The Prize Read online

  Edward had heard from Leonard that Nate had been struggling with his own work as of late. The extraordinary auction prices, over-the-top attention from the critics, and international success had him in a holding pattern. He was an academic painter who’d taken a risk by taking iconic images of the Twin Towers—the buildings slanted to the sky against the pure blue light of day, the explosion of flames, American flag, falling man—and painted them in a style so polished and pristine that they looked synthetic. Their bold emptiness was part of the statement. A high-powered gallerist happened to be at Columbia and had seen something in the work he could manipulate. The rest was history. Whether Nate believed in what he was doing or what he had achieved wasn’t clear, but nevertheless the work was understood to be part of the history of our times. Nate didn’t want to repeat the work he had already done and was at a crossroads. When he wasn’t working well, he partied too hard and went on all-night benders. No wonder he looked like crap.

  Agnes returned to sit next to her husband. “But I want it,” she said, with childlike steeliness. “Edward said it was important.” She took Nate’s hand again. “To create interest for my new show. Is there a way we can control the content?”

  “The short answer is no. Not if the journalist talks to other people for the profile. Is there something I ought to know? Something you’re afraid might be exposed?” Edward adjusted his pant leg, which had crept up when he sat down.

  “Edward should know everything, Nate,” Agnes implored. She touched his thigh. “Otherwise he can’t do his job.”

  Nate leaned over and kissed her. “I’m the only one who needs to know everything about you, baby. Go ahead, tell him then.”

  Agnes blinked her eyes. “It’s about Liam, Nate’s son. He stole a drawing of Nate’s and sold it on the black market and took off for Europe. He’s been in trouble lately. Nate doesn’t want the press to pick up the story.”

  “My concerns are real. He’s my son,” Nate added, soberly.

  “We can wait until it blows over. I’ll tell Cynthia to reschedule the interview closer to the opening. It shouldn’t be a problem. Look, I haven’t seen the new work yet. We’ve got time.” Edward looked at Nate. “I’m sorry about your son, man.”

  Nate nodded. “Thanks. He’ll be all right. He’s still a kid.”

  “He’s my age, baby,” Agnes reminded him. She reached up and smoothed his ripped-at-the-neck T-shirt.

  Once they left, Edward retired to his desk. He swiveled his chair to look out the glass window at the gallery. He watched the junior associates on the phone to clients and assistants typing at their computers and sat back and thought about how he had built up the gallery’s staff and stable of artists and how incredibly personal it all was. He’d fostered relationships, some more profound than others, with colleagues and artists and collectors in hopes they would extend over time and they had. Unlike Savan and others in the business, he never aspired to hang out all night with his artists and flit off to the South of France and get trashed on a weekend bender. He never needed that. He was looking for artists who were extraordinary and singular. He believed that art offered a refuge from the trouble in the world, or at least allowed the culture a way to think about it. Sure, he’d made some mistakes—passing up artists whose work he didn’t get and watching their star rise under another gallerist. He was looking for work that could only have been made by that particular artist. And he hoped and wanted them to be forward-thinkers. There was a train of art history and hopefully some of the people he worked with were moving the train forward. He thought Agnes was, and maybe a handful of others, and for the first time in a long while he actually felt himself getting excited about her new work. He liked shaping and mounting a show and all the hoopla surrounding it. This was going to be big. Sure she was nervous about it. And so was Nate. No one wanted bad publicity before a new show. It was his job to do damage control and not let all the noise infiltrate her studio. He had to calm down and focus.

  17 CONNECTICUT

  HE AWOKE TO the ringtone of his BlackBerry on his nightstand and glanced at the clock. It was three thirty in the morning. He looked at the caller ID. She rarely called him on his mobile. He put the phone to his ear.

  “Agnes? What’s wrong? Wait a minute.” He struggled out of bed and walked into the hallway to not wake Holly.

