An Object of Beauty

by STEVE MARTIN

  “Where’d we get that?” said Eduardo, looking around.

  The other question that was on Talley’s mind was one that only Stirling could answer: “What can it be like to sleep with Blanca?” Talley stood behind her and stared at her bare neck when he was supposed to be looking at the Lam.

  The narrow hallway forced them to line up, Gayle shoulder to shoulder with Eduardo, squeezing Talley to the rear, making him leave the room last. But he could still hear her remark to Eduardo: “You know what would look good in the guest bedroom? Pilot Mouse! I have some transparencies I was going to show to Dean Valentine, but I’ll show them to you first.” This remark was intended to get Flores’s blood flowing, as Dean Valentine made every other contemporary collector a pretender. Hinton Alberg’s collection of seven hundred paintings seemed paltry compared with Valentine’s twelve hundred. His sweet-science combination of a keen eye for new work and a vacuum cleaner mentality meant he got everywhere first. He once sneaked into a Manhattan art fair a day before it opened by disguising himself as a janitor in order to get first crack at the best in the show. But Talley thought Gayle had misjudged her man. Flores never thought of himself as a competitor; he just liked art.

  Initiation, Wilfredo Lam, 1950

  72.8 x 66.9 in.

  Dinner was called. The service was stealthy and invisible; new plates were slipped in like playing cards. The conversation was exclusively about art, not so much art as spiritual metaphor, but art as advanced thing, with beauty being an asset like the sleek lines of a Buick: a really nice thing to have, but it still had to get you there. Gayle Smiley perked up at every mention of artists she represented and fell into irritated silence when any other artist was mentioned, including Goya. Talley scored points by mentioning Gober’s playpen, but he still didn’t understand what it was.

  Gayle was more like a great basketball player than an art dealer: she unfailingly covered her man, making it impossible for Talley to throw him a pass. However, Talley knew that there would be a moment after dinner when Gayle would have to go vomit, leaving her man wide open. When she left, precisely after dessert, Talley took Flores aside and said, “I like the new direction. I left a transparency of a Pilot Mouse picture next to your bed. There could be some fakes out there, so be careful. This one is genuine. I’m assuming the Lam’s not for sale, but if it ever is…”

  Dinner wrapped up with everyone in a stupor, and Talley made his way to the hotel on foot, whistling drunkenly in the balmy night, one hand in his pocket, the other dangling his coat over his back with one finger like Sinatra. Back in his room, the phone rang.

  “Hey, you in?”

  “Yes, darlin’, come on up.”

  A few moments later, Cherry Finch was at his door, and soon they were tugging at each other’s clothes. These rendezvous remained undisclosed even to their closest friends, and their total discretion meant that they could go on forever.

  40.

  PATRICE CLAIRE was in Paris alone, and he didn’t know why. Every bistro lunch, every cafe dinner, every evening engagement, would have been better with Lacey present. He wanted his social group to meet her, to like her, to see her as he did, as an extra measure of sunlight in the room. He knew she would stand up to his friends’ rigid appraisals, because Lacey never tried to impress with manners; she impressed with wit and daring. He could imagine his stuffiest Parisian cohort tilting back on his heels, trying to get a wider look at her. Patrice wanted Lacey’s take on everything in his world: what was the best food, which were his best clothes, what was his best quality.

  It was eight a.m. in Los Angeles, eleven a.m. in New York, and five p.m. in Paris. Barton Talley was boarding a plane at LAX, and Patrice was calling Lacey at the gallery, his first communication with her since the rapturous Carlyle night. Donna put him through upstairs, announcing who it was. Lacey bowed her finger on the extension button.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Thinking about your dick,” she said. Somehow, this was a more welcome response than if she had said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” They talked for one hour, ending with phone sex that was as frustrating as it was fulfilling. Lacey’s palm gripped the front of her chair as she rubbed against her wrist, her other elbow on the desk with the phone held under her hair. Afterward, she walked down the gallery stairs with a just-fucked look so evident that it made Donna wonder if a deliveryman had slipped by her.

