Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  Despite the violence implied in every frame, I couldn’t imagine this woman wanting to die. Art schools in the United States welcomed more than ten thousand hopeful MFA students a year, and only a few dozen would make any international waves before they graduated. According to Lynne’s remarks, Brenae had already been hailed by one critic as “the next generation’s Marina Abramović” for her inclusion in a notable world-traveling group show. With two or three more breakthrough moments, she might have launched a major solo career.

  I looked at the faces of the crowd and registered awe and sadness at the video, as well as flickers of frustration and regret. Ray’s foursome had sunk into impassive silence.

  The movie ended with Brenae in bed, cradling the gun next to her cheek. As the screen went black, the crowd clapped and burst into conversation again, but in the fresh dark, their voices sounded restless. People began milling around, blocking my view of Ray. I wanted to see his face, his reaction. I pushed my way through so fast that a girl hissed to her friend, “There’s waaaay too many L.A. bitches here.” When I reached the place Ray had been standing, he was gone. The foursome he had been observing had vanished, too. The space seemed scrubbed of any evidence of them, the ground scattered with cigarette butts and crumpled maps to the other installation sites. I picked up the maps, refolded them, and set them on a nearby table. A band started jangling on the stage.

  “How do you get a drink here?” said a voice. It was Lynne Feldman, alone, her expression befuddled. In this laid-back atmosphere, my chief curator’s hair looked too groomed and her lips too painted, her all-black getup an overdone urban armor. If this were a West Side party for already famous artists, Lynne would simply wait like a beacon and let the party come to her, but this was a young East Side crowd and they were too intimidated to approach. The official gatekeeper of the Rocque Museum! Lynne Feldman was a goal for them, not a living person.

  “Did you get a drink yet?” she said when I didn’t answer.

  “No. It’s so crowded.” I wondered if Lynne would know why Janis Rocque hadn’t come tonight. “I still haven’t managed it.”

  “Well,” said Lynne, with an unnervingly chummy grin. “Neither of us would survive long in the desert, would we?”

  I smiled obligingly, scanning the festivalgoers. Everyone was draining back inside. I heard a few cars start up, people heading out to see other installations nearby. Should I go to the parking lot, too?

  “The screening must have interested you. Weren’t you an LAAC student?” Lynne persisted.

  “No, I wasn’t,” I said, less surprised by Lynne’s ignorance than by the fact she had asked me a question at all. Lynne rarely cared what anyone else thought. Critical opinions were her territory alone. And tonight, her critical opinion had puzzled me. I decided to press her. “But I was impressed by the film,” I said, “and I was touched by what you said about Brenae Brasil. Any young artist would have been very grateful for that kind of support.”

  Lynne blinked. “I’m glad you heard that,” she said. “Her own institution would like to brush her under the rug. You know, Hal Giroux declined to do the introduction.”

  Hal Giroux was the director of Brenae’s graduate program. I understood why Brenae’s peers might be jealous of her, but her director? Wouldn’t LAAC love their star? I asked Lynne.

  She shrugged. “Let’s just say I heard that Brenae was about to make a very public criticism of their culture for women and minorities. I can’t tell you more than that, because I really don’t know. But Brenae was right, and I’m tired of what happens there.” Defeat did not sync well with Lynne’s usual proud composure, and after a wobbly moment, she steeled her shoulders. “I may brave it. I may just go to my hotel,” she muttered in the direction of the bar.

  “Same,” I said, but the dread I’d been feeling all night had transformed into something else. Anger? No, the sensation was too hardened and familiar: here we were, two women, talking about another female victim, talking about our exhaustion with it, and then letting it go.

  “I hate to ask this,” I said, “but have you heard anything about why she committed suicide?”

  Lynne nodded and waved to someone over my shoulder, her face springing back to its usual forceful, enterprising expression. I followed her gaze to the doorway inside and saw the taut smile of Nelson de Wilde, the well-known gallery owner who was no doubt scouting for new talent this weekend. “I have to speak to Nelson,” she said, then swiveled back, as if my query had just registered. “Why? I heard she went off her antidepressants,” she said. “I heard she was isolated. I heard she was blocked, or she wasn’t that talented after all, and the pressure was eating her up. But why does anyone do the unthinkable?” She sighed. “Because they can’t imagine living another day.”

