The Prize Page 13

  To get to the escalator he ventured through the cosmetics aisles and into the cloud of perfume the sales clerk was spraying onto strips for passersby. It was Bulgari Notte, meant to be worn after dark, the sales clerk with overly made-up eyes suggestively told him. He read the packaging. Bulgari Notte’s blend of galanga, iris and dark chocolate embodies refined seduction, along with the mystery of the night. On a whim he bought the perfume. He wandered to the men’s section and began trying on gloves. Happiness filled him. He thought of Julia again and felt as if he were walking outside his body, floating on air. He decided on a pair made from the finest leather and cashmere. He told himself he wouldn’t buy them and put them back. They cost a thousand dollars. He walked away from the counter and in a few moments wandered back and purchased them. He strolled to the scarves and bought an Italian gray cashmere for nearly twice the cost of the gloves. The purchases made him feel new again.

  He decided to skip the auction and took a cab back to the gallery. The leaves on the trees lining the streets had turned late this year, flaming orange and red—how come he’d never noticed their depth of color? He perceived everything more intensely. Back at his desk, he looked at his picture of Holly and Annabel dressed in matching riding gear at the stables, on the steel-gray blotter Holly had bought for him one Christmas. Holly. He hadn’t thought of her or Annabel all day. He looked at the bag from Saks propped on his desk and regretted his purchases. It was a compulsion, buying things like this; he didn’t know why he did it. He opened the black box with the gloves in tissue paper. The natural softness and elasticity of the Italian deerskin makes these gloves a perfect fit for your hand. They come in black or chocolate brown, the sales clerk had said. Feel them. Put your hands inside. They’re lined in cashmere. Every pair is hand-sewn. He tucked the box of gloves and the scarf in his closet, next to the five-hundred-dollar Paul Smith tie, the turquoise box with the silver clock from Tiffany’s, and the jewelry box that housed the exquisite Locman automatic watch called the Latin Lover: a statement of precision and elegance with reptile band and curved, scratch-resistant rectangular face outlined in stainless steel. Made with only the best materials from around the world and designed and then assembled on the Tuscan island of Elba. Gift box included. Made in Italy. He’d bought the watch online on Forzieri. He’d read over the selling copy as if it were lines of poetry. The cadence of the words relaxed him, as did the idea of comfort and elegance, of a world clean of decay, mediocrity, and shabbiness. He took out the bottle of perfume from the Saks bag, and though he wanted to remove its seal and open it, he forbade himself to do it. He put the bottle in the cabinet of luxuries and locked it for safekeeping.

  14 NEW YORK

  CLARA FEINMAN, HIS therapist, was Jewish. On her bookshelves were volumes of Freud, along with works by Carl Jung, D. W. Winnicott, William James, Virginia Woolf, and Kierkegaard. He had spent silent moments looking at the spines. He hadn’t been feeling right since Berlin. He didn’t understand the loneliness that seized him sometimes traveling to and from the gallery on the train, the waves of anxiety that flooded him in moments in the office, and the inexplicable sensation now and again that his life was a fraud. After Julia mentioned that he should consider therapy, the idea had stayed with him. He had his yearly checkup a week later with their family doctor. Rothman wrote Dr. Clara Feinman’s phone number on a sheet from his prescription pad. After days of considering it, he unfolded the prescription from his wallet and made his first appointment. The first two or three sessions were difficult. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, or thinking about himself so closely. But Clara seemed so genuinely interested in him, and in the work they were doing together, that he slowly began to take the work—probing the minefield of his interior life—seriously too.

  He liked her office. He thought of it as a place where he could go to hibernate for one hour twice a week. She had photographs of Rome—his favorite city—on one wall of the office and matching Shaker furniture: a smart cherrywood coffee table and two end tables, a desk and a mirror. Something about the unpretentious, clean lines of the wood and the furniture’s slender, deerlike legs and the perfect shape of the vase on the table and her library of books relaxed him.

  Once he’d gotten comfortable in the leather chair and began to talk—those first words were always the hardest—he said he didn’t want to go home that night.

  “Really? How long have you been unhappy at home?” Clara asked. Marriage had been the grand theme of their last few sessions, after they had begun to probe his childhood and the lack of meaningfulness he sometimes experienced as of late at work.

  “I’m not sure.” He hadn’t realized till this moment that he was truly unhappy. For so long he’d justified his marriage.

  “But you and Holly have been happy before?”

  He studied the bracelets she wore and the thin watchband on her left wrist. Her hair was silvery white and wavy around her face. Wrinkles had formed over her lips and around her eyes. He was amazed how long he could look at the different parts of Clara and not feel he had to turn away. What else could you do, trapped for fifty minutes inside the small confines of the soundproof room, besides occasionally study the pattern on the kilim rug or her long neck and the pinches of rolled flesh when she dropped her chin, the motor of her mind turning in her intelligent eyes.

