The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  “Edward,” she said and laughed.

  He felt a rare need for reassurance from her. “Holly, has anything changed? Do you still love me?”

  She looked up from the ironing board. He could hear the sizzle the water made when she lifted the iron from the cloth.

  “Do you really need to ask me that?” she said, as if she expected that he understood that everything she did, all this, all they’d built and accumulated over the years, was for him, and wasn’t that enough? Her face wore that slightly confused expression when he was looking for romance and titillation instead of the down-to-earth love she offered.

  He watched her stretch the Christmas evergreen tablecloth over the long table and then remove the china from the cabinet. The porcelain dishes, thin, delicate, she took out carefully one at a time so they would not chip or break. It was the cream-colored wedding china, each plate trimmed with a gold rim to mark its significance. He looked underneath the tree where Holly had small gifts for their guests wrapped with cutouts from magazines. The night before, Edward came upon her on the bedroom floor going through stacks of magazines and snipping pictures to personalize each gift. Annabel’s were wrapped with pictures of horses and dogs.

  He decided not to tell Holly about what had happened with Agnes. Why burden her? Agnes would come around. Her work meant more to her than anything—possibly more than Nate and the twins—and she would consider what Edward had said about the work and see that he had been right. Edward was certain she needed him. In those early days of working together, writing copy, hanging the show, e-mailing every review or comment from the press back and forth, going over negotiations, an intimacy and understanding had developed between them. It wasn’t just business. Beneath his anger was fear for her. Being a gallerist was a delicate dance, to know how much to push and hold back in service to the work, to find a shared sensibility that perfectly meshed. Edward believed he and Agnes had achieved that balance. He felt a little better. She’d be lost without him.

  He went back to the kitchen to baste the turkey and clean up the dishes he’d left in the sink. He needed to go down to the wine cellar and bring up the wine and went to find Holly to ask her which of the reds she wanted to serve. He looked in the living room and then the dining room and couldn’t find her. He remembered he’d heard her go out the back door and assumed she was going to take out the trash. He looked out the window and saw her SUV in the driveway and Holly inside it. Her head was leaning against the steering wheel. He went outside and knocked on the window. When she looked up he saw she’d been crying. She unlocked the door and, cold, he slipped into the passenger seat next to her. “What is it, Holly?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It hit me, earlier, wrapping presents. Annabel is almost sixteen. And we never . . .”

  “Never what?”

  “You know. Had another child.”

  He thought of her full, swelling breasts and rounded abdomen when she was pregnant with Annabel and how he had placed his ear against her belly to hear her gurgle. It had excited him to feel that quick kick of life, that stronghold that held them close. He thought about the years in which they’d tried to get pregnant. He remembered how sometimes after Holly got her period he would find her despondent, curled into the couch after Annabel went to bed. In the middle of the night she washed their clothes, the swishing of the washer and the spinning of the dryer in his dreams. In the morning when he came down for coffee she was in sweatpants ironing, polishing their silver, or cleaning the refrigerator. Then one year, he didn’t know why, she seemed to have turned the corner and stopped talking about having another baby. So as not to upset her, so did he.

  He stroked her arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t anything either of us could control. I thought things would be different, that’s all,” Holly said. She dried her eyes with a Kleenex and gave him a kiss on the lips. “I’m okay. We have so much. Let’s go in,” she said.

  He followed her inside wishing he knew how to comfort her.

  BEFORE LONG IT was time to go upstairs and shower and then greet their guests. Holly’s parents were staying in the city for Christmas this year. His own mother preferred not to leave the retirement home, as if life outside had lost its meaning or frightened her. Each passing year her world became smaller and more contained. He’d go to see her sometime over the weekend with Annabel and bring her gifts. He was grateful the holiday this year would be with friends. He wanted to sink into the wine and get lost in the company.

  After he dressed he came downstairs and admired his living room and the sprays of winter-white flowers Holly had carefully composed for the table and mantel. He poured himself a glass of wine and focused on trying to have a good time. Before long the house was filled with the sounds of conversation. Yet when he caught himself alone, either carving the turkey or pouring the wine, a wave of dread washed over him.

  Dinner was served. He looked across the table at Holly, her cheeks glowing from the wine, and then at Annabel laughing with the Lawson boys. “You hide yourself from me,” Holly had told him once early in their marriage when she had found him in the third-floor study late at night working on a presentation for the board of a museum. She ran her fingers through his hair. “What keeps you so locked up?” she said, kissed his cheek, and then lay down on the couch and fell asleep so he would not be alone. He watched her passing the gravy for the turkey and talking about the fundraiser she was planning for the refuge, and admired how quickly she seemed to have pushed past her sadness from earlier in the afternoon.

