The Prize (23 page)

Christmas, the year ending, was a time at which he had always taken a few minutes after they had finished eating to look around at his family and take stock of how lucky he was. He supposed he
wished Holly had taken more of an interest in his work and his artists. She'd gotten the receptionist position at the gallery because one of her father's clients had a connection, and she'd taken a few art history classes, but she'd never really understood his personal attachment and investment in art—it wasn't just a business for him—and he supposed that you either felt that way or not. Early in their years together it hadn't bothered him. But once he had made something of himself, Holly stopped keeping track, stopped brainstorming or daydreaming with him about how he could go to the next level, advising him about what he should or should not say when he wanted a raise or a promotion. She was good about thinking through that kind of thing—better than he'd ever been. Now she seemed to think little about what he did in the hours he was away from her, unaware of the daily stresses, the ups and downs he navigated, as if his pressures and worries didn't exist if she didn't recognize them. She didn't appear to want anything to change, whereas he was afraid of the stagnation. He recalled the dreams they used to share, the house they would buy, the family they would have, their furniture and trips and celebrations, and now that they had realized them, he wondered what was next. All of it felt empty. Annabel soon to be at college, solitary evenings alone with Holly, the house slowly rotting and falling apart—already they needed a new roof. What would they do together, or talk about, without Annabel? Was the next stage of his life about watching everything they had built fall away?

He wondered if he would feel better if he told Holly what had happened, that he'd potentially lost his prized artist. For the first time since it had happened he allowed himself to wonder if he had handled everything wrong. Why had he needed to be honest?
Hadn't he learned enough about handling artists and the delicacy of their egos? In the military there were certain rules that kept the institution running but always the powerful generals were the ones who broke rank. He had never broken rank. He should have told her the work was brilliant and left it at that. Maybe his flirtation with Julia had brought all this on, on some level. Maybe all this was payback, on some karmic scale, for his being infatuated with another woman. He couldn't bear to think of Agnes showing her work at another gallery.

He opened the turkey cavity and began spooning fistfuls of stuffing into it. Then he sewed the flaps and squeezed juice from an orange over the bird and put it in the oven. He washed his hands and moved into the dining room, where Holly was still ironing. Love, as he had understood it, involved dedication and commitment. It meant pushing past the things that annoyed him, the way Holly looked at him from the corner of her eye when she disapproved, learning when to reach for her and when to retreat. It involved beautiful days of harmony and then weeks of jagged disappointment. It wasn't about affairs in attractive cities. He thought of Picasso's
Woman Ironing
and Alice Neel's
Nancy and Olivia
, Jennifer Bartlett and her houses. Donald Judd and his tools. He thought about other painters documenting their domestic moments, and suddenly felt enlivened by the idea that he ought to curate such a show. He leaned over and kissed Holly's neck.

“Edward,” she said and laughed.

He felt a rare need for reassurance from her. “Holly, has anything changed? Do you still love me?”

She looked up from the ironing board. He could hear the sizzle the water made when she lifted the iron from the cloth.

“Do you really need to ask me that?” she said, as if she expected that he understood that everything she did, all this, all they'd built and accumulated over the years, was for him, and wasn't that enough? Her face wore that slightly confused expression when he was looking for romance and titillation instead of the down-to-earth love she offered.

He watched her stretch the Christmas evergreen tablecloth over the long table and then remove the china from the cabinet. The porcelain dishes, thin, delicate, she took out carefully one at a time so they would not chip or break. It was the cream-colored wedding china, each plate trimmed with a gold rim to mark its significance. He looked underneath the tree where Holly had small gifts for their guests wrapped with cutouts from magazines. The night before, Edward came upon her on the bedroom floor going through stacks of magazines and snipping pictures to personalize each gift. Annabel's were wrapped with pictures of horses and dogs.

He decided not to tell Holly about what had happened with Agnes. Why burden her? Agnes would come around. Her work meant more to her than anything—possibly more than Nate and the twins—and she would consider what Edward had said about the work and see that he had been right. Edward was certain she needed him. In those early days of working together, writing copy, hanging the show, e-mailing every review or comment from the press back and forth, going over negotiations, an intimacy and understanding had developed between them. It wasn't just business. Beneath his anger was fear for her. Being a gallerist was a delicate dance, to know how much to push and hold back in service to the work, to find a shared sensibility that perfectly meshed.
Edward believed he and Agnes had achieved that balance. He felt a little better. She'd be lost without him.

He went back to the kitchen to baste the turkey and clean up the dishes he'd left in the sink. He needed to go down to the wine cellar and bring up the wine and went to find Holly to ask her which of the reds she wanted to serve. He looked in the living room and then the dining room and couldn't find her. He remembered he'd heard her go out the back door and assumed she was going to take out the trash. He looked out the window and saw her SUV in the driveway and Holly inside it. Her head was leaning against the steering wheel. He went outside and knocked on the window. When she looked up he saw she'd been crying. She unlocked the door and, cold, he slipped into the passenger seat next to her. “What is it, Holly?”

“I don't know exactly. It hit me, earlier, wrapping presents. Annabel is almost sixteen. And we never . . .”

“Never what?”

“You know. Had another child.”

He thought of her full, swelling breasts and rounded abdomen when she was pregnant with Annabel and how he had placed his ear against her belly to hear her gurgle. It had excited him to feel that quick kick of life, that stronghold that held them close. He thought about the years in which they'd tried to get pregnant. He remembered how sometimes after Holly got her period he would find her despondent, curled into the couch after Annabel went to bed. In the middle of the night she washed their clothes, the swishing of the washer and the spinning of the dryer in his dreams. In the morning when he came down for coffee she was in sweatpants ironing, polishing their silver, or cleaning the refrigerator. Then one year, he didn't know why, she seemed to have turned the corner
and stopped talking about having another baby. So as not to upset her, so did he.

