The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  “Our clients are serious art collectors.”

  “It isn’t that I alone deserve to be taken seriously. It’s what every serious artist deserves. Otherwise, what is the point to it all?” She pulled back her shoulders and sat tall.

  “Of course it is. Tell me, where does it come from? If we’re going to exploit, er, rather, authenticate you, let’s begin there.” Edward grinned.

  She pulled down her blouse, which had crept up, and shook back her hair, content that he’d taken it upon himself to want to make her known. She explained that many of her ancestors had died in the Irish Famine or on the immigrant ships. Her father’s parents had nothing when they arrived. He had started out as a doorman in a fancy building and now owned a fleet of hotels. Like many children of immigrants, she suffered from survivor’s guilt and proving her self-worth through her art was the source of her bottomless ambition.

  “That’s interesting. My father was a scholar of Romantic poetry. That might have something to do with what I became,” Edward added, more to establish a connection.

  “You’re Harold Darby’s son?” She twirled her swivel chair toward him, impressed. “He was a genius. I read his book on the Romantic period. My father has the soul of a poet too. Our name, Murray, it’s Gaelic. It means ‘of the sea.’ Sea master. Everything I paint is in a way for him. He’s my rudder.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back, pleased with himself. The meeting had gone like clockwork.

  AFTER THE MEETING, Edward invited Agnes and Leonard to an expensive lunch at the Gramercy Park Café. Leonard bowed out, saying he had another meeting across town. Astor Mayweather, known as May, was the widow of an automobile heir who founded the gallery. After her husband died, she became the principal of the gallery, taking over the business side, and hired Edward to be, in her words, her eyes. Before departing for lunch, she told Edward to order the most expensive wine on the list. “You might not think these young bohemians care about expensive things. But believe me, they’re voracious. Narcissism and ambition are not a good combination.” She grinned. Nothing got past her.

  At the restaurant, with its wood-beamed ceilings and elegant understatement, Edward heeded May’s advice and ordered a penetrating cabernet from the South of France. Agnes stopped the waiter attempting to fill her glass, holding her hand over her goblet and saying she rarely drank at lunch, and then conceded, asking for a little bit. She was shapely in all the right places, but thin, almost anorexic. Food did not interest or excite her. She ordered a salad of macrobiotic greens and a side of asparagus and barely finished either dish. Her sense of pleasure derived solely from her work, as if she experienced the world only to see what elements would go into her canvas. She exuded an atmosphere of unattainability and otherworldly glow. She touched Edward. It was all so genuinely important to her.

  “You’re sort of a Renaissance man, aren’t you? One can always tell. Nate’s more of a . . . well, I don’t know how to describe him. He’s not an intellectual. He’s more muscular. Physical. He paints with his body.” She sipped her wine and blinked up at him from the rim of her glass. “If we are going to work together, then I have to be able to tell you everything. I’m worried that I’ll always be seen in Nate’s shadow. You’re the only one I’ve ever said that to. I feel guilty for saying it. We’re very much in love.”

  “When I saw your work for the first time, at your studio, I had no idea you were engaged to Fisher. The work was completely your own.”

  “You didn’t know we were a couple? Really?”

  He shook his head. It was true. He hardly read the gossip columns.

  “Jesus. You’re like . . . How can I say it without offending you? You’re a gentleman. There aren’t many like you anymore.”

  He didn’t know whether she meant it as a compliment, but fortunately she wasn’t waiting for a response. Once she started talking about her work it was hard for her to stop. Her mania manifested or resulted from her unabashed desire to be known as a complex and singular artist. She explained that her art was nothing like Nate’s. She conceded that they both explored 9/11 as subject matter, but that his work was bold and colorful while hers was muted and subdued. She’d been his student, yes, but that didn’t mean his work influenced her. The best teachers, she said, encouraged their students to find their own way. She looked at the lit candle sconces on the wall and then back, the flicker of the flame casting light onto her excited face. She strained her neck, flung back her hair, and looked at him carefully to be sure he understood.

