Still Lives(13)
It must be seven already. Still Lives is open for viewing. Starting with tables one and two, guests may take the freight elevator up to the galleries, or they can take the long way, walking up the staircase and coming in through the museum’s front doors.
I shove my boots back on and hobble from the restroom and into the shadows by the staff elevator. Moments later, Janis Rocque and the rest of the head-table guests flood the loading dock.
Is Kim Lord finally among them? No. Neither is Greg. I hang back to watch, trying to imagine which group a stalker would infiltrate.
First come the wild gray heads of the renegade artists who once carved out studio space among the oil derricks of Venice Beach. They built their art from junk piles and car paint and light. One got arrested for obscenity and some died, but a surviving few have become rich old men. They chuckle and nudge each other, and their eyes have a sharp brightness; they know they are the youngest people here.
A more proper, more resplendent group follows. These are the male board members: CEOs, bankers, music industry magnates who have spent their lives leading meetings and driving up profits. Although their looks range from svelte to plump, they all have the same restless gleam, as if they can’t help jockeying for power, even now.
The last cluster comprises the women on the board and the wives of the men. Mostly platinum-haired, graceful, and over forty, they fall into two categories, the born rich and the born beautiful, rarely both at the same time. An occasional young, foxy girlfriend dots the landscape of older bodies, and she trips along self-consciously in high heels, smiling hard. Of the three groups, only this last one shows any anxiety at Kim Lord’s absence; I catch sight of a couple of ladies glancing back over their shoulders at the glare of the party, and another tightening her silky wrap as if chilled.
Tailing all these groups is one misfit, walking alone: a dark-haired guy, early thirties, with a mustard-colored corduroy suit jacket thrown over jeans. There’s something familiar about him. Not familiar as in we’ve met before, but familiar in type. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s from somewhere rural and East Coast. Overdressed for the warm night, underdressed for the occasion. No interest in fanciness except to flout everyone else’s high opinion of it. His blue eyes look sleepy, as if someone just woke him up and dragged him here. He sees me staring and gives me a wink. I look down at my aching feet, first embarrassed by my scrutiny, then irritated by his cheek. He clearly didn’t dress to blend in.
The massive doors of the freight elevator slide open. In its day, the freight elevator has carried paintings the size of pools and an entire crumpled Volkswagen. It’s hallowed ground, this scuffed metal box; along with thousands of artworks, this freight elevator has lifted L.A.’s reputation, putting our city on the map of critics and collectors. But the cabled mechanism also rattles and lurches, and the interior panels are in dire need of replacement. The guests file in, dwarfed by the elevator’s size. In its silvery light, their faces and bodies are suddenly blank and interchangeable, except for their leader, Janis Rocque. She wears the stoic scowl of a human about to enter an alien spaceship.
Where is Greg? I’m surprised he isn’t keeping up with his crowd.
There’s a flash of blue and tweed beside me: Yegina and Kevin, looking breathless.
“Come on, we can take the staff elevator. Everyone’s walking up the staircase way. They don’t want to wait,” says Yegina, waving her all-access badge on the security pad. “It’s going to be mobbed.”
6
When the staff elevator doors open, Yegina, Kevin, and I rush through the permanent collection to reach Still Lives. All the galleries feel large and cold and secretive tonight, even as I pass familiar white slabs and cubes of light, the red flower of a smashed car hood that’s always on view. The air smells like nothing—not disinfectant, not paint, not wood or plastic, just pure absence. I look over at Kevin, and he’s a wash of fluorescence and shadow, patting his tweed pockets like he forgot something. Beyond him, Yegina wears the cool, keen look of a cat about to be fed.
“Not mobbed yet,” I say, but neither of them answer. Our footfalls are the only sounds, fast and ominous, as they approach the black-painted rooms of Still Lives.
I’ve read the hyperbole about Kim Lord’s talent. Heck, I’ve been writing it for months, ripping adjectives like stunning, harrowing, shocking, edgy, and stark from reviews of prior shows, and coupling those words with the gory stories of the eleven murdered women depicted in Still Lives. The more praise I penned, the more it rang false to me—to be so stagy in your subject matter, to take another woman’s victimization and make it your material. Not until today’s undisclosed press release about her gift has Kim Lord ever acknowledged that she, too, might be capitalizing on these horrific crimes. She seems to think it is her right to depict the victims, to paint herself into their lives and stories, just as she—a well-heeled Canadian—feels it is okay to toss out damning statistics about Los Angeles and its murder rates, and the way Hollywood sensationalizes female homicide. “I picked this city deliberately,” she said. “I want this city to see what it is doing.”
Fine. Let’s see it.
I am wary when I step inside the first black room.
Stabbing victim Roseann Quinn hovers over me with her curls and her wistful grin. Lord based her painting on a well-known photo of Quinn in a loosely tied head scarf and round librarian glasses, grinning at something beyond the camera. In the original photo, Quinn looks as if she’s strolling down a suburban street, past a white house and a yard, the photo snapped just when she’s spotted a friend and beams in recognition. Kim Lord painted as Quinn has the same clothes and sweet expression, but the background to her face is old newspaper clips, their headlines: “Teacher Found Nude and Slain,” “Teacher Victim of Sex Slaying,” “Drifter Held in Roseann’s Slaying.”