An Object of Beauty

by STEVE MARTIN

  64.

  LACEY’S BUSINESS CONTINUED strong through 2007 and 2008, strong enough that she did not wish she could dip into her now invested, and therefore impossible to retrieve, backup fund. The fall sale saw a Hon See bring one hundred fifty thousand, and in the spring of 2008, a Hon See again brought one hundred thirty thousand dollars. Though it was less than the previous season, the price was solid, making the pictures worth at least what had been paid for them.

  During the summer, Lacey prepared for her opening show, now set for September 18. She had tiny reproductions of the Hon See pictures made and paid an architecture student to render a two-foot-square model of her gallery. She could move the small images around and design the best layout for the show. Some of the pictures were floor to ceiling, while the smallest was thirty-six inches square, and Lacey thought the show was going to look handsome.

  She ordered champagne and sent out pre-invitations saying, “Save the date,” followed up by a formal and more exquisite foldout that made the night seem extraordinarily special. Talley did the same, and both their addresses were on the invitation, a coup for Lacey, as she was now linked with one of the most prestigious galleries in Manhattan. Ben and Belinda were invited, of course, and had accepted. Hundreds of others, too, had told Lacey they were going to both openings, uptown and down, and the evening, intended to flush art sales from the distant bushes, was turning into a soiree. Already there were holds on three pictures, at two hundred fifty per, minus a ten percent courtesy discount, and with two holds at Talley’s end, she was at least one-third out of her investment.

  On the Sunday before the opening, Lacey celebrated with Angela and Sharon, both of whom were coincidentally in Manhattan for the weekend. For this rare girls’ night out, she bought dinner, and they seemed happy for her. Sharon, continuing on with a decent man and pregnant with a second baby, and Angela, who was accompanying her famous writer boss on a promotional tour, seemed happy with their lives far away from Manhattan. Lacey went to bed that night with visions of sugar plums dancing in her head.

  Monday morning would be a day spent adjusting the show, sprucing up the gallery, and doing touch-ups on the shoe-level scrapes that had inevitably bruised the white walls. The gallery would be officially closed until opening night, and Lacey knew there would be urgent calls made by collectors trying to get an early peek. Monday noon she called Talley, but he was unavailable. “Have him call me,” she said. By two there was no call back, so she called again. This time he took the call, but breathlessly.

  “Have you been watching the stock market?” he asked.

  “I hate the stock market. Why would I watch it?”

  “It’s down over five hundred points. Lehman Brothers is bankrupt, Merrill Lynch is sold, and AIG is bankrupt.”

  Lacey didn’t quite know what all this meant, but Talley’s voice was shaking.

  “They’re already calling it Black Monday,” he said.

  The next day, Tuesday, the stock market just quivered, but on Wednesday it fell four hundred fifty points. Investors, meaning not just high-end Wall Street pros but every civilian with a few thousand dollars, pulled their money and bought T-bills and T-bonds, and they certainly didn’t buy art. There was no credit, which the U.S. mainstream had relied on for at least thirty years. Only the credit card system was still operating, and with usurious interest rates, those companies had little to worry about. Several were taking three percent of every purchase and eighteen percent on every unpaid debt.

  Thursday, the day of Lacey’s opening, the stock market gained a bit, and she called Barton Talley.

  “Up today,” she said.

  “Lacey, still not good.”

  “But it’s up.”

  “Even a dead cat bounces.”

  Opening night, Lacey swung open her doors to a few students. The only thing missing in Chelsea was tumbleweeds. There were a few stragglers, who looked like scavengers prowling for bodies from which to pluck watches and gold teeth after the big shoot-out.

  By eight p.m., Lacey’s receptionist was afraid to look at her. Talley called, reporting that there were a few people there, but all they talked about was the collapse. “Lacey,” he said, “I’ve never heard anyone talk about global financial disaster and then say, ‘I’ll take it.’ “

  “But there’s a market,” Lacey insisted. “What about the last Hon See that sold at auction? Just four months ago.”

  “We bought it. Bravo and I bought to keep the prices up. We were the only bidders.”

  The last Monday in September, the Dow fell seven hundred seventy-eight points and continued its slide through the week.

  Overnight, the Arabs, the Russians, and the Asians left the art market. The holds on the Hon Sees were released, with, “Sorry, can’t do it right now,” and, “I’m going to wait and see.” Lacey’s show hung for another month to cobweb silence.

  Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was now affecting cherubs, cupids, and flattened popes. The objects hadn’t changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created when the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched.

  Art magazines and auction catalogs thinned. Darwinism swept through Chelsea, killing off a few species, and only the ones with the long necks that could reach the leaves at the tops of the trees survived. There was still some business, but not for Lacey, and negotiations got tougher and tougher up and down the street as collectors, even the ones unaffected, wanted bargains. Lacey was willing to give bargains, but no one wanted what she had to offer.

  She needed an influx of buoyant money, but in her heart, she didn’t know if it would be wise to keep the gallery afloat. She might just be incurring more debt by delaying the inevitable. She called Barton Talley. He could meet her at his gallery later that day.

