An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  So many interpretations. Was he shouting at Lacey, the painting, or the taxi driver? “Don’t step on the walkway!” Was the concrete wet? But Saul ran toward them more sheepish than commanding, and they all stayed put.

  “I thought by having you bring the picture,” Saul said, panting, “that we were taking delivery of the picture in Washington. But it seems to be disputable that this might constitute taking delivery in New York.”

  Lacey looked at Saul, then at the taxi driver. He pulled his cap back and scratched his head. “Oh yeah, sales tax,” he said.

  “What?” said Lacey.

  “My wife sells jewelry. There’s always a sales tax issue.”

  Saul pointed at the driver with a silent “bingo.” “We’ve got to have it shipped to us from New York by a reputable carrier.”

  Lacey muttered, “I’m reputable.”

  “But unlicensed. We’ve got a questionable situation here. You’ve got to take it back. It’s a difference of almost ten thousand dollars,” said Saul.

  The statement hung in the air, until the taxi driver said, “You mean that box is worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

  Lacey turned to him. “Who are you, Rain Man?”

  Saul was balanced on his toes. “I’m so sorry, Lacey, we tried to turn you around, but we just learned it an hour ago. Here’s something for you”—he handed her a folded hundred-dollar bill—“and don’t let the painting touch the walkway.”

  “I’ll be a witness,” said the grinning taxi driver, implying there could be another tip due.

  “I can’t even invite you in,” said Saul. Then he turned to the half-opened door. “Estelle! Wave hello to Lacey!”

  Estelle poked her head out of an upstairs window. “Hello, Lacey. Saul’s insane!”

  Saul, standing away from them as though the state boundary line ran right down the middle of his sidewalk, pressed the driver. “Could you put it back in the taxi, please?”

  “I’m not touching it,” said the driver. “It could be an insurance nightmare.”

  “Well, I can’t touch it,” said Saul.

  “I got it in once; I can get it in again,” said Lacey, hefting it toward the still open cab door, as Saul stuck to his side of the imaginary line that separated him from a ten-thousand-dollar tax bill.

  The driver was now gliding the taxi around potholes and speed bumps and slowing the car with the gentle braking that he reserved for fares involving infants and the elderly. “Rats,” said Lacey. “I wanted to go to the museums, but now I’m stuck with Pricey.”

  “You can go,” the driver said.

  “What do I do with Pricey?”

  “Check it at the museum, in the cloakroom. There’s nothing but guards around there. Safe as a bank.”

  “Hell, I had it on a train. You’re the one who spooked me about how much it’s worth. Okay. Let’s go to the National Gallery.”

  The taxi arrived, and Lacey pulled her burden from the cab. She gave the driver a healthy tip, all to go on Sotheby’s expense tab. “Thank you so much, O kindly taxi driver.”

  “Adios, amigo. By the way, my name’s Truman,” he said. “What time you coming out?”

  “An hour?” she answered.

  Lacey went to the cloakroom, deposited the Avery, then passed through a security check so lax that she instinctively swung her head back to the cloakroom to see if the Avery was still there.

  She wound down the vast interior stairs of the National Gallery. The cavernous entrance had little art to be seen. Only a gigantic, though airy, Calder mobile, swaying from above, indicated that this was an art museum and not an intergalactic headquarters.

  With little interest in contemporary art, she headed underground to the west wing, where she speed-walked past neglected masterpieces in the near empty galleries of American art. There was a surprise around every corner: she had only seen John Singleton Copley’s 1778 painting Watson and the Shark in two-by-three-inch reproductions in books, and the picture, a dramatic tableau of a rowboat staffed with sailors, in waters turned hellish by a circling shark that has just bitten off the leg of a thirteen-year-old boy, stunned her with its monumental size and perverse beauty. Jaws, the beginning, she thought.

  Lacey later told me that while she was steaming past the pictures, she had a sudden, comic overview of herself in motion. She saw her head leaning forward as she entered a picture’s sight lines, her feet trailing. Then her head would slow down while her feet caught up and advanced, so her eyeballs could spend as much time with a picture as possible without retarding her forward motion. Her upper body remained slow and steady, with her feet a futurist blur below.

  Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley, 1778

  71.75 × 90.5 in.

  After twenty minutes in the downstairs picture gallery, Lacey found that her time at Sotheby’s had instilled in her a new way to experience a museum. In addition to her normal inquisitiveness about a work, who painted it and when, and a collegiate hangover necessitating a formulaic, internal monologue about what the painting meant—which always left her mind crackling with static—she now found she had added another task: she tried to estimate a painting’s worth. Lacey’s internal wiring had been altered by her work in Manhattan.

  Her acceleration in the west wing meant that she had time to do the same sprint in the east wing. Here, the giant modern pictures loomed over her. Even the Copley was small compared with the antic Jackson Pollock. At first, she didn’t catch the phallic silhouettes of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy, but on instinct her head turned back, confirming, “Oh yeah, a dick and balls.” A Rothko offered just two colors, more or less, but it made Lacey downshift a gear to take it in, and an Andy Warhol silk screen of a newspaper headline, which seemed so haphazard after the persnickety detail of the nineteenth-century flower pictures and desktop still lifes she had just seen, left her suspicious and not impressed.

  There was a special exhibition of works by Willem de Kooning, and she stopped in front of one showing a female figure as grotesque totem. In the 1950s, de Kooning had aggressively painted women, and in the 1970s, these pictures endured the wrath of feminism. They were regarded as angry, misogynistic depictions of the female as beast: once again, it was claimed, a male artist was on the attack, reducing women to animals.

  But Lacey, staring at de Kooning, taking in the roiling flesh and teeth, recognized herself. This painting was not an attack; this was an acknowledgment of her strength. de Kooning painted women not as horrific monster but as powerful goddess. Lacey felt this way about herself every day. Yes, she had a ghoul’s teeth; yes, she had seductive breasts, long, pink legs, and a ferocious sway. She knew she had sexual resources that remained sheathed. But one day, when she used them, she knew her true face would resemble de Kooning’s painted woman.

  She went down the stairs of the National Gallery, heading toward the coat check. There was no line, but there were three security guards talking into shoulder mikes and a smartly dressed woman in glasses, standing next to Lacey’s cardboard box, which had been leaned against the marble wall of the foyer. Lacey instantly read the situation. Her first thought was, Oh shit, and her second was, What fun. She then put on her toughest face, graveled her voice, and said, “I think I’m the one you’re lookin’ for.” She turned backward and put her wrists in handcuff position. So far, no one had changed expression, which meant that her comedy routine had bombed.

  Woman I, Willem de Kooning, 1950–1952 6 ft.

  3.875 × 58 in.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, turning back, “I’m with Sotheby’s and I’m delivering that picture. It’s a Milton Avery. Here’s my card.”

  The smartly dressed woman spoke: “Do you mind if we open it?”

  “Not at all.”

  Lacey felt a shiver at her fleeting thought that the Avery had been mysteriously replaced with the National Gallery’s Watteau and that she would be sent up the river, unable to explain it even to herself. But the guard sliced open the tape, revealing t
he still pristine picture, while the woman radioed to someone, giving them the date and title and size of the painting. After a moment, the woman said, “Not one of ours. I’m so sorry, Miss… Yeager. I’m sure you understand.”

  As a guard with paper tape sealed the cardboard back up, he turned to Lacey and said, “Nice Avery.”

  Lacey stepped into the street, and before she could raise her hand, Truman’s taxi sped into view. The window rolled down. “I waited for you… slow day.”

  “Okay, let’s go, Truman. My last tip includes this. The Hirshhorn, please.”

  Lacey did the same routine at the Hirshhorn. She almost left the Avery in the taxi because she now trusted that Truman was a good fellow and a working-class hero. But a preview unspooled in her head of how she would feel if she came out and there was no taxi and no Truman; so she hauled the picture inside and got an institutionally authorized claim check.

