The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  “With you it’s so different,” she said.

  He looked at the clock. It was five in the morning. He’d fallen asleep. He turned on his bedside lamp and looked at her asleep next to him. He viewed the room. Across from the bed was a small desk on which she had laid her accoutrements: a black Moleskine sketchbook and some drawing pencils, two books, a pot of tea, and a solitary cup. He thought of her alone in the room with her tea and her drawing pencils and pad. He imagined the two of them living together, both solitary figures sinking into their own inner reflections. He thought about what she’d said about him being different. He turned to her and she opened her eyes sleepily and he felt a sudden overpowering urge to escape. She was a dark pit he was falling into. He was deeply, completely in the thrall of her. He got out of the bed, found his clothes, and put them on while she watched. Like a fawn lying on her side, she was quiet and sullen, as if she, too, sensed his sudden desire to flee not from discontent or displeasure but from fear of where staying might take them.

  “You’re leaving?” she said.

  “I have to.”

  He explained he had a breakfast meeting with an important British dealer in just a few hours. The dealer represented an artist whose work he had been following. He tucked Julia underneath the covers and then sat down next to her. Her eye makeup had smeared and in the bedside light he could make out small imperfect lines fanning around her eyes and forehead.

  “I’m sorry. Should we not have? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “No. I wish you didn’t have to go.”

  “It was a wonderful evening.”

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said, sleepily.

  “I’m here.” He moved the hair from her face. “What did you mean before? When you said I was different?”

  “We have no history,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  He gazed at her and then they kissed and he was drawn back into her warmth, reluctant to break away.

  “After my meeting today I leave for Houston. When do you leave?”

  “Tonight.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m back in New York. In three days.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I don’t either,” he said, and they kissed again. And then he slipped out of her room like a thief. It was still dark outside when he hailed a cab.

  THE PHONE RANG in his hotel room. After he left Julia and returned to his hotel, he had fallen back to sleep. He was disoriented. For a minute he didn’t know if it was morning or night. He parted the curtains. Sunrise lightened the winter sky. He picked up the phone. It was May calling from New York. She apologized for calling so early but knew he was catching a flight later that day and would want to know immediately. She had just left a long dinner with Reynolds and waited up for a respectable hour to call him, not wanting to miss him before he left his hotel.

  “Sorry to have handled this without you. The news isn’t good. Agnes sent us a letter through Reynolds asking us to let her go.”

  “What? Why didn’t she send it to me?” He paused. “She’s gone over my head, then.”

  “He led me to believe you knew of her intentions, and yet you didn’t tell me?” May said. He pictured her face, powerful as a building.

  “I was handling it,” he said. “I was hoping she’d come around. I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.”

  “I told Reynolds under no circumstances are we letting Agnes leave the gallery—not with all we’ve advanced. So she’s staying.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief.

  “The bad news is that she’s taking a larger percentage of the profits.”

  “What?”

  “They renegotiated. Edward, you should have told me. I was blindsided at dinner and felt I had no other recourse. We couldn’t let her walk away. It isn’t just about Agnes. We have our other artists to think about. It won’t look good if she walks.”

  “How big of a cut?”

  “She wants sixty percent.”

  “That’s outrageous.”

  “And she wants Alex Savan.”

  “Savan? What are you talking about?”

  “We’ve talked about expanding. I made Savan an offer. It was the only way. Listen, Edward, it’s not going to change anything. You’re still the managing partner. Savan will answer to you.”

  “No,” he said, firmly. “She’s used us. She used me to get a larger cut. She agreed with me about the work. I have her e-mail. She’s scared shitless and she let Nate run her over.”

  Neither spoke for a second. “Her motives were unclear. I’ll give you that. You should have told me there was trouble with her. You brought her to the gallery. That’s all that matters. Savan’s a friend of Nate’s. She trusts him. Alex likes you. He’s thrilled he’ll get a chance to work with you. Put your sore feelings aside. This is for the gallery. Nothing is going to change. You’re the linchpin in all this. You have to see it this way. I trust you, Edward. This gallery would be nowhere without you. It’s your vision. You have to step back from your hurt feelings and do what’s best for the bottom line. Think about our other artists. And our employees. Look, it’s her work. In the end, she makes the decisions.”

  His mouth tasted like chalk. He’d drunk too much the night before and was crashing. He brought his hand to his face. What had he done? He was dizzy when he stood up. He sat back down to steady himself and focus. Maybe it was best for the gallery, but the idea still fought against him.

  “No,” he said again. “It’s about our integrity. It isn’t right.”

  “You’ll come to see it this way,” she said, and the line went dead, the receiver silent in his hand.

  2 CONNECTICUT

  FROM LONDON HE flew to Houston and met with the museum director, putting himself on autopilot to get the deal done. Because of the success of Agnes Murray he had the cachet to set extraordinary prices for the newer work he represented and collectors bought into it, sometimes not knowing or even caring if the work they were buying had historic significance but because he had succeeded in making them believe the work was important. Did this make him any different from Savan? He wasn’t sure. It still amazed him that people overpaid to be part of his world. He’d managed to make two half-million-dollar sales for a young abstract painter, Liam Wilson, and though he should have felt good about it, he didn’t. He gazed at the wedding band on his hand and twirled it around on his finger and it almost flew off. He pushed it back in place and looked out at the blackness in the window.

