by STEVE MARTIN
The auction started off with a few alarming bumps. An uncharacteristic John Singer Sargent oil, decent enough, died a lonely death without a single bid. The failure was made even more visible because the auctioneer quickly escalated false bids against the reserve to give the illusion of furious bidding, only to promptly sputter out upon reaching the reserve, where he was forced to dwell in a few lingering seconds of ringing silence. It felt as though a shroud of death had fallen over the room. This was especially alarming as last year a Sargent had stunned the crowd, topping out at seven million dollars. Sargent was desirable, more desirable than Milton Avery, and Lacey felt a nervous chill as she acknowledged to herself that the sale could have a disappointing outcome. One would think that the seven-million-dollar figure would motivate at least one buyer to pop for a hundred grand, even for a not-so-great Sargent, if only for the signature, but the auctioneer had to muffle his obligatory announcement, “Passed,” by saying the word exactly as his gavel struck the lectern.
The Avery now seemed like an outside shot to reach even the reserve. There was a sign of life as a Whistler watercolor, expected to bring between sixty and eighty thousand, sparkled enough to double the estimate, and Lacey’s emotions began flip-flopping like one of Winslow Homer’s just-landed trout.
The carousel turned and the Avery swung into view. Now she worried about the frame. Sotheby’s tarted-up lighting reflected harshly off its expensive silver leaf. Thankfully, an art handler, who rode in with each picture, tilted it forward to diminish the glare, and the picture looked better than ever.
“Let’s start with thirty thousand…” Then the auctioneer quickly manufactured a frenzy with an ersatz bidding war: “Thirty-five, forty, forty-five thousand, fifty thousand…” One would have thought there were a hundred bidders in pursuit of this bashful Avery, but really there were none. Then there was that ugly pause. The next bid, fifty-five thousand, would mean that the picture had sold to an actual, existing buyer. A savvy collector might read this pause, if no bids followed, as an opportunity to buy the picture after the sale at a discount and would sit on his hands instead of bidding against the reserve. Lacey looked around to the few recruits, including Tanya Ross, who were manning the phones, hoping for movement. Tanya stood poised, listening, when her heel slipped off the dais, and she clumsily fumbled the phone, dropping it over her counter, where it swung by its cord. Tanya held up her hand to the auctioneer, as if asking for a time-out. This produced the kind of laugh one hears in a restaurant when a waiter drops a stack of plates. She pulled up the phone and stuck it to her ear. Then, raising her finger as if to make a point, Tanya said meekly, “Fifty-five.”
A paddle was raised in the center of the room: “Sixty.” Then, the pall broken, there were raises and reraises, taking the picture to eighty-five thousand, after which there was again, in the room, stillness. But this time the auctioneer didn’t show a detectable squirm. Rather, he turned his body fully toward the phone and waited patiently. “Ninety,” relayed Tanya. Then, turning his body back to the floor as if he were on a spindle, he stared into the face of the floor bidder, whom Lacey could not see. “Will you make it ninety-five?” The ninety-five came and went, the picture crossing a hundred, edging further from Tanya’s prediction and more toward Lacey’s. The auctioneer brought the price up and up and finally, when he felt there was no more, said, “Last chance… selling, then, at one hundred fifty thousand dollars.” Smash. He looked over at the phone. “Paddle number?”
And Tanya replied, “Five oh one.”
Lacey was elated and disappointed. She had won her self-imposed contest, one in which she had enrolled, without her knowledge, only one other contestant, but she had hoped the picture would land on her magic number, one hundred seventy thousand, making her victory more memorable.
After the sale, she blitzed back to the office, trying to make her absence less conspicuous, and she was already in place when Cherry came out of the elevator. Cherry saw Lacey, an armload of superfluous papers held against her stomach, and said, “Good one, Lacey, you hit it.” Lacey was thrilled that her guess had even been remembered, that her plan for professional notice had succeeded, and especially pleased that Tanya Ross had to witness her win.
“I was a bit over, but I thought it was a good picture,” said Lacey, feigning modesty.
“What do you mean?” said Cherry. “You hit it within a few thousand.”