  “Nate has a son, Liam, from his former marriage. He’s my age. I’ll be his stepmother.” She laughed nervously, bringing a sprig of macrobiotic greens to her lips. “Be honest. Am I committing career suicide by marrying him?” She leaned in and in her breath he smelled the wine from her stained lips. “I mean, I love Nate. But I can’t risk my work for him.”

  “Marriage is personal,” he said, because it was the right thing to say. “Your talent speaks for itself.”

  She flitted from Nate to give a brief lecture on the difficulty of being a woman painter. She believed it was perfectly natural for women to be the subject of paintings but to have their own work exhibited and taken seriously was another story. She mentioned Frederick Jackson. He’d been Nate’s student too, a few years ahead of her at Columbia. “Do you know his work? It’s like he’s fucking his models with his brush. And he wins a major prize for idealizing women.” She was referring to the Tanning Prize, one of the most prestigious in the art world, awarded every five years to an American artist under the age of forty. Earlier that week it had gone to Jackson. “Only winning a major prize can change the way women artists are perceived. It’s why I stay away from domesticity as a subject. Did you think it was worthy of the prize—Frederick’s work?”

  “I can see what the judges saw in it. He has a convincing brush.”

  “My work is driven by compulsive and neurotic jealousy. It’s terrible to admit it, but there you go. You can’t imagine how many dinners I’ve endured with Nate and Frederick going on about this or that European dealer or museum. I need this show to work.” She stroked her pale cheek with her hand and timidly licked her lips. “You understand, don’t you?”

  Edward eyed her assertively and nodded. “It will work.”

  He knew from the minute he met her that she was difficult. But she was worth it. So much of what Edward saw in the art world was good, but little seemed brilliant. Agnes’s art was different. He could look at her paintings for long periods of time, continually finding new things in them, the way he liked to plant a beach chair near the waves and stare out to the horizon.

  “What inspires you?” he inquired, genuinely interested, after he’d ordered a chocolate dessert for them to share. It was plated meticulously, almost too beautiful to eat, decorated with a mint leaf and carefully arranged dots of raspberry sauce.

  “Inspiration?” she said, lurching her shoulders backward with disdain. “I don’t paint from inspiration. I paint from necessity.” She speared a tiny bite of the chocolate tart with her fork. “I’m filled with Catholic guilt. For Lent I gave up painting—it was the hardest thing to part from. I am a good Catholic. But honestly, if I can’t paint I don’t know who I am.”

  The waiter topped off their wineglasses. Later, over espresso, Agnes asked Edward a few obligatory questions about himself, inquired about his wife and his daughter, and though she barely waited to hear his reply before she turned the conversation back to herself, he didn’t mind. He didn’t like talking about himself and he found it interesting the way she meticulously steered the conversation so as to make sure he understood what he was getting into. She had mastered the art of passive aggression.

  He asked her what other contemporary painters she admired, since it helped him to know a painter’s influences and taste. She explained that she didn’t go to many shows and that seeing contemporary work made her anxious. She was a little tipsy by then, having gone from “just a little” wine to half a
bottle. She said she wasn’t interested in hanging out with other artists and by nature she was an introvert. It was why she didn’t attend art openings. She didn’t have much use for friends. Her parents were her best friends growing up. She stabbed another bite of tart with her fork, paused, and put her fork down.

  “Nate was my first best friend.” She looked at her watch. “I need to go,” she said. “He’ll be waiting for me. You know, to find out what we discussed.”

  “Is he concerned?”

  “That I’ve made the right decision by coming to you?”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.” Edward fondled his espresso cup. “Have you?” he said. He was good at this too.

  “Of course I have,” she laughed. “Nate’s as invested in my work as I am.” She shook her head and grinned. “Sometimes it’s like he thinks it’s his.”

