Still Lives(23)

My phone pings and I open it to see a text from Greg.

I need to talk to you.

I close the phone and let the breeze wash over me.

“If she really is missing, your boy may end up needing a lawyer,” Kevin says, driving us through panels of sunlight and shade. “My sister, Cherie, went to Loyola. She could help.”


Failure: it never interested me before moving to Los Angeles. Yet after Greg moved out, I saw it everywhere, like dark matter, holding the city together. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people who come to L.A. eventually fail—at acting; at screenwriting; at modeling, painting, surfing, skating; at opening trendy restaurants, galleries, bars; at writing books; at finding love.

For a while after Greg moved out, I stopped reading for pleasure. I watched TV and went to movies. I listened to the radio. I fell asleep early. But I left all my novels and biographies alone, their covers closed and pages pressed against each other.

Only at the Rocque did I read, and because I was trying to keep the deadline for the Still Lives catalog, I spent weeks verifying facts about female homicides that the curators and critics quoted in their essays. It was grisly work, and I was glad when Evie took over checking the photograph captions. But something happened to me during that period when all I consumed was a horrifying assemblage of truths about men killing women. I decided I would never fall in love again. It wasn’t just the rejection from Greg that had hurt me; it was how it became wound up with the cruelty of Nikki’s murder and page after page of accounts of beatings, bloodshed, and dumping of women’s bodies in shallow graves. I felt I could never again find a man to desire and trust. If I tried, I was sure I would fail.

When I finally returned to my books, I’d forgotten everything I’d read before. I had the uncanny feeling a stranger had randomly opened the pages and shoved a bookmark in. Novels now bothered me—too much invention in the narrative felt like a meal with too much sweetness. In the Fitzgerald biography, I had to turn back to the spot where Scott meets Zelda and start all over, only this time their early fascination with each other—their late-night parties and jumping into fountains—didn’t seem giddy and romantic but vain and silly, as if they refused to see the disaster of their lives ahead. So I skipped to Fitzgerald’s waning years in Los Angeles, when he went to a young actors’ gathering with his mistress, Sheilah Graham, and the partygoers were pleased and astonished to meet him. The author of This Side of Paradise! The Jazz Age superstar! They’d thought he was already dead.

As Kevin drives off and I pass a large line of people waiting to enter Still Lives, I remember that moment. What it must have meant to Fitzgerald to be greeted like a ghost, and how desperately the writer later poured himself into his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, the book he thought would secure his literary reputation again. Kevin is right about one thing: With ten years since her last major show, Kim Lord, too, is starting to fall off the cultural map. She must realize how much of her future career rides on Still Lives. What would she trade to ensure its success? Would she give up her sanity, plunging herself into the stories of the tormented victims? Or would she drop Greg for a relationship with some bigger art-world star? Would she fake her own kidnapping? Or does she even care about her own success—she who, for the sake of a principle, wants to donate paintings worth potential millions?

I look back at the crowd that winds down the sidewalk to our nearest architectural neighbor, a mammoth insurance company tower that caps the hill before it starts to tumble toward Pershing Square. The line’s now thirty people deep, and they’re mostly hiding behind sunglasses in the April warmth, dressed in jeans or long pants, boots or heels. The occasional pair of khaki shorts and sandals mark a tourist. There are more of them than usual. Even visitors to L.A. have heard about the exhibition, then. Maybe Bas’s efforts to attract them have worked, or maybe they’ve simply read the news.

These are the multitudes we all hoped for. The ones who would save the Rocque. And yet through them I see my last view of Kim: her trenchcoated figure hurrying down this same sidewalk, running away.





9

I formally call the Craft Club to order with a question,” says Yegina, holding up the purple scarf she is knitting. “Who else wants to ban conversation about Kim Lord?”

Silence greets the announcement. We’re in the swanky boardroom on the offices’ top floor, the walls made of dark wood, slanted windows spilling light onto our needles and yarn. Jayme flips a page in the cookbook she’s reading, Evie shrugs into her embroidery, and Lisa and MeiMei from Membership pick at the quilt they are sewing together. Dee, a skinny crew member who wears genderless compilations of T-shirts and jeans, prods the tiny cats she makes out of dryer lint.

“It’s so sad,” says Lisa finally, tugging a thread. “I mean, if something has actually happened to her.”

“Something has,” says Jayme.

“Because I just spent an hour with that investigator,” Yegina barrels on. “And I suspect I’m not the only one tapped out on the subject, right, Maggie?”

A whole hour? “I guess.”

In Craft Club we occasionally outlaw office gossip for the sake of having deeper conversations about our lives. Last month, the topic of watching our thirtysomething friends become mothers of babies evoked a passionate discussion and a few snarky anecdotes. We spent a long hour once debating the merits of MFAs and graduate school for artists. Post-9/11, we cried together and plotted our escape routes from L.A. Yegina is always the funny, bossy one; Lisa and MeiMei brim with gullible empathy; Evie has a passion for Hollywood gossip; Jayme warily steers us from too much cattiness; Dee makes spacey, sometimes careless remarks; and I—what do I do? I used to play the wide-eyed, eager newcomer, until I learned to hide it better.