“How?” said Lacey.
“The buyer’s premium, twelve percent added on,” said Cherry.
The addition of the buyer’s premium streaked in like a come-from-behind win at a horse race. Lacey felt like a prom queen, even if no one else in the office felt it was that much of a triumph, as numbers routinely bounced around the staff for weeks prior to an auction. But Lacey knew that she was firmly impressed on Cherry’s cortex and that above the name “Lacey,” whenever it slipped across her consciousness, was a shining gold star.
11.
LACEY’S BANK ACCOUNT—a parental send-off for her life in New York—had halved in the two years she had worked at Sotheby’s. New York was cruel to cash reserves, and her Sotheby’s check, even with the routine raises, failed to replenish the pot at the same rate of depletion. Lacey always had magic happen to her at moments of financial crisis, but New York now seemed to vex her. She didn’t believe in guardian angels, except for the guardian angel of her own self, and usually she laid the groundwork for financial salvation way in advance, and often in such unconscious ways that she didn’t even know she was doing it. Her independence kept her from friends offering money, but her cleverness kept it sputtering in. But the past few years were unusually fallow.
My own life was on a gentle gradient moving quietly upward. My contributions to art magazines—I wrote the capsule reviews, usually unsigned—gave me a life and got me out of my apartment, and I found myself with continuing work. There were also relationships, almost romantic, that seemed to lack ignition. My style is courtly, which fails to excite those who anticipate drama. I had to introduce myself to gallery owners a half dozen times before my face started to become familiar.
12.
LACEY HAD, in the course of her work, come to know the Upper East Side. After lunch at 3 Guys, a coffee shop gone crazy with a menu as expansive as a Nebraska plain, she made routine stops at various nineteenth-century galleries along Madison Avenue. Hirschl & Adler, an elegantly staid establishment on 70th Street, held sway in the world of American paintings; they had a knack for polishing and framing a picture so it glowed, and they knew the location of just about every American picture of quality. Next, on 57th Street, was Kennedy Galleries, which had hoarded enough masterpieces to keep it active in the American market but was being sapped of its pictures through the attrition of time. All great pictures flow toward museums. They are plucked off the market by hungry institutions snaring them one by one as the decades march forward. (There are dozens of masterpieces in high apartments along Fifth Avenue, in sight of the Met, longing to make the leap into its comforting arms.)
Lacey had made herself known to the dealers, inquiring about prices and even occasionally helping them out by researching a provenance question about a picture that had passed through Sotheby’s, and her name started to come up irregularly when I traveled above 57th Street.
Mug, Pipe and Book, John Frederick Peto, circa 1880
Size unknown.
On one of these afternoons, as summer approached and also the end of the art season—leaving the galleries’ air-conditioning blazing and floors unpopulated—she wandered into the Kenneth Lux Gallery, which specialized in more moderately priced American paintings. On the wall was a small picture by John Peto. Peto was a nineteenth-century still life painter who presented books, pipes, and mugs arrayed on a tabletop. The still lifes were rendered in dark greens and browns, the books ragged at the edges, close-ups of a tenement dweller’s humble routine. Peto was forgotten until the early 1950s, when a scholar, Alfred Frankenstein, noticed that the most popular of
the nineteenth-century still life painters, W. M. Harnett, whose pictures were quite valuable, appeared to have two distinct styles. One was photographic; every object in those pictures was vivid and defined. The other was looser; the edges of the books and tabletop objects seemed to evaporate and blend softly into the surrounding air. Frankenstein discovered that the second version of Harnett’s work was actually by Peto. Fakers, wanting to cash in on the more valuable Harnett, erased poor Peto’s signature on any of his pictures they could find and added crude monograms of Harnett. When the decades-old fraud was revealed, Peto’s prices shot up, nearly matching Harnett’s.
Herald, William Michael Harnett, circa 1878
Size unknown.