He stroked her arm. “I'm sorry.”

“It isn't anything either of us could control. I thought things would be different, that's all,” Holly said. She dried her eyes with a Kleenex and gave him a kiss on the lips. “I'm okay. We have so much. Let's go in,” she said.

He followed her inside wishing he knew how to comfort her.

B
EFORE LONG IT
was time to go upstairs and shower and then greet their guests. Holly's parents were staying in the city for Christmas this year. His own mother preferred not to leave the retirement home, as if life outside had lost its meaning or frightened her. Each passing year her world became smaller and more contained. He'd go to see her sometime over the weekend with Annabel and bring her gifts. He was grateful the holiday this year would be with friends. He wanted to sink into the wine and get lost in the company.

After he dressed he came downstairs and admired his living room and the sprays of winter-white flowers Holly had carefully composed for the table and mantel. He poured himself a glass of wine and focused on trying to have a good time. Before long the house was filled with the sounds of conversation. Yet when he caught himself alone, either carving the turkey or pouring the wine, a wave of dread washed over him.

Dinner was served. He looked across the table at Holly, her cheeks glowing from the wine, and then at Annabel laughing with the Lawson boys. “You hide yourself from me,” Holly had told him once early in their marriage when she had found him in the
third-floor study late at night working on a presentation for the board of a museum. She ran her fingers through his hair. “What keeps you so locked up?” she said, kissed his cheek, and then lay down on the couch and fell asleep so he would not be alone. He watched her passing the gravy for the turkey and talking about the fundraiser she was planning for the refuge, and admired how quickly she seemed to have pushed past her sadness from earlier in the afternoon.

After dessert around the fireplace, the Christmas tree lights on, he placed another log on the fire, but before he was able to join Ruth Atkinson and Holly chatting on the sofa, Chip Lawson approached him by the fireplace. Chip was a successful hedge fund manager; in a matter of a few years he'd amassed a shitload of money. He was handsome in a Kennedyesque way, dressed in corduroys and a sports coat. His on-top-of-the-world disposition reminded Edward of Holly's father. Chip's wife, Marilyn, was an ex-ballet dancer who Edward suspected drank too much in order to endure her husband's philandering. Chip flirted with Holly at cocktail parties. Observing the coy jostling that went on between them, he perversely wondered if Holly would have been happier with a man like him. He talked in gestures and grunts and could barely put together an articulate sentence, but Edward imagined he fucked like a racehorse, or was it piss like one, he couldn't remember.

Certainly Holly's father would have preferred him for a son-in-law. Edward knew that Frank Moore disapproved of him. He mostly spoke to him about making sure he had long-term health coverage and had already paid for family plots in an elite section of a cemetery in Westchester where four generations of the Moore family were buried.

At dinner Chip had hijacked the conversation by talking about the vacation he'd booked for the family in Anguilla. He boasted about the great year they'd had at the fund. Holly's cheeks flushed and she laughed, a little too robustly, at his jokes.

Chip patted him on the back. “Amazing dinner. Your wife outdid herself. She's one beautiful woman.”

The cliché made him wince.

Chip generously refilled his wineglass from the bottle on the coffee table. As the night went on the guests were getting louder and drunker. “How's the art market?” he asked, as if it were regulated like stock. “Anyone we should know about?” But before Edward could answer, Chip leaned over. “I've had a boner for five days straight. Goddamn Viagra.”

“Sounds rough,” Edward said and excused himself to have a cigarette on the screened-in porch.
Viagra. Is this what it would all come down to?
He put out his cigarette in the ashtray and walked back into the party. He turned his head to look back at Chip and caught him nodding at Holly from across the room. He didn't like it.

Holly was standing with Ruth by the fire, its light wrapping them in a soft insulated cocoon. He was drawn into their glow. Ruth had studied art history in college and was an amateur collector, and one of the few neighborhood friends with whom he felt a connection. She liked to come into the city and visit one or two galleries, and they often discussed particular artists or shows they had seen. Edward advised her on art. The other guests still lingered in a half-comatose state from overeating, their faces rosy, sipping wine. The children had fled the adults for the den. He joined Holly and Ruth.

“Is there anyone new you've discovered?” Ruth asked.

He thought for a moment. The truth was that lately he hadn't taken on anyone new. Instead of telling her this, he heard himself say, “There's this sculptor whose work I like. Julia Rosenthal. Do you know her work? There's something utterly magical about it. The struggle for any artist is how to capture with materials exactly the way of feeling and seeing. With her work it seems effortless.” His face warmed, recognizing he'd gone on. He'd had a little too much to drink.

“I've read about her. In
ArtForum
maybe?”

“Wasn't she that artist who won the Rome Prize?” Holly broke in. “Ages ago. When I was still at the gallery. We were at that reception right before we got engaged.”

Heat rose to his face. He nodded.

“She's controversial. Now I remember. I saw a show of hers years ago. Are you taking her on?” Ruth asked.

“Thinking about it. We were in Berlin together. She was part of the group. Years ago she made a stir. Her work's moving in a new direction. It's softer now.”

“Really,” Holly said. “You didn't mention it.” She looked at him, and unable to meet her eyes he looked at her forehead.

“Mention what?”

“That you were in Berlin together. If Ruth's interested in her, we'll have her for cocktails. And then we can invite you and Martin to join us,” Holly said, without missing a beat.

“I'd like to learn more about her work,” Ruth responded.