An Object of Beauty: A Novel (5 page)

“Could we see it under a black light?”

“Certainly,” dared Lacey. “Just a moment.”

She dashed to the in-house phone and explained the situation to Cherry, overstating the haphazardness with which she happened to be gliding by. Because time spent with a painting created an interested buyer, Cherry was eager to have pictures flipped over, hefted, and examined. She told Lacey to bring the Avery to room 272, where a black light would be produced and Cherry, too, if she could make it.

Saul Nathanson—his suit was dapper, but his tie wasn’t—leaned back and looked at the picture as it hung on a universal nail in the cramped viewing room. His wife, Estelle, her hair a bit too orange but otherwise just as turned out as Saul, stood by, commenting.

“We knew Milton,” she said.

“Lovely guy,” said Saul. “Do you mind?” he said, indicating he would like to take the picture off the wall. He held up the picture and looked closely at it.

“He likes to hold pictures. I say why do you have to hold them?”

“She’s right,” Saul said amiably, “I don’t know what it means, but I do it.”

“You do it a lot,” said Estelle.

Saul grinned at Lacey. “See what I go through?” Then he turned his attention back to the painting. “Avery knew Rothko and Gottlieb. He may have influenced Rothko with his flat planes of color.”

Cherry Finch, slightly harried, opened the door. Cherry knew the Nathansons, so Lacey figured they must be regular customers. Everyone milled around the picture, and Cherry explained that it had never been on the market, which made Saul nod, pleased.

“When’s the sale?” asked Saul.

“Next Tuesday,” Cherry said as they began to exit the room.

Lacey, reminding them of her presence, said, “It’s a very beautiful picture, and a great year, 1946.” Cherry glanced at Lacey.

After the Nathansons left, Cherry turned to Lacey. “Lacey, some advice: You don’t have to sell paintings. All you have to do is put a good picture in front of a knowledgeable collector and stand back.”

AS THE WEEK WENT ON, the public viewing of the American pictures drew only light crowds. Tanya Ross was officially on the floor, but Lacey made detours across the gallery, whenever possible, to promote the Avery when Tanya might lapse. Tanya—her back turned—was on the far side of the floor when Lacey came upon an unlikely customer, a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sun-bleached dreadlocks piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs. He was paused in front of the Avery.

“If you have any questions… ,” Lacey began.

The young man turned. “Who’s this?”

Sensing this was not a knowledgeable collector, Lacey went through her pitch: “American Modernist… America’s Matisse,” she spouted, and then threw in her latest slogan: “Deeply influenced Rothko.” Through Lacey’s compromised history, Avery now “had deeply” influenced Rothko rather than “may have.” The man didn’t have the savvy of the Nathansons, but there was still an aura of money about him.

“Do you have a card?” he asked.

Lacey said she was out but told him: “You can reach me here, I’m Lacey Yeager.”

The man wandered away, looking puzzled as he surveyed other pictures in the gallery. It was then that Lacey realized he was not a customer,
and she had a dim visual recall: he had followed her in from the subway and had just wangled her name and phone number.

When she arrived at the office floor, there was a phone call already waiting for her, but she backed away from the friendly secretary and waved it off, miming, “Take the number.”

Over the next few days, several people inquired about the Avery, but Lacey didn’t know who they were, and Tanya wouldn’t tell her.

Lacey took one extra gamble. She manipulated Tanya into predicting the outcome of the Avery in front of Cherry Finch. Assuming an air of indifference, Lacey said in her most casual voice, “What dya think that Avery’s going to bring?”

“High estimate at most,” said Tanya.

“So seventy-five?” Lacey said, making sure the number registered in everyone’s brain.

American sales started at ten a.m. Unlike the flashier Impressionist and contemporary sales that began at a glamorous seven p.m., where people dressed in their showcase clothes, the day sales attracted attendees who wore brown pants with blue blazers and shirt collars that lay crushed under their lapels. Lacey had improved her single invitation from Heath Acosta to attend one sale into a standing invitation to attend any sale, and nobody seemed to notice.

