The Prize (33 page)

“What happened?” she finally asked.

“I don't know. I saw you across the hall at the Armory looking at me and I couldn't bring myself to face you. I'm sorry.”

Her face looked sullen. Something in it was different.

“Look, can we sit down?”

He wanted to take her to a secluded place, but where? It was impossible. There were people everywhere. He saw a door to the back and motioned for her to follow, and they sat on a bench in the courtyard decked with ornamental trees, still surrounded by people socializing in their own insular pods. Once they sat down, he quickly took her hand and squeezed it before letting it go.

The crowd had grown larger and he could barely hear her over the din. Distracted, she peered into the throng.

“We better go back in. My friends are waiting.”

She wandered back to the group and before he could follow Sam Marcus, a dealer from another gallery, tapped him on the back and Edward spoke to him for a few moments, distracted. His eyes followed Julia over the tops of other heads. He shifted so as not to lose her and watched as she drifted slowly toward the back of the gallery. She still possessed him. It was agony. After Sam peeled off and he spoke to two or three other people he knew, he found her again.

“What is it?” she leaned in and whispered.

“I'm just happy to see you.”

“I'm glad to see you too.”

The tension evaporated and they quickly eased into their easy intimacy. They moved into a quieter corner of the space.

“Did you see Agnes's show?”

Like other prominent artists living in New York, Julia had an ear for gossip. If you lived in Chelsea or Tribeca, and now Bushwick, Dumbo, and Williamsburg, it was impossible to get a cup of coffee without running into another artist or dealer, and he wondered what the perception of Agnes's show was on the streets, what she thought of it.

“I'm afraid it didn't seem to make a loud splash. Is the gallery disappointed?”

“I can't say that we're happy about it. It didn't live up to its promise. And May doesn't like to lose money.” He stopped. “It's been grim.”

“Well, maybe it will save her marriage.”

“Agnes's?”

“I heard they were in trouble. Apparently Nate didn't come to the opening?”

“He never comes to her shows. She doesn't want anyone to associate the two of them together. That's where she draws the line.” He was oddly protective of Agnes. He had possessed—still possessed—such intimate knowledge of her.

“The word is that Agnes is going to be up for the Tanning Prize. My friends, Simone and Nancy, were just talking about it.”

“Really?”

“Simone said Frederick Jackson is one of the judges—I think he's the chair actually—and of course he and Nate are pals.”

“The Tanning prize. You're kidding,” he said again.

They walked over to a piece from Holzer's
The Living
Series. “I like this one,” Julia acknowledged. It was enamel on metal with black type. The inscription read:

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE BUT TO WATCH SOMETHING GRUESOME OCCUR. YOU DON'T HAVE THE OPTION OF CLOSING YOUR EYES BECAUSE IT HAPPENS FAST AND ENTERS YOUR MEMORY
.

They turned to each other in mutual acknowledgment. Julia's fingers reached into her hair. She scooped it back.

“I'm sorry about Agnes. It must have disappointed you. You've put so much into her career,” she offered.

“The paintings weren't quite there yet. I tried to tell her.”

“She should have listened.”

“Enough about Agnes.” He'd thought he'd gotten through the worst part of it, but the long runup to the prize ceremony—if indeed she was up for the prize—would keep Agnes front and center. It would be agony.

“How's your own work?”

“It's going well. Do you still want to come to my studio? Since London I've wanted to show you what I've been up to. I've switched mediums. I'm painting, which is crazy. I haven't painted since graduate school.”

He stood close enough to feel her breath on his neck and heat rise from her thin sweater.

“Yes, I want to see it.”

In London he'd said he was interested in representing her, but he wondered whether it would be a good idea. She seemed to register
his concern. “Don't worry. I want you to see my work, but I don't want you to represent me. That would be career suicide.”

“Would it?”

“You know it would. Wasn't it you who said an artist should never mix business with friendship?”

She motioned to where her two friends were standing. “I should get back,” she said, uncomfortable, but unable to quite leave. Her face was in a knot. She looked at him as if there was more she wanted to say and then shook her head, resigned to their circumstances. A wisp of her soft hair caught on his face as he leaned in to say good-bye.

13 CONNECTICUT

H
E ENTERED HIS
quiet house. He saw Holly's sweatshirt draped on a chair in the kitchen and picked it up and brought it to his lips. He looked out their bedroom window at the cherry tree Holly had planted. Each spring, the tree would begin to blossom, and every year the tree grew more robust. The extreme beauty of the thick, rich pink and magenta flowers in bloom and quick death once all the blossoms had dropped always caught him short. He withdrew upstairs to his study.

He reclined on the sofa facing the wall where he had mounted his father's landscapes and attempted to read a draft of a catalogue. He couldn't concentrate. He couldn't get Julia's changed look at the Holzer exhibition the evening before out of his mind. He remembered her warm disposition in Berlin and the aggrieved look he observed at the gallery.

He turned another page and tried to concentrate, and then raised his eyes from the catalogue and gazed at his father's paintings. He had spent days at the university teaching and evenings locked in his study. But once he became ill, the stream of his thoughts ran dry. In their sunroom he painted the same landscape outside their window, obsessively attempting to pin down something that eluded him. On the horizon of each painting was a cloudlike face and in the foreground a stand of spindled trees. After he died, Edward's mother
aired the sunroom, gathered the paint supplies in a box for the trash. She donated his clothes to Goodwill, packed up his papers in a trunk, and boxed his books. Edward was appointed the literary executor of his estate. The drafty room, emptied of personality, felt as if it belonged to strangers.

