Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  Steve Goetz—proprietor of CJF Gallery, art collector, former Catesby’s consultant, master’s degree from Yates—is burly and dish-faced, with thick brown hair and a flush in his cheeks like he just swallowed a hot toddy. In the photo accompanying one news article, he stands erect, legs spread, in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao, hands in the pockets of his indigo suit. The article is about art philanthropy. Steve Goetz has started an organization called the Patron Foundation to pair wealthy international collectors with individual up-and-coming artists. “Like the microloan movement, but for New Masters,” he says.

  A call to my contact at the Yates library turns up his thesis from 1993 called “The Supercollector and the Artificial Artist,” keywords: art market, economy, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Charles Saatchi, YBAs.

  The librarian says she has the abstract. Do I want her to fax it?

  “Can you read it to me now?” I beg her.

  In our new international contemporary art market, the artist’s value is no longer principally attached to the artist’s work; rather, it is attached to other factors such as wealthy collectors, media hype, and the increasing trend to collect “wet paint” artists. This thesis proposes that key individual non-artists (i.e., collectors, critics, curators) may have a greater influence on artistic movements than the artists themselves, and that the future is ready for a new figure, the “supercollector,” to shape a new canon of “artificial artists.”

  “Say that again—a ‘supercollector’ …”

  “Shapes a new canon of ‘artificial artists.’ Geez. I’ll be an artificial artist if someone wants to hype me,” she says. “Too bad I can’t even draw.”

  “It’s disgustingly cynical,” I say, thinking of all the artists I know who would be mortified to be called artificial. “Like the process and the appreciation of art don’t exist, just its market value, which can be influenced at will.”

  The librarian makes a noise of assent. “Yeah. It’ll never happen, though. What’s the payoff for being the so-called supercollector? That everyone knows you really are a douchebag?”

  “It could happen,” I say. “It could have happened.”

  There’s an expectant silence.

  “That’s all I’m saying,” I say.

  “Really,” she says thoughtfully. “You know, you’re the second person to request that thesis this month.”

  “Who’s the first?”

  “Can’t tell you,” she says reluctantly. She’ll copy the thesis itself and fax it to me by tomorrow morning.

  I gaze out the window, and then down at the splashing sand of my Zen garden, formulating a plan. It’s hard to concentrate when bile keeps rising in my throat at the thought of someone manipulating an art career this way. The preening superiority of Steve Goetz’s thesis dismisses dozens—no, hundreds—of generations of artists who have dedicated their whole lives to making pictures and sculptures that move us, that make us think, that shape our understanding of the world. To turn that effort into some rich person’s economic operation, to turn Kim Lord into a commodity that only the rich could trade—no wonder she wanted to donate all her paintings. And yet. She was also giving up millions of dollars. It was a courageous choice. Or a desperate one.

  I send a quick note to Jayme saying I don’t feel well, and close my inbox without opening Yegina’s message for fear that some fresh worry about her brother will slow me down. I have never left the Rocque in such a rush, flinging the flash drive into my purse, flinging my purse over my shoulder, digging for my car keys and holding them out in front of me blocks before I reach the parking garage. I slam the door, start the car, and roar up through the ramps to street level, hoping not to be seen by anyone from the museum.

  I am not seen. Now the lights go red and I take my place in line on Beverly, leaving the sheer, mirrored corridors of downtown for the twostory sprawl of the rest of the city. I love driving L.A.’s east-west boulevards. It always dazzles me: each broad avenue has its own flavor, shaped by pockets of immigrants—Thai Town, Koreatown, Little Tehran—and each one aims toward the sea. Whenever a song from Beck’s Sea Change is playing on the radio, I think I could spend the rest of my life flowing over these passageways to the Pacific.

  A calm has descended through me since I got in the car. Or maybe it’s detachment—I’m traveling through space, but I don’t feel entirely connected to it, like I’m entering an ocean mist, everything glittery and indistinct. That’s Fairfax I’m passing, and if I glanced right, I’d see the dusky red-and-brown walls of Bootleg, where we’re supposed to meet tonight to hear music. It seems so far away.

