An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  “Are you passing secrets?” said Lacey.

  “Oh no, just making use of my time here for commerce. How about a drink?”

  “I’ll have a black Russian… oh, wait, you said drink. Scotch.” The joke didn’t make it through the language barrier, and Patrice ordered the Scotch.

  She slid onto a stool. “So, Patrice, what’s with the hair?”

  He looked at her, puzzled.

  She continued, “You know, what’s with the oily look?”

  “I am European. It’s what we do.”

  “Maybe forty years ago… but come on.”

  “Anything else you find objectionable?”

  “Just the gold chain. And the open shirt. Chest hair doesn’t have the same effect on American girls. Oh, and I’ll pay for your drink. It’s the least I could do.”

  “I should pay. I’m so grateful for the personal instruction.”

  “Just thoughts.”

  “If I don’t grease my hair, it’s like an Afro.”

  “No way. Euros don’t have Afros. Something matte would do it. Same effect, no shine.”

  “Now should I criticize your hair?”

  “You can’t. Unfortunately for you, I have perfect hair. I have hair that women sit in beauty parlors for hours to try and achieve. Natural streaks, natural highlights. I think my breasts are slightly low, so I’m vulnerable if you want to get even.”

  “Do you get a lot of complaints?”

  “No,” said Lacey, then flatly: “Oh, my God, it was a trick question.”

  “Tell you what,” said Patrice. “After dinner, come to my room. I’ll show you something.”

  Lacey went to change for dinner. Her “luxury” room, one third the size of a room at a Holiday Inn, had electronics from the 1940s and buttons for valet, maid, and room service, all out of commission. A fat hunk of telephone sat by the bedside. Out her window, she could see the Russian Museum, which she found uninviting. Its repeating vertical windows reminded her of a pair of wide, frilly underpants.

  She lay down on the bed for just a minute, and the overwhelming weight of jet lag settled on her. Lying there, unable to lift even an arm, she went into a trance of sleep, waking only a few minutes before the eight-thirty dinnertime. She forced her body to sit up, her head still hanging heavy with double gravity. She sleepwalked to the bathroom and dipped her face in cold water. She looked at herself. Passable, she thought. She bent over to let the blood run to her head, rose slowly, and got dressed.

  At dinner, Lacey didn’t uncap her wit; she thought it would be inappropriate. She was there to listen. She quietly smiled at Patrice, whose hair was now minus the sheen of whatever it was he had been greasing it with. She understood this dinner could be an opportunity to learn something, and her serious question—do museums often swap works of art—was answered quickly by Barton.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “How do you think the National Gallery got its Raphael? Andrew Mellon swept in and bought a ton of pictures after the revolution because the Reds thought paintings were bourgeois.”

  Diners in Russia smoked feverishly at the table, and when Barton pulled one out, Lacey inhaled the secondhand smoke and eventually, wanting the nicotine boost, asked for one herself.

  After dinner, Lacey, wrongly assuming her rendezvous with Patrice was a secret, excused herself, said good night, and left. At eleven p.m., only a few minutes after dessert and coffee, she rapped on his door, heard shuffles and voices, and the door was opened.

  Patrice invited her in—his room was a suite—and she saw the man in black who earlier had spoken with him at the bar. Patrice introduced him, Ivan something. He spoke French with Patrice, English with her, and Russian whenever he felt like it.

  “I wanted you to see this,” Patrice said, and gestured to the man, who laid an ostrich briefcase on a table. The man turned the case toward them and opened it presentationally. In the case, against black velvet, was amber. Amber rings, amber necklaces, amber jewelry.

  The salesman stood with firm confidence, as if he were getting out of the way of a knowledgeable collector and a premier object.

  Lacey sat at the table. “May I?” she said.

  “Certainly.”

  She picked up several pieces, rotating them in the light, seeing fissures in the honey-colored transparent stone that pierced the gem like frozen lightning bolts. Occasionally there was an insect trapped in the petrified resin, which brought a vivid picture of the amber’s formation, the slow ooze of ninety-million-year-old tree sap flowing over a prehistoric bug.

