The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  ALSO BY JILL BIALOSKY

  FICTION

  The Life Room

  House Under Snow

  POETRY

  The Players

  Intruder

  Subterranean

  The End of Desire

  NONFICTION

  History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life

  ANTHOLOGY

  Wanting a Child, edited, with Helen Schulman

  Copyright © 2015 Jill Bialosky

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bialosky, Jill.

  The prize : a novel / Jill Bialosky.

  pages ; cm

  1.Artists--Fiction. 2.Avarice--Fiction. 3.Ethical problems--Fiction.I. Title.

  PS3552.I19P75 2015

  813'.54--dc23

  2015023052

  Cover design by Michael Fusco

  Interior design by Megan Jones Design

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-655-1

  For Milton Abraham Bialosky

  “For ever panting, and for ever young”

  —JOHN KEATS, “ODE ON A GRECIAN URN”

  “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.

  The rest is the madness of art.”

  —HENRY JAMES, “THE MIDDLE YEARS”

  “Art is the window to the interior.”

  —HAROLD DARBY, “THE UNREALIZED SELF”

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1. CONNECTICUT

  2. BERLIN

  3. BERLIN

  4. NEW YORK

  5. HAMBURG

  6. HAMBURG

  7. NEW YORK

  8. CONNECTICUT

  9. NEW YORK

  10. NEW YORK

  11. NEW YORK

  12. CONNECTICUT

  13. NEW YORK

  14. NEW YORK

  15. CONNECTICUT

  16. NEW YORK

  17. CONNECTICUT

  18. CONNECTICUT

  19. NEW YORK

  20. CONNECTICUT

  PART TWO

  1. LONDON

  2. CONNECTICUT

  3. NEW YORK

  4. CONNECTICUT

  5. CONNECTICUT

  6. CONNECTICUT

  7. CONNECTICUT

  8. NEW YORK

  9. NEW YORK

  10. CONNECTICUT

  11. NEW YORK

  12. NEW YORK

  13. CONNECTICUT

  14. NEW YORK

  15. CONNECTICUT

  16. CONNECTICUT

  17. NEW YORK

  18. NEW YORK

  19. CONNECTICUT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  EDWARD DARBY KNEW that an artist’s work had the power to change the way in which art was perceived, for every successful artist must recreate the medium, but he did not know, each time he went to a new artist’s studio, if he’d ever find it. When you see a work of art, it will be as if everything else in relationship to it has faded. Art should transport the seer from the ordinary to the sublime. His father, a scholar of Romantic poetry, told him this when he was a boy. But it was more than that. It was the myths artists created about their art that gave the work authority, and as an art dealer, he was part of that creation. He thought about all this as he looked for Agnes Murray’s name on the directory in the vestibule of a crumbling old warehouse in Bushwick. It was a cold and gray morning in April. He hoped he wasn’t wasting his time.

  He climbed four staircases to her studio. Out of breath, he saw her leaning against the battered door at the end of a dim hall in paint-spattered stretch pants and a moth-eaten cardigan pulled across her chest. She clutched the ends of her sweater. She was pale. Dark circles lined her eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t seen another person in months. She thanked him for coming, held out her hand, and brightened, remarking that she liked the work he showed. “I heard you can see into an artist’s soul,” she said.

  He took her hand, red and chapped, with scratches and cuts, surprisingly tiny for a painter. Something about her earnestness touched him. A slant of light came through her window, and in the brightness she looked different than when she’d greeted him: an Irish beauty with corkscrew curls of red hair held back with a folded bandanna, pea-green eyes, and light freckles peppered on the slope of her nose and upper cheekbones. She was petite but emanated stature.

  He traversed the studio, stiff in his blue suit and embarrassed by the squeaking of his new Italian leather shoes. Paintings leaned against the walls and others were stacked on the floor. Paint pots, brushes, and open art books cluttered a worktable. At the farthest end of the studio stood an unmade cot, and on the windowsill, a creaky hotpot and boxes of cereal. A mini-fridge hummed. Unwashed mugs with dried tea bags strung around their handles stood on top. The room smelled of paint, turpentine, and the slight whiff of her odor. Clearly she lived in the studio.

  Agnes was a painter with one show under her belt. Leonard Horowitz, her manager who’d arranged this studio visit, warned Edward that at her first solo show at a small gallery on the Bowery, unable to stomach the superficial chatter of the guests who she believed had come for the party rather than for the work, and the tastemakers who, in her words, had their swords out, Agnes spent the opening in the back room nervously chipping her blue fingernail polish. She was high-strung and high-maintenance, an explosive combination.

