The Prize (34 page)

He looked at the letter from Kincaid again. It was dated a few months before his father was hospitalized. He returned the papers to the trunk, closed its latch, and pushed it back into the closet, thrusting the weight of his body against the trunk to move it. He looked out the window; it was completely black. Hours had passed.

Not wanting to think about it anymore, he retreated downstairs to find his wife and daughter in the den curled up on the couch watching a movie, their empty plates from dinner spread on the coffee table.

“Why didn't you call me to come down?”

“I did, Daddy. You didn't answer,” Annabel said.

“We figured you were working and didn't want to disturb you,” Holly added, barely raising her eyes to look at him. “We left a plate for you in the kitchen.”

He wandered into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of wine, heated the plate of chicken, rice, and broccoli in the microwave, ate it quickly standing up by the kitchen window, and then wandered back into the den. He looked at the sheer curtain they had hung years ago to frame the window. It was slowly unraveling from its rod. He looked at Holly and Annabel absorbed in the drama on the television, unaware he was in the room. He walked through the dining room and into the living room, examining the empty wooden table shining with wax and the stiff-backed chairs, and then climbed back upstairs to the third floor. He passed the rest of the evening looking at his father's paintings and then out at the cluster of trees lit freakishly by the moon.

14 NEW YORK

T
HE RAIN STOPPED
. Reflections dissolved in the windows of the train. He climbed up from the depths of the damp Spring Street subway into the brightness of the afternoon. Bundles of pink peonies shimmered in buckets under the awning of a Korean market. He recalled that peonies made her happy and picked a bouquet and let the clerk roll it in paper.

Across the street from her building, anchored between Prince and Broadway, construction workers tore down an older structure. The crane screeched, a grating sound like chalk on a board.

Julia took his coat and led him into an airy space with creaky floors and a tin ceiling. She smelled the flowers. He took in her tender throat, warm bright eyes, and expressive hands as she arranged the peonies in a vase. He felt already as he looked at her that he was imprinting her image in memory.

He examined the studio. Coils of wire and stretched canvases were piled in a corner. Chips and wood shavings and a few oily rags collected on the floor. The room smelled of turpentine. Wood-carving tools were assembled on a butcher block. On another table, paint tubes, palette, brushes and palette knives, turpentine, and jars of varnish and oil. The cement floor was painted gray, chipped and spattered with paint.

On another table she displayed her figures made of marble and wood. The sculptures were in the shapes of an infant's curled body, each in a slightly different pose. The spare forms were sanded and shellacked. In their Zen-like simplicity they emanated an ethereal glow. She said the inspiration came from that temple in Tokyo dedicated to infants lost through miscarriage or stillbirth she had told him about when she came back from Tokyo. She led him to the back wall of the studio to show him some new paintings. She'd begun them when she returned from Japan.

One painting depicted a woman alone on a bench in a temple courtyard, her gaze impenetrable. In another, a naked pregnant woman draped only in a blanket appeared at the forefront of the canvas, her abdomen translucent, and inside her the curved body of a baby. In another painting impressions of mother and baby were drawn, erased, and superimposed to make shadings and shadowing so that it was difficult to see where one shape began and another ended.

She opened a large sketchbook and showed him the earlier stages of the project. At the temple in Japan worshipers pay a fee to adopt a figurine and inscribe their names on it. They sometimes come weekly or daily. The statuettes represent their own lost baby. Some dress up the figures like newborns, with bibs and hand-knit sweaters and booties and hats.

“A few weeks after our baby died I was on the bus and I still looked pregnant and I talked to the woman next to me about my baby as if she were still alive,” she said. “I wasn't myself. I think I went a little mad.”

“They're beautiful.”

He turned from the sketches to study her. She brought a small lock of hair close to her face and twirled it around her finger. With
his gaze he traced the river of veins running up the underside of her arm. In her studio she struck him as more viscerally real, a woman with a husband and a child they had lost, a life separate from his. He wondered about her husband and what more about her he didn't know.

They sat down at the end of a velvet sofa. Above them was a wall of lights. Once seated, she too observed him carefully. She gently rested her hand on his arm.

“How are you?”

“Not great.” He shifted uncomfortably.

“How are things at the gallery?”

“Agnes's show has taken a toll. I've given it a lot of thought. I think she was afraid. Of going back into the studio and finding her way through it.”

“Maybe it was Nate that put her up to it.”

“Leonard thinks the same. He said that when he represented Agnes, Nate was driving every deal, constantly pressing to get more money. And shortly after May closed the new deal, he read in the papers that they bought a huge warehouse in Bushwick for Nate to start production. He's hiring a fleet of new assistants.”

“That says it all. It must have cost them a fortune. She's allowed commerce into the studio. Or Nate. Either one won't work for her,” Julia concluded.

“You make her sound calculating. I never saw her that way. Or maybe I didn't want to.”

“There's another way of looking at it. Maybe Nate was sabotaging her. You made Agnes successful. The way you got the critics to notice and the right collectors to be interested. At some level, maybe not even conscious, Nate knows that.”

“So what are you saying? That Nate didn't want the show to be a success?”

“Maybe. His ego is huge. I know something about this.”

“Frederick?”

She nodded. “It's complicated,” she said.

“All will be unveiled shortly. If she wins the Tanning Prize everything will change.”

He picked up one of her stone pieces and examined it. “How do you remain untouched?”

