by STEVE MARTIN
“Come in an hour late tomorrow, Lacey. You’ve worked hard.”
33.
THE NEXT DAY, Lacey banged around the office like a sit-com wife signaling anger. She shut doors with extra force, slammed phones down on their cradles, walked with harder steps on wooden floors. Talley’s door was shut, and Lacey was stuck outside like a cat who wanted in. His phone line would be lit for a solid hour, then he would hang up for seconds, and it would light again for another forty minutes. His voice could be heard, but the closed door gave the effect of a voice in the next room of a cheap motel: you could hear someone was talking but couldn’t understand one clear word. Once, he got angry and his volume rose.
She heard: “Well, they’re idiots! They’re not art people. These people are not art people.”
Lacey continually checked his door and his phone extension light. Closed and on. She went down the hall to the bins, treading lightly even though the bins were a normal place for her to be. The paintings were arranged on shelves covered in carpet and separated by cardboard flats to keep frames from knocking into each other. Some of the pictures were sheathed in bubble wrap, some were in their own pasteboard containers, and some merely had gaffer’s tape stuck on the sides of their frames with the name of the artist written in marking pen. She was familiar with most of the visible stock, but the bins lined both sides of the room and the dark areas toward the back wall remained unexplored.
She wandered down the aisle, her hands touching the frames, left and right, her head doing a tennis match scan of the shelves, pulling the unfamiliar ones out a few inches to check labels. Her head twisted around to the wall phone, and she saw that Talley’s light was still burning. She got to the end of the storage and saw in the last, lower bin a picture wrapped in cardboard and sealed tight with wide, clear tape. Under the tape was written a number, 53876, which she committed to memory. She estimated its dimensions by spreading her hand and counting spans. She had long ago measured this distance for quick calculation of a painting’s size.
She then went back into the hall, which was lined floor to ceiling with art reference books. A never-used section on museum collections had migrated to the bottom row—because nothing in them was ever for sale—and there she found a Gardner catalog published before the theft, in 1974. She didn’t want to be caught holding the book in case Talley suddenly emerged, so she quickly turned back to her office, impressed at her own detective work as she edged out of sight. All this sneaking around was making her agitated, even though every one of her actions could be considered ordinary office maneuvering.
She opened the book and went to Vermeer. There it was, The Concert, one of the world’s masterpieces reproduced in muddy, out-of-register ink. Its size was printed as “0.725 x 0.647.” What the fuck does that mean? she thought. She figured it was metric, but there wasn’t as yet an omnipresent Internet to confirm it. She called the Carlyle and asked for Patrice, but he wasn’t in. Before she hung up, the hotel operator came back on the line and asked, “Would you like to leave a message?” The Carlyle was one of the few remaining hotels where unanswered room calls didn’t default to voice mail.
“Yes,” replied Lacey, “ask him how many centimeters are in an inch.”
“Please hold,” said the operator, whose accent placed her in the heart of Queens. Thirty seconds later, she came back on the line and said, “It’s two point five.”
Lacey computed that The Concert was twenty-eight inches by twenty-five inches, and she added three inches all around to allow for the frame and another inch for packaging. Yes, the package was the same size as the wrapped, stolen Vermeer. She was convinced that this was the missing painting.
A moment later, Lacey heard Talley’s door open. She quickly put the book on the floor under her desk. “Lacey, are you here?” he called.
“Yes,” she shouted. “Let’s meet.”
Talley was flush and distracted. “So what about Hinton Alberg?” he said.
“I called him this morning,” Lacey told him. “He’s sending us transparencies. Nine early paintings by Pilot Mouse.”
“Early? The guy’s thirty.”
“Yes, but it seems that in the contemporary world, early can be four years ago.”
“What’s the deal?”
“He paid a hundred eighty thousand for them, and he wants to double it.”
“Can we?”
“Well, if they were on the New York market, we could, but he doesn’t want them on the New York market because he doesn’t want it known he’s selling.”