  “I’m sorry to call so late. I needed someone to talk to. I’m shaking.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nate’s out of control. He was out drinking and doing God knows what else. He came into my studio and trashed it. The paintings. Thank God.” She took a long breath. “They were untouched.”

  “He trashed your studio? Why? That’s crazy.”

  “He’s freaked about Liam. And he’s not working well. Then he goes out and gets wrecked. He said our art is ruining us. Sometimes he gets like this, but he’s never trashed the studio.”

  “Do you want me to come over? I’ll drive in.”

  “You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you.”

  “You know I would.”

  “That’s why Nate doesn’t trust you.”

  “He doesn’t trust me?”

  “He doesn’t trust anyone. Really. And he knows you’d come if I needed you. He still thinks I’m his student. He doesn’t want anyone to usurp his place.”

  “I’m your dealer, Agnes. It’s different.”

  “I know. Of course it is. But not to Nate.”

  “Do you want me to come? I can get there in less than an hour.”

  “It’s not necessary. I feel better, just hearing your voice.”

  They hung up and he wandered back to bed. He’d always thought Nate was obsessed with himself, but violent? That was something new. The two of them were going to destroy each other. Before, he’d been envious of their intense and charged relationship. Seeing the fallout, now, he wasn’t so sure. He’d found himself wondering since Berlin what it would be like to be in a marriage like theirs—what it would be like if he were married to someone more like him, like Julia. Seeing her again in New York for lunch—open and vulnerable—he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He closed his eyes and willed his mind to go blank.

  IN THE MORNING after breakfast, ensconced in his study, he called Agnes to check in. It was late November and they were expecting snow. He felt it in the air.

  “Nate brought me two dozen yellow roses this morning. They’re my favorite. It’s like it never happened. He likes those drag-down fights. It fuels his work. He’s been painting like a maniac all morning. He called two of his assistants to come by and stretch canvases and mix colors,” she said—a little too gleefully, he thought, and shook his head. What would it be like for Nate, Edward wondered, if her work outshone his? He agreed with Agnes that being a woman artist made things more complicated. Not in terms of the work itself, but in the way in which the work would be perceived and noticed by the critics. Men were used to pushing their work forward. Women artists tended to be more uncomfortable in the spotlight. It was part of the ambivalence he’d noticed in Agnes and, he assumed, why she was nervous about letting go of the new work.

  He powered off his computer and went back downstairs to find Annabel in the breakfast nook doing homework. He sat next to her and restlessly attempted to read the paper. Annabel explained to him the Pythagorean theorem. A squared plus B squared equals C squared—it brought back his own days in geometry class. He looked out the window distracted.

  “Dad?” Annabel said.

  “What is it, Annabel?”

  “Can I go to Danny Wasserman’s house Friday night?”

  “Sure.” he said. “If your mother says so.”

  “Dad?”

  “What, darling?”

  “You need to talk to Mom more. I think she’s lonely.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She always wants to be with me,” she groaned.

  The phone rang. Annabel leaped at it as if she’d been waiting. She held out the receiver and asked him to hang
up once she had gotten to her room. He put the phone to his ear, waiting, and recognized the slow breathing of a boy at the other end and felt a catch in his throat.

  “Is it you?” Annabel said when she picked up.

  “Yeah,” the boy said, in that languid tone Edward recalled from when he was that age. “What’s up?”

  Years ago Annabel used to crawl into his lap and put her tiny arms around his neck. Her face, rosy and unblemished, had taken on contours. She’d grown long and thin and had breasts. He did not know whether he was supposed to observe her changing body, but he had and it unnerved him. He thought about her sudden infatuation with boys. Everything was shifting just a little bit away from him.

