The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  He returned to his office and prepared to shut down his computer and pack up for the night. He looked at his e-mails again and saw one from Agnes and clicked on it.

  Dear Edward,

  It was great to see you today and to finally show you my work. I was so frightened. I thought about what you said all day. I went back into the studio and thought again. I have to be honest. I’m completely freaked out. I can’t make any mistakes with this show. It’s my chance to make my mark. It can’t be as good as “Immortality,” it has to be a leap forward. You said it yourself. I’ll do whatever you say. I trust you completely. You’re a wizard. A visionary. I always knew that about you. Nobody gets the work like you do. In the studio, I was defensive when you said the work hadn’t quite jelled and that I need to step back. But now I see what you mean. You mentioned something about getting a more emotional response from the work? Do you think the work is not emotional enough? I read a biography of Jasper Johns. I suppose you’re right. He is an influence. He said at the beginning of his career he didn’t want to expose himself through his art but eventually he realized that “one must simply drop the reserve.” That’s it, right? I haven’t let go. When I was Nate’s student, he observed my work carefully. He told me what worked and what didn’t work by isolating certain areas. I can’t ask that of Nate anymore. He needs to see me as his equal. Will you come to the studio again after Christmas? You’re the only person who will tell me the truth. I’m in your debt. Agnes.

  He read the e-mail again. Agnes’s e-mails were always polished and professional. This was the first e-mail that hadn’t been edited and reedited, as if she were preparing it for posterity before she sent it. He was glad she’d made herself vulnerable and was willing to listen. There was nothing deeper than to work for years with the same artist. He shot an e-mail back saying that he’d come to the studio the first week after Christmas. He told her not to worry. The work was there. It just needed to be tweaked. He told her he’d been reading Jacques Derrida’s monograph “On Touching,” and he saw her desire to disturb and pierce the viewer by deconstructing the images of 9/11. She’d like the allusion. He told her to relax and, if she could bear it, to take a break from the studio over the holidays, so that she could come back to the work with fresh eyes. He told her that the work would be a step forward. He wouldn’t show it otherwise. She could trust him. He sent the e-mail before he left the office that evening.

  THE DAY BEFORE Christmas he worked steadily all morning on e-mails, clearing the decks for the holiday. Three days had passed since the studio visit. He occasionally thought about Agnes and her e-mail and his response and figured she’d get back to him after Christmas. He felt relieved that she wanted to improve the paintings and better about preparing for the upcoming show in the spring. He looked at the clock. It was five thirty and eerily quiet. The gallery had closed for the holiday and only his assistant and a few other back office employees were in the building.

  His assistant buzzed. Ryan Reynolds was on line two. “Ryan, The new work’s a game-changer. It’s almost there. Did Agnes fill you in?”

  “Edward. Let me get to the point. Agnes called this morning. She’s been thinking things over. She said you didn’t get the work. That your comments were, how should I put it . . .” He hesitated. “I’ll just come out with it. She said that your comments were stupid.”

  Edward stiffened. He told himself to take it easy. “I told her the work was brilliant. She agreed. We talked about what more could be done. She wrote me an e-mail. I’ll forward it to you.”

  “She mentioned that. But over the next few days she thought about it again. She brought Nate back into the studio. He disagreed. He thinks she’s nailed it. He says Agnes shouldn’t change a thing. She said you mentioned critics. And you’re worried about how long it’s been between shows. She thinks she needs to be with someone new.”

  His heartbeat quickened. He was struggling to maintain a sense of calm and not give up his power. “That’s absurd. Don’t you find it all a little odd?”

  “Are you saying her reaction is odd?”

  “You warned me. You used the word ‘dark,’ when you told me about the paintings. You told me to be honest with her. You said my job is to be her worst critic and that’s what I did. I was gentle. I love the work. She knows I do.”

  “She doesn’t feel you do. She wants out. She says she needs to be with someone who’s confident in what she’s produced. Look, in the end, it’s her work.”

  “I don’t have to tell you the time and money this gallery has spent on marketing and promoting her work. And our production costs. We put her on a hefty salary all these years, sight unseen. That’s what she asked for. Something isn’t adding up. Has she been talking to other galleries?”

