Still Lives(57)

I gaze out the window, and then down at the splashing sand of my Zen garden, formulating a plan. It’s hard to concentrate when bile keeps rising in my throat at the thought of someone manipulating an art career this way. The preening superiority of Steve Goetz’s thesis dismisses dozens—no, hundreds—of generations of artists who have dedicated their whole lives to making pictures and sculptures that move us, that make us think, that shape our understanding of the world. To turn that effort into some rich person’s economic operation, to turn Kim Lord into a commodity that only the rich could trade—no wonder she wanted to donate all her paintings. And yet. She was also giving up millions of dollars. It was a courageous choice. Or a desperate one.

I send a quick note to Jayme saying I don’t feel well, and close my inbox without opening Yegina’s message for fear that some fresh worry about her brother will slow me down. I have never left the Rocque in such a rush, flinging the flash drive into my purse, flinging my purse over my shoulder, digging for my car keys and holding them out in front of me blocks before I reach the parking garage. I slam the door, start the car, and roar up through the ramps to street level, hoping not to be seen by anyone from the museum.

I am not seen. Now the lights go red and I take my place in line on Beverly, leaving the sheer, mirrored corridors of downtown for the twostory sprawl of the rest of the city. I love driving L.A.’s east-west boulevards. It always dazzles me: each broad avenue has its own flavor, shaped by pockets of immigrants—Thai Town, Koreatown, Little Tehran—and each one aims toward the sea. Whenever a song from Beck’s Sea Change is playing on the radio, I think I could spend the rest of my life flowing over these passageways to the Pacific.

A calm has descended through me since I got in the car. Or maybe it’s detachment—I’m traveling through space, but I don’t feel entirely connected to it, like I’m entering an ocean mist, everything glittery and indistinct. That’s Fairfax I’m passing, and if I glanced right, I’d see the dusky red-and-brown walls of Bootleg, where we’re supposed to meet tonight to hear music. It seems so far away.

I reach into my purse and close my fingers around the flash drive. I may not need it, but having it with me feels like I have Kim along, and all the hours and heartache she must have poured into making her paintings—ambitious Kim, and then pregnant Kim, Kim the mother-to-be, frightened and angry, knowing in those last days before Still Lives the stakes of her sacrifice: to give up everything she’d made. Vanished Kim. Who must have badly underestimated what could happen to her. I have to be very careful. I have to look eager but guileless. I have to ask the right questions. I don’t need to know everything—just enough to make a case for others to follow up on. Just a piece of the picture. Before it’s too late.


Santa Monica is what I once na?vely pictured all of Los Angeles would be: the palm trees, indoor-outdoor restaurants, views of the ocean, trim green parks. Temperatures sway gently between warm and cool; the air is either muzzy or sparkly. Attractive people lead their Weimaraners on leather leashes. If you deserve the good life, why choose anywhere else? the city seems to ask the moment you pass under its big, blue, invitingly readable street signs.

Instead of this paradise, Greg and I moved into the bustle and grit of Hollywood, on a small street halfway between the old movie theaters reviving themselves and the giant billboards of the Sunset Strip. Every day, going east, we drove past the glamorous edifices of another era decaying over bright, cheesy bric-a-brac shops; going west, we hit the great mirages of commercialization and beauty, slender-legged models fifty feet high, smiling in white sweaters and jeans. Both directions seemed like routes away, and never routes home. Nowhere in L.A. seems like home to me.

I wasn’t raised to deserve anything but my own struggling existence. I grew up down a dirt road next to a family of rednecks whose favorite sport was drinking Budweiser and Ski-Dooing doughnuts in their backyard. When I was twelve, I babysat for them, wiping their kids’ noses and bums for five dollars an hour and a daily assault of dumb-blonde jokes from their Uncle Larry. He called me Faggie Maggie, as in “Hey, Faggie Maggie, how does a blonde like her eggs in the morning? Fertilized!” When I was fourteen I bagged groceries at the A&P; at fifteen I cleaned the cafeteria at the local ski resort. I know the cramps of overworked hands. I know the bored, haggard faces of my supervisors, who were overseeing the same dismal landscape of cash registers and dirty tables at forty because there were no other jobs for them. I know I am lucky to have escaped.

My rust-freckled station wagon rumbles into a parking spot. CJF Gallery gleams straight ahead, a full bank of windows, a gallerina sitting at a desk, a staircase leading up to a loft. The gallerina looks like most gallerinas: young, dark-haired, groomed to flawlessness, her eyes glued to some papers on her desk. The room beyond her looks like most galleries, blank and chilly as an empty refrigerator except for a few paintings hung here and there. And yet. The light is so bright and white inside, it sets the whole scene off, makes it look sinister and fake.

I grab my cassette recorder from my glove compartment. It’s a ridiculous apparatus: black, bulky, clacky, and prone to chewing up tape. Jay Eastman mocked me for it (“Did you get that from the town dump?”), and he made me carry his own little digital machine when I interviewed Nikki. I keep this big one because my father bought it for me one Christmas when I worked on my high school newspaper. Back then, it was a top-of-the-line device. My parents, with three kids and a lackluster income from their elementary school teaching, tended to gift the cheap and homemade. Dad believed I could be a great journalist one day. I don’t know what he imagines for me now.