The Prize Read online

  “He could not accept that the most trivial, transient of infatuations and associations lack any real cause. Through veils and layers he tried to document every thought, every action as if we human beings understand what we do and every action has a cause, and that the same is true of feelings that go deeper. Through literature and poetry he attempted to understand the contradictory nature of the human soul. He believed there had to be an underlying cause or reason for two people to be drawn together and that this union offered the possibility for self-knowledge, even transcendence. Writing at once tortured and compelled him—he could not live with uncertainty and embrace the mysteries he couldn’t fully grasp.”

  Kincaid choked up and then continued. “Harold couldn’t live in the same world as the rest of us, because he could not succumb to the beliefs to which the rest of us conform. In that sense Harold Darby was an aesthete of the highest order.” He concluded by quoting lines from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” saying that Harry had lived by these words, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” choking up again before taking his seat.

  Another colleague, Margery Greer, spoke about how Harold believed, like Keats, that the only way to attain immortality, to lead a life that held meaning, was to create something lasting, and that indeed Darby’s work would last. She closed by saying that it was unfortunate that he had gotten ill before being able to finish his current project, that she’d read drafts of it and believed it to be his most brilliant and compelling.

  Edward sat stiffly in the church pew, a crick in his neck, rubbing his stinging eyes with his sleeve, Tess on one side of him stroking his arm, his mother on the other, regretting as he listened to his father being eulogized that he had not fully acknowledged the great man’s accomplishments. Why hadn’t he taken the time to read his father’s books? To talk more about his ideas when they took walks together? His father’s early death signaled to him that he, too, must find meaning in his life and seek divine truth outside the here and now.

  On the ride back to Amherst Tess said, “I’m here for you,” and took his hand.

  “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel,” he shared.

  “Why would you,” Tess said, and he felt his throat close up. His mother put the house on the market and moved to New Horizons, a retirement community where Bev, her old friend from college, lived. She boxed up his father’s study, including his books and papers, and they resided in a storage bin in a remote area of New Haven until, years later, Edward obtained them.

  Edward felt like one of the alabaster statues of The Mourners, as if he were wrapped in one of their dark hoods. Rembrandt’s Sheet of Studies with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed, Munch’s Death in the Sickroom, Picasso’s The Weeping Woman, paintings he had studied in art history, he saw with a new and personal meaning. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Edward said to himself, unable to quite penetrate the phrase’s meaning but repeating it anyway.

  He spent his waking hours outside class in the art studio, where he attempted to make dark and mercurial (and not completely successful) paintings to express his sadness, and strange collages made out of found objects, and afterward he’d find Tess at the library. He pulled a chair next to her, bleary-eyed from the studio, until she finished, not wanting to return to the house without her. Tess rented foreign films for them to watch at night, and together they witnessed complex and historic moments played out in small domestic scenes and made popcorn in the microwave, listening to the pop, pop, pop of the kernels until it was done. Her presence calmed him. One night they got stoned together, fell into a tranquil, narcotic-laden sleep in her bed, and, as if bringing to life unconscious wishes, upon awakening they moved toward each other, and Edward reached over and kissed her, and then slowly moved on top of her, relieved she did not push him away. They made love two or three times that morning and throughout the day, only getting out of bed to get a glass of water, and later he went in the kitchen and made them orange juice from a frozen container. From that day forward they never slept apart. All of a sudden it hit him, how much he was in love with her.

  He grew to depend on the smell of her hair and the outline of her cheek resting against his nose when he awoke in the morning. He was suddenly drawn to her, wanting her constantly. She was all he could think about. After class they met in dark, unused lecture halls to study and wound up having sex behind the podium or met at the football stadium where they planned to eat a picnic lunch and had sex behind the bleachers. Why? When they could go back to her room at her house, or to his dorm room that looked like a prison cell? Because somehow the urge overtook them the minute they met. Maybe Kincaid was right: there was no apparent cause for one’s attraction or feelings for another person, no knowing when they might be unleashed. When the housemates were gone, Tess rhapsodically traipsed through the living room wearing T-shirts and bikini underwear that revealed curls of her pubic hair, humming to Phoebe Snow on the stereo. Sometimes he grabbed her thigh when she walked by and she came over and sat on his lap. He liked the sounds she made when he made her come, and the way she stroked her fingers underneath the hairline on his neck when she held him. He liked how sure she was of herself. How damn sure.

