An Object of Beauty: A Novel (30 page)

Proceeding parallel to the art boom was a real estate boom, inspired
by crafty lenders who assured easy profits in home ownership, no money down. These weak paper promises to pay were sold off to investors in every corner of the world, and Wall Street saw a glut of money. Wads of cash fell off the money truck as it trundled through Chelsea, across 49th Street for a stop at Christie’s, and onward to Madison Avenue and Sotheby’s.

The publicity that convinced broke home owners that they could make nice profits flipping their houses was the same as that which motivated moneyed art collectors to go further into the market than was practical. The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn’t take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was
so
last year. In the ebb and flow of artists’ desirability, some collectors wondered how a beautiful painting, once it had fallen from favor, could turn ugly so quickly.

Lacey knew the contemporary market did not have the buoyancy of the modern art she had sold at Talley’s. Even the lamest Picasso could coax a bid from someone, but work by an unknown artist was valueless until someone decided to buy it. This was rather like doing business from a cloud, but it was the business she was in, and she decided that if she didn’t believe in it, neither would her customers. So in 2004, when Talley called her again, asking if she wanted to invest in a batch of pictures straight out of the studio by Feng Zhenj-Jie, a Chinese artist working in Beijing who painted Day-Glo images of glamour girls and was rumored to be sought after by several galleries, she listened.

She would need a million five, said Talley, a sum to be matched by him, to purchase a half-share of thirty paintings at approximately one hundred thousand dollars each. Talley believed that the pictures could be sold for a quarter of a million each, plus or minus depending on
size. Lacey didn’t really like Feng Zhenj-Jie’s work; it seemed to belong to the school of
Playboy
more than anything else. But the images were strong. Talley said, “You can spot a painting by Feng Zhenj-Jie across a room and never quite forget it.”

“Is that so good?” asked Lacey. “If you can remember it completely, there’s nothing there when you go back.”

“Lacey,” said Talley, “we’re talking about a moment. You buy the moment. There’s no way to know if the moment will last. I think the moment is coming for Feng Zhenj-Jie. There’s too much momentum. Everybody’s talking Chinese.”

“Problem,” said Lacey. “I don’t have a million five. I’ve got about five hundred thousand, but I operate on it. It’s a cash pool I dip into, and it’s absolutely necessary. Ever had a client want to sell a painting that you sold them and you have to act like it’s the most desirable thing in the world so you give them their money back plus?”

“Of course.”

“That’s why I need that cash.” Lacey declined the offer.

“You shouldn’t be afraid of these deals, Lacey, my advice to you.”

“Odd, isn’t it?” she said. “You sell the conservative paintings and are risky in business, and I sell the risky paintings and I’m conservative in business.”

One year later, Feng Zhenj-Jie set an auction record of three hundred fifty thousand dollars. He became an auction regular with consistent prices while Lacey sat by.

She did, however, sell her uptown apartment for a nice profit and buy a loft in SoHo on margin. The new place was better suited to the display of her artists and better suited for the occasional art parties she threw—all promotional and therefore all deductible. Decorative sparseness was a practical aesthetic, requiring less expenditure on furniture and fixtures while still keeping up with the Joneses, whose imagined apartment was also bare.

LACEY WAS NOW THIRTY-FIVE. If her inner light had softened, her ambition had not. But in New York, one’s sense of competition had to be practical: there was always someone doing better than you, always. Tanya Ross had acceded to department head, but Lacey still figured she had outdone Tanya simply because her name was in lights. There were rival dealers she couldn’t quite topple, like Andrea Rosen and Marianne Boesky—both dealers operating within blocks of her and with nicer galleries. And of course there was Gagosian, who could, it seemed, like a quantum particle, be in two places at once, emerging from the back room of either his uptown or his downtown gallery whenever an important client strolled in. There was no place within Lacey that could properly couch her envy. She just burned up inside and that was that.

Agent Parks became a physical comfort for Lacey; there was evening activity between them that could be categorized as convenient, though there was a humor gap that Lacey could see and he could not. She never took him out to the art parties, and he never wanted to go out to the art parties. After all, he was an investigator of the very people he might meet, and he liked the surreptitiousness that guided their hours together. His business was clandestine encounters; why not have the same in his personal life, too?