  “Pick something,” said Patrice.

  Lacey chose a small pendant, with the amber hanging from a filigreed silver claw, laid it across her neck, and smiled. “It’s so lovely.”

  Patrice pointed to two other pieces—Lacey figured they were for other girlfriends—and the man in black scooped them up with, “Excellent choice. Beautiful, so clear.”

  Lacey held her pendant, warming the amber to her touch as the two men finished their business. She sensed that the amber jewelry was not that expensive, but connoisseurship mattered from piece to piece.

  The man in black left, leaving Lacey to wonder what was next.

  “Vodka?” said Patrice.

  Ah. Vodka was next.

  “Sure.” Sounds of pouring as Lacey pinched the amber between her fingers and held it to the lamplight.

  “Come look out the window.”

  She went to the window, which was in the bedroom, where the lights were off. Moonlight and city lights gave the room a blue hue, and the fanciful, spiraling towers of cathedrals could be seen poking up over the top of the city’s otherwise rigid architecture. Patrice pointed with his finger, circling his arm around her, resting it on her shoulder. He turned half toward her. Sensing permission, he slid his other hand to her breast and caressed it, to the accompanying crinkle of the starch in her blouse.

  “I haven’t been felt up since high school.”

  He said nothing but continued his exploration. There was a moment of unbuttoning, and his hand edged toward her skin, which was becoming dewy from internal heat. He stood there like a boy, holding, cupping, grazing her skin with his fingertips. His lips brushed her neck and shoulder, and Lacey’s arm dropped. The back of her hand moved toward his pant leg, where she felt what she expected. Minutes passed without advancement, just a steady state of touch.

  They stood at the window, in the darkened room, in the same posture, without an instinct to relocate, her hand exploring him, unzipping, reaching in, to which he responded by lifting her skirt and pressing the back of his hand against her. Their heads were both bowed now, their foreheads resting against each other, breathing in what the other breathed out. Lacey lifted her leg against the sill, widening his access to her. He moved her underwear to one side and his fingers slipped in effortlessly, as though they were being drawn up by osmosis. Lacey reached between her legs, lubricating her hand and moving it over to him. They now understood that they were not moving from the window, that this stance was to be the extent of their dalliance. Their breathing intensified; there were adjustments of their bodies, rings clunking on metal, and shoes hitting walls. Lacey’s back rested on the windowsill, and one arm stiffened against the opposite side to hold her firm against his hand while her other hand pulled and pushed on him until the end came for both of them.

  Lacey got a towel from the bathroom for the gentle mop-up, and then, their legs shaky from their unbalanced stances, they laid themselves on the bed.

  “Whoosh,” said Lacey.

  “You are a very beautiful creature.”

  “Well, I’m definitely a creature.”

  There was an unawkward silence.

  “Tomorrow,” said Lacey.

  “Yes, tomorrow. Tomorrow the Hermitage.”

  “Are you a dealer?”

  “No, definitely not. I must move pictures around only to acquire more.”

  “You have the collector’s disease.”

  “Not a disease. A disease makes yo
u feel bad. I have a mania, an acquisitive gene. Pictures come through me like a moving train through a station. I only need to own them once.”

  “Like you owned me tonight.”

  “I don’t think of it that way. You, pictures, two different things.”

  “Momentary objects of desire.” Lacey was cornering him, in a friendly way, and she could tell he was rethinking.

  “It’s true,” he continued, “that both you and paintings are layered. You, in the complex onion-peel way, dark secrets and all that. Paintings operate in the same way.” He didn’t say anything more.

  “Uh. Hello? Go on,” said Lacey.