  He broke into crying jags when he was in the shower, or driving, sometimes remembering his father nearly sleepwalking through the house in his flannel slippers and matching robe. Death had not offered relief. Tess said it wasn’t supposed to. Zen-like, she encouraged him to embrace his pain, when what he really wanted to do was to embrace her, and he did, as often as she would let him.

  His mother settled into life at New Horizons. She had bridge afternoons with Bev and her new friends Pat and John, and shared the same seating with the threesome for dinner. In the evenings they played bingo or Scrabble. Edward took the train up to see her for a day. At Scrabble she quibbled with John over whether jack was a common noun or not (it was). They complained about the food and the saccharine and often neglectful staff. Bev mentioned she was on blood thinners, and his mother patted her hand. He was glad for her until he realized that when he graduated he would have no home to return to. On the train ride back to Amherst he felt alone and adrift.

  New York City was Tess’s idea. He couldn’t have cracked the city on his own. It was loud and overpopulated; opening a bank account took all morning. If you found an apartment you not only had to pay a management fee to get it, but there were ten or more other would-be renters in competition. After losing two or three places the size of broom closets, and tired of eating greasy takeout on the moldy carpet floor of their room at the Y, Tess figured it would be easier for them to get a lease if they got married. He wondered for a moment whether they ought to and then looked into her practical and hopeful eyes and agreed. They exchanged vows at City Hall and celebrated by renting a boat at the boathouse in Central Park and getting sloshed on cheap champagne. They knew that each remaining parent wouldn’t approve of the elopement and decided not to tell them, rationalizing that they were like Tess and Angel in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel they’d both read in a lit class—Tess’s idea, since she shared the protagonist’s name, and they were bound together by spiritual bliss, a connection that could never be undone. Once they got settled they would gently break the news.

  Tess got a job waitressing at Café Luxembourg on the Upper West Side and studied for her LSATs during the day. One of Edward’s father’s friends set him up with an interview with Gertrude Silverman, who owned a gallery in SoHo. Slim, pale-faced, with fierce black eyes and severely cut black hair, Gertrude lectured him on the appropriate relationship between assistant and artist. When asked why he wanted to work at her gallery, he said that after his father’s death art was the only thing that held meaning. When he was in the presence of art that moved him goose bumps traveled along his arms and he felt closer to a divine truth. There had to be more than the here and now, otherwise his father’s suffering and early death was without meaning. He mentioned that he’d read a biography of Jackson Pollock and that Pollock’s father had aban
doned the family when he was nine. “Those spills and swirls of color in his paintings are expressions of his rage,” Edward remarked. Gertrude offered him eleven thousand dollars a year and two weeks’ vacation. “Take it,” Tess said. “At least we’ll be able to pay the utilities.”

  Along with picking up her dry cleaning, sorting her mail, and handling her correspondence, Gertrude de Vil (as the gallery underlings had dubbed her) sent him prowling for talent to art studios in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. He scurried in and out of drab and dusty spaces, looking for art that, as his father said, made all else fade in its presence. He wasn’t interested in the blockbuster crowd-pleaser, or the weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. He found a young abstract painter whose work he liked and an installation artist from Bulgaria who created intricate figures out of car parts. Gertrude instructed him that a relationship with an artist was about trust. She explained that all their deals were concluded with a handshake. If an artist wanted a letter of intent, she’d give him one, and if he preferred a contract, they could do that too, but what was paramount was making sure the artist knew that what mattered most was that the gallery believed in the work. Sometimes the artist leaves the gallery if the work isn’t selling and sometimes they come back. What an artist wants most from a gallerist is to know that he or she understood the work and believed in it enough to put a price tag on it and find it a home.

