An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  “What’s on your walls?” Lacey asked him.

  “Of my apartment? I will give you the virtual tour. Close your eyes.”

  “I will give you the virtual tour, not wheel give you the tour. Will… ill… not wheel.”

  “I will give you the tour… ,” Patrice struggled to say. “Now close your eyes.”

  “I wheel after the prosecco arrives.”

  She stared at him, unwavering, until the waiter placed the fizzy glass in front of her. Then she shut her eyes. “First,” she said, “what’s out the window?”

  “The Seine,” said Patrice.

  “Okay, I’m situated,” said Lacey.

  “On the first wall you see a Miró Constellation gouache. You know what that is?”

  “Expensive.”

  “To the right is a matched pair. A Cubist Braque and a Cubist Picasso. To tell which is which is a game only fools play. Over the sofa—and yes, it matches the fabric—is a Cortès.”

  “Okay, I’m stumped. Who is Cortès?”

  “Cortès is a terrible French street scene painter.”

  “How can you hang it next to the Picasso?”

  “It’s the best picture Cortès ever painted.” At Lacey’s look, he continued, “Look, if you want to be strict, there are only six twentieth-century artists: Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Pollock, de Kooning, and Warhol. But I don’t want to be strict, which is my downfall. I like sentimental Pre-Raphaelites and dumb Bouguereaus, insipid Aivazovskys, and dogs playing poker. As long as they’re good, relatively good, I just can’t help myself.”

  “Everyone you collect is dead.”

  “They’re much easier to negotiate with.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather talk art with an artist than a dealer?”

  “Oh please, no! Have you ever heard an artist talk about their art? It’s Chinese! What they describe in their work is absolutely not there. And it’s guaranteed that what you think is their worst picture, they think is their best picture.”

  Patrice was the funniest unfunny person Lacey had ever met. She liked him, yes, and when they got back to his apartment, she told him so without ever saying it. She treated him as though he were the first and last object of her passion, and their ardor was pitched precisely between lust and romance. Eventually, when it was all over, sitting pegged on him with her knees brought up by his waist, their fingers interlaced palm to palm and her hair falling forward over her face, she looked at him with an expression of immutable love.

  43.

  THE NEXT DAY she went to work, dug out a phone number from the back of her drawer, and booked lunch with Jonah Marsh. The gallery was closing early for summer hours, and Barton Talley had already gone off to the Hamptons. She was to rendezvous with Patrice later, so she went home, wrenched her bicycle from its vertical slot in her closet, and rode down the West Side bicycle path to Chelsea. It was now the glory days of biking, which began in May and sometimes ended not until late October. She could go in shorts and halter tops and let her hair fly free, and she imagined every metallic rattle behind her was an accident caused by the male bikers who swiveled their heads to get a look at her going away.

  She got off the path at 26th Street and slowed to a walk as she gazed into the buildings that had stacks of gallery names listed outside. Here was the kind of activity that separated contemporary art from the sticky pace of the modern masters. She was never going to sleep with Chagall, but she had already slept with Pilot Mouse. There were no exciting studio visits to see Mondrian’s strict output, but south of 26th Street there were iron staircases that led to grungy spaces still fresh with the smell of paint, or fiberglass, or horse manure, or whatever, and occupied by struggling artists who were morosely fucking each other. Lacey could imagine her name headlining a storefront, Yeager Gallery, or perhaps Parrish Gallery, a pseudonym in honor of her first introduction to art. Parrish had a nice sound to it, she thought.

  She met Jonah Marsh—Pilot Mouse—at the Empire Diner, and they sat inside rather than join the cattle line for outside. Jonah introduced Carey, his buddy, his buddy with paint splattered on his jeans, and Lacey thought these two cute guys must have their own kind of waiting list.

  “I’d heard you worked at Talley. So I called to catch up.”

  “Well, I caught up last night. Pilot Mouse. Where did you come up with that name?”

  “The night we did X. And thus I am born.”

  Lacey laughed. “Oh, my God. And Carey, where did you get your weird name?”