  She excused herself to the ladies’ room. He thought of something his father had once told him—true art is born from an almost animalistic urge in the artist. His father insisted on absolute quiet when he worked, as if their home were a sanctuary solely dedicated to the pursuit of his intellect. He walked through the world with blinders on, prizing literature and art above all else, and he believed Agnes was the same.

  Agnes returned, crossed her hands, and rested them on the white-clothed table decorated with a silver saucer of sugar and spoon and a single flower in a clear vase. “There’s one more thing, before we go.” She gazed into the cavernous bowl of the restaurant. “It’s about timing. We have to make sure that my show is mounted before Nate’s next show. I want a wide berth.”

  “Absolutely.” He asked for the check and tried to be optimistic so as not to be concerned. Her expectations were high. He hoped they wouldn’t disappoint her. In the end, he could only control how they mounted the show, the marketing they’d throw behind it, and their private exchanges with collectors and dealers. The rest of it—how the work was perceived, talked about in the press, and the word of mouth that might or might not travel—was about timing and luck.

  AFTER THAT FIRST lunch Edward and Agnes were in touch almost daily. They agreed on how each painting should be mounted, considered the way in which viewers would enter the room and the first painting they would see. And before he knew it, the day disappeared. The whole day was lost in Agnes’s art. They chose frames together. Wrote and rewrote copy. Agnes was enthralled by the close collaboration. She loved all the attention he gave her. “What we’re doing here. You have the ability to bring to life what’s in my head.” She had a way of sentimentalizing experience and including him in the fiction, and though Edward knew it was a fiction, it pleased him nevertheless. Like many men, he found it a thrill to make a woman happy. And to make Agnes Murray happy, well, that was something.

  There was one piece she had wanted to include in the show that was gratuitous and evoked easy emotions, and Edward cautioned her against it. She became defensive, eventually acquiesced, and later acknowledged he’d saved her from embarrassment. A week later he heard her say to an assistant, who was wrapping the rejected painting for storage, that she was her own harshest critic. It was interesting to him how quickly artists forgot the curator’s hand, but he let it go. Part of being a successful dealer was to be self-effacing and to allow oneself to be a mirror for the artist.

  Months before the infamous show was to open—and by then they were so familiar they were finishing each other’s sentences—Edward sent over the catalogue. Agnes objected to the choice of cover painting and demanded the catalogue be redone. Edward explained that the title painting wasn’t necessarily the most inviting of her work and that the purpose of the catalogue was for collectors and the press. After reviewing other options, and a morning of agonizing (they’d already printed ten thousand copies), he finally persuaded her. He rang Leonard once it was sorted.

  “Let me tell you something about Agnes,” Leonard began. “It’s the key to her psyche. She has no one but her family and Nate. No one. She doesn’t need anyone else. When I first met her she invited me out to Spring Lake on the New Jersey shore to see her parents’ house on the water. It was the most magnificent house I’d ever seen. Art filled the walls, sculptures decorated the garden. But it wasn’t lived-in. Her parents have built a mausoleum for themselves. What I’m saying, man, is that she cares about no one but them. She has to control someone. And that person is you.”

  Though the comment disturbed him, he wasn’t so sure. Yes, she was a handful, but it was his job to figure out how to handle her. The difference between Agnes and Nate was that she wanted people to genuinely admire her paintings, while Nate wanted to provoke. Edward learned to present things to her in such a way that she felt as if she’d come up with the idea. Not only was the cover an issue, she wanted to approve every sentence he wrote about her work, including the typeface and layout of the catalogue. He was used to control freaks, but Agnes was extreme.

  The day before the show was to open, she came into the gallery to do a final run-through. After hours of rearranging and deciding on lighting, Nate, rough peppery stubble on his face, entered the gallery, decked in black jeans, jacket, and cashmere scarf around his neck. It was ninety degrees with one hundred percent humidity. He acknowledged Edward with a nod and looped his arm around Agnes’s waist, then gave her an openmouthed kiss, as if he planned to fuck her on the gallery floor. Agnes flushed.

