He smiles. “Thank you all for coming out to celebrate Kim Lord, the Rocque, and the gift”—he lurches and grips the podium, as if he has for a moment lost his balance—“we are bringing to Los Angeles for the next three months.”
He hasn’t announced the real gift. The millions-of-dollars gift from Kim Lord, courtesy of her donation of Still Lives to the Rocque’s permanent collection. I search for Kim’s gallerist again and spot him holding his fork, about to spear his frisée and beets. For some reason, Nelson’s tan, metallic look always makes me think of prosthetic limbs, things that are made to look natural but are creepy instead, and also more durable. He sneers and shakes his head, briefly, as if disgusted. It’s an odd expression for someone whose prize artist just got heaped with critical praise.
Bas returns to his seat in a storm of applause. His wife pats him on the shoulder. She is a predictably pale blonde with a talent for smiling without seeming friendly at all. I’ve heard a rumor of divorce. Does she know Bas may lose his job?
I reach the PR table and relieve Jayme so she can ply the most impatient reporters with extra bottles of champagne. Yegina comes over in a tight blue dress and combat boots and sinks down beside me.
“What was that?” she asks in an impressed voice.
“What?”
“Maggie Richter grabs handsome stranger’s hand just as ex Greg approaches,” says Yegina. She can’t bear to call him by his new moniker either. (“Shaw,” she said scornfully. “It’s like a cross between a soap opera name and a tractor brand.”)
“Handsome stranger is called Kevin. I was afraid we were about to be devoured by Thalia Thalberg,” I say. “Clearly she hasn’t eaten since 2001.”
“I wish you were edible,” says Yegina. “I’m starving.”
I laugh. She waits, gazing at me with her gray-brown eyes. Yegina has carried me through my breakup, as I bolstered her last year during her divorce from Chad, the bitter end of a long string of white surfers, skaters, and Tibetan Buddhism majors that she has been rescuing since age sixteen.
Now Yegina has given herself over entirely to Asian speed dating and singles nights at her parents’ church, but every fellow she meets has some fatal flaw. Humming when he drives. Absolutely silent in bed. Never heard of the Dead Milkmen. Mispronounces Ed Ruscha’s last name. Bad teeth. Too-perfect teeth. Doesn’t know the meaning of ennui. Yegina needs a guy who gets her, and that’s hard to find. There’s a large class of men who can’t endure humor in a woman.
“Anyway, what did our beloved chief curator show you on her phone?” I ask.
Yegina confirms that Lynne got a text from the artist announcing her arrival at seven o’clock. I tell her what Jayme told me about a possible stalker.
“That’s creepy. No wonder she’s been showing up in disguise,” says Yegina.
“Though why can’t she disguise herself as Margaret Thatcher or something?” I ask. “Why only dress as starlets? She’s practically forty.”
Yegina shrugs but doesn’t reply.
My fingers find my little butterfly earrings and twist them. I wish I could rid myself of this poisonous jealousy. At the head table, Kim Lord’s absence looms at Greg’s left elbow, and Greg himself is looking worse and worse, his cheeks rough and red, as if he shaved them with a dull razor. In times of stress, he forgets to take care of himself. He was a stubbly, hollowed wreck the month after his mother died.
I watch Janis Rocque lean across the table and start interrogating him, which is the conversational equivalent of being whipped around in the locked jaw of a pit bull. I have witnessed Bas being berated by her through the glass door of his office, and Greg now has the same eye bulge, as if he is forgetting, second by second, how to breathe. Dark-haired J. Ro—with her masculine suits, enormous cash flow, and abrupt, decisive manner—is CEO, patron saint, and mercurial monarch of the L.A. art world. She is greatly beloved by many and feared by more. Although the Rocque is just one of her projects, it’s been the core of her vision since the 1980s—that L.A. will not play second fiddle to New York, with its entrenched and historic art scene, but will seize the future by taking risks, supporting art that surprises people and forces them to self-examine. Those of us who love the Rocque believe that if we fail, it’s not just the museum that will go under but also the potential of our city and what it could become.
Regardless of the Rocque’s fate, J. Ro’s public censure could be a big blow to Greg’s gallery. Before I feel sorry for him, however, I remind myself that he chose this fate, this attempt at life among the ultrarich. You can’t succeed in art dealing without such effort.
After a few minutes, Greg stares down at the table, silent and rigid. J. Ro yanks out her phone and wanders away to make a call.
“You guys hungry?”
I look up to see Kevin standing over us, holding three dinner plates. Why am I blushing? I duck my chin and stare at the ink stain on one of my fingers.
“Half the paparazzi are heading out,” he says. “Apparently there’s a premiere in Hollywood.”
“Thank God,” Yegina says. “Sit down.”
I don’t think I am hungry, but when Kevin slides the plate in front of me, I eat the salmon and asparagus gratefully, ignoring Yegina’s raised eyebrow.
“Hey, so have you met the artist?” I hear him ask. “What’s she really like?”
5
The first time I saw Kim Lord, she was a picture in a New York magazine. My mother had sent me the magazine in a care package to Thailand, and, even more than the little jar of crunchy peanut butter and packets of Oreos, the glossy pages made me miss America. I missed our messy, mixed-up country, and I missed our media, the blustery way we talked about one another, our constant cultural introspection. I must have read the issue twenty times: the brief newsy dispatches about Dolly the Sheep and The English Patient’s odds for Best Picture, the music and book reviews, and four long articles, full of a bustling culture far away from my decrepit teak house in the Thai countryside. One of the long pieces was a profile of Kim Lord. It featured a photo of one of her paintings—which was actually the painting of a photo she had destroyed. The writer made much of this esoteric process from photograph to self-portrait, which I found mostly befuddling at the time. Instead, I was moved by the figure: a young man smirking in a cutoff T-shirt, tattoos, his neck hung with chains, a cold, evaluating look in his eye. “Pimp #1,” he was called. He was also Kim Lord.
The article said that Kim Lord was born to a wealthy Toronto family, a child of private schooling, piano lessons, and high teas. She spoke perfect French. She won a poetry recitation contest for performing Portia’s mercy speech from memory. Then she broke away from bourgeois life in her teens and went hitchhiking and train-hopping around the United States, and was accepted to art school at the Cooper Union. She spent a year among New York prostitutes and pimps, and then moved into a studio for two weeks and wore disguises and took photos of herself until she got the exact poses she wanted.
With her own self-portraits as subjects, she started the paintings, sometimes capturing herself with exacting realism, sometimes with expressionistic techniques that washed her blurry and indistinct. The day all the paintings were done, she destroyed the studio photos, erasing the only record of herself as a living subject. In the early years, she burned her films and negatives, but once photography went digital, she put all the images on a flash drive and smashed it with a hammer. She emphasized the importance of this last ritual, likening it to a kind of honor sacrifice.