An Object of Beauty: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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