  “Well, first, ephemera and notations on the back of the canvas. Labels indicate gallery shows, museum shows, footprints in the snow, so to speak. Then pencil scribbles on the stretcher, usually by the artist, usually a title or date. Next the stretcher itself. Pine or something. Wooden triangles in the corners so the picture can be tapped tighter when the canvas becomes loose. Nails in the wood securing the picture to the stretcher. Next, a canvas: linen, muslin, sometimes a panel; then the gesso—a primary coat, always white. A layer of underpaint, usually a pastel color, then, the miracle, where the secrets are: the paint itself, swished around, roughly, gently, layer on layer, thick or thin, not more than a quarter of an inch ever—God can happen in that quarter of an inch—the occasional brush hair left embedded, colors mixed over each other, tones showing through, sometimes the weave of the linen revealing itself. The signature on top of the entire goulash. Then varnish is swabbed over the whole. Finally, the frame, translucent gilt or carved wood. The whole thing is done.”

  Lacey grasped his forearm and squeezed it, as if to signal that the extremes he went to were all right with her. They lay there for a while, sounds of traffic in a light rain coming from outside.

  Lacey got up. “That was a nice shortcut. I don’t have to get dressed.” She made a move to the door. “Does this mean I have to sleep with Talley, too?”

  “They say he’s got a girlfriend somewhere. No one knows who.”

  “Maybe it’s a boyfriend.”

  “You make me laugh, Lacey.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  19.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Lacey sat in the courtyard with her breakfast, and when she saw Patrice turning onto the landing from the stairwell, she opened her legs and lifted her skirt slightly, showing him a flash of polka-dot underwear.

  At ten a.m., they got in a limo to take them three blocks to the Hermitage. They stopped on a wide street along the Neva where the side entrance was. The museum was closed today, and they were provided a special tour. Tall wooden doors swung open into a small anteroom, where they were given a brief security check, and a guide appeared—a woman with short dark hair and wearing a worn, ill-fitting uniform—to escort them around. Even though the corridor had layers of green paint that reminded Lacey of her high school cafeteria, the oak wainscoting and interior doors had a mellow patina that spoke of history. They were led up a small staircase that opened onto a stairway of renown: wide, hushed, and grand. Then they stepped into the first room of paintings.

  The gallery was paneled and dark—translucent shades over the tall windows were raised only a few feet, pinching off the light. The ceilings soared up twenty feet, Lacey estimated, and on the walls were a few Rembrandts, Ruysdaels, and unidentified, musty masters. All the pictures were dingy and brooding, with ornate carved frames that seemed to foam around them.

  “This is the beginning of our seventeenth-century collection,” said the guide phonetically.

  They stood in the center of the room and circled their wagons, each with a back to the other. Lacey wondered why these paintings, made in a century lit only by candlelight and fireplaces, were so dark. How could anyone have seen them? It seemed that Impressionism should have been invented immediately, not only for visibility, but for cheer.

  The guard waited patiently, staring toward the daylight with an expression of having been caught in a stagnant pool of unending time. Talley, looking at a nighttime seascape, whispered to Lacey—because whispering was the voice that the hallowed gallery inspired—“You know what I like?” He pointed toward the seascape. “I like it when the moonlight is reflected on the water.” He said this as though he didn’t want anyone to hear a thought so mundane, as though it were a confession for his priest, who would no doubt impose penance of the harshest kind. Lacey wondered how this connoisseur, this scholar, a man who dealt in Picassos, Braques, and Kandinskys, could care about moonlight on water, a simple effect used by both masters and Sunday painters.

  As they moved on through the Hermitage, the ceiling height seemed to grow with every room. Past Jan Steens and even more Rembrandts and through hallways whose second floors, lined with oak paneling holding entrenched libraries, looked down onto galleries below. The tour was punctuated by the appearances of babushkas, stubby little women who served as museum guards and whose word was law. They stood like garden gnomes, wearing head scarves and peasant dresses, and they lurked in the corner of your eye, giving the feeling that if you looked at them, they would vanish into a hidden passage, moving as if on clockwork rollers.

  They came into a large hall, tall, wide, and supremely ornate, with glass vitrines extending the length of the room, containing a vast collection of bejeweled clocks and golden boxes, the result of intense craftsmanship applied to useless loot. The quantity of stuff made the most exquisite reliquary seem inadequate when compared with the even more refined one sitting next to it, and after a half hour spent in the room, their response to this treasury had dulled.

