An Object of Beauty

by STEVE MARTIN

  The Carlyle was still old-fashioned, and phone messages were delivered on handwritten notes that were slid under the doorway by an unseen hand. After his shower, and after dressing in a looser-cut suit than his pre-Lacey, tight-waisted Parisian standby, Patrice noticed a small, folded message poking an edge out from under the doorsill. He opened it and read, “So sorry, something came up and I couldn’t reach you. I’ll call you later. Old friend in town and can’t change.” Patrice cursed the shower and sat on the bed, the message dangling from his fingers like a notification of death, and he wondered what had just happened.

  What had just happened was this: Earlier, I had called Lacey at work and said, “There’s an opening tonight at a small gallery in Chelsea. A not very interesting young artist, but Pilot Mouse is supposed to be there. They’re friends or something. Want to go?”

  “What time?” she said. “I’ve got a dinner tonight.”

  “The opening’s six to eight. Party afterwards,” I said.

  “Where do I meet you?” she said.

  “The bar at Bottino.”

  Lacey had picked up Patrice’s message but hadn’t responded, assuming she would meet him at Le Bernardin. But now there was a stronger pull elsewhere. She left a message for Patrice, not ringing his room, as she dashed out the door.

  Lacey came into the bar wearing her usual too-small sweater and a cloche straw hat with a summer umbrella hung over her arm. When she came into the room, there was an adjustment in the hierarchy of women. The most beautiful remained undisturbed in their fixed positions, but Lacey shot to the top of every other list: cutest, sexiest, most fun. We had a drink, and a few other people joined in. Everyone was talking about Pilot Mouse and was he really going to be there. Yes, for sure, they said. He’s supporting his friend’s show. You know he’s not reclusive, he’s just wanted everywhere, so when he doesn’t show up he’s missed and mythologized. He’s handsome, oh yes, he’s handsome and mysterious. Doesn’t speak much. Very serious. Gay? Maybe, someone said. I heard not, said another knowingly.

  We all marched around the corner and entered an industrial building with a clanking elevator operated by a guy playing a radio. A dozen people crowded into the cab as it jolted and lurched to the seventh floor. The gab was already under way when the door screeched open and we spilled out into the hallway. We filled it like gas expanding and trooped our way around several bends, following hand-drawn signs bearing colored arrows. Finally, the gallery was in sight, indentified by a clutch of young people standing in the hall with plastic conical cups of white wine, a few of them smoking.

  We entered the gallery, an unexpectedly large space for such a small door, where perhaps a hundred invitees, friends of invitees, and miscellaneous interlopers gradually raised the volume to crushing intensity. Lacey and I pulled away from our default group, heading toward the table of wine, which was pour-your-own. The art on the walls was the kind that resists normal interpretation: paper, sometimes cardboard, thumbtacked to the wall with collaged images taped or glued to its surface, and nearby, a plinth displaying a spool of thread, or a safety pin, or something else ordinary under a Plexi box. Lacey and I looked at one of these mysteries and then looked at each other, but I couldn’t knock it because who knows? A lot of strange art had achieved classic status over the last twenty years, making criticism of the next new thing dangerous. Lacey, however, shrugged, leaned in to my ear, and whispered, “Spare me.”

  Even though there was no music, the gallery pulsed to a beat. Thursday is the standard night for openings in Chelsea, and when galleries’ biorhythms aligned so that a dozen or more openings fell on the same night, there was blastoff. This was prom night for the smart set, a night to be smug, cool, to dress up or dress down, and to bring into focus everything one loves about oneself and make it tangible. It was possible for young men to set their sights on a particular woman and “coincidentally” run into her at three different galleries until there was enough in common to start a conversation, or rue for days one’s failure to say hello to the object of desire and then run an ad in the Village Voice‘s “Missed Connections” column.

  Art was being flown in from Europe or carted up from downtown basement studios. It was being made by men, women, minorities, and majorities, all with equal access. Whether it was any good or not, the sheer amount of it—to the dismay of cranky critics—was redefining what art could be. Since the 1970s, art schools had shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. Yet this was the first time in conventional art history where no single movement dominated, no manifesto declared its superiority, and diversity bounced around like spilled marbles on concrete.