  The taxi ride uptown turned into a coincidental Grand Tour of her life in the art world: through Chelsea, past Christie’s, and up Madison where all the galleries hid. Upon arriving at Talley’s, Lacey pushed the doorbell as she had so long ago. It clicked and she muscled it open. She threw her weight against the inner door when there was a second click, and she saw Donna, older, shopworn, still feigning efficiency, with her thumb pressing on the door buzzer long after Lacey had entered the gallery.

  “Hi, Lacey. Can I offer you something to drink?”

  “Is there any poison?” said Lacey.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m here to see Barton.”

  “I’ll see if he’s in.”

  Then she heard Donna say over the phone, “Are you in for Lacey Yeager?”

  Donna looked up at Lacey and said, “Go on up.”

  The nostalgia continued for Lacey as she recalled her initial ascent of these stairs almost a dozen years ago, where she had encountered Agent Parks, now her boyfriend. She recalled her accidental peek at the Vermeer copy at the wrong end of the hall, and her first entrance into Talley’s expert world. Her time in this gallery was the best of it, she thought, and as she walked down the hall, she recalled her footsteps years ago when she headed excitedly toward the window to look for Patrice Claire. Her memory couldn’t quite trace what had led to this now funereal march to Talley’s office; she just knew she had come, and gone, a long way.

  “In here, Lacey,” she heard Talley say.

  She entered the office. “Well,” she said, “I’ve come full circle.”

  “I’ve been through troughs before. They keep the boom times from looking like a Ponzi scheme. You want a drink?”

  She said yes, and Talley poured.

  “Lacey, I’ve seen a lot of beginners in the art business. You were the smartest one of all of them. You seemed to know things before you knew them.”

  “I just paid attention.”

  “Are you looking for investors?”

  “What for? The fever is over, and without the fever…
”

  “What about dealing privately? No rent, except your apartment. You develop clients who trust you,” said Talley.

  “I’ve still got a gallery. I can work harder.”

  “Can you?”

  “No, actually, I can’t.”

  “So why’d you make the trip up here?”

  “Oh, I suppose to say thank you, now that I’ve had a cocktail.”

  “I liked you, Lacey. You were always fascinating to me. And you brought in a lot of clients. Especially single ones.” Talley laughed.

  “And some married ones,” Lacey said. “But, I’m looking you in the eye and saying thank you.”

  “It was fun. Fun and business. What’s better?”

  “I guess I got more out of it than you.”

  “In what way?”

  “I had sex, fun, and business.”

  Talley laughed again. “Well, maybe I had a little of that, too.”

  “What’s on the walls?” asked Lacey.

  “We’re low. Nobody wants to sell in down times. We’ve got a few things,” Talley indicated the few drawings on the office wall. Then he pointed behind her. “What do you think of that?”

  Lacey turned in her chair and saw against the velvet easel a painting in a gilded frame, overframed, in fact, for its diminutive size. There was a jab of recognition for this old friend in spiffy new duds. It was her grandmother’s Maxfield Parrish.

  “It was traded by some collectors to another dealer, and I got it in trade. It’s a gem, don’t you think? The condition is flawless, like it has been under glass.”

  Lacey got up and walked over to it. It was indeed a gem. She wondered if Talley was feeling her out, but he seemed innocent and she was content to believe he was.

  “It is a gem,” she agreed.

  “The picture’s right,” said Talley, meaning that it was a genuine Parrish, “but we have provenance issues. We can trace it back to Sotheby’s and there’s a block. Can’t trace it back to the artist. Doesn’t really matter. It’s real.”

  “Yes,” said Lacey, “it’s real.”

  “You know Parrish’s work?”

  Lacey turned toward him, taking a sip of her drink. “The girl in the picture. That’s my grandmother.”

  “What?”

  His disbelief assured Lacey that this was a coincidence and that Talley was not on FBI detail. “Kitty Owen, that’s her, was my grandmother.”

  “My God. Well, there is a resemblance in the face.”

  “And ass, just so you know,” said Lacey.

  “Well, how lucky for you,” he said with a smile.

  Lacey stared at the picture, got lost in it, in fact.

  Talley broke the spell. “They want a million six for it. Won’t get it now. But it is a top Parrish.”

  “Well, let me know who ends up with it. Maybe one day I could buy it back.”

  “Back?”

  “Buy it. Just buy it,” she said.

  65.

  HER CASH POOL DRAINED, Lacey held on through the new year, finally accepting that her lease was worth more than her gallery and its inventory. In June 2009, she sold it at a loss to a restaurateur. The Hon Sees were sold to a speculator for nine hundred thousand dollars, less than one-third the cost, returning three hundred thousand of her million-dollar investment, which she used to the pay the capital gains tax on the Aivazovsky, which she had forgotten about. Her loft was destined for foreclosure.

  Months earlier, on the drive home from Connecticut when she confirmed her misstep to Barton Talley, she didn’t realize that, as discreet as he was, he still saw Cherry Finch and that pillow talk had leaked the confirmation of Lacey’s grift to her, and thus to the world. The moment was so slight that even Talley didn’t understand that he had passed along the information. When Lacey announced that she would become an “art adviser,” working from home and taking ten percent from every sale advised, this little negative, that she was a bit of a crook, was made clear to clients by her rivals, even if they were crooks themselves.

