The Prize (2 page)

He stepped closer to the canvas. “It's gorgeous. And so much feeling.”

“I'm too close to the work, I can't always see it. I view the studio as a room of visual problems to be solved,” she said, with a sigh. She worked until she was depleted, afraid to stop, as if there were an emptiness inside her that needed to be continually filled to validate her self-worth. He'd seen it in other artists and knew it in the vulnerability in her eyes.

She slowly revealed the other finished canvases, at first shyly, as if exposing parts of herself. Seeing how each of the fifteen paintings reflected off the others, magnifying the whole series like the prisms in a diamond, he was more convinced of her talent. He had to be the one to show it. It was the most original and daring work he'd seen in years. He asked about her process. She worked from drawings, hundreds of them. She lifted her hand to push back a spring of curls that had come loose from her bandanna and explained that from the drawings to a finished painting might take two to three years. She touched the layered paint and then leaned in to smell it. “My work is focused on 9/11 now but really I'm interested in it as one piece—our piece—of the history of human anguish. And how painting bears witness to it. I know it sounds rather grand.”

She motioned him toward an old fold-up wooden chair, then scooted another chair across from him, sat down, opened her fridge, took out two small plastic bottles of Evian, and offered him one. A man's gold Rolex wristwatch slid along her willowy wrist when she raised her arm. Maybe her boyfriend's. She wound her slender legs around the leg of the chair, opened her water, and took
a swig. She studied him as if she were drinking him. It made him uncomfortable. He stretched his neck awkwardly.

Realizing she'd embarrassed him, she took a breath and sighed. “I'm exhausted. I haven't left the studio in weeks. It's amazing how much isolation goes into each painting. All the doubts and second-guessing. And then voilà, something happens and it paints itself.” She half smiled and cocked her head, pleased with herself.

To indulge her, or maybe because it was true, he said that the paintings felt as if she'd dug deep to make them. She turned her head up and laughed. She asked if he knew the painter Nate Fisher. Of course he did. Edward couldn't open an art journal or walk into a gallery without hearing about or seeing Nate Fisher. He was one of the most visible contemporary painters on the scene. She explained that he was still teaching at Columbia when she did her MFA and she'd been his student. He'd introduced her to Leonard, who had a knack for discovering young talent. “I was doing a lot of portraits of strangers. I was sort of lost. My first studio visit with Nate, he told me he could tell I didn't care about them. He told me to start over, to only paint what I couldn't forget.” She explained that she started working from images that she was personally close to and that she'd been accused of exploiting her family's tragedy in a piece in
ArtForum
. Her grandparents emigrated from Ireland with only the clothes on their backs and her father was the firstborn American in her family. She worked from a specific visual memory of her grandparents' homeland where she saw beauty embedded with a sense of loss and regret as if from beyond the grave. She explained her interest in the idea of inheritance—of what she could give back, through her work. She had been riding her bike across the Brooklyn Bridge into the city when she saw the first tower come
crashing down. She quieted, looked down, and then raised her eyes. “I'll never forget it. We have no control over what haunts us. We're helpless to it.” It completely changed her life. She was afraid to ride the subway, cross bridges. “Art must capture what we're afraid of most,” she said.

“Fisher again?” He smiled, not to patronize, but with affection. He'd seen artists who listened to their mentors this way before.

She nodded and smiled back. Then she tipped out of her chair and crouched in front of the painting. Again she touched the layered paint with her finger, carefully scraping off a piece of dust. “If you take me on,” she said, her earlier insecurity fading, “would you make them see that my interest in anguish and destruction isn't overwrought or sentimental?”

“I wouldn't have to. It's all there on the canvas. All that complexity. Between that and your process, the references you're making . . . It's brilliant. We'll position you as a new Old Master.” He stood up and returned to view the first painting again. “What makes this successful is its timelessness, the way it slips free of any attempt to nail down its meaning or objective.”

She put her head in her hands and he wondered if he'd said something to upset her. She took her hands away, trembling, and explained that she hadn't slept in days. She'd been frightened to let anyone in the studio, and his reaction to the work moved her. For a moment he looked into her grainy eyes and soft prettiness and thought that if she weren't so young and childlike, he'd fall in love with her.

The next morning, Agnes Murray sent him a bouquet of white roses.
I'm so glad we found each other
, the note said.
When do we begin?

PART ONE

1 CONNECTICUT

I
T WAS A
gray, overcast late Sunday in September. The windows were open in his third-floor study and a light breeze rustled the papers on his desk. He looked at the tray next to him with his pens and his water glass and the two or three books and catalogues he referred to every now and then. Each word and sentence he'd put to paper he worried over. Chosen to present at the international fair in Berlin, he was reviewing the talk he'd written about the work of Agnes Murray and several other lesser known contemporary artists. He reflected that four years had passed since he'd first met Agnes in her dusty studio in Bushwick. A lot had happened to both of them since then.

“New Movements in American Art: A Desire for Authenticity.” Christ. He hoped he didn't come across as high-minded. An unsettling cry from outside disturbed him. Probably a lost cat or dog from the neighborhood. He looked at his watch to discover two hours had passed. He went back to the talk.
A new vanguard emerged in New York after 9/11
. . . That cry again; it now sounded like a baby's whimper. He remembered how Annabel used to cry in her crib sometimes in the middle of the night. He and Holly hadn't the constitution to let her cry herself back to sleep. He'd get up, go to her, and bring her into their bed, and she'd fall asleep between the two of them, sandwiched by their warmth. The summer was over
and another school year had begun. Annabel was almost sixteen. It seemed incredible.

