An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  Cherry Finch liked Lacey, which also inhibited her transfer from American to Modern Art. Tanya Ross, Lacey’s slight superior, did not like her. She perceived that Lacey’s genie bottle of charm was uncorked when the Sotheby’s elite were on parade and recorked after they passed by. Although she saw this habit as good business sense rather than manipulative evil, Tanya correctly understood that she was the next person up the ladder whom Lacey could displace. So Tanya was attentive when Lacey was called into Cherry’s office, and she watched Lacey cross the room, the door closing behind her.

  “Do you know who Rockwell Kent is?” asked Cherry.

  “Somewhat,” said Lacey. “Illustrated Moby-Dick, right? Painter too.”

  “Painter, mainly,” replied Cherry. “Not one of the top Americans, but rare. Plus, he had ties to Robert Henri, and the Canadians, Lawren Harris, Group of Seven. Landscape painter, mostly. Greenland was his big subject. Icy fjords with Eskimo dogs in tiny perspective standing by their masters. During his lifetime everyone admired them but nobody bought them. Communist sympathizer, ‘man for the people’ type. He ended up owning most of his own major works. Then in the fifties, at the worst time for a citizen to be sympathetic to Russia, he snubbed America and donated most of his work to ‘the Russian people.’ What already looked bad became actually bad.

  “Now forty years have gone by and nobody remembers his Communist bent, and people who want a Rockwell Kent of size can’t get one, and there are about eighty large paintings sitting in Russia, and Russia couldn’t care less.”

  Cherry shuffled some papers, as though she were waiting for Lacey to figure it all out. Finally, Lacey said the only thing she could think of:

  “What are they worth?”

  November in Greenland, Rockwell Kent, 1932

  34.25 × 44.5 in.

  “A top, top Kent would bring about four hundred to six hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Times eighty,” said Lacey.

  “Not really,” said Cherry, “because you couldn’t put them on the market all at once, and some are better than others. But placing a few pictures in conspicuous museums, and releasing one or two a year onto the market could be a nice annuity for someone.”

  Lacey wondered for whom. “But you can’t get them out of Russia?”

  “That’s what we’re going to try and find out. Could you meet Barton Talley at his gallery on Monday, around eleven a.m.?”

  The weekend was a long one for Lacey. She wondered what possible involvement she would have in the Rockwell Kent endeavor, and she was excited because the request indicated career movement—and not just stolid up-the-ladder movement, either, but a skip-step that put her near the center of the action. At parties, Lacey’s fearlessness always guided her to the top person in the room, and her cleverness made the top person in the room believe that he had guided himself to her. But the Sotheby’s feeler seemed to come from nowhere, maybe even merit. She figured out that Talley had called Cherry, and Cherry had recommended her for something. What, she did not know.

  16.

  LACEY NOTED THAT days moved faster when nightlife was involved, so she planned to meet up with Angela and Sharon in Chelsea for drinks. Art galleries populated the area, but Lacey didn’t normally frequent them. She was East Side, and the art she represented was understood; Chelsea was West Side, and the art it represented was misunderstood. She had been meaning to go but never did, as her travel in Manhattan was vertical, not horizontal.

  Lacey’s new dress was, as she described it to me, “schoolgirl with possibilities.” She knew that the conservative quality of the outfit set her apart from the other females who stuffed themselves into jeans and four-inch heels on Saturday night and then, after two too many drinks, bellowed in the bar with resonant horse laughs. Her rule for weekend dressing was excess during the day and sophistication at night. After pulling tight her wide patent-leather belt and leaning over and shaking her hair into a perfect mess, after hurriedly sticking blue Post-it notes on furniture in her apartment that she meant to get rid of, she taxied sideways across town to catch a few galleries on their last gala Saturday before the onset of summer.

  The confidence that she wore so comfortably on her home turf was less present on the new shores of West 25th Street. She had touched down like an immigrant and hadn’t even planned a route. For a moment, in the midst of an active street crowd that didn’t need her, she experienced a rare feeling: invisibility. She passed active galleries with wide windows and unmarked entrances, with modest signage announcing artists she had never heard of. She stood on the street and looked down at dozens of galleries from which new art was mined and then trucked into Manhattan residences.

