The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  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.”

  T
acked 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

  THE 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.

  And then he felt, just as viscerally, that he shouldn’t have: that he had been right to tell Agnes—whom he cared for, who relied on his judgment and, in her own way, cared for him too. These were the values he held most sacred; this was what made him different—he hoped—from someone like Savan. With Savan now a partner, the dynamic and energy of the gallery had changed. Savan had tainted what the gallery had meant to him. He couldn’t let Savan bring down the quality of what he’d built. He’d have to walk away.

  Agnes’s photo took up half the cover page of the arts section. She was dressed in a white shirt and a man’s suit jacket, no doubt to distance herself from her femininity. She told him once that she did not want to paint subject matter a woman would paint because then she’d never be considered successful. He looked at the photo again. The affect, posed in front of the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looked calculated to elicit an impression.

  He continued reading the article. Agnes Murray was the favorite to win. When asked if she was surprised by the nomination, she said, “My art is a mirror of the viewer’s own projection. I’m very pleased that the judges saw themselves or their own experiences in my work.” He turned away from the paper and looked out the window and sipped his bitter scotch.

  He looked back to the computer and continued reading the article. Along with Agnes, a young performance artist called Hugo London was a contender for the prize. He remembered reading about one performance when he pulled a giant boulder with some kind of pulley and walked through Central Park, a modern-day Sisyphus. The Times quoted him as saying that he was a successor to the extraordinary performance art of Marina Abramović, known as the grandmother of performance art. “Although art-world insiders swear that the artwork takes precedence over its maker, it is really a double act. After all, artists are the people who have the authority to deem something as ‘art.’ They have all the energy, intention, discipline, and willpower that an inanimate canvas does not.” A third finalist was Maxwell Flower. His technique was to fill a dark room with rays of fluorescent light. The viewer was meant to be a participant in the work; when the viewer entered the gallery he or she was given a light saber. Edward had been dismissive. The fourth finalist was April Stillman, an abstract outsider artist, relatively new on the scene. Leonard worked with her. Edward smiled, happy for Leonard. She was the least known of the four and apparently the long shot. He poured himself another inch of scotch and sprawled on the sofa and fell asleep.

  HE AWOKE THE next morning stiff and groggy and went downstairs to make coffee. Holly and Annabel had already left. He’d overslept. If he still represented Agnes, the day would have been his. Gallery owners, dealers, collectors, and artists live for prizes. He couldn’t bear to see Savan taking credit for it and endure the high-fives and pats on the back that would be going around the gallery. He called his assistant and said he was working from home. His BlackBerry vibrated in his breast pocket. He looked at the caller ID.

  “Leonard. I know. Fucking unbelievable.”

  “Did you see who else is up for it? April Stillman.”

  “Congratulations. It’s the only thing good about today.”

  “I want her to win,” Leonard said.

  “Of course you do.”

  “Do you think she has a shot?”

  “A quarter of a chance.”

  “I don’t know. You saw who’s chairing the panel? Frederick Jackson. I’m sure Nate persuaded Frederick to put her up for the prize. If only to get Agnes off his back. She’s the favorite, my friend. Can you imagine what it must be like to be married to her these last few months after those reviews? I don’t know how he stays.”

  “She is beautiful,” Edward said, looking at her photo again. “I’ll give her that. And talented.”

  “That she’s a finalist is Nate’s doing,” Leonard insisted. “She needs this.”

  “I don’t know, Leonard.” He stopped and looked out the window. “Fisher has his own reputation to think about.”

  “Don’t be such a purist. This has nothing to do with making art. This has to do with who you know and who scratches your back.”

  “She’s still a damn good painter. We can’t take that away from her.”

  “Think about it. In her high-mindedness she thinks she’s done it on her own. She’d still be sitting up in that ivory tower if it weren’t for me. And you. I brought Aaron Moss to her studio. He was the first critic to write about her work in the Times. The first painting she sold was bought by a Guggenheim heir. You did a brilliant job with Immortality. The show you mounted knocked it out of the park. What goes around comes around. You’ll see.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where are you? Are those birds I hear?”

  “I’m still at home.”

  “Stop hibernating. Walk into the gallery like you own it. You need to get out there again. I have three new artists whose work I want you to see. And there’s April Stillman. I may be looking for a new home for her. You’re on our dance card.”

  “You’re an animal.”

  “So are you, my friend.”

  HE SLOWLY CLIMBED his study stairs. Leonard was right. There were other artists to consider. He logged into his computer and a mountain of e-mails lit up the screen. He couldn’t focus. His eyes were blurry and his head groggy from oversleeping. Holly never let him oversleep on a workday. She barely seemed to think of him now. Anxious, he rose and paced, unable to sit at his desk. His gaze landed on the thick, agonizing swirls of his father’s paintings and to the crook of the tree where embedded in a branch were the initials.

  He lifted one of them off the wall, showered, dressed, gathered his things into his briefcase, and got in the car. With the painting on the seat next to him, he
began to drive. Through the open window he inhaled the fresh air. It was unusual for him to be in Connecticut on a weekday, and as he wound through the small towns, he was surprised by the full and busy street life.

  He hadn’t been to Yale since he was a teenager visiting his father. He entered through the gates of the university and approached the gothic building where his father’s office once was. As a boy it reminded him of a castle. He remembered climbing the winding stairs to his father’s office and wondering as he saw students clustered in study groups in the lounge whether he would feel passionate enough about anything to want to dedicate his life to it. In a lecture hall, he sought out the original Tiffany stained-glass window, titled Education, that his father had once shown him. It showcased a panorama of allegorical figures signifying aspects of art, music, science, and religion. Looking at it as an adolescent had made him restless with want.

  His father’s office now belonged to Professor Margery Greer. He saw her plaque on the door. He continued down the dark hallway reading the plaques until he found Kincaid’s office. He adjusted the painting underneath his arm and knocked on the door. Through the slight opening he saw Kincaid leaning over a manuscript, his cluttered desk lit by a green lawyer’s lamp.

  Kincaid looked up and motioned for Edward to come in. When Edward was a boy, Kincaid had been tall and distinguished. Now his shoulders were painfully hunched and his face craggy. His gray hair was combed back from his forehead. He wore a tie and sweater underneath a tweed blazer. He had been strikingly handsome with eyes the color of turquoise. Now those eyes were rheumy and clouded. Kincaid peered up through his bifocals.

  “Professor Kincaid. It’s Edward Darby.”

  Kincaid came around his desk and reached out to shake Edward’s hand. His nails were yellow and pointed like talons. He patted Edward a little too forcefully on the back, as if he had lost sight of his own strength. He must be in his late seventies, Edward thought.

  “Of course it is. Sit down, dear boy. How’s your mother?” He offered Edward the wooden chair across from his desk.