An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  PART

  III

  47.

  LACEY, NOW AN UPTOWN WOMAN, felt an increasing tug toward Chelsea. She was like a cat sensing the first vibrations of the oncoming earthquake that was about to rumble through the art market. There were plenty of small signs to be successfully interpreted. Years earlier, SoHo, the former New York gallery center, had proven too successful. Rising rents killed all but the strongest galleries. So the smaller galleries moved leftward to Chelsea, stranding and branding the ones that remained in SoHo as unhip. New galleries sprouted in Chelsea overnight, lacking only fungi domes.

  Lacey was aware of an unwieldy rhetorical shift that took place between the Upper East Side and the lower West Side. Art on the Upper East Side was referred to as beautiful, exceptional, serene, exquisite, and important. Art below 26th Street was described in the “language of relational aesthetics” or something like that, an argot with a semantic shelf life of about six months. Now artworks “related to spatial, representational, and material functions in contexts defined by movement and transition.” An artist who painted a face was now “playing with the idea of a portraiture,” or “exploring push-pull aesthetics,” or toying with contradictions like “menacing–slash–playful,” but he or she was never, ever, simply painting a face.

  Patrice Claire, who had chased Lacey into the twenty-first century like a horse chasing a train, and who had allowed humiliations to collect unacknowledged in his psyche, was invited to dinner with Lacey’s good friend, me, at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar. “Oh, you must spend time with Daniel,” I could hear her saying, “we’re so close.”

  Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar was a vertical restaurant squeezed between town houses. Quaint and charming, it had silver salt and pepper chicks on the tables and tiny dining rooms trimmed in mother’s lace curtains and red-and-white-checkered wallpaper. The rooms were connected by narrow stairs that necessitated an excellent grip on the handrail to avoid a deadly, headlong tumble after a round of cocktails. All this atmosphere was reflected in the bill, which soared into triple digits even for single diners. So when Patrice showed up for dinner with Lacey, it would have been romantic, had it not been for me.

  I could see his taxi pull up, and Patrice emerged looking windblown, even though there was no wind. Dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and no tie, he could have been a fashion model who had been directed to get out of the car as though he were carefree, wealthy, and masculine. My theory of his insecurity about me vanished, replaced by my own insecurity about looks, accomplishment, and money, everything that Patrice effortlessly possessed.

  But Patrice was generous toward me, asking questions about my writing, about the art world and the way I saw it. I think he liked that I was not cynical about it, this insular collective that is so vulnerable to barbs from the outside (“Three million dollars for that?”), a world that can shield itself from criticism by the implication that its detractors are rubes. So Patrice and I hit it off, and Lacey was in top form, funny and caustic. And naughty:

  “Oh, Patrice,” she said midconversation, “you like Balthus because you like underpants.”

  Patrice included me in his response: “Could anyone but Lacey make the word underpants sound like a nasty verb?”

  “Well, you are a horn dog,” said Lacey.

  Patrice smiled while he tried to parse “horn dog,” concluding it was both funny and accurate, and looked over at me. “What am I going to do with this creature?”

  I don’t know if the next question Patrice asked me came because he was now satisfied that I was not a threat, hence a few personal questions were okay, or if he was still trying to figure out my status with Lacey:

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Daniel?”

  “I am currently between girlfriends,” I said.

  “You wish,” said Lacey.

  Then I stupidly told them my dating stories, which I realized were all nonstories when I saw their eyes glaze over and stare into their drinks.

  “There must be hundreds of women in the art world,” said Patrice.

  “Yes,” I said. “They like artists, not so much art writers. We seem to be on the fringe. Plus, I’m benign. Benign is not a trait women go for.”

  “But Daniel,” said Lacey, “you are in the most desirable category of all for women of our age, the employed, handsome dork.”

  We all laughed, and I secretly thought, Could I have finally entered into a desirable category?

  Precisely after the appetizers, when the last dish was cleared, as though she were waiting for elbow room, Lacey said, “I took a lease on a space in Chelsea.”

  “A gallery?” I said.

  “Yeager Arts,” she said. “I’ve got connections uptown and downtown.”

  Patrice said, “You’re tired of working for the man.”

  Lacey shriveled. “Oh, Patrice, we don’t say ‘the man.’ ”

  He looked over at me to check; I agreed with a sympathetic nod.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “It’s at 525 West Twenty-fifth Street. Fifth floor. There are lots of small galleries moving in. I grabbed a space.”

  “Commercial or conceptual?” I said.

  This seemed to stump her. The Chelsea galleries were carefully and willfully defining themselves, breaking away from the more established galleries by presenting art that was “difficult,” backing it up with the academic grad school rhetoric. This was art that maintained the irony that began in the sixties, and irony provided an escape valve in case the visuals became too pretty. It was as if a pitcher had decided it was gauche to throw fastballs but still threw fastballs in a mockery of throwing fastballs. These were the conceptual galleries, which garnered respect by defiance and distance, which went young, which made you feel that they possessed the cabalistic code that unlocked the inner secrets of art.

