An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  He was one year younger than Lacey, with a tight, wiry body that was fun for her to explore. He kept himself in shape as part of his job, though the art world seldom required him to climb over chain-link fences or race along rooftops. Lacey liked to say to him, “Fuck me, Agent Parks,” and when it was all over there was no awkward silence, because Agent Parks was not trying to make Lacey his girlfriend. He was not swooning over her, or worrying if he was saying the right thing, or going out of his way to be nice. Out of professional responsibility, he even kept secrets from her that were about people she knew, no matter how much she prodded him. He was a jock with a lust for Lacey and a job situated squarely in the art world, a trifecta of qualities that could never be printed in the personals section of The New York Review of Books but was nonetheless desirable in this combination.

  In January 2006, Agent Parks went to Lacey’s gallery, showed his badge to the receptionist, and asked if Miss Yeager was in. Lacey emerged from her office, and Parks held up a manila envelope. “I’d like to discuss an issue in private with you,” he said.

  Lacey took him in the office and closed the door. He whispered, “Shhhh.” Agent Parks bent her over the desk, made a few clothing adjustments—he left his overcoat on—and quickly inserted himself into her. This visit had happened only a few times in their two-year-long relationship, and what appealed to Lacey about it was that Parks didn’t seem to care whether she was in the mood or not. It was just urgent, and he needed it done. With her palms on the desk and her hair grazing its surface, Lacey’s eyes were positioned directly over a pile of unopened mail. The pieces tended to move around as she raised and lowered her body on the desk, and one time, as she arched her back slightly, her blouse buttons brushed aside a few envelopes, revealing something unusual in this pile of announcements and bills: a corner of an envelope, handwritten. She used the momentum that was pushing her from behind to shift the envelopes that covered it and read who’d sent it. “Claire,” it said, then above it in engraved letters: “The Carlyle Hotel.” She grabbed it in her fist, not because of its sender, but because she had to grab on to something when Agent Parks intensified from behind.

  She had not heard from Patrice Claire in years. She had heard about him, and no doubt he had heard about her, but there had been no direct communication. She was not curious about this letter. In fact, it bothered her. Inside, she guessed, was something quasi-romantic, something thought-out and carefully written, with probably either a request for an explanation, which she didn’t have, or a request to meet, which she knew would be excruciating. Then Agent Parks came inside the condom that was inside Lacey and let her know it by stopping midstroke and squeezing her waist with both hands.

  On his way out, the receptionist said to him, in complete ignorance, “That was quick. ” He smiled, touched the brim of his fedora between his first finger and thumb, and left.

  Lacey knew that at some point she would have to open the letter, so she picked it up, along with a few art magazines, and took it home. She dressed to go out, pausing first to vibrate herself in order to release the head of steam that Agent Parks had built up in her. She walked several blocks in a freezing wind before she found a taxi to take her to an artist’s studio. She spent a half hour looking at work she instantly knew she hated, but she had to invest the time since she and the artist had a mutual friend.

  Back home, she poured herself a glass of white wine and sat at the kitchen table in front of the day’s mail from the gallery. Patrice’s letter was on top, and she was still loath to read it because she knew that whatever was in it would mean more work for her, another ego to soothe. But with the wineglass on her right, easily grasped, she pared back the flap of the envelope and slid out a solitary card. In Patrice’s handwriting, it read, “Dear Lacey, You should know that your Aivazovsky is worth much more than you paid for it, Patrice.”

  She turned the card over: nothing. She smelled it and wasn’t sure if it carried Patrice’s aroma. She put it back in the envelope, then took a sip from her glass. She got up from her chair and thought, Where is that painting?

  She went to a hall closet, where a dozen framed things, wrapped in cardboard and tied with string, were filed as rejects. She searched through them and finally came across the picture. She had wrapped it for the move and never unwrapped it. She had meant to get to it, to sell it, but it was too much trouble, and she was always so preoccupied. She snipped the twine with scissors, took the picture back to her bedroom, and hung it in place of a small Amy Arras across from her bed. It looked better than she remembered, especially now that it was in a spot that had been professionally lit. Lacey figured it might now be worth double or triple what she had paid for it.