  “She mentioned a dealer from Reinstein. Alex Savan.”

  “Savan? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I hear you, man,” he said and then grew serious. “Listen, I can’t control who she’s drawn to. Nate invited him to her studio yesterday. They’re friends. Savan didn’t have any trouble with the work. I know you’re shaken. I know what this feels like. I’ve been dumped before. You can’t be in this business and not get dumped.”

  His heart thumped. “What?”

  “She claims you said nothing about the work’s intellectual drive.”

  “Oh for Christ sakes, Ryan, come on. You know the work needs tweaking.”

  “Let’s sleep on it. Let her cool down. My guess is that she’ll come to her senses. We’ll be in touch after the holidays. We’ve got time.”

  “Let me talk to her. We’ve always had a good relationship. We’re very close.”

  “I’m not sure she sees it that way.”

  He picked up the Mont Blanc pen she’d given to him and looked at the inscription again. Together we have realized the essential rhythms of art.

  “Ryan, I know her sensibility and what she’s capable of. Every artist needs a second pair of eyes. I worked with Leonard closely on her brand. Leonard and I talked sometimes three or four times a day. You have no idea what we’ve done for Agnes. How I’ve talked up her work and contextualized it. She knows.” He paused. The phone went quiet. “Are you saying you didn’t back me?”

  “She’s sensitive. Everyone knows that about her. Call her if you want. We’ll talk soon. Give her some time. Sorry to give you bad news the day before Christmas.”

  Edward bit his thumbnail and it cracked. He looked out the window at the congested city streets and buildings. He remembered that when he first moved to New York the Empire State Building had stood out among the other skyscrapers, with its steel antenna at the top pointed like a rocket ready for takeoff; it represented power and promise. He’d wanted a piece of it. He looked at his blank computer screen. It had shut down. He picked up the phone and called Agnes at home. No answer. He left a message. He called her mobile and left a message there, too. He rewound the phone call with Reynolds in his mind. After the success of Immortality, Savan had managed to bring Agnes up in nearly every conversation they’d had. That motherfucker. He couldn’t move from his chair. A half hour later he rang both phones again and left messages. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He looked out the window. Between the buildings a mass of clouds rolled through. Inside hundreds of office deals and transactions were being made, an invisible human chain of commerce that made the city hum. He watched the sky of winter slowly closing in and then got up and kicked his wastebasket. Agnes’s work was not quite there yet. Nate should have seen it.

  He methodically packed up his briefcase to make the 7:05 train. Before leaving the gallery he stopped in to see May to tell her. By then everyone else had cleared out for the holiday. He walked into her private space. She faced the window, her back to him.

  “May?”

  She turned to look at him. “The city’s all lit up,” she said. She blinked her eyes closed.

  “May, What is it?”

  “The holidays. I always think of Charles this time of year. And Abigail. I thought
she’d be home for Christmas.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know where she is. I told my lawyer to put some money into her account. The only way I know she’s alive is by monitoring her bank funds. She used to love Christmas. I can picture her face coming down the stairs and seeing all the presents.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe she’ll still call,” she said, with a resigned smile.

  He wanted to tell her about the phone call with Reynolds but he suddenly couldn’t bring himself to do it. He told himself that Agnes would change her mind and that there was no reason to worry May.

  “Do you want to have Christmas with us,” he asked instead. “Holly would love to have you.” She thanked him and declined the invitation, saying she was having Christmas with friends.

  COOL NIGHT AIR brought him out of himself. The avenue lay hushed under the first snow. A man in a Santa hat dragging a Christmas tree, his baby stowed in a pack on his back, came up the street leaving a trail of fresh needles in the white. In another mood it would have made him smile. On the train he sat next to the window. The rain blew softly against the pane. Stands of trees and ramshackle houses passed by in a furious blur. The seats rattled. He listened to the rumbling and heaviness filled his body.