Lacey, trying to determine a price for a Peto that was coming up at Sotheby’s, asked Ken Lux what the cost of the small picture was. “Thirty-five thousand dollars,” he said. Lacey thought the picture was fine and asked for a photo for comparison to Sotheby’s picture. “Sure,” he said, and gave her a small transparency. Then, continuing her walk, Lacey went around the corner to Hirschl & Adler, where, coincidentally, another small, comparable Peto was hanging. She inquired about the price. “Sixty-five thousand,” was the reply. Lacey, stuffed from a deli sandwich she had devoured at 3 Guys, hiccuped. The two pictures were so close in subject matter, they could be a pair.
“Oh,” she said, and she walked outside and scraped Ken Lux’s label from the transparency. Lacey had heard that art dealers don’t communicate with one another, trying to keep their offerings private so rival dealers can’t bad-mouth them. This would be a test.
She walked back into H & A, transparency in hand. “Is there someone I could talk to about a Peto I have for sale?”
“Certainly.” The secretary asked her name, then buzzed upstairs. “You can go on up to the third floor.” And she pointed to an elevator just big enough for two.
She was greeted by Stuart Feld, the powerhouse American dealer with a critical eye for pictures that could make a boastful collector wither. Feld not only sold nineteenth-century pictures, he felt nineteenth century. He looked perfectly suited—his suit was perfect—for sitting in his favored neoclassical American furniture. She pulled the photo from her purse. Feld held it up to a light box.
“How big is it?” he asked.
“Eight by twelve inches,” she said.
Silence was his response until, “Where is it?” he asked.
Lacey’s first real dealing in the art world incorporated tiny lies into its construct. “It’s at another dealer’s, but he’s deliberating. The owner is looking for the money now.” It was the perfect response. There was enough truth in the statement for it to be convincing, and it inadvertently sparked Feld’s competitive spirit.
“We don’t make offers,” said Feld. “Tell us what you want.”
Lacey calculated the asking price on Feld’s Peto, discounting it appropriately.
“Forty thousand,” she said.
“That’s a bit rich, but perhaps, providing it’s in good shape,” he said.
Lacey went around the corner to Ken Lux but could only get him down to thirty-three thousand. Still, seven thousand dollars was not bad for a walk around the corner. Ken was a dealer who began in the 1960s, when pictures were hard to sell and were easily let out of the gallery to hang in a collector’s house for a few days’ trial or even shipped out of state with only a promise by phone to secure the painting. The deals were conducted on handshakes alone and often without even that. It wasn’t until the prices started jumping in the mid-1980s—and a few dealers went to jail for selling the same picture twice—that paperwork became necessary. Ken knew Lacey well enough from the floor at Sotheby’s, and relying on old-fashioned instinct, he let the picture out of the gallery with just a one-page contract and a promise to pay in two weeks. (Once he had put a painting out for approval to a motorcycle gang, who for some reason wanted a picture of bears frolicking in human clothes. He got paid the next day, in cash pulled in wads from the gang’s pockets.)
With the picture under her arm, she rounded the corner once again to H & A, got a check, and pocketed seven grand. Lacey hadn’t really lied, she had only been crafty, but she had tasted honey in the art market, and she momentarily felt smarter than Stuart Feld, Ken Lux, and the rest of the dealers who were burrowed in the brownstones stippling Madison Avenue.
13.
THE NATHANSONS had called Sotheby’s—yes, they had bought the Avery. Could it be delivered to D.C. today? It would be an object of conversation at their dressy dinner party tonight. Was there a walker who could escort the picture and deliver it? It’s only a four-hour train ride. Sometimes the lowliest employees get the best jobs, and Lacey was on a train by ten a.m., with the Avery wrapped in cardboard, bound with a splintery sisal string affixed to a wooden handle, and fully insured. This seemed like a snow day to Lacey, although there was no snow in sight for six months.
The wide train windows looked onto verdant pastures, soot-smudged buildings, and shuttered storefronts like a rapidly unscrolling panorama as the train whizzed past them. Her wrinkle-proof dress clung statically to her legs, and each move of her arm pulled it this way or that above a knee, which was noted by a slouching youth facing backward and adjacent to her.
