An Object of Beauty: A Novel by Steve Martin Read Free Book Online Page B

little art to be seen. Only a gigantic, though airy, Calder mobile, swaying from above, indicated that this was an art museum and not an intergalactic headquarters.
    With little interest in contemporary art, she headed underground to the west wing, where she speed-walked past neglected masterpieces in the near empty galleries of American art. There was a surprise around every corner: she had only seen John Singleton Copley’s 1778 painting
Watson and the Shark
in two-by-three-inch reproductions in books, and the picture, a dramatic tableau of a rowboat staffed with sailors, in waters turned hellish by a circling shark that has just bitten off the leg of a thirteen-year-old boy, stunned her with its monumental size and perverse beauty.
Jaws,
the beginning, she thought.
    Lacey later told me that while she was steaming past the pictures,she had a sudden, comic overview of herself in motion. She saw her head leaning forward as she entered a picture’s sight lines, her feet trailing. Then her head would slow down while her feet caught up and advanced, so her eyeballs could spend as much time with a picture as possible without retarding her forward motion. Her upper body remained slow and steady, with her feet a futurist blur below.

    Watson and the Shark,
John Singleton Copley, 1778
71.75 × 90.5 in.
    After twenty minutes in the downstairs picture gallery, Lacey found that her time at Sotheby’s had instilled in her a new way to experience a museum. In addition to her normal inquisitiveness about a work, who painted it and when, and a collegiate hangover necessitating a formulaic, internal monologue about what the painting meant—which always left her mind crackling with static—she now found she hadadded another task: she tried to estimate a painting’s worth. Lacey’s internal wiring had been altered by her work in Manhattan.
    Her acceleration in the west wing meant that she had time to do the same sprint in the east wing. Here, the giant modern pictures loomed over her. Even the Copley was small compared with the antic Jackson Pollock. At first, she didn’t catch the phallic silhouettes of Robert Motherwell’s
Elegy
, but on instinct her head turned back, confirming, “Oh yeah, a dick and balls.” A Rothko offered just two colors, more or less, but it made Lacey downshift a gear to take it in, and an Andy Warhol silk screen of a newspaper headline, which seemed so haphazard after the persnickety detail of the nineteenth-century flower pictures and desktop still lifes she had just seen, left her suspicious and not impressed.
    There was a special exhibition of works by Willem de Kooning, and she stopped in front of one showing a female figure as grotesque totem. In the 1950s, de Kooning had aggressively painted women, and in the 1970s, these pictures endured the wrath of feminism. They were regarded as angry, misogynistic depictions of the female as beast: once again, it was claimed, a male artist was on the attack, reducing women to animals.
    But Lacey, staring at de Kooning, taking in the roiling flesh and teeth, recognized herself. This painting was not an attack; this was an acknowledgment of her strength. de Kooning painted women not as horrific monster but as powerful goddess. Lacey felt this way about herself every day. Yes, she had a ghoul’s teeth; yes, she had seductive breasts, long, pink legs, and a ferocious sway. She knew she had sexual resources that remained sheathed. But one day, when she used them, she knew her true face would resemble de Kooning’s painted woman.
    She went down the stairs of the National Gallery, heading toward the coat check. There was no line, but there were three security guardstalking into shoulder mikes and a smartly dressed woman in glasses, standing next to Lacey’s cardboard box, which had been leaned against the marble wall of the foyer. Lacey instantly read the situation. Her first thought was, Oh shit, and her second was, What fun. She then put on her toughest face,