  The first painting she revealed was Two Boys Holding Hands. She threw off a white sheet and beamed. It depicted two boys searching in the rubble of 9/11, the eerie ghost remains of the towers behind them. Wearing pantaloons and ruffled shirts, the boys looked as if they had stepped out of another century. There was, of course, a sense of irony to their dress, to Agnes’s clear reference to the great Dutch portrait artists of the seventeenth century, but there was also a solemnity to their expression that cut through that irony, transcended it. Their beautiful and tender faces reminded him of Vermeer’s portraits. Though Agnes had painted a vast, sprawling scene, a history painting more in the vein of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the faces themselves had an intimacy and quietude that reminded him of Vermeer’s portraits of women. Since his student days Edward had been drawn to the old master. He liked that Vermeer didn’t try to impose on the world by painting grand scenes. He tried to describe the world as it was in moments of solitude and quiet domesticity.

  It was rare that he saw a contemporary artist whose work invited comparisons to the old masters. The art world was insular, and so much of the time no one was looking back more than fifty years. Agnes clearly was.

  She walked to the back of the studio where some canvases were stacked and put up a miniature, a study of a girl from the painting. Her head was slightly turned so that her gaze stared back at him. Her hair was pulled back behind a scarf. He looked at it again. The girl, with her tender and wanting eyes, reminded him of his first love, Tess. He hadn’t thought of her in years.

  The paintings were beautiful with an edge of something darker and deeper. In the juxtaposition of creation and destruction, Agnes brought to life
in a personal way the agony of the lives that had been lost when the towers collapsed. He thought it would have been something impossible to catch and yet she had. He was convinced that this work would define a particular moment in history. No contemporary painter that he knew of had captured it yet.

  He stepped closer to the canvas. “It’s gorgeous. And so much feeling.”

  “I’m too close to the work, I can’t always see it. I view the studio as a room of visual problems to be solved,” she said, with a sigh. She worked until she was depleted, afraid to stop, as if there were an emptiness inside her that needed to be continually filled to validate her self-worth. He’d seen it in other artists and knew it in the vulnerability in her eyes.

  She slowly revealed the other finished canvases, at first shyly, as if exposing parts of herself. Seeing how each of the fifteen paintings reflected off the others, magnifying the whole series like the prisms in a diamond, he was more convinced of her talent. He had to be the one to show it. It was the most original and daring work he’d seen in years. He asked about her process. She worked from drawings, hundreds of them. She lifted her hand to push back a spring of curls that had come loose from her bandanna and explained that from the drawings to a finished painting might take two to three years. She touched the layered paint and then leaned in to smell it. “My work is focused on 9/11 now but really I’m interested in it as one piece—our piece—of the history of human anguish. And how painting bears witness to it. I know it sounds rather grand.”

  She motioned him toward an old fold-up wooden chair, then scooted another chair across from him, sat down, opened her fridge, took out two small plastic bottles of Evian, and offered him one. A man’s gold Rolex wristwatch slid along her willowy wrist when she raised her arm. Maybe her boyfriend’s. She wound her slender legs around the leg of the chair, opened her water, and took a swig. She studied him as if she were drinking him. It made him uncomfortable. He stretched his neck awkwardly.

  Realizing she’d embarrassed him, she took a breath and sighed. “I’m exhausted. I haven’t left the studio in weeks. It’s amazing how much isolation goes into each painting. All the doubts and second-guessing. And then voilà, something happens and it paints itself.” She half smiled and cocked her head, pleased with herself.

  To indulge her, or maybe because it was true, he said that the paintings felt as if she’d dug deep to make them. She turned her head up and laughed. She asked if he knew the painter Nate Fisher. Of course he did. Edward couldn’t open an art journal or walk into a gallery without hearing about or seeing Nate Fisher. He was one of the most visible contemporary painters on the scene. She explained that he was still teaching at Columbia when she did her MFA and she’d been his student. He’d introduced her to Leonard, who had a knack for discovering young talent. “I was doing a lot of portraits of strangers. I was sort of lost. My first studio visit with Nate, he told me he could tell I didn’t care about them. He told me to start over, to only paint what I couldn’t forget.” She explained that she started working from images that she was personally close to and that she’d been accused of exploiting her family’s tragedy in a piece in ArtForum. Her grandparents emigrated from Ireland with only the clothes on their backs and her father was the firstborn American in her family. She worked from a specific visual memory of her grandparents’ homeland where she saw beauty embedded with a sense of loss and regret as if from beyond the grave. She explained her interest in the idea of inheritance—of what she could give back, through her work. She had been riding her bike across the Brooklyn Bridge into the city when she saw the first tower come crashing down. She quieted, looked down, and then raised her eyes. “I’ll never forget it. We have no control over what haunts us. We’re helpless to it.” It completely changed her life. She was afraid to ride the subway, cross bridges. “Art must capture what we’re afraid of most,” she said.

  “Fisher again?” He smiled, not to patronize, but with affection. He’d seen artists who listened to their mentors this way before.

  She nodded and smiled back. Then she tipped out of her chair and crouched in front of the painting. Again she touched the layered paint with her finger, carefully scraping off a piece of dust. “If you take me on,” she said, her earlier insecurity fading, “would you make them see that my interest in anguish and destruction isn’t overwrought or sentimental?”

