Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  “You’d think Hal would have covered himself, wouldn’t you?” I said. “I mean, he’s been the director of an MFA program for years. Why wouldn’t he just call in professional campus help? Brenae couldn’t have been the first traumatized student he’d met.”

  Alicia cocked one leg on the other knee and tugged at her jean cuff. “Yeah,” she said. “He could have ‘covered’ himself. So why didn’t he?”

  I thought she was going to answer her own question, but she didn’t. Instead she examined me, her expression both thoughtful and cynical.

  “I guess he thought it was a bluff,” I said.

  She gave a small, tight smile. “I guess he didn’t give a crap either way. He didn’t think of her as a person. He thought of her as a problem. A bomb. Just like you said. Something to ‘cover himself’ from.”

  At her words, I felt my face stiffen, like someone had thrown cold water on it. The feeling spread to my chest, my gut. Deep down, was this how I really saw Brenae—not as a person, but as a problem? Was this how Alicia saw me seeing her? Alicia’s motivation to advise on Janis’s private investigation—was it really to keep things “legal,” or because she didn’t trust how we’d perceive the information we found?

  All I knew was that Alicia had been there for us that night, no matter her own reservations.

  She had gone to Nelson’s house to find me. The lights were all off. With her son in the car, she wouldn’t go down the driveway, so she called for backup. Two squad cars speeding for the Palisades while I was trying to climb through the gallery ceiling. When I dialed 911 from the Westing phone, I told them to contact Alicia. She was parked on the road above Nelson’s property, waiting for a search warrant. She immediately alerted dispatch to be on the lookout for anyone resembling Nelson and Layla.

  The pair were caught at a gas station off the freeway, seventy miles from the Mexican border. Without Layla’s call to her father and the speed of Alicia’s response, they might have made it out of the country. Without me being locked with Ray in the hidden room at the Westing, Ray might have died. We had both fulfilled our missions that night. But I was lucky. Rash and lucky. I knew that. I was lucky there had been a way out for me. I bowed my head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “You’re absolutely right.”

  I felt Alicia tense, then sigh. Something nudged against my ribs, and I looked down to see her pushing her arm through mine, looping us together. She was actually much smaller than I was, and it was the first time I realized it, the way our ribs met, the bottom ridge of hers touching my waist.

  “I know,” she said in such a bored tone that I had to laugh. She laughed, too.

  After that, we relaxed and leaned into each other, listening to the honks of traffic and gazing together into the little jungle garden, waiting for news of Ray.

  HE RESTED ON A WHITE bed, IV in one hand, other arm in a sling, the tube still in his mouth. The bruises on his face and neck had purpled, making a garish map on his handsome features, but he looked glad to see us. The nurse stood by, fiddling with his monitors.

  Alicia and I took our places on either side of him. She had the side with the IV, and she took his hand gently. I had the one with the sling, so I didn’t touch him at all.

  “Layla wants to cooperate,” she said. “London, too. They raided the office on Genevieve Street, and found other illegal antiquities. Nelson de Wilde was shipping his clients’ work through there and picking up some very expensive stowaways on the way.”

  Ray blinked.

  “You got something to tell me, you can do it tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be back with my notebook.”

  There was a pause.

  “We made it,” I said, trying to sound encouraging.

  Ray tilted toward me, his blue eyes resting on my face. I had more to say, but it didn’t come. My breath stuck in my throat. Across the bed, I saw Alicia slowly release Ray’s hand.

  “Willow and Nathaniel want to come out here, but I told them no,” she said. “Because you said no. Are you sure?” She hesitated. “To be frank, they’re out of their minds with worry.”

  Ray shook his head, his IV hand rising to pull out the tube.

  “Sir,” said the nurse. “Sir, you can’t do that.” She swept in, and Ray’s hand fell.

  “It’s all right. Don’t talk,” said Alicia. “I’ll calm them down.”