  3

  WHILE I POUNDED TWO LONELY gin and tonics in quick succession, I reviewed my situation. I wasn’t a total outcast at The Oasis. I could find someone with Rocque connections to chat with, and I could blend in, with my faded jeans and my navy shirt with its cleverly jagged hem. But to do so would mean giving up my freedom to spy on people, and I’d lost my taste for small talk. So I wedged myself into a little corner alone and watched the pool game.

  Two men circled the table, intent, not caring when their sticks jabbed strangers. Only when the bar’s lone waitress passed did they pause, their eyes downcast, as if they had been reprimanded before. And they played with speed, the shots sure, the balls reeling into holes. Blurs of color, clacks and knocks. Fast games. I counted three, four, before I realized the same man kept winning. He was the smaller of the two, bent at the shoulders, with an unhealthy leanness to his face. It was possible that he was far older than his spry body let on. The other man was looser, floppier, with long, dirty-blond hair, a soft gut, a casual slump when he wasn’t shooting. When he did take aim, he tensed like a hornet, and his strokes stung. The balls obeyed him completely. But the older man always triumphed. He won by strategy. He won by patience. An eight ball almost tipped into a pocket. A striped ball blocking a solid. A cue ball impossible not to scratch.

  By the fifth game, the loser was starting to mutter, his sneakers punching the ground. His confidence was fading, too, and he muffed the first break, the balls barely spinning apart. The winner noticed me staring and leered. The expression turned him ancient, lizard-like, and nasty.

  I turned away and wandered outside to the parking lot again. No Janis, no Dee. No Ray. Lynne must have left for her hotel. The screen that showed Brenae Brasil’s video was still there, but it was now unlit and looked more like a wall with no building behind it, one of those facades on western film sets. The desert sky seemed bigger and darker, chaotic with stars.

  Unsure what I was waiting for, and still unwilling to leave, I stood in line for the steamy, disgusting bathroom, hurried through my time in the stall, and washed my hands. The mirror was too spotted and warped to show my face. I bought another gin and tonic, but I had lost the thirst for booze and boldly took up my roost near the pool table and sucked on the ice. I ignored the victor’s lewd glance. I could stand where I wanted.

  An hour had passed now, and the crowd was thick and loud. Everyone who was going to make the drive from L.A. had made it, and their numbers overwhelmed the locals, scattering them to small atolls of denim and middle age at the bar. In the packed booths, where the students and hipsters reigned, chatter replaced argument, and young bodies slurred to single glossy, laughing creatures. I heard the name Brenae Brasil more than any other, although dozens of up-and-coming artists were showing at sites nearby. I envisioned her among them. The dark-haired, muscular twenty-two-year-old on the video looked the part, but somehow I couldn’t see her happily squashed in with the others. She seemed too serious, too impatient for success to participate in this rowdy field trip from the metropolis.

  Something flew past my head and hit the wall beside me. A thud, then shattering. It took me a second to understand that the projectile was a bottle of beer from the hand of the blon
d pool player, who’d thrown it toward his opponent, who’d ducked. I froze as they began to fight, fists on ribs, then slapping and grappling as the younger, larger man tried to pick up his opponent by the shirt and shove him down. Shrieks filled the air and a mob pushed backward, out of the way of the fight. The bartender charged out, elbowing the bystanders, yelling, “Break it up, break it up!” Glass fell from my hair and tumbled to the ground, and I smelled the sour odor of beer.

  The older man tripped his opponent and flung him back on the pool table, his lean face carved by a smile, as if all along this fight was what he’d been playing for. He took a yellow-striped pool ball, raised it in his fist, and smashed it down on the other man’s nose, then abruptly dropped him, hands soaked in blood, and strode toward The Oasis door, which was just beyond me and the broken glass.