  He went up the stairs again to check e-mail. He was expecting a deal to come through from London. He opened his laptop and logged in. He looked out the window at the cloud formations building in the sky and sensed the coming snow. His assistant had sent him a message that Agnes wanted him to secure a deal with a gallery in Madrid. Nate had two galleries there interested in his work and his prices had skyrocketed. What was it like for them working in private studios in the same house, always comparing? Talking about every deal? He thought again about Nate trashing Agnes’s studio. Nate was losing his way. He’d seen it happen to other successful artists terrified that there was nowhere to go but down. Years ago he had mounted a first show by a young painter, Miles Mahoney, and it had gotten favorable write-ups, and though the work hadn’t generated nearly the amount of excitement he’d gotten for Agnes Murray it had been respectable. Two years later and the new work was shit. It was all a crap shoot.

  He looked at his father’s paintings on his wall—all that unrealized brilliance. What happened to him? At dinner with John Kincaid, gnarled in an argument about the interpretation of a poem, they could go at it for hours. His study crammed with three decades’ accrual of books, couch and desk stacked with works in progress and students’ papers. His father was obsessed with his work. “It can’t be just about this,” he once said, when they were lingering at the dinner table and his mother was cleaning up.

  “What’s wrong with this?” his mother said.

  “There has to be more,” he’d said, looking into his coffee cup.

  “The more you search, the unhappier you are,” she muttered.

  His father’s last years teaching, he grew paranoid. Awarded a prize for a book, he felt that the other books that did not get prizes were better and didn’t trust the praise. Preoccupied at home, he snapped at Edward or his mother if he couldn’t find a misplaced book or paper. If one of his students failed an exam his father took it personally. Edward’s mother passed her evenings knitting. She looped the yarn over one needle, stretched it over the forefinger, and stabbed the other needle into the wool.

  Edward closed his laptop and went downstairs, restless. In the kitchen Annabel vigorously erased marks from a problem on her math sheet. Holly was unpacking groceries.

  “I’ll be back soon. I’m going to visit my mother before dinner,” he said. A sudden desire to see her overcame him. He’d been thinking about her a lot since he started seeing Clara.

  “That’s brave of you,” Holly remarked.

  His mother had recently moved into the assisted-living section of the retirement community where she lived, forty-five minutes away. She’d started forgetting things, and once had left the stove on and nearly burned down her kitchen. He’d dragged Annabel and Holly with him a few times and they’d had lunch with his mother in the overheated dining hall, but they complained about going and now he usually went alone. He hadn’t been in weeks. He avoided spending much time there, stopping in to bring over papers that needed to be signed, or her medications and toiletries from the pharmacy, sitting a few minutes before abruptly rising with an excuse that he had to run to the city for a meeting. Afterward it took him days to shake free of her.

  18 CONNECTICUT

  HE FOUND HER in the game room, smaller than in his memory, playing cards with a group of other residents before dinner.

  “Edward,” she said, happy to see him. “You didn’t tell me you were coming.” She turned her cheek for his kiss and introduced him to the others at the table. “The snow’s supposed to get worse. Was it snowing when you drove in, darling?”

  “Not too bad yet.” It was the first snowfall of the season.

  Rising unsteadily, and more slowly, she reached for her cane. He hadn’t noticed it before. He held her arm and led her to the sitting room, which smelled of decaying fruit. On the sofa an elderly man slept sitting up with his mouth open. A woman in a wheelchair stared into the fireplace. This is what the end looks like, he thought. They found two empty overstuffed chairs in a corner of the room. The afternoon light slowly faded from the window.

  “Get us some tea, darling.” She pointed to a narrow table near the entrance to the room where tea was set out for the residents.

  She was small and neatly groomed, dressed in a plaid wool skirt, blouse, and cashmere sweater, a Kleenex tucked into her sleeve. He leaned over to hand her a cup of tea. A musty smell rose off her sweater. Sipping her tea, she ran her eyes along him as she had when he was a boy, remarking if his hair was too long, or a pimple was on his chin. She never missed a beat. When he was a boy she was happiest, his father was happy too—Sundays in the park, walking to school, his father on one side of him, his mother on the other, each holding one of his hands, their long car rides to the city to see a concert or go to a museum.

