Still Lives(3)
I should make it clear: I had no romantic stake in this. It was purely sympathy, fueled by my journalistic training in social fearlessness. Fifteen pounds too skinny and without his shaggy hair, Greg had a surly, reptilian look. He didn’t grin or joke like he does now. I coerced him out with our merry crew to ride the canals, to watch a Thai movie with no discernible plot but shrieking and hitting. I gave him my castoff Kundera novels to read. Yet I had no idea that I sparked any feelings in him until he wrote me after orientation, from his campus in southeastern Thailand, and invited me to visit. By then, his hair had grown, and obligatory drinking bouts with his Thai colleagues had forced him to abandon his hard-core Buddhist habits. The man who picked me up from the Chanthaburi bus station was a wry, warm, intelligent dreamboat, and strangest of all, he seemed to adore me.
That adoration is gone now, revoked by a toxic mix of grief and ambition. I know why Greg left me and whom he wants to become, and in the abstract I accept it. I even wish him well. He never once lied to me. But whenever I see him in person, it’s like being in a room with an impostor: some creature who slunk out of L.A.’s giant billboards and gated studios and false hopes and took over my boyfriend’s body. He goes by “Shaw” now: a slicker, smarter version of the old Greg. It’s the name of his gallery, too: SHAW.
A shadow crosses my glass door, and Jayme West whips it open with one hand while talking on her cell with the other. Jayme spends most of her day attached to the device, and they both possess the same sleekness and utility—everything on my boss’s gorgeous half-Norwegian, half-Eritrean body is exactly where it belongs, from her high, narrow hips to her low, smooth voice and the bright scent of tangerines that follows her everywhere. With her looks and poise, Jayme could make ten times her Rocque salary in Hollywood or politics, but she hates being on camera and always makes Bas take center stage. He adores her. We all do, because Jayme’s hard work and behind-the-scenes orchestrating have helped the Rocque maintain its cultural reputation despite declining revenues. Saved by Jayme is a mantra, which is why her behavior around the Kim Lord exhibition has been especially puzzling to me.
“Yes, that’s ‘Rocque’ as in ‘lock.’ Still Lives as in ‘wives.’” Jayme hangs up the phone, rolling her eyes.
“Or crock,” I say. “And hives.”
Jayme doesn’t smile. She is not a smiler by nature. It would interfere with the sixteen hundred other things she’s doing at any given moment. “Got anything else to wear?”
Before I have a chance to answer, Jayme is marching me to her bigger, tidier office and pulling dresses from a closet, holding them under my chin. “You’re the same size as I am, just shorter,” she mutters. Her phone rings. She looks at the name and cringes, but her delivery is flawless. “Mr. Gillespie, we’re going to need to move the interview again. The artist wants more time with you especially.”
She waves the dress she is currently holding. When I take it from her, I’m surprised to see her arm is goose-bumped and shaking. I try to catch her eye, but she deliberately turns away and steadies herself on her desk. I carry the dress obediently down the hall to a bathroom stall, mesmerized by the shimmery green fabric, its leathery weight. I tend to choose demure grays and blues, the wardrobe of a Catholic schoolgirl. This dress feels otherworldly, like it was fished from some alien sea. I fear it will look terrible on me. To say Jayme and I are the same size is like comparing a Jaguar to a Yugo. Clothes don’t fall on Jayme’s lean torso. They float. She could attend the Gala tonight wearing a couple of crusty washcloths, and the fashion writers would fawn over the hot new trend.
I twist the stall lock and step out of my skirt and blouse. The cool air stings my bare skin, and I feel silly and guilty about the washcloth thought. I’ve seen Jayme anxious in recent weeks, but not like this. She and I usually work together on copyediting the exhibition catalogs—I check the text and she checks the images—yet for Still Lives she dumped the whole project on me. This was in January, just after Greg moved out, and only when Jayme found out that he was dating Kim Lord did she apologize for my extra workload.
“I wish I could help,” Jayme said to me, or rather to the pen holder on my desk, because she would not meet my eyes. “But I’m still out on this one. Bas has got too many new irons in the fire, and I can’t keep up.”
And so, while seething at Kim Lord, I had the additional stomachchurning task of proofing the captions for the photos of the famous female murder victims featured in her show. I tried not to let my eye stray to the disturbing spectacle of Judy Ann Dull, sitting in an armchair, wearing a neat 1950s wool cardigan and flared skirt, her ankles and mouth bound by white rope. I tried not to see the chair’s ratty upholstery, or Dull’s wary, regretful expression at being taken in by a dopey television repairman who promised to help her with her modeling career. I didn’t want to see Judy Ann Dull alive and well, because I knew that later she would be dressed in long black gloves and black thigh-high stockings, trussed topless to an X of wood, raped repeatedly, and strangled in the desert by Harvey Glatman, the Glamour Girl Slayer. Dull was only nineteen years old.
If I had trouble looking at one victim and her story, I couldn’t imagine how Kim Lord had deeply inhabited eleven of these lives and deaths to make her paintings.
Despite her claims, I wasn’t sure she had.
Still Lives street-pole banners hang all over town now, displaying the least graphic of Kim’s works, a depiction of herself as a living Roseann Quinn, a 1973 stabbing victim with long ringlets and a toothy, innocent smile. The curators had insisted on an image without gore, but the banners have a crimson background. When I drove under a block of them on Fairfax yesterday, the color kept tearing my eyes from the road up into the sky. Kim Lord’s face looked back at me, disguised in paint and the features of a murdered woman.