Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  STILL LIVES

  ALSO BY MARIA HUMMEL

  Motherland House and Fire Wilderness Run

  STILL LIVES

  a novel

  Maria Hummel

  COUNTERPOINT

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  STILL LIVES

  Copyright © 2018 by Maria Hummel

  First hardcover edition: 2018

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hummel, Maria, author.

  Title: Still lives : a novel / Maria Hummel.

  Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017055410 | ISBN 9781619021112

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.U46 S75 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055410

  Jacket designed by Jaya Miceli

  Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Kyle

  Contents

  THURSDAY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  FRIDAY

  7

  8

  9

  SATURDAY

  10

  11

  SUNDAY

  12

  13

  MONDAY

  14

  15

  16

  17

  TUESDAY

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  WEDNESDAY

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  THURSDAY

  28

  SUNDAY

  29

  A MONTH LATER

  30

  31

  Acknowledgments

  Don’t rub the sleep out of your eyes. It’s beautiful sleep.

  A LINE FROM THE FILM A YANK AT OXFORD, CONTRIBUTED BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  THURSDAY

  1

  For the four years I’ve lived in Los Angeles, the Rocque Museum has been my university and my workplace, offering me a degree in contemporary art and the cosmopolitan life—brilliant as the blues in a Sam Francis painting, decadent as a twenty-four-karat cast of a cat testicle. Most days pass in a pleasurable blur of words and pictures. Most nights I hate to leave my little office, especially on April evenings like this, when I can look over my mess of proofs, out to the greening city, and imagine I am still happy.

  A couple of blocks down the avenue, a new concert hall is rising like a silver ship from a dirty parking lot. Just past it, I see a theater pavilion, a row of jacaranda trees floating their violet clouds. A mile beyond that, I know the city’s river is still flooding its concrete throat, and I can remember why I came to this place, to live a new life, away from old ghosts.

  I would love to stay late tonight in this tiny room, with space enough for my chrome desk and file cabinet, a shelf of art catalogs, and one extra chair for visitors. It’s quiet here past six o’clock. I know where everything is, I have editing to do, and my glass door makes it impossible for people to surprise me. I could wait out the traffic, drive home late in the flowing lights of the 101. On my way, I might glance too many times behind me; I might rush the key in the lock of my peeling bungalow. But I would make it home fast, and there would be fewer silent, empty hours before sleep.

  Horns bleat below my window. I look down to see two beverage trucks heading for the intersection that leads to the underpass beneath our avenue. They will take two more turns and disappear down a ramping street tunnel to reach the museum’s loading dock. The party is arriving.

  Within a few hours, this whole street will clog with limousines. I need to steal my chance now and leave the Rocque. The entire L.A. art world converges tonight for the museum’s Gala opening of Still Lives, Kim Lord’s latest exhibition. Three hundred guests will arrive to eat, guzzle champagne, and crowd the galleries until the rooms hum and buzz. Then they will parade back outside to make glowing speeches about the artist, and dance. A tangible excitement will push out through their noise, like a ball held underwater. It will be the party of the year. Every show of Kim Lord’s is a moment. Every painting “is so powerful it makes your eyes bleed,” according to her new boyfriend, that up-and-coming gallerist with the crooked grin, Greg Shaw Ferguson.

  Nice line. I can guess how Greg said it, too. First he looked the Los Angeles Times interviewer deep in the eyes, as if he were suddenly just seeing her, human to human. Then he spoke the words with a little gravel in his voice, shook his dark blond head, and ignored the reporter to brood on some secret thought. And during that brooding, which lasts just one second too long, she fell for him. They always do.

  A white TV news van roars below, heading toward the same intersection. Time to go. Ruminating on Greg’s irritating allure won’t erase my own five-year folly over him, and it might thwart my escape. I sling my bag over my shoulder and grab some proofs to drop off with Yegina, our exhibitions manager and my closest friend. I need a good dose of Yegina’s undying loyalty to the Rocque to inoculate myself against more wallowing. So what if the man who moved to L.A. with me, the man I once thought I would marry, will be squeezing Kim Lord’s hand all night? Phones are ringing off the hook at our membership desk. We might all keep our jobs tomorrow.

  When I reach the staircase that winds down the center of the building, I allow myself one slow take of the party I’ll be missing. Our offices rise in a windowed, four-story tower above the low-slung hulk of the museum itself, a 1920s police-car warehouse converted to galleries. The Rocque’s concrete walls, broken by a single glassy, steel-girdered entrance, give us the look of a bygone industrial gem plopped among boring skyscrapers. Our members love the building, but I’m sure its size and design incite the ire of every greedy developer who drives by our footprint on downtown’s best hill.

  The museum’s western side is a low gray expanse that flaunts its drabness against the mirroring blaze of bank towers. Tonight, it wears a white banner bearing Kim Lord’s name and a dozen sponsor logos. A red carpet unfurls beside it, under spotlights. Men in vests set out cones to block the street. Here, the limos will drive up, guests pouring out until the sidewalk disappears beneath their gowns. There, people will pause in the glare of cameras, not quite smiling. Then they’ll follow a velvet rope to a staircase half a block away that descends to the delivery underpass below, now transformed into a cocoon of cloth and flowers. No stale ballrooms for Kim Lord’s Gala. I can already imagine all the rich, pleased, apprehensive faces. The way they will glide like souls pouring into Hades.

