Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  “I found a space for a gallery,” Greg said, his eyes sliding from mine. “I’m going to live there while I fix it up. It’s going to take a lot of work.”

  His mother had left him an inheritance. A few weeks ago, Greg and I had discussed using it to buy a house. With an extra bedroom for our kids one day.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You could still sleep here,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry,” Greg said.

  He slept on the couch that night, and the next day he left with his first bags of stuff. I assumed, in a self-protective way, that grief was overwhelming him. That he needed to cope with the loss of his mother by throwing himself into his new career. The next week, Greg presented me with a key to the gallery and his new apartment—“In case you need it for any reason,” he said—and he kept his set to our bungalow, though he never slept there again. When we spoke on the phone, we spoke like lapsed friends who are pretending they still care. I wanted to yell at him, I wanted to cry; I just didn’t feel allowed. Permission to suffer could only be granted to the most injured. So I kept my weeping to myself, where it festered and spread until I felt like I was two people: the serene, hardworking Maggie Richter everyone knew at the Rocque, and the private one who wanted to kick the young couple kissing on the street corner or set a big hot fire to the tiny sign that hung outside Greg’s new gallery, announcing his evolution, man and gallery combined: SHAW.

  After all, I was the one alone. Truly alone. Alone, for Greg, meant inviting Kim Lord to shack up with him weeks later. Apparently she “needed” a local studio space to complete her show for the Rocque. Apparently she stayed late one February night and they fell helplessly in love.

  And apparently I have not gotten over the shame of all this, because here I am months later getting drunk in a turquoise Mexican restaurant until the heavy table corner stabs me every time I stumble to the bathroom. I get in a fight with Greg then Yegina then Greg and Yegina and Kaye about who will take me home. Greg has volunteered because he still wants to talk to me—about what? About his worries for his famous, beautiful missing girlfriend? Screw her and her death obsession! Not every woman fantasizes about being a sex slave or a starlet or a murder victim! Some of us just want to get sucked into a good novel and grow our own tomatoes one day when we have more time. When Rick asks me if I’d like to call a taxi instead of riding Babe over the hills again, I say with great dignity that I love Babe because she is a back-looking creature and I love the past, too, the past defines us and to ignore it is like putting down roots in a city that will one day fall into the sea and what is wrong with words anyway why is everyone here so obsessed with pictures I’ve got a picture for you what kind of person wears flip-flops to a riding party?

  Greg’s voice is far above me and spinning. It’s farther than the ground, which is awfully close and spattered with wet, sour-smelling chunks. In the distance I hear neighs, hooves stamping. I didn’t want to vomit in the taxi, so I held it in. Now, in the ranch parking lot, it’s all coming out.

  “Feel better?”

  My stomach heaves again, and a pair of hands catches my hair.

  “No,” I say, wiping my mouth.

  There’s a blurry station wagon ride down through the hills. Then Greg walks me into our bungalow, through our old kitchen, with its still mismatched cups and plates and the knife his mother gave us, and out the back door, where he sits me down on the patio in our old hard chairs. I haven’t swept the fallen leaves in a long time, and they crackle underfoot. Why is he here? I’m too tired to understand. The evening returns to me in flashes: Kaye’s face wrinkles with concern as I tell her for the umpteenth time that, yes, my hip hurts but I’m fine, I know how to roll (as if leaping off horses is a hobby of mine). Then Rick the ranch hand says, “I might need to rope her horse.”

  Then Yegina tries to stop me from refilling my glass and gets a heavy splash of margarita on her blouse. “All yours, Greg,” she says, throwing up her hands.

  I’m not anyone’s, but here we are, Greg and I, sitting side by side on our old patio in the dark. It’s a small rectangle of concrete and brick between my house and the next bungalow, planted long ago with an avocado tree and a guava tree and a dark-green bush with glossy jagged leaves. A wooden fence blocks the view to the courtyard. The wood is so ancient, it has a soft gray texture and the nails have turned to circles of rust. A child could punch the whole thing down.

  Greg shifts in his chair but doesn’t speak. The cool air makes my sticky cheeks feel stickier.

  If we were still a couple now, our silence would be the dull, smooth silence of two people who are so accustomed to each other that they don’t need to talk.