  20 CONNECTICUT

  THE SMELL OF ginger, cinnamon, apples, and currants rippled throughout the house. Christmas was Holly’s favorite holiday. She was baking pies, a dusting of flour in her hair, the kitchen table covered with bowls, sifter, jars of molasses, boxes of sugar and bags of flour, cans of pumpkin, spice bottles lined up in a row like competent little toy soldiers.

  “Hi, Daddy.” Annabel reached up to give her father a hug.

  “I’m glad you’re home. I finished the shopping. Will you bring up the card table and extra chairs from the cellar? And we need firewood from the shed.” Holly wiped her hands on her apron and kissed his cheek. “Do you like these Santa salt and pepper shakers I picked for the table? They’re a little kitschy but it’s Christmas.”

  “Sure,” he said, barely looking. He cracked open the window and breathed in the December air. He could scarcely focus or think. His eyes wandered around the room. He admired the long mahogany table and matching chairs in his dining room. He admired the Williams-Sonoma pots hanging in his kitchen and the original Steichen and Eggleston photographs in his living room, which he and Holly decided to buy shortly after some of the revenues had come in from Immortality. All of it they had bought little by little in the years he had worked at Mayweather and Darby. Was it possible that Agnes could undo everything he had built? He began to calculate how many millions the gallery would lose if she left. And not just money. The news would go viral. She had the power to scar his reputation. All because she was running scared.

  He was going to the dark place. Clara had cautioned him against it. Her voice had become like a chip implanted in his brain. She was moving him toward experiencing the emotions that had been wound up tight ever since he was a young boy. “Take it one day at a time, hour by hour, don’t get so far ahead of yourself,” Clara had told him when he mentioned moments of panic.

  “I’ll bring up the card table. Going to change,” he called to Holly.

  “Annabel wants you to come to the stables on Saturday for the Christmas pageant. And the Waxmans invited us over for Friday night leftovers. Saturday we have cocktails at the Ackermans’. I know you’re annoyed, but you could at least pretend to enjoy the holidays,” she said playfully.

  “I’ll pretend,” he said. “By the end of it we’ll be pickled and preserved in alcohol. Should be good.”

  He climbed the stairs, which were carpeted with an antique rug he’d bought at an auction. It was a present to his family after he sold one of Agnes’s paintings to LACMA. He went into the master bathroom and looked at his pale and oily face in the mirror. On top of the toilet tank was a basket that contained fragrant soaps in the shape of seashells. He looked at the rack. There were two soft bath towels lined up, one for him and one for Holly.

  He took out his BlackBerry from the breast pocket of his jacket and called Leonard.

  “She’s unbelievable,” Leonard groaned. “I’m sure everything you said was on the money.”

  “It all happened so fast. I’m not sure of anything anymore.”

  “It’s a setup. You locked her into a deal and she wants more money.”

  “I don’t know, Leonard. I think she’s running scared. Do you think she’ll come around? There’s May to consider. And the gallery. She needs a firm hand.”

  “Be prepared, my friend. She’s used to getting what she wants.”

  He took off his jacket. It was heavy in his hands. He went to his closet and gazed at the rows of shirts and suits, forgetting what he was doing. Then he slowly hung the jacket on an empty hanger and stood in the dressing room looking out at his vast lawn. Everything outside was darkening. Across the yard a family of deer scattered.

  ON CHRISTMAS MORNING his job was to make the stuffing and prepare the turkey. He put the butter in the pan and melted it. He chopped onions and wiped away the sting of tears with his sleeve. He chopped up apples and pecans and then tore up crusts of whole wheat and corn bread and tossed it all in a pan and let it simmer. He began to attack the turkey with the same vigor. Annabel was upstairs in her room. Holly was ironing the tablecloths and napkins. It was ten in the morning. Edward had barely slept the night before, and when he did his dreams were dark and unsettling. He put in a CD of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. It was one of his favorite operas. He stuck his hand into the cavity of the turkey and pulled out its neck and giblets. The turkey was cold and naked, and when he rubbed butter over it he felt the pimply nubs where the feathers had once protected it. Outside a cold rain lingered. He opened the window just a little to air out the warm kitchen and breathed in the hickory smell of rotting wet leaves. Thunder rumbled through the clouds. The temperature had dropped. Maybe it would snow.