  “I’m having lunch with Frederick around the corner. I’m late,” Nate said, breaking away. “I couldn’t go another minute without seeing you, baby. Come here.” He brought her close again, drinking in her neck.

  She laughed. “I’ve missed you, too,” she said. “If you wait a few minutes, I’ll join you.”

  “Can’t. Frederick needs me for something. I’ll call you later.”

  “Will you?” she said with a pout. She was disappointed.

  “Of course I will. How’s it going, Edward?” Nate gave him a handshake. Before Edward answered, he swaggered down the hallway toward the doors. “Hey, man,” he called back. “I saw how skillfully you hung Jean Faber’s last show.” He must have seen the framed poster in the gallery entrance. “You took him from a solid B to an A. I didn’t know he was yours.” There was something in his voice, Edward couldn’t exactly make it out, but he thought that maybe Nate seemed a little thrown.

  After he left, Agnes smiled uncomfortably and shook her head to hide her awkwardness. “I know he’s a little much. But he loves me.” She paused, stepped back, and looked at her paintings mounted on the wall. “He thinks the show is going to be brilliant. Do you think he’s just saying that? Being my husband. I don’t know if I should trust him.”

  “It will,” Edward said.

  A few minutes later they heard again the sound of Nate’s boots clicking on the gallery’s wooden floors.

  “Baby, come here.” He beckoned with his hand for her. She excused herself and as they looked at each other the effect was as if they’d stepped onto a lofty precipice above where the rest of humanity lived. Nate took Agnes’s face between his two hands and kissed the top of her forehead. He held her in his half-opened, sleepy eyes. Agnes returned his look.

  “I’m sorry, baby, of course you can come to lunch.” He looked at her as if she were the only person that mattered. “I’ll wait for you.” Nate’s impression was one of stature without elegance. Every interaction was a seduction. His gift was to make you feel as if you alone existed and when his spotlight was pointed on you it made all his other shortcomings fade.

  After they’d left the gallery, a wind of loneliness blew in. Edward had been so engaged with Agnes, everything suddenly felt too quiet. He thought about Agnes and Nate and wondered, as he had many times, if their interaction was genuine or curated to elicit a response.

  A few days before the opening, in an interview in the Times, Agnes was quoted saying she had chosen Mayweather because of how moved Edward had been by the work and the way in which he had put the meaning of her work into words. “I feel like Matisse must hav
e felt when Gertrude Stein first discovered his work.”

  5 HAMBURG

  THE AMERICAN GROUP had flown to Hamburg to see two renowned galleries, before returning to Berlin for their last dinner. Once they landed and were congregating in the terminal waiting for the rest of the group before hailing cabs, Julia dug in her purse, taking out various items: makeup bag, brush with gum wrappers stuck in its bristles, wallet, a wad of rubber-banded envelopes, Kleenex. “I can’t find my passport. I used it when we checked in and may have left it on the plane. I have to go back to the gate. How will I get home without it?” She searched her bag again.

  “If we wait for you we’ll be late for our first meeting in Hamburg,” Tina, their escort from the German council, asserted. Tina wore the same uniform each day: plain cotton shift, in a new color, black pumps, and a string of pearls. Throughout the trip she had kept them on a tight schedule. Tina handed Julia her itinerary. “After you get your passport sorted, take a cab directly to the gallery. We’ll meet you there.”

  Julia looked upset.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Edward volunteered.

  “Are you sure?” Julia questioned, relieved.

  He nodded.

  “We’d better hurry, then. What if I’m stuck in this godforsaken country?”

  They walked briskly, almost running, through the overly lit airport. After taking a quick turn, Edward slipped and fell on the waxed floor and his bag tumbled. He quickly recovered and stood up. His face colored with embarrassment.

  “Are you okay?” Julia said.

  He picked up his bag and dusted off his pants. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine. Really. Jesus, these floors are slick.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s my fault, making you run like that.” She brushed off the back of his jacket with her hand in an intimate gesture, and as if realizing it together they stopped and then awkwardly fumbled with their bags and continued to the gate.