had better breasts, better lips, better hair… long, full, lustrous dark hair as opposed to this americana’s sexless blond bob, copied from that English girl—what was her name?—Posh Spice… She just wished she had worn a minidress, too, to show off her bare legs… as opposed to these slim white pants that mainly showed off the deep cleft of her perfect little butt. But this “A.A.” girl had something else, too. She was in the know. Advising rich people, like Fleischmann, about what very expensive art to buy was her business, and she knew all about this “fair.” If somebody called it “Miami Art Basel,” thinking that was the full name, she would inform him in some mostly polite way that it was officially Art Basel Miami Beach… and that those in the know didn’t call it “Miami Art Basel” for short. No, they called it “Miami Basel.” She could fire off sixty in the know cracks a minute.
At this very moment, A.A. was saying, “So I ask her—I ask her what she’s interested in, and she says to me, ‘I’m looking for something cutting-edge… like a Cy Twombly.’ I’m thinking, ‘A Cy Twombly?’ Cy Twombly was cutting-edge in the nineteen fifties! He died a couple of years ago, I think it was, and most of his contemporaries are gone or on the way. You’re not cutting-edge if your whole generation is dead or dying. You may be great. You may be iconic, the way Cy Twombly is, but you’re not cutting-edge.”
She didn’t address any of this to Magdalena. She never looked at her. Why waste attention, much less words, on some little nobody who probably didn’t know anything anyway? The worst part of it was that she was right. Magdalena had never heard of Cy Twombly. She didn’t know what cutting-edge meant, either, although she could sort of guess from the way A.A. used it. And what did iconic mean? She hadn’t the faintest idea. She bet Norman didn’t know, either, didn’t understand the first thing Miss All-Business sexy A.A. had just said, but Norman created the sort of presence that made people think he knew everything about anything anybody had to say.
Iconic was a word that was beginning to pop up all around them, now that there were just minutes to go before the magic hour, noon. The maggots were rooting amongst one another more anxiously.
Somewhere very nearby, a man with a high voice was saying, “Okay, maybe it isn’t iconic Giacometti, but it’s great Giacometti all the same, but no-o-o-o—” Magdalena recognized that voice. A hedge fund billionaire from Greenwich?—Stamford?—someplace in Connecticut, anyway. She remembered him from the BesJet party two nights ago.
And some woman was saying, “Koons’d die at auction right now!”
“—Hirst, if you ask me. He’s high as a dead fish after fifteen minutes in the sun.”
“—what you just said? Prince is the one who’s tanked.”
“—the fish that’s up there at Stevie’s, rotting its forty-million-dollar guts out?”
“—iconic, my ass.”
“—svear, ‘de-skilt’ vas vot she said!” (“—swear, ‘de-skilled’ was what she said.”) Magdalena knew that voice very well, from last night at the dinner party Michael du Glasse and his wife, Caroline Peyton-Soames, gave at Casa Tua. She even remembered his name, Heinrich von Hasse. He had made billions manufacturing… something about industrial robots?… was that what they said? Whatever else he did, he had spent so many millions buying art at Art Basel in Switzerland six months ago, people were talking about him at practically every party she and Norman and Maurice had been to.
“—about to see it! A measles outbreak, baby!”
“—and no time to kick the tires!”
“See it—like it—buy it! That’s all you—”
“Art Basel in Basel?” That was A.A. piping up again. “Have you ever been to Basel? The only place worse is Helsinki. There’s no place to eat! The food is not anywhere near as good as the food here. The fish tastes like it arrived in the backseat of a Honda, and the price—”
“—keep his hands off my adviser, for Christsake.”
“—think you’ve got a fifteen-minute reserve, but five minutes later—”
“—the price is twice what it is here. And Basel’s so-called historic hotels? I’ll tell you what’s historic—the basins in the bathrooms! Aaaagh! They’re that old kind. You know what I mean? You could have somebody scrub them day and night for a week, and they’d still look gray like somebody’s old bedridden grandmother with bad breath. No shelf space and these old gray metal cups screwed into the wall they expect you to