An Object of Beauty: A Novel (9 page)

“I’ve got it,” said Lacey.

This was not a cheap bill. The routine was that it would be split, as none of them could easily afford to treat except at the cheapest of restaurants. The ease and snap with which she picked up the check had a second-nature quality that said Lacey was not extending herself uncomfortably. Both Angela and Sharon thought this was odd.

On the street, Lacey hailed a cab, and they all bowed low as they filed in. “Driver,” said Lacey, “follow that street,” and her finger pointed uptown.

“Where’re we going?” they chirped.

“I’ll show you,” said Lacey.

The cab wheeled up to 83rd Street and Broadway and, according to Lacey’s exact command, hung a left, meandered over a few streets, and stopped at a corner. Lacey rolled down the window and leaned out, and so did the other two as best they could.

“Look up,” Lacey told them.

“What are we looking at?” asked Sharon.

“Count three floors up and look at the apartment on the corner, then count five windows in.”

They did and saw a nicely framed window in an old building. From what they could see of the apartment, it was empty, freshly painted white inside, and illuminated by a contractor’s light standing in the center of the room.

“It’s my new apartment,” said Lacey. “I move in tomorrow.”

“You bought it?” said Angela.

“Yes.”

The girls were stunned. As recently as several months ago, they had shared financial recaps, and both Angela and Sharon knew this apartment was out of Lacey’s reach.

“Lacey,” said Sharon, “how’d you pay for it?”

“Think of it as magic,” she said.

Lacey had come into money not by magic, but by prestidigitation. No one had seen her sleights except her and me, and I was bound to silence by complicity. I was guilty, too, but I did not know exactly of what. Lacey and I had collaborated on a feint—I delivered on the requested favor—for which I went mostly unrewarded, but Lacey had seen hundreds of thousands of dollars come her way. It was her will that brought money to her, and it was my lack of will that kept it from me, so I considered her deserving of this newfound rootless cash. But sometimes money falls like light snow on open palms, and sometimes it falls stinging and hard from ominous clouds.

MONDAY MORNING, Lacey climbed the steps of Barton Talley’s gallery on East 78th. She rang a buzzer, looked into a videocam, then pushed on the door when she heard a solid click. She entered what was once the foyer of a grand residence, now painted white and accommodating half a dozen paintings of varying size and period and one freestanding Miró sculpture, illuminated only by reflected sunlight as the gallery lights were off.

There was no assistant on duty, and she faced a carpeted staircase, at the top of which sunlight spilled around a curve of banister. Voices, too, tumbled around from somewhere up above. She stood, not knowing what to do. Then two men in narrow suits and cropped hair appeared at the top of the stairs, talking low to each other as they descended the steps. One of them said to Lacey, “He said to come upstairs and walk back to his office.” The two men left, and Lacey thought how in the art world even well-dressed, intelligent-looking men could look like misfits.

At the top of the stairs she entered a hall, unsure which way to go. She looked left, toward the street, to a sunny, blindingly white front room, then right, to a hall that extended back to another half-open door, which she guessed was her destination. She walked down the hall, passing a few offices housing an art library, open books on desks, transparencies leaning on light boxes. She got close enough to the end of the
hall to see, through a door cracked open not more than a few inches, a sliver of a painting on an easel, an old master type, of a woman singing in a parlor.

“Not there, behind you,” Talley said. She turned and saw Talley silhouetted against the window, waving his arm for her to come the other way. “That way, evil and darkness; this way, goodness and light,” said Talley, then added, “We’re all in here.”

“Thank you, Mr. Talley. I’m Lacey Yeager, just in case—”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “Thank you for coming. This is Patrice Claire…” Lacey saw the open-collared European whom she had met briefly at Sotheby’s a little over three years ago.

“We’ve met,” she said, recalling a memory that had set firm in her by a feeling of premonition.

“Ah, you remembered,” said Claire.

“Ah,
you
remembered,” said Lacey.

Lacey sat; they all sat. “Have you ever been to Russia?” Talley asked her.

“It’s on my to-do list,” she said.

“Well, move it up a few notches. Did Cherry explain about the Rockwell Kent situation?”

