An Object of Beauty: A Novel (24 page)

The sounds of New York were lighter today; fewer cars along the highway made the journey more pleasant, and the whir of Rollerbladers reminded her of the ball-bearing rumble of her childhood skates on a sidewalk. There was a siren in the distance, which she barely noticed. Colors were stark and crisp: there was the blue of the sky against the green of the grass, and Lacey’s sun-yellow shirt against the pure white of her shorts. And of course there was the occasional butthead who streaked by everyone with near-miss intentions. She thought she might
tour the entire perimeter of Manhattan, after a religious stop at her new gallery. Another siren.

She neared 54th Street, where the bike path emerged from under the highway trestle and the buildings retreated, giving the feeling that Manhattan was doing its best to have a prairie. She imagined her gallery and its accidental golden rectangle interior that would make hanging pictures a joy; and she visualized its cozy back room that would make any artwork hanging in it seem more special, shown to the important clientele only. A fire truck blared down the highway, annoying her. These sirens are ruining my day, she thought. When another and then another siren blared by, she understood: Oh, something’s happening.

She looked ahead—the sirens seemed to be headed south—but she saw nothing. A police action, she suspected. She continued down the path and sensed a disturbance in the mien of people who populated the next few hundred yards of path. Some were stalled, talking in groups, while some continued on as usual. She saw a car ahead, barely parked off the path, and a man sitting motionless inside with his foot holding the door wide open. As she neared, she could hear that he had the radio on. A few people were listening around the speaker in the car door. She slowed to a stop, putting her foot on the ground, leaning the bike against her thigh.

“What’s going on?” she said.

A Hispanic man turned his head toward her. “They think a plane flew into the World Trade Center.”

She looked downtown but could see only one of the giant buildings, as they lined up almost perfectly. There was a stream of black smoke starting to billow from a window-size puncture. She imagined that a stray Piper Cub, guided by a Sunday pilot, had misjudged a banking turn over the Hudson and couldn’t pull out in time. She ventured farther downtown, and still nothing changed much. People kept biking,
jogging, walking. She stopped again when she saw a small group of people who seemed to be aware of the news, and again she said, “What’s going on?”

“They think a plane crashed into the tower.”

“A Cessna or something?”

“A jet,” someone said.

She believed this report would be corrected, thinking the small plane scenario more logical, and she biked another mile down. Within minutes, she could see flames spewing from a high floor of the building like spitfire, and she paused, thinking how two-dimensional, how flat, it looked. She had to remind herself that as surreal an image as it was, it was also real. Horror was going on inside, and her distance from the site meant that the screams inside were falling silent before they reached her ears.

Decency told her she should not press forward, but her awareness that this moment was unique and probably historical drove her farther downtown. But the previously sparse crowds had turned thick. People were now moving en masse uptown along the bike path, talking unperturbedly, a migration of people away from the towers. Lacey could no longer cycle forward. She turned around, pedaled uptown, veered off onto 83rd Street, carried her bike upstairs, turned on the TV, and stared.

She looked at the towers, believing the camera angle was from her bike path point of view, seeing only one. Unaware that the north tower had fallen, she went to the kitchen for a bottle of water, returning in time to see a replay of the second tower imploding into rubble. She figured out that both towers had fallen, one while her back was turned to the south, cycling home, and one while she stood at her refrigerator. She looked out her window. She could see a slow movement of people heading north, walking safely down the center of West End Avenue, as all car traffic had stopped. The silence brought on by terror struck
Lacey as perversely serene, and it took her a while to notice that all air traffic had stopped, too, reducing Manhattan’s constant din to what it must have been like one hundred years earlier.

She went alone to Isabella’s for lunch and found it a busy restaurant, with patrons talking, laughing, ordering with puzzled looks while pointing at the menu. It wasn’t that life was going on as usual, it was that what had happened was not yet fully known. Over the next twenty-four hours, there would be a dampening in people’s gestures, activity, and volume.

