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.
I set up the machine to record and slide it in my purse, but I can’t muster the nerve to leave the car. I shouldn’t be doing this alone.
As if she senses my presence, the gallerina glances out the window. Her eyes travel over me, assessing and dismissing my car, then the person inside. The coldness in her gaze demoralizes me. I flutter in my purse for my drugstore lipstick. My lips redden in the mirror as if someone has just pumped blood into them. I look childish and middle-aged at the same time.
Did Kim want to keep her baby? She was thirty-eight, almost on the brink of too-late.
Did Steve Goetz make her afraid? Say he did spend fifteen years coldly collecting and planning, building to his great statement about Kim’s career as his own artwork—what would he do if she found out and tried to unravel it all? Would he stop her any way possible? Would he benefit even more if she died?
I won’t go into the gallery without knowing there’s someone waiting for me on the other side. I try Yegina, but her phone’s turned off. I try Evie, but I only get her voice mail. “I think I’ve found something else. Call me,” I say, and hang up.
I need to reach a real voice, to set a time when I should be arriving somewhere. Reluctantly I pull out Ray Hendricks’s card, stare at it for a while, heart pounding. Finally I dial.
“Yes,” he says in almost a whisper.
“Uh, sorry, did I wake you?”
“Maggie. Hold on. I’m in a movie.” I hear the creak of a chair, the blare of a soundtrack, then a hush. “Did something happen?” Then traffic. “Are you all right?” He sounds genuinely concerned.
“I just—you said—if I was ever—” I can’t tell him where I am yet. “There’s someone at the Rocque I’m worried about.”
“Yes,” he says.
His seriousness alarms me. “What were you watching anyway?”
Hendricks mumbles something.
“Did you just say Piglet?” I say.
“Piglet’s Big Movie,” he says in a resigned voice. “I’m screening it for someone.”
So you have a kid, too, I think. Apparently everyone has a kid these days.
“My nephew,” he adds.
His nephew. The son of his deceased half brother?
How was it? I intend to ask about the movie, but it comes out, “How is he?” I cough. “I mean, do you think he’ll like it?”
“Even at the tender age of five, he might find it beneath him.”
“I always liked Piglet,” I say, stalling.
Hendricks makes a noise. “Your point?”
“What?”
“Your point in calling me?”
“Can you meet me at Luster’s Steakhouse at five? It’s a few blocks from the museum. I can’t talk here.”
Hendricks doesn’t answer immediately.
“I’ll be there,” he says, his voice retreating from the phone as if he’s writing something down. We say awkward good-byes, and then I jump out of my car and charge toward the gallery before I have time to change my mind.
The air is so cool and sharp inside that it hurts my nose to breathe. Everything has a hard shine in here, the glass frames on the wall, a sculpture made of broken test tubes, the red nails of the gallerina, now clicking away at a keyboard. I stroll to a couple of paintings, pretending to look at their bold, simplistic lines, working up my courage. Then I reach in my purse and click the record button on my machine before approaching the desk.
“I’m here to see Steve Goetz,” I say to the gallerina, who is ignoring me with a deep intensity.
She types a few more sentences before turning. “Your name?”
“Sheilah Graham,” I say.
She starts typing again.
“I’m here from the Rocque.”
The gallerina smooths a single brown hair back into place, stands up, mutters “Excuse me,” and slowly climbs the stairs to the loft. Her dark suit ascending through the white space reminds me of an insect mounting a wall. When the gallerina disappears through a door upstairs, the silence thickens. I am recording it through the muffling leather of my purse, and I know that if I listen to it later, it will sound like nothing, a blank interval of time. But the sensation of it now is heavy and textured, like sand.
A quick exchange of voices. The door opens again, and he is standing there, looking down on me, tanner than in his photographs. He has broad, high brows, the shadow of stubble, puzzled eyes.
“Yes?”
“I’m here for the profile,” I say brightly. “For the Rocque’s members’ magazine?”
He frowns. “Is that on my calendar?” he says to his assistant.
She peers at her computer. “I don’t have any record of it,” she says in a brittle voice, darting a nervous look at him.
“Juanita told me she set it up for three o’clock today,” I say, doing my best to look very young and very crestfallen. “I’m sorry. Is there any way? I have a deadline—”
He gives an exasperated, wouldn’t-you-know-it sigh and gestures for me to climb the steep steps, no railing, each one lifting me farther away from the safety of the door to the outside. I feel like I am ascending into a hive.
When I reach the top, Goetz calls down to his assistant. “Do get us some coffee, will you.”
She looks up. From this angle, her once flawless face looks mousy and frightened.
“Oh, that’s okay—” I say.