Still Lives(21)

Nikki appears often in my dreams: sitting on a bench by Lake Champlain, her arms folded, legs sprawled out in pale-blue skintight jeans. She sees me approach and buckles as if someone just kicked her lightly in the stomach. Then I’m right beside her, and she is looking over at me: long-jawed, slightly dopey, acne pitted, and solemn. Nikki is the type who hangs at the back of a room, the corner of a party, her blond hair thin and limp, pulled back hard in a barrette because she thinks it makes her eyes look exotic. She risks brown eyeliner. She keeps a small assortment of cheap jewelry but rarely wears it because she is embarrassed at longing to be beautiful. Vermont’s long winter makes her skin lunar and her bones achy, but Nikki doesn’t believe she can move elsewhere. Only women who seek their own importance leave her circle of family and friends. She is no one until she dates Keith, and then she is his, a figure at the center of a circle of new cars, huge TVs, and a four-hundred-dollar leather jacket for her birthday that makes her feel tough and as sexy as a Hollywood movie. Then Keith dumps her and she is no one again—until I find her and ask her to tell me her story.

In my dreams, we sit side by side, staring at the lake and its islands. Nikki opens her mouth and says Maggie, wait.

But she never says anything else.


At noon I am standing outside the Rocque when Kevin pulls up in a blue convertible. He has shed his tweed and pipe for a dark T-shirt and jeans, but he somehow retains the earnestness of an overgrown student. After several tries, he squeezes into an illegal spot beside a hydrant and waves to me. It’s the only open space on the whole street. The line for Still Lives has been steady all day, from older men in biker jackets to pretty bankers in pressed suits on lunch break, all checking out their shadowy reflections in the Rocque’s glass entrance as they wait for their timed entry.

I smell fresh leather as I climb into the car.

“You’re living the dream,” I say.

“I know, I know. I got a little spendy with the rental,” he retorts. “But it’s thirty degrees today in New York.” He squeezes into the traffic behind a massive tour bus, and we follow the avenue past the new concert hall, its silvery billows catching the light, and under the jacaranda trees losing their sticky purple-blue flowers.

“How far are we going?” I ask, surprised when he cruises over the freeway to the end of the avenue, where it meets the start of Sunset Boulevard.

“How much L.A. history do you know?”

“Once upon a time, everything was orange groves,” I say. “And some other stuff.”

“Yeah?” he says, and looks at me in that warm, intent way of his and darts us forward through a yellow light.

I want to tell him that if we kept driving down Sunset we’d reach the Short Stop Bar, where Rampart cops celebrated their bloody shootings. We’d reach the faux Egyptian arches of the mall that was D. W. Griffith’s movie studio. We’d pass the parking lot that was once the site of the Garden of Allah, with its discreet clay-roofed villas and Black Sea–shaped pool for the rich and famous, where F. Scott Fitzgerald drank away any possibility of succeeding in Hollywood. We’d coast by upscale storefronts that once were jitterbug clubs like the Trocadero, and Sherry’s, a gin-swilling site with a long, ruffled awning that overlooked the 1949 attempted assassination of gangster Mickey Cohen. Glamour, corruption, violence, dust—this street is a trail of dreams twisted into might-have-beens. It is the mythic L.A. that people arrive from all over the world to see, and some to spend their lives in. But there’s also another L.A., a city I didn’t notice until I started working on the Still Lives catalog. It’s the city where murderers come to hide—where the Black Dahlia’s killer cut her mouth all the way up to her ears and slipped away, never to be found; where a figure once called the “Southside Slayer” turned out to be multiple serial killers murdering poor African American women in South Central for decades.

But it’s all too much to say, so I just reply, “Yeah, I read some books on it.”

Kevin looks disappointed, but he nods and we lapse into an awkward silence, staring at strip malls. He eventually turns off Sunset, glides a couple of blocks, and slows down before a large white building notable for its roundness and mass.

“Recognize this?” he says.

“Church?” I say doubtfully. The churches of my New England childhood are narrow brick-and-wood affairs, built skyward, for small audiences. But this place runs the width of a block and looks vaguely governmental. Entrances and arches line the first stories. Flags from many different nations jut from poles above. Then come the stripes of smaller windows. A little cross perches on a lunar dome, almost like an afterthought.

“The Angelus Temple,” he says, as if I should know the name.

“Are we going in?”

“You didn’t see that third room in Still Lives, did you?” says Kevin. “Or did you go back later?”

“I didn’t go back.” I don’t know why I feel defensive about this. I had a right to decide I’d had enough.

Kevin doesn’t notice my scowl. “Well, you know the painting ‘Disappearances’?”

“No.” A week ago I proofed the wall labels for Still Lives. Each painting bore the name of its victim, except for the last, the largest still life, entitled “Anonymous.” I tell this to Kevin.

He frowns. “Well, it was called ‘Disappearances’ last night, and it’s full of objects. That’s what’s causing all the buzz. People think Kim was leaving clues to her vanishing.”