“Well, we’ll do our best.”
“Who’s your collector in Mexico? Flores? He bought a Hirst, didn’t he? It was in the Art Newspaper,” she said.
“Flores buys Legers and Braques.”
“He also buys Hirst.”
“Who’s Hirst?”
“He’s my dry cleaner.”
“Are you joking?”
“Yes, Mr. Talley. You’ve got to get out more.”
“I’ll call him. Tell me about Pilot Mouse.”
“I don’t know much about him. He was with a small gallery, Alberg bought all the paintings, then Pilot Mouse jumped.”
“Jumped?”
“Jumped to another gallery with a higher profile. Then he started doing conceptual pieces, and raids.”
“What are raids?”
“Like happenings. He fills the gallery with nudes, nudes standing around, lots of things banging and sound effects, clatter. He calls them raids, as in raiding the conventional art establishment.”
“Sounds unsalable.”
“I agree. That’s the part I don’t get.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Never seen him.”
“What do I tell Flores?”
“You just say Pilot Mouse and he’s either heard of him or he hasn’t, I guess.”
Talley was not used to talking about living artists. “The deader the better,” he would say. The antics of the long dead, like Duchamp sending a signed urinal to an art show or Salvador Dali giving an interview with a lamb chop on his head, had transformed in time from pranks to lore, while the actions of Pilot Mouse just sounded juvenile or, at best, lacking in originality. But Talley was not stupid. He knew that “derivative” was an epithet used erratically and that generations of collectors grew up believing that the art of their time, however derivative, was wholly new. He understood that markets could be blinkered, with activity hotly occurring and nobody ever hearing about it. So while Pilot Mouse’s status as an artist of importance was doubtful, his status as a name that could be sold, at least for a while, was probably assured.
I met Lacey for lunch, and she alternated between fretful and enthused. She described the trip to Boston and the consignment from Alberg. When she told me about the office tryst with Patrice Claire, again I felt an involuntary electrical jerk pulse through me, which I interpreted to mean not that I had a crush on Lacey, but that I wished she had commandeered me instead. When she elaborated on the intrigue, she never once asked me what she should do. I only listened. Once she said, “Am I in trouble?” but she answered her own question by placing herself at such a distance from the initial crime that she tried and exonerated herself in a matter of seconds. Whether Talley was complicit or innocent was open to her. He could be working to get the pictures back, but if the Vermeer was indeed in his gallery, didn’t that make him a criminal? And if Talley went to jail, would that hurt her career or help it?
Finally, Lacey said to me, “How are you doing?”
“I’m still writing, got a piece in ARTnews, doing an essay for a photography catalog. I keep trying to start a novel.”
“About?”
“About my growing up.”
“Daniel, jeez, get a subject.”
“Well, I’m rethinking.”
“Girlfriends?”
“They come, they go. Nothing sticks.”
“You know what you are, Daniel? You’re too kind. Girls like trouble until they’re thirty
-five.”
“I thought I was an intellectual nerd.”
“Wow, if you were an intellectual nerd who made trouble, you would be potent.”
Lacey paid the bill, and we walked out of 3 Guys onto Madison Avenue, and in the air were the first real hints of summer.
34.
“IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE to me, Mr. Talley.”
“What is that, Lacey?”
“Why you didn’t go to Boston.”
“I told you—”
“I know what you told me, that you didn’t want to see people from the Boston Museum. But that’s never stopped you. You’re not shy. And the room was filled with collectors. That’s like Ho-Ho’s to a fat man.”
“I’m breaking you in, Lacey.”
“Baloney. Is it that you didn’t want to carry back what was in that envelope?”
Talley looked up at her. “What was in the envelope?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lacey, you carried something back. I didn’t even know what it was. You have to stay out of this.”
“But I’m in it. Your fault.”
“Aren’t you afraid of being fired?”
“But you can’t fire me now, can you? Can you put me loose on the streets?”