The auction started off with a few alarming bumps. An uncharacteristic John Singer Sargent oil, decent enough, died a lonely death without a single bid. The failure was made even more visible because the auctioneer quickly escalated false bids against the reserve to give the illusion of furious bidding, only to promptly sputter out upon reaching the reserve, where he was forced to dwell in a few lingering seconds of ringing silence. It felt as though a shroud of death had fallen over the room. This was especially alarming as last year a Sargent had stunned the crowd, topping out at seven million dollars. Sargent was desirable, more desirable than Milton Avery, and Lacey felt a nervous chill as
she acknowledged to herself that the sale could have a disappointing outcome. One would think that the seven-million-dollar figure would motivate at least one buyer to pop for a hundred grand, even for a not-so-great Sargent, if only for the signature, but the auctioneer had to muffle his obligatory announcement, “Passed,” by saying the word exactly as his gavel struck the lectern.

The Avery now seemed like an outside shot to reach even the reserve. There was a sign of life as a Whistler watercolor, expected to bring between sixty and eighty thousand, sparkled enough to double the estimate, and Lacey’s emotions began flip-flopping like one of Winslow Homer’s just-landed trout.

The carousel turned and the Avery swung into view. Now she worried about the frame. Sotheby’s tarted-up lighting reflected harshly off its expensive silver leaf. Thankfully, an art handler, who rode in with each picture, tilted it forward to diminish the glare, and the picture looked better than ever.

“Let’s start with thirty thousand…” Then the auctioneer quickly manufactured a frenzy with an ersatz bidding war: “Thirty-five, forty, forty-five thousand, fifty thousand…” One would have thought there were a hundred bidders in pursuit of this bashful Avery, but really there were none. Then there was that ugly pause. The next bid, fifty-five thousand, would mean that the picture had sold to an actual, existing buyer. A savvy collector might read this pause, if no bids followed, as an opportunity to buy the picture after the sale at a discount and would sit on his hands instead of bidding against the reserve. Lacey looked around to the few recruits, including Tanya Ross, who were manning the phones, hoping for movement. Tanya stood poised, listening, when her heel slipped off the dais, and she clumsily fumbled the phone, dropping it over her counter, where it swung by its cord. Tanya held up her hand to the auctioneer, as if asking for a time-out. This produced the kind of laugh one hears in a restaurant when a waiter drops a stack of
plates. She pulled up the phone and stuck it to her ear. Then, raising her finger as if to make a point, Tanya said meekly, “Fifty-five.”

A paddle was raised in the center of the room: “Sixty.” Then, the pall broken, there were raises and reraises, taking the picture to eighty-five thousand, after which there was again, in the room, stillness. But this time the auctioneer didn’t show a detectable squirm. Rather, he turned his body fully toward the phone and waited patiently. “Ninety,” relayed Tanya. Then, turning his body back to the floor as if he were on a spindle, he stared into the face of the floor bidder, whom Lacey could not see. “Will you make it ninety-five?” The ninety-five came and went, the picture crossing a hundred, edging further from Tanya’s prediction and more toward Lacey’s. The auctioneer brought the price up and up and finally, when he felt there was no more, said, “Last chance… selling, then, at one hundred fifty thousand dollars.” Smash. He looked over at the phone. “Paddle number?”

And Tanya replied, “Five oh one.”

Lacey was elated and disappointed. She had won her self-imposed contest, one in which she had enrolled, without her knowledge, only one other contestant, but she had hoped the picture would land on her magic number, one hundred seventy thousand, making her victory more memorable.

After the sale, she blitzed back to the office, trying to make her absence less conspicuous, and she was already in place when Cherry came out of the elevator. Cherry saw Lacey, an armload of superfluous papers held against her stomach, and said, “Good one, Lacey, you hit it.” Lacey was thrilled that her guess had even been remembered, that her plan for professional notice had succeeded, and especially pleased that Tanya Ross had to witness her win.

