by Maria Hummel
“I wish I could help,” Jayme said to me, or rather to the pen holder on my desk, because she would not meet my eyes. “But I’m still out on this one. Bas has got too many new irons in the fire, and I can’t keep up.”
And so, while seething at Kim Lord, I had the additional stomachchurning task of proofing the captions for the photos of the famous female murder victims featured in her show. I tried not to let my eye stray to the disturbing spectacle of Judy Ann Dull, sitting in an armchair, wearing a neat 1950s wool cardigan and flared skirt, her ankles and mouth bound by white rope. I tried not to see the chair’s ratty upholstery, or Dull’s wary, regretful expression at being taken in by a dopey television repairman who promised to help her with her modeling career. I didn’t want to see Judy Ann Dull alive and well, because I knew that later she would be dressed in long black gloves and black thigh-high stockings, trussed topless to an X of wood, raped repeatedly, and strangled in the desert by Harvey Glatman, the Glamour Girl Slayer. Dull was only nineteen years old.
If I had trouble looking at one victim and her story, I couldn’t imagine how Kim Lord had deeply inhabited eleven of these lives and deaths to make her paintings.
Despite her claims, I wasn’t sure she had.
Still Lives street-pole banners hang all over town now, displaying the least graphic of Kim’s works, a depiction of herself as a living Roseann Quinn, a 1973 stabbing victim with long ringlets and a toothy, innocent smile. The curators had insisted on an image without gore, but the banners have a crimson background. When I drove under a block of them on Fairfax yesterday, the color kept tearing my eyes from the road up into the sky. Kim Lord’s face looked back at me, disguised in paint and the features of a murdered woman.
“I’ve been having terrible dreams about the victims,” she recently told a reporter. “I’m just … haunted. Write this down: I, Kim Lord, solemnly swear my next show is going to be about bunny rabbits.”
But Kim Lord’s next show is always more dramatic than her last, she who started her career with The Flesh, a reconstruction of a dingy brothel, hung with paintings of herself costumed as both pimps and sex workers.
“By turning every viewer into a john, Kim Lord asked her audiences to question the ethics of their own gaze,” I wrote for our press release. “Viewers paid an admission fee after seeing The Flesh, unusual for a gallery exhibition, and Lord became the youngest contemporary artist to sell her entire first show at a Catesby’s auction.”
Catesby’s auctions are usually reserved for established artists, and Kim Lord could have been humiliated by lackluster bids, but instead she made an enormous pile of cash. She is no dummy, which is why I suspect her absence at the moment is just another of her “groundbreaking” moves to escalate her press coverage and drive more people to the museum.
A sudden vain hope bubbles up: maybe neither Kim nor Greg will show up tonight. And I’ll get to attend the best party of 2003 without them.
I shake the dress until I find an opening. The garment slides over my head and tumbles to midthigh. Jayme’s citrus smell floods my nose. I zip up the side and feel the cloth tighten over my hips, snug but not straining. So far so good. Except that the shoulder straps barely cover my bra, and the front of the dress poufs like overalls. The word lederhosen slinks into my mind.
A creak, the bathroom door opens, and someone enters the stall next to me. I check the shoes. Absurdly small blue pumps. Evie from the registrar’s office. I’ve felt bad around Evie since I let our friendship drift a couple of years ago, and even worse lately. When I became overwhelmed by the Still Lives catalog this winter, she was the one who finally stepped in to help me. Registrars are better than anyone at fact-finding on artworks and images, and Evie took a whole chunk of captions off my plate. I promised to repay her by taking her out to dinner at our old haunt in Little Tokyo, but I haven’t. Evie always wants to ridicule Greg’s new name and ambition, or complain about how fattening our tempura is when she’s as tightly muscled as a gazelle. Secretly I fear that she only needs me to feel better about herself.
I race past the mirror, trying not to see the vaguely Germanic oaf flashing across it, and am almost out the door when I hear Evie speak.
“Your clothes.”
“Hi, Evie.” I bend to grab my castoffs. The leather dress constricts like a snake around my abs. “What brings you up here?” The registrar’s office is off the loading dock.