Lacey stopped at a market, wondering if there would be a run on food; but there wasn’t. She bought enough for a few days and returned home. She sank into her sofa, transfixed by the television, her cell phone and landline jammed by traffic. She didn’t move until night came, eventually sitting in darkness, having forgotten to turn on even a lamp. The room was illuminated only by the blue glow of the TV news, while banners of text streamed under the newscasters, amid reports of a Pentagon attack, a delinquent president, a crash in the Pennsylvania woods. The nation grew still, an anesthetized giant waiting to figure out what was happening to it. That night in bed, she revisited the searing image of the tower shooting flames. It reminded her of something—which seemed impossible to her—but she didn’t know what.

She woke in the early morning and checked her phones: still dead. The TV was alive, however. She sat again watching while news tumbled over itself, and again she sat until ten p.m., never turning on a light in her apartment, because the TV was all she wanted and all that she needed. She assumed her parents were concerned for her, but there was no way to communicate, so she could only wait. She worried for her downtown friends, but the area was closed tight. The bridges and tunnels remained closed, stranding people where they were at the moment of penetration. She sat and watched.

Wednesday came and went. Thursday morning the phones were still
dead. Her cell phone had bars, but service was jammed. She walked outside a bit and wondered if New York had been this silent, ever. Even twenty minutes away from the television created an unease that something worse had happened, which required her to focus harder on the news and its flowing ticker tape of rumors and facts in order to catch up. For another day, she remained motionless in front of the TV, hours passing, night creeping over the city.

It was around nine p.m. when the door buzzer rang. She rose, her legs stiff from the last three days of cave dwelling, and spoke into her intercom.

“Hello?”

“It’s Carey. You okay?”

She buzzed him in; he climbed the stairs.

“I thought I’d check in. Nobody can reach anybody,” he said when she opened the door.

“How’d you get here?”

“I walked,” said Carey.

“Sixty blocks?”

“Yeah.” His head gestured toward the TV. “Anything?” he asked.

“All the same,” she said.

They were now in the dark, all connections to the outside frozen, all considerations for the outside in suspension. Whatever was about to happen was excusable, was necessary to confirm humanity. As carnal as their night was about to be, they would be visited by a simulacrum of emotion that loomed briefly and moved on. They would be reminded of love without feeling love, reminded of deep human contact without having it.

It was now Friday morning after the awful Tuesday. Carey and Lacey watched the morning news, then walked funereally to Riverside Park, where they stood and looked where the towers once were. It was shocking that there was no trace of them, no afterimage left in the sky, no outline traced around their perimeter.

Lacey said, “I know what I was reminded of yesterday.”

“When?” said Carey.

“When I first saw the tower burning. The Ruscha.”

“What Ruscha?”

“Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.”

When Carey left, they agreed to postpone his opening until a more practical date. This was the first time Lacey thought of her business, a demonstration of the numbing power of shock. Their sexual encounter was never mentioned again.

There was still an art world, but there was no art market. Stocks tumbled; who but the crazy would buy pictures when it was unknown if anything would have value, when our main preoccupation was anticipation of further terror? Lacey mourned for her gallery and her dream of self-governorship, but she knew that rage was useless, that this was an act of God, or godlessness, and that she could do nothing until the world righted itself.

Her gallery finally opened in December, a slow time in the art world, when buyers were about to disappear for the holidays and not straggle back until the second week in January. She sold two paintings by Carey Harden, but they were to his relatives at deep discounts, and the opening party was a fizzle. Patrice Claire was in Paris; he was weaning himself away from her, so he and his dazzling friends never came. She waited for the gallery to fill up, to resemble a crowded first night, but it never did. She felt like another hopeful tucked into the warrens of the building, running a gallery that needed a flashlight and compass to be found, and the long, empty days meant that business, real and imagined, was conducted mostly on the phone.

When Christmas came, she went home to her parents in Atlanta and pretended that everything was fine. But now, away from New York, the idea of selling art after the apocalypse seemed frivolous.

ART MAGAZINES SURVIVED—I guess subscription canceling is the last thing to think about after a disaster. My income stayed at parity, and my savings stayed intact, topped off occasionally by my intuitive parents, who had miraculously timed the sale of a dozen prime acres near Stockbridge. New York still moved, mostly on inertia, like a car coasting downhill after it had run out of gas. It turned out there was nothing to do but go on as usual, with a revival of old-fashioned love-it-or-leave-it patriotism coating everything, and the public eventually caught on that the nascent TV phrase
breaking news
could mean a traffic tie-up in Queens.