  Carey laughed, catching the joke, and said, “When I took aspirin.”

  Jonah Marsh had really called Lacey because he was not finished. Their dissolution had been so abrupt, he felt as though he had been left teetering on a precipice and not quite fallen, his arms still circling for balance. I don’t think Jonah was in love with Lacey anymore, but he still wanted to sleep with her; he felt she owed him that. Jonah had interpreted their drug-driven intimacy as genuine, and the enhanced sex that accompanied it stayed in his memory as something that was unique to them, and he believed, correctly, that Lacey wouldn’t mind the occasional experiment.

  It was to Lacey’s advantage to keep Jonah interested. It was to her advantage to keep the newly discovered Carey interested—maybe he was a sellable artist. It was to her advantage to keep everyone interested.

  44.

  THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER, Lacey continued with Patrice Claire. There were parties and introductions, there was a trip to Paris to see his apartment and be shown off to friends. When the dinners were in English, Lacey charmed; when conversations would drift into French, she sat and waited, a pretty young thing. Her high school French was no help when the speakers sped through words and sentences, leaving nothing for her ear to latch on to.

  Patrice’s travel kept the relationship from becoming routine, but it also kept him from advancing it. They were still in the romantic phase, extended because of their discontinuous time together, which meant that every two weeks there was an exciting renewal. Lacey’s indiscriminate joie de vivre, her openness to adventure, never let Patrice feel he was on solid ground. Though he had tacit commitment, he waited for actual commitment. He also believed their relationship deserved a phone call a day, but sometimes she would not return a Wednesday call until Saturday. Once, he decided to punish her by not calling or returning her calls for four days. It was torture for Patrice. He felt cruel, and his imagination pictured Lacey worrying about him. But this behavior would have been better left to expert manipulators. When he finally called, ninety-six hours after they last spoke, which Patrice had timed exactly, he was twittering with nervous energy. She answered her cell phone with party noise in the background.

  “Hey,” she said, “I’m at a party downtown. All art people. Are you coming in?”

  Absent from Lacey’s conversation was the simple inquiry that Patrice had expected and had suffered to obtain, which was, “Where have you been? I missed you so much.” She was certainly not in mourning; it seemed she had barely noticed he was missing. Patrice’s plan had been a trick on himself, one that left him hurting and alone in the City of Light.

  The next day, Lacey called Patrice in Paris as though nothing had happened—because to Lacey, nothing had happened—saying, Come in, we’ll go to Shakespeare in the Park. Patrice humbly packed his bags, unable to resist the command. But he didn’t take the Concorde, as a personal sign of civil disobedience.

  Lacey’s display of excitement at seeing him compensated for all her misdemeanors of the past month, and she gave her all in bed that night, which brought him back to the mountaintop. While making love to her, he was also watching her. Yes, this was real passion, centered on him, focused and indivisible. He felt he was taking her to a place no man had taken her, that she had given herself over to him entirely. But afterward, when she rested beside him and he watched her sink into her own thoughts, he could feel the communion slip away, and he knew that she was not his.

  Patrice was still unable to give up his fantasy of perf
ect love and a changed life, even with the surprise blows of reality that Lacey delivered. He could distort her shortcomings and make them his own: it was he, he thought, who was not vital enough to make her fully his.

  His week with her extended over Labor Day, and they went to Larry Gagosian’s house in the Hamptons for an all-day party. Barton Talley was not invited, being a rival dealer, but Hinton Alberg was there and he greeted Lacey warmly. The ovoid Hinton didn’t register a blip on Patrice’s jealousy sonar, and he felt almost fine the whole day. As they drove back late in the evening by limousine, Lacey fell asleep against his shoulder. He felt that if he moved, she might be displeased with him, so he stayed stiffly in place the entire two hours.

  45.

