An Object of Beauty: A Novel (23 page)

“When did this start?” said Cornelia.

Patrice smiled at her. “Start? I’m not sure it has. She said to go ahead without her.”

Patrice always laughed with the Albergs. Cornelia’s curiosity about the forceful personalities that populated their collectors’ world and Hinton’s lack of interest in anything that moved except by art courier made them lively, made them yin and yang, and Patrice could bounce along over the entire spectrum of conversation. But tonight, as their chatter crisscrossed the table, Cornelia noticed something in Patrice: his eyes shifting from the table to the restaurant entrance. Sometimes a glimmer would come to his face as he spotted the tip of a skirt or a sweater-covered arm that edged inside the front door, and occasionally the anticipatory brightening of his face would turn Cornelia toward the door, too, to see nothing, a mistake, not Lacey.

During the dinner, Acquavella dropped by and jousted with Hinton.
“When are you going to get rid of that stuff and get some real paintings?”

“Well, when are you going to offer me something great?”

“Oh, I’ve just got Van Goghs and Monets, nothing any good.”

“I’ll come by tomorrow, Bill.”

“Okay, I’ll dig something out for you; get you into some quality merchandise. All right, see you later, buddy.”

Cornelia was amused by Bill, but she again noted Patrice’s distraction from the table and attention to the door. They covered no topic that wasn’t attended by this little punctuation. By dessert, Lacey had not shown up, and one last time Patrice gave a now mournful head twist toward the entrance. Cornelia looked at him, squinted her eyes with displeasure, and said, “Women can be so stupid.”

III

LACEY, NOW AN UPTOWN WOMAN, felt an increasing tug toward Chelsea. She was like a cat sensing the first vibrations of the oncoming earthquake that was about to rumble through the art market. There were plenty of small signs to be successfully interpreted. Years earlier, SoHo, the former New York gallery center, had proven too successful. Rising rents killed all but the strongest galleries. So the smaller galleries moved leftward to Chelsea, stranding and branding the ones that remained in SoHo as unhip. New galleries sprouted in Chelsea overnight, lacking only fungi domes.

Lacey was aware of an unwieldy rhetorical shift that took place between the Upper East Side and the lower West Side. Art on the Upper East Side was referred to as beautiful, exceptional, serene, exquisite, and
important
. Art below 26th Street was described in the “language of relational aesthetics” or something like that, an argot with a semantic shelf life of about six months. Now artworks “related to spatial, representational, and material functions in contexts defined by movement and transition.” An artist who painted a face was now “playing with the idea of a portraiture,” or “exploring push-pull aesthetics,” or toying with contradictions like “menacing–slash–playful,” but he or she was never, ever, simply painting a face.

Patrice Claire, who had chased Lacey into the twenty-first century like a horse chasing a train, and who had allowed humiliations to collect
unacknowledged in his psyche, was invited to dinner with Lacey’s good friend, me, at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar. “Oh, you must spend time with Daniel,” I could hear her saying, “we’re so close.”

Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar was a vertical restaurant squeezed between town houses. Quaint and charming, it had silver salt and pepper chicks on the tables and tiny dining rooms trimmed in mother’s lace curtains and red-and-white-checkered wallpaper. The rooms were connected by narrow stairs that necessitated an excellent grip on the handrail to avoid a deadly, headlong tumble after a round of cocktails. All this atmosphere was reflected in the bill, which soared into triple digits even for single diners. So when Patrice showed up for dinner with Lacey, it would have been romantic, had it not been for me.

I could see his taxi pull up, and Patrice emerged looking windblown, even though there was no wind. Dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and no tie, he could have been a fashion model who had been directed to get out of the car as though he were carefree, wealthy, and masculine. My theory of his insecurity about me vanished, replaced by my own insecurity about looks, accomplishment, and money, everything that Patrice effortlessly possessed.

But Patrice was generous toward me, asking questions about my writing, about the art world and the way I saw it. I think he liked that I was not cynical about it, this insular collective that is so vulnerable to barbs from the outside (“Three million dollars for
that
?”), a world that can shield itself from criticism by the implication that its detractors are rubes. So Patrice and I hit it off, and Lacey was in top form, funny and caustic. And naughty:

“Oh, Patrice,” she said midconversation, “you like Balthus because you like underpants.”

Patrice included me in his response: “Could anyone but Lacey make the word
underpants
sound like a nasty verb?”

“Well, you are a horn dog,” said Lacey.

Patrice smiled while he tried to parse “horn dog,” concluding it was both funny and accurate, and looked over at me. “What am I going to do with this creature?”

I don’t know if the next question Patrice asked me came because he was now satisfied that I was not a threat, hence a few personal questions were okay, or if he was still trying to figure out my status with Lacey:

“Do you have a girlfriend, Daniel?”

“I am currently between girlfriends,” I said.

“You wish,” said Lacey.

Then I stupidly told them my dating stories, which I realized were all nonstories when I saw their eyes glaze over and stare into their drinks.

“There must be hundreds of women in the art world,” said Patrice.

“Yes,” I said. “They like artists, not so much art writers. We seem to be on the fringe. Plus, I’m benign. Benign is not a trait women go for.”

“But Daniel,” said Lacey, “you are in the most desirable category of all for women of our age, the employed, handsome dork.”

