by Maria Hummel
For a while after Greg moved out, I stopped reading for pleasure. I watched TV and went to movies. I listened to the radio. I fell asleep early. But I left all my novels and biographies alone, their covers closed and pages pressed against each other.
Only at the Rocque did I read, and because I was trying to keep the deadline for the Still Lives catalog, I spent weeks verifying facts about female homicides that the curators and critics quoted in their essays. It was grisly work, and I was glad when Evie took over checking the photograph captions. But something happened to me during that period when all I consumed was a horrifying assemblage of truths about men killing women. I decided I would never fall in love again. It wasn’t just the rejection from Greg that had hurt me; it was how it became wound up with the cruelty of Nikki’s murder and page after page of accounts of beatings, bloodshed, and dumping of women’s bodies in shallow graves. I felt I could never again find a man to desire and trust. If I tried, I was sure I would fail.
When I finally returned to my books, I’d forgotten everything I’d read before. I had the uncanny feeling a stranger had randomly opened the pages and shoved a bookmark in. Novels now bothered me—too much invention in the narrative felt like a meal with too much sweetness. In the Fitzgerald biography, I had to turn back to the spot where Scott meets Zelda and start all over, only this time their early fascination with each other—their late-night parties and jumping into fountains—didn’t seem giddy and romantic but vain and silly, as if they refused to see the disaster of their lives ahead. So I skipped to Fitzgerald’s waning years in Los Angeles, when he went to a young actors’ gathering with his mistress, Sheilah Graham, and the partygoers were pleased and astonished to meet him. The author of This Side of Paradise! The Jazz Age superstar! They’d thought he was already dead.
As Kevin drives off and I pass a large line of people waiting to enter Still Lives, I remember that moment. What it must have meant to Fitzgerald to be greeted like a ghost, and how desperately the writer later poured himself into his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, the book he thought would secure his literary reputation again. Kevin is right about one thing: With ten years since her last major show, Kim Lord, too, is starting to fall off the cultural map. She must realize how much of her future career rides on Still Lives. What would she trade to ensure its success? Would she give up her sanity, plunging herself into the stories of the tormented victims? Or would she drop Greg for a relationship with some bigger art-world star? Would she fake her own kidnapping? Or does she even care about her own success—she who, for the sake of a principle, wants to donate paintings worth potential millions?
I look back at the crowd that winds down the sidewalk to our nearest architectural neighbor, a mammoth insurance company tower that caps the hill before it starts to tumble toward Pershing Square. The line’s now thirty people deep, and they’re mostly hiding behind sunglasses in the April warmth, dressed in jeans or long pants, boots or heels. The occasional pair of khaki shorts and sandals mark a tourist. There are more of them than usual. Even visitors to L.A. have heard about the exhibition, then. Maybe Bas’s efforts to attract them have worked, or maybe they’ve simply read the news.
These are the multitudes we all hoped for. The ones who would save the Rocque. And yet through them I see my last view of Kim: her trenchcoated figure hurrying down this same sidewalk, running away.
9
I formally call the Craft Club to order with a question,” says Yegina, holding up the purple scarf she is knitting. “Who else wants to ban conversation about Kim Lord?”
Silence greets the announcement. We’re in the swanky boardroom on the offices’ top floor, the walls made of dark wood, slanted windows spilling light onto our needles and yarn. Jayme flips a page in the cookbook she’s reading, Evie shrugs into her embroidery, and Lisa and MeiMei from Membership pick at the quilt they are sewing together. Dee, a skinny crew member who wears genderless compilations of T-shirts and jeans, prods the tiny cats she makes out of dryer lint.
“It’s so sad,” says Lisa finally, tugging a thread. “I mean, if something has actually happened to her.”
“Something has,” says Jayme.
“Because I just spent an hour with that investigator,” Yegina barrels on. “And I suspect I’m not the only one tapped out on the subject, right, Maggie?”
A whole hour? “I guess.”