  She called the Carlyle and asked for Patrice Claire, even though it was past ten p.m. The operator said, “Just a minute,” and a full minute later, she came back on and said, “He’s not in, can I take a message?” She left her name, but Patrice never called back.

  Unlike the glory and wonder of the Warhol, there was no sentimental attachment to the Aivazovsky, but Lacey still waited a few days before pursuing the sale of the picture. She thought it would be more likely to find an enthusiastic customer in Europe, so she found a house in Sweden, the Stockholms Auktionsverk. She had her gallery photographer come to the loft and photograph the picture, then she e-mailed the image and information about where she got it—Patrice Claire’s name gave it good provenance—and waited.

  The picture hung in its spot across from the bed, in limbo, an ugly puppy about to be sold. But one night Agent Parks (she just couldn’t call him Bob), after a wrestling bout in the clean linens of her bed, observed the picture. “What’s that?” he said. “That’s new, right?”

  “Not really, it was put away.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Russian. Nineteenth century. Artist’s name unpronounceable.”

  He walked up to it. “He’s painting like Rembrandt. You know the one that was stolen? The Storm on the Sea of Galilee? With the ship? This has the same surface.”

  “You know the surface of the Rembrandt?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen so many photos, transparencies. Plus I saw it, quickly, in a locker at the train station. It was a bargaining chip, but I couldn’t tell if it was the real thing. They called the wrong dude. They thought I was a reporter. They wanted to give the pictures back in trade for no prosecution. But how can the government agree to that? They can’t say it’s fine to steal a bunch of pictures as long as they are returned. Then the Rembrandt went underground again. Too bad. I’ve begun to feel for those pictures.

  “The Rembrandt Galilee has a layer of varnish over it,” he continued, “like you’re looking at it through amber, but I don’t think it’s the varnish that gives you that feeling. It’s somehow in the paint. This has it, too.” He moved in close to the picture, moving his head from side to side to avoid the shadows from the overhead spotlight.

  “You know about varnish?”

  “Yeah. I had a quickie course when I started in this department.”

  “Who teaches art courses at the FBI?”

  “We had someone from Sotheby’s. Ross somebody?”

  “Tanya?”

  “Miss Ross, is all I know.”

  “So you didn’t fuck her.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, you called her Miss Ross.”

  “You call me Agent Parks. But no, I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it. Not my type, I guess. Too sane.” He smiled at her.

  “I’m selling it,” she said.

  “Really? I like it.”

  “Tell me why you like it.”

  “Well, it’s pretty. Kind of lonely looking. And it’s symbolic, don’t you think?”

  “Symbolic?”

  “That’s where something in the picture stands for something else. Like truth or something.”

  “Thank you. So what’s symbolic about it?”

  “Remember, this is not my best subject.”


  “I’ll remember.”

  “Well, the water, to me, represents the earth and all the things that happen on the earth, reality. And the moonlight represents our dreams and our minds.”

  “And…”

  “And the reflection… well, I guess the reflection represents art. It’s what lies between our dreams and reality.”

  62.

  THE NEXT DAY, Lacey received an e-mail from the Stockholms Auktionsverk saying they could give an estimate on the picture at somewhere between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and that the wide range could be adjusted after they saw the picture.

  None of Lacey’s huge returns in the art market had been based on wise investing: one had been bought to show off, one was bought out of her surprising response to it, and a third was essentially stolen. But in an exploding market, it was hard to make a mistake. The Russians had come in the way they came into Poland, and while raiding the modern masters, paying huge sums for Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, they eventually looked to their own nineteenth-century artists, whose prices rose with every fall of the gavel. Aivazovsky was one of the three or four nineteenth-century Russian artists who qualified as collectable. Except for one gigantic spike for the rarest bird of all, Kazimir Malevich, who sold at sixty million dollars, the Russians’ own great modern movements of suprematism and constructivism attracted little attention because the market was flooded with homegrown fakes.