  If the history of humor could be charted, visual art of this period might be seen as its next frontier. Stand-ups were still doing stand-up, but Jeff Koons made a forty-foot-high sculpture of a puppy built out of twenty-five tons of flowers and soil in pots, and Maurizio Cattelan made a life-size sculpture of the pope flattened by a meteor that had just fallen through a skylight. This piece was made only a year before he convinced his gallery director to walk around for a month dressed as a bright pink penis.

  We were about to leave when there was a stir by the entrance. A small coterie of people moved toward another group standing midgallery, and there was a moment where I thought they were like two galaxies about to pass through each other. But there was a halt, and the two groups became one. The galaxy metaphor is apt, as this commingling produced two centers. One was a young man we had identified as the artist whose work was on the walls, but the second man seemed to have all the gravity. Lacey looked over, and her first identification in the lineup was a woman: “Oh shit, Tanya Ross.” But her second identification was friendlier. “Oh,” she said, “Jonah Marsh.” She had not seen him in three years, and Jonah had grown from boy to man. His black hair looked uncombed, but the truth was probably a meticulous opposite. Lacey led the way toward the group, and Tanya Ross turned first.

  La Nona Ora, Maurizio Cattelan, 1999

  Lifesize.

  “Hi, Lacey,” she said stiffly.

  Lacey introduced me, and fixated as I was on Tanya’s screen-test beauty, she seemed not to notice me. Tanya reluctantly introduced Lacey and me to a few more people by their first name only, then she turned to Jonah Marsh and said, “And this is Pilot Mouse.”

  Lacey cocked her head and uttered a long, slow, “Hey…” It was the first time I had seen her unsettled. Then she recovered, saying, “I owe you a phone call; I’ve been out of the country.” It was as though she had backed into someone at a high-rise and accidentally bumped him out the window but hoped no one had noticed. Unwanted by Tanya, Lacey shouldered her way into the troupe like a boxer muscling her opponent back against the ropes. Lacey’s uptown moves, high-style reserve with a playful edge, had been perfected, but she hadn’t used her downtown moves—fearless sexuality with a flapping fringe of pluck and wit—in a long time. There was an instant breeze from her, and she was the new alternate center of this group of stars. When she spoke to the young artist whose show it was and whom she had just displaced, she didn’t betray herself by flattering him but instead asked vibrant questions about his intent. And after his unparsable response, including a passage where he said he was “blurring the boundaries between a thing and thought,” she said, “Thank you, I get lost sometimes,” while laying two fingers on his folded arm.

  We walked around Chelsea for a while. I was trying to make headway with Tanya Ross, who was clearly friends with Jonah Marsh, and Lacey, not knowing to what degree Tanya was a friend, was staying in Jonah’s sight, crossing his field of vision whenever Tanya got his attention. Then there was a discussion of food and drinks. Lacey declined, peculiarly, saying, “No, I’m meeting a friend.” The group mentioned Cia, a sushi bar around the corner. “Oh, jeez,” said Lacey, lying, “that’s where I’m meeting him.”

  I was relieved that the evening wasn’t over, because I wasn’t ready to give up on Tanya Ross. It was obvious to me that Tanya was no
t Pilot Mouse’s date, because she had clearly warmed to me and she didn’t seem duplicitous, unlike Lacey. She asked what I did, and when I told her I was a freelance art writer, there was no ho-hum blankness that overcame her. Instead she responded with, “Oh, how interesting!” No one had ever said that to me since birth. She even had the courtesy not to ask if I was published, so I volunteered that I wrote regularly for ARTnews, and for gallery catalogs. And when I told her I wrote an essay about the rare bird Arthur Dove for the Whitney show, her face brightened and she said, “I read that. I think.”

