The Prize (31 page)

“And what's that?” she asked, with a catch in her voice.

“To be friends.” He didn't know why he'd said it.

“Well, we are friends,” she agreed, looking at him deeply. “I suppose what we are most is friends.”

She thrust her hand into her hair and it fell back on her shoulder. She glanced around the room and then down at the temple of prayer she'd made with her hands. Then she looked up and with sudden angry brightness, she said, “At my dinner tonight everyone
was talking about Fisher's new work. Did you hear that a reviewer mistook one of his figures for a penis?”

“Really.” Edward laughed and she laughed too. “I'm sure it was intentional. The subtext of all Nate's work is sex.”

She slipped off her coat and hung it behind her chair, more relaxed, as if she'd made some decision.

“Didn't Freud say sex is the subtext for everything?”

He wished to be alone with her instead of in a populated bar. “How are you? I've missed you,” he said, straining, though it was difficult, to remain unmoved.

“I'm feeling a little down. Watkins has taken on Mira Auchincloss. We went to grad school together. Do you like her work? She's making him a fortune.”

“I can see what Watkins sees in the work. She's doing something different.”

“Do you think so? I don't know. She's too curated for my taste. Everything she does is about making a statement.”

“Listen, you have nothing to worry about. Your work, what I've seen, it's completely different.”

“Did I sound competitive?” she asked.

“I have something to tell you too. It's about Agnes Murray.” He didn't know why he hadn't told her before. It hadn't been the right time, or he was reluctant to talk about it, thinking, hoping perhaps, that Agnes would come back to him, but after seeing her waltz into the fair with Nate, he knew he'd been fooling himself. He kept his own face blank. Never let them see you bleed, his father had told him. He had to show backbone. All men did. He quickly told her the story.

“She's unbelievable.” Then after a long pause she said, “Look, you're better off without her.”

“Am I?”

“I
think
so.”

Meanwhile, a look that said
you poor thing
passed across her face. He couldn't take being pitied.

“It sounds like she was defensive. I'm sure you were right, about the work. I've heard you speak. I've seen the work you show. You did your job. You have to let it go.”

He swiveled his stool. Her eyes blazed with feeling. She understood.

As if she'd intuited his thoughts, she said, “What I said . . . in London. About Roy not being involved in my work. He doesn't understand my world. Or what I do. Or the emotional risks involved. It's lonely.”

“Holly isn't interested in mine,” he said, though once he said it he wasn't sure if he believed it or if by keeping his work life to himself he had shut her out. It didn't matter. What mattered was that he was completely alone in the new turn it had taken, or felt he was. He thought about what Holly had said. She wasn't one of his pieces of art. Shame filled him. Had he always kept her at a slight remove?

“Things have been tense at home for me too. I told Holly about Tess.”

“How did she take it?”

“Not well.”

“I'm sorry. At least you told her. You had to get it out there. It was killing you.” Suddenly uncomfortable, she looked at her watch.

“What is it?” he said.

“Over there. I thought I knew them. I should go. It's late. Roy will be home.” She got up quickly and excused herself for the ladies' room.

A man walked over from the other end of the bar. “She's beautiful,” the man said as he passed by. Pleasure and then shame quickly swept over him.

He paid the bill and they walked toward the lobby to say good night. It seemed that he'd only begun to relax into the pleasure of her. He didn't want her to go just yet. “Do you want to come up? Just for a little?”

She peered around quickly.

“Just for a few minutes. I can't think here.”

“For a few minutes,” she agreed.

Once they'd gotten past the awkward moment in the elevator, both wanting to be alone and regretting their want, and then the long walk down the hallway to find his room, he fumbled with the card key until she took it in her hand and slipped it in and opened the door. Once in the room, he flipped out his BlackBerry and looked to see if he had any messages from Holly. None. He excused himself. In the bathroom he splashed water on his face and returned to find Julia sitting at the little café table by the window.

She turned back to him. “What's wrong? You look uncomfortable.”

“I wouldn't want Holly to know, that's all.”

“Don't you trust me?”

“No, that's not what I meant.”

“I have my marriage to protect too.”

He sat down on the chair next to hers. “Of course you do.”

“Maybe we're both doing this, whatever we're doing, so we don't have to face our lives.” She lowered her eyes. “That's what I've been thinking, sitting here.” She folded her hands together. “I don't want to live with the thought that you might call or e-mail or
we'll bump into each other like we did today, or last time, and suddenly ask me to meet you. Or that you won't. I'm not cut out for it. Some people are. I mean, for what we're doing.”

Exasperated by the complexity of his feelings, he took her hand and clasped it. “I don't know if I am either. Can't we lie together? And maybe not talk. It would be nice to just hold you for a few minutes,” he said, leading her toward the bed.

They lay down and began to kiss. He tasted wine on her lips and rubbed his hands along her thighs and she kissed him back. Within minutes they were both feverish. He turned off the light by the nightstand.

In the dark, she twisted out from underneath him and sat up. “I'm sorry. I can't do this. Not here. Not now. I keep thinking about Roy. No, I can't.”

She leaned against the pillows propped on the bed. Her face looked different. He noticed a ridge above her eye and furrows around her mouth.

“I said I wanted us to be friends only because it is the right thing to do, to be friends, not because I want to.” He moved a piece of hair that had fallen into her face behind her ear.

“I know,” she said, resigned.

“Let's go downstairs. I need a drink,” he said, tucking in his shirt and slipping into his shoes.

She straightened her hair with her fingers and smoothed her skirt and put her heels back on and then looked at him. Tears filled her eyes.

