The Prize (12 page)

How are you? How was your flight?
He hit the Send button without recognizing that in writing to her he was taking a step back from his life as he knew it and into the unknown future, for one cannot embark upon the new without giving up something in return.

9 NEW YORK

N
EARLY TWO DECADES
earlier, when he'd first started out, Edward ordered a cocktail from a young artist slumming as a bartender. Having heard he was an up-and-coming gallerist at Gertrude Silverman, the bartender asked if Edward would visit his studio. Edward liked the guy, Josh Swartzman, shaggy hair and muscular arms underneath a black tee, from a Jewish background in Queens, son of a worker at a failing button factory. Though Edward rarely made commitments on a first viewing, he was knocked out. Bold and expressive, the work revolutionized a technique in which Swartzman used different-sized buttons from his dad's factory and applied them in patterns to form an image, the way Seurat's work was made from dots. It celebrated the integrity of the working class and confirmed Edward's conviction that it was possible to turn materials into something as transparent as life itself. In the faces of the workers he saw there was illumination behind death, that memory could be objectified. Edward snapped him up immediately. It was his first major find.

Swartzman's unusual working-class background got him a big feature in the
Times
and the work flew off the walls. If a painting sold, or he scored an institutional sale, he felt weirdly as if he were still doing it for Tess. He had dreams where she was sitting at their kitchen table waiting for him. In the dream her cheeks were rosy
and wisps of hair came loose from her ponytail, the way she looked after she came back from a run around the reservoir. There were strange moments in the dream when he was trying to enter the room to see her, but somehow couldn't move closer, like he was out at sea and the waves kept pushing him back. When he awoke it was as if she was there beside him.

After she died he walked through his days as if living behind a veil, and then, unable to stand himself, he threw himself into his work. It was the only time he felt free of his sadness. He told himself that Tess would want him to make something of himself—she was always in his thoughts, a second consciousness. He conversed, mused, read, wrote, thought, obsessed, and fantasized about art—breakfast, lunch, dinner with collectors, artists, gallerists—evenings pounding back shots at their favorite corner bar on Cornelia Street with pals from the gallery, so that he felt like his life was one long arduous effort to prove there was a reason to go on living. After Tess died he was attracted to work that spoke to the fragility of the human condition and grew obsessed with the randomness of existence. He began to get a reputation at the gallery for being way too serious.

E
ACH MORNING
H
OLLY
Moore, the gallery's full-time receptionist, greeted him with a wide and buoyant smile and cheery welcome. It annoyed him to see happiness incarnate at nine thirty every morning. Pretty and always dressed in a crisp white blouse and slim black skirt or pants, hers was the perfect face for the gallery. Once walking in after a somber weekend, he heard her laughing on the phone—a clear, effervescent laugh unencumbered, almost like a trill. He felt a sudden pang.
Why is she so happy?
Walking home, he noticed that little grass blades had come up in the park, and
stubborn shoots of daffodils sprang forth as if thrusting themselves up from the darkness of the earth. He thought about her laugh. Another time when he walked into the gallery, thinking about an unpleasant conversation he'd had with a collector, she traced her lips with her index fingers in the shape of a smile. “Life can't be that bad,” she said. “Is your girlfriend giving you trouble?”

Edward froze. It had been almost a year since Tess died. “It's over,” he said, and tears welled in his eyes. He hadn't confided to his friends and colleagues at the gallery much about his private life. No one did. There was an unspoken etiquette that once you entered the gallery nothing mattered but the work.

“I'm sorry,” Holly said, tenderly. He nodded and, afraid he'd break, ducked into the men's room. He couldn't look himself in the mirror. When he came out, he avoided her. His darkness felt contagious.

On Monday mornings by the water cooler Holly mentioned her volunteer work at the wildlife refuge in Connecticut. Once she'd wrested a jackrabbit's leg from a trap; another time she mentioned puppies she was looking after at the sanctuary who were waiting for a home. She'd taken lessons at the stables in Central Park when she was young, and boarded her own horse at a barn near her parents' country house in Connecticut. The best part of her week was volunteering for a program at the barn where as a form of therapy autistic kids interacted with the horses. Tom Drury, a childhood friend, owned the horse farm and had started the program. Pictures of the children riding at the barn were tacked up on the bulletin board above her desk.

She took pleasure in the simplest things—a cappuccino and croissant for breakfast, for instance, delighted and sustained her
throughout a dull morning of answering phones. It hadn't occurred to him that some people considered pleasure to be a worthy ambition. He observed Holly like she was a foreign species, marveling at a life untouched, or so it seemed, by any need to prove herself.

Every now and then a memory of Holly would pop into his head when he was drifting off to sleep. He didn't know why. He pictured her leaning against the reception desk, teasing him for kissing up to Gertrude when he came in with her dry cleaning. She showed him photos of her favorite horse at the barn where she rode. Once she called him over with the curl of her finger when she caught him staring at her from behind his computer screen. “Let me give you some advice,” she said. “Stop trying so hard. Gertrude thinks the world of you,” and then a call came through and she turned back to the phones. She held some strange hypnotic power over him, perched at her desk answering phones when he walked into the gallery every morning, representing some unattainable idea of detached elegance. Her long neck and dark green eyes reminded him of a woman from a Modigliani painting.

At an opening at the gallery he went to collect some prints from the storage room to show a client, and Holly said she'd help. In the elevator she surprised him by pushing the stop button, then thrust him against the glass in a spontaneous burst of excitement. They kissed. No one had ever thrown herself on him before. After the reception, they continued their buzz and went for drinks at a dive downtown with the others. All throughout the evening her eyes kept finding his and he felt a twinkle in his gut. Charlie slid into the booth next to Holly, and later, when Edward had gone to the bar to get another round, Charlie and Holly slipped out of the booth together to leave. He tugged on Holly's sleeve.