We all laughed, and I secretly thought, Could I have finally entered into a desirable category?

Precisely after the appetizers, when the last dish was cleared, as though she were waiting for elbow room, Lacey said, “I took a lease on a space in Chelsea.”

“A gallery?” I said.

“Yeager Arts,” she said. “I’ve got connections uptown and downtown.”

Patrice said, “You’re tired of working for the man.”

Lacey shriveled. “Oh, Patrice, we don’t say ‘the man.’ ”

He looked over at me to check; I agreed with a sympathetic nod.

“Where?” he asked.

“It’s at 525 West Twenty-fifth Street. Fifth floor. There are lots of small galleries moving in. I grabbed a space.”

“Commercial or conceptual?” I said.

This seemed to stump her. The Chelsea galleries were carefully and willfully defining themselves, breaking away from the more established galleries by presenting art that was “difficult,” backing it up with the academic grad school rhetoric. This was art that maintained the irony that began in the sixties, and irony provided an escape valve in case the visuals became too pretty. It was as if a pitcher had decided it was gauche to throw fastballs but still threw fastballs in a mockery of throwing fastballs. These were the conceptual galleries, which garnered respect by defiance and distance, which went
young
, which made you feel that they possessed the cabalistic code that unlocked the inner secrets of art.

I had more trouble explaining commercial galleries because the word implies saccharine merchandise headed for the space above the living room sofa. But Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman are not saccharine, they are simply
known.
Commercial galleries dealt in artists, famous or not, whose work was in the tradition of something before it and therefore was, in some way, understood.

Lacey got it, Patrice got it, but neither cared. Lacey was opening a gallery, and she needed to find artists, conceptual or commercial, and she was excited.

“Why not both?” she said in answer to my question. “It should be ready in nine months.”

“How come so long?” I said.

“Because you’re painting it and I know you’re slow,” said Lacey.

We laughed. But Patrice was drifting out of the conversation. With Lacey’s adventure would come new men, and he knew she was careless.

He took Lacey to her home that night and slept with her. Afterward, still between sheets, with a drink beside him, he said to a distracted Lacey, “Do you need money for your gallery? I’ll be happy to help out.”

“What would I be if I didn’t do it myself?” she said. “Besides, I have money.”

As noble as Lacey’s self-sufficiency was to Patrice, he knew that her refusal kept him out, kept her free of him.

There was a long silence, which, if made audible, would have sounded with the jangle and clatter of Patrice’s racing mind and the singular drone of Lacey’s will. Finally, hoping for a reprieve from her increasing remoteness, Patrice said to her, probing for conversation, “What are you thinking?”

She lowered her voice to a comic gravel to cut the harshness of her response. “You don’t want to know,” she said. Patrice suddenly felt very tired.

IN THE SPRING of 2001, Lacey took her beloved Warhol
Flowers
and auctioned it at Christie’s—she was too uneasy to deal with Sotheby’s. When she heard talk on the street—the art street—that a small
Flowers
could bring as much as eighty thousand dollars, a profit to her of perhaps sixty-four thousand, practicality prevailed. Whatever heartache she felt at selling the painting was soothed by the stunning check she received after it brought a warming one hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. Warhol was on the move, and so was she. This would cushion her against the hard landings that can occur when one is in business for oneself. Pilot Mouse had promised her two paintings, not to be sold until her gallery opened; and his friend Carey proved to be an interesting painter, and it was decided that he would be her first show. She liked his work because it was essentially inexplicable, and she knew it would keep her gallery from seeming too easy. She was also a regular at the studio of a beautiful African-American girl just out of art school, Latonya Walsh, whose racy and racial images would be her second show. She knew both these attractive artists would show well at their opening night party, both on the wall and as physical specimens.

She stayed at Barton Talley’s through the summer running the gallery, and Barton was happy to have her, as it allowed him to have his Hamptons weekends and summer jaunts to Europe. He had no rivalry with her; he was experienced enough to know that gallerists come and
go, and he saw her departure not as creating competition, but as developing connections.

Yeager Arts was scheduled to open after Labor Day, when the streets of Chelsea would be teeming, when the festivities would bloom with art openings that included handsome servers bearing plastic flutes of champagne and patrons backing clumsily into paintings as their chat circles grew wider and wider. The hoopla was a month long, because galleries rolled out their events so they didn’t all occur on the same night. When Lacey’s opening was postponed several weeks for several reasons, she knew there would still be enough excitement to spare for her virgin upstairs space.

ONE MORNING she woke to a late summer day so glorious, she was compelled to take an early bike ride down to Chelsea to sit in the middle of her still-unhung gallery and contemplate the potential of its blank walls. There was one week left before she was to open.

Outside, it was cloudless and already warming at nine a.m. The silken air slipstreamed around her even though she was trying to be as unaerodynamic as possible. She sat erect, steering the bike with one hand while her other arm swung free. Though now, at thirty-one years of age, she was more respectful of helmets and sunscreen, today she was unhampered by safety apparatus, letting the wind blow through her hair as she turned her face toward the morning sun. This was a free day; Barton Talley was in, and she was attending to the impractical side of her business, allowing creative daydreams to overrule the duty call of daily business.