The Prize (13 page)

Holly looked up at him with her big green eyes. “You're a little mixed-up too, aren't you,” she said, lovingly.

He squeezed her close.

“We have a lot in common.”

“Do we?” He stared at her with a confused look.

“Loss, dum-dum,” she said.

Holly caressed his face and the tension drained from his body. They messed around on her canopy bed, Holly aggressively fondling him (not that he minded) as if to get back at her father, and one thing led to another. Afterward, they went back into the kitchen and made mimosas. Frank Moore wandered in wearing silk slippers and a jacket with the family crest on his breast pocket, a caricature from an eighteenth-century novel come to life. “Mike Fountain says he's waiting for you to graduate from law school. He wants you to join the firm.”

“I guess he's going to wait a long time, Daddy.” The spark of life shot through her like a cannonball.

After her father left the room she said, “I feel like I'm always disappointing him. They don't give me any space. It's like they think they're going to lose me, too.”

Holly scooted him out close to five, saying she had tickets to a jazz concert. The tickets were for her and Charlie. “Charlie?” Edward said. “Are you still seeing him?”

“Yeah. We still do stuff,” she said, and peered into his eyes as if she were looking for a response. He wondered if she was purposefully trying to make him jealous. He left feeling soiled by Frank Moore's company and mad at himself for kissing up to him, unable to get the slope of his daughter's perfect nose out of his head.

The next morning Holly sat on her perch in the gallery, a flush on her face, pushing in phone buttons and connecting calls, when he entered the gallery. He walked past Holly at the reception desk
and went into his cubicle and turned on his computer. A few minutes later he heard her laugh. He opened the Dunkin Donuts bag and washed down his unhappiness with four powdered donut holes and lukewarm coffee.

That laugh! He could hear it again from his cubicle.

One of the gallery's artists was getting an award at the Academy of Arts and Letters and they were all going that night. He meandered over to the bar in the garden where they held the reception. Charlie and Holly came to join him, Holly a few inches taller than him, her arm locked in Charlie's, watching others do turns around the room. Charlie was a little portly with thick wavy hair and had that sort of Pillsbury Doughboy innocence that some women seemed to like. He possessed a boldness of temperament and confidence that made Edward squirm with envy. Earlier that week one of his artists, a twenty-four-year-old wunderkind straight out of graduate school, had sold a painting to the Whitney and suddenly the four or five young artists who had received Rome fellowships flocked around Charlie. Edward was good at spotting talent—Swartzman and the few others in his stable had created ripples—but he was looking to nail the real deal and take the art world by storm.

Julia Rosenthal was one of the Rome fellows. She sported a low-cut dress and high-heeled boots, a small bag hand-painted with flowers hanging from her delicate wrist. After Edward schmoozed with Julia and tucked his card into her palm, Charlie and Holly waltzed over, Holly in high golden sandals that laced up her ankles like the slippers of a Greek goddess, wearing a frothy thin dress.

“I saw you talking to Julia Rosenthal. You gave her your card, man.” Charlie turned to Holly. “Looks like our boy is finally a player.”

Holly tugged on his sleeve. “Who's Julia Rosenthal?”

Charlie pointed her out by the doorway. “She's on everyone's wait-and-see list.”

Holly onced-over Julia and her face fell into a pout. She pressed Edward's arm and looked at him carefully with liquid eyes.

“Do you think she's pretty?” Holly said. “You probably want to be with an artist, right?”

He stumbled for a minute. “No, Holly, you're who I want.”

She grinned, showing her generous, sparkling teeth. “Of course I am.”

Charlie eyed Peter Highland, another Rome fellow, in a small cluster next to them. “Excuse me,” he said, and maneuvered himself into their conversation. Peter was chatting with Lisel Miller, who covered art for the
Observer
.

Holly hooked her arm in Edward's. She leaned into him and whispered in his ear. “I feel as if I don't really know you,” she said, surprising him. “And yet, I do.” She squeezed his hand, flirty and a little wasted.