Her blue pumps twitch. “The crew’s having a party on the roof,” she says. “Watching people arrive and such.”
This would be the opportune moment for Evie to invite me to join the party later, but she doesn’t. The exhibition crew is the coolest club in the museum, mostly young artists who work part-time constructing the shows and part-time on their own projects. They hang out in their cavernous carpentry room near Evie’s office and bust jokes in low, bitter voices about how broke they are. There’s a distinct social disconnect between them and the upstairs office crowd.
“Fun for you,” I say finally. “I got coerced into working.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I just hope Kim Lord actually shows up,” I add. “She’s blowing all her interviews.”
“Fashionably late,” Evie says in a tone of fake cheer.
The toilet roll rattles. At this point I realize I am harassing someone having a private anatomical moment and apologetically take my leave. Jayme’s in the hall, waiting for me, a paper in her hand. She looks calmer now, but she grimaces at the lederhosen.
“Here. Proof this while I fix you,” she says. “And then I’ll tell you your assignment.” She shoves a press release in my face and starts digging in her closet again. “What size shoe?” she says, her voice muffled.
“Ten. With a sizable bunion on the right foot.”
Jayme groans but keeps digging. I read.
Artist Offers Unprecedented Gift
Bas Terrant, director of the Rocque Museum, is pleased to announce that artist Kim Lord is donating the entire exhibition Still Lives to the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition comprises eleven paintings of Kim Lord impersonating murdered females, including Roseann Quinn, Bonnie Lee Bakley, Gwen Araujo, Chandra Levy, Lita McClinton, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia), as well as one monumental still life. Before undertaking the portraits, the artist spent years studying the lives and deaths of the victims. The combined value of the paintings is estimated at more than $5 million. [Here someone had scribbled $7 million?]
When asked about the reasons behind her munificent gift, Lord cited the Rocque’s demonstrated support of female artists and her wish not to profit from these particular paintings. She said she sees Still Lives as a tribute to the victims and as an indictment of America’s obsession with sensationalized female murders.
“I don’t want these paintings ever to be associated with monetary value,” she said. “No one should profit from them. No one should profit from the deaths of any of these women. They are not pinups—they were daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives torn from their lives and their families.”
Terrant expressed his deep admiration for Lord and her work, saying, “An artist of Kim Lord’s talent and generosity comes along once or twice a century.”
“Looks correct, but is this for real?” I say. “Nelson must be livid.” Gallerists like Nelson de Wilde earn a standard fifty percent from art sales, which means he will be out millions if he is not allowed to sell Kim’s work to collectors. He shelled out seventy grand for the exhibition costs, too, covering the publication of the catalog and the gallery guide. It’s not uncommon for gallerists to chip in on exhibitions (one of the many ethically murky practices of the art world), but in return they expect a reputation bump in their artist’s prices.
“It’s real.” Jayme produces a green-blue scarf and a pair of tall brown boots. Her hands flit over my shoulders, tightening a strap here, tugging the leather there, flowing the scarf. Gusts of tangerine drift over me.
“Too bad
we can’t sell the paintings,” I say. “It would completely fix the hole in our budget.”
Something flashes in Jayme’s face. “Too bad we can’t send the release out if she doesn’t approve it,” she says after a moment, “and she can’t approve it if she doesn’t show up.” She points to the floor. “Step into the boots.”
I grip her desk to slide into them; they’re too tight, but Jayme bends and zips them up anyway.
“Maybe she’s already here, but in disguise. She loves costumes so much,” I say, unable to suppress my annoyance. Every time Kim Lord has visited the museum in the past couple of weeks, she’s arrived in a different camouflaging getup, complete with wig, sunglasses, retro dress, or boxy 1980s suit.
Jayme gives me an evaluating look.
“I’m a disaster, aren’t I?” I say. “I should wear my own clothes. Should I take out the earrings?” I touch the studs, tiny gold butterflies that used to belong to my grandmother.