  TOWARD THE NEW MILLENNIUM, Lacey began to throw accurate strikes for the Talley gallery. At the end of 1998, she sold a small Léger for over a million dollars (to a French couple Patrice Claire had directed her way), and early in 1999, she negotiated a sale of little-known Warhol black-and-white photographs to Elton John, whose Atlanta-based collection of photography had grown into a treasury. Large numbers were beginning to be easier to say. She had had an initial reticence about saying “one point two” instead of “one million two hundred thousand.” It seemed as though “one point two” should be said by people partying on a yacht, not a twenty-nine-year-old woman who still felt like a downtown girl. It remained hard for her to say “three” when there could be a confusion as to whether she meant three million or three hundred thousand. When Talley said “three,” the client always understood its meaning.

  As comfortable as Lacey was becoming with prices that would have stuck in her throat a year earlier, she was working on salary rather than commission, except for the occasional generous gratuity from Talley, meaning that she was not participating in the newly inflated profits the art market was starting to generate. She continued to imagine a gallery with her name out front. She could likely afford a new gallery that showed younger artists, while she couldn’t fund even the frames required to show modern masters, despite her windfall from a few years ago.

  To further enhance the viability of downtown galleries, a new category of art was being created. Already in place were “old masters,” “Postimpressionists,” “postwar,” and “contemporary.” When collectors said, “We collect contemporary,” their scope and interest—and their prestige—could be fairly understood. But when the rubric of “young artists” surfaced, a whole new class of collectors had a label. Saying, “We collect young artists,” had extraordinary cachet. It meant that they were in the forefront, ferreting out genius, risking money and reputation.

  It was impossible to know if this new art was good, because, mostly, good art had been defined by its endurance over time. But even though this new art had not yet faced that jury, collectively it had a significant effect: it made art of Talley’s generation seem old and stodgy. It was similar to what happened to crooners when Elvis came along: they were instantly musty. A living room full of Picassos identified the collectors as a certain kind of old money. But a roomful of unprecedented objects, historically rootless, was lively and game, and the collectors who amassed them were big-game hunters.

  The nature of collecting changed, too. Formerly, dealers tried to win the respect of their collectors. Now collectors were trying to win the respect of their dealers. A new social constellation had been created linking New York to London, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Collector stars were once again being created on rumors of buying binges and hearsay about private galleries being planned to house their vast acquisitions.

  An art renaissance was under way. Unlike the Italian Renaissance, fueled by science and art nibbling away at a strict anti-intellectual environment, the new renaissance was fueled by an abundance of affordable art that was, in most cases, made by sincere and talented artists flocking to New York, its cultural center. Cortés and Sir Francis Drake were on the prowl, not for land, but for competent artists with an idea.

  In 1999, the full potency of young artists was not yet known. Lacey’s embryonic notion of starting a gallery had begun before objects that were barely two years old would achieve million-dollar prices.

  46.

  WHEN AUGUST FALLS on Manhattan, the galleries go quiet, with some of them shuttering until the season opens again in September. Lacey became the gallery sitter while Barton took his Hamptons vacation. By the time the workday ended, she still had hours of sunlight left to Rollerblade around Central Park. Lacey liked the summer heat and the stripping away of sullen winter clothing to near nudity or athletic wear that emphasized the bas-relief of her anatomical landscape. The sky was still dusky when she set out for open ground, the bars and restaurants of young Manhattan.

  Patrice Claire still courted Lacey, and Lacey courted him back. But while he was forthright, she was tricky and unreliable. As much as Patrice’s every thought was about Lacey, whenever he was wheels up at JFK and heading for Paris, there was an accompanying release of tension, as he no longer felt the need to be constantly interesting or to artificially represent himself to her and her friends as a ceaselessly dynamic person. He made many transatlantic flights that summer, because he knew not to stay too long in New York, not to crowd Lacey with his presence, and not to appear that he was exclusively hers. However, Lacey already knew he was exclusively hers, if she wanted him. As long as Patrice didn’t embarrass himself by proclaiming undying love, she was fine remaining involved but uncommitted.

  One August night, Patrice landed in New York against a burnt orange sunset and headed for a spontaneously arranged dinner with Cornelia and Hinton Alberg. Unable to call her from Paris without it being a three a.m. wake-up, he phoned Lacey upon hitting the tarmac, and she answered.