Not sure what she meant, Talley squinted fiercely and leaned back, and although he was taking himself farther away from her, his total area seemed to expand. “Oh, I could, Lacey. But truthfully, I wouldn’t. Go back to work. Zone out. Stare at the Matisse for a few minutes. Use it like Zen.”
Lacey crossed her arms and looked up at the Matisse. “Wrong time of day,” she said.
Busying himself at his desk, he said, “Well, take a last look because it’s leaving. Sold it this morning.”
“Oh, who bought it?” said Lacey.
“A European,” said Talley.
“That’s specific,” said Lacey.
“A Western European,” said Talley.
35.
LACEY WAS SURE she was going to open the wrapped picture, but she would let several weeks elapse without drama to make Talley believe that the matter was a blip, now forgotten. Auction season was settling upon Manhattan, so there was much to be distracted by. Patrice Claire invited her to the previews, and Lacey decided she couldn’t avoid Sotheby’s forever, so she made the trip on her lunch break, understanding that it would be Sotheby’s lunch break, too, and perhaps she would not run into those she would rather avoid. As she stepped out onto the tenth floor, she saw a newly promoted Tanya Ross leading clients around the room. Lacey was not and never had been unnerved by her—she only resented her for being competent, nice, pretty, and prim. When Patrice, reacting to her “Ugh,” asked her why she didn’t like Tanya, Lacey said, “Because I’m a petty person.”
They turned the corner into the main gallery and saw, in the premier spot where a 1909 Picasso had hung last week before selling for eleven million dollars, the Warhol Orange Marilyn, a silk screen done in 1964. While the Cubist Picasso had gravitas, the Orange Marilyn had exuberance: it was as though a fruit-hatted Carmen Miranda had just shown up at a funeral.
However opposite these pictures were, they both worked as historical objects, and they worked as objects of beauty. While the Picasso was deep and serious, the Warhol was radiant and buoyant. The Picasso added up to the sum of its parts: artistic genius combined with powerful thought combined with prodigious skill combined with the guided hand equals masterpiece. The Warhol was more than the sum of its parts: silk screen, photo image of popular actress, repetitive imagery, the unguided hand, equals… masterpiece.
Woman with Pears, Pablo Picasso, 1909
36.25 x 28.875 in.
“How,” said Lacey, “can an artist have no effect on you for years and then one day it has an effect on you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Warhol. I’m a proud owner, you know. A small flower picture, but still…”
“Darling, I call that the perverse effect. Those things that you hate for so long are insidiously working on you, until one day you can’t resist them anymore. They turn into favorites. It just takes a while to sort out the complications in them. Those artworks that come all ready to love empty out pretty quickly. It’s why outsiders hate the art we love; they haven’t spent time with it. You and I see things again and again whether we want to or not. We see them in galleries, we see them in homes, we see them in the art magazines, they come up at auction. Outsiders see it once, or hear about it after it’s been reduced to an insult: ‘It’s a bunch of squiggles that my kid could do.’ I would like to see a kid who could paint a Jackson Pollock. In a half second, any pro could tell the difference. People want to think Pollock’s not struggling, that he’s kidding. He’s not kidding. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.’ “
Marilyn, Andy Warhol, circa 1964
40 x 40 in.
“And I thought you were just in the service industry.”
“That’s my night job,” said Patrice.
They stopped at Sant Ambroeus for a panini at the bar. Patrice set up a dinner with her the next night at the Carlyle. “I’m leaving in four days, Lacey.”
“Oh,” she said with an edge of disappointment. “When are you back?”
“It depends on how the auction tomorrow night goes.”
They ate their sandwiches, and Lacey left for the gallery. Patrice stayed seated and watched Lacey through the glass window as she spoke with a young man on the street whom she seemed to know. Lacey was so vital with him, so animated, that Patrice wondered if she was as vital and animated with him. This moment, innocuous as it was, functioned as an ax blow to a tree: it didn’t knock him over, but it left him less steady. Then he was invited to join a Minnesota collector and Larry Gagosian at their table, where they would engage in a conversation about art so lustful that an eavesdropper would assume they were three randy guys discussing babes.
