An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

“I’ve got nine of them I want to sell. Talley could sell them. Do you think he’d be interested?”

  “Well, that’s not his area, but—”

  “That’s the point. I don’t want them ‘on the market.’ Quietly, to clients who aren’t downtown every day. I want them to go to Mexico, Europe. Those are Talley’s clients. I don’t want it known I’m selling them.”

  “I know that Mr. Talley…” said Lacey, making up facts she hoped were true, “… has many clients who buy both modern masters and contemporary. He’s perfect for this.”

  “He can keep it secret?”

  “Have you ever heard gossip of any major sales by Talley? They’re always discreet. I work there and I don’t know anything. I didn’t know who you are.”

  Lacey boarded the plane feeling she had impressed two men. One was Hinton Alberg, who had plucked her like the one bright rose from a monochrome Boston garden; and the other was Barton Talley. Not only had she ignored those to be ignored and attended to those who needed attending, she was returning with a consignment from one of the most freely spending collectors on earth.

  32.

  LACEY CHECKED IN at the gallery late Monday, stopped by the front desk, and asked Donna if there were any messages.

  “Yes, one from the Goodman Gallery and one from Patrice Claire.”

  “Were the messages for me or Mr. Talley?” she said, hiding her exasperation.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did Mr. Claire ask for me?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did he leave a number?”

  “He said he’s at that hotel… down the street?”

  “The Carlyle?”

  “Yes.”

  Impeccable and expensive, the Carlyle Hotel was art central. Its tower stood over Madison Avenue like a beacon. Buyers and dealers came to the Carlyle from around the world, but they were social pikers next to the princes and princesses, presidents, prime ministers, and mysterious international travelers who amassed there, and who thought nothing of paying sixteen dollars for a glass of room service orange juice and who didn’t blink when the occasional actor crossed the lobby wearing jeans and a headband. Ursus Books was on the second floor, dealing exclusively in art books and rare editions, and was the place to go to buy the thirty-three-volume catalogue raisonné of Pablo Picasso at somewhere around fifty thousand dollars, which all Modernist dealers had to have, whether or not they ever opened it again. Across the street was the Gagosian Gallery, about to expand vertically, horizontally, and internationally. Up Madison was Sant Ambroeus, the flawless Italian restaurant where dealers gathered at feeding time. When Larry Gagosian, the champion art world muscle-flexing aesthete, and Bill Acquavella, the connected and straight-shooting dealer in Impressionists and beyond, were at their separate tables, the place had a nuclear afterglow. The rivalry between the two was friendly, since officially they dealt in different corners of the market, though temperatures could rise to boiling when their merchandise overlapped. Picasso was implied to be Acquavella’s, and Cy Twombly was implied to be Gagosian’s, but what if some Saudi prince wanted to swap his Picasso for a Twombly? Star wars.

  “Is Barton upstairs?” said Lacey to Donna, who sipped coffee with no steam coming from it.

  “He left. But he said for you to call him.”

  Lacey turned toward the stairs. She remembered the first time she’d climbed them, before her Russia trip. Like an echo, one that reverberated with memory rather than sound, she recalled that the two men who handed her the envelope in Boston were the same two men she had passed one year ago when she came to the gallery for the first time. She paused, her eyes downward, letting the memory come back fully. Then she moved up the stairs and into her office.

  Lacey called Barton at home, but there was no answer. She left a message, then called the Carlyle and asked for Patrice Claire.

  “Oh, Lacey. I’m in town. Let’s have a drink. Where are you?”

  “Hi,” said Lacey.

  “Oh yes, hi. The Kents have done well. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “Not dinner?”

  “I thought you hated me or something,” he said.

  “Hate can be so fleeting.”

  Patrice hesitated, trying to interpret her. “Well, good. Drinks and dinner. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the gallery.”

  “I’ll meet you there and we’ll walk to Bemelmans and see where we end up. It’s beautiful out.”

