An Object of Beauty

by STEVE MARTIN

  When the couple left, Cherry turned to Lacey and asked her what she thought the picture would bring. Lacey knew this was a test and decided to make a calculated but extravagant guess. She thought it might be better to have her guess remembered than forgotten. She considered the picture to be a small gem that could easily snare a strong bid, so she said, “Probably one hundred seventy thousand.” Cherry smiled at the poor, innocent child.

  Lacey ran down the interior escalators. The Avery couple were on their way out of the building when Lacey caught up with them. “Do you mind if we reframe the picture?” she asked. “It might help.”

  Not quite understanding why—it had been framed the same way for fifty years—they consented at Lacey’s professional urgency.

  She took the picture downstairs and measured it, knocked off early, and dropped by Lowy, the Upper East Side framer to the magnificent. She approached the woman at the desk: “Hello, I’m Lacey Yeager, I’m with Sotheby’s. I’d like to talk about a frame for a Milton Avery.”

  Lacey’s voice carried past the desk to the racks of luxurious samples, where velvet easels held pictures while corners of frames were laid over them. Customers stood back and imagined the other three-fourths of the frame. A man walked over to her. “Hello, I’m Larry Shar. How can I help you?”

  “We have a Milton Avery that needs a frame. It’s being auctioned in the next sale. Could something be done in that time?”

  “Sure. Where’s the picture?”

  “Well, here’s the situation. The couple who’s selling it can’t really afford a frame, so I was wondering if you could make a frame on spec. We could auction the picture stating that the frame is on loan from you. Whoever buys the picture would certainly want to purchase the frame. Your work is so good.”

  “We usually—”

  “And if they don’t buy the frame,” Lacey added, “I will.”

  Larry said curiously, “What is your name?”

  With that, Lacey knew he had consented.

  7.

  LACEY LIKED THE GAMBLE, and she flew home with other thoughts of how to ratchet up the picture’s appeal. She had noticed after it had been pulled from the frame that the picture was brighter where it had been hidden under the liner. Maybe the owners were smokers or had hung the picture over a fireplace, where it had been layered with grime. Certainly the picture could be freshened. She had an idea that she could corner Tony, the conservator from downstairs, and persuade him to give it a light cleaning.

  When she got home there was a message on her machine from Jonah Marsh: “Hey, want to do X tonight? I’ve got some.”

  Sure, Lacey thought, let’s do X.

  Jonah Marsh arrived at six p.m., minutes before dark. Lacey threw a maroon scarf over a lamp, reddening the room. Outside, the streets were wet from a sudden, cooling rain. Lights were coming on in windows across the street. Jonah produced the pills, displaying them in his hand like buttons. “Supposed to be excellent and very clean,” he said.

  Lacey poured two glasses of tap water and momentously swallowed a pill, then laid the other pill on Jonah’s tongue, gave him the water, and kissed him as the pill was going down.

  “You’ve done it before?” asked Jonah.

  “Yes, once.”

  “What was it like?”

  “I saw my goddess.”

  Huh? thought Jonah.

  Minutes passed. He lay on her bed, and Lacey lay down next to him, not with romantic proximity, but at the polite distance of two travelers sharing a bed. The sex that Jonah had anticipated now seemed very distant to him. Lacey breathed deeply, and an eerie wave shimmied up her body. She gripped the bedspread beneath her and hung on until the unpleasantness passed. She comforted herself and had closed her eyes again, when, unexpectedly, a stronger, final flood of chemistry saturated her body from head to toe, placing her in its ecstatic grip. In this dream state, she saw her mother extending her hand toward her. Her mother led her through her childhood home, swung her on the backyard swing, held her close. She led her to the Maxfield Parrish, where she saw the silken girl that was her grandmother, whose luminosity Lacey had inherited, who was now in Atlanta, lying so ill in her bed. Lacey wondered whether her grandmother was looking backward over her life, finding her face reflected in one of Parrish’s pools, or if she was in the present, staring into the face of death.

