Still Lives(12)

The second time I saw Kim Lord was the second time I wanted to dislike her but couldn’t. Instead, we became the kind of provisional pals you only meet at parties, always nodding and acknowledging each other, but never really talking. Why would we? What Kim Lord and I have in common could be measured by the teaspoon: a childhood in the North, a tendency to stay quiet while everyone else chatters. Yet sometimes I think I’m the only one in L.A. who understands her: she is not a genius, but she knows how to package herself, how to make it sound like she matters. She looks the part, too—a gaunt, darkening blonde, size four in jeans. She has a neat little way of licking her lips before she speaks. It makes her seem younger, though she never acts eager to please.

Here, at the Gala tonight, I can’t tell Kevin-the-rock-critic any of this, so I just listen to Yegina say that Kim Lord is pretty easy to deal with for an artist who finishes paintings six months later than she says she will. And who refuses to do educational events of any kind because her work is “not for children.” And who always arrives dressed in elaborate disguises and insists on entering the museum through the loading dock.

Then Kevin asks how we decide which artists get the green light for shows at the Rocque, and Yegina goes into another long-winded answer.

“It’s a pretty collaborative process, except when your director forces something down your throat,” Yegina finishes, loathing in her voice. “As in Art of the Race Car. Next year, September 2004. I kid you not. George W. Bush will be running for reelection, and Bas wants to park a Corvette in front of the museum.”

For years, the brilliant shows at the Rocque have made up for other failures in Yegina’s life: the museum’s failure to promote her, Chad’s failure at staying faithful to her, and, most of all, her parents’ failure to understand any of her artsy, leftist, cash-poor choices. I half wish that her brother gets rejected by med schools again so that he can share the burden of disappointing them.

“And then Bas wants to tear down this building and make something huge,” she adds. “He doesn’t understand that people actually find us because we’re a break in the skyline. We’re at a human scale.”

A break in the skyline.

I remember the last time I saw Kim Lord. It was yesterday, almost lunchtime, and I was heading downstairs to grab Yegina for our toning class at the gym. As I held the rail, gazing out on my favorite view of the avenue below us, I caught sight of a woman in a platinum wig and trench coat, hurrying downhill, away from the museum and toward Pershing Square. She jumped as if something had startled her, patted herself, and then kept hustling west. In that moment, I didn’t register what I was seeing. Scarcely a day goes by in Los Angeles when I don’t witness something odd on the streets. But the woman was Kim Lord. And she was fleeing the Rocque.

I excuse myself to use the restroom, which is inside the building. As I totter through the increasingly younger outer circles of the dinner tent, I catch sight of manicured hands cupping glasses, smooth bare legs extending from slitted dresses, unbuttoned tux collars, gleaming watches. I hear snatches of conversation.

“Her shows are never worth the hype, but I still want to see it.”

“When was her last one, when Reagan was president?”

Kim Lord’s Noir exhibition had bombed so badly that it shadows her reputation almost as much as her early success brightens it, and there are some, possibly many, here who expect to be underwhelmed again. Another night, their derision might privately cheer me, but now I’m glad when I make it out of the humid clouds of talk to the cooler, grittier open air of the underpass.

The dock looms like a tomb. It used to be the basement for the police-car garage. The architect retrofitted the walls and beams to be earthquake-safe and extended the museum’s underground level two stories so that we could use the same delivery underpass as our neighboring skyscrapers. The Rocque’s remodel is considered a subterranean masterpiece, because the architect retained the drama of the old walls and arches while making the space much larger and more modern. Our garage door is forty feet tall, and when it’s up, as it is tonight, you see a dark cathedral of art crates and shelving, the thresholds that lead to the registrar’s office and the carpentry room, and another massive door at the back, where much of our permanent collection is stored.

Security guys in white shirts stand, arms folded, all over the dock, but they don’t recognize me and I don’t have my badge or an official wristband for the evening. I bob along them like a horse looking for a break in the fence until I find Fritz, our main daytime dock guard, a short, robust, close-shaven guy who sports tinted glasses and a friendly air. Fritz likes me because I helped his daughter with her college essays last year and she got into UCLA. He beckons me in with a smile, and I pass into the underground vault of the Rocque, with its smells of fresh carpentry and old paint. I cross the hard cement floor and hide in the restroom, unzipping my boots down to the ankle to pop out my complaining feet.

My toes flex, prickling. They feel like little knobs pounded into the ends of my feet. Kim Lord should be at the Gala by now. Her absence is a wind, invisibly touching everything. The last time I felt this sensation was six years ago, the cold spring day when Nikki Bolio, my source, was found dead on the shore of Lake Champlain.

I hear the bathroom door swing open, and two guests talking.

“Hurry, okay?” says one. “I don’t want to get stuck behind a massive crowd. I hate craning my neck.”