  Traveling through the hemisphere’s netherworld, he had time to reflect that his life had changed dramatically within a matter of days. He tried to close his eyes but he couldn’t sleep. He sipped his drink and raised the shade and peered again into the clouds. Thoughts flooded him. Agnes Murray was no longer his artist. Savan had joined the gallery. May had made an executive decision without consulting him. Gertrude cautioned him when he first joined her gallery never to get too attached, that the work finally always belonged to the artist. But he’d never been burned by an artist he represented before. Not getting too attached was easier said than done.

  His mind jumped from the gallery to his last night in London. He’d broken his trust with his wife by sleeping with another woman. He thought about Jimmy and the other men he knew who had affairs and wondered why he should be left out of the club, and for a few moments he made himself feel better about what he’d done. But it didn’t last very long.

  He glanced at a young woman across the aisle, lip-synching words, head bobbing from side to side, lost in the dream induced by the music coming from her earbuds. He thought about Julia. He wondered what had happened to him to be in the thrall of another woman when he truly loved his wife. He couldn’t blame Holly. Marriage was an amorphous brain with its own mysterious beliefs and myths, fueled and distorted by unconscious wishes and hopes. Perhaps because there were two different versions of the truth and the truth of these versions didn’t always coalesce. Perhaps because one’s spouse saw o
ne in a particular way when in fact the spouse did not see him or herself in that way at all, because the self is always evolving, or so one hopes. It baffled him. He wondered how Julia was feeling and how it would be for her to return home. He wondered too if their versions of each other, the narratives they had shared of their lives, were authentic, or whether they had inflated their stories for their own purposes. He knew, he was sure, that Julia loved her husband. To some, is betrayal another form of intimacy? He had read that somewhere.

  At Kennedy he got off the plane and sat in a seat by the gate. He dried his damp face with a paper towel he’d taken from the bathroom. He looked around at strangers peering into their laptops and thumbing their electronic devices, to the picture window watching the lights on the runway, and wished he could disappear. He wasn’t like Jimmy, capable of juggling two women. He knew himself better. Or at least he thought he did. He’d supposed, until now, that it was not possible to love two women at once. But maybe it was? And then he thought about Holly. He couldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t hurt her.

  Terrible thoughts about Savan usurping his position at the gallery filled him. It was May’s way to take care of matters quickly, but this time she hadn’t thought it through carefully enough. It was all falling apart. He began to panic again and his mind went to his father sitting in the darkness of their lonely house, his hands shaking from his meds.

  For a moment he thought about where he might go. He could go back to Europe or to South America. With his credit card he could pay for a flight to anywhere. He took out his wallet and fumbled for the card Julia had given him. He could ask her to meet him. He’d take her to Italy, to Rome and Florence, and they would look at art and dine in cafés and drink wine and eat exquisite meals and travel further into the dark corridors of desire. Reality intervened. He should call her and apologize. He hoped he hadn’t made a fool of himself. He wondered if she regretted it.

  He punched her number into his BlackBerry. She picked up on the first ring. She was in her studio.

  “Edward, is that you? I’m glad you called.”

  “I’m sorry for what I did. What we did. We got carried away. When I’m with you I can’t think straight.”

  “Please don’t apologize. It’s okay. I feel the same way.” She paused. “Where are you? You sound like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

  “I’m at the airport. I just flew back from Houston.”

  “So you’re not at home yet?”

  “No. I’ll be in touch soon.”

  “I’ll be in Vienna at the end of the week. When I get back?”

  “Yes, when you get back.”

  “What are we doing?” she said, just before they were about to hang up.

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out,” he said. The call was breaking up. “Julia?”

  He sat back down and watched another airplane land. A new flock of passengers came through the doorway and into the terminal with their sleek rollaways and carry-ons, urgent to get home. Slowly he began to calm down. He watched passengers deplane, including the flight attendants and pilots, until he was alone at the gate, the only passenger among the rows of empty seats.

  He reluctantly rose and saw the lit-up entryway to the duty-free shops where luxury items from Hermès, Cartier, Chanel, and Mont Blanc beckoned. He entered the small Cartier booth and looked at the watches and jewels. His eye caught hold of a sapphire ring and he thought about how it would look on Julia’s slender finger. He studied the ring and the depth and sparkle of the stone set in a platinum crown, and before he could think he took out his credit card and purchased it and for a moment felt some relief. He put the box in his jacket pocket and occasionally put his hand in his pocket to hold it. He heard Clara’s words. Why do you buy things you love and then not enjoy them?

  He followed the signs to ground transportation, where the car he had hired was waiting to take him to Westport, lost in the flow of other passengers rushing to get home. Once in the car, on the freeway, rushing past dilapidated buildings and ugly blocks of identical row houses, where he imagined day and night their inhabitants listened to the endless flow of traffic, he put his hand in his pocket and felt the box that held the ring. What was he thinking?

