Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  The elevator slows and toggles. Jayme looks like she’s about to say something, but instead she punches the button to our floor again.

  “Do you need me to help with the press conference?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, and I see the tremble in her shoulders.

  “You sure?” I say.

  There’s a beat of silence, and then Jayme swings on me.

  “I want you to stay away from them,” she says with such force that I back up into the elevator wall. Jayme blinks, but she keeps talking. “They’ll eat you alive if they connect you to Shaw. They’re desperate for anything now, because the cops have clammed up. The detectives are not even coming today. It’s just Bas talking for ten minutes, and me taking questions.” She straightens to her fullest height. “You are not allowed, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, cowed.

  Ordinarily I might show up to help Jayme anyway, but now I’m thinking, Ten o’clock might be the only time Bas’s assistant leaves her cube all day. I hug my bag closer to my body, gathering courage from Jayme’s courage. Whatever happened to her, she doesn’t let it rule her. The elevator shudders and the doors slide open.

  “This is a terrible time for you,” Jayme says gently. “You want to take a sick day, I’ll sign off.”

  “I want to be here,” I say, and stride out with her staring after me.

  Press conference at ten. I’ve got an hour and forty minutes before Bas and his assistant, Juanita, vacate their offices. My stomach is a sack of acid, I’m so nervous, but I tell myself that this snooping is just another kind of copyediting—looking for things that should not be there. I’m watching what happened last week the way I watch the page.

  Monday

  Bas and stalker seen together by Kim Lord.

  Monday or Tuesday?

  Kim Lord offers massive gift to museum, negotiating herself out of millions of dollars.

  Tuesday

  Greg last sees Kim Lord.

  Wednesday

  My last sighting of Kim Lord, leaving the Rocque.

  Thursday

  Texts continue to come from Kim Lord’s phone (could be someone else, pretending to be her). She goes missing on her opening night.

  The police are so busy trying to nail the angry boyfriend, maybe they’ve overlooked Monday’s meeting and Kim’s gift. Maybe they can’t see the possibility of a cold, calculating intelligence who covers his tracks. A collector who has become obsessed with her. Who panics when she threatens to expose him.

  I plug in the flash drive and click through the files again, slowing down at the last five photographs.

  The dog is standing on grass and sidewalk. He could be anywhere.

  The woman in the last photo sits against a white wall. Her shirt is blue, collared, nondescript. Her gray-threaded hair is brushed, and lipstick darkens her mouth, but there’s something violating about these improvements; they only serve to highlight the woman’s pallor and exhaustion. The photo is dated a week before the opening-night Gala.

  A friend? A new subject? The images are not labeled. The woman is looking not at the camera, but at something or someone beyond the photographer.

  Should I call Cherie? If I call Cherie, she will requisition the flash drive. If Greg wanted his lawyer to requisition the flash drive, he would have told her to ask me for it. I am supposed to hold on to these images as art, not evidence.

  For now.

  I remove the flash drive and chuck it deep in my drawer.

  When I reach the entrance of Still Lives, I don’t look at the walls. The museum has not yet opened for the day; the galleries are as dim as crypts, and the paintings hard to see. I hurry toward the third room, but I can feel the gazes of the dead following me.

  Unlike Kevin, I don’t believe Kim was painting secret messages, but her monumental still life, “Disappearances,” is one of the last things she touched before vanishing. She delivered it on Tuesday with the paint still drying, hours after Brent went over to her studio himself and demanded it on behalf of the nerve-racked exhibitions crew.

  According to crew gossip, when Lynne saw “Disappearances” go up on the wall, she stared at it for ten minutes—in disgust? in awe?—and then stomped out of the room.

  Still Lives has never been Lynne’s pet show. Its origins on the Rocque exhibition schedule are unclear; Yegina thinks Janis Rocque was behind it, because it was not something our curators proposed. Most of our exhibitions originate from the scholarly agendas of their department—they like to be the ones who decide which artists matter.