  This silence is different. Prickly and hesitant. Why doesn’t Greg just go? We gaze up into the avocado tree, me sipping the sparkling water he has brought for me. I guess he’s waiting to see if I’ll be sick again. I try to stand, but the effort makes me dizzy so I subside into my chair.

  “How did you get there anyway?” I say. My throat is acid, sore.

  “Where?”

  “I mean, why didn’t you drive to the ranch?”

  “I wanted to walk.”

  “You walked. From Echo Park.”

  “I walk a lot these days,” he says.

  “Hoping to run into her?” It comes out more harsh than funny.

  “Kind of. I can’t sit still and I can’t sleep.”

  The avocados are ripe now, and they hang like dark jewels in the high branches. The squirrels around here are as fat as cows. They’re smart, too. We used to call them the squirrels of NIMH. Last week I saw one using a fence post to cut through a peel.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, Maggie,” Greg says quietly. “You never did anything to deserve this.”

  A stillness descends through me. My hip throbs, but otherwise I feel senseless, weightless. Even Greg seems distant, though I could touch his arm from here. His voice seems detached from him, too.

  “After my mom died, it became frighteningly clear to me: you wanted to settle down and I didn’t,” his voice continues. “You were ready to have children whose father would be around for them. I wanted to do something that … changes things. Culture. I didn’t want to be a father yet, and I refused to let my son or daughter grow up without me.” Greg’s shape shifts and the chair wheezes. “So I moved out. I told myself it was to protect you, but really it was to protect myself from seeing you hurt.”

  I was hurt anyway, I think, but I don’t say it. I don’t want to stop this voice, because it’s going to apologize and then it’s going to tell me that Greg wants me back, wants someone whose bare shoulders he held in the South China Sea and marveled, “God, they fit my palms exactly.”

  “And then when I saw you at the Gala, it hit me,” says Greg. “You’re the only person—”

  The voice breaks off.

  I’ve ever really loved, I hear him say.

  “—in Los Angeles that I trust completely,” Greg says. “My mother even said it, that I would always be able to trust you.”

  His mother. That specter of strength and bitterness and pain.

  Greg is still talking. “But how could I ask you for help now?”

  “Help?” I wobble back to the present.

  Of all the apologies and reconciliations that I fantasized about, I never imagined this one.

  “I’m the police’s lead suspect. I have no alibi for Wednesday evening. I was out walking that night, too.” There’s a catch in Greg’s voice.

  I glance over at him, but it’s too dark to see his face.

  “I told them about Kim seeing Bas with some man she thought was stalking her. But I can tell they don’t believe me,” he says. “Frankly, I didn’t believe Kim.”

  “She saw Bas with her stalker?” My stomach suddenly roils, and I sip the bubbly water.

  “On Monday. On the West Side somewhere.”

  “But what kind of stalker was he? Was he following her, sending her messages? Was he threatening her?
”

  “She wouldn’t tell me.” Greg sounds hurt and defensive. “She said it was complicated.”

  “But she knew who he was?”

  “She thought she did, but she wouldn’t say.”

  “What would Bas be doing with him?”

  “I don’t know. She thought he wanted to get at her through her art. I don’t know. The show was making her hysterical,” Greg says. “She was barely sleeping, and she wasn’t … taking care of herself.”

  It’s dawning on me: why he hasn’t seen her since Tuesday. “And you fought about that and she left. And you don’t know where she went.”

  “Yes.”

  “Must have been a serious fight.” I drink another slug of my water.

  “It was. But I never thought—”

  I hear the same dread in Greg’s voice as earlier, when Babe reared beneath me, pitching us backward. I don’t want to hear any more.

  “You’re absolutely sure it was Monday?” I interrupt.

  Greg says he’s certain. I tell him about Bas’s bizarre behavior in the elevator, and the board vote on his directorship, and the press release that Jayme had me copyedit.

  “That’s impossible.” Greg bolts up in his chair. “Kim needs that money as much as anyone. So does Nelson.”

  “As much as Bas needs his job? The gift would make him look really good. Especially if it was announced to the public. It might make it hard to fire him.”

  As I say it, I still can’t see how the gift would be a motivation for Bas to make Kim Lord disappear.

