An Object of Beauty: A Novel (8 page)

In the spring of 1997, Lacey sat at her desk, which had not, as yet, a cubicle around it, and saw, through an open doorway to the executive office, a picture leaning on an upholstered easel. It was covered with dark green velour, weighted at the bottom by a brass rod. A hand lifted the velour to reveal a Van Gogh drawing so fine that the only improvement it could make would be to turn itself into a painting. It showed Van Gogh’s finest landscape subject, wheat fields being harvested by
workers loading wheat into a hay wain. The velour, in place to keep sunlight off the drawing, was lifted only on occasions of aesthetic contemplation or for reasons of commerce. The person doing the lifting was Tanya Ross, and the person doing the viewing, Lacey later learned, was Barton Talley, whose cup was full with equal amounts of notoriety and respect.

Barton Talley’s history was part glorious résumé and part rap sheet. He wore pale blue suits and expensive shoes, which were a sartorial trademark. He had a PhD in art history from Yale and had vaulted into fame and position with essays, art scholarship, and charm. After a decade in a curatorial position at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he had been let go for using his known and respected expertise to advise collectors on purchases and then receiving gifts of appreciation with dollar signs in front of them. Among the legacy trustees, he was still thought of as sullied.

He then formed a gallery in New York City, Talley, with funding that seemed bottomless, and he specialized in Very Expensive Paintings. He was a rare entity in the art world: a dealer with the credentials of a scholar. Most dealers knew only their own area, and it seemed that dealers in contemporary art knew nothing that happened before 1965. But Talley knew it all, except for the very latest. His familiarity with the ways of the rich, learned during his malfeasant tenure at the Boston Museum, as well as his own financial ease, gave him the clout of equality with international collectors. He never pushed to close a sale, making him the chased rather than the chaser.

Talley didn’t like the artificial light in the small display room, so he brought the Van Gogh out to the offices, where ambient sunlight would make any flaws in the drawing more visible. He hovered around Lacey’s desk, tilting it this way and that, looking for fading, looking for foxing. Lacey presumed he didn’t notice her, but when he said, “A beautiful thing… a beautiful thing,” Lacey, at her desk, said, “I do my best.”

Talley looked at her, gave her an approving smile for her chutzpah—though neither of them could claim ethnic rights to the word—and then angled the drawing so he could see it under the raking light. Without moving his eyes from the drawing, he said, “Is there a lot of interest in it?”

Looking down at her desk, Lacey said, “There have been three or four people in to look at it, but let’s keep that between us friends.” Tanya Ross peered across the room at them from behind her doorway but sensed nothing unusual. They were like two spies looking at a sunset while they exchanged top-level information.

That spring, in London, the drawing achieved an exhilarating fourteen million dollars, and the auction room froze for a few seconds of unusual silence after such a spectacular price, before ripping into applause reserved for Derby winners and sports matches. Reports of cheering in the auction room when a painting soared past its reasonable limit and into the unreasonable stratosphere sound like a crass symptom of our age, but auction applause dates back centuries. Auctions were, and still are, spectator sports, where the contestants are money. In the nineteenth century, pictures were wheeled out to hoots and clapping, like boxers entering the ring, and the spectators responded to escalating bids as if they were hard lefts and roundhouse rights.

The Van Gogh represented one of a few stunning prices that had perked up the market in the last few years. Gossip and awe reverberated around Manhattan when rumors of fifty-million-dollar private sales began to circulate. Those overachieving paintings had great names attached to them: Picasso, Renoir, Degas. Prices were beginning to recall the glory days of the previous decade, and Lacey found herself rubbing elbows not only with these mighty names from the past, but with the well-funded dealers and collectors of the present. Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art divisions, however, were fully staffed and immutable. No one in this upturning market was going anywhere, and
there was no nook that Lacey could be wedged into without popping someone else out from the other side.

Cherry Finch liked Lacey, which also inhibited her transfer from American to Modern Art. Tanya Ross, Lacey’s slight superior, did not like her. She perceived that Lacey’s genie bottle of charm was uncorked when the Sotheby’s elite were on parade and recorked after they passed by. Although she saw this habit as good business sense rather than manipulative evil, Tanya correctly understood that she was the next person up the ladder whom Lacey could displace. So Tanya was attentive when Lacey was called into Cherry’s office, and she watched Lacey cross the room, the door closing behind her.

“Do you know who Rockwell Kent is?” asked Cherry.

“Somewhat,” said Lacey. “Illustrated
Moby-Dick
, right? Painter too.”

“Painter, mainly,” replied Cherry. “Not one of the top Americans, but rare. Plus, he had ties to Robert Henri, and the Canadians, Lawren Harris, Group of Seven. Landscape painter, mostly. Greenland was his big subject. Icy fjords with Eskimo dogs in tiny perspective standing by their masters. During his lifetime everyone admired them but nobody bought them. Communist sympathizer, ‘man for the people’ type. He ended up owning most of his own major works. Then in the fifties, at the worst time for a citizen to be sympathetic to Russia, he snubbed America and donated most of his work to ‘the Russian people.’ What already looked bad became actually bad.

“Now forty years have gone by and nobody remembers his Communist bent, and people who want a Rockwell Kent
of size
can’t get one, and there are about eighty large paintings sitting in Russia, and Russia couldn’t care less.”

Cherry shuffled some papers, as though she were waiting for Lacey to figure it all out. Finally, Lacey said the only thing she could think of:

“What are they worth?”

November in Greenland,
Rockwell Kent, 1932
34.25 × 44.5 in.

“A top, top Kent would bring about four hundred to six hundred thousand dollars.”

“Times eighty,” said Lacey.