  In her face, I saw a quick, guilty evasiveness and I knew: Willow and Nathaniel weren’t communicating directly with her. They were talking to Ynez, Ray’s old girlfriend, and she was talking to Alicia. Cousin to cousin. I belong with him, Ray had said. He belonged with Nathaniel. What about with Ynez?

  There was a moaning noise, and a stretcher sped by in the hall, propelled by a nurse and an orderly. The body on it, covered by a sheet, looked scarcely larger than a child’s. The moaning switched to hoarse, agonized yelps.

  I wanted to rip Ray out of this place. I knew it was just a room like any other room, and that all the tubes and monitors and nurses were there to keep him and others safe, to help them heal. I knew I should be grateful that he had such good care. But a restless anger engulfed me anyway, watching him gagged and threaded with needles, his brown hair matted to his head, his thin cotton johnny wrapping his bruised chest. I wanted his old sleepy gaze back, his courtliness and his absurd questions. I wanted him through with this. Through the damage and healing. Through the raw hurt of Calvin’s death. I wanted him home, wherever home was. I wanted him whole. Just standing there motionless above him took enormous effort. It felt like someone was stripping pieces of me from the inside.

  “We should go,” Alicia said quietly.

  I reached out and brushed Ray’s forehead, above his uninjured eye, smoothing his brown hair back. “Do whatever they tell you, so they’ll let you go,” I whispered, and turned away before he could reply.

  The corridor outside the ICU was so clean, the walls shone with faint reflections.

  “Thank God, right?” said Alicia beside me. “He looks good.”

  I nodded, still unable to speak.

  “You don’t think so?” she said, and shook her head. “He’ll be up and gone the first chance he gets.”

  27

  “YOU MUST BE DYING TO get back into your bungalow,” Yegina said, staring at my sublet’s jumble of furniture, the photos of empty sidewalks. She had come over with two towering bags of premade meals, convinced that my battered right hand had made me incapable of shopping or cooking.

  “It hasn’t been that bad here. Just lonely.” I cleared my table of a bouquet of orange lilies from Janis Rocque so that Yegina could set her parcels down. The bouquet had appeared the day after Nelson’s arrest and was already almost a week old, but I couldn’t throw it out. Petals and pollen scattered over the counter.

  Yegina stood close to me, swiping up the petals with her long-fingered open hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve been so caught up with my job and Hiro, I just let you drift.”

  “I think I needed to drift,” I said. “Not from you, but from who I was.”

  Yegina stopped swiping and looked at me. “And now?”

  I sat down on the huge blue couch. Yegina dropped the petals in the trash and perched beside me, her black-trousered knees beside my jeans. She put a hand on my arm.

  “Don’t make me call your mother,” she said. “She’ll pry it out of you.”

  I hadn’t called my mother at all yet. I didn’t want to tell my parents what had happened in the past two weeks. They would fly out, the two of them this time, and demand I choose a different life.

  “I’m quitting the Rocque,” I said. “I want to work full-time on the story of Brenae Brasil. I have so much reporting to do, and I need to find an editor who will work with me.” I faced her. “Janis paid me enough for my gallerina gig that I can live for three or four months. And then, who knows. I’ll find other freelance work.”

  “Does Janis know?”

  “I’m going to meet her tomorrow.”


  Janis was scheduled for a double mastectomy, to be followed by chemo and radiation. For a private person, she’d been surprisingly open about this to everyone. She had declared that she was stepping away from all her duties at the Rocque in order to address her health. (“You won’t miss me scowling at your staff meetings unless you’re a total suck-up,” she’d told the museum’s executive committee.) I’d worked up the courage to ask to see her, and she’d invited me to her estate.

  “Lucky you,” said Yegina. “Was that all, though?”

  That wasn’t all. I also wanted to say how different I felt now. Not different exactly, but deeper into the self I wanted to be. The self with a purpose.

  “I’m happy,” I said cautiously. “Not the giddy kind, but the real kind.”

  “I can tell.” By the fragile, pained pleasure on Yegina’s face, I could see how much she’d worried for me. “What about Ray?”