  “Yes. We were happy.” He thought about the times when they used to spend a Sunday holding hands walking through antique shops to furnish their home. Or stopping at their favorite diner for burgers and splitting a plate of fries. How they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. “But, now—I can’t explain it. I don’t feel close to Holly.” He looked down at his hands. “I wish I had more space. I mean, that we could take a break and I could figure it out and it would be all right.”

  “Is there someone else?”

  “No. Not really.” He looked above him at a photograph of the crumbling walls of the Colosseum. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Clara about Julia. That would make it too real.

  “You don’t think it would be all right if you had a break from Holly?”

  “And risk losing her?”

  “So you don’t want to lose her?” Clara said, in that way she had of making a statement into a question.

  “She’s my wife.” He looked at Clara and then back at the photograph of the Colosseum, and then back at her again. “I love her. I don’t want to hurt her or leave her.”

  “And?”

  “And there’s Annabel.”

  He paused, started to say something, and then stopped. He could not formulate his thoughts into words.

  “What’s wrong? Did something happen you’re not telling me about?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “I had a lunch that unsettled me. I went to Saks and bought a pair of expensive gloves and a scarf I don’t need. I do that sometimes. When I’m anxious.”

  “What else have you bought that you feel guilty about?”

  “There’s an Italian watch I bought online. Sometimes when I travel . . . I keep them in a closet at the gallery.”

  “Why? You mean you buy things you don’t use?” Clara probed.

  “There’s a Matisse drawing I bought after we closed a big deal in Paris for Agnes. And a Homer watercolor of the sea. Holly would kill me if she knew how much I paid. She doesn’t understand that art . . . well, that for some of us it’s more than a beautiful image. I don’t mean to be patronizing.”

  “Why do you think you do it? Hide things. Is it because you feel deprived?”

  “Because they make me feel better.”

  “But why keep them in a closet? Why not enjoy them?”

  “Then they’d be ordinary, like everything else.” He looked into her face for reassurance. “I could be buying crack or heroin,” he said with a smile. He shifted in his chair. He was too uptight to master the couch. “We go to the Cape every summer. We rent the same house. Every year Holly makes the same Thanksgiving dinner. She’s bought the identical white sheets fo
r our bed since we were married twenty years ago.” He pondered further. “Everything seemed good between us. Until . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “A few years after Annabel was born. We were trying to have another baby. Everything changed.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  He didn’t think he could go there. He couldn’t explain how having sex when they were trying to get pregnant suddenly seemed mechanical. He’d wanted to take her ovulation thermometer and break it in two. He’d watched as she drifted off in sadness when she got her period, and then a week or ten days later she’d begin to feel hopeful again, until her period came. And once they stopped trying, sex no longer seemed to interest her in the same way. Nor him, if he was honest with himself.

  Initially, therapy had seemed an indulgence, but within weeks he found himself looking forward to his sessions. He discovered terrain inside himself he had not known existed.

  “I can’t.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  “I feel if I talk about it—I don’t know, that I won’t be able to contain it. That I’ll snap or something.”

  “Like your father?” Clara searched.

  “They weren’t happy. My parents. Everything changed once he got sick.”

  “The items you’ve purchased. Do you think you keep them a secret because you’re frightened?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of being fully known.”

  Edward looked at her thoughtfully.

  “There were a lot of secrets at home, weren’t there?” Clara asked.

  “My father’s illness?”

  She nodded. “Did your father’s illness frighten your mother?”

  “I suppose so. My mother’s father committed suicide when she was a child. I never thought about her being frightened.”

  “Did you marry Holly to please your mother?”

  Edward pictured his mother, whose face over the years had hardened into an iron mask of disappointment. He felt a tiny crack in his chest. It was true that his mother had approved of Holly. It was true, too, that when his mother was happy, he felt free of her sadness. His mother made him feel, because she was distant, that he was too emotional. She, by contrast, was impenetrable. He didn’t like this. When Clara brought his mother up he felt ice jams beginning to break loose inside him. He married Holly because he was in love with her.

  “Do you blame your mother for your father’s illness?” Clara said.

  He flinched. “I’m not sure.”

  He looked at the clock on the wall and watched the second hand go steadily around the numbers, one after the other.

  “But why do you hide them? You buy things you love and you don’t enjoy them. Are you afraid to come out of hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding.” He cleared his throat. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe.

  “Are there other things you’re keeping from Holly?”

  He thought about Tess and how he’d never told Holly about her. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time, as if he had been willing it to all disappear, until he first saw Agnes’s work four years ago and the figure in the painting that reminded him of Tess, then his abrupt confession to Julia. Suddenly the terror of how Holly might react seemed bigger than he’d thought. A prickle of fear went through him.

  “Tell me more about what it’s like at home. So we can figure out what it is that’s frightening you.”

  “It’s a nice house. Everything we saved for has gone into it. It’s hard to describe. It’s not extraordinary. We have three bedrooms. A third floor. A garden.”

  “Tell me what it’s like when you’re at home. Let me picture it,” Clara asked as she looked at the clock and noted the session was ending.

  “Picture what?”