“Yes, she—”

“So the Russians have these pictures that they really don’t care about, but America does care about. Mr. Claire has some pictures that the Russians really do care about, and we don’t care about at all.”

Patrice Claire picked up the story. “I collected about twenty nineteenth-century Russian landscape painters through the years. All these Russian pictures are painted tight, very photographic, very realistic, the respected standard for the period. Russian artists never got into Impressionism until it was practically over—”

“Neither did the Americans,” Talley interjected.

“Yes, neither did the Americans. A hundred years later they turn out
to be unimportant, pretty pictures, but they are still amazing. Amazing light, amazing detail.”

“Patrice contacted me with the thought of an exchange, a sort of prisoner exchange,” Talley explained, “and I contacted Sotheby’s for added clout. The art world wants an opening in Russia, and this could be a civil way to begin. We need an assistant for the trip, someone with an American look and nature, preferably from Sotheby’s, and Cherry recommended you. Do you think you might have an interest?”

Not wondering, or caring, whether she was picked as a sexual possibility on a lengthy trip for gentlemen, Lacey said yes.

“We would leave in a week for a three-day trip to St. Petersburg. Many of the pictures are at the Hermitage, stowed away. My Russian pictures are being sent there now. Russia’s a bit chaotic these days, so it might be easier to make a deal now than in five years.”

The conversation loosened; anecdotes were told about travel, foreign ways, differences between Europeans and Americans, and everyone relaxed. Barton Talley fussed with a letter opener, finally laying it precisely square on his desk, leaned back in his chair, and said, “One night in Paris, I was faced with the choice of flying to the South of France to meet Picasso, or staying in Paris and fucking Hedy Lamarr. I chose to fuck Hedy Lamarr.

“That I would call a mistake.”

“I’ll try not to make the same one,” said Lacey.

WITH LACEY ACTING as passport holder and ticket captain, the three of them landed at the St. Petersburg airport, which had a lonely, neglected quality. Weeds grew in the centers of the runways. Broken-down Aeroflot jets seemed to be parked randomly, but upon closer look, Lacey realized they were not broken down at all and there were rattled passengers disembarking from them.

After a sour-faced customs agent rubber-stamped their papers, they checked into the Grand Hotel in St. Petersburg on a rare hot day of the Russian summer. The hotel was built around an indoor courtyard that was now a mecca for the traveling businessman. In 1997, Russia was “between regimes,” and a Wild West lawlessness gripped the major cities. Danger marked the streets, and Lacey had been warned that evenings out could be trouble, and that the food in restaurants could not be trusted. It was wisest to eat only at the hotel and walk no farther than around the block. This made her job as tour guide and car arranger easier. Everything was done through the hotel desk.

Before sundown, Lacey took a jet-lagged stroll in the permitted area. Magnificence surrounded her, but the city was tattered at the edges and had a run-down feeling that affected all the stately buildings, except for the busy churches. The government buildings were shabby and tired; she could imagine the hunched shoulders of weary Kafkaesque protagonists trudging up their unending staircases. Street
vendors sold assembly-line paintings only a few blocks away from the Hermitage, which made the junky pictures seem better by its beatific proximity.

Cavernous government offices had been converted to gigantic marts with stalls that offered household cleanser next to plastic baby Jesuses, and the variety of products from stall to stall was so extreme as to be illogical. The streets were alive, though; the warm day brought everyone out as if to stockpile sunlight and warmth for the battering winter. The people seemed to be of two types only, sculpted beauties or squat beer kegs. Lacey’s flirtatious imagination made fantasy contact with a few of these Adonises, but she knew that if she was to sleep with anyone on this short trip, it might as well be one of her employers.

The food plan for the day would be the same for every day: breakfast in, lunch in, cocktails in, dinner in. Tomorrow morning they would be given a private tour of the Hermitage, tomorrow afternoon they would meet with the director, and the next day they would fly home. So they would be three musketeers for the next few days, all for one and one for all, relying on, or perhaps stuck with, one another for camaraderie. When Lacey returned to the hotel, she saw Patrice Claire already in the bar, talking to a man in black. He saw her and signaled her over just as the man was leaving.

“Are you passing secrets?” said Lacey.

“Oh no, just making use of my time here for commerce. How about a drink?”