  I reach into my purse and close my fingers around the flash drive. I may not need it, but having it with me feels like I have Kim along, and all the hours and heartache she must have poured into making her paintings—ambitious Kim, and then pregnant Kim, Kim the mother-to-be, frightened and angry, knowing in those last days before Still Lives the stakes of her sacrifice: to give up everything she’d made. Vanished Kim. Who must have badly underestimated what could happen to her. I have to be very careful. I have to look eager but guileless. I have to ask the right questions. I don’t need to know everything—just enough to make a case for others to follow up on. Just a piece of the picture. Before it’s too late.

  Santa Monica is what I once naïvely pictured all of Los Angeles would be: the palm trees, indoor-outdoor restaurants, views of the ocean, trim green parks. Temperatures sway gently between warm and cool; the air is either muzzy or sparkly. Attractive people lead their Weimaraners on leather leashes. If you deserve the good life, why choose anywhere else? the city seems to ask the moment you pass under its big, blue, invitingly readable street signs.

  Instead of this paradise, Greg and I moved into the bustle and grit of Hollywood, on a small street halfway between the old movie theaters reviving themselves and the giant billboards of the Sunset Strip. Every day, going east, we drove past the glamorous edifices of another era decaying over bright, cheesy bric-a-brac shops; going west, we hit the great mirages of commercialization and beauty, slender-legged models fifty feet high, smiling in white sweaters and jeans. Both directions seemed like routes away, and never routes home. Nowhere in L.A. seems like home to me.

  I wasn’t raised to deserve anything but my own struggling existence. I grew up down a dirt road next to a family of rednecks whose favorite sport was drinking Budweiser and Ski-Dooing doughnuts in their backyard. When I was twelve, I babysat for them, wiping their kids’ noses and bums for five dollars an hour and a daily assault of dumb-blonde jokes from their Uncle Larry. He called me Faggie Maggie, as in “Hey, Faggie Maggie, how does a blonde like her eggs in the morning? Fertilized!” When I was fourteen I bagged groceries at the A&P; at fifteen I cleaned the cafeteria at the local ski resort. I know the cramps of overworked hands. I know the bored, haggard faces of my supervisors, who were overseeing the same dismal landscape of cash registers and dirty tables at forty because there were no other jobs for them. I know I am lucky to have escaped.

  My rust-freckled station wagon rumbles into a parking spot. CJF Gallery gleams straight ahead, a full bank of windows, a gallerina sitting at a desk, a staircase leading up to a loft. The gallerina looks like most gallerinas: young, dark-haired, groomed to flawlessness, her eyes glued to some papers on her desk. The room beyond her looks like most galleries, blank and chilly as an empty refrigerator except for a few paintings hung here and there. And yet. The light is so bright and white inside, it sets the whole scene off, makes it look sinister and fake.

  I grab my cassette recorder from my glove compartment. It’s a ridiculous apparatus: black, bulky, clacky, and prone to chewing up tape. Jay Eastman mocked me for it (“Did you get that from the town dump?”), and he made me carry his own little digital machine when I interviewed Nikki. I keep this big one because my father bought it for me one Christmas when I worked on my high school newspaper. Back then, it was a top-of-the-line device. My parents, with three kids and a lackluster income from their elementary s
chool teaching, tended to gift the cheap and homemade. Dad believed I could be a great journalist one day. I don’t know what he imagines for me now.

  I set up the machine to record and slide it in my purse, but I can’t muster the nerve to leave the car. I shouldn’t be doing this alone.

  As if she senses my presence, the gallerina glances out the window. Her eyes travel over me, assessing and dismissing my car, then the person inside. The coldness in her gaze demoralizes me. I flutter in my purse for my drugstore lipstick. My lips redden in the mirror as if someone has just pumped blood into them. I look childish and middle-aged at the same time.

  Did Kim want to keep her baby? She was thirty-eight, almost on the brink of too-late.

