The Prize (19 page)

He looked up and noticed that the train was heading into his station. Passengers shoved past him to get off. He put the pad of paper and pen away and grabbed his briefcase and newspaper and exited the car. He stepped onto the platform, slipping into the anonymous flow of strangers.

16 NEW YORK

N
ATE AND
A
GNES
, embroiled in a heated discussion, surprised him, sitting on the couch in his office when he strolled in a week or two later. Nate's hair was unwashed. He hadn't shaved. His wrinkled clothes looked slept-in. He passed the hours of the afternoon and night in his studio or out and about and was not the kind of man usually seen in broad daylight before noon. Something was up. He was manically chewing gum, one arm strung over the end of the couch. Agnes looked uncomfortable.

“Did I miss something on the calendar?” Edward shook Nate's hand and kissed Agnes's cheek as they rose to greet him. “Have you been waiting long?”

“I wanted to call first and Nate thought we should just drop in. I hope that's okay. We've been up half the night talking.”

Georgia brought in coffee and placed the mugs on the table in front of the couch. Agnes held hers between two hands. She rose and stood in front of the window and looked out at the cityscape, pensive, her sprawling hair in a cascade down her back.

Nate started. “Look, Edward. Might as well get down to business. We're here about the
Vanity Fair
profile.” Cynthia, the gallery's publicist, had arranged a profile for Agnes to keep her in the limelight before gearing up for her new show and she was thrilled
about it. “Now isn't a good time for a journalist to go poking around. I don't think Agnes should agree to the interview.”

Edward had heard from Leonard that Nate had been struggling with his own work as of late. The extraordinary auction prices, over-the-top attention from the critics, and international success had him in a holding pattern. He was an academic painter who'd taken a risk by taking iconic images of the Twin Towers—the buildings slanted to the sky against the pure blue light of day, the explosion of flames, American flag, falling man—and painted them in a style so polished and pristine that they looked synthetic. Their bold emptiness was part of the statement. A high-powered gallerist happened to be at Columbia and had seen something in the work he could manipulate. The rest was history. Whether Nate believed in what he was doing or what he had achieved wasn't clear, but nevertheless the work was understood to be part of the history of our times. Nate didn't want to repeat the work he had already done and was at a crossroads. When he wasn't working well, he partied too hard and went on all-night benders. No wonder he looked like crap.

Agnes returned to sit next to her husband. “But I want it,” she said, with childlike steeliness. “Edward said it was important.” She took Nate's hand again. “To create interest for my new show. Is there a way we can control the content?”

“The short answer is no. Not if the journalist talks to other people for the profile. Is there something I ought to know? Something you're afraid might be exposed?” Edward adjusted his pant leg, which had crept up when he sat down.

“Edward should know everything, Nate,” Agnes implored. She touched his thigh. “Otherwise he can't do his job.”

Nate leaned over and kissed her. “I'm the only one who needs to know everything about you, baby. Go ahead, tell him then.”

Agnes blinked her eyes. “It's about Liam, Nate's son. He stole a drawing of Nate's and sold it on the black market and took off for Europe. He's been in trouble lately. Nate doesn't want the press to pick up the story.”

“My concerns are real. He's my son,” Nate added, soberly.

“We can wait until it blows over. I'll tell Cynthia to reschedule the interview closer to the opening. It shouldn't be a problem. Look, I haven't seen the new work yet. We've got time.” Edward looked at Nate. “I'm sorry about your son, man.”

Nate nodded. “Thanks. He'll be all right. He's still a kid.”

“He's my age, baby,” Agnes reminded him. She reached up and smoothed his ripped-at-the-neck T-shirt.

Once they left, Edward retired to his desk. He swiveled his chair to look out the glass window at the gallery. He watched the junior associates on the phone to clients and assistants typing at their computers and sat back and thought about how he had built up the gallery's staff and stable of artists and how incredibly personal it all was. He'd fostered relationships, some more profound than others, with colleagues and artists and collectors in hopes they would extend over time and they had. Unlike Savan and others in the business, he never aspired to hang out all night with his artists and flit off to the South of France and get trashed on a weekend bender. He never needed that. He was looking for artists who were extraordinary and singular. He believed that art offered a refuge from the trouble in the world, or at least allowed the culture a way to think about it. Sure, he'd made some mistakes—passing up artists whose work he didn't get and watching their star rise
under another gallerist. He was looking for work that could only have been made by that particular artist. And he hoped and wanted them to be forward-thinkers. There was a train of art history and hopefully some of the people he worked with were moving the train forward. He thought Agnes was, and maybe a handful of others, and for the first time in a long while he actually felt himself getting excited about her new work. He liked shaping and mounting a show and all the hoopla surrounding it. This was going to be big. Sure she was nervous about it. And so was Nate. No one wanted bad publicity before a new show. It was his job to do damage control and not let all the noise infiltrate her studio. He had to calm down and focus.

17 CONNECTICUT

H
E AWOKE TO
the ringtone of his BlackBerry on his nightstand and glanced at the clock. It was three thirty in the morning. He looked at the caller ID. She rarely called him on his mobile. He put the phone to his ear.

“Agnes? What's wrong? Wait a minute.” He struggled out of bed and walked into the hallway to not wake Holly.

“I'm sorry to call so late. I needed someone to talk to. I'm shaking.”

“What is it?”

“Nate's out of control. He was out drinking and doing God knows what else. He came into my studio and trashed it. The paintings. Thank God.” She took a long breath. “They were untouched.”

“He trashed your studio? Why? That's crazy.”

“He's freaked about Liam. And he's not working well. Then he goes out and gets wrecked. He said our art is ruining us. Sometimes he gets like this, but he's never trashed the studio.”

“Do you want me to come over? I'll drive in.”

“You'd do that for me, wouldn't you.”