  HE THRUST OPEN the door to his home and sank into the house’s familiar air. Annabel brushed past.

  “Don’t I get a hug?” He put down his luggage in the hallway.

  “Oh, sorry, Daddy.” She reached down, already on the stairs, and clasped her hands around his shoulders and gave him a squeeze, and then, before he could smell the top of her hair, a smell he’d loved since she was a baby, quickly let go.

  “How was your trip?” she called back from the upstairs landing, not waiting for an answer.

  He found Holly in the kitchen and kissed her. “Good to be home,” he said. “It smells good in here.” Seeing her in their cheery kitchen—painted soft yellow because Holly said it was a happy color—where he’d left her, unease cut through him. Holly gave him her happy-to-see-him-and-resentful-that-he’d-been-gone smile and they hugged awkwardly. He looked at the open shelves where they displayed their decorative dishes; they’d begun to sag and had a sad, failed look to them.

  “How was the flight?”

  “Not bad. Is Bell having dinner with us?”

  “She’s going to a party. Dan Wasserman is picking her up. You remember Dan? They went to camp together.”

  “Is he driving already?”

  “He’s a senior. Yes, our daughter is hanging out with seniors.” Holly smiled.

  He’d hoped to begin his repentance by having a family dinner. He would talk to Holly. He’d tell her that Agnes had fired him and that May had sacrificed his integrity for the sake of the gallery. Holly always had sound advice. Maybe it was time for him to give up his position at the gallery and do something completely different. He could direct a foundation or a museum, or perhaps teach. Holly wanted him to stop traveling. She complained that he was away too much. She’d help him formulate a plan. It was wrong for him to mix art with commerce. Art, in essence, was priceless. Once seen, it distilled itself into a memory, an image in the mind. At that moment it seemed absurd that he had devoted his life to putting a price on something so intangible. Artists, the whole bunch of them, self-absorbed narcissists. He told himself to calm down.

  On the way upstairs he stopped to look through the mail on the counter in the foyer. Among the magazines was the new Vanity Fair. He looked at the cover and quickly scanned the bylines. Among them, “Nate Fisher and His Multi-Million Dollar Splash.” He flipped through the article and remembered how Nate had told Agnes not to do the profile. That motherfucker. He’d usurped her spot. He shook his head, disgusted.

  Upstairs he looked out the bay window in their bedroom. Dusk would fall in an hour. A rangy squirrel raced up the tree and back down. A deer lingered in the backyard near the bed of ruined pines and then, hearing the sound of a car racing down the block, fled for the woods. A police car blasted its siren chasing the speeding car. Everything seemed in a state of chaos. He willed himself to forget all of it, Agnes, Nate, Julia, and London, and fall into the gentle domesticity of evening. His eye caught the small orchid on the windowsill. He hadn’t noticed it before. Its leaves were rubbery and green, and from its crown had thrust a lone stem with purple flowers papery and thin. It moved him that Holly had cared for it so tenderly.

  AFTER HIS SHOWER he went down to the cellar for the wine and came into the kitchen. Annabel emerged from the cave of her bedroom in a loose top that slipped off one shoulder and a miniskirt. A pink streak trailed down her dirty-blonde hair. She was suddenly tall and willowy. She took his breath away. He remembered how fine and soft her blonde hair had been when she was a child. He remembered her chubby legs, her pink pajamas with horses and lassos. He remembered watching her in her bedroom with her toy horses and jumps and riders spread out on the rug and how she could spend hours dressing up the little doll in her riding clothes and putting the saddle on the little toy horse
. Now boys were on her mind. Her face was soft and pale with beautiful cheekbones like her mother’s.

  “Be careful,” he called, and then heard the door shut behind her and the screen door bang closed.

  Holly had made one of his favorite dinners, chicken cutlets with olives and almonds and tiny red potatoes. He opened the wine and they sat down together with their full and splendid plates. When their daughter was absent he and Holly sat awkwardly together, trying too hard for conversation. They were in love with her. He wondered in his darkest moment if their great love for her would somehow harm her; how could that love be trumped? They could not part with even the white gliding rocker that once was in her nursery. It had been reinstalled in their bedroom and sometimes Edward caught himself looking at it with longing and suffered the deep pangs a parent feels when his child is growing away from him. When Annabel left for college it would be terrible for them. He knew it and even though she was only fifteen, he was already trying to get used to the idea.

  “Annabel’s different,” Holly said at dinner. “She’s secretive. I don’t even know her anymore.”

  “She’s a teenager.” When Holly played bad cop, he played good cop. And vice versa.

  “She hasn’t been going to the stables after school.” Holly sipped her wine.

  “Where does she go?”

  “I don’t know where she goes.” Holly sighed.

  “She’s a teenager,” he repeated.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Exchanging their private worries and anxieties about Annabel had the effect of making him more anxious rather than less. “We have to let her go a little,” he asserted.

  “She’s lost interest in riding.” Holly added. “All that time and money.”

  “Did you expect it would get her somewhere?” He glanced at Annabel’s empty chair and then at Holly.

  “Just through high school. To keep her out of trouble.”