I made a lunch date with Tanya Ross. I was attracted to her, and we both spoke art, which meant the conversation never ran dry: we could talk about artists, shows, openings, museums, prices, collectors, Europe, the Prado, uptown, downtown, gossip, theory, Bilbao, the Guggenheim, little-known works at the Met, the Frick, Isabella Stuart Gardner, Chuck Close, Florine Stettheimer, and sales. I met her at the restaurant at Barneys on Madison, and she insisted that we split the check. I tried, but she insisted. I couldn’t interpret if this was a good or a bad sign. Splitting the check indicates it’s not a date but also shows respect for the other person, especially since she suggested the restaurant. There was nothing datelike about our lunch, but once, she touched my hand as she made a point, and at the end of it, she invited
me to a lecture sponsored by Sotheby’s. I couldn’t tell if the invite was social or professional.

“Oh, John Richardson’s talking about his new book on Friday. Would you like to come?”

“John Richardson?” I said. “My superhero, my god, and if it were possible, my Halloween costume.”

Tanya laughed and looked into my eyes, pleased.

“I’d love to come,” I said. “What’s the book? A new one?”

“
Sacred Monsters, Sacred Munsters
, something,” she said. “It’s at five and there are drinks afterwards.”

“Drinks afterwards” made me think that Tanya was putting her toe in the water with me, and it turned out she was. She was Lacey’s opposite. She didn’t leap in ablaze. She was a tortoise to Lacey’s hare, perhaps not as effective, but her goals were less grand than Lacey’s, and a modest presence can eventually catch the eye in a powerful way.

The lecture took place at Boulud, which Sotheby’s had bought out at tea time for the event. I felt this was the way the art world was supposed to be: sophisticated, dressed, with a British accent and raconteur’s tongue. Richardson, a real scholar with a bright pen, was a renowned biographer of Picasso; he had already completed two massive volumes of a projected four. He had escaped from the astringent clutches of Savile Row and didn’t wear the English gentleman’s uniform of a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt with a white collar, pinched gray suit, and pink tie. Instead, he looked sharp but frazzled: in other words, like an author. He enjoyed humor, especially wicked humor, and at age seventy-seven, he seemed keener and more magnetic than any person in the room. His talk, a form of worldly gossip about the fabulously interesting, was too brief, and I wanted more: I didn’t know that the Art Deco designer Jean-Michel Frank was a close relation of Anne Frank, the doomed child from Amsterdam.

Afterward, pools of admirers collected in the dining room. I bought
his book—it was actually titled
Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters
—and he signed it. I of course tried to impress him by quoting back his own lines to him, but what I really wanted was for him to simply tell me his writing secret. Unfortunately, I already knew it: brilliance. Perhaps I should work on that. Then Tanya brought Richardson a six p.m. Scotch, and we all were thrilled by his further stories of the naughty elite.

I walked Tanya down Madison, asked her if she wanted to sit for a while. Yes. We stopped at Le Charlot, an authentic French bistro that made me feel authentically inferior. The waiters sped by us, curiously, since the place was nearly empty. The drinks made us loose, and we got only one-third the way through our art world, and world, topics before it was time to leave. She grabbed a cab, and I took the subway home. I thought about her a lot. There was talk of war, it was cold, but our afternoon spent in peace comforted me, and I think it comforted Tanya, too.

IN FEBRUARY 2002, Chelsea was about to be hit with five hundred tons of steel. The Gagosian Gallery was opening a space on 24th Street, which, considering the timing, seemed like a misstep, inspiring glee in Larry’s detractors. And he was bringing in the colossal work of Richard Serra, whose favorite medium was difficulty. Fifteen-foot-high walls of rusted Corten steel had to be moved into an old paint factory, and the old paint factory had to look like a slick gallery in a matter of months. The opening was delayed because the cranes that were necessary to move the leviathan works were all occupied at Ground Zero and couldn’t be diverted for something as frivolous as an art show. But eventually, the massive leaves of corroded steel were balanced in the Gagosian Gallery like sheets of paper standing on end, and walking among them produced in the viewer equal measures of awe and nervousness.