  Regarding Still Lives, Lynne made her own position clear. In her catalog essay, she professed a faint admiration for Kim Lord’s much-heralded career and her initial concerns about the show’s content and the artist’s self-declared turn away from portraiture. “Still lifes have long been considered a lesser form of art, a decorative or feminine form,” Lynne wrote. “Instead of looking outward to epic characters and scenes, the still life looks inward, to the possessions of a family.” Tables of peaches and flowers. Tables of dead birds. A glass of half-drunk wine. “In Still Lives, Kim Lord has inverted the form, to examine today’s commodification and consumption of the images of female homicide victims.” Lynne steadfastly refused to praise the move, however; I think she felt that no matter what artistic process Kim used, the blood and gore were beyond the realm of good taste.

  The text was finished months before the images; Lynne asked Yegina to approve all the copyedits, which, for a control freak like Lynne, was the equivalent of washing her hands of the whole thing.

  Now the faces of dead women follow my progress through the gallery. When I reach the threshold of the third room, I realize I am holding my breath. I don’t see these pictures as treasure maps, but, reluctantly, I find them haunting. And like Lynne, I don’t yet know why.

  Why here? Why subject us to these scenes in an art museum, when we’ve seen them practically everywhere else? For decades, the spectacle of female homicide has spattered the news. A couple of weeks ago a former actress was found dead in a record executive’s house. Her beautiful face glowed from every crevice of the media. Another blond smiler. Another bloody mess on someone’s floor. We’ve seen her and seen her and seen her. We’ve witnessed victims in every feminine shape, young to old. The child pageant winner with her sexy lipstick, duct-taped and garroted. The teenager abducted from her suburban bedroom. The elderly woman raped and strangled by a stranger she allowed in the door. What we haven’t seen, we’ve read or overheard. How could Kim Lord’s depictions move us beyond disgust and visceral fear, into an emotion that is deeper and richer, freighted with pain for humanity? It’s just paint around me now. Shape, texture. It’s also more.

  Until now, I’ve avoided Kim’s portrait of Judy Ann Dull, victim of the Glamour Girl Slayer. It’s the main feature of the third room: Kim-as-Judy is wearing only underpants, gloves, and thigh-high stockings and is bound to an X of wood, her blond head slumped, bare breasts exposed. The life-size painting hangs low on the wall, so you can stare right into the victim’s shuttered and drained face, her eyes closed, her skin glowing against a black background. “I can’t tell if she’s dead or still alive,” Evie said to me about this image when she handed the catalog pages back, and I wondered the same thing, then and now, looking into Kim’s depiction. It’s impossible to tell if Kim-as-Judy has perished already or simply lost the will to respond to another torture. She just sags there, strung by her wrists.

  I hate this artwork. I hate the abject powerlessness it projects. I hate it because it reminds me there is an end for women worse than death. I will not look at it again.

  I exhale and turn my gaze to the monumental canvas hanging on the back wall.

  In the weak sun from the skylights, the painting looks like someone’s overloaded buffet table, strewn and heaped with objects and fruits. The colors glow with a lushness absent from the rest of the exhibition, but here, too, red appears more than any other hue. I am halfway across the room when I finally di
scern a woman’s shape underneath the chaos. As with the photo on the flash drive, she is lying facedown, as if someone has flung her to the table. She is all contour, her body covered in a rough gray robe, her head thrust in a dark wooden box. The only spot of bare skin is her white, exposed neck. The neck pulls my eyes back, again and again, even as I try to catalog the rest of the things Kim Lord is showing me:

  A gold blanket.

  A book marked 5¢.

  A bloodstained screwdriver.

  An empty bottle of absinthe tipped on its side.

  A cloth hanging behind the figure, a cream-colored curtain, alternately patterned with jugs and fruit.

  A heap of apples, one of them split and lying open, showing its pale meat and seeds.

  The old-timey radio microphone with a cross on it.

  A toy bicycle with an oddly numbered license plate leaning in one corner.

  That white neck.

  A clock.

  That neck.

  I open Kevin’s notes and read about the five-cent notebook that eleven-year-old Florence Sally Horner stole from a store in Camden, New Jersey, prompting a pervert who witnessed the theft to tell her he was an FBI agent. If she didn’t follow him, he’d have her arrested. He then proceeded to make Horner his sex slave as he traveled across states, masquerading as her father. May have inspired Nabokov’s Lolita, wrote Kevin.