He was one year younger than Lacey, with a tight, wiry body that was fun for her to explore. He kept himself in shape as part of his job,
though the art world seldom required him to climb over chain-link fences or race along rooftops. Lacey liked to say to him, “Fuck me, Agent Parks,” and when it was all over there was no awkward silence, because Agent Parks was not trying to make Lacey his girlfriend. He was not swooning over her, or worrying if he was saying the right thing, or going out of his way to be nice. Out of professional responsibility, he even kept secrets from her that were about people she knew, no matter how much she prodded him. He was a jock with a lust for Lacey and a job situated squarely in the art world, a trifecta of qualities that could never be printed in the personals section of
The New York Review of Books
but was nonetheless desirable in this combination.

In January 2006, Agent Parks went to Lacey’s gallery, showed his badge to the receptionist, and asked if Miss Yeager was in. Lacey emerged from her office, and Parks held up a manila envelope. “I’d like to discuss an issue in private with you,” he said.

Lacey took him in the office and closed the door. He whispered, “Shhhh.” Agent Parks bent her over the desk, made a few clothing adjustments—he left his overcoat on—and quickly inserted himself into her. This visit had happened only a few times in their two-year-long relationship, and what appealed to Lacey about it was that Parks didn’t seem to care whether she was in the mood or not. It was just urgent, and he needed it done. With her palms on the desk and her hair grazing its surface, Lacey’s eyes were positioned directly over a pile of unopened mail. The pieces tended to move around as she raised and lowered her body on the desk, and one time, as she arched her back slightly, her blouse buttons brushed aside a few envelopes, revealing something unusual in this pile of announcements and bills: a corner of an envelope, handwritten. She used the momentum that was pushing her from behind to shift the envelopes that covered it and read who’d sent it. “Claire,” it said, then above it in engraved letters: “The Carlyle Hotel.” She grabbed it in her fist, not because of its sender, but because
she had to grab on to something when Agent Parks intensified from behind.

She had not heard from Patrice Claire in years. She had heard about him, and no doubt he had heard about her, but there had been no direct communication. She was not curious about this letter. In fact, it bothered her. Inside, she guessed, was something quasi-romantic, something thought-out and carefully written, with probably either a request for an explanation, which she didn’t have, or a request to meet, which she knew would be excruciating. Then Agent Parks came inside the condom that was inside Lacey and let her know it by stopping midstroke and squeezing her waist with both hands.

On his way out, the receptionist said to him, in complete ignorance, “That was quick. ” He smiled, touched the brim of his fedora between his first finger and thumb, and left.

Lacey knew that at some point she would have to open the letter, so she picked it up, along with a few art magazines, and took it home. She dressed to go out, pausing first to vibrate herself in order to release the head of steam that Agent Parks had built up in her. She walked several blocks in a freezing wind before she found a taxi to take her to an artist’s studio. She spent a half hour looking at work she instantly knew she hated, but she had to invest the time since she and the artist had a mutual friend.

Back home, she poured herself a glass of white wine and sat at the kitchen table in front of the day’s mail from the gallery. Patrice’s letter was on top, and she was still loath to read it because she knew that whatever was in it would mean more work for her, another ego to soothe. But with the wineglass on her right, easily grasped, she pared back the flap of the envelope and slid out a solitary card. In Patrice’s handwriting, it read, “Dear Lacey, You should know that your Aivazovsky is worth much more than you paid for it, Patrice.”

She turned the card over: nothing. She smelled it and wasn’t sure if it
carried Patrice’s aroma. She put it back in the envelope, then took a sip from her glass. She got up from her chair and thought, Where is that painting?

She went to a hall closet, where a dozen framed things, wrapped in cardboard and tied with string, were filed as rejects. She searched through them and finally came across the picture. She had wrapped it for the move and never unwrapped it. She had meant to get to it, to sell it, but it was too much trouble, and she was always so preoccupied. She snipped the twine with scissors, took the picture back to her bedroom, and hung it in place of a small Amy Arras across from her bed. It looked better than she remembered, especially now that it was in a spot that had been professionally lit. Lacey figured it might now be worth double or triple what she had paid for it.