  At the restaurant, there was a seating war that appeared casual but if diagrammed would have looked like an Andy Warhol dance-step painting. With me across from Tanya, Lacey positioned herself so that every time Jonah looked at her, he was forcibly looking away from Tanya. With the seating chart done, Lacey excused herself from the table and walked toward the phone with a small swing of her hips.

  Patrice Claire sat in his Carlyle paradise, which had so quickly turned itself into hell. There was nothing with which to uplift himself; the repair was out of his control and completely in Lacey’s. He had canceled Le Bernardin, but this was not an act of power, it was one of grief. Lacey had said she would call. Did she mean tonight? He had ordered room service to keep him close to the phone. When it rang, he felt a surge of hope that he resented in himself. It was Lacey.

  “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t sure if you meant tonight. We never set a time… I’m downtown at Cia. I ran into an old friend. He’s great. Come down. I need to see you.”

  “I’ll find it,” said Patrice.

  Patrice was used to the steadfast responses of paintings, not the unpredictable responses of people. A discussion of a picture was a conversation of ultimate complexity and intrigue, irresolvable and ongoing. A conversation with Lacey was the same, except the picture did not strike out at him. He fantasized that he and Lacey would have a lifelong conversation—also irresolvable and ongoing—because their common subject would be a route to each other. He was stable and sane, an avid art enthusiast with the same mutant gene as the stamp collector, the coin collector, or the model train freak—except that there were glorious buildings erected solely to house and protect his objects of interest, objects that commanded the attention of scholars, historians, and news bureaus, giving undeniable proof that they were worthy of devotion. But because the objects of his adoration were inert, he was unaccustomed to mood swings. Especially volcanic ones that took place over a few seconds. He was angry that Lacey had canceled, unhappy that he would be seeing her in a group, disturbed that her old friend was male—yet he was eager to see her.

  Instead of the serenity and anticipation with which he would have arrived at Le Bernardin, he arrived at Cia with anxiety and vulnerability. He was too old for this place. It was a different crowd, with different slang and different references, a crowd ignorant of the nomenclature of the uptown art world. He did, however, understand sushi.

  He passed through the bar, and thankfully, it was an art bar and not a sports bar, so he wasn’t the shortest male in the gauntlet. He looked around the darkened restaurant when he heard Lacey shouting from the murk, “Patrice!”

  From my seat, I watched as Lacey ran up to Patrice, delivering an affectionate hug that seemed to me exaggerated. She took him to the group and introduced everyone, at least everyone she knew, and except for me and Tanya, whom he knew, there were lackluster hellos.

  Lacey squeezed back into her slot across from Pilot Mouse, with Patrice having to turn sideways to sit down. She seemed genuinely in love with Patrice, and genuinely trying to rekindle Jonah’s fleeting interest of three years ago. Looking back, I think that both behaviors were valid. To her this was natural, to Patrice it was unsettling, to me it was bewildering, and to Tanya Ross, who had matured normally, it was creepy. Tanya occasionally looked at me with an expressionless stare that I knew signified disgust. Although it seemed that Jonah Marsh was with Tanya tonight, I did notice his eyes glancing over to Lacey with metronomic regularity.

  As I reached over to refill her sake glass, Tanya looked at me oddly and said, “Have we met?”

  “I would have remembered,” I flirted.

  “You look familiar,” she insisted, and she sat in silence for a minute, trying to work it out.

  The party broke up, and Lacey hugged Pilot Mouse good-bye, her actions maintaining that they were just old friends, while Patrice stood by, correctly assuming that Pilot had already fucked her, or was about to again, which made him queasy. They took a taxi to her apartment, and Patrice came up for a few minutes, but this was not the end that he wanted for the night. So he made, enthusiastically, a date for the next night, but he knew Le Bernardin would be impossible on a Friday and he would be settling for a restaurant less major, less symbolic.

  He had been knocked backward, but a previously untouched part of his heart kept driving him forward, fueled by fresh emotions emerging from the wound, unknown and uncontrollable. Lacey gave him a ravishing kiss good night, then he walked east to Central Park, where he flagged down a cab. On the way back to the Carlyle, his mental reenactment of their last kiss told him, yes, she loves me, and he once again saw Lacey as an illuminating white light, forgetting that white is composed of disparate streaks of color, each as powerful as the whole.