  Did Steve Goetz make her afraid? Say he did spend fifteen years coldly collecting and planning, building to his great statement about Kim’s career as his own artwork—what would he do if she found out and tried to unravel it all? Would he stop her any way possible? Would he benefit even more if she died?

  I won’t go into the gallery without knowing there’s someone waiting for me on the other side. I try Yegina, but her phone’s turned off. I try Evie, but I only get her voice mail. “I think I’ve found something else. Call me,” I say, and hang up.

  I need to reach a real voice, to set a time when I should be arriving somewhere. Reluctantly I pull out Ray Hendricks’s card, stare at it for a while, heart pounding. Finally I dial.

  “Yes,” he says in almost a whisper.

  “Uh, sorry, did I wake you?”

  “Maggie. Hold on. I’m in a movie.” I hear the creak of a chair, the blare of a soundtrack, then a hush. “Did something happen?” Then traffic. “Are you all right?” He sounds genuinely concerned.

  “I just—you said—if I was ever—” I can’t tell him where I am yet. “There’s someone at the Rocque I’m worried about.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  His seriousness alarms me. “What were you watching anyway?”

  Hendricks mumbles something.

  “Did you just say Piglet?” I say.

  “Piglet’s Big Movie,” he says in a resigned voice. “I’m screening it for someone.”

  So you have a kid, too, I think. Apparently everyone has a kid these days.

  “My nephew,” he adds.

  His nephew. The son of his deceased half brother?

  How was it? I intend to ask about the movie, but it comes out, “How is he?” I cough. “I mean, do you think he’ll like it?”

  “Even at the tender age of five, he might find it beneath him.”

  “I always liked Piglet,” I say, stalling.

  Hendricks makes a noise. “Your point?”

  “What?”

  “Your point in calling me?”

  “Can you meet me at Luster’s Steakhouse at five? It’s a few blocks from the museum. I can’t talk here.”

  Hendricks doesn’t answer immediately.

  “I’ll be there,” he says, his voice retreating from the phone as if he’s writing something down. We say awkward good-byes, and then I jump out of my car and charge toward the gallery before I have time to change my mind.

  The air is so cool and sharp inside that it hurts my nose to breathe. Everything has a hard shine in here, the glass frames on the wall, a sculpture made of broken test tubes, the red nails of the gallerina, now clicking away at a keyboard. I stroll to a couple of paintings, pretending to look at their bold, simplistic lines, working up my courage. Then I reach in my purse and click the record button on my machine before approaching the desk.

  “I’m here to see Steve Goetz,” I say to the gallerina, who is ignoring me with a deep intensity.

  She types a few more sentences before turning. “Your name?”

  “Sheilah Graham,” I say.

  She starts typing again.

  “I’m here from the Rocque.”

  The gallerina smooths a single brown hair back into place, stands up, mutters “Excuse me,” and slowly climbs the stairs to the loft. Her dark suit ascending through the white space reminds me of an insect mounting a wall. When the gallerina disappears through a door upstairs, the silence thickens. I am recording it through the muffling leather of my purse, and I know that if I listen to it later, it will sound like nothing, a blank interval of time. But the sensation of it now is heavy and textured, like sand.

  A quick exchange of voices. The door opens again, and he is standing there, looking down on me, tanner than in his photographs. He has broad, high brows, the shadow of stubble, puzzled eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m here for the profile,” I say brightly. “For the Rocque’s members’ magazine?”

  He frowns. “Is that on my calendar?” he says to his assistant.

  She peers at her computer. “I don’t have any record of it,” she says in a brittle voice, darting a nervous look at him.

  “Juanita told me she set it up for three o’clock today,” I say, doing my best to look very young and very crestfallen. “I’m sorry. Is there any way? I have a deadline—”

  He gives an exasperated, wouldn’t-you-know-it sigh and gestures for me to climb the steep steps, no railing, each one lifting me farther away from the safety of the door to the outside. I feel like I am ascending into a hive.

  When I reach the top, Goetz calls down to his assistant. “Do get us some coffee, will you.”

  She looks up. From this angle, her once flawless face looks mousy and frightened.

