by Maria Hummel
My roommate got escorted back to her dorm room by a guy because she was nauseous from drinking too much. She started throwing up in her trash can, she felt so ill, and he stayed for a while. She thought he was being nice, making sure she was well enough to go to bed, but she LITERALLY had just SPIT OUT her last mouthful of BILE when he said, “So, uh, can I just have a blow job, then?”
My friend woke up after a party with a guy on top of her and her pants down. She’s too embarrassed to tell anyone, but I know she can’t get it out of her head.
The guy who raped me is still walking around our dorm. I’m won’t report him because I don’t want my parents finding out what happened to me. I have to leave the room as soon as he arrives.
In short, LAAC didn’t look especially worse than most colleges. It was the same story across the country. Earlier in the year, UMass Boston and Brown researchers had published a study of nearly 2,000 men at an unnamed midsized urban campus and found that, of the 120 who admitted to rape or attempted rape, over half had done it multiple times. Unless this anonymous campus had a particularly sadistic population, the conclusion was chilling: serial rapists prowled American universities. Why? Because the consequences for them had not arrived. Women were afraid to accuse, and if they did, they often suffered in the public eye. Especially if the male student had some campus prominence: basketball player, wrestler, football player. And then there was the issue of alcohol and drug abuse. Intoxication increased the likelihood of sexual assaults. It also blurred memory, creating a he-said, she-said dilemma for adjudicators. Often the victims were blamed.
Brenae did not appear to be intoxicated in Lesson in Red. She looked stone-cold sober, and prepared, as if she’d meant to film everything that happened. To show how she’d caved in to Erik’s coercion, time and again. To trap him as she’d felt trapped.
He comes. He asks me. I say yes. What can I say? What will happen if I say no? Where will I go?
With her video, Brenae was documenting one of the hardest aspects of sexual crimes. What if the stakes of saying no feel too great? What happens to a yes, then?
I wasn’t sure I knew.
Brenae could have refused him, but she didn’t feel she could. So she hadn’t.
Erik’s openness and outrage in the interview with Ray seemed genuine. But then so did the distress on Brenae’s face.
Nelson de Wilde interrupted my research that second afternoon. The moment he entered the gallery, the big open room seemed to flinch. Nelson barely cut his eyes sideways at me, and I sensed that I had a small stain on my collar and that my lips were chapped. The crew paused in their work, as if suddenly uncertain how to proceed.
Nelson passed me without comment. In profile, he had heavy shoulders, carefully diminished by the slim cut of his expensive suit. He moved like a big man, though he wasn’t especially tall, and when he crossed the gallery his footsteps had a low, decisive beat. Layla waited. Erik waited. Nelson ignored them. He nodded to his daughter, Zania.
She tossed down a sneaker. “I hope we didn’t take these from homeless people. Did we?”
“They were slated to go overseas,” Nelson began.
“Oh great, from refugees,” Zania said. “Even better.”
“I paid for them with a generous donation,” Nelson said smoothly, eyes holding hers until she gave a thorny little smile. Then he asked Pearson for an update. Pearson pinkened at the attention and effused about the Westing space. “If we had time, we could go a lot higher,” he said. “But we’re running low on time.”
“It’s not going to happen. The shoes came yesterday,” Erik whined. “We’re so freaking behind.”
“We’ll get there,” said Pearson.
“Can we change the name to Shoe Lean-to?” said Erik.
Nelson regarded him. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said, turning to include me, to include all of us. His voice lowered but deepened in pitch. “One time, I was working with an artist who shall not be named, and her crew quit on her two days before the show. She was making a sculpture out of her own body fat mixed with makeup, and we couldn’t get the temperature in the room right. Too cold, and it was too hard to mold; too hot, and it would melt. She just ragged and ragged on her crew and blamed them, and they got sick of it and they all walked out.” He gave a humorless chuckle. “So there I was, with the media and collectors calling me. Do we cancel the show? Postpone it? I said to her, ‘You give me twenty-four hours. I’ll find you a new crew. You tell me what you want, make it really direct and easy to follow. You pay overtime and you let me talk to them and we’ll get your shit done.’ She throws up her hands and says okay,” he said. “So I went to every butcher at every market in East L.A. and said, ‘I have a job for you. Two days. Good pay.’ And they came and they pulled it off, everything she wanted. They had real skill with meat, with fat. It was their craft. And she worked with those same guys for ten more years. Her best sculptures came through them. One of them got his own career, too.” He nailed Erik with his eyes now. “You’ve got to recognize there’s a craft here and you are the craftspeople. You are not the artists. Not yet. You make Hal shine, and you never know where it will take you. You don’t, and guess what. He’s still the artist. He’ll go on without you.”