  I had more trouble explaining commercial galleries because the word implies saccharine merchandise headed for the space above the living room sofa. But Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman are not saccharine, they are simply known. Commercial galleries dealt in artists, famous or not, whose work was in the tradition of something before it and therefore was, in some way, understood.

  Lacey got it, Patrice got it, but neither cared. Lacey was opening a gallery, and she needed to find artists, conceptual or commercial, and she was excited.

  “Why not both?” she said in answer to my question. “It should be ready in nine months.”

  “How come so long?” I said.

  “Because you’re painting it and I know you’re slow,” said Lacey.

  We laughed. But Patrice was drifting out of the conversation. With Lacey’s adventure would come new men, and he knew she was careless.

  He took Lacey to her home that night and slept with her. Afterward, still between sheets, with a drink beside him, he said to a distracted Lacey, “Do you need money for your gallery? I’ll be happy to help out.”

  “What would I be if I didn’t do it myself?” she said. “Besides, I have money.”

  As noble as Lacey’s self-sufficiency was to Patrice, he knew that her refusal kept him out, kept her free of him.

  There was a long silence, which, if made audible, would have sounded with the jangle and clatter of Patrice’s racing mind and the singular drone of Lacey’s will. Finally, hoping for a reprieve from her increasing remoteness, Patrice said to her, probing for conversation, “What are you thinking?”

  She lowered her voice to a comic gravel to cut the harshness of her response. “You don’t want to know,” she said. Patrice suddenly felt very tired.

  48.

  IN THE SPRING of 2001, Lacey took her beloved Warhol Flowers and auctioned it at Christie’s—she was too uneasy to deal with Sotheby’s. When she heard talk on the street—the art street—that a small Flowers could bring as much as eighty thousand dollars, a profit to her of perhaps sixty-four thousand, practicality prevailed. Whatever heartache she felt at selling the painting was soothed by the stunni
ng check she received after it brought a warming one hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. Warhol was on the move, and so was she. This would cushion her against the hard landings that can occur when one is in business for oneself. Pilot Mouse had promised her two paintings, not to be sold until her gallery opened; and his friend Carey proved to be an interesting painter, and it was decided that he would be her first show. She liked his work because it was essentially inexplicable, and she knew it would keep her gallery from seeming too easy. She was also a regular at the studio of a beautiful African-American girl just out of art school, Latonya Walsh, whose racy and racial images would be her second show. She knew both these attractive artists would show well at their opening night party, both on the wall and as physical specimens.

  She stayed at Barton Talley’s through the summer running the gallery, and Barton was happy to have her, as it allowed him to have his Hamptons weekends and summer jaunts to Europe. He had no rivalry with her; he was experienced enough to know that gallerists come and go, and he saw her departure not as creating competition, but as developing connections.

  Yeager Arts was scheduled to open after Labor Day, when the streets of Chelsea would be teeming, when the festivities would bloom with art openings that included handsome servers bearing plastic flutes of champagne and patrons backing clumsily into paintings as their chat circles grew wider and wider. The hoopla was a month long, because galleries rolled out their events so they didn’t all occur on the same night. When Lacey’s opening was postponed several weeks for several reasons, she knew there would still be enough excitement to spare for her virgin upstairs space.

  49.

  ONE MORNING she woke to a late summer day so glorious, she was compelled to take an early bike ride down to Chelsea to sit in the middle of her still-unhung gallery and contemplate the potential of its blank walls. There was one week left before she was to open.

  Outside, it was cloudless and already warming at nine a.m. The silken air slipstreamed around her even though she was trying to be as unaerodynamic as possible. She sat erect, steering the bike with one hand while her other arm swung free. Though now, at thirty-one years of age, she was more respectful of helmets and sunscreen, today she was unhampered by safety apparatus, letting the wind blow through her hair as she turned her face toward the morning sun. This was a free day; Barton Talley was in, and she was attending to the impractical side of her business, allowing creative daydreams to overrule the duty call of daily business.

  The sounds of New York were lighter today; fewer cars along the highway made the journey more pleasant, and the whir of Rollerbladers reminded her of the ball-bearing rumble of her childhood skates on a sidewalk. There was a siren in the distance, which she barely noticed. Colors were stark and crisp: there was the blue of the sky against the green of the grass, and Lacey’s sun-yellow shirt against the pure white of her shorts. And of course there was the occasional butthead who streaked by everyone with near-miss intentions. She thought she might tour the entire perimeter of Manhattan, after a religious stop at her new gallery. Another siren.

  She neared 54th Street, where the bike path emerged from under the highway trestle and the buildings retreated, giving the feeling that Manhattan was doing its best to have a prairie. She imagined her gallery and its accidental golden rectangle interior that would make hanging pictures a joy; and she visualized its cozy back room that would make any artwork hanging in it seem more special, shown to the important clientele only. A fire truck blared down the highway, annoying her. These sirens are ruining my day, she thought. When another and then another siren blared by, she understood: Oh, something’s happening.