She called the Carlyle and asked for Patrice Claire, even though it was past ten p.m. The operator said, “Just a minute,” and a full minute later, she came back on and said, “He’s not in, can I take a message?” She left her name, but Patrice never called back.

Unlike the glory and wonder of the Warhol, there was no sentimental attachment to the Aivazovsky, but Lacey still waited a few days before pursuing the sale of the picture. She thought it would be more likely to find an enthusiastic customer in Europe, so she found a house in Sweden, the Stockholms Auktionsverk. She had her gallery photographer come to the loft and photograph the picture, then she e-mailed the image and information about where she got it—Patrice Claire’s name gave it good provenance—and waited.

The picture hung in its spot across from the bed, in limbo, an ugly puppy about to be sold. But one night Agent Parks (she just couldn’t call him Bob), after a wrestling bout in the clean linens of her bed, observed the picture. “What’s that?” he said. “That’s new, right?”

“Not really, it was put away.”

“What is it?”

“It’s Russian. Nineteenth century. Artist’s name unpronounceable.”

He walked up to it. “He’s painting like Rembrandt. You know the one that was stolen?
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
? With the ship? This has the same surface.”

“You know the surface of the Rembrandt?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen so many photos, transparencies. Plus I saw it, quickly, in a locker at the train station. It was a bargaining chip, but I couldn’t tell if it was the real thing. They called the wrong dude. They thought I was a reporter. They wanted to give the pictures back in trade for no prosecution. But how can the government agree to that? They can’t say it’s fine to steal a bunch of pictures as long as they are returned. Then the Rembrandt went underground again. Too bad. I’ve begun to feel for those pictures.

“The Rembrandt
Galilee
has a layer of varnish over it,” he continued, “like you’re looking at it through amber, but I don’t think it’s the varnish that gives you that feeling. It’s somehow in the paint. This has it, too.” He moved in close to the picture, moving his head from side to side to avoid the shadows from the overhead spotlight.

“You know about varnish?”

“Yeah. I had a quickie course when I started in this department.”

“Who teaches art courses at the FBI?”

“We had someone from Sotheby’s. Ross somebody?”

“Tanya?”

“Miss Ross, is all I know.”

“So you didn’t fuck her.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, you called her Miss Ross.”

“You call me Agent Parks. But no, I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it. Not my type, I guess. Too sane.” He smiled at her.

“I’m selling it,” she said.

“Really? I like it.”

“Tell me why you like it.”

“Well, it’s pretty. Kind of lonely looking. And it’s symbolic, don’t you think?”

“Symbolic?”

“That’s where something in the picture stands for something else. Like truth or something.”

“Thank you. So what’s symbolic about it?”

“Remember, this is not my best subject.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Well, the water, to me, represents the earth and all the things that happen on the earth, reality. And the moonlight represents our dreams and our minds.”

“And…”

“And the reflection… well, I guess the reflection represents art. It’s what lies between our dreams and reality.”

THE NEXT DAY, Lacey received an e-mail from the Stockholms Auktionsverk saying they could give an estimate on the picture at somewhere between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and that the wide range could be adjusted after they saw the picture.

None of Lacey’s huge returns in the art market had been based on wise investing: one had been bought to show off, one was bought out of her surprising response to it, and a third was essentially stolen. But in an exploding market, it was hard to make a mistake. The Russians had come in the way they came into Poland, and while raiding the modern masters, paying huge sums for Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, they eventually looked to their own nineteenth-century artists, whose prices rose with every fall of the gavel. Aivazovsky was one of the three or four nineteenth-century Russian artists who qualified as collectable. Except for one gigantic spike for the rarest bird of all, Kazimir Malevich, who sold at sixty million dollars, the Russians’ own great modern movements of suprematism and constructivism attracted little attention because the market was flooded with homegrown fakes.