  The bottle of absinthe and the robe: Favorite libation of Elizabeth Smart’s captor, who dressed her in a burka when he took her in public.

  The clock: The passing of time. Significance of no hands? You’re out of time when you’re dead?

  The apple: Symbol of female sexuality. Cleft apple = woman’s reproductive parts. Also, implied violence.

  The screwdriver: Could be the weapon used to kill Carol Jenkins, a young black woman stabbed in the chest while selling encyclopedias in a white Indiana neighborhood (1968).

  I fold the notes and just look at the painting: at once artifacts of opulence and of pain and debasement.

  I don’t see what Kevin’s decoding can possibly add up to. I step closer for one last study, when I notice something odd.

  There was no drape behind the figure in the flash-drive photographs. Kim had set up no curtain, no backdrop at all. Instead, the space behind her body was a blank wall. This section of the painting doesn’t have the classic Kim Lord exactitude. The curtain behind the figure is smudgy, the brushstrokes less precise than in the rest of the canvas. Oranges, apples, and jugs decorate the fabric, but they, too, seem hastily applied. Oranges, apples, and jugs? What can those mean? And why do they seem painted in a hurry?

  Evie is alone in the registrar’s office, stroking her nails with her thumb while staring at her computer screen. In the artificial basement light, she has a pale, stoic appearance, like someone guarding a bunker. She’s changed a lot since our first day at the Rocque. We met at orientation. We made the quintessential provincial pair: me in a floral cotton sundress and chunky sandals, and Evie in the cheap gray pantsuit and white blouse of a supermarket manager. Neither of us looked like we belonged at the museum, where half the staff slinks around in svelte black, the other half in steampunk or couture.

  As we waited outside the HR office that day, I smoothed my wrinkled dress and made awkward small talk with Evie about summer movies and their infinite depictions of the apocalypse by stray meteor, aliens, and global epidemic.

  “You’re so calm!” Evie said to me after a while, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the end of the world or our new jobs.

  “Not inside, I’m not,” I said. I asked her where she was from.

  She shrugged. “All over small-town California. My mom moved us around a lot, depending on the guy.” Then she gave a hard little laugh that I didn’t understand until later, when she explained about Al, her stepdad, whose more-than-fatherly interest in her spurred her to run away.

  Evie liked dropping hints about herself and her tragic past, and I liked alluding to my own secret reasons for leaving the East, but there was a game to it, where neither of us would ever fully explain the truth. Sometimes, in our early days at the Rocque, we would take coffee breaks outside by one of the many corporate fountains and smoke her cigarettes, staring pityingly at the bankers around us while we made cutting remarks about their predictable lives. But we never said much about what had been different in our own. It was as if we were living in a Raymond Chandler novel, and confessing anything sincere would make us less interesting, too gushy, too feminine. We both needed to pose as savants of cool to feel like we belonged in L.A. I’d never had a friendship like this, and it fascinated me, especially because Evie dressed like she wanted to belong, body and soul, to an insurance agency. And then Yegina entered the picture, and I found myself with a real friend, someone who needed me and, later, who lifted me from my own misery.

  Evie’s clothing tastes have remained plain, but her appearance now exudes upkeep and expense. The material of her navy jacket has a silken luster. Her chin-length blond hair never gets a millimeter longer; her plucked brows are straight as a line of ink. Last year Evie got a loan to buy a loft near Boyle Heights, in a block of deserted warehouses on the other side of the L.A. River. It’s as austere and pretty as the rest of her: sun spills down onto the spare geometries of her modernist furniture. I didn’t like how empty the place must feel at night, but Yegina cooed over it and approved of the investment. “In five years, you could quit on what you’ll make from this.”

  I hope Evie doesn’t quit. She’s good at her job of caring for our art collection and our loans to other institutions.

  As I knock on the threshold, she startles and looks up, her eyes unfocused.

  “Sorry,” I say, nervous. “I just wanted to see if you wanted to go to spin class with me and Yegina.”

