Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  “Thank God,” Yegina says. “Sit down.”

  I don’t think I am hungry, but when Kevin slides the plate in front of me, I eat the salmon and asparagus gratefully, ignoring Yegina’s raised eyebrow.

  “Hey, so have you met the artist?” I hear him ask. “What’s she really like?”

  5

  The first time I saw Kim Lord, she was a picture in a New York magazine. My mother had sent me the magazine in a care package to Thailand, and, even more than the little jar of crunchy peanut butter and packets of Oreos, the glossy pages made me miss America. I missed our messy, mixed-up country, and I missed our media, the blustery way we talked about one another, our constant cultural introspection. I must have read the issue twenty times: the brief newsy dispatches about Dolly the Sheep and The English Patient’s odds for Best Picture, the music and book reviews, and four long articles, full of a bustling culture far away from my decrepit teak house in the Thai countryside. One of the long pieces was a profile of Kim Lord. It featured a photo of one of her paintings—which was actually the painting of a photo she had destroyed. The writer made much of this esoteric process from photograph to self-portrait, which I found mostly befuddling at the time. Instead, I was moved by the figure: a young man smirking in a cutoff T-shirt, tattoos, his neck hung with chains, a cold, evaluating look in his eye. “Pimp #1,” he was called. He was also Kim Lord.

  The article said that Kim Lord was born to a wealthy Toronto family, a child of private schooling, piano lessons, and high teas. She spoke perfect French. She won a poetry recitation contest for performing Portia’s mercy speech from memory. Then she broke away from bourgeois life in her teens and went hitchhiking and train-hopping around the United States, and was accepted to art school at the Cooper Union. She spent a year among New York prostitutes and pimps, and then moved into a studio for two weeks and wore disguises and took photos of herself until she got the exact poses she wanted.

  With her own self-portraits as subjects, she started the paintings, sometimes capturing herself with exacting realism, sometimes with expressionistic techniques that washed her blurry and indistinct. The day all the paintings were done, she destroyed the studio photos, erasing the only record of herself as a living subject. In the early years, she burned her films and negatives, but once photography went digital, she put all the images on a flash drive and smashed it with a hammer. She emphasized the importance of this last ritual, likening it to a kind of honor sacrifice.

  “I don’t want that record to exist,” she said in the article. “It links the work to me, and I am not painting myself.”

  This statement lodged in my mind when I first read it, riding an air-conditioned bus through durian plantations to visit Greg. I am not painting myself. It was a curious thing to say when your entire oeuvre was some variation on the self-portrait. I talked about it with Greg on our lazy vacation in Ko Samui. We were side by side on beach towels, me on my belly, Greg sitting up, reading the magazine. Beyond us, turquoise water lapped white sand and boats droned, carrying tourists to snorkel over dying coral reefs. The heat was making my bones melt. I loved it, yet I still missed America. Greg flipped a page.

  “Doesn’t it make you homesick?” I mumbled into my bare arm.

  “Some of it,” he said. “Kim Lord’s painting is the best thing in here.”

  His admiration rankled me. I propped myself up on my elbows. “She claims she’s not painting herself. But isn’t she?”

  “No. She’s painting a subject.”

  “A gorgeous subject.” I gestured at Kim’s narrow, girlish body, visible somehow through the male clothes, the posture. “Would her art be so famous if she was ugly? Or poor?”

  Greg shrugged, brushing the sand off his legs. But he kept reading.

  “She also says that unless women artists simultaneously inhabit the roles of artist and subject, the art world will never escape the prison of the male gaze,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d be jealous of her. She’s on your team.”

  My team. I’d told Greg that my Thailand adventure was “a break” from pursuing a career in investigative journalism, that I wanted to apply to J-school once I’d sorted out my feelings about Nikki Bolio’s death.

  “I am not jealous of her,” I said. “I just don’t see why she needs to keep justifying herself.”

  Greg backed up a page, peered at the image again.

