The Prize (16 page)

Jimmy got up and headed toward the bar.

Once he was out of range, Melody put her head in her hands. Edward rose and moved into the booth next to her and touched her shoulder. “Mel,” he said, genuinely moved. “What's wrong? You and Jimmy are perfect.”

“Are we? If you commit one sin, then you commit them all.”

In Los Angeles Jimmy had a wife and two daughters he worshipped. Edward had been to their home with a swimming pool that overlooked a canyon and a magnificent house with one side made of windows. He'd suspected something was up with Jimmy after he showed up in New York for the Armory Show, then a month later an auction, two weeks later to go to an exhibition. Jimmy said he'd fallen in love. Edward wondered whether he had meant with Melody or with the intoxication of the New York art scene and the people who were part of it, or if they were both the same for him, an adrenaline-inducing fictional world (for art could only masquerade as reality) where he could reinvent himself. Before
Melody there was a girl, an artist, with hair cut shorter on one side than the other, which had made Edward just a little dizzy when he looked at her, and then there was Julie Johnston, an art critic for the
Times
, and briefly a slim Italian art dealer. Melody was the latest. She was overstimulated and—Edward could tell—highly sexual. It was what Jimmy saw in her.

“But you're the one he's with now,” Edward offered.

“What's she like?”

“His wife?”

She nodded, and bit her bottom lip.

“You don't want to know. Best to not know anything. This is what's absolute. You and Jimmy are good together.” He didn't know if he really believed this or not, but he wanted to—just as much as he wished he were more free and easy, like Jimmy, who didn't stop to think about the consequences of his actions, or if he did, was willing to risk it. And poor Melody—she looked so strung out, he had to say something.

“So you approve?”

“How many absolutes do we have proof of? We don't even know what color the sky will be on any given day.”

“You're masterful,” Melody said, and sniffed back her tears.

He didn't think so, or believe really in what he'd said, but her mood lifted and it made him feel better. Jimmy returned with drinks and Edward rose from the booth so that Jimmy could sit beside her. Jimmy slid in close and kissed her. Then her hand reached under the table. Edward excused himself to catch his train.

Outside it was dark and the wind blew in swirls. A loose piece of paper skimmed his cheek. The buildings loomed overhead. He walked over a sewer grate and felt it tremble under his feet. A
homeless man dressed in rags picked at a half-eaten sandwich in the garbage can. Traffic went by in an unremitting flow down Fifth Avenue. He walked swiftly to the station, pulled by its powerful force. He thought about Julia and wondered if Melody was right. Had meeting her changed him somehow?

He found an empty car at the back of the train. The severe light exposed sections of newspaper, soda and beer cans, and sandwich wrappers strewn on the floor. The cheap upholstery was ripped. The train pulled off, rattling the cans, and the lights dimmed. Rain appeared on the window, and as he listened to the stop-start patter on the glass, pressed against the side of the darkened car, he retreated into its sound.

Like Jimmy, he had had opportunities. He supposed there always were if one wanted only sex. Once an ambitious assistant shocked him by coming up to him at a reception and asking him point-blank if she could give him a blowjob. He had refused her, awkwardly heading toward the door of the gallery claiming he had a train to catch. Had he given off the vibe that he had been attracted to her? He wasn't sure he had been, though he'd noticed the way her body moved when she walked in and out of his office. When he was outside, he had broken out in a rash of perspiration, wondering if he had led her on. In the coolness of the night, away from the warm bodies standing arm to arm in small clusters, he had wanted to go back in and find her. On the train home he fantasized about inviting her into his office the following morning. But when he got there, bright and early, he avoided her and was glad when a few weeks later she left to take a sales position at Sotheby's.

He watched the lit houses near the tracks rush past. Then a long ravine. A cemetery. The rain made him relax and for a few
moments he retreated into a rich forest of fantasy. He thought of Julia next to him in the dark car and his hand went to the empty seat at his side. In the forty-eight hours since he'd been back from Berlin he couldn't shake her. He closed his eyes and breathed.