“It's because you're everything to me,” he said, because he'd been depleted and like an empty vase she was filling him again. He supposed it was true that he didn't know her either, only what she let him see of her. What mattered was that he was no longer alone.

S
IX MONTHS LATER
they were engaged. Raised in a modest home on a professor's salary, he was nothing like Holly's father, and while it irked Frank Moore, it thrilled Holly. Mr. Moore insinuated once at a dinner party, after Edward found himself in a mood to explain to one of their guests the meaning behind Duchamp's
Bicycle Wheel
on display at MOMA (it challenged assumptions about the meaning of art), that working at a gallery was for sensitive types. At their
engagement dinner, Holly's father took him to the bar and ordered them each a scotch.

“You're against them until you're with them, if you know what I mean,” he said, clinking Edward's glass. “Now give my daughter what she deserves and enough fussing over whether a piece of art is good or not. If it sells it's good,” he said, and patted Edward's back aggressively. Edward's knee-jerk reaction was to compulsively rattle off the new deals he'd made as if he were still auditioning for the part of Holly's husband, and he supposed he was. Around Mr. Moore he felt like a fraud. “Why don't you just show him your bank statement,” Holly said, interrupting their conversation and rolling her eyes.

On the way back from dinner he told himself he would tell Holly about Tess. Occasionally when he'd run into a mutual friend from college and her name was mentioned he felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. Why couldn't he talk about it? It was like there was a pit in his throat.

They walked arm in arm through the park to Holly's apartment. She leaned into him and every few blocks stopped to kiss him. She moved with eagerness, alert and present, quick to brush off disappointments. Her optimism anchored her. He tried to formulate what he would say, but he didn't know how to begin. He didn't know how to explain it right, because he didn't himself quite understand how forcefully Holly had come to mean his very salvation. He couldn't risk losing her—what if she thought less of him or would not want to marry someone who'd been married before? Holly was a purist. And what would Frank Moore think of him, his only daughter marrying a man who'd been scarred first by his father's mental illness and then by this?

He stopped at the Korean market and bought Holly a bouquet of wild daisies that made her blush with happiness, and they resumed their walk together, dodging the sidewalk gratings that he always feared would give way. He'd find another time; they had their whole lives. But as he neared her apartment he felt regret at not telling her.

When they got to her doorstep she looked up at him. “What's wrong, honey,” she said. “You look like there's something you want to say.”

He looked into her open, honest face and felt he didn't deserve her. “Only how much I love you,” he said, unaware that the longer he waited, the longer Holly would feel in retrospect that her trust had been violated.

T
HE WEDDING WAS
at her father's club in Connecticut. They honeymooned on St. Barths, an extravagant gift from Holly's father that for once she accepted. When they arrived at the hotel they uncorked the complimentary bottle of champagne waiting in their room and made love on the bed. Holly asked Edward to promise that they would never take money from her father again. “I don't want him controlling our lives,” she said, her head propped on her arm, looking at him with her steely, purposeful eyes.

In the mornings they drank mimosas and took long walks to a secluded beach. “Let's tell each other one thing we don't know about each other,” Holly said, her coppery skin gleaming in a skimpy bikini. Her revelation: for the year after Lizzie died, she made herself throw up after she ate.

“I told you. I couldn't deal with pleasure.”

He wanted to tell her about Tess, he started to, knowing it was wrong to keep it secret.
There was this girl from college, we lived
together in New York
. . . but the words stayed in his throat. Instead he said he'd never told his parents that he was kicked off the soccer team his senior year of high school for not going to practice, and when he was supposed to be at practice he hid out in his best friend Bennett's basement getting high.

“Oh, come on,” Holly said. “So I married a liar?” She laughed and poked him in the ribs. They made love by the turquoise sea so picturesque and still he thought he was looking at a painting.