  Patrice had promised to be back in New York in two weeks, but Lacey knew he would be there by Thursday, so she kept her evenings open.

  Talley stopped by the gallery after his plane landed. He looked exhausted, so she postponed until tomorrow the grilling she was about to give him. If he was going to be dragged off to jail, she thought he should be freshly shaven.

  41.

  I SHOWED UP at Lacey’s that night at eight p.m. She was making pasta for Angela, Sharon, and me, the recipe for which she had gleaned from The New York Times Magazine, and tossing together a clarifying drink called an Aviation, which has to be made in a batch because after the first one you’re too drunk to make any more.

  When the drinks had taken effect, I was treated like the gay friend, privy to all gossip, allowed to hear the girls’ most detailed sexual experiences. I even found myself retorting with catty comments that I imagined a stereotypical gay invitee might interject amid the squeals and coughing fits generated by spit takes. Lacey detailed the earlier phone encounter with Patrice and then would repeat it this way: she would say, “It was an ordinary, boring day, except for the…” then she would mouth the words phone sex. “Yes,” she would go on, “except for the [mouthed] phone sex, it was a very ordinary day.” Once, the phone rang during dinner. Lacey looked over at us and said, “That must be my phone sex.” This sent us into fits whenever we could work “phone sex” into the conversation, and things got sillier and sillier as all of us contributed, intoning the unimportant words at full volume and finishing the sentence by mouthing the last two words only: “Now where did I put that phone sex?” We were aching so much that we imposed a moratorium on saying “phone sex,” which, like an Arab/Israeli cease-fire, took longer to take effect than it should have.

  During an interlude of sobriety, figurative only, we each filled in the others on our lives. Angela, the most practical of us, was likely to be married within the year and living in Seattle. Sharon had fallen in love with a downtown theater actor and was focusing on theater fund-raising so her boyfriend would have a place to act. And I had broken through at ARTnews magazine with an article on Jeff Koons’s relation to Pop Art, where I made the case that Pop had become a genre unto itself, like landscape and still life, and was therefore no longer ironic by definition. I didn’t get to explain the premise of my piece to the women, because my floor time had been cut short by a contest to see who could say the word dirigible without laughing.

  Angela and Sharon shuffled out when the evening had deflated like a whoopee cushion after the joke’s over, and I lingered because Lacey indicated for me to linger. She wanted to get my take on the Vermeer situation, and I sat rapt as she unfolded the story. She really didn’t need me to hear it, because she never asked me what to do, and I had no clue what to tell her. I did think that it was symptomatic that her life fell naturally into states of intrigue, while I was always moving in a world where nothing changed.

  Lacey finally arrived at the conclusion that the only questionable evidence was the Vermeer in the bins and that everything else could be explained as being on the right side of the law. This frustrated her. She wanted to go into work tomorrow steaming, but she couldn’t quite. She finally found an angle that could work her up into a frenzy.

  Tuesday morning she left a note on Barton Talley’s desk: “I need to talk to you.” Each word was underlined for emphasis. An hour later, Barton appeared at her office door with nonchalance, not picking up on the underlining.

  Lacey looked up. “Oh,” she said, “I need to see you.”

  “That’s w
hat the note said,” Talley responded.

  “In your office,” she commanded.

  Lacey was trying to funnel her energy into one pure welder’s arc of white heat that would sear Talley’s forehead, but she kept feeling herself slipping back into unwelcome calm.

  “Sit down,” Talley invited her.

  Lacey, thinking she was being stern, said, “I’d rather stand,” then she sat down.

  “Look,” she said, “why didn’t you go to Boston?”

  “When?”

  “When you sent me.”

  “Lacey, do you realize you work for me, not the other way around?”

  “You used me.”

  “You work for me. I’m supposed to use you.”

  “You used me in an off-contract way.”

  “We don’t have a contract.” Talley’s responses were all said with a half-smile that indicated to Lacey he considered this repartee and not grounds for dismissal. So she went on.

  “Why didn’t you go to Boston?”