  Ben and Belinda Boggs were among the first to recoil from Lacey, sensing that she was an outcast. They also rehung their entire art collection, placing into deep storage objects that the new, dismal market shouted they had overpaid for, and pulling out more classic objects, including the Beuys felt suit, bought when prices were sensible. They hoped this would peg them as astute collectors.

  Lacey’s larger secret, that the auctioned Parrish had been purloined from her own grandmother, remained secret, and Lacey remained curiously, disturbingly, guilt-free.

  66.

  NOT MANY ART world denizens wanted to talk to me after the crash, fearing journalists, fearing would-be novelists, fearing parody and revenge for the free-spending years. I had drinks with Lacey once before I lost contact with her, and I told her of my intent to write this book. I offered to change her name. “How about Alison Ames?” I said.

  “If I had to hear the name Alison Ames in my head for three hundred pages, I’d go insane,” she said.

  “It won’t be all flattering,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to be a good little girl,” she said.

  Lacey seemed not to care that her life might be mirrored in a book, that she might not be portrayed as a heroine, and that art world readers would certainly deduce that it was about her. She seemed to have the attitude that of course she would be the subject of a book.

  “My mother is ill, so I’m going back to Atlanta for a while.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  ”You’re sorry? She’s so nuts about Jesus that I can hardly speak to her.”

  This was the mother whom Lacey had maneuvered out of six hundred thousand dollars that was presumably hers.

  “Lacey,” I said, “you’re going to have to do something in Atlanta besides caretake.”

  “Elton John is disposing of some of his photography collection and I’ve been asked to help, so I can do two things at once. Help Mom. Help Elton. And the High Museum there is good; I bet I can worm my way in somehow.” On the word worm, she twisted her baby finger through the air, but it seemed a tired gesture.

  “How’d you get into the Elton John situation?”

  “I don’t know. They called, saying someone recommended me.”

  I wondered who that might be, perhaps a sympathetic Barton Talley.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” I asked.

  “I’m seeing a guy who’s got me figured out. He never says I love you.”

  “That’s good?”

  “I love him for it.”

  “Will he go with you to Atlanta?”

  “He travels, he’s FBI.”

  “FBI?”

  “What did I say?” she said.

  “Do you think it will last?”

  “Daniel, there’s no way it’s going to last.” Then she paused, staring at me. “Goddamn it, the art world ran out on me.”

  “You’re still in the art world even if you’re in Atlanta,” I said.

  “Paris doesn’t qualify as being in the art world, why should Atlanta? I know I’m in purgatory.” She sipped her coffee. “I’m going to take the Parrish print back to my mother. She says she’d like to see it.”

  It wasn’t clear to me whether Lacey remembered that while under the influence she had told me about her larceny.

  Lacey looked around the walls of the restaurant. “God, I’ve seen thousands of paintings. High and low. Remember the Avery I told you about? I’d like to see it again. It’s like a first love; it might be nice to say hello.”

  Her energy seemed drained, but I knew it was not a permanent state. She even laughed a bit, saying, “Damn it, why didn’t I try to seduce Rauschenberg? He might have given me a silk screen.”

  “Rauschenberg was gay and near death,” I said.

  “You don’t know my powers,” she said.

  67.

  ART WAS STILL ART whether it was tied to money or not. People continued to attend art fairs, museums, galleries. They thought about it, they cha
tted about it, they pontificated about it, but the financial race over it had stalled. Most art enthusiasts who resided outside of New York or Los Angeles didn’t know or care about the market’s collapse. The collectors stood back and tried to remember how to love art the old-fashioned way, and the dealers developed strategies—that finally included discounts—on how to survive the trough. A Pilot Mouse work died at auction. He was a symbol of the bubble, and the bubble had burst.

  New York City’s Armory Show of 2009 was just barely breathing, and collectors who asked prices always feigned disbelief and shock, trying to indicate lower, lower. There was acting on both sides, with the dealers citing sales and European notice, real or not. Two giant hangars housed the works for sale, connected by a membrane of jerry-built steel stairs, which allowed only ten people on at a time, for fear of another kind of art world collapse. The Modernist galleries were on one side and everything else on the other. Gold frames to the left; no frames to the right. The Nathansons would peer at a Miro gouache, then time-travel—to next door—and be puzzled by the extreme art of the present month.

  As a writer—though one now fearing at all times for my reputation—I covered this waterfront, also attending the Miami Basel art fair in the fall. This fair was always a big draw, recession or not, and the gallerygoers included the sandals-and-T-shirt crowd out for an afternoon of eyeballing. I did not see Hinton Alberg there, and the usual party festivities were thinned out. I did see Patrice Claire, affectionate with a woman in her late forties who had streaks of gray in her black hair, and overheard them speaking French. I caught them at the drinks bar and introduced myself, reminding him that we had met before with Lacey Yeager and that I was a writer for ARTnews. Would he allow me to interview him, I asked, just to get his take on the fair?