Still Lives(35)

Yet Greg genuinely didn’t seem to know about Kim’s plan until I told him, and his reaction would be typical of any gallerist. The donation makes terrible business sense, short term and long term. Even if Kim can swallow the financial blow, she will sacrifice a pivotal reputation-building moment with collectors eager to purchase her work. It took years for her to complete this show. The Kim Lord I know is deeply ambitious. And her gift to the museum flies in the face of a main objective of artist and gallerist: to develop a wealthy and steadily more glamorous provenance.

Provenance is the chronology of ownership of a work of art. Who owns what. Who bought what from whom. The record of exclusive possession. Ownership is listed on every wall label, and it’s written in a history that accompanies every object when it’s sold. If a famous collector buys a sculpture, that sculpture will sell for a higher price the next time it goes on the market, sometimes hundreds of thousands more. Dealers know this. They keep long waiting lists of purchasers so that they can control who gets what, and which sales are known to the press. In Britain, collector Charles Saatchi practically made the career of Damien Hirst when he bought the artist’s first major animal installation, a glass case with maggots feeding on a rotting cow’s head. Saatchi later paid for Hirst to create his famous formaldehyde shark. Public display of the works catapulted them both to fame. And some could say that Hirst made Saatchi, because if Saatchi ever sells the shark, he’ll probably get millions. The artist-dealer-collector triad is a symbiotic relationship, soaked in cash. Most of the time, the transactions happen behind closed doors.

Who owns Kim Lord’s work? Who wants to own it? Could a collector have frightened her with his demands, with his obsession, enough to make her decide not to sell any of Still Lives? It’s not easy to find the right information to illuminate the situation. Kim’s gallerist, Nelson de Wilde, might know, but he would never share anything about his clients, and sometimes, especially when an artist’s value is declining, different gallerists and consultants can sell a piece several times in quick succession, and it’s hard to keep track of who owns it.

My cell starts buzzing. It’s still lying on the floor, where I dropped it after I hung up on Yegina, and I have to strain to reach. The number on the screen has a New York area code. Kevin. Reluctantly I answer.

“Can’t tell you anything. I mean nada. Cherie doesn’t breach her clients’ privacy,” he says. “But can we meet somewhere cool? I’m flying out tonight and I want to give you something.”


For a repository of dreams, the Chinatown wishing well is a surprisingly dumpy sculpture: a hunk of lumpy grottoes, smiling gold Buddhas, and blue-lettered luck signs. The well resembles an altar instead of a hole, and although it’s supposed to replicate some famous cave in China, it seems more like a shrine to a bygone era when Chinatown bustled with actual Chinese residents. Pennies and pigeon droppings scatter the tin cups placed in front of WEALTH, LOVE, and VACATION. Nearby, shops sell bamboo plants, brass tins of tea, and hoary brown roots in big barrels. In the distance, the freeways carry constant streams of cars downtown. Yet here, by the well, it is perpetually hushed and still. Whenever Yegina and I walk past it on the way to our favorite dumpling shop, I feel like we are walking sideways through time, that we are connected to neither past nor future.

I’m staring at the sign for LOTTO, wondering about my choice of meeting place, when a penny sails over my head and plinks a metal cup.

“I got it in SUERTE,” a voice says from behind me. “What’s suerte?”

Kevin’s wearing his tweed again, but it works tonight because there’s a chill, and because he’s going home to New York.

“Luck, I think.”

“Why is everything else in English and SUERTE’s in Spanish?” he says.

“Suerte sounds luckier, I guess.” I pull out my pennies and aim for MONEY’s metal cup, missing wildly.

“You in shock?” Kevin says.

“Yeah. I mean, I just saw Greg last night. Now he’s in jail.” I explain about the ranch, the ride, the fall, but not my drunken outbursts. “He’s not guilty. He didn’t even care that they were searching his gallery and studios.”

We chew over the known details of Kim Lord’s disappearance, though I still don’t tell Kevin about the press release and Kim’s intended donation to the Rocque. I secretly think Kevin knows something about Greg that he’s not telling me. “Did your sister tell you if there’s going to be an arraignment tomorrow?”

I understand a bit about police procedure from Jay Eastman, who was tracking the arrests and prosecutions of the drug dealers in Vermont. The fact that it’s Sunday today changes the usual timetable and gives the cops extra hours with Greg, but not many. They could hold him overnight, but if they’re not going to charge him by Monday afternoon, they have to let him go.

“No idea. My sister is a vault,” Kevin says, but his voice rises.

He’s lying. I wait, hoping.

“You’ve given up on your Aimee Semple McPherson theory,” I say.

“Entirely.” He looks grim. “I think the head box in ‘Disappearances’ is Colleen Stan’s,” he says. “Homemade torture instrument made by the guy who abducted her.”

The head box? Homemade torture instrument? Just two days ago, Kevin was deep into his theory of Kim Lord cunningly staging her own vanishing. Now he’s decided on a different story in the same painting—the giant still life I have yet to view. It makes me skeptical that there’s anything to find.