  I dropped my head to my towel. Beneath the cloth, the sand made a grainy static in my left ear until it settled into a hard, unstable pillow. I closed my eyes and let the sun drape its flame across half my face. I hadn’t sorted out any of my feelings about Nikki except one: I didn’t want to return to Vermont. I wanted to go back to my own country but live far away from my home state, anonymous, starting over.

  “We should move to a big city when we get home,” I said. “A big warm city.”

  Something soft and light touched the back of my neck. It was Greg, kissing me.

  “We should,” he murmured, and then withdrew. “I’m going swimming.”

  There it was, in that moment on the white sand. I said it first; I claimed a future with Greg, the one that led us to Los Angeles. The one that led him to Kim. What happened between us still mystifies me: how two lovers can move to a city, and the city itself wraps around them like vines, pulling them apart, pushing them toward others, until they become so entwined in their separate lives that they no longer recognize what they once felt, or even who they once were.

  I sound so young in that memory. So full of sunlight and glittering beach. The only clock the distant tock-tock-tock of the cook cracking coconuts for dinner.

  The second time I saw Kim Lord, she and another woman were racing each other on two large mechanical sperm in a wall-to-wall crowd at a gallery opening in Silver Lake. Greg and I stood on the street, too shy to do anything but gawk through the gallery’s big windows. Players at two video game consoles controlled each sperm, aiming them around curving red foam pieces to a dais where a glowing egg waited. The sperm moved with the lurching glide of automatons, but each was covered in chrome that reminded me of 1950s cars. Each also bore a tiny vanity license plate: FINISH and FETISH.

  Greg and I knew only two people there: Phil and Spike, the tall, bigheaded identical twin designers that I worked with at the Rocque. The twins were easy to spot: they usually towered over crowds, and as if to further fool with their eerie likeness, they routinely costumed themselves as conquistadors of dork. That night, it didn’t take me long to find them, wearing matching striped one-piece vintage swimsuits and hunched behind the video game console. Together they watched impatiently as a bearded hipster fiddled with the joystick. Judging by their expressions, the console was wired to Kim’s sperm, which was nosing futilely into a wall of uterine foam.

  It wasn’t Kim Lord’s show. It was a recent MFA grad’s, and it astonished both Greg and me to see Kim there, like a movie star showing up at your favorite breakfast place (a frequent occurrence in our new L.A. life). But we tried to play it cool, somehow striking up a conversation with the smokers beside us, making dumb puns about being “pro-creative” and speculating about what sort of “donors” had given to this show.

  “Think she’ll beat the other sperm?” I said.

  “Not if Spike and Phil start driving,” said Greg.

  And then, I don’t know exactly how it happened, Greg pulled me inside, got us icy cans of beer from a plastic tub, and suddenly he was next to Phil and Spike, joysticking Kim Lord to victory while I drank my cheap brew in the corner alone. As Greg jolted Kim through the gallery on her sleek chrome tadpole, I watched his face sharpen with something that looked like lust, but wasn’t quite. It was the savage desire to win. To win this crowd of people in their post-punk leather, their trousers and embroidery and heavy black glasses, to be one of them and the best of them at the same time. It happened fast, and then other things happened: a guy came up to hit on me, aggressive and insistent; Greg returned with Phil; Kim came over to meet Greg.


  She was smaller in person and not as pretty as I’d imagined, but she had this long, scrutinizing way of looking at you that made you feel noticed. She remembered my name after hearing it once, and when Phil told her I’d just gotten a job with him at the Rocque, she said we should all have a drink sometime, she loved a museum that said screw you to mediocrity. She uttered it in a humorless tone that brooked no laughter or clever retort. Perhaps she was already preoccupied with Still Lives then. She must have started on the work by that point—it was about four years ago—and she must have been poring over the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson, who became the subject of her first painting and the reason Kim eventually wanted to open the exhibition in Los Angeles.

  “This city is the magic looking glass to North American culture—it shows us what is most beautiful and passionate about ourselves, and what is most monstrous,” she said later in an interview. “Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder was all three. Her bloody death speaks as much to the obsessions of our society as it does to the violence in one man.”