The train came to his stop and he robotically rose, reached for his briefcase, and departed. He felt inside his pants pocket for his keys, opened the car door, slid inside, and sat for a few minutes before he turned the key and the car accelerated. The streets were dark and wet. He pulled up his driveway. It was unbearably quiet, with no sense of the trees as companions, no sense of any living thing, not the deer that had begun to deplete his garden or the occasional fox that ran through his yard. The rain stopped. The house seemed to belong to ghosts.

12 CONNECTICUT

A
T THE
A
CKERMANS
' cocktail party he watched Holly in a short black dress, snug at her hips, and high pumps. She looked amused conversing with Tom Drury. She and Tom had been close friends as kids, and now he owned the barn where she and Annabel rode. Holly was flirting with Tom, Edward observed, almost abstractly. They were such old friends it didn't worry him. Hand on her hip, high cheekbones, square chin, and hair cut in a long bob, she caught Edward's eye and he returned the glance. They both smiled, and he brightened. It was a rare moment at a crowded party to get a moment of her attention. It excited him, seeing her across a crowded room like that, even after all these years.

In the car on the way home, Holly was tipsy. “Did you see how much weight Irene lost? I bet she's having an affair. She has that rabid look on her face. If Mark finds out, he'll throw her out.”

“Aren't you being a little harsh?”

“You'd throw me out, wouldn't you? If I were cheating on you.”

“You'd probably throw me out,” Edward said.

“Did you hear that Sally left Tom?”

“No, since when? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't want to betray Tom's confidence but now it's out in the open.”

“Why do you suppose Sally left him?” He took his eye off the road and looked at her.

“Because Tom lost interest. Isn't that how it usually works? Sally—do you find her attractive?”

“Sally's not bad.”

“Tom said that he doesn't know if Sally ever really loved him.” She scooted closer and rested her face against his arm. “I never liked Sally.” He smelled the evening's wine on her breath; her words were slow and languid. “She was always critical of Tom.” She curled next to him. “I think we need to spend more time together.”

They pulled into the drive. Sometimes returning from a party he wandered the downstairs of the house or took the dogs for a long walk through their quiet streets to settle his thoughts. But before he could get the leash on the dogs, Holly led him up the stairs by his hand. He couldn't remember the last time she'd wanted him. The years after Annabel, when they were trying to have another baby, he had to perform on demand when Holly was ovulating. Since then sex had become freighted. All these years later and they hadn't quite figured out how to get their rhythm and spontaneity back. Maybe she sensed something.

She went into the bathroom. He undressed and lay on their bed reviewing the night in his mind. Throughout the evening he had observed his neighbors' lives, comparing them to his own rather than enjoying himself. Phil, two houses down, was in mergers and acquisitions. There was always some new possession he made you aware of, a Mercedes or an antique rug. His recent purchase, an estate in East Hampton. Chip Lawson boasted about his twin boys who were both on the hockey team at Harvard, and though he liked the boys he wasn't interested in hearing a play-by-play
of a hockey game. And Tom Drury was getting divorced? Tom ran three different horse farms in Connecticut. He and Holly were close. He'd known Lizzie too, and for that reason Tom knew Holly in a way he never would and every now and then Edward found himself jealous of their closeness. He had always thought Tom and Sally looked happy. Thinking about his neighbors, he realized that though he wanted to connect with them, he felt separate and distant. They had little in common. He was more like his father, who rarely socialized outside his field and groused when his mother had wanted him to go out with her friends.