Lacey had picked D.C. highlights from her mental guidebook of sights to see. The National Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum had moved up the wish list every time they were cited in illustrations as being the home of her favorite paintings. All she had to do was crib some time from the Nathansons to devote to holiday sightseeing in D.C.
The Avery, stowed overhead in the steel-pipe luggage rack, was projecting out just enough to thwack a man on the forehead. Lacey’s rifle response, said before she even turned her head—“You can sue me, but I’ve got nothing”—charmed the man enough that he said, “Is this seat taken?”
“Sit down, father figure.”
He was older, professorial. Wearing a suit and tie and crowned with a muss of gray hair. He muttered his name, but Lacey didn’t catch it.
“Who’s the artist who clobbered me?”
“Milton Avery,” she said.
“Milton Avery? That’s a big name for such a slow train. Shouldn’t he be on the express?”
“I would have preferred it. I don’t think the painting cares,” Lacey said.
I should tell you now about Lacey and strangers. She loved codgers and coots, truck drivers and working folk, any sort of type that she wasn’t familiar with. She would engage them in bars and parks, focusing on their accents and slang, probing them for stories, and the slightest accomplishments, including whittling, elevated them to heroes. The man next to her didn’t qualify as a folk hero, he was too well dressed for that, but Lacey liked the opportunity for repartee and felt she could keep pace with anybody.
“How do you know about Milton Avery?”
“I try to be a gentleman of taste, even when it comes to getting clocked in the head.” He glanced up and down, taking her in. “What do you do?” he said.
“What do you do?” she said.
“What do you do?” he said.
“Okay. You outmaneuvered me. I work at Sotheby’s and I’m delivering a painting to Washington.”
“Oh, Sotheby’s. Then perhaps you can answer a question I’ve been mulling over. Or maybe you’re too young.”
“Just give me the question.”
“How is it that rich people know about good paintings?” he said.
Lacey said nothing but implied that he should continue.
“Well, think about it. How do they have the eye for it? Why is a five-million-dollar picture always a Velásquez or some other fancy name, and not a Bernard Buffet?”
“Maybe you just explained it to yourself,” said Lacey.
“How?”
“You said ‘fancy name.’ Maybe they’re just buying fancy names.”
“But then a lousy Velásquez would bring as much as a good one. They actually seem to know which one is better. How does
a steel magnate or a car dealer or oil baron learn what scholars take years to learn?”
“I’m going to need some train wine,” she said.
“I’ll get it,” he volunteered, loosening his tie. Minutes later, he reappeared holding two plastic cups that didn’t bother to imitate wineglasses. Lacey took a sip, “Acheson, Topeka, 1994.”
After he had settled in, now using his briefcase as a table, he relaxed deep into his seat’s leatherette cushion.
“I see it this way. Paintings,” he said, “are Darwinian. They drift toward money for the same reason that toads drifted toward stereoscopic vision. Survival. If the masterpieces weren’t coveted, they would rot in basements and garbage heaps. So they make themselves necessary.”
She laughed and stared at him with a pixie face. “I must be drunk, because I think I understood you,” she said, and cranked her body sideways to better see his pleased response.
The noontime wine wore off just as the train pulled into the station. The gentleman stood, saying, “Lacey, have a great day. You shortened the trip for me.”
Lacey, responding with warmth, said, “You too; you have a great trip, too.”
Lacey never knew the man’s name until a month later when she saw his photo on the inside of the book’s dust jacket. It was John Updike.
14.
LACEY ANGLED THE PICTURE into the backseat of a taxi, its corner sticking into her knees because of the drivetrain hump on the floor. She braced it with her palm for self-protection as well as for its own good as the taxi bounced and rattled from one stoplight to the next. The taxi pulled up to a Georgian brownstone with gardens neat and trimmed and a crisp white door with a brass knocker. On the street were laborers unloading party chairs and caravanning them into a side door. She got out of the taxi, and the driver, a vociferous cabbie with a resonant voice who had entertained her by singing the songs of John Lee Hooker, pulled the picture from the backseat. The white door of the brownstone swung open with a faint jingle-bell tinkle, and Saul Nathanson waved with full panic, shouting, “Don’t come up the steps!”