She wasn't sure if she was, she said. What mattered to her was the work. One of her mentors lived for years in Westbeth. To him, the idea that art should make someone wealthy was obscene. Making art was a reaction against consumerism. There are the artists who always think someone else can do more for them. They leave one gallery to go to a better-known one. Or pin one gallery up against the other to squeeze out more money. Or their spouses support their art and they drift into feelings of unworthiness. “I'd rather make art and hope that it will be recognized and that I'll be paid market value. Art can't be a substitute for living. At least for me it can't,” she said.

“It is for Agnes.”

“Maybe. But she'll never be happy if she's looking for someone to place a value on her work. The prize is the creation. It's all that matters.”

She thought for a moment more. “You're not powerless,” she said. “You could forget the gallery and let it all go.”

Everything he had he'd invested in the gallery. He crossed and uncrossed his legs uncomfortably. “It isn't that. No, that's not what I want.”

He was silent for a moment and then gazed back at her. “The painful part is that I still care.”

“I know you do. That's because you're decent.”

She touched his arm gently and he felt a pleasant sensation travel through his body. It was quiet. No one in the studio, no one but the two of them.

“I'm not sure the way I feel about you makes me decent,” he finally said. “I don't like myself very much right now.”

“What are you saying?”

He looked at her pale throat and grave eyes. “I don't think we should be doing this anymore. Not because I don't want to. We're married. We'll destroy each other.”

Darkness crossed her face. She was quiet for a moment, pondering what he'd said, and then, more subdued, she raised her head and spoke. “Since we lost the baby I've been dead. You brought me back. I don't understand how it all happened.”

“I don't either.”

She'd thought she was through with all of it—the wish for connection and intimacy. She thought she had that with Frederick and it was a disaster. With Roy it was less complicated. Easier. It was why they got married. She wanted to get on with it—to get on with life.

“I don't want this.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “This isn't what I want.”

The last thing he wanted was to hurt her, he said.

She released her hand and brushed away a swath of hair that had fallen over her face, and her eyes welled again. “I know,” she said.

He pulled her close and she pressed her face into his shoulder and held him tightly. All was quiet, like being in a snow-filled forest
of pine trees when dusk descends and you don't mind that you've lost your way. She lifted her face to him.

“Roy's not like you. He's guarded. He has to be. It's the way he functions. Sometimes when I look at him I see what we lost in his eyes and what I'm unable to give him. It's incredibly painful.”

“I don't like when you talk about him. I'm sorry. I can't hear his name. I know it's selfish.”

“Why?”

“Because then he's imprinted in my brain.”

From the window a construction vehicle keened back and forth until the blaring sound slowly blurred into an echo. “They're tearing down the building across the street. The noise is driving me crazy. It's like they're taking part of history away.”

She stood up and looked out the window. “My view has changed,” she said, overcome by the realization. The sun shifted and the room darkened. He looked at his watch. Hours had passed. It was nearly four. He observed her work mounted on the walls and propped on her worktable and she caught him looking and she said, “I'm not interested in artifice anymore. It's fake. I want the work, at least now, to mirror life. Not to mock it or to be in opposition to it.”

He smiled. It was what he liked about her most, her lack of artifice. You couldn't separate the work from the individual who made it. They were one and the same.

“So you approve?”

“Yes, I approve,” he laughed. He stood up and reached for his jacket. Suddenly it was cold in the room—unbearably so.

“Please don't go.” She reached for his arm. “Not yet.”

Tacked on the wall above a small wooden desk were photographs and a typed copy of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” He glanced at one of the sculptures of a baby curled in its stone womb and then at the paintings.

“You've immortalized what you lost, you know,” he said. He looked again at her painting on the studio wall and studied it. He noticed a black form at the edge of the canvas. “It's almost like a silhouette,” he added.

“He's watching her but he can't help her. It's the nature of grief, isn't it?”

He wondered, thinking about Julia and himself, but also his father, whether in its suffering longing brings us closer to truth. And then, just as he thought it, he dismissed it. What difference did it make? No one wants to suffer.

“I don't want you to go,” she said.

“You'll be glad when I'm gone. You love Roy. He's a good man.” His throat closed up. “What will I do without you,” he said, suddenly bereft. He put on his jacket and then kissed her cheek quickly before departing.

Once outside, debris hit the pavement. The sound vibrated through the ground underneath him, across the street from her studio. The wrecking ball hurled against the building. He turned to look. Glass smashed. Part of a wall crumbled. He looked up at the window of her studio and in the pinking ash saw her figure behind the curtain, her hand cupped against the sash, and felt another tremor in the seam of where the building once stood.

15 CONNECTICUT

T
HE FINALISTS FOR
the Tanning Prize were to be announced, as they were every year, in the morning paper on June 1st and posted online before that, at midnight. Against his better judgment he logged onto the
Times
website before bed and read the post. Agnes Murray was one of four finalists. Though he'd expected it, he felt as if he were swimming away from himself.

Winning the prize would reconfirm, after a swath of lukewarm reviews, her status in the art world. Were she to win, it would not only ensure her own future but it would elevate Edward's as well, were he still her gallerist. He found himself wondering again whether his instincts had been wrong. Like many artists at her level, their egos inflated by praise, fame, and the sudden escalation of their work's monetary value, she might not have wanted a realistic appraisal of the work. He should have lied; he felt it in his gut.