  By the time she got to the end of the street, after quick ins and outs, shouldering through crowds for partial glimpses of this and that, she had a movie montage in her head of artworks spinning in an aesthetic vertigo. These objects were not old paintings bound in gold frames like their uptown counterparts; these were free-growing sprigs of wild grass, curving around corners and hanging from ceilings. They were lying on floors, making noise, glittering with mirrors and alien parts, stuck in the walls like spears, and looking at you with human eyes. There were good old college tries mixed in with older artists on the edge. There were blatant messages hanging opposite indecipherable jabberwocky. There was kid’s stuff, crass stuff, smart stuff, and porn stuff. There were labor-intensive works that sold for two thousand dollars and flimsy slap-ups that cost thirty thousand. And taking it all in were the muscled, the pretty, the pretty strange, and the thoughtful. Lacey felt like a Martian lander, scooping up dirt samples and having no luck analyzing it. As exciting as the carnival was, the art she saw left her unmoved. It was not comparable to the Picassos and others she navigated around every day, but her addiction to energy kept her pushing on, snaking between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, down to 20th Street and beyond, until the mood gave way to mundane galleries presenting new art made in the old way.

  Lacey met Angela and Sharon at Cointreau, where they sat at the hundred-decibel bar for thirty minutes, until they were shown to a table. Of the three of them, Lacey was the easiest to pick up, Sharon was unlikely, and Angela was impossible. This rule also coincided with their physical appeal, with Lacey at the top, though it was Sharon who was often pointing Lacey toward mischief, like a dare, because she knew Lacey was often up to it. Angela saw intrusions suspiciously and couldn’t open up to lengthy chats with strangers at the table. But Lacey was also loyal to girls’ night out and never flew away before the evening was officially over. If Lacey met a man she enjoyed, it was she who was the sole determiner of the sexual possibilities, and if emotions were invested, they were his and not hers.

  The three of them, well dressed but a mismatched trio of varying styles, made outsiders wonder at the nature of their dinner. Three women who couldn’t get dates? Impossible. Each was appealing in her own way. Lesbians? Too easy a guess, the fantasy of frat boys, who were not to be found in the pricey restaurant. The way they talked in animation, leaning forward with palms on the table, stifling giggles that led to champagne hiccups, said clearly that they were having a good time, hadn’t seen one another in a while, and were quite sufficient on their own.

  In the room was a noted television actor, Stirling Quince, who was forming a collection and hosting fund-raisers. He was in rare company: Larry Gagosian, the powerful art dealer with growing influence reaching to Europe and Los Angeles, whose eye for pictures made him competitive with museums of the world; Roy Lichtenstein, the most congenial of the new old masters, anointed at a time when consensus took twenty years rather than months to point its finger at genius; his wife, Dorothy, the most likable of all the artists’ spouses. At the actor’s side was Blanca, a Czech model whose body seemed to be assembled from schoolboys’ dream bits.

  Neither Angela, Sharon, nor Lacey knew who anyone was by sight, except the actor. Yes, he was handsome. Yes, he was smart. Such a man, Angela and Sharon agreed, but Lacey balked.

/>   “A man? He wakes up every morning and goes into makeup.”

  Angela caught the conversational trend: “And holds a pretend gun.”

  “And shows his bare ass on TV,” Sharon added as she slapped the table a bit too hard.

  “His girlfriend is supposed to be smart,” said Angela.

  “Smart?” said Lacey. “She’s supposed to be smart? She poses.”

  When the check came, Lacey reached for it. “No!” said Angela.

  “I’ve got it,” said Lacey.

  This was not a cheap bill. The routine was that it would be split, as none of them could easily afford to treat except at the cheapest of restaurants. The ease and snap with which she picked up the check had a second-nature quality that said Lacey was not extending herself uncomfortably. Both Angela and Sharon thought this was odd.

