Still Lives(15)

Elizabeth Short was found in Leimert Park. That patch of grass is not two miles from here.

Before I entered these galleries, I was sure Kim Lord would make me feel something—maybe sadness, maybe anger, maybe awe or jealousy. But whatever is flooding me right now, I can’t name it—it’s like the feeling you get when your car starts hydroplaning on a rainy road and you don’t know where the pavement is anymore or when the sickening glide will end.

There’s one more picture to see before I leave this room.

Nicole Brown Simpson lies at the bottom of a staircase, face hidden, her blond hair soaked in so much blood that it glistens like wet clay. Her blood also runs down the tile, filling its cracks. This is the first painting where Kim Lord isn’t looking out at me, and for a moment I struggle to see what she’s done to make the image different from a terrifying photograph of the murder’s aftermath. After all, Nicole Brown Simpson’s 1994 killing is probably our city’s most famous, both for its high-profile suspect and the media circus that followed the trial. O. J. Simpson and the clues to the homicide became so much the focus of the news that it’s easy to forget the savagery of the actual attack. Nicole Brown Simpson was knifed so many times that her head was almost separated from her body. Quarts of blood spilled from her.

I can’t grasp what the painting has made of this. Then I spot it, how Nicole’s blood in the tile cracks extends and extends until it forms a dark, shiny inverted tree. From the upside-down branches, hundreds of tiny orbs hang like drops. Like fruits. The meticulous delicacy of each. I look back to her collapsed body. The black walls draw closer.

Behind me, voices amplify in the first room; people are starting to arrive in droves. Below me, the cold floor. There’s another gallery to this exhibition, but I don’t move.


I never viewed Nikki Bolio’s body, but I read the autopsy report: the raw skin at her wrists and ankles, the water in her lungs. Death from hypothermia and drowning. The likely scenario: the murderer towed her behind his boat at night. Her flesh would have burned at the touch of the icy lake, and she would have sunk because she could not kick or paddle. She must have struggled in the water; she must have screamed. So he sped up until her head whipped and body bounced, turning his boat until the wake washed over her and black waves flooded her mouth. Then he threw her toward the shore to be found.

She must have struggled; she must have screamed. Her thrashing must have been ugly and violent. Her cries must have ripped the night over the lake, ripped into the cold, inky New England sky, into the pines lining the shore. How long did it take for him to kill her, his hand pushing the throttle, steering the wheel? What made her finally give up and breathe water?

No matter the power of the paintings around me, the violation of homicide is so terrible, so unknowable, that it exists beyond any meaning we might make from it. And once the horror touches you, as Nikki’s murder touched me, you’re aware of it, all the time. It’s like having an abyss next door. Just beyond your ordinary patio and fence: a giant, sticky hole to nowhere. It makes you sick. It makes your skin crawl. It makes your eyelids feel like they are blinking over dry glass.


I feel a tap on my shoulder.

“You okay?” says Kevin.

“Come on, you’ll miss it,” says Yegina.

I tell them to go ahead.

“You need me to get you some water?” says Yegina.

I shake my head. “I’m fine. Go.”

After a hesitation, she squeezes my arm and heads into the next room. Kevin waits by the threshold, pulling out his notebook. In my peripheral vision I can see the last series, among them Chandra Levy, Lita McClinton, Judy Ann Dull, and a giant still life of objects honoring the thousands of other female victims of abduction and murder. I close my eyes. Open them again.

Printed on the wall beside me is a square of text about still lifes. I’ve read it before. I copyedited it. But I read it again because Lynne’s stuffy, informative voice calms me:

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, including both natural and manufactured objects. In prior eras, it was considered an ideal art form for women artists, who would not have been allowed to learn life drawing from nudes.

The typical still life gives the artist more freedom of arrangement than landscapes or portraits do. Early European paintings often incorporated moral lessons through the placement of objects that were also symbols, such as an apple suggesting temptation or a snuffed candle being synonymous with death.



Black letters on a clean white background. Black wall behind it. Nearby, the doorway to the next gallery. I push my eyes through the threshold, where Yegina stands with Hiro, our new grant writer, gazing silently at a painting I can only see the edge of, but I know it is Judy Ann Dull by the sharp-heeled foot, the ankle bound to a board by wire. A solid, warm bulk materializes beside me, and I get a whiff of overheated wool. I turn to Kevin, relieved.

“I thought still lifes were grapes and dead hares and stuff,” he says. “Aren’t these portraits?” he asks.

“Not according to the artist,” I say. “She says that these paintings are still lifes because the subjects are inanimate and positioned to relay a meaning.”

“Kim Lord is inanimate?”

“Her photos of herself are. And the victims are.”

Kevin looks dubious.

“Also, because still lifes were often a display of opulence or wealth,” I explain. “Some rich person showing off the luxuries they own. Well, what if the liberated woman is one of our society’s luxuries? And what if she’s something hunted and killed, too?” I can’t keep the edge from my voice. I can’t get Roseann Quinn’s headlines from my brain, or the staring eyes of Kitty Genovese. I won’t forget Jayme leaving an early Still Lives planning meeting, a queasy look on her face; or Evie’s confession that she couldn’t sleep after checking all the captions for the catalog’s graphic photos. I suppose we knew what was coming with Still Lives—it would expose us, it would expose most women’s oppressive anxiety about our ultimate vulnerability, a fear both rational and irrational, like the fear of the footsteps behind you at night, magnified a hundred times. But we suppressed our dread in the excitement of a successful show.