  He looked out the window at the branches of the cherry tree they had planted when they bought the house nearly fifteen years ago. Now they almost touched the side of the house, suffocating one of the windows. The leaves were nearly gone, a few holding on. The years were going by. Annabel was growing up so quickly. He could remember his early years of Christmas with her and how she used to pull up a chair beside him and watch him stuff the turkey. He could remember how she squealed the first time she saw him take out the giblets and how she had been a little sad when she put together the fact that the bare turkey, stripped of its black feathers and loose neck, was like the wild turkeys she sometimes saw in their yard. He remembered how Annabel had seemed to forget all about it later that day once the turkey was carved, and she took particular delight in breaking the wishbone.

  When he thought about the years disappearing, the new crew of young assistants at the gallery, the crop of newly marrieds in their neighborhood, he felt that something was moving steadily away from him. He wondered if Holly felt the same. He observed her in the same gray sweatshirt and sweatpants with their faded Princeton emblem, still trim and fit, her hair loose at her shoulders. She was rigorously ironing, pressing down on the white linen tablecloth, no doubt thinking about how she would lay out the desserts and when she should make the salad instead of depressing thoughts about the passing of years. For a moment his body ached for her.

  Christmas, the year ending, was a time at which he had always taken a few minutes after they had finished eating to look around at his family and take stock of how lucky he was. He supposed he wished Holly had taken more of an interest in his work and his artists. She’d gotten the receptionist position at the gallery because one of her father’s clients had a connection, and she’d taken a few art history classes, but she’d never really understood his personal attachment and investment in art—it wasn’t just a business for him—and he supposed that you either felt that way or not. Early in their years together it hadn’t bothered him. But once he had
made something of himself, Holly stopped keeping track, stopped brainstorming or daydreaming with him about how he could go to the next level, advising him about what he should or should not say when he wanted a raise or a promotion. She was good about thinking through that kind of thing—better than he’d ever been. Now she seemed to think little about what he did in the hours he was away from her, unaware of the daily stresses, the ups and downs he navigated, as if his pressures and worries didn’t exist if she didn’t recognize them. She didn’t appear to want anything to change, whereas he was afraid of the stagnation. He recalled the dreams they used to share, the house they would buy, the family they would have, their furniture and trips and celebrations, and now that they had realized them, he wondered what was next. All of it felt empty. Annabel soon to be at college, solitary evenings alone with Holly, the house slowly rotting and falling apart—already they needed a new roof. What would they do together, or talk about, without Annabel? Was the next stage of his life about watching everything they had built fall away?

  He wondered if he would feel better if he told Holly what had happened, that he’d potentially lost his prized artist. For the first time since it had happened he allowed himself to wonder if he had handled everything wrong. Why had he needed to be honest? Hadn’t he learned enough about handling artists and the delicacy of their egos? In the military there were certain rules that kept the institution running but always the powerful generals were the ones who broke rank. He had never broken rank. He should have told her the work was brilliant and left it at that. Maybe his flirtation with Julia had brought all this on, on some level. Maybe all this was payback, on some karmic scale, for his being infatuated with another woman. He couldn’t bear to think of Agnes showing her work at another gallery.

  He opened the turkey cavity and began spooning fistfuls of stuffing into it. Then he sewed the flaps and squeezed juice from an orange over the bird and put it in the oven. He washed his hands and moved into the dining room, where Holly was still ironing. Love, as he had understood it, involved dedication and commitment. It meant pushing past the things that annoyed him, the way Holly looked at him from the corner of her eye when she disapproved, learning when to reach for her and when to retreat. It involved beautiful days of harmony and then weeks of jagged disappointment. It wasn’t about affairs in attractive cities. He thought of Picasso’s Woman Ironing and Alice Neel’s Nancy and Olivia, Jennifer Bartlett and her houses. Donald Judd and his tools. He thought about other painters documenting their domestic moments, and suddenly felt enlivened by the idea that he ought to curate such a show. He leaned over and kissed Holly’s neck.