  On the street, Lacey hailed a cab, and they all bowed low as they filed in. “Driver,” said Lacey, “follow that street,” and her finger pointed uptown.

  “Where’re we going?” they chirped.

  “I’ll show you,” said Lacey.

  The cab wheeled up to 83rd Street and Broadway and, according to Lacey’s exact command, hung a left, meandered over a few streets, and stopped at a corner. Lacey rolled down the window and leaned out, and so did the other two as best they could.

  “Look up,” Lacey told them.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Sharon.

  “Count three floors up and look at the apartment on the corner, then count five windows in.”

  They did and saw a nicely framed window in an old building. From what they could see of the apartment, it was empty, freshly painted white inside, and illuminated by a contractor’s light standing in the center of the room.

  “It’s my new apartment,” said Lacey. “I move in tomorrow.”

  “You bought it?” said Angela.

  “Yes.”

  The girls were stunned. As recently as several months ago, they had shared financial recaps, and both Angela and Sharon knew this apartment was out of Lacey’s reach.

  “Lacey,” said Sharon, “how’d you pay for it?”

  “Think of it as magic,” she said.

  Lacey had come into money not by magic, but by prestidigitation. No one had seen her sleights except her and me, and I was bound to silence by complicity. I was guilty, too, but I did not know exactly of what. Lacey and I had collaborated on a feint—I delivered on the requested favor—for which I went mostly unrewarded, but Lacey had seen hundreds of thousands of dollars come her way. It was her will that brought money to her, and it was my lack of will that kept it from me, so I considered her deserving of this newfound rootless cash. But sometimes money falls like light snow on open palms, and sometimes it falls stinging and hard from ominous clouds.

  17.

  MONDAY MORNING, Lacey climbed the steps of Barton Talley’s gallery on East 78th. She rang a buzzer, looked into a videocam, then pushed on the door when she heard a solid click. She entered what was once the foyer of a grand residence, now painted white and accommodating half a dozen paintings of varying size and period and one freestanding Miró sculpture, illuminated only by reflected sunlight as the gallery lights were off.

  There was no assistant on duty, and she faced a carpeted staircase, at the top of which sunlight spilled around a curve of banister. Voices, too, tumbled around from somewhere up above. She stood, not knowing what to do. Then two men in narrow suits and cropped hair appeared at the top of the stairs, talking low to each other as they descended the steps. One of them said to Lacey, “He said to come upstairs and walk back to his office.” The two men left, and Lacey thought how in the art world even well-dressed, intelligent-looking men could look like misfits.

  At the top of the stairs she entered a hall, unsure which way to go. She looked left, toward the street, to a sunny, blindingly white front room, then right, to a hall that extended back to another half-open door, which she guessed was her destination. She walked down the hall, passing a few offices housing an art library, open books on desks, transparencies leaning on light boxes. She got close enough to the end of the hall to see, through a door cracked open not more than a few inches, a sliver of a painting on an easel, an old master type, of a woman singing in a parlor.

  “Not there, behind you,” Talley said. She turned and saw Talley silhouetted against the window, waving his arm for her to come the other way. “That way, evil and darkness; this way, goodness and light,” said Talley, then added, “We’re all in here.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Talley. I’m Lacey Yeager, just in case—”

  “Oh, I know,” he said. “Thank you for coming. This is Patrice Claire…” Lacey saw the open-collared European whom she had met briefly at Sotheby’s a little over three years ago.

  “We’ve met,” she said, recalling a memory that had set firm in her by a feeling of premonition.

  “Ah, you remembered,” said Claire.

  “Ah, you remembered,” said Lacey.

  Lacey sat; they all sat. “Have you ever been to Russia?” Talley asked her.

  “It’s on my to-do list,” she said.

  “Well, move it up a few notches. Did Cherry explain about the Rockwell Kent situation?”

  “Yes, she—”

  “So the Russians have these pictures that they really don’t care about, but America does care about. Mr. Claire has some pictures that the Russians really do care about, and we don’t care about at all.”