  One hour had gone by. Jonah and Lacey were now suspended in an artificial nirvana. They loved their friends and understood their enemies. They loved their mothers and fathers, they loved the bed they were in and the street noise outside, they loved the person next to them. Jonah, in a low mutter addressed to himself, whispered, “Wow, wow,” as though a revelation had just transformed him, a thought that he brought to himself in cupped hands after holding them under a fountain.

  Nighttime had fully arrived, and Jonah slid the covers lower, to Lacey’s waist, and looked at her without the cloud of sexual desire. She was a ceramic, her skin reflecting light, the ribs highlighted, the slope of her stomach shading into desert tan. His palm glided over her upper body, hovering like a hydroplane, a few fingers occasionally touching down. Lacey then sat up like a yogi, and Jonah did the same. Lacey pulled the curtains shut.

  The drug made Jonah a perfect lover. Time was slower, making his normal masculine drive turn feminine, while Lacey’s normal masculine overdrive downshifted into the pace of a luxurious Sunday outing.

  “I love you,” said Lacey. “I love you so much.”

  In the morning they stirred, relapsed into sleep, and were at last out of bed at eleven a.m. They moved like slugs around the apartment until Jonah pulled on his socks, his pants, and the fancy shirt that he’d thought he was going to need last night. He looked out the window and said, “Thank God it’s gray. No sunglasses.”

  He told Lacey, “Last night, I saw a painting. Now I’m going to go home and paint it.” It was a momentous night for each of them. The only problem was that when Lacey told Jonah she loved him, he believed her.

  8.

  I MET LACEY at the Cranberry Cafe near 10th Street on an unexpectedly blessed spring day, which appeared after a string of cold weekdays that blossomed into sudden glory on Saturday. Her conversation was full of spit and vinegar, and her complaints about one person would effortlessly weave themselves into praise for another person, so it wasn’t as though she hated everybody. She gave me every detail of the Ecstasy trip, recounted all the complexities of her work life at Sotheby’s, and even managed to inquire how I was doing. Having my torpid accounting of my last few months spill out in such proximity to Lacey’s salacious and determined adventures made me feel all the more dull. I had just had a two-year relationship end because of boredom on both sides. Even the breakup was boring.

  Lacey was anticipating the sale of the Milton Avery in a few weeks. She had focused on pumping it up to the exclusion of all other interests, including returning Jonah Marsh’s forlorn phone calls. Lacey, I believe, liked to know that he was hanging on, that he was hers when she wanted him. She would occasionally leave him an affectionate message—crafted to be both enticing and distancing—when she guessed he wasn’t home, just to keep the pot stirred.

  Then Lacey leaned in, as though she were going to tell me a secret.

  “I was in Atlanta last Sunday. It was so vivid when I saw my grandmother dying, I went.”

  “Is she lucid?” I asked.

  “More than you, not as much as me,” she said. “The Parrish print I told you about? It was across from her, and its presence was almost cruel. She’s so withered, but the print is bright. I took it closer to Gram; she wanted to look at it. I looked at it, too.” Then Lacey started to talk more excitedly. “Daniel, I’ve known that print all my life, but I…”

  She paused, strangely, as though she were distracted by the implications of the next sentence. I could almost see her head bobbing along to the words like a bouncing-ball sing-along.

  “But what?” I said.

  She was silent. It was as though
she were trying to retract what she had told me. Her mind was turning something over, then she looked up at me and stammered through the rest of the meal, as though she had an idea she needed to hang on to.

  Outside, as we rambled around the East Village, Lacey would throw exaggerated looks to me as we passed the overweight, the underclothed, and a wandering family of tourists who looked as if they were at least forty blocks away from where they wanted to be. I laughed shamefully every time as Lacey parodied each sorrowful personality with a quick, exact facial expression.

  Then I found myself participating in an unpleasant coincidence. We rounded a corner and Jonah Marsh was walking toward us. Spotting him, Lacey did an awful thing: she took my arm. Guessing that Jonah was probably dumped by Lacey, I instantly tried to look as nonthreatening, as nonromantic, as I could. But Lacey’s bearing didn’t change; she clung to my arm as though we had just gotten engaged.