  They were then led upstairs, to the highest floors, where the oak paneling was replaced by industrial paint and track lighting. However, there was compensation for this depressing change in ambience. The transition from the lower floors was like being taken from the river Styx up to an ascendant sunrise in paradise. Here hung the Matisses and Picassos from the first decade of the twentieth century, paintings so startling, then and now, that they provided a fulcrum on which twentieth-century art was hoisted. To Barton Talley, being in the presence of these pictures—Matisse’s colossal painting of elongated figures the color of red clay, dancing against a turquoise blue sky, and Picasso’s Cubist women, painted in dark greens and grays—was like being in the presence of the singular gravity around which the modern art world revolves.

  Lacey knew she was seeing something she could not quite comprehend. She didn’t feel equipped to appreciate these paintings, but she suspected it was a moment that would acquire meaning as her life went on.

  She leaned in to Patrice. “How did they get to Russia?”

  Talley, looking over to be sure they were the proper distance from the guide, intervened.

  “It seems the revolution developed an eye for pictures. Two great rivals, Morozov and Shchukin, were the only two Russians who saw Matisse and Picasso as collectible. They were fantastic competitors, and each made sojourns to Paris to gobble up as much as he could. They double-hung them in grand apartments, until, of course, the Marxists stole—uh, nationalized that which the State would never in a million years have collected.” Talley looked around warily, as though he might be shackled at any moment.

  They toured the rest of the galleries, the endless Kandinskys and Braques, and every picture was enhanced by Talley’s sometimes enigmatic expertise (“Poor old Chagall,” he said, not adding anything), until they were exhausted by art and longing for food. They went back to the real world, the busy courtyard of the Grand Hotel, where they ordered American sandwiches and rested up for their afternoon meeting.

  At three p.m., they met in the lobby and were taken to the director’s office in the Hermitage. The director spoke English and welcomed them cordially. “Did you see our few pictures?” he joked. “Come…”

  The Bay of Naples by Moonlight, Ivan Aivazovsky, circa 1850

  47.6 × 75.2 in.

  He opened a side door onto a large library. In the room, resting on the wais
t-high shelf that ran around the bookcases, were eight large Rockwell Kents, the Greenland pictures, inhabited by sled dogs and Greenlanders, ice floes and midnight sun. On the opposite railing were a dozen paintings by the Russians Aivazovsky and Makovsky, landscapes, mist-scapes, and village-scapes, some of size, some small and resting on the floor. Not as magnificent, Lacey thought.

  “Russia is getting interested in its own,” said the director, and with that ensued a negotiation as tough as a missile crisis under Khrushchev. Lacey sat, pretending to make notes in order to justify her presence. Forty-five minutes later all sides were exhausted, and the result was the same as if one of them had said in the first five minutes, “How about twelve Russian pictures for eight Kents?”

  They were offered vodka, and they sat around the center table, eventually laughing and toasting. The director looked up at the Kents. “I’m going to miss these pictures.”

  “Ah, you spent time with them?” said Talley.

  “No, this is the first time I’ve seen them. I didn’t know we had them, but they are quite beautiful. Couldn’t be hung here, of course. Next to the Rembrandts and Matisses, they would look like… what is the word? Slang for shit.”

  “Uh… ,” stammered Talley, “turds?”

  “Ah, turds. That’s the word I’m looking for. Yes, they would look like turds. What about Kent? Wasn’t he a… what did you call us? Commies? Wasn’t he a Commie?”

  “Never quite,” said Talley. “It’s mostly forgotten now. He’s too rare to collect; that’s been a problem.”

  “You want to see something? You want to see something wonderful?”

  “We would like to see something wonderful,” said Patrice.

  The director rose, went to his office, and called out, “Sylvie, bring in the gouache we were looking at.”

  A minute later, a striking brunette entered the room, so beautiful that Lacey’s normal confidence was dimmed. She observed the men’s response to this sylph, noticing that Patrice was doing the gentlemanly thing and faking oblivion, while Talley stared at her between neck and knees. She brought in a Van Gogh watercolor and set it on the railing.