  Patrice Claire picked up the story. “I collected about twenty nineteenth-century Russian landscape painters through the years. All these Russian pictures are painted tight, very photographic, very realistic, the respected standard for the period. Russian artists never got into Impressionism until it was practically over—”

  “Neither did the Americans,” Talley interjected.

  “Yes, neither did the Americans. A hundred years later they turn out to be unimportant, pretty pictures, but they are still amazing. Amazing light, amazing detail.”

  “Patrice contacted me with the thought of an exchange, a sort of prisoner exchange,” Talley explained, “and I contacted Sotheby’s for added clout. The art world wants an opening in Russia, and this could be a civil way to begin. We need an assistant for the trip, someone with an American look and nature, preferably from Sotheby’s, and Cherry recommended you. Do you think you might have an interest?”

  Not wondering, or caring, whether she was picked as a sexual possibility on a lengthy trip for gentlemen, Lacey said yes.

  “We would leave in a week for a three-day trip to St. Petersburg. Many of the pictures are at the Hermitage, stowed away. My Russian pictures are being sent there now. Russia’s a bit chaotic these days, so it might be easier to make a deal now than in five years.”

  The conversation loosened; anecdotes were told about travel, foreign ways, differences between Europeans and Americans, and everyone relaxed. Barton Talley fussed with a letter opener, finally laying it precisely square on his desk, leaned back in his chair, and said, “One night in Paris, I was faced with the choice of flying to the South of France to meet Picasso, or staying in Paris and fucking Hedy Lamarr. I chose to fuck Hedy Lamarr.

  “That I would call a mistake.”

  “I’ll try not to make the same one,” said Lacey.

  18.

  WITH LACEY ACTING as passport holder and ticket captain, the three of them landed at the St. Petersburg airport, which had a lonely, neglected quality. Weeds grew in the centers of the runways. Broken-down Aeroflot jets seemed to be parked randomly, but upon closer look, Lacey realized they were not broken down at all and there were rattled passengers disembarking from them.

  After a sour-faced customs agent rubber-stamped their papers, they checked into the Grand Hotel in St. Petersburg on a rare hot day of the Russian summer. The hotel was built around an indoor courtyard that was now a mecca for the traveling businessman. In 1997, Russia was “between regimes,” and a Wild West lawlessness gripped the major cities. D
anger marked the streets, and Lacey had been warned that evenings out could be trouble, and that the food in restaurants could not be trusted. It was wisest to eat only at the hotel and walk no farther than around the block. This made her job as tour guide and car arranger easier. Everything was done through the hotel desk.

  Before sundown, Lacey took a jet-lagged stroll in the permitted area. Magnificence surrounded her, but the city was tattered at the edges and had a run-down feeling that affected all the stately buildings, except for the busy churches. The government buildings were shabby and tired; she could imagine the hunched shoulders of weary Kafkaesque protagonists trudging up their unending staircases. Street vendors sold assembly-line paintings only a few blocks away from the Hermitage, which made the junky pictures seem better by its beatific proximity.

  Cavernous government offices had been converted to gigantic marts with stalls that offered household cleanser next to plastic baby Jesuses, and the variety of products from stall to stall was so extreme as to be illogical. The streets were alive, though; the warm day brought everyone out as if to stockpile sunlight and warmth for the battering winter. The people seemed to be of two types only, sculpted beauties or squat beer kegs. Lacey’s flirtatious imagination made fantasy contact with a few of these Adonises, but she knew that if she was to sleep with anyone on this short trip, it might as well be one of her employers.

  The food plan for the day would be the same for every day: breakfast in, lunch in, cocktails in, dinner in. Tomorrow morning they would be given a private tour of the Hermitage, tomorrow afternoon they would meet with the director, and the next day they would fly home. So they would be three musketeers for the next few days, all for one and one for all, relying on, or perhaps stuck with, one another for camaraderie. When Lacey returned to the hotel, she saw Patrice Claire already in the bar, talking to a man in black. He saw her and signaled her over just as the man was leaving.