Holly came out of the bathroom, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, in a black satin nightshirt that brushed her thighs. She folded into her side of the bed and turned to him. Her hand reached between his legs and she touched him and he thickened against her. “You're sure you're not too tired,” he asked, guarded from the nights he'd gotten aroused and she'd rolled into her pillow longing for sleep. The moonlight through the fold in the curtains shadowed her face, her skin warm and slightly damp. “No,” she whispered in his ear. He moved closer to her and slid her nightshirt up to reach her skin and slipped down her panties. He felt her come loose in his arms as she moved upward to meet him. He was aroused by her overnight smell, her slightly sour breath mixed with the faint odor of the evening's perfume. She fondled the back of his neck with her fingers, like she always did, and moved her mouth to kiss him and soon her skin began to perspire, her body warm like fever. After, they lay on their backs next to each other for a long time in silence. He sensed Holly was thinking the same thing he was—their love-making, though pleasurable, had become routine and familiar, and though it should have brought them closer, he felt far away from
her. It seemed it ought to be simple to get back what they once had, and yet, it wasn't.

He kissed her forehead and tried to coast into sleep, telling himself that it was what happened in most marriages. Holly turned into her pillow and before long he heard the recognizable sound of her slow sleep breathing. His thoughts drifted to Julia. Since Berlin his thoughts kept turning to her. He climbed out of bed to take the dogs out.

13 NEW YORK

J
ULIA
'
S
STUDIO WAS
in Soho, one of the last of the rent-controlled holdouts, and his gallery was in Chelsea. She only had an hour or so for lunch, and had an afternoon meeting near Grand Central, so he'd come up with the idea of meeting at the oyster bar in the terminal, which was centrally located (he mentioned he might afterward pop into Christie's, where there was a print auction going on) and quick and, Edward surmised, not the sort of place where one made love to a woman. Men and women mostly dressed in business attire sat on stools eating oysters or clam chowder. The waitresses clashed dirty plates down in bins one after the other in an orchestra of angry sound. It smelled slightly rancid, like urine covered over with a strong cleaning product. The smell of the shellfish reminded him of the summer they'd rented a house on the Cape for a week and grilled lobster on the deck and even the next morning the smell was still on his fingers.

He looked out for her toss of hair streaked with locks of blond. She arrived in the midst of some mild state of confusion, looking as she did at Hamburg airport that day when she thought she had lost her passport. “I got on the wrong train. I thought I was late.”

He smiled. “You're not late.”

They greeted each other briskly and then he stopped a moment to admire her.

“You're looking well,” he said. It had been months since he'd last seen her in Berlin, and face to face he was struck again by her radiance. She had just gotten back from Japan with her husband, who had business there. He asked her about it.

“I love Tokyo. The Japanese have a minimalist, poetic culture. What are you having?” she asked when the waitress arrived, holding out her pad and impatiently tapping her pencil on the counter, to take their order. The menu was as dense as the phone book. “I'll have the shrimp salad. No, I'll have the crab cakes. Should I have the salad or the crab cakes?”

He smiled.

“I'll take the crab cakes,” she said. When the waitress left she turned to him. “I feel like we're back in Berlin. Our waitress looked German, didn't she?”

They laughed.

“Did you see Flammarion's show at Gagosian? Some people find his work derivative and overhyped. Derivative or not, that last painting made me cry.” Her cheeks reddened. She was more comfortable talking about other artists' work than her own, which made Edward like her more. She was so unlike Agnes. She looked up at him, suddenly embarrassed by her burst of passion. “Why don't you stop me?”

“I like hearing you talk.”

“Are you going to the London Art Fair?” She sipped her glass of seltzer, lime, no ice, from a straw.

He was so absorbed by how pretty she was and by the hint of cleavage from her V-neck sweater when she leaned over that he couldn't concentrate on her words and didn't immediately realize she had stopped talking and was waiting for a response.

“London? Are you going? Watkins is taking my
Dancers
.” They were Giacometti-like figures in unusual, uncomfortable poses. Her sculptures were shown by Watkins and Rogers, one of the hipper but lesser-known galleries in Chelsea. “Seriously, is your gallery showing anyone in London this year?”