In Craft Club we occasionally outlaw office gossip for the sake of having deeper conversations about our lives. Last month, the topic of watching our thirtysomething friends become mothers of babies evoked a passionate discussion and a few snarky anecdotes. We spent a long hour once debating the merits of MFAs and graduate school for artists. Post-9/11, we cried together and plotted our escape routes from L.A. Yegina is always the funny, bossy one; Lisa and MeiMei brim with gullible empathy; Evie has a passion for Hollywood gossip; Jayme warily steers us from too much cattiness; Dee makes spacey, sometimes careless remarks; and I—what do I do? I used to play the wide-eyed, eager newcomer, until I learned to hide it better.
“What did the investigator ask you?” Dee says to Yegina. “I missed everything. Out sick Wednesday and Thursday.”
Dee sounds funny when she says it, and not just because she has an adorable British accent that coordinates well with her dryer-lint cats and her muscular handiness with carpentry tools. Dee is Brent’s charismatic first mate, the longest-standing member on an often revolving crew. Without Dee’s upbeat wrangling, Brent’s ideas would not be so easily realized. But she must be feeling awkward. Wednesday and Thursday—the last two full installation days for Still Lives—were odd ones for her to be absent.
“He asked me not to tell.” Yegina loops her yarn and begins to knit.
“Oh, come on,” says Dee.
“It was nothing,” Yegina says primly.
I struggle not to frown. I know Yegina is trying to protect me. After Greg moved out, I camped in her apartment—in a bed she made for me between her Pocky sticks and hard-core record collection—until I could bear to go home. If someone says the word kindness, I see a curvy silhouette like Yegina’s bringing cookies and Valium on a tray. Yet Yegina protects by exerting control, even over other people’s feelings. She saw me freeze last night in the galleries, and she doesn’t want to see it again.
“We could talk about the ‘I Survived Cancer’ party that I invited you to tomorrow,” I say. “On horseback.”
I feel Evie’s eyes flick to me. I could have invited Evie instead. I probably should have.
“You survived cancer?” says Lisa. “I’m so sorry. I mean, I’m happy.”
She’s almost tearing up over her sewing needle, so I explain. My friend Kaye has survived throat cancer and she’s throwing herself an official fete. I Survived Cancer. Join Me on My Gallop Back to Health.
“Her words,” I say. “It’s at some ranch in Griffith Park. We’re supposed to ride over the hills at dusk, eat dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and then ride back.” I’d debated about making an excuse not to go, since Greg is also friends with Kaye and a couple of weeks ago he RSVPed yes for two. I retaliated by RSVPing for two as well. I didn’t have a date until I successfully coerced Yegina.
“Griffith Ranch? I’ve been on that ride,” says MeiMei. “Make sure you get a mellow horse.”
“Or what?” says Yegina. Her brows are furrowing.
“They have to have mellow horses,” I say. “Or they’d be out of business.”
MeiMei regards both of us before continuing. “It’s just a long way in the dark,” she says.
An awkward quiet falls. I know Yegina wants me to release her from her promise, but I need her tomorrow. I don’t want to be out alone on winding roads.
“That private investigator guy’s been watching the loading dock all afternoon,” Evie says in her soft voice. “He just sits there. Maybe he thinks the stalker’s going to show up.”
And then we’re sliding into the same conversation we’ve been having all day, all over the mus
eum and outside it, too. About the rumor of the stalker. About Kim Lord’s theatrical nature, how she often had some performance element to her exhibitions. About the large still life I didn’t view last night, the one called “Disappearances.” (“She changed the name on Monday,” Yegina tells me. “I didn’t want to bother you for one label.”) Our voices grow hushed, and we are bending closer together like conspirators, knowing that beyond these walls the press and the world await the news of what will happen here, at our museum.
After a while, it grows clear that my friends are of two camps. While Jayme and Yegina believe something ominous has happened to Kim, the rest are hopeful that the disappearance is a stunt. It doesn’t surprise me that the groups would divide this way, given Yegina’s usual cynicism, Jayme’s anxiety about the show, and the others’ tendency to heroworship artists and invest them with intentions and capabilities far beyond a mere mortal. I am the only one on the fence. Kim Lord hasn’t even been missing forty-eight hours, and given her oversize, confrontational approach, I agree with my pals and Kevin that she might have another performance up her sleeve. But it’s hard to ignore the cold, blank fear that flooded me last night in the exhibition, or the tone of the artist’s statements in the press release. She didn’t sound like she was planning to vanish.