  I was one of the people who screamed, though I couldn’t recall opening my mouth. I knew it because I heard my voice. I backed toward the doorway. The lean-faced man shouldered past me, leered again, and with one quick snaking hand grabbed my left breast hard, and twisted, before stepping around me and slipping out the threshold. After another minute, his truck roared out of the lot, large and black.

  By the time my own shock broke, the entire bar had burst into motion. The bartender blotted the injured man’s face with a towel and gently rolled him to his feet. The waitress got on the phone, calling an ambulance or the police or both. No one seemed to have noticed the groping, or if they had, they didn’t know what to say. I found myself standing in a circle of space, utterly alone. My breast and nipple throbbed. I pulled my wrinkled shirt flat, then stumbled away from my place on the wall and headed for the bathroom again. But the line was too long, and I couldn’t stand still and wait.

  For the next several minutes I let the milling crowd shoulder me around the room, moving into one gap, then out to another. If people stared, I fixed my face with the look of expectation, as if I spotted someone across the way whom I couldn’t quite reach. The injured pool player staggered outside, holding his blood-soaked face. His groans were raw and guttural.

  When the bartender returned to the bar, I wormed a path to him to ask if there were any taxis to Twentynine Palms. I tried to keep the choke from my voice, but it came through anyway.

  “You ready to go, honey?” the bartender said, pausing with a tumbler of ice in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other. “I’ll phone a guy right now. He charges thirty bucks. Fifty if it’s after midnight.”

  I felt a neighboring woman’s sympathetic eyes on me. She was at least ten years older than me, with a low-cut shirt and thinning blond hair that she teased forward toward her face. A permanent tan roughened and speckled her cleavage. “Whoever he is, he’s not worth waiting for,” she murmured.

  “Thanks,” I half yelled to the bartender. “I can’t find my friends.”

  The cab ride smelled of pipe tobacco, my driver silent and incurious but not unfriendly. He waited until I entered the hotel before driving off. An e-mail message from Dee popped up in my laptop inbox when I connected to the internet in my large, serene room: So sorry, Maggie, but by now you know we couldn’t make it. Janis will find you at work on Monday and explain. Hope you have an amazing time. Get room service!

  I saw the screening, I wrote back. Intense.

  She didn’t reply.

  For all her warmth and charm, Dee was a private person, a keeper of secrets, or she couldn’t have stayed with Janis. Whatever Janis wanted to tell me about Brenae Brasil would wait until Janis was ready, but I chafed at her secrecy after the night I’d had. I’d thought there was a mutual trust between us, from our confidences this summer. I’d come all this way. I paced the expensive room, unable to sit down. The rug was soft and deep on my bare feet; a long mirror, framed in dark wood, reshaped my figure, taller, slimmer. Inside, however, I felt raw and scraped and determined, a wintry version of me. I’d returned to L.A. because of the offer Janis had dangled—but now I wondered what I was signing up for. Janis wasn’t an editor. She was a rich, influential woman, used to getting her way. Say there was a real story behind Brenae’s death; would it be my story, or my benefactor’s? What power would I have to shape my reporting, to pitch magazines? I slumped down on a chair by the empty desk. The room got small. The air tasted clean but close. In the silence, I didn’t know what I was listening for. Cars on the road outside? The accommodations were too pricey for that. But the presence of the road—that I heard, not as a noise, but as a lapse in the night’s total stillness.

  Kim Lord’s paintings had taught me one thing: women died violent deaths all the time, in agonized and humiliating ways, and you shouldn’t publicize any one of their severed lives unless you searched inside yourself and questioned why.

  I rose, soaped and rinsed my body twice in the sparkling white bathtub, drank two glasses of water to avoid a hangover, and crawled into the dead center of the soft, smooth king, unable to touch any of the edges. The distance felt good, but I got up anyway, checked the door’s lock for a third time, then switched off the light.

  I woke up an hour later, completely alert, my heart racing, as if someone had shouted in my ear. I clicked on the light, but the room was empty and quiet. I turned off the lamp again and closed my eyes. I couldn’t sleep. In my mind’s eye, I saw the gun touching Brenae’s lips. The milk dribbling from her chin. The footage had been so tender and lush. So deliberate. Who had been holding the camera? It had to have been someone she trusted.

