Still Lives(41)
Until now, I’ve avoided Kim’s portrait of Judy Ann Dull, victim of the Glamour Girl Slayer. It’s the main feature of the third room: Kim-as-Judy is wearing only underpants, gloves, and thigh-high stockings and is bound to an X of wood, her blond head slumped, bare breasts exposed. The life-size painting hangs low on the wall, so you can stare right into the victim’s shuttered and drained face, her eyes closed, her skin glowing against a black background. “I can’t tell if she’s dead or still alive,” Evie said to me about this image when she handed the catalog pages back, and I wondered the same thing, then and now, looking into Kim’s depiction. It’s impossible to tell if Kim-as-Judy has perished already or simply lost the will to respond to another torture. She just sags there, strung by her wrists.
I hate this artwork. I hate the abject powerlessness it projects. I hate it because it reminds me there is an end for women worse than death. I will not look at it again.
I exhale and turn my gaze to the monumental canvas hanging on the back wall.
In the weak sun from the skylights, the painting looks like someone’s overloaded buffet table, strewn and heaped with objects and fruits. The colors glow with a lushness absent from the rest of the exhibition, but here, too, red appears more than any other hue. I am halfway across the room when I finally discern a woman’s shape underneath the chaos. As with the photo on the flash drive, she is lying facedown, as if someone has flung her to the table. She is all contour, her body covered in a rough gray robe, her head thrust in a dark wooden box. The only spot of bare skin is her white, exposed neck. The neck pulls my eyes back, again and again, even as I try to catalog the rest of the things Kim Lord is showing me:
A gold blanket.
A book marked 5￠.
A bloodstained screwdriver.
An empty bottle of absinthe tipped on its side.
A cloth hanging behind the figure, a cream-colored curtain, alternately patterned with jugs and fruit.
A heap of apples, one of them split and lying open, showing its pale meat and seeds.
The old-timey radio microphone with a cross on it.
A toy bicycle with an oddly numbered license plate leaning in one corner.
That white neck.
A clock.
That neck.
I open Kevin’s notes and read about the five-cent notebook that eleven-year-old Florence Sally Horner stole from a store in Camden, New Jersey, prompting a pervert who witnessed the theft to tell her he was an FBI agent. If she didn’t follow him, he’d have her arrested. He then proceeded to make Horner his sex slave as he traveled across states, masquerading as her father. May have inspired Nabokov’s Lolita, wrote Kevin.
The bottle of absinthe and the robe: Favorite libation of Elizabeth Smart’s captor, who dressed her in a burka when he took her in public.
The clock: The passing of time. Significance of no hands? You’re out of time when you’re dead?
The apple: Symbol of female sexuality. Cleft apple = woman’s reproductive parts. Also, implied violence.
The screwdriver: Could be the weapon used to kill Carol Jenkins, a young black woman stabbed in the chest while selling encyclopedias in a white Indiana neighborhood (1968).
I fold the notes and just look at the painting: at once artifacts of opulence and of pain and debasement.
I don’t see what Kevin’s decoding can possibly add up to. I step closer for one last study, when I notice something odd.
There was no drape behind the figure in the flash-drive photographs. Kim had set up no curtain, no backdrop at all. Instead, the space behind her body was a blank wall. This section of the painting doesn’t have the classic Kim Lord exactitude. The curtain behind the figure is smudgy, the brushstrokes less precise than in the rest of the canvas. Oranges, apples, and jugs decorate the fabric, but they, too, seem hastily applied. Oranges, apples, and jugs? What can those mean? And why do they seem painted in a hurry?
Evie is alone in the registrar’s office, stroking her nails with her thumb while staring at her computer screen. In the artificial basement light, she has a pale, stoic appearance, like someone guarding a bunker. She’s changed a lot since our first day at the Rocque. We met at orientation. We made the quintessential provincial pair: me in a floral cotton sundress and chunky sandals, and Evie in the cheap gray pantsuit and white blouse of a supermarket manager. Neither of us looked like we belonged at the museum, where half the staff slinks around in svelte black, the other half in steampunk or couture.
As we waited outside the HR office that day, I smoothed my wrinkled dress and made awkward small talk with Evie about summer movies and their infinite depictions of the apocalypse by stray meteor, aliens, and global epidemic.
“You’re so calm!” Evie said to me after a while, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the end of the world or our new jobs.
“Not inside, I’m not,” I said. I asked her where she was from.
She shrugged. “All over small-town California. My mom moved us around a lot, depending on the guy.” Then she gave a hard little laugh that I didn’t understand until later, when she explained about Al, her stepdad, whose more-than-fatherly interest in her spurred her to run away.
Evie liked dropping hints about herself and her tragic past, and I liked alluding to my own secret reasons for leaving the East, but there was a game to it, where neither of us would ever fully explain the truth. Sometimes, in our early days at the Rocque, we would take coffee breaks outside by one of the many corporate fountains and smoke her cigarettes, staring pityingly at the bankers around us while we made cutting remarks about their predictable lives. But we never said much about what had been different in our own. It was as if we were living in a Raymond Chandler novel, and confessing anything sincere would make us less interesting, too gushy, too feminine. We both needed to pose as savants of cool to feel like we belonged in L.A. I’d never had a friendship like this, and it fascinated me, especially because Evie dressed like she wanted to belong, body and soul, to an insurance agency. And then Yegina entered the picture, and I found myself with a real friend, someone who needed me and, later, who lifted me from my own misery.