Neither spoke as the elevator descended, the air thick with what was unsaid. He walked her up the staircase to the bar, where he ordered them a drink and they sat on a couch and sipped from their
glasses slowly and she began to talk again. He listened to the light and sexy sound of her voice and looked into her softening eyes. She apologized. All of this, new to her. Something like that. Maybe they could take a trip together, figure it out. Maybe he could meet her in Vienna; she had to go back to do some publicity.

When they finished their drink he walked her out to get a cab and they told each other they'd meet tomorrow at the Armory. Back in his room he couldn't remember what they had talked about. He lay on the bed where she had been, smelled her in the pillow, and put his face in it—his mind swimming—and eventually in the velvet black behind his eyes, where a whole theatre unfolded, he slept.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
he did his time at the booth and spotted Julia across an aisle. She had work on display at Watkins's booth. He saw her dressed fashionably, as if she'd put time into it, and she saw him and for a moment their eyes locked and she smiled upon seeing him, even in her own unease. Instead of smiling back, he glanced over her head as if he were looking for someone else. Seeing her in broad daylight amid all his colleagues and the anonymous passersby, he couldn't acknowledge her. He saw a break in her face and he turned and walked back into his booth and did not go after her. He didn't know why he'd refused to acknowledge her. It was like when he was a kid and didn't want to face his father after his father found out he'd been getting high at Bennett's house when he was supposed to be at soccer practice. He'd thought if he did not acknowledge his father that somehow his father would not be disappointed in him, or that he could distance himself from it and pretend he didn't care, when what he cared about most was not disappointing his father. Almost immediately after, he hated himself for it, and a few
times during the afternoon he dodged through the cattle call pushing through the aisles and tried to find her to apologize.

In the afternoon, at the crowded canteen where stylish men and women sat on stools and drank champagne, some dealers and gallerists and others there to see the ebb and flow of new work or to encounter new galleries, grabbing bottled water, parched from the lack of natural air pumping through the large cavernous pier, she came toward him, arms swinging beside her and her eyebrows pointed downward and her mouth twisted in a hardened scowl. He was glad to see her. She pulled him aside to the end of one of the aisles with a nod of her head. Throughout the day he had chided himself for giving in to his passion, for asking her to meet him the night before and for the uncomfortable situation they were both in, for having lost Agnes and his fear of the repercussions and his inability to move past it, and vowed to himself that he had to earn back his integrity. He wondered if he had a right, if anyone had a right, to personal happiness if it meant hurting others in the process.

“I've been looking for you to apologize. Will you forgive me, Julia?”

“You can't do that.” Her voice quivered to restrain her emotions. “We have to stop this. It isn't good for either one of us.”

She turned, threaded through the aisles, and dissolved into the crowd before he had a chance to explain himself. Once or twice when he took a tour of the booths he spotted her again, deep in conversation with another artist or dealer, and though their eyes met she did not acknowledge him.

9 NEW YORK

A
PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT WAS
released. Savan gave a statement: “Agnes Murray is the master painter of her generation. These new works dare the viewer to look away.” To escape the pandemonium the media attention was spilling into the day-to-day activities at the gallery, Edward took long lunches, going to his club and swimming laps as if he were training for a race. Back at his desk, his eyes blurry and stinging in a chlorine haze, nothing looked exactly right. He could side with the gallery and swallow his pride, or he could maintain his integrity and publicly denounce the new work and Agnes's behavior. It occurred to him that he did not have to be a passive party in the center of his own theatre.

Meanwhile, Savan had ordered ostentatious, slick, shiny black Italian furniture for his new office and was in high-octane mode—
fantastic, brilliant, a masterpiece
—his Bluetooth in his ear, fingers hammering away furiously on his keyboard when Edward walked by. More than a few times he observed May and Savan huddled in council together in her private space. Savan was May's new confidant. He knew the common sense of attaching himself to those on the rise and befriending his enemies, but he couldn't quite make himself heed it when it came to Savan. In their weekly meetings Savan brought up new artists he wanted to sign, wooing Fay Reinhart, and River, an up-and-coming video artist, from
Gertrude's shop. The
Observer
dubbed him “the Poacher.” The more he was denigrated by the press, the higher his standing went.

May didn't seem to mind Savan's lack of modesty; rather, she watched with what seemed like proud fascination. Occasionally Edward objected to an artist Savan wanted to take on, claiming that the work wasn't up to the gallery's standards. He thought May would support him. Lionel Wood used dog hair as a medium, and in one of their weekly meetings Edward suggested that he feared the work would alienate a portion of their clientele. May said, excusing the pun, that she was going to give Savan a long leash. The work made a fortune for the gallery.
I'll give him a long leash too
, Edward thought to himself. Let him self-destruct on his own.

At their marketing meetings Savan name-dropped, one time about Ian Pearlman. “Edward knows him. Edward knows everyone that matters,” he obsequiously said through his smile. “He writes about art for the
New York Review
.”

“Everyone knows Ian Pearlman, Alex,” Edward chided.

“He's writing a long piece on one of my young artists, Milo Sorrento. I sent him images of the work and he flipped over it,” Savan said.

May beamed. Edward left the meeting. No wonder Savan was successful. He'd befriend a serial killer if he thought it would get him somewhere.

Savan peeked his head into Edward's office afterward. “Sorrento's on the rise. I just landed him a huge commission.”

“Good for you,” Edward acknowledged.
Slick. Mediocre. Smug
, he thought to himself.