  Eventually, tired of lying there sleepless, I got up and tidied the room, hanging the towels, zipping away my makeup, folding the evening’s clothes. It was only then that I noticed the faint stain on the front of my navy shirt. In the bathroom’s fluorescent glow: dark smudges from the man’s hand. I threw the shirt in the sink and turned on the faucet, squeezing and rubbing until the water ran rusty, then clear. Then I squeezed the cloth and hung it, dripping.

  4

  BRENAE BRASIL HAD BEEN RAISED in a small town in the Central Valley, the long swath of premier agricultural land off the highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her father was an assistant manager at a dairy farm that had been owned by his extended Portuguese-American family for three generations. Her mother was Italian-Chinese-Irish and worked as a clerk for an auto parts store. Brenae had three brothers: one a farmer, one a musician, the other likely headed to jail for dealing meth. None of them had commented on her death in the press last spring, but her high school English teacher had called Brenae one of the “most brilliant and definitely most provocative” students she’d ever had.

  Brenae had gotten a scholarship to USC for premed, then switched majors to art after she won a student award for a video she made of her campout in a foreclosed home in South Central. Her junior year, she’d taped her mouth and eyes shut and filmed herself trying to swim the length of a swimming pool. She named the work First-Generation College Student. It turned into a series: Brenae folding herself tightly inside a cardboard box from the university bookstore, shifting and squishing her body until she could close the lid. Brenae with ten mugs of beer lined up in front of her, their bottoms taped with her course names, drinking one after another slower and slower, collapsing on the table before she finished the sixth. With another full scholarship offer, she’d rocketed straight to Los Angeles Art College for her master’s degree. This past March, little more than halfway through her first year, she had lain down on the mattress in her studio, put a pillow over her head, and shot herself. The police dated her death to sometime in the early morning. Two people had heard a loud popping noise then. The police found a suicide note, a bottle of sleeping pills, evidence of temazepam in her system. The gun was hers.

  The official news stories were fewer than I’d expected: one short piece in the L.A. Times, one in the Valdivia Star, and several posts by art bloggers. There had been a quick school memorial, but by now the next class had arrived at LAAC, replacing Brenae, filling the studios with their own ideals, ironies, and micromanaged playlists.
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  And yet.

  And yet her story was not entirely over. Packing would tour in a couple of big traveling exhibitions and get press for another year or two. A gallerist or curator might even take interest in Brenae’s undergraduate films, but eventually, with no new work, she would become an anecdote of LAAC and its pressures: An artist tragically killed herself in her first year. Then a legend: Didn’t some girl shoot herself in this building? And finally, a ghost: Did you hear that noise last night? I’m so creeped out.

  On Monday morning, Janis’s dark blue Lexus arrived outside the Rocque and pulled to a stop beside a wall banner for our next exhibition, a cool, arid show about California light and California architects. For a moment, I recalled the old Still Lives banner, the sickening flash of Kim Lord’s smile in her self-portrait as murder victim Roseann Quinn. Then I stuffed it away. I walked slowly to the car and got in.

  “Café Francesca,” Janis Rocque told her driver, and he peeled out into traffic, pinning me to the leather seat beside her.

  “I love Café Francesca,” I said, surprised. The two-story café sat like a stranded French ship in the old theater district, serving up sandwiches, salads, Gypsy guitar music, and real Parisian waiters that scorned and flirted with you with equal charm. But it was a far drive from Janis’s Bel Air estate, and not the kind of place that attracted multimillionaires.

  “Do you?” said Janis. “You seem shocked we’re going there.”

  “I’m shocked that we’re finally talking,” I said truthfully. “It was a strange weekend.”

  She grunted. “I’m sorry we didn’t make it to the desert. It wasn’t my choice,” she said, sounding genuinely contrite, and for a moment I thought she would explain why, but she blinked, and her voice changed back to the old brisk Janis. “You said you got a chance to see her work.”