  “Oh, that’s okay—” I say.

  “No, no. Fresh coffee, please,” he says, and I suppress a flinch as the gallerina grabs her purse and stands up to leave.

  Goetz opens the door to his office. I enter first. He shuts it behind me and stands against it a moment, regarding my face, before circling to his desk. The room is filled with shelves of art catalogs. I recognize their bulky, oversize shapes, and the smaller bound paperbacks that are auction catalogs. Ordinarily such a collection would reassure me. Thinking people read. I like thinking people. I like people who like art. But the air in here is musty and oppressive, and there are several boxes on the floor, also full of books, and no place to put them.

  “So, Sheilah,” he says genially. “Tell me about this profile.”

  He takes a seat behind his desk, and instead of waiting for my answer, he begins clacking at his computer. I can’t see the screen.

  “Well, I’m awfully sorry it’s a surprise,” I say earnestly. “Development wanted us to do a profile in each issue on our biggest donors, and we’re really grateful for your support. It’s helped enormously with shows like Still Lives.”

  His typing pauses. He sits back in his chair, making it creak. He is heavier than he looks in his photographs. He has large hands. But the scariest thing about him is the overbearing friendliness in his features, as if he wants to drive me into the ground with his pleasantness, as if he wants to smear it all over me.

  “How nice,” he says, smiling.

  “So I got a lot of good information about you online,” I say, and tell him what I know about his philanthropy and his schooling at Yates.

  Goetz’s shoulders relax as it becomes clear how much research I’ve already done, and he corrects only the date of his degree. All the while, I’m trying to glean what I can from scanning the titles around me. They’re all contemporary art. I don’t see any book pertaining to Kim Lord. What else is here? A long modern desk, a computer, a leather chair. An empty vase with a broad base and narrow flute—could it be Japanese? Back in a corner, a white birdcage hangs from its own stand, its door ajar. In the other corner sit stacks of embroidered textiles, their colors too bright to be American. The souvenirs of a world traveler.

  As Goetz tells me about the latest beneficiaries of his Patron Foundation, my eyes return to the birdcage, the thin, straight bars banded once in the middle, and what looks like a winged carving inside, also white. The stand is white. Even the links of the short chain it hangs from: white. A lustered white, almost cream, and smooth as
bone.

  The cage, its captive bird—the entire piece is made of ivory.

  So maybe he bought something illegal, or maybe he collects antiquities. It’s an odd piece, but not unusual for a rich man to own something so ornate and rare.

  Yet as I stare at the cage’s open door, all the book titles I skimmed moments ago start playing like credits: Marlene Dumas, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith. Every catalog, every artist lined up neatly on his shelves: they are all women.

  “Promise you won’t put my messy office in your profile,” Goetz says, catching my gaze. “I haven’t finished unpacking.”

  “Of course not.” We both laugh.

  He leans toward his screen and clicks the mouse a few times. “Anything else?”

  I need more. I make my next move.

  “There’s one last thing,” I say. “I’d like to get a quote or two to spice this up. Are you okay with playing a little word game?”

  “A little game,” he says, with another mouse click. “What does that mean?”

  “It sounds silly, but it’s a fun way to get to know people,” I say. “Our members love reading the answers, too. It goes like this. I say a word, and you say whatever comes to your mind. So if I said sunset, you might say boulevard. Or you might say beautiful or beach.”

  “Why not,” he says. “I like games.”

  “Okay,” I say. “The first word is museum.”

  “Treasure.”

  “Art.”

  “Necessary,” he says.

  “Artist.”

  “Maker.”

  “Collector,” I say.

  “Creator.”

  I almost falter. “Andy Warhol.”

  “Factory.”

  “Agnes Martin.”

  “Faded.”

  “Kim Lord.”

  “Missing,” he says in an unreadable tone. The fake smile is on his face, but he is watching me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, coughing, because I can’t think of another word. I can’t think of anything. I just want to bolt from here.

  “You’re not on the Rocque staff contact list, Sheilah,” he says.