“Why don't you stay for another,” he offered. “I'll walk you home.”

Holly turned to him. “I'm with Charlie,” she said. “Sort of,” and scooted out. She turned back to look at him when she was leaving to gauge his reaction. He was a little wasted by then and proceeded to get smashed.

She had two free tickets to see
Madame Butterfly
at the Met and asked if he wanted to go. He assumed, because he wanted to, that Charlie was no longer in the picture. The idea of three hours in a cramped velvet seat in the middle of the row didn't exactly thrill him, and he feared he'd forgotten the art of conversation during his long year of mourning, but didn't want to give up the chance of spending an evening with her. Once the glittering lights lifted into the ceiling and the theater darkened and Puccini's music tumbled into the dark hall he was swept up in the central drama of Butterfly and her tragic demise. The emotion of the performance gutted him and he choked up. Holly clutched his arm, which was resting between them. When the curtain fell she turned and looked at him with misty eyes.

She invited him back to her apartment on the Upper West Side, a studio that was conspicuously small given that he'd imagined she had family funds—someone said her parents lived on Park Avenue and you could always tell a girl came from money by the understated but expensive clothes she wore and her pristine and manicured nails. She sat him down on the bed and slowly took off his tie. A woman hadn't touched him since Tess. The opera was still in his head, the bells and gongs, the cries of grief and despair, and as he was pulled into the canyon of her, smelling the richness of her hair, touching the soft folds of her body, emotion overcame him.
No, there
, she said.
Yes, right there.
She had possessed him quickly. Afterward,
alone in his apartment, he told himself he didn't want to open himself to another woman. He couldn't afford to get crushed. But there was her laughter, and the way she tossed back her head, and the shine in her eyes when she spotted him coming into the gallery.

At the gallery, sometimes she came and sat next to him and asked him a question about the work of an artist they were showing. She'd listen patiently while he told her what he loved about a particular painting, transfixed by his zeal.
It's like the way I feel when I watch a horse take off, there is this beauty and intensity that is hard to describe.
One night they went out for drinks with a bunch of others and Carrie Phillips, one of the gallerinas, mentioned that she was dating an investment banker.

Edward turned to Holly. “That's probably what you're looking for.”

She looked at him squarely. “That's not what I'm into. My father's sort of a bastard. He buys companies and then hundreds of people lose their jobs.”

“So you and your father, you don't get along?”

“It's complicated. I love Daddy. He'd do anything for me. It's just that I don't respect what he does. He's angry because I refuse his money.”

“Why do you refuse it?”

“Would you want to be owned?” She rubbed her nose with a forefinger and he felt his stomach drop. “With you, it's different. You love what you do.”

The next Sunday he invited her to a Degas exhibit at the Met. They stopped to look at his
Children on a Doorstep
, in which four young children sit in a circle, and Holly said, “I love children. I want at least three.” She confided that she'd lost her twin sister
when she was nine from a rare blood cancer. “It's strange. Since Lizzie died I feel that there's always someone following me. And at the same time, I have the feeling that someone is missing.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. They walked past a pastry shop, gazing into blueberry and strawberry tarts, her eyes full of hunger and joy.
What is she so happy about?
he thought when he left the flower shop where he'd gone to get a bouquet for her parents (they were going to visit them for Sunday brunch) and found her sitting on one of the benches on the sidewalk, her head tilted toward the sun, eyes closed, a grin on her face.

At brunch it turned out that Holly's father had known of Harold Darby. They had graduated from the same class at Princeton. “A brilliant man,” Frank Moore said, and shook his head. He sized Edward up—Edward had seen the gesture before—as if mental illness in the gene pool might be contagious. Then he cleared his throat.

“Young man, is selling art something you plan to make your livelihood?”

Edward had made a profit for the gallery by bringing in Swartzman and then two younger artists that followed. He nodded.

“Passion is one thing, but don't expect to make a living on it,” Frank Moore said, and poured them both a glass of sherry. Edward looked down at his scuffed loafers and then at his white shirt frayed at the cuffs, decade-old blazer, and unwashed jeans and felt himself shrink. Hanging on the living room wall were two side-by-side paintings—in the style of Renoir—of two small girls dressed identically. The faces in the portraits reminded him of the eerie feel of Diane Arbus's figures. The girls were Holly and her twin, Lizzie, dressed in plaid skirts and knee socks. At the table, Mrs. Moore sat rigid and bone-thin in the Louis XVI dining chair as if she were
being held up by a coat hanger, straining for conversation. The cracks in her caked-on foundation made her face look like puzzle pieces pasted together. The room was cold and airless. He looked across at Holly, good-natured and pleasant—he didn't know how she did it—and felt a sudden urge to take her away from them.

“Daddy,” Holly said impatiently, “money isn't everything.”

“Clearly,” Frank Moore said, and cast his discerning eye on Edward.

“Let's get out of here,” Holly whispered. “Don't mind him. He's impossible.”

She took Edward by the hand into her childhood bedroom wallpapered with horses and lured him to her canopy bed.

“I don't want their life.”

She said she wanted to live in a little farmhouse in the country with her dogs and horses. Edward looked at her soulfully and kissed her delicious neck. She made him exceedingly happy, even though being happy caused him pain. Everything about her seemed to go against the tenor of his life but being with her, seeing her smile at him, made him feel like he was coming to life again. “Now that you've seen my horror show, tell me about something about you. You never talk about your parents,” she said.

He told her how once he had gone to see his father teach his class on Romantic poetry and sat in the back row mesmerized by this person transformed from the slightly scattered and melancholy man he was at home into a dashing intellectual. And then he told her how after his father had gotten sick his eyes lost all their sheen. “They were gray and blank.”