  Ray had left the hospital the day after his surgery, arm in a sling, and requested a medical leave from his job in North Carolina to recuperate and follow the investigation of Nelson de Wilde. We’d made a plan to catch up next week when he was in less pain; he promised he had somewhere to take me. I explained all this to Yegina.

  “Anyway, we’re even now. He saved my life. I saved his.” I shrugged to cover up the waver in my voice.

  “Actually, I think that makes you in enormous debt to each other,” she said with a knowing smile.

  “I’d rather hear about you and Hiro,” I said.

  “I said yes,” she said.

  “You did?” I whooped.

  The smile grew on her face.

  “You set a date?” I said.

  “Next December,” she said. “After the groundbreaking of the new museum.” She rose, too, and went back to the bouquet, plucking out the most wilted stems and putting the vase in the sink.

  “Congratulations,” I said, trying to keep anything but joy from my voice. “I’m so thrilled for you,” I added truthfully.

  I expected details, but instead she pulled the remaining lilies loose from the vase. She let water rush into the silt and dried leaves at its bottom, pushing them up, brimming over, then ran the faucet until the vase filled clear. Then she dropped the lilies gracefully back in.

  “You’re waiting for the real news, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Getting married is real news,” I said, then grinned. “Okay, yes.”

  She put the vase back on my counter but stayed standing, like she was pitching me at a board meeting. “Promise you’ll listen to the whole thing?”

  I promised.

  Yegina had been conferencing all week with Janis, Bas, Hal, and Steve Goetz. She, Janis, and Bas had proffered the idea that the Rocque could be annexed into the new museum but keep its experimental performance programming (“which was always Janis’s first love”). Rather than being a single institution, the museum could become a downtown complex, eventually incorporating more buildings around it. One day it would rival the Smithsonian, but with an L.A. angle on the art of the present and future. Steve Goetz told her he wanted to think about it, but he called back the next day and said he liked all of it. Everything Yegina said. And that he wanted to phase Hal Giroux out by the time the museum opened and replace Hal’s presence with hers. As assistant director of the whole complex.

  “Hal represents the past,” Goetz had told her. “You represent the future.”

  “Get that in writing,” I told her.

  “That’s what Janis said. She told me Steve Goetz is a hustler with a gold purse who thinks he’s a grandee.” Yegina laughed at the phrasing. “I don’t like him,” she admitted. “I don’t like how he talks about artists, or art. But he owns gobs of it, and he’s right. I am the future.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and dusted my counter. “We both are. It’s the end of an era.” Her voice was triumphant, but her eyes were wistful. It was the end of an era for Janis, too. The last time I’d left the Rocque, I’d looked back at its long bank of windows, wondering how I would begin my mornings without seeing my own reflection stride across them—on my way to the realm where Janis ruled.

  “She’ll be with you in spirit, if not on the phone at all hours,” I predicted.

  “It’s weird that the leaders are going to become us eventually.” Yegina looked at me. “Our generation.”

  “Hal won’t give up that easily,” I said. “He’ll go into private consulting and make pots of money.”

  “The way you wrecked Shoe Cathedral when you fell, he actually loved it,” she said. “He was bragging about it on the Art News blog. He said it’s more complete than ever. The Westing’s closed, of course, but Hal already got a photographer in there, and they’re planning to sell high-end prints of the wrecked installation to raise money to mount a retrospective tribute to Brenae Brasil.”

  I knew all this already, but hearing it from Yegina, cast in her new hopefulness, it seemed like a genuine attempt at reparations, and not a cheap publicity move.

  “About time,” I said. Yegina continued to swoop her makeshift cloth over my furniture. “Would you please stop dusting?”

  Yegina folded up the tissue.

  “You do know who Steve Goetz is,” I said.

  “I know that he’s Layla Goetz-Middleton’s father,” she said. “But honestly, Maggie, I think he was so frantic when he found out.”

  Steve Goetz had claimed complete ignorance of his daughter’s affair with the gallerist—an affair that dated back to when she was fifteen years old. “I regarded Nelson as a sharp guy, my daughter’s friend’s father. Not a dirtbag predator,” he’d told Alicia. “I’m heartbroken and sick.” Now Layla’s father just wanted his daughter home. With his excellent lawyer by her side.