  “Giving away millions of dollars makes no sense for her,” says Greg. He tugs a hand through his hair as if trying pull free an explanation for Kim’s alleged donation.

  He refers to her in the present tense. I notice this with a slow lurch inside.

  “You need some more water? I’ll get you some more,” Greg says, and disappears into the house, the steel back door slamming behind him.

  I hunch in my chair, trying to process the information Greg has told me. Their fight. Kim’s departure. Her connecting Bas to her stalker. The pieces feel jagged, like they don’t fit together. My sense of time has been mugged by the tequila, and I don’t know if minutes pass or just a moment before I look up and see Greg in the window watching me, his face twisted with rage. I flinch, our eyes catch, and the expression vanishes. He waves and holds up a water glass.

  “Here. You need to drink about ten of these,” he says in his usual amiable tone when he returns.

  I decide my vision must have been a warp of the old bungalow window, an odd reflection. I can’t see any trace of anger or fear.

  “I’ll try to find out where Bas went on Monday,” I say.

  “Christ, if you could—” says Greg.

  “But your new lawyer, what’s she doing?”

  “She says the police are getting a warrant to search my properties. There’s nothing to find.” He sits back down in his chair and sighs. “Except this.” From his pocket he fishes something that looks like a thin, black finger. “I do have another favor to ask.”

  I’m shaking my head, but when he slides the object toward me, I take it in my palm. It’s a flash drive.

  “These are Kim’s photos. The studies for Still Lives. She deleted them off her computer and camera, and she was going to destroy this after the opening.”

  I recall copyediting the pages in the Still Lives catalog devoted to Kim Lord’s idiosyncratic process, the same one I first puzzled over so long ago in Thailand: first her study of her subjects, then her photographs of herself costumed as those subjects, then her paintings of her photos, and, finally, the obliteration of the photos. Smashing the flash drive is her last ritual. I would have thought she’d done it by now. She delivered her last painting to the Rocque on Tuesday.

  “Why don’t you just take a hammer to it yourself?”

  “I can’t,” Greg says. “I just can’t. Please hold on to it for me?”

  “We might be obstructing an investigation.”

  “It’s not like that, I swear. There’s nothing on here that will help the police.”

  He closes my fist around the flash drive. I wince at his touch. You shouldn’t trust me, I say in my mind, and Greg asks Why? And I say, You shouldn’t trust me because I still stupidly wrongly hopelessly love you. But I say nothing aloud; instead, my fingers stay closed.

  Greg stands up. I feel a squeeze on my shoulder and a tiny peck on the top of my head. “I hope you and the squirrels of NIMH get some good sleep,” he says.

  Still speechless, I stand and turn on the patio light for Greg to find his way out. The glow illuminates a low branch in a nearby bush and what looks like a white hose wrapped around it. As I lean close, the hose shifts, and inside its hollows, an elongated face gazes into mine. It has a sharp funnel for a nose and deep-set eyes. It looks like a distorted heart. I leap back, yelping, and there’s an immense, heavy scrambling as the creature disappears deeper into the bush.

  “Possum,” Greg says in a wondering voice. “They’ve evolved into possums.”

  Kim is missing and Greg doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know her. He loves her, but he doesn’t know her. After he leaves the patio, I go up to my bedroom, lie down, and brood with a spinning and bitter mind about this paradox. Greg doesn’t know Kim or love Kim, but he thinks he does. He thinks he knows Kim because she is his mother. Not his mother, who is dead, but the mother of his childhood. The beautiful Theresa Ferguson, who was also an heiress and a runaway. And a genius. Theresa was the opposite of me, which was why Greg loved me until the moment his mother died.

  Theresa Ferguson was born in 1932 to a wealthy New York family and ran away to Paris at eighteen. She enrolled at the Sorbonne, and drifted from lover to lover, all over postwar Europe. She learned five languages and never married. A “protofeminist,” Greg called her. Her sculptures are in the collections of eight minor museums.