  Too late for the fall sales, the Aivazovsky would be sold in the spring of 2007, almost eight months away. Lacey called the art movers, and the work was sent off to Sweden.

  Ben and Belinda Boggs continued to befriend Lacey, which she sometimes viewed as her punishment for leaving Barton Talley, for moving downtown, for opening a gallery, for having ambition. They also bought pictures from her and gave her pictures to sell. There was a monthly train ride to Connecticut for an art dinner at their home, with guests numbering about forty. Dinner was inevitably accompanied by tours of the house, gallery, and sculpture garden, which she had memorized, and each repetitive tour was excruciating. She was running out of things to say, and she did not, absolutely did not, want to climb the stairs one more time and see their horse photos. The only light for her was the occasional presence of Barton Talley himself, who was often her dinner partner. Whenever Belinda started a soliloquy, Lacey would turn to him with a neutral stare that was code for an expression of disgust.

  At one of these dinners, Belinda started in: “Oh, oh, stop me if I told you this. We were hosting a big gala event and we were showing our collection and we had the Beuys felt suit… well, Ben had a new tuxedo…”

  Lacey turned to Talley with the blank stare and he gave the blank stare back. But this time, Lacey whispered, “Can we stop her with a gun?” and Talley snickered. Fortunately, there were ten seats between them and the hostess.

  Belinda went on, soon to be interrupted by Ben: “Honey, you left out the part…” Finally, Talley turned to Lacey.

  “Lacey, you know the artist Hon See?”

  “Yet another Chinese,” said Lacey. “The one who does large paintings of news stories.”

  “Yes, up-and-coming. Another opportunity. A collector in Singapore has thirty works. We could buy all of them and dole them out, a few yearly. An annuity.”

  Lacey remembered the missed opportunity with Feng Zhenj-Jie and viewed Talley as a dealer who never made mistakes. “Oh God, Barton, I just can’t do it. I’m in the same situation. I exist on the cash I have. How much do I need?”

  “A million should do it. I’m putting in a million, and Stephen Bravo’s putting in a million.”

  The difference between Bravo and Talley putting in a million and her putting in a million was that her cash was all she had and theirs was tip money.

  “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “… we steamed the suit and gave it to a gallery in Tulsa,” said Belinda, eliciting courteous smiles from those who had heard the story before, which was nearly everybody.

  After dinner, valet parkers pulled cars around, and Talley offered her a ride back to the city, liberating her from returning in the minivan that had ferried her and a few of the other lesser lights to the dinner.

  In the car, Talley and Lacey reminisced. “You’ve done well, Lacey.”

  “The truth is, I’ve done just well enough,” she said.

  “It’s a tough business.”

  “I miss the old pictures. Picasso drawings. Klees. Remember that small Corot landscape you had? So beautiful.”

  “Sold to the Met,” he said.

  “Thank you for hiring me.”

  “You were an asset.”

  “I might not have come to you highly recommended.”

  “You mean because of the Sotheby’s thing?”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “Not much. They said you were bright and fast. And that there might have been a bidding issue, but they didn’t know. Just that they had to let you go.”

  “That’s what they said?”

  “Yes. Was there a bidding issue?”

  “I helped a friend.”

  “Was the friend you helped yourself?”

  Lacey didn’t answer, but Talley didn’t care. He went on:

  “When you start in the art business, you can see that there are ways to illegitimately cut corners. And because you’re so desperate to make a sale, you do. Then you come to a crossroads and you decide the type of dealer you’re going to be. I cut a few corners early on, then I realized being straightforward was so much easier. So whatever you did, I hope you moved on.”

  “That’s what I learned from you,” said Lacey, “and yes, I moved on.”

  There was silence in the car for several miles. Then:

  “And oh, remember that FBI guy?” said Lacey. “On the Gardner thing you got me into?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m dating him.”