  After work he went gallery-hopping or for drinks with the other assistants; Tess waited tables in the evenings, putting her tips in an empty mayonnaise jar in the kitchen and counting it at the end of the week. His salary per week was less than Tess made serving tables in a night. She had it all worked out. Two years of law school, then she’d get a job and by then he’d be promoted and in four years they could buy an apartment and start a family.

  Among his gallery friends, he didn’t mention he was married; no one else was, and then later it seemed awkward to bring it up. Tess thought Edward’s friends from the gallery, with multiple ear pierces, draped in vintage clothes that didn’t match, were pretentious. She was possessive, wanting him home when she got back from work, and if he was still out, she pouted in the bedroom and refused to speak to him when he came home. Once he invited her to come to an opening on her night off and she spent the greater part of the evening talking to the bartender, who was from Detroit. Edward spent most of the reception chatting with Noreen and Bill Witherspoon, a couple who made environmental art. They were planning to create a bridge across a canyon in Sedona that would take a decade to complete using a particular kind of copper wire that had to do with the earth’s energy grid system. They cornered Edward to ask about grants and whether he knew any investors.

  “Your friends are narcissists,” Tess said when they were walking home. “All they talk about is their work. I don’t think they asked me one question about myself.” He pondered what she’d said. He thought Noreen and Bill, in their mid-thirties, were kind of cool. They weren’t married, but they called themselves life partners. He was impressed by their bohemian lifestyle and their dedication to art. Tess thought the art world was filled with phonies and that most contemporary art looked like it had been painted by a first-grader. “You’re different around them. I don’t know. What you do—it seems fake or something,” she said.

  Charlie Baker was another assistant director. They were rivals but friends too. The gallery’s underlings lunched at the Blue Flame diner around the corner, where over greasy omelets they gossiped about their colleagues, ragged on Gertrude, bitched about certain entitled artists and revered others, and as a result had become close. Tess didn’t get it. No one spoke about art, because that was beside the point. He liked going to artists’ studios and attempting to access an artist’s intentions. All art must have a conceptual component, one of his art teachers had said during crit. He liked hanging out with his friends from the gallery and being a part of this new world of abstract ideas. Valuing art was something he’d grown up on. His father had recited poetry to him when he tucked him in to sleep at night. He took him to museum shows when he was a boy, purchasing the headsets so that he could hear the museum director lecturing on the paintings. Art and literature were his father’s religion. He was slowly learning how to file things in his mind as he went along, making connections between techniques or motifs he had picked up in works by the masters and contemporary work, and learning to access their value in intellectual and economic terms. And after a long day and evening immersed in it all, so much that sometimes he felt his head was spinning, he liked nothing more than to come home to the cozy apartment Tess had decorated with odds and ends from Pottery Barn. In bed he listened, half asleep, for her to come in, dump her change from her apron pocket into the half-filled mayonnaise jar in the kitchen, and slip into bed smelling like French fries, and once she was in his arms, all the stimulus faded away.

  Nearly a year in, the glamour of the city had worn off and they were barely making the rent. On Sunday, their only day together, over a too-expensive brunch at a trendy diner, Tess asked him one question after another about the gallery and, slightly hungover and not into talking about work, he glumly stared into his eggs Benedict, giving her one-word answers like he gave to his mother when he was a kid. For months she had complained that she thought he ought to get commission or a raise and was pressing him to talk to Gertrude.

  “Are you sure this is the life you want?” she started in. “Don’t you think you’d make more money, like, if you . . . I don’t know. Did you see all those bar tabs you put on the Visa?”

  “What, like go to law school or get an MBA? You don’t think I’ll cut it, do you?”

  “We can’t live in a three-hundred-square-foot apartment forever,” she said, tightening her ponytail. “You’ve changed.”

