An Object of Beauty: A Novel (6 page)

Herald,
William Michael Harnett, circa 1878
Size unknown.

Lacey, trying to determine a price for a Peto that was coming up at Sotheby’s, asked Ken Lux what the cost of the small picture was. “Thirty-five thousand dollars,” he said. Lacey thought the picture was fine and asked for a photo for comparison to Sotheby’s picture. “Sure,” he said, and gave her a small transparency. Then, continuing her walk, Lacey went around the corner to Hirschl & Adler, where, coincidentally, another small, comparable Peto was hanging. She inquired about the price. “Sixty-five thousand,” was the reply. Lacey, stuffed from a
deli sandwich she had devoured at 3 Guys, hiccuped. The two pictures were so close in subject matter, they could be a pair.

“Oh,” she said, and she walked outside and scraped Ken Lux’s label from the transparency. Lacey had heard that art dealers don’t communicate with one another, trying to keep their offerings private so rival dealers can’t bad-mouth them. This would be a test.

She walked back into H & A, transparency in hand. “Is there someone I could talk to about a Peto I have for sale?”

“Certainly.” The secretary asked her name, then buzzed upstairs. “You can go on up to the third floor.” And she pointed to an elevator just big enough for two.

She was greeted by Stuart Feld, the powerhouse American dealer with a critical eye for pictures that could make a boastful collector wither. Feld not only sold nineteenth-century pictures, he
felt
nineteenth century. He looked perfectly suited—his suit was perfect—for sitting in his favored neoclassical American furniture. She pulled the photo from her purse. Feld held it up to a light box.

“How big is it?” he asked.

“Eight by twelve inches,” she said.

Silence was his response until, “Where is it?” he asked.

Lacey’s first real dealing in the art world incorporated tiny lies into its construct. “It’s at another dealer’s, but he’s deliberating. The owner is looking for the money now.” It was the perfect response. There was enough truth in the statement for it to be convincing, and it inadvertently sparked Feld’s competitive spirit.

“We don’t make offers,” said Feld. “Tell us what you want.”

Lacey calculated the asking price on Feld’s Peto, discounting it appropriately.

“Forty thousand,” she said.

“That’s a bit rich, but perhaps, providing it’s in good shape,” he said.

Lacey went around the corner to Ken Lux but could only get him
down to thirty-three thousand. Still, seven thousand dollars was not bad for a walk around the corner. Ken was a dealer who began in the 1960s, when pictures were hard to sell and were easily let out of the gallery to hang in a collector’s house for a few days’ trial or even shipped out of state with only a promise by phone to secure the painting. The deals were conducted on handshakes alone and often without even that. It wasn’t until the prices started jumping in the mid-1980s—and a few dealers went to jail for selling the same picture twice—that paperwork became necessary. Ken knew Lacey well enough from the floor at Sotheby’s, and relying on old-fashioned instinct, he let the picture out of the gallery with just a one-page contract and a promise to pay in two weeks. (Once he had put a painting out for approval to a motorcycle gang, who for some reason wanted a picture of bears frolicking in human clothes. He got paid the next day, in cash pulled in wads from the gang’s pockets.)

With the picture under her arm, she rounded the corner once again to H & A, got a check, and pocketed seven grand. Lacey hadn’t really lied, she had only been crafty, but she had tasted honey in the art market, and she momentarily felt smarter than Stuart Feld, Ken Lux, and the rest of the dealers who were burrowed in the brownstones stippling Madison Avenue.

THE NATHANSONS had called Sotheby’s—yes, they had bought the Avery. Could it be delivered to D.C. today? It would be an object of conversation at their dressy dinner party tonight. Was there a walker who could escort the picture and deliver it? It’s only a four-hour train ride. Sometimes the lowliest employees get the best jobs, and Lacey was on a train by ten a.m., with the Avery wrapped in cardboard, bound with a splintery sisal string affixed to a wooden handle, and fully insured. This seemed like a snow day to Lacey, although there was no snow in sight for six months.

