Jayme gives a convulsive little shrug.
“I’m sorry, I—” I begin.
“I always thought it was a scribble,” she interrupts dryly, gesturing at the Twombly. “Excuse me.” She pulls out her phone, dialing a number.
Hiro appears behind Jayme. “Just two more minutes,” I call to him.
Jayme departs, hand to her ear, already deep in conversation. I’m amazed at how she can compartmentalize so fast. I ought to try it. I gesture at Hiro to sit while I scan through the last few names. He lowers himself into a chair and folds his hands. I mention Bootleg, and we joke about their awful food, about filling up at a happy hour before. Even to my own ears, I sound cheerful. Maybe compartmentalizing is the only way to cope this week. Kim’s sister is safe. That should be good news. But, then, who is the woman in the photos on the flash drive?
“So … CJ Gallery—is that what this says?” I ask, tapping the list.
He looks at the list, frowns. “No, CJF. MeiMei wrote that. I think it used to be Curtain, Jug, and Fruit, but they changed their name before they opened.”
“Curtain, Jug, and Fruit?” I repeat. “I can see why they shortened it. Let me check the punctuation, though.”
I open a search engine, make sure the initials have no periods, and hand the whole list off to Hiro, who thanks me profusely and splits. I am about to click on Yegina’s message when the back of my neck prickles. I look again at the search results.
CJF is a brand-new Santa Monica gallery, run by proprietor Steve Goetz. I’ve seen that last name before, but can’t remember where—another donor list?
Curtain, Jug, and Fruit is a painting by Paul Cézanne that sold for $60 million in 1999, making it one of the most expensive still lifes in the world.
Steve Curtain was the notation in Juanita’s planner. Steve at Curtain?
Kim Lord’s hastily painted backdrop in “Disappearances” features a hanging cloth depicting oranges, apples, and jugs. Curtain, jugs, and fruit.
Kim Lord was warning him. Or the rest of us. But warning us of what?
Steve Goetz—proprietor of CJF Gallery, art collector, former Catesby’s consultant, master’s degree from Yates—is burly and dish-faced, with thick brown hair and a flush in his cheeks like he just swallowed a hot toddy. In the photo accompanying one news article, he stands erect, legs spread, in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao, hands in the pockets of his indigo suit. The article is about art philanthropy. Steve Goetz has started an organization called the Patron Foundation to pair wealthy international collectors with individual up-and-coming artists. “Like the microloan movement, but for New Masters,” he says.
A call to my contact at the Yates library turns up his thesis from 1993 called “The Supercollector and the Artificial Artist,” keywords: art market, economy, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Charles Saatchi, YBAs.
The librarian says she has the abstract. Do I want her to fax it?
“Can you read it to me now?” I beg her.
In our new international contemporary art market, the artist’s value is no longer principally attached to the artist’s work; rather, it is attached to other factors such as wealthy collectors, media hype, and the increasing trend to collect “wet paint” artists. This thesis proposes that key individual non-artists (i.e., collectors, critics, curators) may have a greater influence on artistic movements than the artists themselves, and that the future is ready for a new figure, the “supercollector,” to shape a new canon of “artificial artists.”
“Say that again—a ‘supercollector’ …”
“Shapes a new canon of ‘artificial artists.’ Geez. I’ll be an artificial artist if someone wants to hype me,” she says. “Too bad I can’t even draw.”
“It’s disgustingly cynical,” I say, thinking of all the artists I know who would be mortified to be called artificial. “Like the process and the appreciation of art don’t exist, just its market value, which can be influenced at will.”
The librarian makes a noise of assent. “Yeah. It’ll never happen, though. What’s the payoff for being the so-called supercollector? That everyone knows you really are a douchebag?”
“It could happen,” I say. “It could have happened.”
There’s an expectant silence.
“That’s all I’m saying,” I say.
“Really,” she says thoughtfully. “You know, you’re the second person to request that thesis this month.”
“Who’s the first?”
“Can’t tell you,” she says reluctantly. She’ll copy the thesis itself and fax it to me by tomorrow morning.
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.