  After dessert around the fireplace, the Christmas tree lights on, he placed another log on the fire, but before he was able to join Ruth Atkinson and Holly chatting on the sofa, Chip Lawson approached him by the fireplace. Chip was a successful hedge fund manager; in a matter of a few years he’d amassed a shitload of money. He was handsome in a Kennedyesque way, dressed in corduroys and a sports coat. His on-top-of-the-world disposition reminded Edward of Holly’s father. Chip’s wife, Marilyn, was an ex-ballet dancer who Edward suspected drank too much in order to endure her husband’s philandering. Chip flirted with Holly at cocktail parties. Observing the coy jostling that went on between them, he perversely wondered if Holly would have been happier with a man like him. He talked in gestures and grunts and could barely put together an articulate sentence, but Edward imagined he fucked like a racehorse, or was it piss like one, he couldn’t remember.

  Certainly Holly’s father would have preferred him for a son-in-law. Edward knew that Frank Moore disapproved of him. He mostly spoke to him about making sure he had long-term health coverage and had already paid for family plots in an elite section of a cemetery in Westchester where four generations of the Moore family were buried.

  At dinner Chip had hijacked the conversation by talking about the vacation he’d booked for the family in Anguilla. He boasted about the great year they’d had at the fund. Holly’s cheeks flushed and she laughed, a little too robustly, at his jokes.

  Chip patted him on the back. “Amazing dinner. Your wife outdid herself. She’s one beautiful woman.”

  The cliché made him wince.

  Chip generously refilled his wineglass from the bottle on the coffee table. As the night went on the guests were getting louder and drunker. “How’s the art market?” he asked, as if it were regulated like stock. “Anyone we should know about?” But before Edward could answer, Chip leaned over. “I’ve had a boner for five days straight. Goddamn Viagra.”

  “Sounds rough,” Edward said and excused himself to have a cigarette on the screened-in porch. Viagra. Is this what it would all come down to? He put out his cigarette in the ashtray and walked back into the party. He turned his head to look back at Chip and caught him nodding at Holly from across the room. He didn’t like it.

  Holly was standing with Ruth by the fire, its light wrapping them in a soft insulated cocoon. He was drawn into their glow. Ruth had studied art history in college and was an amateur collector, and one of the few neighborhoo
d friends with whom he felt a connection. She liked to come into the city and visit one or two galleries, and they often discussed particular artists or shows they had seen. Edward advised her on art. The other guests still lingered in a half-comatose state from overeating, their faces rosy, sipping wine. The children had fled the adults for the den. He joined Holly and Ruth.

  “Is there anyone new you’ve discovered?” Ruth asked.

  He thought for a moment. The truth was that lately he hadn’t taken on anyone new. Instead of telling her this, he heard himself say, “There’s this sculptor whose work I like. Julia Rosenthal. Do you know her work? There’s something utterly magical about it. The struggle for any artist is how to capture with materials exactly the way of feeling and seeing. With her work it seems effortless.” His face warmed, recognizing he’d gone on. He’d had a little too much to drink.

  “I’ve read about her. In ArtForum maybe?”

  “Wasn’t she that artist who won the Rome Prize?” Holly broke in. “Ages ago. When I was still at the gallery. We were at that reception right before we got engaged.”

  Heat rose to his face. He nodded.

  “She’s controversial. Now I remember. I saw a show of hers years ago. Are you taking her on?” Ruth asked.

  “Thinking about it. We were in Berlin together. She was part of the group. Years ago she made a stir. Her work’s moving in a new direction. It’s softer now.”

  “Really,” Holly said. “You didn’t mention it.” She looked at him, and unable to meet her eyes he looked at her forehead.

  “Mention what?”

  “That you were in Berlin together. If Ruth’s interested in her, we’ll have her for cocktails. And then we can invite you and Martin to join us,” Holly said, without missing a beat.

  “I’d like to learn more about her work,” Ruth responded.

  “Maybe it’s the cure for restless husbands.” Holly had had a few glasses of wine. “Inviting pretty artists to the house.”

  EMPTY WINEGLASSES AND dessert plates still on the coffee table and scattered throughout the living room, cigarette butts in the ashtray on the porch, the cushions on the couch sunken, still holding the ghosts of their last inhabitants, the fire nearly extinguished. Edward went to the kitchen to start the dishes. Dirty plates crowded the sink. On the counter sat the picked-over turkey carcass and charred casserole dishes. The windowpanes above the sink were black. The house felt uncomfortably still.

  Holly wrapped the leftovers, pulling out a sheet of plastic wrap and meticulously placing it over the bowl, stretching it so that it sealed the container without letting any air in. He thought of the way she had flirted with Chip at dinner. He slipped the sponge into a crystal goblet and the glass broke in his hands. “Goddamn it,” he said.

  “Are you okay? Did you get cut?”

  “I’m fine.” He shook his hand to stop the blood.

  “You’re not fine.” She came over and wrapped his finger with a paper towel. Blood oozed into it.

  “I’m sorry.” He pressed his finger against the paper towel to stop the flow of warm blood.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Chip Lawson is a dick. He never stops talking about himself. He put me in a bad mood.”

  “He’s Chip.”