  She looked ahead—the sirens seemed to be headed south—but she saw nothing. A police action, she suspected. She continued down the path and sensed a disturbance in the mien of people who populated the next few hundred yards of path. Some were stalled, talking in groups, while some continued on as usual. She saw a car ahead, barely parked off the path, and a man sitting motionless inside with his foot holding the door wide open. As she neared, she could hear that he had the radio on. A few people were listening around the speaker in the car door. She slowed to a stop, putting her foot on the ground, leaning the bike against her thigh.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  A Hispanic man turned his head toward her. “They think a plane flew into the World Trade Center.”

  She looked downtown but could see only one of the giant buildings, as they lined up almost perfectly. There was a stream of black smoke starting to billow from a window-size puncture. She imagined that a stray Piper Cub, guided by a Sunday pilot, had misjudged a banking turn over the Hudson and couldn’t pull out in time. She ventured farther downtown, and still nothing changed much. People kept biking, jogging, walking. She stopped again when she saw a small group of people who seemed to be aware of the news, and again she said, “What’s going on?”

  “They think a plane crashed into the tower.”

  “A Cessna or something?”

  “A jet,” someone said.

  She believed this report would be corrected, thinking the small plane scenario more logical, and she biked another mile down. Within minutes, she could see flames spewing from a high floor of the building like spitfire, and she paused, thinking how two-dimensional, how flat, it looked. She had to remind herself that as surreal an image as it was, it was also real. Horror was going on inside, and her distance from the site meant that the screams inside were falling silent before they reached her ears.

  Decency told her she should not press forward, but her awareness that this moment was unique and probably historical drove her farther downtown. But the previously sparse crowds had turned thick. People were now moving en masse uptown along the bike path, talking unperturbedly, a migration of people away from the towers. Lacey could no longer cycle forward. She turned around, pedaled uptown, veered off onto 83rd Street, carried her bike upstairs, turned on the TV, and stared.

  She looked at the towers, believing the camera angle was from her bike path point of view, seeing only one. Unaware that the north tower had fallen, she went to the kitchen for a bottle of water, returning in time to see a replay of the second tower imploding into rubble. She figured out that both towers had fallen, one while her back was turned to the south, cycling home, and one while she stood at her refrigerator. She looked out her window. She could see a slow movement of people heading north, walking safely down the center of West End Avenue, as all car traffic had stopped. The silence brought on by terror struck Lacey as perversely serene, and it took her a while to notice that all air traffic had stopped, too, reducing Manhattan’s constant din to what it must have been like one hundred years earlier.

  She went alone to Isabella’s for lunch and found it a busy restaurant, with patrons talking, laughing, ordering with puzzled looks while pointing at the menu. It wasn’t that life was going on as usual, it was that what had happened was not yet fully known. Over the next twenty-four hours, there would be a dampening in people’s gestures, activity, and volume.

  Lacey stopped at a market, wondering if there would be a run on food; but there wasn’t. She bought enough for a few days and returned home. She sank into her sofa, transfixed by the television, her cell phone and landline jammed by traffic. She didn’t move until night came, eventually sitting in darkness, having forgotten to turn on even a lamp. The room was illuminated only by the blue glow of the TV news, while banners of text streamed under the newscasters, amid reports of a Pentagon attack, a delinquent president, a crash in the Pennsylvania woods. The nation grew still, an anesthetized giant waiting to figure out what was happening to it. That night in bed, she revisited the searing image of the tower shooting flames. It reminded her of something—which seemed impossible to her—but she didn’t know what.

  She woke in the early morning and checked her phones: still dead. The TV was alive, however. She sat again watching while news tumbled over itself, and again she sat until ten p.m., never turnin
g on a light in her apartment, because the TV was all she wanted and all that she needed. She assumed her parents were concerned for her, but there was no way to communicate, so she could only wait. She worried for her downtown friends, but the area was closed tight. The bridges and tunnels remained closed, stranding people where they were at the moment of penetration. She sat and watched.

  Wednesday came and went. Thursday morning the phones were still dead. Her cell phone had bars, but service was jammed. She walked outside a bit and wondered if New York had been this silent, ever. Even twenty minutes away from the television created an unease that something worse had happened, which required her to focus harder on the news and its flowing ticker tape of rumors and facts in order to catch up. For another day, she remained motionless in front of the TV, hours passing, night creeping over the city.

  It was around nine p.m. when the door buzzer rang. She rose, her legs stiff from the last three days of cave dwelling, and spoke into her intercom.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Carey. You okay?”

  She buzzed him in; he climbed the stairs.

  “I thought I’d check in. Nobody can reach anybody,” he said when she opened the door.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I walked,” said Carey.

  “Sixty blocks?”

  “Yeah.” His head gestured toward the TV. “Anything?” he asked.

  “All the same,” she said.

  They were now in the dark, all connections to the outside frozen, all considerations for the outside in suspension. Whatever was about to happen was excusable, was necessary to confirm humanity. As carnal as their night was about to be, they would be visited by a simulacrum of emotion that loomed briefly and moved on. They would be reminded of love without feeling love, reminded of deep human contact without having it.

  It was now Friday morning after the awful Tuesday. Carey and Lacey watched the morning news, then walked funereally to Riverside Park, where they stood and looked where the towers once were. It was shocking that there was no trace of them, no afterimage left in the sky, no outline traced around their perimeter.