“Not really,” said Cherry, “because you couldn’t put them on the market all at once, and some are better than others. But placing a few pictures in conspicuous museums, and releasing one or two a year onto the market could be a nice annuity for someone.”

Lacey wondered for whom. “But you can’t get them out of Russia?”

“That’s what we’re going to try and find out. Could you meet Barton Talley at his gallery on Monday, around eleven a.m.?”

The weekend was a long one for Lacey. She wondered what possible involvement she would have in the Rockwell Kent endeavor, and
she was excited because the request indicated career movement—and not just stolid up-the-ladder movement, either, but a skip-step that put her near the center of the action. At parties, Lacey’s fearlessness always guided her to the top person in the room, and her cleverness made the top person in the room believe that he had guided himself to her. But the Sotheby’s feeler seemed to come from nowhere, maybe even merit. She figured out that Talley had called Cherry, and Cherry had recommended her for something. What, she did not know.

LACEY NOTED THAT days moved faster when nightlife was involved, so she planned to meet up with Angela and Sharon in Chelsea for drinks. Art galleries populated the area, but Lacey didn’t normally frequent them. She was East Side, and the art she represented was understood; Chelsea was West Side, and the art it represented was misunderstood. She had been meaning to go but never did, as her travel in Manhattan was vertical, not horizontal.

Lacey’s new dress was, as she described it to me, “schoolgirl with possibilities.” She knew that the conservative quality of the outfit set her apart from the other females who stuffed themselves into jeans and four-inch heels on Saturday night and then, after two too many drinks, bellowed in the bar with resonant horse laughs. Her rule for weekend dressing was excess during the day and sophistication at night. After pulling tight her wide patent-leather belt and leaning over and shaking her hair into a perfect mess, after hurriedly sticking blue Post-it notes on furniture in her apartment that she meant to get rid of, she taxied sideways across town to catch a few galleries on their last gala Saturday before the onset of summer.

The confidence that she wore so comfortably on her home turf was less present on the new shores of West 25th Street. She had touched down like an immigrant and hadn’t even planned a route. For a moment, in the midst of an active street crowd that didn’t need her,
she experienced a rare feeling: invisibility. She passed active galleries with wide windows and unmarked entrances, with modest signage announcing artists she had never heard of. She stood on the street and looked down at dozens of galleries from which new art was mined and then trucked into Manhattan residences.

By the time she got to the end of the street, after quick ins and outs, shouldering through crowds for partial glimpses of this and that, she had a movie montage in her head of artworks spinning in an aesthetic vertigo. These objects were not old paintings bound in gold frames like their uptown counterparts; these were free-growing sprigs of wild grass, curving around corners and hanging from ceilings. They were lying on floors, making noise, glittering with mirrors and alien parts, stuck in the walls like spears, and looking at you with human eyes. There were good old college tries mixed in with older artists on the edge. There were blatant messages hanging opposite indecipherable jabberwocky. There was kid’s stuff, crass stuff, smart stuff, and porn stuff. There were labor-intensive works that sold for two thousand dollars and flimsy slap-ups that cost thirty thousand. And taking it all in were the muscled, the pretty, the pretty strange, and the thoughtful. Lacey felt like a Martian lander, scooping up dirt samples and having no luck analyzing it. As exciting as the carnival was, the art she saw left her unmoved. It was not comparable to the Picassos and others she navigated around every day, but her addiction to energy kept her pushing on, snaking between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, down to 20th Street and beyond, until the mood gave way to mundane galleries presenting new art made in the old way.

Lacey met Angela and Sharon at Cointreau, where they sat at the hundred-decibel bar for thirty minutes, until they were shown to a table. Of the three of them, Lacey was the easiest to pick up, Sharon was unlikely, and Angela was impossible. This rule also coincided with their physical appeal, with Lacey at the top, though it was Sharon
who was often pointing Lacey toward mischief, like a dare, because she knew Lacey was often up to it. Angela saw intrusions suspiciously and couldn’t open up to lengthy chats with strangers at the table. But Lacey was also loyal to girls’ night out and never flew away before the evening was officially over. If Lacey met a man she enjoyed, it was she who was the sole determiner of the sexual possibilities, and if emotions were invested, they were his and not hers.

The three of them, well dressed but a mismatched trio of varying styles, made outsiders wonder at the nature of their dinner. Three women who couldn’t get dates? Impossible. Each was appealing in her own way. Lesbians? Too easy a guess, the fantasy of frat boys, who were not to be found in the pricey restaurant. The way they talked in animation, leaning forward with palms on the table, stifling giggles that led to champagne hiccups, said clearly that they were having a good time, hadn’t seen one another in a while, and were quite sufficient on their own.

In the room was a noted television actor, Stirling Quince, who was forming a collection and hosting fund-raisers. He was in rare company: Larry Gagosian, the powerful art dealer with growing influence reaching to Europe and Los Angeles, whose eye for pictures made him competitive with museums of the world; Roy Lichtenstein, the most congenial of the new old masters, anointed at a time when consensus took twenty years rather than months to point its finger at genius; his wife, Dorothy, the most likable of all the artists’ spouses. At the actor’s side was Blanca, a Czech model whose body seemed to be assembled from schoolboys’ dream bits.

Neither Angela, Sharon, nor Lacey knew who anyone was by sight, except the actor. Yes, he was handsome. Yes, he was smart. Such a man, Angela and Sharon agreed, but Lacey balked.

“A man? He wakes up every morning and goes into makeup.”

Angela caught the conversational trend: “And holds a pretend gun.”

“And shows his bare ass on TV,” Sharon added as she slapped the table a bit too hard.

“His girlfriend is supposed to be smart,” said Angela.

“Smart?” said Lacey. “She’s supposed to be smart? She
poses
.”

When the check came, Lacey reached for it. “No!” said Angela.