Evie thinks Kim Lord might be leading us to another set of paintings, somewhere beyond the museum, representing all the women murdered outside the media spotlight. “For all the Jane Does,” she says with a smirk. Sometimes the way Evie contributes to discussion reminds me of Nikki Bolio—she speaks to the air in front of her, with a self-conscious twist of her lips, as if her utterances are aimed at some invisible, judgmental third party. Maybe it’s how you learn to talk when you grow up afraid of the place that raised you—in Evie’s case, a series of abusive homes in small-town Northern California. The few stories she’s told me make me both sad and impressed by her current job, her loft across the river, her neat olive suit and chunky beads.
“I did see her leave the museum in a rush on Wednesday,” I say, and tell about my view from the stairs.
“I wonder why,” says MeiMei.
“She never made it to the galleries,” Evie confirms. “She just got upset about something and left.”
“I don’t know how she handled it, frankly,” says Jayme, looking surprised to be saying something.
“Handled what?” says Yegina.
Jayme turns a page in her Oaxacan cookbook, glares at a new recipe. “Making that whole show,” she says.
No one knows how to respond to this comment, not coming from Jayme, whom we all admire, and who is so private that she works out at a different gym from the rest of us and never stays at happy hour for more than one gin gimlet. Even trickier, we do know what Jayme means—what it must have cost Kim Lord to inhabit these murders—yet saying it aloud strips away the safe armor of our own intellectualization, the same armor that got us through the Jason Rains show on capital punishment, when we each allowed ourselves to sit in a lethal injection chair and watch the syringes come closer. Still Lives is art. Art should shock us. We work at the Rocque.
Silence falls over the table, but we keep knitting and sewing, and the needles make tiny clicking and piercing sounds.
“I bet the police will turn up something soon,” says Lisa.
“Motivation,” says Yegina. “That’s the first thing on my mind: Why would anyone want her missing?”
Motivations are misleading, I think. Only after all the evidence is in, after you unearth so many little hows, can you try to piece together the great why.
I’m about to say so, when Dee announces that boyfriends are the likeliest suspects, and that Shaw Ferguson looked shocked and miserable last night.
Here we go.
I feel everyone’s eyes on me now. They all know he dumped me. For her. Their collective sympathy is the hardest to endure. I knit harder, the yarn scratching my fingers.
“I thought he looked awful, too,” says Evie. “Like he hadn’t slept a wink.”
He did look awful.
“Greg Shaw Ferguson is too much of a narcissist to kill someone,” Yegina says.
He also looked deeply afraid.
“Oh well. That leaves Maggie, right?” Dee says. “The jealous ex.”
Dee clearly means it as a joke to clear the tension. I should have my own clever retort, but I don’t. My mouth tastes stale and hollow. The dread I felt in the galleries is carving through me again. I stare down at my hands, shoving the needle, ripping a new loop.
“Low blow, Dee,” Jayme says.
“This is what I was trying to avoid,” Yegina mutters.
One warm winter day in our first year in Los Angeles, I was driving the 101 with the skyscrapers streaming past on my right, the hills on my left, when I felt the city—really felt it—for the first time.
I was en route to the Rocque, my radio tuned to indie twang, my skirt tight over my thighs, my sunglasses heavy on my nose and just starting to slide on the sweat, and it happened—the sensation of metropolis—expanding me like a balloon.
I passed a parking garage under construction. Out of the corner of my eye: giant steel girders, ramps, and levels. When this is finished, I thought, two hundred people will come every day to slide their cars into these spots, and I will never know a single person by name or what troubles them, and they will not know me, and if two hundred more take their place, I won’t know that either.