  The second time I saw Kim Lord was the second time I wanted to dislike her but couldn’t. Instead, we became the kind of provisional pals you only meet at parties, always nodding and acknowledging each other, but never really talking. Why would we? What Kim Lord and I have in common could be measured by the teaspoon: a childhood in the North, a tendency to stay quiet while everyone else chatters. Yet sometimes I think I’m the only one in L.A. who understands her: she is not a genius, but she knows how to package herself, how to make it sound like she matters. She looks the part, too—a gaunt, darkening blonde, size four in jeans. She has a neat little way of licking her lips before she speaks. It makes her seem younger, though she never acts eager to please.

  Here, at the Gala tonight, I can’t tell Kevin-the-rock-critic any of this, so I just listen to Yegina say that Kim Lord is pretty easy to deal with for an artist who finishes paintings six months later than she says she will. And who refuses to do educational events of any kind because her work is “not for children.” And who always arrives dressed in elaborate disguises and insists on entering the museum through the loading dock.

  Then Kevin asks how we decide which artists get the green light for shows at the Rocque, and Yegina goes into another long-winded answer.

  “It’s a pretty collaborative process, except when your director forces something down your throat,” Yegina finishes, loathing in her voice. “As in Art of the Race Car. Next year, September 2004. I kid you not. George W. Bush will be running for reelection, and Bas wants to park a Corvette in front of the museum.”

  For years, the brilliant shows at the Rocque have made up for other failures in Yegina’s life: the museum’s failure to promote her, Chad’s failure at staying faithful to her, and, most of all, her parents’ failure to understand any of her artsy, leftist, cash-poor choices. I half wish that her brother gets rejected by med schools again so that he can share the burden of disappointing them.

  “And then Bas wants to tear down this building and make something huge,” she adds. “He doesn’t understand that people actually find us because we’re a break in the skyline. We’re at a human scale.”

  A break in the skyline.

  I remember the last time I saw Kim Lord. It was yesterday, almost lunchtime, and I was heading downstairs to grab Yegina for our toning class at the gym. As I held the rail, gazing out on my favorite view of the avenue below us, I caught sight of a woman in a platinum wig and trench coat, hurrying downhill, away from the museum and toward Pershing Square. She jumped as if something had startled her, patted herself, and then kept hustling west. In that moment, I didn’t register what I was seeing. Scarcely a day goes by in Los Angeles when I don’t witness something odd on the streets. But the woman was Kim Lord. And she was fleeing the Rocque.

  I excuse myself to use the restroom, which is inside the building. As I totter through the increasingly younger outer circles of the dinner tent, I catch sight of manicured hands cupping glasses, smooth bare legs extending from slitted dresses, unbuttoned tux collars, gleaming watches. I hear snatches of conversation.

  “Her shows are never worth the hype, but I still want to see it.”

  “When was her last one, when Reagan was president?”

  Kim Lord’s Noir exhibition had bombed so badly that it shadows her reputation almost as much as her early success brightens it, and there are some, possibly many, here who expect to be underwhelmed again. Another night, their derision might privately cheer me, but now I’m glad when I make it out of the humid clouds of talk to the cooler, grittier open air of the underpass.

  The dock looms like a tomb. It used to be the basement for the police-car garage. The architect retrofitted the walls and beams to be earthquake-safe and extended the museum’s underground level two stories so that we could use the same delivery underpass as our neighboring skyscrapers. The Rocque’s remodel is considered a subterranean masterpiece, because the architect retained the drama of the old walls and arches while making the space much larger and more modern. Our garage door is forty feet tall, and when it’s up, as it is tonight, you see a dark cathedral of art crates and shelving, the thresholds that lead to the registrar’s office and the carpentry room, and another massive door at the back, where much of our permanent collection is stored.