He picked up his father's edition of Keats's poems and opened it. Inside the front flap his father had made notes to himself in pen.
Where are you? Why are you hiding? Who are you?
He'd circled key words in the poems, written along the margins, underlined passages. Through his work he constructed a system of hiding and subterfuge.
We must be broken in order to heal
.

As a kid he occasionally heard his father cursing in his study. He'd come out after a weekend when he'd retreated, emerging only to make coffee, moody, exhausted, grumbling that he didn't know whether he'd made his manuscript better or worse. He explained how his ideas felt simplistic the minute he tried to pin them down and was frustrated that they did not live up to the originality and brilliance he imagined. He accompanied his father on long walks in the woods behind their backyard with their dog, Beckett. Sometimes his father walked in silence, and other times, consumed by problems with his work, he obsessed. One of his obsessions was with the notion of character. His first major academic work was on Keats; it received numerous academic prizes and had secured his tenure at Yale. Keats described poetic character as having no self but only serving the imagination, as if the poetic self were a mirror to reflect back to readers their own inner lives. Keats strove in his work not to reconcile contradictory aspects of character by fitting them into closed systems. “Human character is essentially unknowable,” his father once said, stripping bark from a branch as he walked. The
deeper he delved inside his own intellectual thought, the harder it was for him to be in the world of the day-to-day. “You keep me whole, son,” he confided after they had spent the morning fishing in the stream. His father was fit and handsome, with a square chin and sensitive smile. He always looked better in the outdoors, when color came into his pale face. Years before he became ill he'd been collaborating on a book in private with John Kincaid, a Wordsworth scholar in the department. While Keats believed that immortality could be sought in art, Wordsworth sought it in nature. His father was excited about their partnership, more than he'd been about any project in a long while. Though they argued heatedly at times, his close intellectual bond with Kincaid fueled his work and gave him renewed faith in it. Once when Edward returned from school he heard the two men speaking with raised voices behind the study door. After Kincaid left, his mother confronted him.

“What do the two of you do in there for hours? Don't you see enough of him at the university?”

His father retreated back inside his study, as he always did when she was critical. His mother returned to the kitchen where she'd been preparing dinner, with tears in her eyes.

“It's me she's disappointed in, son, not you,” he said to Edward later that night. Edward didn't know which was worse: to be ordinary like his mother, or to strive for the perfection that had taken his father away from her.

E
DWARD LOOKED OUT
the window. It was getting dark and the woods behind his yard vanished in blackness. He turned on the light in the study. The frenzied layers in the paintings disturbed him. In the gnarled trees in the foreground he made out a soft
etching of black. He stood up and moved closer. A pair of initials, J and K, was painted into a crook in the branches. He looked closely at the other paintings and discovered in each one the same initials obscured in the crooks and crannies of a branch.

The trunks in the closet held his father's private manuscripts and papers. After his death Edward found it too painful to read through them. He put off the Yale library's requests to purchase the papers, not yet willing to let them go. Edward pulled out one of the heavy trunks from the closet. It was coated with dust and its casing was brittle. He opened the latch. Inside were stacks of letters in rubber bands and sheaves of papers and manuscripts with smeared and fading type. He read through some letters. The paper had turned yellow and brittle, crumpling around the edges. The letters were from colleagues and students. He'd been a beloved teacher. He opened another manuscript box slightly dampened by mildew.
The Unrealized Self,
the last, unpublished book his father had been working on before he grew ill. He began to read.
Art is the window to the interior.

The first chapter opened with Blake, whose visionary narratives were idea-driven. Using his own mythological characters, Blake portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from a fallen state through art. In the second chapter he wrote about Wordsworth.
The Prelude,
the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self, was dedicated to his friend Coleridge. Edward's father had written that it was Wordsworth who proclaimed the self as a topic for art and literature. In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Wordsworth contemplated the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. As Edward read on, his
father's sentences became more long-winded and convoluted; he intuited his father struggling for coherence. He wrote about how the Romantic poets coming off the Age of Reason—the eighteenth-century poets believed it wasn't man's business to seek divine Truth—divine truth was accessible in God's creations—particularly nature—and that “chosen” people—poets (artists)—had the capability of discovering divine truth if they kept at it, were pure in their artistic pursuits of it, and believed in the possibilities of what their poetic search could yield. He wrote about the suffering that resulted from man's lack of self-expression and not being true to himself. Edward slid the manuscript back into its box. The work had become too insular. A note on Yale letterhead slipped out from the bottom of the manuscript.

       
Dear Harry,

       
This has to stop. Nothing good can come of it.

       
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

       
My heart is at your festival,

       
My head hath its coronal,

       
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.

       
Yours as ever, John

The lines of poetry in the letter were from Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality.” Was Kincaid speaking about their professional collaboration? Or was there something more between them? Edward scanned his bookshelves. Along with inheriting his paintings and papers, he had acquired his father's library, including his collection of first editions. He pulled off the shelf Wordsworth's
Lyrical Ballads,
a poetic collaboration with Coleridge. The two
poets were intimate friends. The book was a gift from Kincaid. Scrawled on the title page was an inscription:
Your comrade, lovingly, John.