  “Lacey, tell me you’re okay for dinner. Meeting Hinton and Cornelia at Boulud.”

  “Rats, give a girl a little warning. I’ve got to be downtown, I don’t know how long. Can I come if I can get out of this?”

  “Of course. Just come if you can, love to see you.”

  “Don’t wait for me, just start,” she said.

  Patrice was so polite. “Just come if you can” was not what he meant. He meant “Come. Do it. Show up.” But “Just come if you can” made him feel less desperate, more confident. And now he was left with a lacerating curiosity about what she was doing instead of being with him.

  Boulud, adjacent to the Carlyle, was the restaurant where upscale dealers took their clients, often to celebrate a sale or to position themselves as matchmaker between an important collector and a museum director. The collectors liked to meet museum people because one approving word from them about a single painting in a hallway could, by liberal extrapolation, validate an entire collection. Directors liked to meet collectors because maybe they would soon be dead and their collection would come to their museum.

  But Patrice’s dinner with the Albergs was not about business. Hinton could, and would, talk art with anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Patrice and the Albergs liked each other, and Cornelia enjoyed listening to his dating woes and giving him advice and counsel. So when Patrice phoned her to say that Lacey might be joining them and would it be all right, she regarded the request not only as a politeness, but as information about Patrice’s heart.

  “Lacey Yeager, oh yes, we like her,” said Cornelia into her cell phone moments before walking into Boulud.

  She and Hinton were seated at a corner table while Patrice’s taxi jangled down Park Avenue, heading for 76th Street. There was a moment of repose as they waited. Hinton fit beautifully into the restaurant and its clientele; it was as though he were sitting on an easy chair at home. And Cornelia’s frankness made her welcome in an art world so filled with reserve. In came Acquavella with his wife and grown children, clearly not here on business, and Hinton wondered about the practicality of hosting one’s family at a restaurant that Zagat’s rated as $$$$.

  Patrice arrived and took the seat with the best view of the entrance.

  “Patrice
, you look well. Doesn’t he look well, honey?”

  “Darlin’, don’t you know I can’t look people in the eye?” said Hinton. “That’s why I have pictures. I can look over people’s shoulders and land on something so forthcoming.”

  “But Hinton, there’s nothing on the walls here, you might as well look at me,” said Patrice, coaxing a laugh from him. “Lacey’s going to try and come,” he continued, “she’s got work downtown.”

  “When did this start?” said Cornelia.

  Patrice smiled at her. “Start? I’m not sure it has. She said to go ahead without her.”

  Patrice always laughed with the Albergs. Cornelia’s curiosity about the forceful personalities that populated their collectors’ world and Hinton’s lack of interest in anything that moved except by art courier made them lively, made them yin and yang, and Patrice could bounce along over the entire spectrum of conversation. But tonight, as their chatter crisscrossed the table, Cornelia noticed something in Patrice: his eyes shifting from the table to the restaurant entrance. Sometimes a glimmer would come to his face as he spotted the tip of a skirt or a sweater-covered arm that edged inside the front door, and occasionally the anticipatory brightening of his face would turn Cornelia toward the door, too, to see nothing, a mistake, not Lacey.

  During the dinner, Acquavella dropped by and jousted with Hinton. “When are you going to get rid of that stuff and get some real paintings?”

  “Well, when are you going to offer me something great?”

  “Oh, I’ve just got Van Goghs and Monets, nothing any good.”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow, Bill.”

  “Okay, I’ll dig something out for you; get you into some quality merchandise. All right, see you later, buddy.”

  Cornelia was amused by Bill, but she again noted Patrice’s distraction from the table and attention to the door. They covered no topic that wasn’t attended by this little punctuation. By dessert, Lacey had not shown up, and one last time Patrice gave a now mournful head twist toward the entrance. Cornelia looked at him, squinted her eyes with displeasure, and said, “Women can be so stupid.”