  “I told you, I was trying to avoid a certain group of trustees.”

  “Okay, so that’s bullshit. Next.”

  “Uh, you go next.”

  “As long as I’ve known you, you have never been shy, perturbed, or cowed. An art dealer doesn’t live on tact. You sent me because of the two men. You wanted me to carry something back that you didn’t want to be caught carrying back.”

  Talley got up, walked to the office door. “I didn’t know what it would be,” he said, and then he closed the door. “Do you know what it was, Lacey?”

  “They showed it to me before they sealed it,” she said.

  Talley paused and thought over this statement, assigning numeric value to its possible truth. The number came up low.

  “No, they didn’t,” he said.

  “I steamed it open,” said Lacey.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “I think I do.”

  “It was like sending back a finger of a kidnap victim. Grotesque. I didn’t expect it.”

  “And the two men?”

  “FBI.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Why ‘Oh, good’?”

  “Because if they were the crooks, you’d probably ask me to sleep with one of them. Wouldn’t you.”

  There was a second of silence, then they both broke into laughter.

  “Wouldn’t you, you fucker!” said Lacey, simultaneously screaming and muffling her own voice.

  “Only off-contract,” Talley said.

  Then Lacey got serious. “Don’t mistake this smile for ‘problem solved.’ I don’t want to be the dupe who gets ten to twenty.”

  “We wanted evidence that they had the pictures. The FBI guys acted as go-betweens to the thieves. I was expecting a photograph of the painting next to today’s paper, something like that. But these jerks are not us. They don’t handle with care. I didn’t know they were going to deliver that night. I got a call and told them to give it to you. I didn’t realize you were Nancy Drew.”

  “And why you?”

  “It started years ago when I was in Boston. I was the expert; I had written essays on the Vermeer. The FBI came to me to authenticate if the situation ever came up in New York. The thieves tried contacting the FBI years ago, but the agent couldn’t confirm that the picture they let him glimpse was the real thing, and the deal fizzled.”

  “So none of the pictures have been returned,” Lacey said, which was her own test of authenticity.

  “No. These pictures probably won’t be returned until the next generation. Deathbed confession sort of thing.”

  Lacey had heard nothing but plausibility, yet everything Talley was saying was rendered implausible by the corpus delicti in the bins, and she didn’t know how to handle it. But directness had worked so far, so she decided to produce the body. She stood up.

  “Sit, just sit,” she said to Talley, and she left the office. She went back to the bins, looked at the slot where the Vermeer still dumbly sat. She pulled it out and grabbed a box cutter on the way back to the office.

  When she walked into the office with the package, Talley said, “Oh.”

  She carefully sliced open the tape and took out the painting while he sat. She rested it on Talley’s office easel and stood back, crossing her arms.

  “And?” said Talley.

  “And you’re under arrest if you don’t explain.”

  “You’re one to be talking about arrest, Lacey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve had a few conversations with Cherry Finch.”

  Lacey stopped still. She turned her attention back to the Vermeer. “What about this?”

  Talley put the intercom on speaker and rang Donna. He indicated to Lacey to show him the edge of the cardboard box. “Donna, what’s inventory item 53876?”

  “Oh… okay… ,” said Donna, rattling around on a keyboard. “That’s the… let’s see… that’s the Johannes Vermeer,” she said, pronouncing the J in Johannes.

  “Okay, thank you,” said Talley. “Now, Lacey Drew, if Donna, who is my Connecticut client’s quidnunc daughter—”

  “What?” said Donna, who was still on the phone.

  “Oh, sorry, Donna. I meant to hang up.” Talley pressed the intercom button. “If Donna knows we’ve got a Vermeer in here, do you think we have a serious problem?”

  Lacey put her index finger to her chin and shifted her hips, posing herself like a Kewpie doll.

  “Turn the Vermeer around,” said Talley.

  Lacey did, resting it backward on the easel. “Read the label.”

  “Johannes Vermeer, blah blah, Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “What does that tell you?” said Talley.

  “What’s it supposed to tell me? It sounds like it’s getting worse for you.”