“Can’t even see them. And you actually look almost fabulous,” she says shortly. “But you have no idea.” She unzips a bag on her desk, pulls out powder. “Close your eyes. I’m going to do your face.”
Something swipes my brows, dusts my cheeks.
The strokes tickle but feel tender, too. No one has touched me for months.
“No idea about what?” I say.
No answer. Jayme’s fingers grab my jaw, rub my cheekbones, but beneath their quick movements, I can feel her trembling. I have to struggle not to open my eyes.
“She thought she was being stalked,” she says. “Last week she called me three times to check the names on my media list.” Jayme’s words burn with emotion. “She says he sometimes sneaks into the openings through PR.”
“She told you that?” I didn’t know Jayme and Kim Lord had gotten so intimate. I’d thought Jayme had had too many irons in the fire.
“She said she was close to nailing who it was.” I hear Jayme sigh. “And now she’s missing.”
“Wouldn’t she have told the police, too? Or did she just tell you?”
Jayme dabs my lips.
“You’re done,” she says gently.
When I open my eyes, Jayme has already swiveled away, her slender back to me, her straightened hair falling to the tops of her shoulder blades. “I’ve got to get ready myself,” she says, zipping her makeup bag.
Jayme rarely divulges anything from her private life. I know she adores Prince and fish tacos, but boyfriends? Never introduced. Childhood? Nothing happened, apparently, before her halcyon years at UCLA. And her age? Late thirties? Hard to say. But after tonight’s worries and Jayme’s avoidance of the Still Lives catalog, I’m starting to think there’s a reason she never tells anyone about her past. There’s a memory of violence inside her. We might have more in common than I thought.
3
Bas hired big-time Hollywood event designers for the Gala. Their first proposal for the decor included red-spattered walls and body outlines chalked on the pavement. This caused a near apocalypse in Curatorial, where scholarly types organize the exhibitions and define the art of our time. Stranded in a city of endless boob jobs and crumbling adobe, our curators take to their jobs with special piety. You would have thought their skin was melting off from the howls that went up.
“Nothing squalid. Nothing cop-show. This is supposed to be high art,” snapped Lynne Feldman, our chief curator, earning her the nickname “High Art” among our fund-raising folks, as in “Hey, let’s tell High Art we’re serving Bloody Marys.” “Stiff ones, ha-ha!”
When Kim Lord heard of the controversy, she suggested moving the Gala out of the museum entirely and into the subterranean underpass used for truck deliveries to the skyscrapers: a street party literally in the street. There’s a good patch of the underpass behind the Rocque’s loading dock—a vaulting asphalt cavern that also connects to a staircase to the upper avenue.
Everyone agreed that Kim’s suggestion was the kind of brilliant and superbly impractical idea for which the Rocque was known, and the designers got to work. It’s turned out to be an amazing space for a party—fifty-foot-high concrete columns soar to the giant girders that hold the avenue above. Instead of gazing at L.A.’s orange night sky, patrons will look up into the beams that hold a living road. The usual white dinner tent, gargantuan florals, cocktail stations, and dance stage will intersperse with real-life street signs and dented guardrails. Thursdaynight rush hour will roar above the DJs, and the muted odors of tar and spray paint will mingle with champagne in the mouth.
I tried hard to avoid this occasion on account of my post-breakup bitterness, but now that I’m here, clad in my cutoff Nazi mermaid garb, I’m fearful and glad at once. I didn’t expect how the late-afternoon glow would spill down the staircase to the upper avenue, making a grotto of the Gala’s lower entrance. A small gauntlet of paparazzi flanks a second red carpet at the bottom. Mostly doughy, bearded men, they squint into the intense last half hour of sun, when L.A. seems to get the whole country’s light in one concentrated dose before it fades. As the first guests descend past them, the paparazzi take a few shots, then lounge, cameras dangling loose on their chests. No one from Hollywood has arrived yet. Neither has Kim Lord.