  Then, “Oh, Jonah! I’ve missed you!” she cried, and hugged him like a returning army husband. “How was your birthday? I’m sorry I couldn’t come… This is my friend Daniel. Daniel is a great art writer. He should see your pictures.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  Jonah tried to let nothing show, though he may have lightened in color. He knew that Lacey was up for anything and that my hip-nerd look was something that she might go for.

  “Jonah, are you doing anything now?” she asked.

  I guessed that whatever Jonah might have been doing would be thrown aside if Lacey was implying anything from a tryst to a walk around the block.

  “Not right now,” he said.

  Then Lacey turned to me. “Were you headed midtown?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I think I’ll stick around here, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, and after one of those intense, show-off hugs from Lacey, I headed for the subway. I don’t know what happened after that.

  9.

  BY MAY 1995, Lacey had become conversant with American painting up to 1945 (because that was where the auction catalogs stopped) and it was becoming her default specialty. Default because although she had a collegiate overview of art history, her heavy lifting had taken place in the Sotheby’s sales department. She had learned to differentiate good pictures from bad ones, but because prices usually followed quality she was now learning the difference between good pictures and desirable pictures. What lifted a picture into the desirable category was a murky but parsable combination of factors. Paintings were collected not because they were pretty, but because of a winding path that leads a collector to his prey. Provenance, subject matter, rarity, and perfection made a painting not just a painting, but a prize. Lacey had seen the looks on the collectors’ faces as they pondered various pictures. These objects, with cooperating input from the collector’s mind, were transformed into things that healed. Collectors thought this one artwork would make everything right, would complete the jigsaw of their lives, would satisfy eternally. She understood that while a collector’s courtship of a picture was ostensibly romantic, at its root was raw lust.

  From her experience with men, she knew that lust made them controllable, and she wondered if this principle could be applied to the art business.

  Unfortunately, the Avery was not a picture that would arouse lust. It was a respectable girlfriend you would take home to Mom, without stopping first to have sex in the car. After Lacey had tweaked the picture in every way it could be tweaked, it hung in the galleries during the Sotheby’s previews, wearing its new frame like a bridal gown. Lacey explained this change to Cherry Finch by simply saying, “I reframed it,” as though this were the most natural thing in the world. Because this strategy had been used at Sotheby’s before, Cherry assumed Lacey was implementing a standard practice, not, as Lacey believed, creating one. Lacey had connived to have the picture hung in the main gallery, near the star lot, a nearly perfect Homer watercolor of a trout squirming on a fishing line. She would pass by the picture during viewing hours to see who paused, who commented, who nodded. A particular couple, the Nathansons, had swung by the picture a few times and, quickly sizing her up as an employee, turned to Lacey, who had been eavesdropping.

  “Do you know the condition of this picture?” they asked.

  She was not supposed to answer floor questions, but she couldn’t resist. “It’s perfect,” she said. “We gave it a light cleaning, that was all.”

  “Could we see it under a black light?”

  “Certainly,” dared Lacey. “Just a moment.”

  She dashed to the in-house phone and explained the situation to Cherry, overstating the haphazardness with which she happened to be gliding by. Because time spent with a painting created an interested buyer, Cherry was eager to have pictures flipped over, hefted, and examined. She told Lacey to bring the Avery to room 272, where a black light would be produced and Cherry, too, if she could make it.

  Saul Nathanson—his suit was dapper, but his tie wasn’t—leaned back and looked at the picture as it hung on a universal nail in the cramped viewing room. His wife, Estelle, her hair a bit too orange but otherwise just as turned out as Saul, stood by, commenting.

  “We knew Milton,” she said.

  “Lovely guy,” said Saul. “Do you mind?” he said, indicating he would like to take the picture off the wall. He held up the picture and looked closely at it.

  “He likes to hold pictures. I say why do you have to hold them?”

  “She’s right,” Saul said amiably, “I don’t know what it means, but I do it.”