  I tread my own humble path down a corridor of fading art posters to Yegina’s office.

  She’s alone, blinking, as if someone just handed her a trophy. She’s a catch, Yegina, not in the favored Angeleno way of being so thin you could double as a cocktail straw, but noteworthy for her inky hair
and slyly arching cheekbones.

  She waves me in, beaming. “Guess what?”

  “You got engaged since lunch without telling me?”

  Yegina divorced her white slacker husband last year and is searching for the perfect Asian match, preferably Vietnamese.

  “Ha-ha. Guess again,” she says.

  “Don finally got in somewhere?” Yegina’s younger brother has been receiving rejections from med schools for the second year in a row. The whole family is devastated.

  “They’re going to vote yea or nay on Bas,” she says in a dreamy voice. “At the next board meeting.”

  Bas Terrant is the museum’s new director. Yegina loathes his preppy blond zeal and his appeal-to-the-masses agenda to make the Rocque a “must-see destination” instead of a museum. Since Yegina has spent her whole life despising the masses, and ardently defining herself in opposition to them, she’s nearly come to blows with Bas over the exhibition schedule and when she can squeeze in his “people-friendly” new idea, Art of the Race Car.

  “I thought he had a three-year contract,” I say.

  “It gets crazier.” Yegina shakes her head. “Kim Lord is AWOL. She was supposed to be here this morning for press photos, and she still hasn’t shown up.”

  I put my hand on the door. I don’t care if Kim Lord has gone to Pluto. If I leave the Rocque in the next ten minutes, I can beat rush hour home to Hollywood.

  “She sent a couple of texts, but she’s not answering her phone.” Yegina pauses dramatically. “PR’s got major interviews lined up before the Gala.” Her eyes catch me sideways and her lashes dip.

  I know that look.

  “Oh no,” I say, opening the door. “I’m not calling Greg.”

  “Just dial and let me talk,” Yegina says. “He’s got to know where she is.”

  “It’s too humiliating,” I croak.

  “Do you understand that the entire Development department will spontaneously combust if their Gala honoree doesn’t appear on time?” She smiles at me brightly.

  It’s true. Our fund-raising team gets increasingly flammable the week before the Gala, and they go off like firecrackers at the slightest provocation. The museum depends on the money they raise, and this year’s party has gotten more buzz than in decades. Art lovers know Kim Lord’s name. They have seen the blood-red banners popping up all over town, and they want to be the first to view her shocking paintings.

  “Please,” says Yegina. “I’ll go with you to that stupid pony party this weekend.”

  This is serious payback. I’ve been begging her for weeks.

  I sigh and open my bag. “It’s horses. In the hills at sunset.”

  “Fiery stallions?” she says hopefully as I claw through receipts and wrappers. “Oh, and Jayme is looking for you,” she adds. “PR needs help.”

  “She promised I didn’t have to work tonight.”

  At home is the F. Scott Fitzgerald biography I’ve been reading. And a glass of dry white wine. And the remains of a cherry pie I baked from scratch. It’s a dull life these days, and not the one I thought I’d be signing up for when I first pored over maps of Los Angeles with Greg, tracing the vast quilt of neighborhoods with my finger, imagining our hikes in the Palisades, concerts at the Pantages, breakfasts at Los Feliz cafés, and me making my way writing for magazines. But it’s an unpretentious life, and it’s mine.

  Yegina holds out her hand for my phone, a beat-up old flip that makes it difficult to text. I can’t look as I offer it to her. Greg’s number is still the first on my list of contacts, above my parents.

  Just as Yegina presses dial, there’s a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” she says, putting the phone to her ear.

  “Could we talk?” says a hearty, patronizing voice that could only belong to our dear director, Bas Terrant, an East Coast silver-spoon scion layered under a sheen of Hollywood. Bas’s suit and hair always seem to enter a room before him, and they are immaculate, his fabrics so pastel they melt in your mouth, his blond locks tapered to fall boyishly across his forehead. He is at the age where he should be showing wrinkles and gray hair, yet some aggressively shiny blend of treatments keeps both at bay. Tonight, however, sweat has darkened his temples and his eyes look crimped, as if someone tried unsuccessfully to button them shut. “Pressing problem with sponsor recognition,” he says. “Among other things.”

  “Of course. Speak with me.” Yegina’s face morphs into a pleasant mask. She hangs up the phone and holds it out. It slides cool and solid into my palm. Call to Greg disconnected. He’ll see that I tried to call him. Two months of rigid self-control for nothing.

  Bas gives me a strained smile. “And do check in with Jayme. All hands on deck tonight,” he says, and shuts the door.

  2

  I do not go straight to Jayme. I go back up to my office and stare at the Cy Twombly drawing on my wall, willing my nerves to settle before I allow myself to be dragged into this train wreck of an evening.