  “I wouldn’t have to. It’s all there on the canvas. All that complexity. Between that and your process, the references you’re making . . . It’s brilliant. We’ll position you as a new Old Master.” He stood up and returned to view the first painting again. “What makes this successful is its timelessness, the way it slips free of any attempt to nail down its meaning or objective.”

  She put her head in her hands and he wondered if he’d said something to upset her. She took her hands away, trembling, and explained that she hadn’t slept in days. She’d been frightened to let anyone in the studio, and his reaction to the work moved her. For a moment he looked into her grainy eyes and soft prettiness and thought that if she weren’t so young and childlike, he’d fall in love with her.

  The next morning, Agnes Murray sent him a bouquet of white roses. I’m so glad we found each other, the note said. When do we begin?

  PART ONE

  1 CONNECTICUT

  IT WAS A gray, overcast late Sunday in September. The windows were open in his third-floor study and a light breeze rustled the papers on his desk. He looked at the tray next to him with his pens and his water glass and the two or three books and catalogues he referred to every now and then. Each word and sentence he’d put to paper he worried over. Chosen to present at the international fair in Berlin, he was reviewing the talk he’d written about the work of Agnes Murray and several other lesser known contemporary artists. He reflected that four years had passed since he’d first met Agnes in her dusty studio in Bushwick. A lot had happened to both of them since then.

  “New Movements in American Art: A Desire for Authenticity.” Christ. He hoped he didn’t come across as high-minded. An unsettling cry from outside disturbed him. Probably a lost cat or dog from the neighborhood. He looked at his watch to discover two hours had passed. He went back to the talk. A new vanguard emerged in New York after 9/11 . . . That cry again; it now sounded like a baby’s whimper. He remembered how Annabel used to cry in her crib sometimes in the middle of the night. He and Holly hadn’t the constitution to let her cry herself back to sleep. He’d get up, go to her, and bring her into their bed, and she’d fall asleep between the two of them, sandwiched by their warmth. The summer was over and another school year had begun. Annabel was almost sixteen. It seemed incredible.

  He heard the sound again. He crossed the room to look out the front window facing the street. By the side of the road lay a dead deer, stiff, with its legs tucked back, middle gutted with dried blood. The cry was coming from the other side of the house near the woods. From the back window, he saw Holly in a plaid flannel shirt and high rubber boots rush out the kitchen door and his daughter Annabel behind her. The door slammed shut. He climbed down the three flights of stairs from his study and followed them. A spotted baby fawn lay camouflaged in a patch of leaves and thistle just at the outskirts of their garden. The fawn stretched its neck and unsuccessfully attempted to lift itself. Fear was in its eyes and the fawn was shaking. Holly peered over the fawn. She volunteered at an animal refuge, was sometimes called out in the middle of dinner or early in the morning to help rescue a fledgling or a jackrabbit or a stray dog. The fawn couldn’t move.

  “Maybe she’s waiting for her mother?” Annabel wondered.

  “If a doe hears her fawn in distress she’ll come. She won’t forage far. I bet the doe’s been hurt too,” Holly said.

  “Killed,” Edward added, making the connection. He mentioned the dead deer he saw from his study window on the other side of the house.

  “Poor orphaned baby,” Holly said. The fawn cried out again, thrusting her head in another attempt to get up. Holl
y asked Annabel to go into the trunk of her car where she kept a pair of gardening gloves, blanket, and injection kit. She explained that she’d sedate the fawn and take her to the refuge. The fawn trembled. “It’s scared,” Holly said, and stepped away to give the fawn room. An excited look was in her eyes. Holly read about animals and birds and had shelves full of journals and guides in their library. She owned copies of Animal Behavior Desk Reference and Sibley’s and Peterson’s guidebooks about birds. She subscribed to National Geographic and obscure animal and horse journals. She was interested in animal and bird anatomy and sixth sense, as she called it. She remarked once when she’d been called to rescue a pigeon with a torn wing that pigeons have an ability to detect the earth’s magnetic field, a sense they use like a compass to navigate distance. She said a horse can pick up a rider’s fear in its heart rate. She’d read her books and journals at night or in the breakfast nook, glasses perched at the end of her nose. He liked to watch her this way when she didn’t know he was watching. She was a woman who knew a great deal but often said little. God only knows why she had a temple inside her where she alone could rest and restore when others of us did not. You have your art, and I have this, she said once when he caught her looking at the Journal of Animal Science.

  Annabel returned with the items Holly had requested. Holly put on her gloves and draped the blanket over the fawn’s head to calm her. Edward looked on with admiration. He’d never before witnessed his wife at work. Underneath the blanket the fawn curled her head and quieted. Holly filled the injection needle and pressed it into the fawn’s side. She lifted the fawn in her arms as if she were cradling a hurt child and brought it toward her SUV. Annabel and Edward trailed behind. He opened the back hatch and laid out another wool blanket for the fawn to lie on.

  “I’ll go with you, Mom,” Annabel offered, caught up in the drama. Edward asked if Holly wanted him to come too.

  “No, stay home and finish your talk,” she said, closing the hatch.