Still Lives(40)
“Okay,” I say, cowed.
Ordinarily I might show up to help Jayme anyway, but now I’m thinking, Ten o’clock might be the only time Bas’s assistant leaves her cube all day. I hug my bag closer to my body, gathering courage from Jayme’s courage. Whatever happened to her, she doesn’t let it rule her. The elevator shudders and the doors slide open.
“This is a terrible time for you,” Jayme says gently. “You want to take a sick day, I’ll sign off.”
“I want to be here,” I say, and stride out with her staring after me.
Press conference at ten. I’ve got an hour and forty minutes before Bas and his assistant, Juanita, vacate their offices. My stomach is a sack of acid, I’m so nervous, but I tell myself that this snooping is just another kind of copyediting—looking for things that should not be there. I’m watching what happened last week the way I watch the page.
Monday
Bas and stalker seen together by Kim Lord.
Monday or Tuesday?
Kim Lord offers massive gift to museum, negotiating herself out of millions of dollars.
Tuesday
Greg last sees Kim Lord.
Wednesday
My last sighting of Kim Lord, leaving the Rocque.
Thursday
Texts continue to come from Kim Lord’s phone (could be someone else, pretending to be her). She goes missing on her opening night.
The police are so busy trying to nail the angry boyfriend, maybe they’ve overlooked Monday’s meeting and Kim’s gift. Maybe they can’t see the possibility of a cold, calculating intelligence who covers his tracks. A collector who has become obsessed with her. Who panics when she threatens to expose him.
I plug in the flash drive and click through the files again, slowing down at the last five photographs.
The dog is standing on grass and sidewalk. He could be anywhere.
The woman in the last photo sits against a white wall. Her shirt is blue, collared, nondescript. Her gray-threaded hair is brushed, and lipstick darkens her mouth, but there’s something violating about these improvements; they only serve to highlight the woman’s pallor and exhaustion. The photo is dated a week before the opening-night Gala.
A friend? A new subject? The images are not labeled. The woman is looking not at the camera, but at something or someone beyond the photographer.
Should I call Cherie? If I call Cherie, she will requisition the flash drive. If Greg wanted his lawyer to requisition the flash drive, he would have told her to ask me for it. I am supposed to hold on to these images as art, not evidence.
For now.
I remove the flash drive and chuck it deep in my drawer.
When I reach the entrance of Still Lives, I don’t look at the walls. The museum has not yet opened for the day; the galleries are as dim as crypts, and the paintings hard to see. I hurry toward the third room, but I can feel the gazes of the dead following me.
Unlike Kevin, I don’t believe Kim was painting secret messages, but her monumental still life, “Disappearances,” is one of the last things she touched before vanishing. She delivered it on Tuesday with the paint still drying, hours after Brent went over to her studio himself and demanded it on behalf of the nerve-racked exhibitions crew.
According to crew gossip, when Lynne saw “Disappearances” go up on the wall, she stared at it for ten minutes—in disgust? in awe?—and then stomped out of the room.
Still Lives has never been Lynne’s pet show. Its origins on the Rocque exhibition schedule are unclear; Yegina thinks Janis Rocque was behind it, because it was not something our curators proposed. Most of our exhibitions originate from the scholarly agendas of their department—they like to be the ones who decide which artists matter.
Regarding Still Lives, Lynne made her own position clear. In her catalog essay, she professed a faint admiration for Kim Lord’s much-heralded career and her initial concerns about the show’s content and the artist’s self-declared turn away from portraiture. “Still lifes have long been considered a lesser form of art, a decorative or feminine form,” Lynne wrote. “Instead of looking outward to epic characters and scenes, the still life looks inward, to the possessions of a family.” Tables of peaches and flowers. Tables of dead birds. A glass of half-drunk wine. “In Still Lives, Kim Lord has inverted the form, to examine today’s commodification and consumption of the images of female homicide victims.” Lynne steadfastly refused to praise the move, however; I think she felt that no matter what artistic process Kim used, the blood and gore were beyond the realm of good taste.
The text was finished months before the images; Lynne asked Yegina to approve all the copyedits, which, for a control freak like Lynne, was the equivalent of washing her hands of the whole thing.
Now the faces of dead women follow my progress through the gallery. When I reach the threshold of the third room, I realize I am holding my breath. I don’t see these pictures as treasure maps, but, reluctantly, I find them haunting. And like Lynne, I don’t yet know why.
Why here? Why subject us to these scenes in an art museum, when we’ve seen them practically everywhere else? For decades, the spectacle of female homicide has spattered the news. A couple of weeks ago a former actress was found dead in a record executive’s house. Her beautiful face glowed from every crevice of the media. Another blond smiler. Another bloody mess on someone’s floor. We’ve seen her and seen her and seen her. We’ve witnessed victims in every feminine shape, young to old. The child pageant winner with her sexy lipstick, duct-taped and garroted. The teenager abducted from her suburban bedroom. The elderly woman raped and strangled by a stranger she allowed in the door. What we haven’t seen, we’ve read or overheard. How could Kim Lord’s depictions move us beyond disgust and visceral fear, into an emotion that is deeper and richer, freighted with pain for humanity? It’s just paint around me now. Shape, texture. It’s also more.