  “How are you?” He unbuttoned his jacket, reluctant to take it off.

  “I’m fine, darling. And you? You look tired.” She brushed her hand across his temple. “You’re not giving Holly any trouble?”

  He raised his eyebrows playfully. “Maybe a little.”

  “And my granddaughter?”

  “Growing up. Almost sixteen.”

  She smiled and smoothed her skirt over her lap. “I’m knitting her a sweater for Christmas.” He glanced at his mother’s hands. Blue cordlike veins, blotches of age spots. The flesh had fallen off her bones. They’d have to eventually cut off her wedding band, he thought morbidly; it was trapped beneath an arthritic knuckle the size of a garlic bulb.

  “Your father didn’t get to see you become a man, and look at you now. You look so handsome, darling. And your work is going so well.” She spoke to him as if he were still her little boy. Her eyes shifted to the wall above him and then filled with tears.

  “Always in that dusty study like some nocturnal creature.” She shook her head. “I used to wonder what he’d be like if he spent more time with us.”

  Edward remembered coming home to his mother in the kitchen preparing supper or doing laundry, one day indistinguishable from the next.

  “Dad was an intellectual. He needed solitude to write his books.”

  “Of course he did. But success, brilliance, they’re a completely abstract thing. You don’t have to make excuses for him. You always defended him. I suppose a boy does with his father. He was looking for things that didn’t exist. He was happier when I could get him to forget it all.”

  “Was he?”

  “He wasn’t teaching the Romantic period—he lived it. Or wanted to. I don’t know which was worse.”

  Outside the window more clouds had muscled through. A rash of heat swept over him. He didn’t know why the tight black box where he’d stored his parents’ marriage was opening and why it suddenly seemed important to have this conversation with his mother. But it did. How and why they met and married made no sense to him. No one could predict how a marriage would wear into an unknown future. That was what made it interesting, he supposed.

  “I wish you were happier. You made each other miserable.”

  She picked a piece of lint off his jacket. “Who are you to judge us, darling? Your father was sensitive. He felt everything too much and couldn’t filter it out fast enough. It’s what made him a brilliant man, I suppose.”

  “He didn’t make you happy.”

  “I d
idn’t make him happy? Is that what you mean?”

  He flinched. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “They don’t give out prizes for the woman who organizes the home, makes the bed, cleans out the closets.” He remembered how his mother laid out his father’s clothes in the morning, packed his lunch. Edward shrank from her eyes and looked out the window. More clouds.

  “No, they don’t, Mom.” He looked at her tenderly.

  “When you live here, there’s plenty of time to think.” She touched her pearl earring and twisted it. “He was lost in himself. It was hard to get used to. But you can get used to anything.” She took a sip of tea. The china teacup trembled in her hands. “He was his own worst enemy. I suppose all of us are.”

  The smell of evening dinner rose from the kitchen. He looked at his watch. Quarter to six. He’d have to leave soon. Other residents shuffled toward the dining room.

  “Walk me to dinner, darling. When you live here it’s like a prison. The staff needs to get home early. And stop being judgmental. It won’t get you anywhere. The snow’s supposed to get worse. The roads will be slick. You’ll drive slowly, won’t you?”

  He nodded and buttoned his coat.

  “You’ll come again soon?” She grasped his arm. Her eyes were suddenly black with fear.

  “Soon.” He kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry—in there.” He nodded toward the drawing room. “He’d have been nowhere without you.”

  “The love of my life,” she said, touching his cheek.

  OUTSIDE, FREE OF the emotions binding him, his movements came more easily. He took in the cold air and let out a long breath. Everything was quiet and still. He turned back and saw his own shallow footsteps. The snow blanketed the shrubs. He turned back to look again. The roof and branches of the trees surrounding the retirement house were almost completely covered in snow. It clung to the railings, forming a lace of ice, and settled into the empty windowboxes clinging, holding on. Wind shattered the icicles along the gutters and they fell silently to the snowy ground.