  Lacey consented and hung up the phone. She reached in her travel bag, took out the small envelope, and set it on her desk. She unpacked an outfit from her trip and stepped into it, changing her underwear and bra, too. This was a sudden fix-up that worked. Her hands went to the side of her head, and she raised and lifted her hair, fluffing it outward, making her look like what she was: reckless.

  She walked the envelope down to Talley’s office and set it on top of his desk. A Matisse hung on one wall, a Balthus drawing in colored pencil of a young girl hung on another. The Matisse was sublime. It was an unreal thing, a windowsill still life with the colors in the wrong places, where flowers were black, and trees were blue, with a pink sky above a floor that was plum purple; and it was, incidentally, a painting at the impossible end of Matisse prices. The picture was being encroached by a harsh streak of sunlight, so Lacey canted the blinds.

  The Matisse seemed to respond to the decreasing light by increasing its own wattage. Every object in the room was drained of color, but the Matisse stood firm in the de-escalating illumination, its beauty turning functionality inside out, making itself a more practical and useful presence than anything else in sight.

  Lacey retrieved the envelope from Talley’s desk, because now she had plans for that desk, and walked back to her own office. She picked up the intercom, almost saying “Dopey,” but she caught herself in time. “Donna, you can go home. There’s nothing to do here now. I’ll lock up.”

  “Should I set the alarm?”

  “No,” Lacey said, “I’m still inside. I’ll take care of it.” Lacey put the small envelope back in her purse.

  She watched from the window until she saw Donna leave, then walked to a drawer in Barton’s office and pulled it open until she could see bottle tops. She picked out a vodka and made herself a drink, meaning she poured an inch into a glass without a mixer or ice. Then she drank it down.

  It was twenty minutes before she looked down and saw Patrice Claire’s head at the gallery door. She buzzed him in and met him in the downstairs gallery. Patrice’s hair was now straight, combed back over his head, his collar was buttoned higher than his chest hair, and he appeared to have undergone a stylistic transformation.

  “Bonsoir, Lacey!”

  “Bonsoir, whoever you are.”

  “You like my new image? I took a look around me and cleaned out the closets.”

  “How’s it working?”

  “Fewer European girls, more American girls.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m joking, Lacey. I’ve been all over. Europe, Brazil, Mexico. But I still remember Paris.”

  “It was Saint Petersburg.”

  “To me it was Paris.”

  “Patrice, you can also lose the winking.”

  Patrice peeled off to look at the walls. “Nice Gorky drawing. Hard to find. You still have your Aivazovsky?”

  “Neatly in place.”

  “Barton here?”

  “Nobody’s here.”

  “Just the three of us?” asked Patrice.

  “Three?”

  “You, me, and crazy you,” he said.

  “You want to see something great?” said Lacey.

  “Absolutely.” He knew she meant a painting.

  “You won’t mention it to Barton?”

  “I never mention the surreptitiously viewed thing.”

  She flicked off the downstairs lights, leaving on one ghost light in the back gallery.

  Patrice kept his eyes on Lacey as she led him up the stairs. “We sold a Kent
in Canada. Sold one in New York. One to a dealer here,” he told her. “Our Russian trip was successful.”

  They turned into the upstairs hallway, toward the office. “You want something to drink?” she asked him as they entered. She set the rheostat to half, spotlighting the Matisse.

  Patrice stopped at the doorway. “Oh, that’s so nice,” he said.

  “Vodka? Is it calling you?”

  “Yes. Vodka. Thanks.”

  Lacey poured, got ice from a small refrigerator, handed him his drink, and leaned back on a bookshelf while Patrice stepped around the room, looking at the picture, farther back, closer, farther back. “Nice condition.”

  It was dark outside now, and Lacey had decided she wanted to have sex under the Matisse or thereabouts. Things slowed a bit as they looked at the Balthus, a sexy image that became officially unsexy when the age of legal consent started to settle in America’s mind. They had second drinks, and Lacey sat on the sofa opposite the picture.

  “I don’t know where to look,” said Patrice, who was starting to get the idea. He moved toward her. “You’re moving up in the world, Lacey.”

