Still Lives(6)
I tried hard to avoid this occasion on account of my post-breakup bitterness, but now that I’m here, clad in my cutoff Nazi mermaid garb, I’m fearful and glad at once. I didn’t expect how the late-afternoon glow would spill down the staircase to the upper avenue, making a grotto of the Gala’s lower entrance. A small gauntlet of paparazzi flanks a second red carpet at the bottom. Mostly doughy, bearded men, they squint into the intense last half hour of sun, when L.A. seems to get the whole country’s light in one concentrated dose before it fades. As the first guests descend past them, the paparazzi take a few shots, then lounge, cameras dangling loose on their chests. No one from Hollywood has arrived yet. Neither has Kim Lord.
In the black-carpeted cocktail area, vestiges of the old murder theme linger, making my stomach twist into its third or fourth knot tonight. A stalker would be right at home here. Bare lights, resembling those in interrogation rooms, hang from poles above the tables. The centerpieces blister with lilies and scarlet roses. Even the appetizers have a corpse-like color scheme: caprese salad with its red tomatoes and white cheese, rare beef toasts, some smeary fig-paste chèvre concoction that resembles an infected wound.
Unable to eat any of it, I chug two glasses of sparkling champagne, trying to pick out my PR assignment. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead playing the pleasant media escort; I would have expected to be the young, aggressive reporter nosing out the story. But here I am, balancing in Jayme’s high boots with a fake smile on my face.
I need to find a fellow named Kevin Rhys from ArtNoise.
“Artwhat?” I’d asked Jayme.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jayme said. Kevin is writing a cover story for a new magazine funded by Mindy Allen, the daughter of a wealthy New York collector. “Development wants to hook them as a sponsor. Be nice to the guy. Just got here from the East Coast. He wants to meet all the players.”
All the players? Our annual Gala draws hundreds of elite tastemakers: the people who make art, the people who buy and sell it, the people who opine about it, and the people who long to belong, which includes most of the museum staff, and random rich people, actors, scuzzballs, and politicians. The cocktail area is filling with well-dressed folks, but I don’t recognize any. So many of them look cut from the same mold: the men trim and spectacled, the women like forty-year-olds from the front and sixty-year-olds from the back, their faces feline and taut, their hands spotted and wrinkled. No suspicious figures that I can see, though I doubt Kim Lord’s supposed stalker resembles the gaunt, goofy male I’ve constructed in my mind, an amalgam of the killers who stabbed, strangled, shot, and beat the victims of Still Lives.
My eyes stop on a familiar huddle: Yegina standing with Brent Patrick, leader of the exhibitions crew, and Lynne Feldman, our chief curator.
Lynne’s gothic good looks always stand out in our crowd, as if she alone among us has never stepped foot from our cool white galleries into the abrasive L.A. sun. She is showing her cell phone to the others with a reprimanding look. Reprimanding is one of Lynne’s three signature expressions (enraged and reverent are the others), and it usually indicates that she is politely and heroically restraining herself from pitching a fit. No other curator on the West Coast has organized more significant solo exhibitions than Lynne Feldman, and no one at the museum is more difficult to work with. Artists tend to regard Lynne as a figure of almost godlike generosity and vision, while coworkers go to such extremes to avoid her that some (okay, mostly Yegina) walk up the stairs and take the elevator down to bypass Lynne’s office on the way to the coffee machine.
Lynne’s crimson lips shape the words seven o’clock. I’m guessing that she has heard from the artist. Seven. Kim Lord will be here in time for the end of dinner, then. So why are the others shaking their heads?
Just as I’m stepping closer to eavesdrop, I see a tall, stocky guy weaving through the crowd with a notebook in his hand. He is wearing tweed. He is wearing tweed, leather loafers, and a full beard, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the tiny black stem poking from his breast pocket belongs to a tobacco pipe. The Angelenos glide apart for his passing like aquatic creatures in the presence of a clumping land animal. I have a hunch that he is my Kevin, and I go to rescue him.
He surprises me by shaking my hand warmly when I introduce myself.
“You work here?” he says. “Doing what?”
As I tell him briefly about my role as the museum’s writer/editor, he yanks out his notebook and scribbles. “Sweet job.”
I’d gladly trade, I think. Even as I do, I feel the grief and the inertia that have kept me from trying to be a journalist, pitching editors, gathering clips.
“What do you think of the show?” he says.
“I haven’t seen the actual paintings yet,” I admit. “The crew doesn’t like to be ogled when they’re hanging them. But some of the reproductions are … intense.”
Kevin pauses his note-taking to regard me. In an interested and possibly flirtatious manner. I don’t experience this often in my day-to-day existence. Less than fifty percent of the museum employees are men; of those, half are gay and a quarter are married. The other quarter tend to date cocktail straws.
“I saw the Black Dahlia one,” Kevin says. “Is intense a highbrow euphemism for freaking disgusting?”
“Highbrow euphemisms are my stock-in-trade,” I say. I ask Kevin about his own gig, and he tells me he’s here from New York for a week to get the inside scoop on Still Lives. He hasn’t done much art writing; he’s more of a rock critic. But he knows the magazine publisher, and she likes his style.