  In every office at the Rocque hangs a real artwork from the museum’s permanent collection. I wouldn’t have picked Twombly, but his sketch has grown on me over time. Gray marks cover the paper, a storm of lines. I try to follow one with my eyes; it breaks. I follow another. It breaks, too. If you had asked me at twenty-seven about my life, I would have predicted marriage soon, children after that, a logical and contented unfolding of decades not unlike my parents’. But at twenty-eight, I can’t see how anything connects.

  I met Greg Shaw Ferguson almost six years ago, when we were both on a program teaching English in Thailand. A month’s orientation in Bangkok threw us together with about twenty others to learn Thai. The program attracted a core group of the usual naïve, adventurous college grads; one constantly bickering married couple; one guy who wore his bike helmet at all times; and me, who was trying very hard to belong with the college kids. And then there was Greg. He was the same age as most of us, but his mother had just survived her first bout of ovarian cancer, and he had spent the two months prior meditating in a monastery. His head was shaved to a dark fuzz and his silences could pulse like strobes. Most people regarded him with a glum awe. I decided to woo him to our flock.

  I should make it clear: I had no romantic stake in this. It was purely sympathy, fueled by my journalistic training in social fearlessness. Fifteen pounds too skinny and without his shaggy hair, Greg had a surly, reptilian look. He didn’t grin or joke like he does now. I coerced him out with our merry crew to ride the canals, to watch a Thai movie with no discernible plot but shrieking and hitting. I gave him my cast-off Kundera novels to read. Yet I had no idea that I sparked any feelings in him until he wrote me after orientation, from his campus in southeastern Thailand, and invited me to visit. By then, his hair had grown, and obligatory drinking bouts with his Thai colleagues had forced him to abandon his hard-core Buddhist habits. The man who picked me up from the Chanthaburi bus station was a wry, warm, intelligent dreamboat, and strangest of all, he seemed to adore me.

  That adoration is gone now, revoked by a toxic mix of grief and ambition. I know why Greg left me and whom he wants to become, and in the abstract I accept it. I even wish him well. He never once lied to me. But whenever I see him in person, it’s like being in a room with an impostor: some creature who slunk out of L.A.’s giant billboards and gated studios and false hopes and took over my boyfriend’s body. He goes by “Shaw” now: a slicker, smarter version of the old Greg. It’s the name of his gallery, too: SHAW.

  A shadow crosses my glass door, and Jayme West whips it open with one hand while talking on her cell with the other. Jayme spends most of her day attached to the device, and they both possess the same sleekness and utility—everything on my boss’s gorgeous half-Norwegian, half-Eritrean body is exactly where it belongs, from her high, narrow hips to her low, smooth voice and the bright scent of tangerines that follows her everywhere. With her looks and poise, Jayme could make ten times her Rocque salary in Hollywood or politics, but she hates being on camera and alw
ays makes Bas take center stage. He adores her. We all do, because Jayme’s hard work and behind-the-scenes orchestrating have helped the Rocque maintain its cultural reputation despite declining revenues. Saved by Jayme is a mantra, which is why her behavior around the Kim Lord exhibition has been especially puzzling to me.

  “Yes, that’s ‘Rocque’ as in ‘lock.’ Still Lives as in ‘wives.’” Jayme hangs up the phone, rolling her eyes.

  “Or crock,” I say. “And hives.”

  Jayme doesn’t smile. She is not a smiler by nature. It would interfere with the sixteen hundred other things she’s doing at any given moment. “Got anything else to wear?”

  Before I have a chance to answer, Jayme is marching me to her bigger, tidier office and pulling dresses from a closet, holding them under my chin. “You’re the same size as I am, just shorter,” she mutters. Her phone rings. She looks at the name and cringes, but her delivery is flawless. “Mr. Gillespie, we’re going to need to move the interview again. The artist wants more time with you especially.”

  She waves the dress she is currently holding. When I take it from her, I’m surprised to see her arm is goose-bumped and shaking. I try to catch her eye, but she deliberately turns away and steadies herself on her desk. I carry the dress obediently down the hall to a bathroom stall, mesmerized by the shimmery green fabric, its leathery weight. I tend to choose demure grays and blues, the wardrobe of a Catholic schoolgirl. This dress feels otherworldly, like it was fished from some alien sea. I fear it will look terrible on me. To say Jayme and I are the same size is like comparing a Jaguar to a Yugo. Clothes don’t fall on Jayme’s lean torso. They float. She could attend the Gala tonight wearing a couple of crusty washcloths, and the fashion writers would fawn over the hot new trend.

  I twist the stall lock and step out of my skirt and blouse. The cool air stings my bare skin, and I feel silly and guilty about the washcloth thought. I’ve seen Jayme anxious in recent weeks, but not like this. She and I usually work together on copyediting the exhibition catalogs—I check the text and she checks the images—yet for Still Lives she dumped the whole project on me. This was in January, just after Greg moved out, and only when Jayme found out that he was dating Kim Lord did she apologize for my extra workload.