At the gallery, Lacey stopped by the front desk for messages. Donna, who had unveiled a new, unbecoming hairdo, handed her a few, and Lacey read them as she climbed the stairs. One was from Hinton Alberg, inviting her to join them for cocktails after the auction on Thursday. And one was from her old boyfriend Jonah Marsh, asking her to call back. Lacey hadn’t thought of Jonah Marsh for three years, and she guessed he had heard she was with Talley now, and would he look at my paintings? Lacey threw the message in her lowest drawer.
Talley summoned her into his office. “Eduardo Flores is going to be in Los Angeles next weekend, so I’m flying out with a shitload of transparencies,” he told her. “You’ll have to hold down the fort. The town will empty out after the auctions, so I think you’ll be fine. Just remember, ‘First, do no harm.’ “
“And if I sell anything, do I get a commission?”
“You won’t sell anything.”
“I’ll settle for five thousand on every million dollars I sell.”
“Oh hell, all right.”
36.
LACEY ARRIVED AT the Carlyle for her dinner with Patrice. Her salary at Talley’s had given her not only a living wage, but enough spare money, if there is such a thing, to keep her well clothed without having to dip into her reserves. She looked elegant enough that she could move across the lobby without a disapproving head turn, and in fact she got a few approving, inviting, head turns. Elegance in the Carlyle lobby was common, but youthful elegance was not.
She went to the desk and asked for Patrice Claire. The clerk rang the room—after getting her full name—then pointed to the elevator. The operator pulled aside a brass folding gate and cranked an iron lever around to 21. His head tilted back and he looked just above her eye line during the ascent. The elevator landed, and the operator did a precision adjustment to ensure there was no fault line between the cage and the hallway floor. “To the right,” he said.
Patrice opened the door, and over his shoulder, the first object Lacey saw was a small Picas
so drawing: a nude reclining against nothing, all line and space, set in a dusky gold frame. He gave her a European kiss on each cheek and brought her into the small corner apartment; a hotel room that he owned. A large window looked over the rooftops to Central Park as the lights of the city beyond it were starting to twinkle on.
Lacey looked out over the city, south to the Plaza Hotel and north to Harlem, and said, “This will be a nice place to watch the apocalypse.”
She turned and looked at him up and down as he waited for her full attention. Patrice did look attractive. He had completed his transformation from the oily Euro she had met at Sotheby’s almost four years ago into an Armani guy with regular hair that no longer made her queasy to touch.
“I thought we’d eat in the room. The food is from the restaurant, and with the view—”
“Let’s go get a drink in the bar first,” Lacey said.
“But we can have one here.”
“Yes, but then no one will see how great we look.”
They walked around the block first, each proud to be on the other’s arm. The sun was just dropping, and the bedecked, bejeweled mannequins in the store windows were like saluting soldiers as they strolled in their enchanted state of opulent seduction. They walked a few blocks and asked for an outside table at La Goulue. They explained they were just going to have drinks, and even though prime dinner hour was approaching when the outdoor tables were prized, the restaurant could hardly refuse such a civility.
Like their drinks, their date was perfectly blended. Patrice, desirous of Lacey, was the subtle engine driving them back to the Carlyle, and Lacey’s nonchalant “let’s wait and see” demeanor kept the ending unknown to both of them. This was Patrice’s chance to legitimize their previous dalliances with a full courtship press.
Now, feeling the kind of euphoria that can overtake you at this time of day, at this temperature, at this level of breeze, after one drink, when the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable, Lacey and Patrice went back to the Carlyle. Patrice knew that tonight would be their first opportunity, if her signals were interpreted correctly, for real sex, real lying-down sex, not standing-up sex or sitting-on-a-desk sex.