shouldn’t tan?”

“No,” said Lacey, “no more tanning no matter how you’re getting it.” Then there was a pause while they waited for a new subject to appear.

“What’s on your walls?” Lacey asked him.

“Of my apartment? I will give you the virtual tour. Close your eyes.”

“I
will
give you the virtual tour, not
wheel
give you the tour.
Will… ill
… not
wheel
.”

“I
will
give you the tour… ,” Patrice struggled to say. “Now close your eyes.”

“I
wheel
after the prosecco arrives.”

She stared at him, unwavering, until the waiter placed the fizzy glass in front of her. Then she shut her eyes. “First,” she said, “what’s out the window?”

“The Seine,” said Patrice.

“Okay, I’m situated,” said Lacey.

“On the first wall you see a Miró
Constellation
gouache. You know what that is?”

“Expensive.”

“To the right is a matched pair. A Cubist Braque and a Cubist Picasso. To tell which is which is a game only fools play. Over the sofa—and yes, it matches the fabric—is a Cortès.”

“Okay, I’m stumped. Who is Cortès?”

“Cortès is a terrible French street scene painter.”

“How can you hang it next to the Picasso?”

“It’s the best picture Cortès ever painted.” At Lacey’s look, he continued, “Look, if you want to be strict, there are only six twentieth-century artists: Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Pollock, de Kooning, and Warhol. But I don’t want to be strict, which is my downfall. I like sentimental Pre-Raphaelites and dumb Bouguereaus, insipid Aivazovskys, and dogs playing poker. As long as they’re good, relatively good, I just can’t help myself.”

“Everyone you collect is dead.”

“They’re much easier to negotiate with.”

“Wouldn’t you rather talk art with an artist than a dealer?”

“Oh please, no! Have you ever heard an artist talk about their art? It’s Chinese! What they describe in their work is absolutely
not there
. And it’s guaranteed that what you think is their worst picture, they think is their best picture.”

Patrice was the funniest unfunny person Lacey had ever met. She liked him, yes, and when they got back to his apartment, she told him so without ever saying it. She treated him as though he were the first and last object of her passion, and their ardor was pitched precisely between lust and romance. Eventually, when it was all over, sitting pegged on him with her knees brought up by his waist, their fingers interlaced palm to palm and her hair falling forward over her face, she looked at him with an expression of immutable love.