“I was a bit over, but I thought it was a good picture,” said Lacey, feigning modesty.

“What do you mean?” said Cherry. “You hit it within a few thousand.”

“How?” said Lacey.

“The buyer’s premium, twelve percent added on,” said Cherry.

The addition of the buyer’s premium streaked in like a come-from-behind win at a horse race. Lacey felt like a prom queen, even if no one else in the office felt it was that much of a triumph, as numbers routinely bounced around the staff for weeks prior to an auction. But Lacey knew that she was firmly impressed on Cherry’s cortex and that above the name “Lacey,” whenever it slipped across her consciousness, was a shining gold star.

LACEY’S BANK ACCOUNT—a parental send-off for her life in New York—had halved in the two years she had worked at Sotheby’s. New York was cruel to cash reserves, and her Sotheby’s check, even with the routine raises, failed to replenish the pot at the same rate of depletion. Lacey always had magic happen to her at moments of financial crisis, but New York now seemed to vex her. She didn’t believe in guardian angels, except for the guardian angel of her own self, and usually she laid the groundwork for financial salvation way in advance, and often in such unconscious ways that she didn’t even know she was doing it. Her independence kept her from friends offering money, but her cleverness kept it sputtering in. But the past few years were unusually fallow.

My own life was on a gentle gradient moving quietly upward. My contributions to art magazines—I wrote the capsule reviews, usually unsigned—gave me a life and got me out of my apartment, and I found myself with continuing work. There were also relationships, almost romantic, that seemed to lack ignition. My style is courtly, which fails to excite those who anticipate drama. I had to introduce myself to gallery owners a half dozen times before my face started to become familiar.

LACEY HAD, in the course of her work, come to know the Upper East Side. After lunch at 3 Guys, a coffee shop gone crazy with a menu as expansive as a Nebraska plain, she made routine stops at various nineteenth-century galleries along Madison Avenue. Hirschl & Adler, an elegantly staid establishment on 70th Street, held sway in the world of American paintings; they had a knack for polishing and framing a picture so it glowed, and they knew the location of just about every American picture of quality. Next, on 57th Street, was Kennedy Galleries, which had hoarded enough masterpieces to keep it active in the American market but was being sapped of its pictures through the attrition of time. All great pictures flow toward museums. They are plucked off the market by hungry institutions snaring them one by one as the decades march forward. (There are dozens of masterpieces in high apartments along Fifth Avenue, in sight of the Met, longing to make the leap into its comforting arms.)

Lacey had made herself known to the dealers, inquiring about prices and even occasionally helping them out by researching a provenance question about a picture that had passed through Sotheby’s, and her name started to come up irregularly when I traveled above 57th Street.

Mug, Pipe and Book,
John Frederick Peto, circa 1880
Size unknown.

On one of these afternoons, as summer approached and also the end of the art season—leaving the galleries’ air-conditioning blazing and floors unpopulated—she wandered into the Kenneth Lux Gallery, which specialized in more moderately priced American paintings. On the wall was a small picture by John Peto. Peto was a nineteenth-century still life painter who presented books, pipes, and mugs arrayed on a tabletop. The still lifes were rendered in dark greens and browns, the books ragged at the edges, close-ups of a tenement dweller’s humble routine. Peto was forgotten until the early 1950s, when a scholar, Alfred Frankenstein, noticed that the most popular of the nineteenth-century still life painters, W. M. Harnett, whose pictures were quite valuable, appeared to have two distinct styles. One was photographic; every object in those pictures was vivid and defined. The other was looser; the edges of the books and tabletop objects seemed to evaporate and blend softly into the surrounding air. Frankenstein discovered that the second version of Harnett’s work was
actually by Peto. Fakers, wanting to cash in on the more valuable Harnett, erased poor Peto’s signature on any of his pictures they could find and added crude monograms of Harnett. When the decades-old fraud was revealed, Peto’s prices shot up, nearly matching Harnett’s.