  “You do it a lot,” said Estelle.

  Saul grinned at Lacey. “See what I go through?” Then he turned his attention back to the painting. “Avery knew Rothko and Gottlieb. He may have influenced Rothko with his flat planes of color.”

  Cherry Finch, slightly harried, opened the door. Cherry knew the Nathansons, so Lacey figured they must be regular customers. Everyone milled around the picture, and Cherry explained that it had never been on the market, which made Saul nod, pleased.

  “When’s the sale?” asked Saul.

  “Next Tuesday,” Cherry said as they began to exit the room.

  Lacey, reminding them of her presence, said, “It’s a very beautiful picture, and a great year, 1946.” Cherry glanced at Lacey.

  After the Nathansons left, Cherry turned to Lacey. “Lacey, some advice: You don’t have to sell paintings. All you have to do is put a good picture in front of a knowledgeable collector and stand back.”

  10.

  AS THE WEEK WENT ON, the public viewing of the American pictures drew only light crowds. Tanya Ross was officially on the floor, but Lacey made detours across the gallery, whenever possible, to promote the Avery when Tanya might lapse. Tanya—her back turned—was on the far side of the floor when Lacey came upon an unlikely customer, a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sun-bleached dreadlocks piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs. He was paused in front of the Avery.

  “If you have any questions… ,” Lacey began.

  The young man turned. “Who’s this?”

  Sensing this was not a knowledgeable collector, Lacey went through her pitch: “American Modernist… America’s Matisse,” she spouted, and then threw in her latest slogan: “Deeply influenced Rothko.” Through Lacey’s compromised history, Avery now “had deeply” influenced Rothko rather than “may have.” The man didn’t have the savvy of the Nathansons, but there was still an aura of money about him.

  “Do you have a card?” he asked.

  Lacey said she was out but told him: “You can reach me here, I’m Lacey Yeager.”

  The man wandered away, looking puzzled as he surveyed other pictures in the gallery. It was then that Lacey realized he was not a customer, and she had a dim visual recall: he had followed her in from the subway and had just wangled her name and phone number.

  When she arrived at the office floor, there was a phone call already waiting for her, but she backed away from the friendly secretary
and waved it off, miming, “Take the number.”

  Over the next few days, several people inquired about the Avery, but Lacey didn’t know who they were, and Tanya wouldn’t tell her.

  Lacey took one extra gamble. She manipulated Tanya into predicting the outcome of the Avery in front of Cherry Finch. Assuming an air of indifference, Lacey said in her most casual voice, “What dya think that Avery’s going to bring?”

  “High estimate at most,” said Tanya.

  “So seventy-five?” Lacey said, making sure the number registered in everyone’s brain.

  American sales started at ten a.m. Unlike the flashier Impressionist and contemporary sales that began at a glamorous seven p.m., where people dressed in their showcase clothes, the day sales attracted attendees who wore brown pants with blue blazers and shirt collars that lay crushed under their lapels. Lacey had improved her single invitation from Heath Acosta to attend one sale into a standing invitation to attend any sale, and nobody seemed to notice.

  The auction started off with a few alarming bumps. An uncharacteristic John Singer Sargent oil, decent enough, died a lonely death without a single bid. The failure was made even more visible because the auctioneer quickly escalated false bids against the reserve to give the illusion of furious bidding, only to promptly sputter out upon reaching the reserve, where he was forced to dwell in a few lingering seconds of ringing silence. It felt as though a shroud of death had fallen over the room. This was especially alarming as last year a Sargent had stunned the crowd, topping out at seven million dollars. Sargent was desirable, more desirable than Milton Avery, and Lacey felt a nervous chill as she acknowledged to herself that the sale could have a disappointing outcome. One would think that the seven-million-dollar figure would motivate at least one buyer to pop for a hundred grand, even for a not-so-great Sargent, if only for the signature, but the auctioneer had to muffle his obligatory announcement, “Passed,” by saying the word exactly as his gavel struck the lectern.