  Security guys in white shirts stand, arms folded, all over the dock, but they don’t recognize me and I don’t have my badge or an official wristband for the evening. I bob along them like a horse looking for a break in the fence until I find Fritz, our main daytime dock guard, a short, robust, close-shaven guy who sports tinted glasses and a friendly air. Fritz likes me because I helped his daughter with her college essays last year and she got into UCLA. He beckons me in with a smile, and I pass into the underground vault of the Rocque, with its smells of fresh carpentry and old paint. I cross the hard cement floor and hide in the restroom, unzipping my boots down to the ankle to pop out my complaining feet.

  My toes flex, prickling. They feel like little knobs pounded into the ends of my feet. Kim Lord should be at the Gala by now. Her absence is a wind, invisibly touching everything. The last time I felt this sensation was six years ago, the cold spring day when Nikki Bolio, my source, was found dead on the shore of Lake Champlain.

  I hear the bathroom door swing open, and two guests talking.

  “Hurry, okay?” says one. “I don’t want to get stuck behind a massive crowd. I hate craning my neck.”

  It must be seven already. Still Lives is open for viewing. Starting with tables one and two, guests may take the freight elevator up to the galleries, or they can take the long way, walking up the staircase and coming in through the museum’s front doors.

  I shove my boots back on and hobble from the restroom and into the shadows by the staff elevator. Moments later, Janis Rocque and the rest of the head-table guests flood the loading dock.

  Is Kim Lord finally among them? No. Neither is Greg. I hang back to watch, trying to imagine which group a stalker would infiltrate.

  First come the wild gray heads of the renegade artists who once carved out studio space among the oil derricks of Venice Beach. They built their art from junk piles and car paint and light. One got arrested for obscenity and some died, but a surviving few have become rich old men. They chuckle and nudge each other, and their eyes have a sharp brightness; they know they are the youngest people here.

  A more proper, more resplendent group follows. These are the male board members: CEOs, bankers, music industry magnates who have spent their lives leading meetings and driving up profits. Although their looks range from svelte to plump, they all have the same restless gleam, as if they can’t help jockeying for power, even now.

  The last cluster comprises the women on the board and the wives of the men. Mostly platinum-haired, graceful, and over forty, they fall into two categories, the born rich and the born beautiful, rarely both at the same time. An occasional young, foxy girlfriend dots the landscape of older bodies, and s
he trips along self-consciously in high heels, smiling hard. Of the three groups, only this last one shows any anxiety at Kim Lord’s absence; I catch sight of a couple of ladies glancing back over their shoulders at the glare of the party, and another tightening her silky wrap as if chilled.

  Tailing all these groups is one misfit, walking alone: a dark-haired guy, early thirties, with a mustard-colored corduroy suit jacket thrown over jeans. There’s something familiar about him. Not familiar as in we’ve met before, but familiar in type. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s from somewhere rural and East Coast. Overdressed for the warm night, underdressed for the occasion. No interest in fanciness except to flout everyone else’s high opinion of it. His blue eyes look sleepy, as if someone just woke him up and dragged him here. He sees me staring and gives me a wink. I look down at my aching feet, first embarrassed by my scrutiny, then irritated by his cheek. He clearly didn’t dress to blend in.

  The massive doors of the freight elevator slide open. In its day, the freight elevator has carried paintings the size of pools and an entire crumpled Volkswagen. It’s hallowed ground, this scuffed metal box; along with thousands of artworks, this freight elevator has lifted L.A.’s reputation, putting our city on the map of critics and collectors. But the cabled mechanism also rattles and lurches, and the interior panels are in dire need of replacement. The guests file in, dwarfed by the elevator’s size. In its silvery light, their faces and bodies are suddenly blank and interchangeable, except for their leader, Janis Rocque. She wears the stoic scowl of a human about to enter an alien spaceship.

  Where is Greg? I’m surprised he isn’t keeping up with his crowd.

  There’s a flash of blue and tweed beside me: Yegina and Kevin, looking breathless.

  “Come on, we can take the staff elevator. Everyone’s walking up the staircase way. They don’t want to wait,” says Yegina, waving her all-access badge on the security pad. “It’s going to be mobbed.”