  “Wrong museum,” said Talley. “The stolen Vermeer’s from the Gardner. The label says the Met. This is a nineteenth-century copy. Vermeer didn’t bring much money until then; that’s when the fakers got busy. Very precise, meant to fool. The size is correct to the centimeter. Bernard Berenson vetoed this one and found the real one for Mrs. Gardner. He was a dog, but he had a good eye. In the twenties this picture got donated as a study picture to the Met. There was a moment where we thought the bad guys were going to produce the real one as evidence, keeping the rest hostage while we examined it. We intended to swap the real picture out of its frame and stick in this pretender. The Met agreed that this was a lamb that could be sacrificed.”

  Lacey was deflated. “Rats. I wanted there to be a crime,” she said. “It would have been so much more fun.”

  42.

  PATRICE CLAIRE sat at his favorite restaurant in Paris, Le Petit Zinc, surrounded by cheerful friends who were toasting his fortieth birthday on a beautiful and still summer night when the sun wouldn’t set until ten p.m., and all he could think was, What am I doing here? He had made several trips to New York during the summer to see Lacey, and each seemed to enforce his suspicion that she was in love with him. While his friends laughed and chatted, he left a phone message for Lacey: “Lacey, dinner Thursday?” He would fly to New York for no reason at all except to see her, unable to wait the two weeks to return to Manhattan that was his usual cycle. He had noted that phone sex with Lacey was better than real sex with his standby Parisian girlfriend, who once had intrigued him—but now looking at her was like looking at cardboard. Later that evening, when he told his standby that he was breaking it off, she responded with a “puh” so indifferent that he thought she had misheard him.

  Patrice left Lacey a message with Donna, and wondered whether to go ahead and book the flight and just chance it. When he finally got a message back (“Come on over, sailor boy, I’ll let you swab my decks”), he booked a Thursday Concorde, not because he didn’t want to risk being late for dinner, but because he was so eager to get there that he wanted to arrive before he took off, which only the Concorde could accomplish.

  As Patrice waited in the Concorde l
ounge, he noticed a change in the usual demographics. The Americans, English, and French were being displaced by Russians, Asians, and Arabs, who not only could afford to bring their entire families on the plane even though there was no discounted child’s fare, but would also buy blocks of seats so no one could sit next to them.

  A new level of wealth was emerging from the former Communists and the capitalist Chinese. Businesses lacking glamour, like mining and pipelines, bestowed riches on Russian entrepreneurs who had stunningly outmaneuvered organized crime and political kingpins. What one thousand dollars was to a millionaire, a million dollars was to the new billionaires. And what they spent on art was irrelevant to them and their lifestyles. Art was about to acquire the aura of an internationally recognizable asset, a unique and emotional emblem of the good life. While Patrice Claire was only a normal millionaire, incapable of the extended reach of the new global money, he had the advantage of expertise and intuition in a delicate business.

  Even though the Concorde was sleek and magnificent, looking like a perfect robot bird, it was still a crate. It rattled like a jalopy as it hypersped down the runway, it jerked and clanked as it climbed, and it gave the illusion of stalling as engines were suddenly cut back because of noise regulations. And once aloft, it sailed dully like any other aircraft. The seats were cramped, and if someone took the seat beside you, it was easy to feel that your costly flight had been downgraded to a Bombay train.

  When Patrice landed at JFK, he felt as though he had been inside a dart that was launched into the Paris sky and stuck into a passenger gate in New York. He called Lacey from the taxi, but six p.m. was a bad time to reach anyone, and he got message machines all around. He made reservations at Le Bernardin, which was intended to send a message to Lacey, and to himself, that this was a special night and she was worth every extravagance. It was seven p.m. by the time he arrived at the Carlyle, having already left another message for Lacey at her apartment. In case they don’t connect, he said, meet him at nine p.m. at the restaurant. His actions, his mood, his methodology, indicated the presence of an unrealized kernel of hope in his soul: this night they would walk into the restaurant as two people on a deliciously serious date and emerge as two people in love.