  In the Hirshhorn, she sped along with the same gallop as at the National Gallery, racing by masterpieces with her head swiveling. One picture, however, stuck her feet in cement. Painted in 1967, Ed Ruscha’s large canvas depicted the Los Angeles County Museum on fire. Devoid of people on the grounds, the museum was shown in cool tones and sharp outline, while flames blew out from behind the building. The picture was so unlike the slash-and-burn canvases of the abstract pictures she had just seen. Those pictures asked for an emotional response. This one asked for an intellectual response. Was this a tragic image or a surreal one? The horror going on inside was unrevealed and only imagined. And where were the people? Then, as she waited in front of the picture for a thought to congeal, Lacey’s mental gears cranked down, the questions stopped, and for a moment, her brain stopped churning and she just stared at it.

  Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, Ed Ruscha, 1968

  53.5 × 133.5 in.

  Lacey glanced at her watch as she headed toward the Hirshhorn’s coat check, worried that a kerfuffle over the Avery would slow down her schedule, which now demanded precision. But nothing happened, the picture was retrieved and Truman sped her to the depot for the long ride home.

  Lacey crawled into her apartment at ten p.m., still lugging the picture. Her tired body longed for a Scotch, which she poured over ice. She lay back on her bed. Light from the street lamps, diffused by summer leaves, gave her room movement. The idea of the Scotch hit her even before the alcohol did, so she was relaxed at just the taste. Her window was cracked open enough to let in the light summer breeze, and her eyes meandered around the dim room, moving slowly, high and low, from a vase of flowers, across her half kitchen, to a photograph, to a lamp. Her eyes drifted toward a closet door and the Avery that leaned against it. It’s here, she thought. Why not hang it?

  She unwrapped the Avery with care, more care, she felt, than was given it at the National Gallery, and hung it on the wall. She took a lamp off her chest of drawers and put it on a low stool in front of the Avery, so that light was thrown upward on the picture from below. Then she lay back again. Without looking, she reached out and her hand landed perfectly on the glass of Scotch.

  Would Leonardo’s Annunciation be as beautiful hanging crooked in a messy college dorm at a party school in Florida? No, not as beautiful as it is in the Uffizi, framed, lit, and protected as the prize it is, while two thousand years of history flow by in the Arno outside. Context matters, but in Lacey’s apartment, where nothing exquisite had ever been, where just the two of them looked back at each other, the Avery was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. This moment was a secret among the Avery, the Scotch, and Lacey, and she saw clearly something that had eluded her in her two years in the art business. In a few minutes of unexpected communion, she understood why people wanted to own these things.

  She rescanned the room. Where before she saw a photograph, a kitchen, a vase, she now added an adjective: she saw a student’s photograph, a student’s kitchen, a student’s vase. The painting was an adult object, by and for people with grown-up eyes. This apartment, these things, were instantly in Lacey’s past. They were on the way out, ready to be sold or boxed. The Avery had dipped her in an elixir. She wanted fine things, beautiful things, like the Avery. She wanted to grow up, no longer to live like a student. Lacey knew that what she needed was an amount of money that could support her rapidly evolving taste. This need repainted moral issues that were formerly black-and-white into a vague gray, and a dark idea that she had formed in her head as hypothesis now had to become actual.

  Lacey called me late that evening. “Oh Daniel. I need you to do me a favor,” she said. I agreed because her incomplete explanation made it seem like an adventuresome art world lark. I did not know that, if its nature were ever revealed, this favor would jeopardize my budding career as an art writer.

  PART

  II

  15.

  BY 1997, the art market, becalmed over the previous seven years, was beginning to catch wind. A day spent trekking from Sotheby’s to Christie’s with a lunch stop at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue was a collector’s version of the Grand Tour. Increased foot traffic at galleries and auction houses indicated a widening public interest. Prices were now reported in The New York Times, and even though I was somewhat acclimated to the art world while writing my fledgling reviews for ARTnews or Artforum, I was still surprised that no belligerent letters appeared in the paper condemning huge sums spent on art that could be better spent on children’s hospitals. The public seemed to accept these sudden escalations with either resignation or glee, I couldn’t tell which. I can’t imagine that art prices reported around the water cooler were ever responded to with a “That’s fantastic”—except the water cooler at the auction houses—and more than likely they were met with a dismissive sniff or complaint.

