She’s almost tearing up over her sewing needle, so I explain. My friend Kaye has survived throat cancer and she’s throwing herself an official fete. I Survived Cancer. Join Me on My Gallop Back to Health.
“Her words,” I say. “It’s at some ranch in Griffith Park. We’re supposed to ride over the hills at dusk, eat dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and then ride back.” I’d debated about making an excuse not to go, since Greg is also friends with Kaye and a couple of weeks ago he RSVPed yes for two. I retaliated by RSVPing for two as well. I didn’t have a date until I successfully coerced Yegina.
“Griffith Ranch? I’ve been on that ride,” says MeiMei. “Make sure you get a mellow horse.”
“Or what?” says Yegina. Her brows are furrowing.
“They have to have mellow horses,” I say. “Or they’d be out of business.”
MeiMei regards both of us before continuing. “It’s just a long way in the dark,” she says.
An awkward quiet falls. I know Yegina wants me to release her from her promise, but I need her tomorrow. I don’t want to be out alone on winding roads.
“That private investigator guy’s been watching the loading dock all afternoon,” Evie says in her soft voice. “He just sits there. Maybe he thinks the stalker’s going to show up.”
And then we’re sliding into the same conversation we’ve been having all day, all over the museum and outside it, too. About the rumor of the stalker. About Kim Lord’s theatrical nature, how she often had some performance element to her exhibitions. About the large still life I didn’t view last night, the one called “Disappearances.” (“She changed the name on Monday,” Yegina tells me. “I didn’t want to bother you for one label.”) Our voices grow hushed, and we are bending closer together like conspirators, knowing that beyond these walls the press and the world await the news of what will happen here, at our museum.
After a while, it grows clear that my friends are of two camps. While Jayme and Yegina believe something ominous has happened to Kim, the rest are hopeful that the disappearance is a stunt. It doesn’t surprise me that the groups would divide this way, given Yegina’s usual cynicism, Jayme’s anxiety about the show, and the others’ tendency to heroworship artists and invest them with intentions and capabilities far beyond a mere mortal. I am the only one on the fence. Kim Lord hasn’t even been missing forty-eight hours, and given her oversize, confrontational approach, I agree with my pals and Kevin that she might have another performance up her sleeve. But it’s hard to ignore the cold, blank fear that flooded me last night in the exhibition, or the tone of the artist’s statements in the press release. She didn’t sound like she was planning to vanish.
Evie thinks Kim Lord might be leading us to another set of paintings, somewhere beyond the museum, representing all the women murdered outside the media spotlight. “For all the Jane Does,” she says with a smirk. Sometimes the way Evie contributes to discussion reminds me of Nikki Bolio—she speaks to the air in front of her, with a self-conscious twist of her lips, as if her utterances are aimed at some invisible, judgmental third party. Maybe it’s how you learn to talk when you grow up afraid of the place that raised you—in Evie’s case, a series of abusive homes in small-town Northern California. The few stories she’s told me make me both sad and impressed by her current job, her loft across the river, her neat olive suit and chunky beads.
“I did see her leave the museum in a rush on Wednesday,” I say, and tell about my view from the stairs.
“I wonder why,” says MeiMei.
“She never made it to the galleries,” Evie confirms. “She just got upset about something and left.”
“I don’t know how she handled it, frankly,” says Jayme, looking surprised to be saying something.
“Handled what?” says Yegina.
Jayme turns a page in her Oaxacan cookbook, glares at a new recipe. “Making that whole show,” she says.
No one knows how to respond to this comment, not coming from Jayme, whom we all admire, and who is so private that she works out at a different gym from the rest of us and never stays at happy hour for more than one gin gimlet. Even trickier, we do know what Jayme means—what it must have cost Kim Lord to inhabit these murders—yet saying it aloud strips away the safe armor of our own intellectualization, the same armor that got us through the Jason Rains show on capital punishment, when we each allowed ourselves to sit in a lethal injection chair and watch the syringes come closer. Still Lives is art. Art should shock us. We work at the Rocque.
Silence falls over the table, but we keep knitting and sewing, and the needles make tiny clicking and piercing sounds.
“I bet the police will turn up something soon,” says Lisa.
“Motivation,” says Yegina. “That’s the first thing on my mind: Why would anyone want her missing?”
Motivations are misleading, I think. Only after all the evidence is in, after you unearth so many little hows, can you try to piece together the great why.
I’m about to say so, when Dee announces that boyfriends are the likeliest suspects, and that Shaw Ferguson looked shocked and miserable last night.
Here we go.
I feel everyone’s eyes on me now. They all know he dumped me. For her. Their collective sympathy is the hardest to endure. I knit harder, the yarn scratching my fingers.
“I thought he looked awful, too,” says Evie. “Like he hadn’t slept a wink.”
He did look awful.
“Greg Shaw Ferguson is too much of a narcissist to kill someone,” Yegina says.
He also looked deeply afraid.
“Oh well. That leaves Maggie, right?” Dee says. “The jealous ex.”
Dee clearly means it as a joke to clear the tension. I should have my own clever retort, but I don’t. My mouth tastes stale and hollow. The dread I felt in the galleries is carving through me again. I stare down at my hands, shoving the needle, ripping a new loop.
“Low blow, Dee,” Jayme says.
“This is what I was trying to avoid,” Yegina mutters.
One warm winter day in our first year in Los Angeles, I was driving the 101 with the skyscrapers streaming past on my right, the hills on my left, when I felt the city—really felt it—for the first time.
I was en route to the Rocque, my radio tuned to indie twang, my skirt tight over my thighs, my sunglasses heavy on my nose and just starting to slide on the sweat, and it happened—the sensation of metropolis—expanding me like a balloon.
I passed a parking garage under construction. Out of the corner of my eye: giant steel girders, ramps, and levels. When this is finished, I thought, two hundred people will come every day to slide their cars into these spots, and I will never know a single person by name or what troubles them, and they will not know me, and if two hundred more take their place, I won’t know that either.
I—who’d grown up in a Vermont village, who could identify every local family by name or habit—was now surrounded by so many thousands, millions, they could only be specters. Ever anonymous to me, and I to them. The isolation almost made me choke.
That was the painful part of my awakening.
After that, exhilaration. The road opened like a sea. I could be anyone speeding down it, not the daughter of my parents, the sister of my brothers. Not the girl who struck out at bat her entire first year of Little League. Not the teenager who sang a torturously earnest a cappella rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” in the school talent show. Not the Rocque newbie who brought maple-bran muffins to a cocktail potluck. And especially not the unknown young woman who sat outside Nikki Bolio’s funeral in her car, weeping uncontrollably.
All those old, encumbering selves slid away, leaving me feeling exposed but light, too, as if it were suddenly possible to float.
When I’d reached my office, I’d called Greg. “What’s wrong?” he said when he heard my husky voice. “Has something happened at work?”
“No, I just …” I paused. How could I explain the tingling in my skull, as if I had just hatched from a shell? “I could be anyone here. I just realized that. And it terrifies me.”
“Why?”