The wide train windows looked onto verdant pastures, soot-smudged buildings, and shuttered storefronts like a rapidly unscrolling panorama as the train whizzed past them. Her wrinkle-proof dress clung statically to her legs, and each move of her arm pulled it this way or that above a knee, which was noted by a slouching youth facing backward and adjacent to her.

Lacey had picked D.C. highlights from her mental guidebook of sights to see. The National Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum had moved up the wish list every time they were cited in illustrations as being the home of her favorite paintings. All she had to do was crib some time from the Nathansons to devote to holiday sightseeing in D.C.

The Avery, stowed overhead in the steel-pipe luggage rack, was projecting out just enough to thwack a man on the forehead. Lacey’s rifle
response, said before she even turned her head—“You can sue me, but I’ve got nothing”—charmed the man enough that he said, “Is this seat taken?”

“Sit down, father figure.”

He was older, professorial. Wearing a suit and tie and crowned with a muss of gray hair. He muttered his name, but Lacey didn’t catch it.

“Who’s the artist who clobbered me?”

“Milton Avery,” she said.

“Milton Avery? That’s a big name for such a slow train. Shouldn’t he be on the express?”

“I would have preferred it. I don’t think the painting cares,” Lacey said.

I should tell you now about Lacey and strangers. She loved codgers and coots, truck drivers and working folk, any sort of type that she wasn’t familiar with. She would engage them in bars and parks, focusing on their accents and slang, probing them for stories, and the slightest accomplishments, including whittling, elevated them to heroes. The man next to her didn’t qualify as a folk hero, he was too well dressed for that, but Lacey liked the opportunity for repartee and felt she could keep pace with anybody.

“How do you know about Milton Avery?”

“I try to be a gentleman of taste, even when it comes to getting clocked in the head.” He glanced up and down, taking her in. “What do you do?” he said.

“What do
you
do?” she said.

“What do
you
do?” he said.

“Okay. You outmaneuvered me. I work at Sotheby’s and I’m delivering a painting to Washington.”

“Oh, Sotheby’s. Then perhaps you can answer a question I’ve been mulling over. Or maybe you’re too young.”

“Just give me the question.”

“How is it that rich people know about good paintings?” he said.

Lacey said nothing but implied that he should continue.

“Well, think about it. How do they have the eye for it? Why is a five-million-dollar picture always a Velásquez or some other fancy name, and not a Bernard Buffet?”

“Maybe you just explained it to yourself,” said Lacey.

“How?”

“You said ‘fancy name.’ Maybe they’re just buying fancy names.”

“But then a lousy Velásquez would bring as much as a good one. They actually seem to know which one is better. How does a steel magnate or a car dealer or oil baron learn what scholars take years to learn?”

“I’m going to need some train wine,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” he volunteered, loosening his tie. Minutes later, he reappeared holding two plastic cups that didn’t bother to imitate wineglasses. Lacey took a sip, “Acheson, Topeka, 1994.”

After he had settled in, now using his briefcase as a table, he relaxed deep into his seat’s leatherette cushion.

“I see it this way. Paintings,” he said, “are Darwinian. They drift toward money for the same reason that toads drifted toward stereoscopic vision. Survival. If the masterpieces weren’t coveted, they would rot in basements and garbage heaps. So they make themselves necessary.”

She laughed and stared at him with a pixie face. “I must be drunk, because I think I understood you,” she said, and cranked her body sideways to better see his pleased response.

The noontime wine wore off just as the train pulled into the station. The gentleman stood, saying, “Lacey, have a great day. You shortened the trip for me.”

Lacey, responding with warmth, said, “You too; you have a great trip, too.”

Lacey never knew the man’s name until a month later when she saw his photo on the inside of the book’s dust jacket. It was John Updike.

LACEY ANGLED THE PICTURE into the backseat of a taxi, its corner sticking into her knees because of the drivetrain hump on the floor. She braced it with her palm for self-protection as well as for its own good as the taxi bounced and rattled from one stoplight to the next. The taxi pulled up to a Georgian brownstone with gardens neat and trimmed and a crisp white door with a brass knocker. On the street were laborers unloading party chairs and caravanning them into a side door. She got out of the taxi, and the driver, a vociferous cabbie with a resonant voice who had entertained her by singing the songs of John Lee Hooker, pulled the picture from the backseat. The white door of the brownstone swung open with a faint jingle-bell tinkle, and Saul Nathanson waved with full panic, shouting, “Don’t come up the steps!”