  Lacey shrugged it off as if it hadn’t even been said. He started to speak again, but she put her finger to her lips. “Shh. Lights,” she whispered.

  “Lacey, let me take you to dinner first…”

  She stared at him. He continued, “All right, I’ll take you to dinner after.”

  He walked over and pulled her up from the sofa. His hands ruffled her clothes as he felt all around, finally raising her dress, his palm on the back of her leg. He moved her over to Talley’s desk, then pulled down her underwear, and Lacey stepped out of it. He sat her on the desk and slid down the length of her body until he was on his knees, his head pressed against her skirt. Slowly he lifted the cotton fabric until his head was between her legs. With a deep breath, Lacey leaned back, and, stiff on her arms, spread her knees by inches. Patrice’s hands were on her thighs, his head now covered by cloth. She raised her eyes and saw the Matisse. She pulled up one leg, hooking the heel of her shoe on the desk, and she stayed in that position until it was all over.

  There was a lot of neatening done to Talley’s office. Lacey tried to get herself back together, but it had been a long day for her.

  “Patrice, let’s go to dinner now. I flew in from Boston and I’m dead.”

  “We’ll go to the Carlyle,” said Patrice. “Nobody will be there this early.”

  “Will that make us nobodies?” said Lacey.

  The maître d’ at the Carlyle went over his reservation sheet for a solid minute before allowing these walkins to get a table. He seemed to be on their side, scanning the list as though it were a long equation in which he was trying to find a scientific loophole, even though the place was practically vacant. At last, yes, there was a table. He took them into the blissfully old-fashioned restaurant, with French wallpaper bearing rococo vignettes of women stepping up into carriages, a dining room lit by chandeliers and sconces, and a center flower display that had to cost as much as ten dinners. They were seated at a dream corner table, on a tufted banquette, catty-corner to each other, and the only other people in the restaurant were stragglers just paying their check for afternoon tea.

  “Lacey, just so you know, I didn’t call you up to have sex with you.”

  “And if you had?” said Lacey, implying that would not have been a problem.

  Patrice angled himself toward her. “Lacey, do you realize you’ve never said one thing to me that is not banter?”

  “I’m doubly shocked,” said Lacey.

  “Why?”

  “Well, one, you’re right, and two, that you know the word banter.”

  They ordered food and drinks, and Lacey settled back comfortably.

  “There’s a Warhol Marilyn coming up for auction. They’re estimating it at four million,” said Patrice.

  “Four million,” said Lacey, thinking of her own small Warhol; if the Marilyn did bring that much, there was a good chance some financial goodwill would spill over onto her flower picture.

  “Want to go look at it next week?”

  “Where is it? Christie’s or Sotheby’s?”

  “Sotheby’s.”

  “Uhh… maybe. I was in Boston today, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner. Have you ever been?”

  “Don’t think so. A long time ago, maybe.”

  “Look at this,” she said, reaching in her purse and pulling out the black-and-white brochure from the museum. She put it on the table and flattened it with her palms. “Look at these pictures.” She stabbed her finger at each one. “Stolen. Stolen. Stolen…”

  “Oh yes, I remember that. A tragedy.”

  “Rembrandt. Degas. Manet. Vermeer…” Lacey stopped her finger on the Vermeer, and her expression changed to quizzical.

  “What?” said Patrice.

  “I’ve seen this somewhere.”

  “It’s a famous painting.”

  “No, I’ve seen this, recently, I think. Where did I see it?”

  “There was a Vermeer show in New York at the Met. I can’t remember when.”

  “I wasn’t in New York before it was stolen.”

  The rest of the dinner, Lacey would periodically renew her question, as if she were trying to remember a movie title that escaped her, shouting, “Oh, oh!” and hitting her head with her fist. But still, she hadn’t found the answer. Patrice observed her like a child interested in an automated toy; he kept wondering what it would do next.