In the black-carpeted cocktail area, vestiges of the old murder theme linger, making my stomach twist into its third or fourth knot tonight. A stalker would be right at home here. Bare lights, resembling those in interrogation rooms, hang from poles above the tables. The centerpieces blister with lilies and scarlet roses. Even the appetizers have a corpse-like color scheme: caprese salad with its red tomatoes and white cheese, rare beef toasts, some smeary fig-paste chèvre concoction that resembles an infected wound.
Unable to eat any of it, I chug two glasses of sparkling champagne, trying to pick out my PR assignment. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead playing the pleasant media escort; I would have expected to be the young, aggressive reporter nosing out the story. But here I am, balancing in Jayme’s high boots with a fake smile on my face.
I need to find a fellow named Kevin Rhys from ArtNoise.
“Artwhat?” I’d asked Jayme.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jayme said. Kevin is writing a cover story for a new magazine funded by Mindy Allen, the daughter of a wealthy New York collector. “Development wants to hook them as a sponsor. Be nice to the guy. Just got here from the East Coast. He wants to meet all the players.”
All the players? Our annual Gala draws hundreds of elite tastemakers: the people who make art, the people who buy and sell it, the people who opine about it, and the people who long to belong, which includes most of the museum staff, and random rich people, actors, scuzzballs, and politicians. The cocktail area is filling with well-dressed folks, but I don’t recognize any. So many of them look cut from the same mold: the men trim and spectacled, the women like forty-year-olds from the front and sixty-year-olds from the back, their faces feline and taut, their hands spotted and wrinkled. No suspicious figures that I can see, though I doubt Kim Lord’s supposed stalker resembles the gaunt, goofy male I’ve constructed in my mind, an amalgam of the killers who stabbed, strangled, shot, and beat the victims of Still Lives.
My eyes stop on a familiar huddle: Yegina standing with Brent Patrick, leader of the exhibitions crew, and Lynne Feldman, our chief curator.
Lynne’s gothic good looks always stand out in our crowd, as if she alone among us has never stepped foot from our cool white galleries into the abrasive L.A. sun. She is showing her cell phone to the others with a reprimanding look. Reprimanding is one of Lynne’s three signature expressions (enraged and reverent are the others), and it usually indicates that she is politely and heroically restraining herself from pitching a fit. No other curator on the West Coast has organized more significant solo exhibitions than Lynne Feldman, and no one at the museum is more difficult to work with. Artists tend to regard Lynne as a figure of almost godlike generosity and vision, while coworkers go to such extremes to avoid her that some (okay, mostly Y
egina) walk up the stairs and take the elevator down to bypass Lynne’s office on the way to the coffee machine.
Lynne’s crimson lips shape the words seven o’clock. I’m guessing that she has heard from the artist. Seven. Kim Lord will be here in time for the end of dinner, then. So why are the others shaking their heads?
Just as I’m stepping closer to eavesdrop, I see a tall, stocky guy weaving through the crowd with a notebook in his hand. He is wearing tweed. He is wearing tweed, leather loafers, and a full beard, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the tiny black stem poking from his breast pocket belongs to a tobacco pipe. The Angelenos glide apart for his passing like aquatic creatures in the presence of a clumping land animal. I have a hunch that he is my Kevin, and I go to rescue him.
He surprises me by shaking my hand warmly when I introduce myself.
“You work here?” he says. “Doing what?”
As I tell him briefly about my role as the museum’s writer/editor, he yanks out his notebook and scribbles. “Sweet job.”
I’d gladly trade, I think. Even as I do, I feel the grief and the inertia that have kept me from trying to be a journalist, pitching editors, gathering clips.
“What do you think of the show?” he says.
“I haven’t seen the actual paintings yet,” I admit. “The crew doesn’t like to be ogled when they’re hanging them. But some of the reproductions are … intense.”
Kevin pauses his note-taking to regard me. In an interested and possibly flirtatious manner. I don’t experience this often in my day-to-day existence. Less than fifty percent of the museum employees are men; of those, half are gay and a quarter are married. The other quarter tend to date cocktail straws.
“I saw the Black Dahlia one,” Kevin says. “Is intense a highbrow euphemism for freaking disgusting?”