  “Your home. I know you don’t want to go home tonight. But perhaps we can conjure one image that makes you feel safe enough to return. At least for tonight.”

  He felt a lump form in his throat. “I can’t picture it.”

  “Try.”

  Instead he remembered Berlin. He closed his eyes and sank into the memory. He and Julia exchanged glances in the open white room of a gallery. She was talking to a small party of others, and he had felt excluded and agitated watching her and not being part of her conversation. The light in the gallery made her skin pale and almost translucent, and he had wanted to walk into the circle of friends around her and embrace her but he couldn’t move.

  “Where did you go, Edward?” Clara had been patiently waiting for him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Just then. Where were you?”

  “Home,” he said, his eyes stinging. “You wanted to know about home.”

  15 CONNECTICUT

  TREES, RAMSHACKLE HOUSES, empty streets rushed by the train window. Slowly the stress of the day fell away and he eased into solitude. He needed to slow down. Recalibrate. Agnes had promised to let him come to her studio to see the new work soon. Before Christmas. He had to gear up. Begin conversations with collectors. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. One of the things he loved about being a dealer was to see an artist grow over a period of years, to take the work to a new level and challenge her own history.

  He thought about the lead-up to the last show he’d mounted for her. She’d called it Immortality, which struck him as slightly grand, but he felt Agnes could get away with it. When the show opened, the first review in the Times compared the work with Fisher’s. Agnes had made sure in all their marketing materials that they distanced themselves from Nate’s work. If anything was worded in a similar way to how his work had been described, she demanded they change it. The show was timed, as Agnes had requested, so that it would not overlap with Nate’s.

  Agnes Murray’s second show, ‘Immortality,’ bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘Falling Man,’ by her better-known husband and former professor, Nate Fisher. It is unclear whether Murray is paying tribute to Fisher or attempting to outshine him. One wonders whether it is self-indulgence rather than historic guilt that fuels the work—the guilt, of course, of those who escaped unscathed—and whether it is appropriated guilt or appropriated subject matter.

  Edward thought they’d be hung out to dry. A scathing New York Times review could ruin an artist.

  Agnes had dated the reviewer years before and had left him for Nate. She blamed the gallery. She thought the review was a breach of ethics and that they should do something. Edward recognized that Agnes sometimes functioned better when she was angry and he allowed her to vent—not that he could have stopped her. He explained that the gallery couldn’t control whom editors assigned to cover the work.

  “Why can’t you?” she responded, never missing an opportunity to let him know she was disappointed.

  They recovered once a three-page rave in the New Yorker hit the stands, a few more positive reviews trickled in from influential papers and journals, and the paintings sold quickly—though one cynical rival had said in print that the reason Murray’s show sold out was that the consumer wanted to be in the same company as Fisher and thereby be touched by his genius.

  It took a month or two after the money had started flowing in before Agnes calmed down and realized that the response to the show had changed her stature. One critic said she was “an artist who transformed her canvas into a modern-day theatre wherein a conflict between man and history might be rehearsed.” While another painter might have received the statement with humility, for Agnes it set the bar and as a result she grew more controlling and irrational. Mounting the new show was going to be rough sailing. If Agnes had demanded a lot then, now that she had more at stake it would be more difficult to please her. He took out his notepad from his breast pocket, suddenly remembering a few phone calls he had to make, before he forgot them again. He reached for his Mont Blanc fountain pen. Agnes had given it to him after a review in Art News praised the exhibition as the most outstanding solo show of the year. He read the inscription: “Together we have realized the essential rhythms of art.”


  He looked up and noticed that the train was heading into his station. Passengers shoved past him to get off. He put the pad of paper and pen away and grabbed his briefcase and newspaper and exited the car. He stepped onto the platform, slipping into the anonymous flow of strangers.

  16 NEW YORK

  NATE AND AGNES, embroiled in a heated discussion, surprised him, sitting on the couch in his office when he strolled in a week or two later. Nate’s hair was unwashed. He hadn’t shaved. His wrinkled clothes looked slept-in. He passed the hours of the afternoon and night in his studio or out and about and was not the kind of man usually seen in broad daylight before noon. Something was up. He was manically chewing gum, one arm strung over the end of the couch. Agnes looked uncomfortable.

  “Did I miss something on the calendar?” Edward shook Nate’s hand and kissed Agnes’s cheek as they rose to greet him. “Have you been waiting long?”

  “I wanted to call first and Nate thought we should just drop in. I hope that’s okay. We’ve been up half the night talking.”

  Georgia brought in coffee and placed the mugs on the table in front of the couch. Agnes held hers between two hands. She rose and stood in front of the window and looked out at the cityscape, pensive, her sprawling hair in a cascade down her back.

  Nate started. “Look, Edward. Might as well get down to business. We’re here about the Vanity Fair profile.” Cynthia, the gallery’s publicist, had arranged a profile for Agnes to keep her in the limelight before gearing up for her new show and she was thrilled about it. “Now isn’t a good time for a journalist to go poking around. I don’t think Agnes should agree to the interview.”