Layla nodded at this, but her face was expressionless, as if she hadn’t processed what he was saying. Erik turned away and went back to wiring shoes.
“Thank you for the lecture, Daddy,” said Zania. “We really needed to be told how insignificant we are.”
“Honey,” Nelson said, but his attention was still on Erik, on the younger man’s bowed, curly, oblivious head. The gallerist’s mouth twisted with dislike.
Then Pearson asked Nelson something under his breath, and they fell into a conversation so quiet that even Layla was straining to hear. Pearson seemed to be troubled by its drift, but he nodded and looked more solid than ever, standing on his heels. Nelson reached out and patted his arm, then turned away. As soon as his back was turned, Pearson wiped his face with his hand, then shook his head and returned to the shoes.
I saw Layla watch the interaction and struggle to conceal the worry on her face. Unperturbed, Nelson went into his office and shut the door. I saw my desk phone light up with his extension—he was making a phone call. When he came out again, twenty minutes later, he complimented the crew on their progress in a tone that suggested they could work harder. He did not acknowledge me except to tap my desk when he passed and give me a wink. It was just a wink, but it said: I know who you are and this ridiculous stunt you’re pulling, and I’ll get rid of you if you interfere with the crew finishing this installation, got it? Good. Nice neckline. I felt my cheeks grow warm and then noticed Layla staring at me. It took a long time to stop blushing, and by then the blush had turned to something else, an uncomfortable burning.
FOR THE NEXT TWO NIGHTS, I met Ray after I left the gallery and we debriefed watching the boats in Marina del Rey while eating some kind of foil-wrapped food he’d brought. The air was cool off the gray-blue water, the city at our backs. The grass was spinning itself into straw after a rainless summer, but in the quiet air it looked more golden than dead. Ray talked less than I did. He claimed he was still working on transcribing the interviews, verifying for accuracy every statement that the crew had made. It was important, he told me, not to pass on any falsehoods to Janis.
“Like what?” I said.
“Like Pearson claiming that Brenae didn’t attend one class in the spring semester.”
I was certain that Ray had to be doing something else with his time, too, but I didn’t ask on Wednesday, when he showed up with a sunburn on the left side of his face, clearly from sitting in a car somewhere for hours. What’d you find out about Calvin today? I was tempted to say. My pride kept me silent. This was a professional opportunity for me, and not an inquisition into Ray’s private life. As if through an unspoken mutual pact, we veered from personal questions and kept our conversation focused on the crew, Brenae, and LAAC. I left the car
quickly when Ray drove me home.
Back in my spare living room, I filled my notebook with other discoveries. I called Brenae’s high school and paid for her senior yearbook to be overnighted to me: it featured a photo spread that Brenae had done of senior prom, showing only the dancers’ feet. It was an evocative series, yet likely infuriating to the students who’d wanted a record of their pretty smiles and hairdos. On her own senior page, Brenae’s “faves” included the color purple; avocados, salted; and every Pavement and Dr. Dre album. She took part in debate, band, drama, and soccer.
I checked police records for the older brother: he had been booked twice for marijuana possession. With the third strike, dealing meth, it was probable that he’d get a jail sentence.
Davi Brasil was all over the budding social internet, cultivating his music career. He had three times as many friends on Friendster as Brenae, and a Myspace page full of moody photos he’d shot and sparkling praise from female fans.
Brenae’s father had once signed a public petition about water rights, but otherwise Brenae’s parents and eldest brother had no online presence at all.
Brenae’s apartment had already been rented again.
