An Object of Beauty: A Novel (7 page)

Lacey later told me that while she was steaming past the pictures,
she had a sudden, comic overview of herself in motion. She saw her head leaning forward as she entered a picture’s sight lines, her feet trailing. Then her head would slow down while her feet caught up and advanced, so her eyeballs could spend as much time with a picture as possible without retarding her forward motion. Her upper body remained slow and steady, with her feet a futurist blur below.

Watson and the Shark,
John Singleton Copley, 1778
71.75 × 90.5 in.

After twenty minutes in the downstairs picture gallery, Lacey found that her time at Sotheby’s had instilled in her a new way to experience a museum. In addition to her normal inquisitiveness about a work, who painted it and when, and a collegiate hangover necessitating a formulaic, internal monologue about what the painting meant—which always left her mind crackling with static—she now found she had
added another task: she tried to estimate a painting’s worth. Lacey’s internal wiring had been altered by her work in Manhattan.

Her acceleration in the west wing meant that she had time to do the same sprint in the east wing. Here, the giant modern pictures loomed over her. Even the Copley was small compared with the antic Jackson Pollock. At first, she didn’t catch the phallic silhouettes of Robert Motherwell’s
Elegy
, but on instinct her head turned back, confirming, “Oh yeah, a dick and balls.” A Rothko offered just two colors, more or less, but it made Lacey downshift a gear to take it in, and an Andy Warhol silk screen of a newspaper headline, which seemed so haphazard after the persnickety detail of the nineteenth-century flower pictures and desktop still lifes she had just seen, left her suspicious and not impressed.

There was a special exhibition of works by Willem de Kooning, and she stopped in front of one showing a female figure as grotesque totem. In the 1950s, de Kooning had aggressively painted women, and in the 1970s, these pictures endured the wrath of feminism. They were regarded as angry, misogynistic depictions of the female as beast: once again, it was claimed, a male artist was on the attack, reducing women to animals.

But Lacey, staring at de Kooning, taking in the roiling flesh and teeth, recognized herself. This painting was not an attack; this was an acknowledgment of her strength. de Kooning painted women not as horrific monster but as powerful goddess. Lacey felt this way about herself every day. Yes, she had a ghoul’s teeth; yes, she had seductive breasts, long, pink legs, and a ferocious sway. She knew she had sexual resources that remained sheathed. But one day, when she used them, she knew her true face would resemble de Kooning’s painted woman.

She went down the stairs of the National Gallery, heading toward the coat check. There was no line, but there were three security guards
talking into shoulder mikes and a smartly dressed woman in glasses, standing next to Lacey’s cardboard box, which had been leaned against the marble wall of the foyer. Lacey instantly read the situation. Her first thought was, Oh shit, and her second was, What fun. She then put on her toughest face, graveled her voice, and said, “I think I’m the one you’re lookin’ for.” She turned backward and put her wrists in handcuff position. So far, no one had changed expression, which meant that her comedy routine had bombed.

Woman I,
Willem de Kooning, 1950–1952 6 ft.
3.875 × 58 in.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, turning back, “I’m with Sotheby’s and I’m delivering that picture. It’s a Milton Avery. Here’s my card.”

The smartly dressed woman spoke: “Do you mind if we open it?”

“Not at all.”

Lacey felt a shiver at her fleeting thought that the Avery had been
mysteriously replaced with the National Gallery’s Watteau and that she would be sent up the river, unable to explain it even to herself. But the guard sliced open the tape, revealing the still pristine picture, while the woman radioed to someone, giving them the date and title and size of the painting. After a moment, the woman said, “Not one of ours. I’m so sorry, Miss… Yeager. I’m sure you understand.”

As a guard with paper tape sealed the cardboard back up, he turned to Lacey and said, “Nice Avery.”

Lacey stepped into the street, and before she could raise her hand, Truman’s taxi sped into view. The window rolled down. “I waited for you… slow day.”

“Okay, let’s go, Truman. My last tip includes this. The Hirshhorn, please.”

Lacey did the same routine at the Hirshhorn. She almost left the Avery in the taxi because she now trusted that Truman was a good fellow and a working-class hero. But a preview unspooled in her head of how she would feel if she came out and there was no taxi and no Truman; so she hauled the picture inside and got an institutionally authorized claim check.