  A friendly expression slides over her face. “Thanks. I’ll try,” she says. “I have so much work. It’s ridiculous.”

  I nod, casting about for a segue. On Evie’s desk, I spot a magazine, open to an interview with Janis Rocque. “What’s J. Ro got to say?” I say, stepping in, picking up the issue.

  “She’s talking about her sculpture garden,” Evie says. “Dee’s been doing some installing there. She says she can get me in for a tour.”

  “Wow. Lucky you.” The cover photo shows a steel ellipse by Richard Serra, big as a barn and flowing like a wave. Janis Rocque’s Bel Air estate has more art than most museums, ours included, and her sculpture garden is the stuff of legend.

  “You want to go?” Evie glances at me. “You should ask Dee.” She turns back to her keyboard and resumes typing.

  I page through the photos of Goldsworthy and di Suvero sculptures, oohing and aahing to a silent Evie. There’s a pull quote from Janis Rocque: “I like my art to cast a big shadow, but don’t get me wrong, I don’t buy something because it’s famous. I buy it because it’s a masterpiece.” J. Ro sounds as bossy and all-knowing as ever, but she gives the camera a shy, harassed look, as if she wished she weren’t being photographed.

  I can’t keep it in any longer. “Did you hear that Shaw Ferguson was arrested?”

  “He was?” says Evie, without turning around. “Are you relieved?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, he could have hurt you, too, right?” she says, her head framed by the gray glow.

  The odds are stacked against Greg. His arrest makes sense to people. He is the victim’s boyfriend. He has no alibi. He rose so fast, from being an unknown personal assistant to opening his own gallery to dating a famous artist. From receiving no invitation to the Rocque’s annual Gala to sitting at its head table. Maybe he rose too fast.

  I perch on the edge of Evie’s desk. “Look,” I say quietly. “I think they’ve got the wrong guy. We know Kim had a stalker, and I think we could find him. If you had time to help me.”

  “You know who her stalker is?” For the first time in our conversation, Evie sounds interested. She swings around to me, searching my face.

 
“Not yet. But I have a good idea,” I lie. Then I hesitate again, reluctant to ask the favor.

  Evie continues to study me. “You’re really scared for him,” she says softly. “For Shaw.”

  Yes, I try to say, but the word gets stuck in my throat, so I just nod.

  Evie’s brow wrinkles. “Of course I’ll help you.”

  “Great,” I say, swallowing the lump. “I need someone to find out the provenance of Kim Lord’s paintings. All of them. Every one she has ever made.”

  On the way out of the registrarial den, full of warm feelings toward Evie, who swore herself to secrecy, I pass a small, handwritten sign taped to the wall. The word Batcave is crossed out and replaced with Lascaux, with an arrow to the vaulting cavern that holds the permanent collection storage, the carpentry room, and the loading dock. I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels like this dim subterranean space is the real temple of the museum, precious and distant from the hubbub of the surface. Because we can’t possibly put on view even a fraction of the thousands of artworks the Rocque owns, there’s more art and history in our storage room than in most of Los Angeles: Pollock lined up beside Krasner, Krasner beside Kline, a Chamberlain wreck beside a Ruscha ribbon drawing. When our old director resigned, the space overflowed with gifts to the collection. Evie is now seeking a second, off-site storage facility. “You have no idea what it’s costing the Rocque just to own stuff,” she once told me, and then went into a copious explanation of the superb climate-control capacities of a new place in Van Nuys.

  A shrill noise blasts from the carpentry room. I pop my head through the doorway to wave at Dee, who is slicing up boards with a table saw, goggles on.

  “Spin today?” I shout.

  She nods and gives me a froggy grin, then goes back to the saw. I envy Dee her underpaid job sometimes. I envy this sawdusty room. The stacks of plywood, the painting tarps. The pegboards hung with tools: mallet, chisel, hammer—worn handles, oiled blades, all neatly arranged. Here Dee makes tangible things—frames, pedestals, crates, scaffolding—that smell of trees and glue and metal. At the end of the day, she can touch them with her hands.