“I’ll have a black Russian… oh, wait, you said drink. Scotch.” The joke didn’t make it through the language barrier, and Patrice ordered the Scotch.

She slid onto a stool. “So, Patrice, what’s with the hair?”

He looked at her, puzzled.

She continued, “You know, what’s with the oily look?”

“I am European. It’s what we do.”

“Maybe forty years ago… but come on.”

“Anything else you find objectionable?”

“Just the gold chain. And the open shirt. Chest hair doesn’t have the same effect on American girls. Oh, and I’ll pay for your drink. It’s the least I could do.”

“I should pay. I’m so grateful for the personal instruction.”

“Just thoughts.”

“If I don’t grease my hair, it’s like an Afro.”

“No way. Euros don’t have Afros. Something matte would do it. Same effect, no shine.”

“Now should I criticize your hair?”

“You can’t. Unfortunately for you, I have perfect hair. I have hair that women sit in beauty parlors for hours to try and achieve. Natural streaks, natural highlights. I think my breasts are slightly low, so I’m vulnerable if you want to get even.”

“Do you get a lot of complaints?”

“No,” said Lacey, then flatly: “Oh, my God, it was a trick question.”

“Tell you what,” said Patrice. “After dinner, come to my room. I’ll show you something.”

Lacey went to change for dinner. Her “luxury” room, one third the size of a room at a Holiday Inn, had electronics from the 1940s and buttons for valet, maid, and room service, all out of commission. A fat hunk of telephone sat by the bedside. Out her window, she could see the Russian Museum, which she found uninviting. Its repeating vertical windows reminded her of a pair of wide, frilly underpants.

She lay down on the bed for just a minute, and the overwhelming weight of jet lag settled on her. Lying there, unable to lift even an arm, she went into a trance of sleep, waking only a few minutes before the eight-thirty dinnertime. She forced her body to sit up, her head still hanging heavy with double gravity. She sleepwalked to the bathroom and dipped her face in cold water. She looked at herself. Passable, she
thought. She bent over to let the blood run to her head, rose slowly, and got dressed.

At dinner, Lacey didn’t uncap her wit; she thought it would be inappropriate. She was there to listen. She quietly smiled at Patrice, whose hair was now minus the sheen of whatever it was he had been greasing it with. She understood this dinner could be an opportunity to learn something, and her serious question—do museums often swap works of art—was answered quickly by Barton.

“Oh yes,” he said. “How do you think the National Gallery got its Raphael? Andrew Mellon swept in and bought a ton of pictures after the revolution because the Reds thought paintings were bourgeois.”

Diners in Russia smoked feverishly at the table, and when Barton pulled one out, Lacey inhaled the secondhand smoke and eventually, wanting the nicotine boost, asked for one herself.

After dinner, Lacey, wrongly assuming her rendezvous with Patrice was a secret, excused herself, said good night, and left. At eleven p.m., only a few minutes after dessert and coffee, she rapped on his door, heard shuffles and voices, and the door was opened.

Patrice invited her in—his room was a suite—and she saw the man in black who earlier had spoken with him at the bar. Patrice introduced him, Ivan something. He spoke French with Patrice, English with her, and Russian whenever he felt like it.

“I wanted you to see this,” Patrice said, and gestured to the man, who laid an ostrich briefcase on a table. The man turned the case toward them and opened it presentationally. In the case, against black velvet, was amber. Amber rings, amber necklaces, amber jewelry.

The salesman stood with firm confidence, as if he were getting out of the way of a knowledgeable collector and a premier object.

Lacey sat at the table. “May I?” she said.

“Certainly.”

She picked up several pieces, rotating them in the light, seeing
fissures in the honey-colored transparent stone that pierced the gem like frozen lightning bolts. Occasionally there was an insect trapped in the petrified resin, which brought a vivid picture of the amber’s formation, the slow ooze of ninety-million-year-old tree sap flowing over a prehistoric bug.

“Pick something,” said Patrice.

Lacey chose a small pendant, with the amber hanging from a filigreed silver claw, laid it across her neck, and smiled. “It’s so lovely.”

Patrice pointed to two other pieces—Lacey figured they were for other girlfriends—and the man in black scooped them up with, “Excellent choice. Beautiful, so clear.”