  “He’s an asshole.” He turned to the sink and with his free hand picked out the broken glass. “Sorry. I’m not myself tonight.”

  “I’m not either.” In the half-light of the kitchen, Holly kicked off her heels and appeared suddenly smaller, more diminished.

  “Maybe it’s the holidays? I always feel a little sad this time of year.”

  “Maybe.”

  He dried his free hand on a dishtowel and turned to Holly.

  “That’s not it,” Holly said. “I’ve been thinking. You know, about what I said earlier to Ruth. About inviting that artist, Julia, to the house for cocktails. Why don’t you ever bring your artists home? Or take me to one of your dinners?”

  “I guess I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  “It’s like you’re ashamed of me,” Holly said.

  “I’m not ashamed of you. I thought you’d be bored. You know what it’s like when you get a group of artists together. They only want to talk about themselves. Hol, you don’t invite me out with your friends at the barn either.”

  “I guess,” Holly said, drifting. “I’ve just been thinking. In taking care of everyone else—you, Annabel, Mother and Daddy, this house—I’ve lost a bit of myself.”

  “That’s not true. We’d all be lost without you.” He wondered about his own unhappiness but it upset him to think Holly was unhappy or disappointed or had lost faith in him. Was what Holly said true? Was he embarrassed by his wife? That wasn’t it. He liked keeping her separate. Home was his refuge.

  “I don’t know,” Holly said. “Nothing seems fun anymore with us.”

  She stretched out another piece of plastic wrap. His eyes moved down her body and stopped at her legs, covered in sheer nylons. On one leg her nylon had snagged, causing a rip up the seam. He leaned into her back and nuzzled her neck. A shimmer of desire went through him. As if sensing it, she moved away, picked up the plastic wrap, tore off a sheet, and placed it tightly over a plate of cookies. Why was she always moving away? If only she would come into his arms and kiss him—for so many years he lived for her to take him in like that. He wanted to be adored. Maybe all men—everyone—did.

  “It seems as if you’ve lost interest.”

  “I’ve lost interest?” She turned to look at him. “You really are dumb. In the morning you don’t look above your coffee cup to acknowledge I’m there.”

  His thoughts raced. He could not break through the layers to figure out how to reach her or what to say. Or how to get what they once had back. It seemed in that moment that if he went any further it all might fall apart. He looked at the copper teakettle on the burner next to the sink. It was a wedding present from one of Holly’s cousins. It was discolored after years of tarnish; the bottom had corroded and puckered from built-up residue and the copper had pulled back to expose the raw metal underneath.

  He wanted to say something more to her about their unhappiness, something simple that might fix it, but the words fought him. He considered telling her about Agnes and stopped himself. He didn’t want to bring it up. Not then.

  “My work seems to have lost its meaning.”

  “Until your next discovery. The way you spoke of Julia Rosenthal, it doesn’t sound as if the magic is gone just yet.”

  The room seemed to go around him. His heart sped. He peered at his reflection in the dark pane, and farther back, the shadow of Holly. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed.

  They finished in the kitchen, unease lingering, abstract but all-inclusive. He turned off the lights, one after the other, darkness shadowing them, and followed Holly to the staircase.

  PART TWO

  1 LONDON

  THE FAIR PRESENTED more than a hundred galleries of modern and contemporary international art. Julia gave a talk about her exhibited work in the crowded space of a new British gallery: “Sculpted figures that hang from the ceiling like naked mannequins in dancer-like poses,” the catalogue read. All Powerful Individuals Eventually Become Powerless, the show was titled. In her talk she said she aimed to depict the unknown individuals in society. “At the end of the day, who are we really?” she said, then she quoted from Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” She spoke about the strangeness of making something out of nothing and of how her dancers lifted themselves out of the iron in which they’d been molded and brought themselves to life. Her cheeks were pink as she turned to look anew at her sculptures projected on a screen behind her.

  Edward waited for her in the back of the gallery. After Christmas, in clear moments, he had told himself
to cancel their dinner plans, but from the moment he boarded the plane to London she was the only person he wanted to see.

  “It was wonderful,” he said to her, after the last of the crowd had drifted to the drinks buffet. “I’m spellbound.” He kissed her on one cheek and then the other.

  Julia’s face was flushed, high from the talk. “I didn’t embarrass myself?”

  “No. You were terrific.”

  “I’m glad it’s over.”

  “Charlotte invited us to her dinner. Do you want to join?”

  “Charlotte knew we were getting together?”

  “I ran into her at Saatchi this morning. She asked about you. She’s been trying to get in touch.”

  “Will the others from Berlin be there too?”

  He nodded. “Charlotte said if we don’t attend her dinner she’ll make sure we’re the main topic of conversation. And people need to see you after your talk. It was brilliant.”

  “Well, then, we have to join,” she said, a little reluctantly.

  “We have time for a drink first,” he said, walking her toward the door and then around the corner to a small, dark, and crowded pub. They sat in a back booth. He ordered a Guinness and she a glass of cabernet.