  The lights in the restaurant were turned low. A pianist could be heard from the bar playing “The Way You Look Tonight,” which worked subconsciously on Patrice. Lacey, now lit by candlelight, her hair relaxed and heading toward unkempt, her concentration diverted, would include him by holding his wrist with one hand and pounding the table with the other when the answer she sought appeared near. In these few seconds, deep inside him, so deep as to be insensible, a passion of viral intensity was slowly infecting him. In spite of their odd beginning, he was deciding not only that Lacey Yeager would make his life wonderful, but that her absence would make it tragic.

  Outside, Patrice was shocked to learn it was nine p.m. That meant he and Lacey had spent at least four hours tête-à-tête, talking, eating, flirting, wooing and cooing, and oh yeah, much earlier, fucking. Lacey was exhausted and said good night to him in front of the Carlyle, and a further discussion of another meeting was aborted by the arrival of a cab. Lacey threw her bag in the backseat and said, “Au revoir, baby.”

  Lacey crossed the park at 79th Street and rested her head against the door of the cab. Her mind relaxed, allowing a sunken memory to bob to the surface. She had seen the Vermeer, or at least a sliver of it, through a crack in the door on her first visit to Barton Talley’s gallery, when she was there to be interviewed. She straightened up and the image came into focus, a young girl singing to a gentleman whose back was to the frame, all in Vermeer’s unmistakable colors.

  She hurried into her apartment, standing vacantly in the center of her living room, wondering what to do. She saw her message light blinking. There were three messages from Talley, saying, “Call me when you get in,” “Call me when you get this,” and “Where are you? Call me.”

  She picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Oh, Lacey. Gee, darling, where were you? I left word everywhere. I’m getting you a cell phone. Did you get a package? Did someone give you a package?”

  “An envelope.”

  “You got an envelope. Where is it?”

  “I have it here.”

  “Is it thick? Thin?”

  “Thin, they said it was fragile.”

  “Can you bring it over? Can I come get it?”

  “You can come get it. I’m dead.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes. Where are you again?”

  Lacey hung up the phone and went to her purse. She took out the envelope and examined it. It was stiff in the center but otherwise flimsy. She filled her electric kettle with water
and turned it on. She took out a white cloth napkin and laid it on the counter. She went and lay on her bed, closing her eyes, not to rest but to blot out the overhead light, her heart beginning to accelerate. The kettle started to spit.

  She went to the kitchen, picked up the envelope, and began to steam it open. After a while, there was success, though she left a few faint tears in the flap. She opened the envelope and poured its contents onto the cloth napkin. She saw two pieces of shirt cardboard, cut to about the size of a playing card, taped together and bulging slightly at the center. She went to her bedroom and got a pair of scissors and a roll of tape. She cut one end of the tape and squeezed the cardboard like a change purse. A small, rectangular piece of canvas fell out, ragged at the edges as though snipped by shears, hard and stiff like plastic.

  She turned it over and saw brown, old brown paint made rigid by layers of varnish, and she could see its amber tint affecting the color of what was underneath. She put it under the light. She could see words, and she read, written in script, “Rembrandt van Rijn.”

  Lacey took the piece and sealed it back inside the cardboard package. She went into the bathroom and turned on her hair dryer, aiming it at the flap while she stood and waited, waving the envelope through the blasting air.

  Her doorbell rang. She checked the envelope, which looked good, and put it back in her purse. She buzzed in Barton Talley, and his first words were, “I’m glad I remembered where you live. Do you realize you gave me the wrong address? You inverted two digits.”

  Yes, Lacey thought, while saying, “Oh, sorry, I do that sometimes.”

  The teakettle gurgled. “You want some tea?” Lacey asked him.

  “No thanks, too late for me. Did you have a good trip?”

  “Fabulous. I got a consignment from Hinton Alberg.”

  “Really?”

  “Nine Pilot Mouse paintings.”

  “Well, that will be interesting. Difficult and interesting. How are we supposed to sell those? Anyway, good job. Fill me in.”

  “Tomorrow, I’m so tired. Here’s the envelope…” Lacey started to root around in her purse. “What’s in it?” she said, handing it over.

  “Come in an hour late tomorrow, Lacey. You’ve worked hard.”