An Object of Beauty: A Novel (20 page)

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.”

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 lounge, 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.

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.