So many interpretations. Was he shouting at Lacey, the painting, or the taxi driver? “Don’t step on the walkway!” Was the concrete wet? But Saul ran toward them more sheepish than commanding, and they all stayed put.

“I thought by having you bring the picture,” Saul said, panting, “that we were taking delivery of the picture in Washington. But it seems to be disputable that this might constitute taking delivery in New York.”

Lacey looked at Saul, then at the taxi driver. He pulled his cap back and scratched his head. “Oh yeah, sales tax,” he said.

“What?” said Lacey.

“My wife sells jewelry. There’s always a sales tax issue.”

Saul pointed at the driver with a silent “bingo.” “We’ve got to have it shipped to us from New York by a reputable carrier.”

Lacey muttered, “I’m reputable.”

“But unlicensed. We’ve got a questionable situation here. You’ve got to take it back. It’s a difference of almost ten thousand dollars,” said Saul.

The statement hung in the air, until the taxi driver said, “You mean that box is worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

Lacey turned to him. “Who are you, Rain Man?”

Saul was balanced on his toes. “I’m so sorry, Lacey, we tried to turn you around, but we just learned it an hour ago. Here’s something for you”—he handed her a folded hundred-dollar bill—“and don’t let the painting touch the walkway.”

“I’ll be a witness,” said the grinning taxi driver, implying there could be another tip due.

“I can’t even invite you in,” said Saul. Then he turned to the half-opened door. “Estelle! Wave hello to Lacey!”

Estelle poked her head out of an upstairs window. “Hello, Lacey. Saul’s insane!”

Saul, standing away from them as though the state boundary line ran right down the middle of his sidewalk, pressed the driver. “Could you put it back in the taxi, please?”

“I’m not touching it,” said the driver. “It could be an insurance nightmare.”

“Well, I can’t touch it,” said Saul.

“I got it in once; I can get it in again,” said Lacey, hefting it toward the still open cab door, as Saul stuck to his side of the imaginary line that separated him from a ten-thousand-dollar tax bill.

The driver was now gliding the taxi around potholes and speed bumps and slowing the car with the gentle braking that he reserved for
fares involving infants and the elderly. “Rats,” said Lacey. “I wanted to go to the museums, but now I’m stuck with Pricey.”

“You can go,” the driver said.

“What do I do with Pricey?”

“Check it at the museum, in the cloakroom. There’s nothing but guards around there. Safe as a bank.”

“Hell, I had it on a train. You’re the one who spooked me about how much it’s worth. Okay. Let’s go to the National Gallery.”

The taxi arrived, and Lacey pulled her burden from the cab. She gave the driver a healthy tip, all to go on Sotheby’s expense tab. “Thank you so much, O kindly taxi driver.”

“Adios, amigo. By the way, my name’s Truman,” he said. “What time you coming out?”

“An hour?” she answered.

Lacey went to the cloakroom, deposited the Avery, then passed through a security check so lax that she instinctively swung her head back to the cloakroom to see if the Avery was still there.

She wound down the vast interior stairs of the National Gallery. The cavernous entrance had little art to be seen. Only a gigantic, though airy, Calder mobile, swaying from above, indicated that this was an art museum and not an intergalactic headquarters.

With little interest in contemporary art, she headed underground to the west wing, where she speed-walked past neglected masterpieces in the near empty galleries of American art. There was a surprise around every corner: she had only seen John Singleton Copley’s 1778 painting
Watson and the Shark
in two-by-three-inch reproductions in books, and the picture, a dramatic tableau of a rowboat staffed with sailors, in waters turned hellish by a circling shark that has just bitten off the leg of a thirteen-year-old boy, stunned her with its monumental size and perverse beauty.
Jaws,
the beginning, she thought.