  “You never throw anything away, do you, Lacey?”

  “All the time,” she said.

  63.

  IT WAS FIVE PM one April day in 2007, and Lacey was sitting at her desk, fretting that she could not, or best not, participate in Talley’s Hon See deal, worrying that the outlay could put her in jeopardy, and hating that she had to miss this big league opportunity that would put her in Talley and Bravo’s world. Then the phone rang. It was Stockholms Auktionverks calling, the voice said.

  “Is this Miss Yeager?” The accent was difficult and the connection worse.

  “Yes.”

  “We have your auction results for today’s sale. Lot 363, the Aivazovsky, sold for five million ten thousand Swedish kronor.”

  Her heart leapt when she heard “five million,” but then she came to her senses.

  “How much is a krona?”

  “How much is a krona?” the voice responded.

  “How much is a krona in dollars?”

  “Ah, I see. Let me calculate that for you.” And then: “That would be approximately seven hundred thousand U.S. dollars.”

  Lacey hung up the phone and thought that there were still a few surprises left in the art market: with the sale of one painting, she had paid for her entire gallery and its inventory. She called Barton Talley’s cell and caught him in an elevator.

  “Is the Hon See deal still open?”

  “I’m meeting with Stephen Bravo now, to finalize.”

  “Is it still open?”

  “We bought part of it, but we could buy the whole thing if you want in.”

  “Let’s take the whole thing.”

  “Can you be at Bravo’s at six? This will take some rejiggering.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Lacey didn’t let Bravo’s private elevator or the three hundred feet of art reference library in his Manhattan office intimidate her. She entered as Talley was listening to the Los Angeles art dealer on the phone. Bravo signaled her to sit down.

  “We’ll confirm it tomorrow,” he said. “Yes, it’s a done deal
, but we’ll confirm it tomorrow… How much more done could it be? Because we’ve got a third party and we’ve got to talk at least once. It’s not done, but it’s done.”

  Where would the pictures go? Half stored at Bravo’s and half at Talley’s gallery. They would wait until the fall 2007 auctions were over: there was a sensational Hon See coming up that would likely set a record, since everything was setting records. It was decided that the show would be split between Talley, uptown, and Lacey, downtown. This hadn’t often been done before and would indicate that Hon See was a master in either milieu. Stephen Bravo would sell the pictures to select clients out of his back room in Los Angeles. The first show, they decided, would open in late September 2008, perfect for the fall gallery openings and in plenty of time to massage the market into a Hon See frame of mind.

  64.

  LACEY’S BUSINESS CONTINUED strong through 2007 and 2008, strong enough that she did not wish she could dip into her now invested, and therefore impossible to retrieve, backup fund. The fall sale saw a Hon See bring one hundred fifty thousand, and in the spring of 2008, a Hon See again brought one hundred thirty thousand dollars. Though it was less than the previous season, the price was solid, making the pictures worth at least what had been paid for them.

  During the summer, Lacey prepared for her opening show, now set for September 18. She had tiny reproductions of the Hon See pictures made and paid an architecture student to render a two-foot-square model of her gallery. She could move the small images around and design the best layout for the show. Some of the pictures were floor to ceiling, while the smallest was thirty-six inches square, and Lacey thought the show was going to look handsome.

  She ordered champagne and sent out pre-invitations saying, “Save the date,” followed up by a formal and more exquisite foldout that made the night seem extraordinarily special. Talley did the same, and both their addresses were on the invitation, a coup for Lacey, as she was now linked with one of the most prestigious galleries in Manhattan. Ben and Belinda were invited, of course, and had accepted. Hundreds of others, too, had told Lacey they were going to both openings, uptown and down, and the evening, intended to flush art sales from the distant bushes, was turning into a soiree. Already there were holds on three pictures, at two hundred fifty per, minus a ten percent courtesy discount, and with two holds at Talley’s end, she was at least one-third out of her investment.