I twist the stall lock and step out of my skirt and blouse. The cool air stings my bare skin, and I feel silly and guilty about the washcloth thought. I’ve seen Jayme anxious in recent weeks, but not like this. She and I usually work together on copyediting the exhibition catalogs—I check the text and she checks the images—yet for Still Lives she dumped the whole project on me. This was in January, just after Greg moved out, and only when Jayme found out that he was dating Kim Lord did she apologize for my extra workload.
“I wish I could help,” Jayme said to me, or rather to the pen holder on my desk, because she would not meet my eyes. “But I’m still out on this one. Bas has got too many new irons in the fire, and I can’t keep up.”
And so, while seething at Kim Lord, I had the additional stomachchurning task of proofing the captions for the photos of the famous female murder victims featured in her show. I tried not to let my eye stray to the disturbing spectacle of Judy Ann Dull, sitting in an armchair, wearing a neat 1950s wool cardigan and flared skirt, her ankles and mouth bound by white rope. I tried not to see the chair’s ratty upholstery, or Dull’s wary, regretful expression at being taken in by a dopey television repairman who promised to help her with her modeling career. I didn’t want to see Judy Ann Dull alive and well, because I knew that later she would be dressed in long black gloves and black thigh-high stockings, trussed topless to an X of wood, raped repeatedly, and strangled in the desert by Harvey Glatman, the Glamour Girl Slayer. Dull was only nineteen years old.
If I had trouble looking at one victim and her story, I couldn’t imagine how Kim Lord had deeply inhabited eleven of these lives and deaths to make her paintings.
Despite her claims, I wasn’t sure she had.
Still Lives street-pole banners hang all over town now, displaying the least graphic of Kim’s works, a depiction of herself as a living Roseann Quinn, a 1973 stabbing victim with long ringlets and a toothy, innocent smile. The curators had insisted on an image without gore, but the banners have a crimson background. When I drove under a block of them on Fairfax yesterday, the color kept tearing my eyes from the road up into the sky. Kim Lord’s face looked back at me, disguised in paint and the features of a murdered woman.
“I’ve been having terrible dreams about the victims,” she recently told a reporter. “I’m just … haunted. Write this down: I, Kim Lord, solemnly swear my next show is going to be about bunny rabbits.”
But Kim Lord’s next show is always more dramatic than her last, she who started her career with The Flesh, a reconstruction of a dingy brothel, hung with paintings of herself costumed as both pimps and sex workers.
“By turning every viewer into a john, Kim Lord asked her audiences to question the ethics of their own gaze,” I wrote for our press release. “Viewers paid an admission fee after seeing The Flesh, unusual for a gallery exhibition, and Lord became the youngest contemporary artist to sell her entire first show at a Catesby’s auction.”
Catesby’s auctions are usually reserved for established artists, and Kim Lord could have been humiliated by lackluster bids, but instead she made an enormous pile of cash. She is no dummy, which is why I suspect her absence at the moment is just another of her “groundbreaking” moves to escalate her press coverage and drive more people to the museum.
A sudden vain hope bubbles up: maybe neither Kim nor Greg will show up tonight. And I’ll get to attend the best party of 2003 without them.
I shake the dress until I find an opening. The garment slides over my head and tumbles to midthigh. Jayme’s citrus smell floods my nose. I zip up the side and feel the cloth tighten over my hips, snug but not straining. So far so good. Except that the shoulder straps barely cover my bra, and the front of the dress poufs like overalls. The word lederhosen slinks into my mind.
A creak, the bathroom door opens, and someone enters the stall next to me. I check the shoes. Absurdly small blue pumps. Evie from the registrar’s office. I’ve felt bad around Evie since I let our friendship drift a couple of years ago, and even worse lately. When I became overwhelmed by the Still Lives catalog this winter, she was the one who finally stepped in to help me. Registrars are better than anyone at fact-finding on artworks and images, and Evie took a whole chunk of captions off my plate. I promised to repay her by taking her out to dinner at our old haunt in Little Tokyo, but I haven’t. Evie always wants to ridicule Greg’s new name and ambition, or complain about how fattening our tempura is when she’s as tightly muscled as a gazelle. Secretly I fear that she only needs me to feel better about herself.
I race past the mirror, trying not to see the vaguely Germanic oaf flashing across it, and am almost out the door when I hear Evie speak.
“Your clothes.”
“Hi, Evie.” I bend to grab my castoffs. The leather dress constricts like a snake around my abs. “What brings you up here?” The registrar’s office is off the loading dock.
Her blue pumps twitch. “The crew’s having a party on the roof,” she says. “Watching people arrive and such.”
This would be the opportune moment for Evie to invite me to join the party later, but she doesn’t. The exhibition crew is the coolest club in the museum, mostly young artists who work part-time constructing the shows and part-time on their own projects. They hang out in their cavernous carpentry room near Evie’s office and bust jokes in low, bitter voices about how broke they are. There’s a distinct social disconnect between them and the upstairs office crowd.
“Fun for you,” I say finally. “I got coerced into working.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I just hope Kim Lord actually shows up,” I add. “She’s blowing all her interviews.”
“Fashionably late,” Evie says in a tone of fake cheer.
The toilet roll rattles. At this point I realize I am harassing someone having a private anatomical moment and apologetically take my leave. Jayme’s in the hall, waiting for me, a paper in her hand. She looks calmer now, but she grimaces at the lederhosen.
“Here. Proof this while I fix you,” she says. “And then I’ll tell you your assignment.” She shoves a press release in my face and starts digging in her closet again. “What size shoe?” she says, her voice muffled.
“Ten. With a sizable bunion on the right foot.”
Jayme groans but keeps digging. I read.
Artist Offers Unprecedented Gift
Bas Terrant, director of the Rocque Museum, is pleased to announce that artist Kim Lord is donating the entire exhibition Still Lives to the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition comprises eleven paintings of Kim Lord impersonating murdered females, including Roseann Quinn, Bonnie Lee Bakley, Gwen Araujo, Chandra Levy, Lita McClinton, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia), as well as one monumental still life. Before undertaking the portraits, the artist spent years studying the lives and deaths of the victims. The combined value of the paintings is estimated at more than $5 million. [Here someone had scribbled $7 million?]
When asked about the reasons behind her munificent gift, Lord cited the Rocque’s demonstrated support of female artists and her wish not to profit from these particular paintings. She said she sees Still Lives as a tribute to the victims and as an indictment of America’s obsession with sensationalized female murders.
“I don’t want these paintings ever to be associated with monetary value,” she said. “No one should profit from them. No one should profit from the deaths of any of these women. They are not pinups—they were daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives torn from their lives and their families.”
Terrant expressed his deep admiration for Lord and her work, saying, “An artist of Kim Lord’s talent and generosity comes along once or twice a century.”