In the Hirshhorn, she sped along with the same gallop as at the National Gallery, racing by masterpieces with her head swiveling. One picture, however, stuck her feet in cement. Painted in 1967, Ed Ruscha’s large canvas depicted the Los Angeles County Museum on fire. Devoid of people on the grounds, the museum was shown in cool tones and sharp outline, while flames blew out from behind the building. The picture was so unlike the slash-and-burn canvases of the abstract pictures she had just seen. Those pictures asked for an emotional response. This one asked for an intellectual response. Was this a tragic image or a surreal one? The horror going on inside was unrevealed and only imagined. And where were the people? Then, as she waited in front of the picture for a thought to congeal, Lacey’s mental gears cranked down,
the questions stopped, and for a moment, her brain stopped churning and she just stared at it.

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire,
Ed Ruscha, 1968
53.5 × 133.5 in.

Lacey glanced at her watch as she headed toward the Hirshhorn’s coat check, worried that a kerfuffle over the Avery would slow down her schedule, which now demanded precision. But nothing happened, the picture was retrieved and Truman sped her to the depot for the long ride home.

Lacey crawled into her apartment at ten p.m., still lugging the picture. Her tired body longed for a Scotch, which she poured over ice. She lay back on her bed. Light from the street lamps, diffused by summer leaves, gave her room movement. The idea of the Scotch hit her even before the alcohol did, so she was relaxed at just the taste. Her window was cracked open enough to let in the light summer breeze, and her eyes meandered around the dim room, moving slowly, high and low, from a vase of flowers, across her half kitchen, to a photograph, to a lamp. Her eyes drifted toward a closet door and the Avery that leaned against it. It’s here, she thought. Why not hang it?

She unwrapped the Avery with care, more care, she felt, than was given it at the National Gallery, and hung it on the wall. She took a lamp off her chest of drawers and put it on a low stool in front of the
Avery, so that light was thrown upward on the picture from below. Then she lay back again. Without looking, she reached out and her hand landed perfectly on the glass of Scotch.

Would Leonardo’s
Annunciation
be as beautiful hanging crooked in a messy college dorm at a party school in Florida? No, not as beautiful as it is in the Uffizi, framed, lit, and protected as the prize it is, while two thousand years of history flow by in the Arno outside. Context matters, but in Lacey’s apartment, where nothing exquisite had ever been, where just the two of them looked back at each other, the Avery was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. This moment was a secret among the Avery, the Scotch, and Lacey, and she saw clearly something that had eluded her in her two years in the art business. In a few minutes of unexpected communion, she understood why people wanted to own these things.

She rescanned the room. Where before she saw a photograph, a kitchen, a vase, she now added an adjective: she saw a
student’s
photograph, a
student’s
kitchen, a
student’s
vase. The painting was an adult object, by and for people with grown-up eyes. This apartment, these things, were instantly in Lacey’s past. They were on the way out, ready to be sold or boxed. The Avery had dipped her in an elixir. She wanted fine things, beautiful things, like the Avery. She wanted to grow up, no longer to live like a student. Lacey knew that what she needed was an amount of money that could support her rapidly evolving taste. This need repainted moral issues that were formerly black-and-white into a vague gray, and a dark idea that she had formed in her head as hypothesis now had to become actual.

Lacey called me late that evening. “Oh Daniel. I need you to do me a favor,” she said. I agreed because her incomplete explanation made it seem like an adventuresome art world lark. I did not know that, if its nature were ever revealed, this favor would jeopardize my budding career as an art writer.

II

BY 1997, the art market, becalmed over the previous seven years, was beginning to catch wind. A day spent trekking from Sotheby’s to Christie’s with a lunch stop at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue was a collector’s version of the Grand Tour. Increased foot traffic at galleries and auction houses indicated a widening public interest. Prices were now reported in
The New York Times
, and even though I was somewhat acclimated to the art world while writing my fledgling reviews for
ARTnews
or
Artforum
, I was still surprised that no belligerent letters appeared in the paper condemning huge sums spent on art that could be better spent on children’s hospitals. The public seemed to accept these sudden escalations with either resignation or glee, I couldn’t tell which. I can’t imagine that art prices reported around the water cooler were ever responded to with a “That’s fantastic”—except the water cooler at the auction houses—and more than likely they were met with a dismissive sniff or complaint.