  In the spring of 1997, Lacey sat at her desk, which had not, as yet, a cubicle around it, and saw, through an open doorway to the executive office, a picture leaning on an upholstered easel. It was covered with dark green velour, weighted at the bottom by a brass rod. A hand lifted the velour to reveal a Van Gogh drawing so fine that the only improvement it could make would be to turn itself into a painting. It showed Van Gogh’s finest landscape subject, wheat fields being harvested by workers loading wheat into a hay wain. The velour, in place to keep sunlight off the drawing, was lifted only on occasions of aesthetic contemplation or for reasons of commerce. The person doing the lifting was Tanya Ross, and the person doing the viewing, Lacey later learned, was Barton Talley, whose cup was full with equal amounts of notoriety and respect.

  Barton Talley’s history was part glorious résumé and part rap sheet. He wore pale blue suits and expensive shoes, which were a sartorial trademark. He had a PhD in art history from Yale and had vaulted into fame and position with essays, art scholarship, and charm. After a decade in a curatorial position at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he had been let go for using his known and respected expertise to advise collectors on purchases and then receiving gifts of appreciation with dollar signs in front of them. Among the legacy trustees, he was still thought of as sullied.

  He then formed a gallery in New York City, Talley, with funding that seemed bottomless, and he specialized in Very Expensive Paintings. He was a rare entity in the art world: a dealer with the credentials of a scholar. Most dealers knew only their own area, and it seemed that dealers in contemporary art knew nothing that happened before 1965. But Talley knew it all, except for the very latest. His familiarity with the ways of the rich, learned during his malfeasant tenure at the Boston Museum, as well as his own financial ease, gave him the clout of equality with international collectors. He never pushed to close a sale, making him the chased rather than the chaser.

  Talley didn’t like the artificial light in the small display room, so he brought the Van Gogh out to the offices, where ambient sunlight would make any flaws in the drawing more visible. He hovered around Lacey’s desk, tilting it this way and that, looking for fading, looking for foxing. Lacey presumed he didn’t notice her, but when he s
aid, “A beautiful thing… a beautiful thing,” Lacey, at her desk, said, “I do my best.”

  Talley looked at her, gave her an approving smile for her chutzpah—though neither of them could claim ethnic rights to the word—and then angled the drawing so he could see it under the raking light. Without moving his eyes from the drawing, he said, “Is there a lot of interest in it?”

  Looking down at her desk, Lacey said, “There have been three or four people in to look at it, but let’s keep that between us friends.” Tanya Ross peered across the room at them from behind her doorway but sensed nothing unusual. They were like two spies looking at a sunset while they exchanged top-level information.

  That spring, in London, the drawing achieved an exhilarating fourteen million dollars, and the auction room froze for a few seconds of unusual silence after such a spectacular price, before ripping into applause reserved for Derby winners and sports matches. Reports of cheering in the auction room when a painting soared past its reasonable limit and into the unreasonable stratosphere sound like a crass symptom of our age, but auction applause dates back centuries. Auctions were, and still are, spectator sports, where the contestants are money. In the nineteenth century, pictures were wheeled out to hoots and clapping, like boxers entering the ring, and the spectators responded to escalating bids as if they were hard lefts and roundhouse rights.

  The Van Gogh represented one of a few stunning prices that had perked up the market in the last few years. Gossip and awe reverberated around Manhattan when rumors of fifty-million-dollar private sales began to circulate. Those overachieving paintings had great names attached to them: Picasso, Renoir, Degas. Prices were beginning to recall the glory days of the previous decade, and Lacey found herself rubbing elbows not only with these mighty names from the past, but with the well-funded dealers and collectors of the present. Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art divisions, however, were fully staffed and immutable. No one in this upturning market was going anywhere, and there was no nook that Lacey could be wedged into without popping someone else out from the other side.