He heard the sound again. He crossed the room to look out the front window facing the street. By the side of the road lay a dead deer, stiff, with its legs tucked back, middle gutted with dried blood. The cry was coming from the other side of the house near the woods. From the back window, he saw Holly in a plaid flannel shirt and high rubber boots rush out the kitchen door and his daughter Annabel behind her. The door slammed shut. He climbed down the three flights of stairs from his study and followed them. A spotted baby fawn lay camouflaged in a patch of leaves and thistle just at the outskirts of their garden. The fawn stretched its neck and unsuccessfully attempted to lift itself. Fear was in its eyes and the fawn was shaking. Holly peered over the fawn. She volunteered at an animal refuge, was sometimes called out in the middle of dinner or early in the morning to help rescue a fledgling or a jackrabbit or a stray dog. The fawn couldn't move.

“Maybe she's waiting for her mother?” Annabel wondered.

“If a doe hears her fawn in distress she'll come. She won't forage far. I bet the doe's been hurt too,” Holly said.

“Killed,” Edward added, making the connection. He mentioned the dead deer he saw from his study window on the other side of the house.

“Poor orphaned baby,” Holly said. The fawn cried out again, thrusting her head in another attempt to get up. Holly asked Annabel to go into the trunk of her car where she kept a pair of gardening gloves, blanket, and injection kit. She explained that she'd sedate the fawn and take her to the refuge. The fawn trembled. “It's scared,” Holly said, and stepped away to give the
fawn room. An excited look was in her eyes. Holly read about animals and birds and had shelves full of journals and guides in their library. She owned copies of
Animal Behavior Desk Reference
and Sibley's and Peterson's guidebooks about birds. She subscribed to
National Geographic
and obscure animal and horse journals. She was interested in animal and bird anatomy and sixth sense, as she called it. She remarked once when she'd been called to rescue a pigeon with a torn wing that pigeons have an ability to detect the earth's magnetic field, a sense they use like a compass to navigate distance. She said a horse can pick up a rider's fear in its heart rate. She'd read her books and journals at night or in the breakfast nook, glasses perched at the end of her nose. He liked to watch her this way when she didn't know he was watching. She was a woman who knew a great deal but often said little. God only knows why she had a temple inside her where she alone could rest and restore when others of us did not. You have your art, and I have this, she said once when he caught her looking at the
Journal of Animal Science
.

Annabel returned with the items Holly had requested. Holly put on her gloves and draped the blanket over the fawn's head to calm her. Edward looked on with admiration. He'd never before witnessed his wife at work. Underneath the blanket the fawn curled her head and quieted. Holly filled the injection needle and pressed it into the fawn's side. She lifted the fawn in her arms as if she were cradling a hurt child and brought it toward her SUV. Annabel and Edward trailed behind. He opened the back hatch and laid out another wool blanket for the fawn to lie on.

“I'll go with you, Mom,” Annabel offered, caught up in the drama. Edward asked if Holly wanted him to come too.

“No, stay home and finish your talk,” she said, closing the hatch.

“The talk,” he said, dread filling him.

“What's wrong? It will be brilliant,” Holly said. “You'll be brilliant.”

“Doubtful,” he remarked. She had no idea what it was like to put himself out there in front of everyone who mattered in his world. It was a part of him she could never understand. Nothing frightened her.

“Look at Dad,” Annabel said, laughing. “Daddy, it's just a hurt fawn.” Annabel sprang onto her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. “I don't know what you'd do if something happened to me.” Annabel was right. The thought of his wife and daughter hurt or upset caused him to stir with agitation. It would be like a tree coming up from its roots. If Holly went before him he'd be one of those lost men who padded around the house still talking to her.

Holly started to laugh and then looked at her husband and stopped. “Edward, you look peaked. Annabel, stop making fun of your father.” She touched his arm. “The fawn will be okay. It's probably broken one of its back legs.”

“It's not that,” Edward said.

“Then what is it?”

“It's you. You're amazing.” He watched his wife and daughter get into the car, and suddenly he didn't want them to leave. The light shifted and shadows fell into the grass, and silence entered him, cool and severe. He thought about getting up in the morning and traveling across the ocean to Berlin to speak in front of hundreds and the thought of it and separating from his wife and
daughter filled him for a moment with panic. An owl screeched. He lifted his head to the purple sky careening into the sudden fall of evening.

2 BERLIN

E
DWARD WATCHED OUT
of the corner of his eye as Julia Rosenthal, an American sculptor, chatted with Charlotte Moss while they waited for cabs outside the hotel. Julia's latest work was an installation set in a darkened room with hay strewn on the floor and barbed wire lining the walls, with photographs of crematoria behind the wire. He'd seen it at the Jewish Museum.

He stood apart from the group. Though he kept to himself, he was not unfriendly. He'd spent much of his boyhood alone, an only child of a complicated marriage, and though he'd been in the business for years, he'd never acquired the talent for superficial conversation. He preferred to read art books or an absorbing biography or work of history at home with his family, rather than to dine out on chatter. But here he was at the fair in Berlin, along with a group of Americans. It wasn't as though he could skip the lecture and go back to his hotel room—though part of him wanted to. He looked at Charlotte Moss hovering over Julia. Charlotte was an up-and-comer at Matthew Marks. He wondered what they were talking about.

He thought about Holly at home. She was different from his art colleagues. Unpretentious. Earthy. Self-contained. He did not know why when he was tense it was this image he conjured up, but it was always in the garden that he pictured his wife, kneeling over
her flowering plants, hair in front of her face, trowel in her gloved hand, intent, pulling out weeds or planting. She could spend all of Saturday morning running between the garden and the kitchen where she went for a glass of cold water and then out again, sometimes stopping to give him a quick kiss, the whip and heat of her hair against his neck. There was something in Holly's face, in her smile, in the way she looked at him and fussed over him, the promise of her and him together, and the children they would have that from the moment he met her had made him feel as if the first half of his life was only preparation for the bliss that would come.