I wrote to USC professors about Brenae, and one wrote back: She was extraordinary, and she wanted everyone to know it. I probably wasn’t her favorite teacher because I insisted that she master the fundamentals of painting, and painting was too slow a medium for Brenae. But I predicted a great career for her. I’m deeply saddened to have been proven wrong.
Another professor told me she’d saved one of Brenae’s video works and left me a copy with her department. It was from Brenae’s First-Generation College Student series. I sat on the giant blue sofa and fed in the DVD, watching Brenae swim the length of a pool with her eyes and mouth taped. Two cameras, one underwater, one above, alternated footage of Brenae in a red swimsuit, her blind, even strokes. About halfway across the blue expanse, she ripped off the mouth tape to breathe, bubbles spewing. Then she paused and tried to put the tape back on, but it only stuck loosely, then flapped free. For the rest of the swim, Brenae struggled to replace her gag. The effort made her lose her sense of direction, and she splashed in zigs and zags, treading water, coming up for air, sticking the gag back on. Finally she gave up and pulled off one of the eye tapes, too, her lid beneath red, dented, and puffy. Sighted now, she swam the last feet to the edge. The final image showed her gasping through the dangling tape, her hair flattened to her skull, one eye tearing up, one still covered. Her light brown fingers clutched the edge. This was Erik’s cinematography again, three years ago, when Brenae was just nineteen. I thought about what Ray said, that Brenae was Erik’s creation and this was the reason he couldn’t see her as a human being. I didn’t know how anyone could watch this video, much less film it, without seeing the human being.
ON THURSDAY MORNING, I WAS running low on West Side outfits, so I picked a dress I rarely wore, a black one with cap sleeves and a slim cut. I hoped it said unconscious sophistication and not holiday cocktail party. Today was Thursday, and my decision loomed: tell Janis I wanted to continue this investigation my own way, as groundwork for an article, or hand over everything I’d found out and go back to the Rocque. My phone buzzed with an L.A. number.
“Good,” said a brusque female voice when I answered. “You need to get ready. Ray is going to pick you up in fifteen minutes to go out to LAAC. We have our own personal tour. We’ll be able to see the scene of her death.”
Just as I realized that the caller was Janis Rocque, she hung up.
Exactly fifteen minutes later, Ray rolled up, dressed in a silver-gray suit. He told me he was playing the role of a potential donor (“Oil money, honey,” he’d informed me), with intentions to renovate the school’s crumbling 1970s-era studios and then plaster his name all over them. The early hour was to shave off traffic time and to beat Hal’s possible arrival at LAAC.
In the warm morning light, I felt a little ridiculous in the black dress and heels. Ray glanced over my outfit with the same suppressed mirth as I greeted his suit, and then gestured at a sack of pastries and two full coffees. Hungry as I was, I was afraid of crumbs all over my dark lap, so I didn’t eat. But the silence seemed like a waste. I floated a few stale topics—weather, time zones, traffic—before cutting to the chase.
“What are you looking for today?” I said.
Ray gave me an appraising look. “Timeline and location,” he said. “First, I hope to prove the video was shot in her studio. Second, I hope to see how someone got in and out of it on Thursday, possibly with her laptop in hand. The medical examiner dates the time of her death to sometime before dawn on Thursday. Computer forensics show that the files were shredded on Thursday evening. On Friday, LAAC staff found her body.” He paused. “Someone must have entered her studio and wiped the files, or took the laptop away then put it back. That had to happen on Thursday.”
“Have you talked to the detectives at LASD? It seems like they must have pursued this,” I said. “Can Alicia connect you to them?”
“One of them already stuck his neck out giving her the file,” said Ray. “For now, that’s all Alicia can do.”
“She doesn’t seem to want to get too involved.”
“All this digging doesn’t make sense to Alicia. She sees things in a criminal justice framework. Either it’s illegal or it isn’t. If it isn’t, move on,” said Ray. “But she feels for Janis. And she can’t stand not keeping an eye on me.”
He said this casually, as if the detective’s interest in him was obvious.
My throat closed, and I cleared it, annoyed with myself. “How long have you known her?”
“Ten years, off and on,” said Ray. “She’s my ex-girlfriend’s cousin.”
For a moment, I was too surprised to ask another question.