  When Patrice called that afternoon, telling her the restaurant was Nello on Madison, walking distance from the Carlyle, Lacey said, “Can I shower at your apartment? I brought a change.” The idea of Lacey showering and changing at his apartment made his heart leap. This was a special gesture of ease, of closeness. Where he had been thrown down last night, he was now proportionately uplifted. This evening was suddenly more than a date; the details bore the assumption of attachment.

  Patrice opened the door after Lacey’s light rap. “Hello, lover,” she said, hitting at least three separate musical notes. Patrice, with comic timing, turned to look behind him. She kissed him hello, strutted into the apartment, and threw herself down on the sofa with a sigh of homecoming. The red lights from last night were turning to green. The bag on her arm slid off onto the carpet beside her. She pulled her knees up, draping her skirt between them as her fingers combed through her hair, spreading it out on the pillow like a peacock’s tail. Patrice sat and enjoyed the show.

  “Can you see my place from here?” said Lacey.

  “I don’t know,” said Patrice, “I haven’t tried.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’m an adult.”

  “I can see the Carlyle from the park, but I couldn’t tell which apartment was yours,” said Lacey.

  “Twenty-first floor. Can’t count to twenty-one?”

  “I can’t see the street level, smart guy. There’s no place to start counting.”

  Patrice looked at Lacey and wanted her right then, but he knew that immediate sofa sex would be an intense but short engagement, and he preferred the promise of a long entwinement between the perfumed sheets of the Carlyle’s king-size bed.

  After a shared glass of wine taken from Patrice’s personally stocked minifridge, Lacey took over the bathroom while he sat in the living room and listened to the sounds coming from behind the door. When he first heard the hard rain of the shower, the image of her naked, with her hands slipping over herself, rose and stayed in his mind. He visualized every move she might make with a washcloth, until finally he pictured her standing motionless under the rich flow of water, taking in the enveloping steam that cumulated around her like summer clouds.

  The jet-engine volume of the hair dryer went on for about ten minutes, then it stopped, and there was another ten minutes of intermittent jangling. He saw a quick flash of her, nude, as she dashed across the hallway to the bedroom, where she had hung up her change of clothes. A few minutes later, she came out dressed, still pulling her hair with a brush. “When are we supposed to be there?”

  “We are supposed to be there when we get there,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “but for normal people
what time are we supposed to be there?”

  “Eight o’clock.” Patrice liked what he saw in this snapshot. She looked sophisticated and confident. He liked that she still had a sense of the normal, and she was treating him as if they were living together. When she finally presented herself, she was wearing the amber necklace he had given her in St. Petersburg.

  She leaned against the wall and snaked the amber around her finger. “Remember this? You gave it to me on the night we got hot.”

  Madison Avenue was just beginning to flicker on. They walked down the street, sometimes arm in arm, sometimes with Lacey breaking away to physically exaggerate a point, walking backward, then slue-footing around to take his hand or slip her arm through the crook of his elbow. Her strut appropriately modified, her girlishness tempered and grown up for the richest shopping promenade in Manhattan, Lacey had artfully tailored her downtown vibrancy to an acceptable uptown chic.

  Nello was filling up quickly, but Patrice had clout. After being greeted with a genuine smile and handshake from the maitre d’, they were taken to a small, intimate table that was prime Nello real estate. They had a broad view of the restaurant and its select clientele, who were not the same habitues from even a few blocks down the street. Lacey scanned the room, able to take in all the faces because of a narrow strip of mirror that ran around the entire diameter of the restaurant.

  “No art dealers,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Art dealers don’t have dinners. They have lunches.”

  “Let’s have a prosecco.” Lacey laid her calf over Patrice’s ankle.

  A couple next to them was speaking French. Patrice turned and said in stern French, “You should mind your own business.”