“You know I would.”

“That's why Nate doesn't trust you.”

“He doesn't trust me?”

“He doesn't trust anyone. Really. And he knows you'd come if I needed you. He still thinks I'm his student. He doesn't want anyone to usurp his place.”

“I'm your dealer, Agnes. It's different.”

“I know. Of course it is. But not to Nate.”

“Do you want me to come? I can get there in less than an hour.”

“It's not necessary. I feel better, just hearing your voice.”

They hung up and he wandered back to bed. He'd always thought Nate was obsessed with himself, but violent? That was something new. The two of them were going to destroy each other. Before, he'd been envious of their intense and charged relationship. Seeing the fallout, now, he wasn't so sure. He'd found himself wondering since Berlin what it would be like to be in a marriage like theirs—what it would be like if he were married to someone more like him, like Julia. Seeing her again in New York for lunch—open and vulnerable—he couldn't stop thinking about her. He closed his eyes and willed his mind to go blank.

I
N THE MORNING
after breakfast, ensconced in his study, he called Agnes to check in. It was late November and they were expecting snow. He felt it in the air.

“Nate brought me two dozen yellow roses this morning. They're my favorite. It's like it never happened. He likes those drag-down fights. It fuels his work. He's been painting like a maniac all morning. He called two of his assistants to come by and stretch canvases and mix colors,” she said—a little too gleefully, he thought, and shook his head. What would it be like for Nate, Edward wondered, if her work outshone his? He agreed with Agnes that being a woman artist made things more complicated.
Not in terms of the work itself, but in the way in which the work would be perceived and noticed by the critics. Men were used to pushing their work forward. Women artists tended to be more uncomfortable in the spotlight. It was part of the ambivalence he'd noticed in Agnes and, he assumed, why she was nervous about letting go of the new work.

He powered off his computer and went back downstairs to find Annabel in the breakfast nook doing homework. He sat next to her and restlessly attempted to read the paper. Annabel explained to him the Pythagorean theorem. A squared plus B squared equals C squared—it brought back his own days in geometry class. He looked out the window distracted.

“Dad?” Annabel said.

“What is it, Annabel?”

“Can I go to Danny Wasserman's house Friday night?”

“Sure.” he said. “If your mother says so.”

“Dad?”

“What, darling?”

“You need to talk to Mom more. I think she's lonely.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She always wants to be with me,” she groaned.

The phone rang. Annabel leaped at it as if she'd been waiting. She held out the receiver and asked him to hang up once she had gotten to her room. He put the phone to his ear, waiting, and recognized the slow breathing of a boy at the other end and felt a catch in his throat.

“Is it you?” Annabel said when she picked up.

“Yeah,” the boy said, in that languid tone Edward recalled from when he was that age. “What's up?”

Years ago Annabel used to crawl into his lap and put her tiny arms around his neck. Her face, rosy and unblemished, had taken on contours. She'd grown long and thin and had breasts. He did not know whether he was supposed to observe her changing body, but he had and it unnerved him. He thought about her sudden infatuation with boys. Everything was shifting just a little bit away from him.

He went up the stairs again to check e-mail. He was expecting a deal to come through from London. He opened his laptop and logged in. He looked out the window at the cloud formations building in the sky and sensed the coming snow. His assistant had sent him a message that Agnes wanted him to secure a deal with a gallery in Madrid. Nate had two galleries there interested in his work and his prices had skyrocketed. What was it like for them working in private studios in the same house, always comparing? Talking about every deal? He thought again about Nate trashing Agnes's studio. Nate was losing his way. He'd seen it happen to other successful artists terrified that there was nowhere to go but down. Years ago he had mounted a first show by a young painter, Miles Mahoney, and it had gotten favorable write-ups, and though the work hadn't generated nearly the amount of excitement he'd gotten for Agnes Murray it had been respectable. Two years later and the new work was shit. It was all a crap shoot.

He looked at his father's paintings on his wall—all that unrealized brilliance. What happened to him? At dinner with John Kincaid, gnarled in an argument about the interpretation of a poem, they could go at it for hours. His study crammed with three decades' accrual of books, couch and desk stacked with works in progress and students' papers. His father was obsessed with his
work. “It can't be just about this,” he once said, when they were lingering at the dinner table and his mother was cleaning up.

“What's wrong with this?” his mother said.

“There has to be more,” he'd said, looking into his coffee cup.

“The more you search, the unhappier you are,” she muttered.

His father's last years teaching, he grew paranoid. Awarded a prize for a book, he felt that the other books that did not get prizes were better and didn't trust the praise. Preoccupied at home, he snapped at Edward or his mother if he couldn't find a misplaced book or paper. If one of his students failed an exam his father took it personally. Edward's mother passed her evenings knitting. She looped the yarn over one needle, stretched it over the forefinger, and stabbed the other needle into the wool.

Edward closed his laptop and went downstairs, restless. In the kitchen Annabel vigorously erased marks from a problem on her math sheet. Holly was unpacking groceries.

“I'll be back soon. I'm going to visit my mother before dinner,” he said. A sudden desire to see her overcame him. He'd been thinking about her a lot since he started seeing Clara.

“That's brave of you,” Holly remarked.

His mother had recently moved into the assisted-living section of the retirement community where she lived, forty-five minutes away. She'd started forgetting things, and once had left the stove on and nearly burned down her kitchen. He'd dragged Annabel and Holly with him a few times and they'd had lunch with his mother in the overheated dining hall, but they complained about going and now he usually went alone. He hadn't been in weeks. He avoided spending much time there, stopping in to bring over papers that needed to be signed, or her medications and toiletries from
the pharmacy, sitting a few minutes before abruptly rising with an excuse that he had to run to the city for a meeting. Afterward it took him days to shake free of her.