Ray’s voice went on: “Ynez lives in North Carolina. She’s an emergency room nurse. We were together—lived together—for about eight years, but it’s been—it hasn’t been working for a while, and definitely not since Calvin died. I broke things off over the summer.” He looked at me, then to the road. “Alicia originally connected me with Janis, back when I first came to L.A. I helped them both with Kim Lord’s case, and Alicia promised to keep me abreast of developments in Calvin’s. But then she got divorced, and the sole custody of her son has been too much for her to manage, so she took a desk job. She’s not on homicide anymore. She can’t help me much now, and I’m not sure she wants to. She’s pretty tight with Ynez.”
Ray looked to be in his early thirties: of course he’d have been in some significant relationships by now. The fact of Ynez didn’t surprise me. It was his closeness with Alicia—apparently, they knew everything about each other, about her son, about Calvin. Why hadn’t either of them mentioned this before? It would have been so easy to slip it into conversation months ago.
“So you are still investigating Calvin’s case,” I said.
“Actually, today, I’m getting paid to investigate Hal Giroux,” said Ray.
“Really,” I said.
“Really.”
His little notebook said differently. But if I mentioned it, Ray would know that I’d snooped in his stuff. We passed a truck full of crates of apples, the fruits red in the shadows of the wooden slats.
“I guess I don’t trust you in a suit,” I said finally.
“You shouldn’t. And I really am sorry. I could have been straight with you a long time ago—about—about everything.” Ray gestured with his open hand, as if the traffic and the steep hills and the smog-white sky around us were included in his omissions. Then, without waiting for me to answer, he said, “There’s another thing I was wanting to tell you, if you don’t mind my changing the subject.”
“Go for it.”
Ray rummaged in the bakery bag with one hand and pulled loose a palmier, the light, golden, flaky pastry rolling toward itself in two big swirls. “You like these?” he said. “My stepmother, Willow, used to make these. She ruined my br
other for whoopie pies, donuts, all that stuff. Drove our dad crazy. But really”—he bit into it, crumbs flying—“these things are not that good. And they make a huge mess. Cal thought he had one up on the whole neighborhood, though. He’d tasted the authentic Paris cookie.” He held it out to me. “Want one?”
“Was he always like that?” I said, fishing for the other palmier. “Wanting to be superior?”
The pastry was mouthwatering. The coffee, too—a frothy latte. Ray had clearly gone out of his way to find a decent bakery, which was not always easy in L.A.
“His whole life,” he said.
“It’s really good,” I said, trying hard not to sputter crumbs.
“Maybe Willow’s recipe needed work,” he admitted.
“I read Calvin’s thesis,” I confessed. “He was a beautiful writer—it must have been terrible to lose him.”
Ray looked momentarily befuddled, forlorn. “How did you . . . ?”
“The librarian at the Rocque helped me get it from Yates,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Ray. Were you close?”
Trucks passed on either side, casting us in a sudden valley of shade. Ray glanced at them and sped out of it.
“You rarely say or do what I expect,” he said in a soft voice. “We were opposites,” he added. “He loved art. I loved science. Spider-Man, Batman. He hated our vacations at the beach. I loved them.”
He sank into silence.
“But we were close,” he said after a while. “Especially after our father died.”
And then, as if a tap had opened somewhere inside him, Ray began to talk. Calvin had been his only blood relative after their father died, other than a few second cousins. They had grown up together in their father’s house. Ray’s mother had died when Ray was very small. Ray’s dad had married Willow Teicher when Ray was four, and Willow gave birth to Calvin when Ray was six. A self-described “women’s libber,” she’d insisted that her son carry on her last name, an unconventional choice that puzzled and rankled their neighbors, and subtly reinforced Calvin’s destiny to abandon his hometown. The brothers had drifted when Cal left for graduate study at Yates, but they came together again after Cal went into rehab for addiction to snorting Adderall, courtesy of his high-pressure college life. In rehab Cal had met a borderline female patient with multiple addictions named Katrina, who’d gotten pregnant and carried the baby to term but didn’t want anything to do with motherhood. So Cal had brought his infant son, Nathaniel, home to North Carolina and raised him with Ray and Willow helping out, all the while working on his thesis.