  He liked being around artists who wore all black and smoked European cigarettes, and going to parties in fancy apartments in the city with views of Central Park and paintings by Balthus on the wall. Art existed beyond the fray of ordinary life, though its intent was often to capture it. He admired artists who worked rigorously and near poverty simply because they could do nothing else. At first he was surprised by the incongruity between the bohemian artists he knew living in flats in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side, earning a living by bartending or waiting tables or temping, and the wealthy art buyers they were dependent upon in one way or another if they were to be successful. There was something marvelous about the way in which a painting, for instance, could soften the social divide and bring diverse people together. He once saw a man and a woman, strangers, flirting over a painting by Magritte at the Met and then walk off together. When he saw an object or piece of art he liked it was like a shot of adrenaline went through his veins. He couldn’t imagine anything he’d want to do more than be a part of it.

  Art was a way of controlling the chaos of the mind that had entrapped his father. Color, line, composition ordered the universe of the canvas or installation in timeless stasis. It was extraordinary. At Gertrude’s shop he was exposed to the geography of the art world, a network of associates in New York and various cities around the world who did business together, especially those who were interested in the same kind of art and showed similar artists. They were colleagues, some close friends and others rivals, at the end of the day competing for the same work and sometimes, with an international gallery, sharing a particular artist. He watched how the senior dealers at the gallery flitted off to European cities, scoring deals and putting more money in their pockets. Hanging a show, drumming up press, finding an artist whose work he admired, hoping he might be able to help get the work known, building a roster, energized him.

  After they paid the bill, they walked home from brunch through Central Park. “What do you mean, I’ve changed?” he finally asked, kicking some leaves in their path.

  “You treat me like one of your buddies. I never got a wedding ring. I don’t feel special around you.”

  “I don’t feel special with you either.” They walked back to their ap
artment in silence. Tess said she was going to her study group, and Edward spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in front of the TV filled with self-loathing. He hated disappointing her.

  He stayed out late pursuing collectors, or going to parties to network. Tess had to study anyway. One of her study buddies was a guy named Adam Weinberg. When Adam called, he noticed that Tess did this little stretch with her neck and stood on her tiptoes as if she were performing. It made him jealous and he stayed out all night with Charlie getting trashed. Tess called him the next morning at the gallery and asked if he planned to send in the rent check. It was two weeks overdue. Touché. “You’re the kindest person I know,” she said, “except when you’re being a jerk.”

  Maybe Tess was right. He needed to buckle down and get serious. He remembered when they had first crossed the bridge into Manhattan with their futures spread out before them. Which building do you want to live in, Tess said, her face fresh and eyes shiny as the skyline came into focus. He liked the fact that she wasn’t a part of his world—keeping it private was like a secret that if revealed would lose its poignancy. He liked having something that was all his own, separate. He decided he would hate to be like Bill and Noreen Witherspoon, always together, obsessed by the same things. He took a break and walked to a jewelry shop on Forty-Seventh Street and bargained with a jeweler for a ring with a small starter diamond and bought it with the credit on his Visa card. He would give the ring to Tess that night.

  When he arrived home the apartment looked eerily different. He found an envelope with his name on it propped against the ketchup bottle on the kitchen table. It contained a letter a few pages long, meticulously composed in her perfect cursive. She was heading back to Michigan for a while to live with her dad and study for the LSATs. You don’t have the guts to admit you want your freedom, she’d written. You have an uncanny brilliance for not picking up on what you don’t want to pick up on. He read the letter twice, heat rising to his face. He looked around the apartment and noticed it was empty of her things. He called her in Michigan and spoke to her dad but she refused to come to the phone. He called her the next day, and the next, hoping she’d finally pick up. No, she was wrong. He didn’t want his freedom. He wanted her. If he didn’t hear from her by the weekend he’d fly to Michigan and show up at her door. He missed the sound of her banging pots in the kitchen when she was cooking and little things like the way she forgot to turn the faucet all the way off in the bathroom and he awoke in the mornings to the sound of dripping water. He didn’t know what to do if she never came back. Who would fold his socks into little balls in his drawers? But it wasn’t just those little things. She gave him a reason to wake up in the morning.