  When Theresa gave birth to Greg, she was forty and living in a Swiss town filled with artists. Greg’s father was just one of many who came through, an Irishman who never knew of his son. Greg didn’t seem to mind much. Instead, he channeled all his filial devotion toward his mother, who alternately adored and ignored him. He grew up at the fringes of her all-night parties—waking in the mornings to find strangers filling the other bedrooms, and once an entire French circus troupe sleeping off hangovers, the acrobats still wearing their dusty tights.

  Theresa relocated to a New York suburb in Greg’s teens. He and I stayed in her gorgeous, art-strewn house one night before leaving for Los Angeles. I don’t think Theresa disapproved of our big move, but she’d always disapproved of Greg’s interest in me, a young woman with a country upbringing and no distinct ambitions.

  That night, Theresa cooked a full French meal for the three of us. She chopped, she sliced, she stirred, pacing about the kitchen, her dark hair piled messily on her head. The one time she looked directly at me, her gray eyes carved holes. “Are you thirsty, Maggie?” she asked.

  I realized I was.

  “Oh no, I’m fine,” I said.

  She poured me a glass of water anyway, her bony fingers extending it. “You look thirsty,” she said.

  I offered several times to help Theresa. She finally handed me a chef’s knife and asked me to cut some red bell peppers. I made a pile of chopped pieces before she came over and stared at them.

  “Greg, can you show her how to julienne,” she said coolly.

  Wordlessly, Greg stood behind me, wrapped his arms past my waist and murmured in my ear, directing me, as we cut the rest of the peppers together. Theresa faded outside the fortress of our intimacy and the smooth movements of the knife. That night he also sneaked into my bed, and we had the best sex of our relationship, better even than the first months in Thailand, Theresa’s old clocks wheezing in the hall while we touched in silence with the fever of teenagers.

  When I opened my suitcase in a hotel in Ohio, I found the chef’s knife, carefully wrapped in butcher paper. No note.r />
  I showed it to Greg. He raised one eyebrow. “She’s just funny that way,” he said. “She gave my last girlfriend her extra blow-dryer. She likes to get rid of stuff.”

  Theresa’s knife was an expensive one. After Greg moved out I kept it. I still use it, ignoring the pang it gives me every time: that I might never learn the right way to slice things.

  Kim Lord knew who her stalker was. She knew, but she chose not to tell anyone who could protect her. Not Greg, not the police. Why? Did she believe nothing could happen to her, she who had spent years immersed in the accounts of killers who lurked in alleys and parks, in innocuous apartments, and in the very homes and beds of the women they murdered? Did she think she was safe, she who posed as, and then expressively painted, the Black Dahlia in her final position: arms raised, legs spread, gutted, with her intestines tucked beneath her? Did she think she could escape, when Gwen and Chandra and Nicole could not?

  Or did Kim Lord have a reason not to name him? What could she be hiding? Outside my bedroom window, the branches of my avocado tree rustle and toss. The creature must be climbing higher. I push my aching head deeper into my cool pillow to block out the sound. The pressure makes me want to throw up again. I squeeze my eyes shut, longing for sleep, though I know it will come over me like a heavy sack, and I will wake feeling worse.

  SUNDAY

  12

  My morning is a blur of sick and head split. A series of decisions followed by stunned immobility. Pulling on jeans. Lurching to the toilet. Back to bed. Glass of water. Kim Lord’s flash drive tumbling from my night table. Retrieved. Its flat bullet shape in my hand. Why did Greg have it? More sleep, troubled by nausea and worry. Shoving off damp sheets and stumbling downstairs. The chairs still pulled away from the patio table, where Greg and I sat. My purse open. Phone on, messages blinking. More water. Slipping on sandals, sunglasses. A yearning for milky Thai tea. Coconut curry. I know a place deep in the Hollywood and Highland mall. I know artists destroy their work all the time. Claude Monet, Francis Bacon. Painting slashers. John Baldessari burned everything he made in a thirteen-year span: 123 paintings went into the crematorium; ten boxes of ashes emerged. He baked some of the ashes into cookies and ate them. What did Kim Lord do with the smashed pieces of her flash drives? Chuck them in the trash? Scatter them in the sea? I’m at the Thai restaurant now, slouching in a fish-sauce fog. Metal spatula clangs the wok. I order spring rolls, too. A huge Thai tea. Stagger home over the pink marble stars, sucking sweet orange toothache through a straw.