At night, after long romantic dinners, he slept beside his new bride in their wide hotel bed with its soft mattress and crisp sheets, feeling her arm hairs brush against his, her breathing melding with the continuous sound of the sea outside their window, aware that his life was not his alone and that whatever he did now would affect her. He watched her slowly coast toward sleep, a foreign being beside him, frightened by her essential unknowability and his own strange unwillingness to reveal himself fully to her. In her sleep Holly slipped her leg between his as if sensing his detachment, and slowly he drifted into a state of calm and then suddenly jerked awake, frightened again. Throughout the nights of their honeymoon the pattern repeated itself, the slow drift toward unconsciousness and then the sudden shock into wakefulness, where a dull seizure of panic took hold of him. In the roll of the ocean, he heard his own fear and pull toward oblivion, moving him forward and then taking him back.

10 NEW YORK

J
IMMY
O
LDMAN WAS
in town from Los Angeles. Ran a small gallery there. Pity he had no taste. Jimmy had made a sport out of representing pale, tall women—his newest was called Angel, no last name, with a snakelike tattoo running down the back of her neck, piercings in the nose and tongue.

Jimmy's thick hair crested to his shoulders. It had once been blond but some recent gray had turned it more of a neutral color. He wore a jacket with jeans and cowboy boots, a style that suited him. Edward still wore the same uniform from his prep school days, navy jacket (he'd lost the school emblem on the breast pocket), crisp white shirt, dark jeans, and the occasional Italian suit. Jimmy was endearingly earnest and excitable, always ready for a party, refusing to give in to middle age. He'd come to the work late, a second career that began as a hobby, collecting prints, lithographs, and paintings, turning up at auctions, and only recently had opened the gallery. Eventually he put everything he had into it, though he'd yet to turn a profit. The gallery gave him a second adolescence, jump-starting his professional life and apparently rekindling his sex drive.

He'd been negotiating an affair with high-strung Melody for nearly a year. Strange how none of the women Jimmy slept around with were pretty and his wife, Lucinda, was a knockout. Melody was a young assistant at Betty Cunningham, a gallery in Chelsea. Well,
she wasn't exactly young anymore. She was thirty-five, had a gangly son with a spiked haircut and crooked teeth whom she adored (she'd shown Edward his photo on her phone), and had separated from her husband but hadn't officially divorced. She accepted the no-strings-attached concept involved in sleeping with Jimmy—he was married—but she still expected to be texted, that when he came into town he'd get a decent hotel room, and that she'd be invited to stay. There was often a new dustup with her ex over money or custody. When Jimmy was in town, Edward sometimes met him for a drink at the Red Cat. Melody predictably showed up in an intoxicated state after coming from a gallery opening and crashed their drinks date. Inevitably, Jimmy was engaged in a conversation with one of his artists (who also showed up unannounced), lathering on praise in a verbal symphony of adjectives, and Melody privileged Edward with the awkward details of her most recent dramas. She looked just on the verge of a nervous breakdown, spewing without inhibition whatever was bothering her, from the unpleasant side effects of her antidepressant to tales of her delinquent son and play-by-plays of her combative relationship with Jimmy. Edward thought her impulsive and careless need to spill her manic energy into whoever cared to listen oddly comforting.

The first morning back at the gallery after Berlin, Edward wasn't in the mood to find Jimmy, who had been in town all weekend, slumming on the sleek leather couch in his office, answering e-mails on his phone. Familiar, like a brother. Well, it was Jimmy who called them brothers. Edward's office had open windows on one side that looked out into the vast gallery and the flock of assistants facing their computers in small open-cubicle desks. He drew the blinds.

“Don't you have somewhere else to go?” Edward clutched his red-eye, a Grande Sumatra with a shot of espresso in it—he allowed himself one potent coffee every morning, and then something milder in the afternoon—and settled into his desk chair for the morning's long haul. “I have work to do.”