  “That’s not the only thing wrong with him,” I said.

  “And I know he was obsessively collecting Kim Lord’s work before she died,” she said. “But so what? I think he’s just a completist.”

  “A completist.”

  “He’ll get this done,” said Yegina. “This museum will happen. And it can kill the Rocque or it can save it. I actually think he wants to save it. He’s very deferential to Janis. He’s even agreed to put ‘Goetz’ on his building, but not on the whole complex. For now, we’re calling it the Next Museum.”

  “Until an even richer person comes along and pays for naming rights,” I said.

  But as I gazed at my proud friend, who’d worked for years without proper acknowledgment and now was getting the break she deserved, I felt my resistance fading. After all, I was moving on, too. The run-down, shoestring, risk-taking Rocque as I’d known it had to end, and maybe this way was the best way.

  “Tell me how you said yes to Hiro,” I said.

  She smiled big again. “With lots of conditions.”

  THE NEXT DAY, JANIS LED me out to a patio that looked down on her sculpture garden. On the slope below, I could see the Richard Serra ellipse, like a giant, tilted rusting paddock for exceptionally tall horses, and beyond it, the grove of trees where I’d almost died last spring. I was glad the hole in the earth was hidden from me.

  My boss was altered. The navy suit was gone. She wore jeans and a collared white shirt that gaped on her, her dark eyes peering from a face that seemed glossier and more worn at once. I avoided looking at her chest. No matter how she downplayed the impending loss with sardonic humor, I couldn’t imagine losing my own breasts.

  Janis lowered herself to her chair as if any moment she expected the furniture to fly out from under her. “Gigi will bring us some lemonade and cookies,” she said. “I hope that’s appealing. I actually don’t know what you like to eat. You abandoned that lunch I ordered for you at Café Francesca.”

  “I love them both.” I couldn’t keep the choke from my voice. “And I’m really sorry.”

  “Oh, please don’t cry,” she said. “If you survive two murder attempts, you’re not allowed to weep at the cancer lady serving you lemonade. Did they get him?”

  “He’s been
indicted on attempted murder and illegal art trafficking,” I said. “But it will be a long time before the trial.”

  She looked out over her garden of grass and flowers and million-dollar sculptures.

  “I always knew Nelson de Wilde was a crook,” she said with a satisfied air. “I always knew he had secrets. An expensive suit and a yacht-ready tan don’t hide the real man. But the thing is”—she nestled deeper in her chair—“he was our kind of crook. He knew what we wanted, and he got it for us. Not always great art,” she said, giving me a shrewd look. “Exclusivity. We wanted to have what no one else had, but everyone else wanted. That’s a long, complicated, expensive game. Some gallerists and dealers have their own money to lose on it. Nelson didn’t. Doesn’t justify his brutality when he got trapped, but I understand its root. I tried to destroy the possibility of a brand-new art museum in downtown L.A. because I felt cornered. And cheated. Despair makes people ugly.” She paused to watch a bee veer near us, then fly off again. “Fortunately, I’m used to being ugly, and I’ve learned it’s far better to wear it kindly.” She gave me a haggard smile. “No condolences now. For anything. We’ll win in the end.”

  “I agree,” I said, swallowing both my grief and my admiration, and I told her my plan. I summarized everything I’d learned about Brenae Brasil that week—how she’d faced increasing isolation this year, as her family contracted to cope with her older brother’s arrest, as the school cut her off from the opportunities it had offered, as she lost friends to careerism. I told her about the fateful trip to London to install Hal’s show, and the confessions that Layla and Brenae must have traded about their secret lovers: Layla and Nelson, Brenae and Erik. Brenae must have told Layla that Erik still came to her, demanding sex, and Layla hadn’t believed her. Neither had Hal. Hal had taken Erik’s side, because he was worried about his favorite student losing his visa status, and future opportunities to stay in the States.