I—who’d grown up in a Vermont village, who could identify every local family by name or habit—was now surrounded by so many thousands, millions, they could only be specters. Ever anonymous to me, and I to them. The isolation almost made me choke.
That was the painful part of my awakening.
After that, exhilaration. The road opened like a sea. I could be anyone speeding down it, not the daughter of my parents, the sister of my brothers. Not the girl who struck out at bat her entire first year of Little League. Not the teenager who sang a torturously earnest a cappella rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” in the school talent show. Not the Rocque newbie who brought maple-bran muffins to a cocktail potluck. And especially not the unknown young woman who sat outside Nikki Bolio’s funeral in her car, weeping uncontrollably.
All those old, encumbering selves slid away, leaving me feeling exposed but light, too, as if it were suddenly possible to float.
When I’d reached my office, I’d called Greg. “What’s wrong?” he said when he heard my husky voice. “Has something happened at work?”
“No, I just …” I paused. How could I explain the tingling in my skull, as if I had just hatched from a shell? “I could be anyone here. I just realized that. And it terrifies me.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s too huge—this city—”
“That’s not the city. That’s life. Life is huge. Isn’t that what you wanted?” Greg sounded earnest and impatient.
I meekly agreed with him, but something inside me did not. Maybe that was the moment things started to fall apart between us. Maybe it was also the moment I started to realize how naïve I’d been about Los Angeles. I’d come here thinking that the sunny metropolis would catalyze me to a second start, but instead its staggering possibilities left me paralyzed.
Later that afternoon, I went downstairs to the galleries to check a wall label and ran into our exhibitions manager, Yegina, standing in the center of a room of hand-stitched photographs by a Cuban artist. Her dark head was cocked and her lips parted as her eyes followed the lines of red thread the artist had used to finish the Havana buildings that the Castro regime had left half constructed. Yegina looked more like she was listening than looking. Listening to a sublime symphony.
I’d heard that she and the curator had made a huge effort to get the artworks past the U.S. government embargo.
“It was worth it,” I said, coming up beside Yegina. We didn’t know each other well yet. I knew she’d just gotten married, but that was all.
“I hope
so.” There was a wistful tone in her voice. Though the museum had been open two hours, the galleries were nearly empty.
“It’s going to get great reviews. Jayme told you, right?”
Yegina looked back at the photographs, the black-and-white images of the half-completed buildings, the delicate red stitching that suggested their final facades, their arches and roofs.
“Richard is leaving,” she said, referring to our old director, who’d been with the museum for fifteen years. “He’s resigning tomorrow. The fiscal-year reports came in yesterday, and we overspent by six million. Again. Janis told the board last night that this is the last time she’ll bail out the Rocque.” She nudged me. “You might want to keep your eyes out for another job.”
I could tell by the way Yegina said it that she wasn’t warning me of my own layoff, though layoffs were sure to come. Everyone on the staff knew that the Rocque was in trouble—various board members had stepped in over the years with big contributions, but we could never get our revenues up to meet the costs of our exhibitions.
“You, too,” I said, trying to imagine the museum with our long-term director gone.
Yegina gave me a small, sad smile. “I can’t leave this place. I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’ll have to leave me.”
Maybe the best friendships begin with admiration. It’s true of my feelings for Yegina. On the same day I panicked at my unknowable future in Los Angeles, Yegina reminded me of the value of being part of something greater than myself. She also had a deliciously subversive sense of humor and knew the best hole-in-the-wall restaurants downtown. We started to spend more time together, weathering the layoffs that came and the hiring of Bas Terrant over French café lunches in the fashion district and happy hours at Luster’s Steakhouse before we stumbled home to our significant others, then later stumbled home alone.
Through all those close moments, I never told Yegina about Nikki Bolio. I could never tell her, because she’d want to analyze it, this place she’d never been and these people she’d never met. She’d want to break my big, heavy grief into smaller griefs, and then into dust so that I could stop hauling it around. But I want to haul it around, the whole clumsy story: Nikki’s testimonial, our failure to protect her, her mysterious death, and the sad truth about small towns and how they can smash down the person who dares to stand up.