“I don’t want that record to exist,” she said in the article. “It links the work to me, and I am not painting myself.”
This statement lodged in my mind when I first read it, riding an air-conditioned bus through durian plantations to visit Greg. I am not painting myself. It was a curious thing to say when your entire oeuvre was some variation on the self-portrait. I talked about it with Greg on our lazy vacation in Ko Samui. We were side by side on beach towels, me on my belly, Greg sitting up, reading the magazine. Beyond us, turquoise water lapped white sand and boats droned, carrying tourists to snorkel over dying coral reefs. The heat was making my bones melt. I loved it, yet I still missed America. Greg flipped a page.
“Doesn’t it make you homesick?” I mumbled into my bare arm.
“Some of it,” he said. “Kim Lord’s painting is the best thing in here.”
His admiration rankled me. I propped myself up on my elbows. “She claims she’s not painting herself. But isn’t she?”
“No. She’s painting a subject.”
“A gorgeous subject.” I gestured at Kim’s narrow, girlish body, visible somehow through the male clothes, the posture. “Would her art be so famous if she was ugly? Or poor?”
Greg shrugged, brushing the sand off his legs. But he kept reading.
“She also says that unless women artists simultaneously inhabit the roles of artist and subject, the art world will never escape the prison of the male gaze,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d be jealous of her. She’s on your team.”
My team. I’d told Greg that my Thailand adventure was “a break” from pursuing a career in investigative journalism, that I wanted to apply to J-school once I’d sorted out my feelings about Nikki Bolio’s death.
“I am not jealous of her,” I said. “I just don’t see why she needs to keep justifying herself.”
Greg backed up a page, peered at the image again.
I dropped my head to my towel. Beneath the cloth, the sand made a grainy static in my left ear until it settled into a hard, unstable pillow. I closed my eyes and let the sun drape its flame across half my face. I hadn’t sorted out any of my feelings about Nikki except one: I didn’t want to return to Vermont. I wanted to go back to my own country but live far away from my home state, anonymous, starting over.
“We should move to a big city when we get home,” I said. “A big warm city.”
Something soft and light touched the back of my neck. It was Greg, kissing me.
“We should,” he murmured, and then withdrew. “I’m going swimming.”
There it was, in that moment on the white sand. I said it first; I claimed a future with Greg, the one that led us to Los Angeles. The one that led him to Kim. What happened between us still mystifies me: how two lovers can move to a city, and the city itself wraps around them like vines, pulling them apart, pushing them toward others, until they become so entwined in their separate lives that they no longer recognize what they once felt, or even who they once were.
I sound so young in that memory. So full of sunlight and glittering beach. The only clock the distant tock-tock-tock of the cook cracking coconuts for dinner.
The second time I saw Kim Lord, she and another woman were racing each other on two large mechanical sperm in a wall-to-wall crowd at a gallery opening in Silver Lake. Greg and I stood on the street, too shy to do anything but gawk through the gallery’s big windows. Players at two video game consoles controlled each sperm, aiming them around curving red foam pieces to a dais where a glowing egg waited. The sperm moved with the lurching glide of automatons, but each was covered in chrome that reminded me of 1950s cars. Each also bore a tiny vanity license plate: FINISH and FETISH.
Greg and I knew only two people there: Phil and Spike, the tall, bigheaded identical twin designers that I worked with at the Rocque. The twins were easy to spot: they usually towered over crowds, and as if to further fool with their eerie likeness, they routinely costumed themselves as conquistadors of dork. That night, it didn’t take me long to find them, wearing matching striped one-piece vintage swimsuits and hunched behind the video game console. Together they watched impatiently as a bearded hipster fiddled with the joystick. Judging by their expressions, the console was wired to Kim’s sperm, which was nosing futilely into a wall of uterine foam.
It wasn’t Kim Lord’s show. It was a recent MFA grad’s, and it astonished both Greg and me to see Kim there, like a movie star showing up at your favorite breakfast place (a frequent occurrence in our new L.A. life). But we tried to play it cool, somehow striking up a conversation with the smokers beside us, making dumb puns about being “pro-creative” and speculating about what sort of “donors” had given to this show.
“Think she’ll beat the other sperm?” I said.
“Not if Spike and Phil start driving,” said Greg.
And then, I don’t know exactly how it happened, Greg pulled me inside, got us icy cans of beer from a plastic tub, and suddenly he was next to Phil and Spike, joysticking Kim Lord to victory while I drank my cheap brew in the corner alone. As Greg jolted Kim through the gallery on her sleek chrome tadpole, I watched his face sharpen with something that looked like lust, but wasn’t quite. It was the savage desire to win. To win this crowd of people in their post-punk leather, their trousers and embroidery and heavy black glasses, to be one of them and the best of them at the same time. It happened fast, and then other things happened: a guy came up to hit on me, aggressive and insistent; Greg returned with Phil; Kim came over to meet Greg.
She was smaller in person and not as pretty as I’d imagined, but she had this long, scrutinizing way of looking at you that made you feel noticed. She remembered my name after hearing it once, and when Phil told her I’d just gotten a job with him at the Rocque, she said we should all have a drink sometime, she loved a museum that said screw you to mediocrity. She uttered it in a humorless tone that brooked no laughter or clever retort. Perhaps she was already preoccupied with Still Lives then. She must have started on the work by that point—it was about four years ago—and she must have been poring over the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson, who became the subject of her first painting and the reason Kim eventually wanted to open the exhibition in Los Angeles.
“This city is the magic looking glass to North American culture—it shows us what is most beautiful and passionate about ourselves, and what is most monstrous,” she said later in an interview. “Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder was all three. Her bloody death speaks as much to the obsessions of our society as it does to the violence in one man.”
The second time I saw Kim Lord was the second time I wanted to dislike her but couldn’t. Instead, we became the kind of provisional pals you only meet at parties, always nodding and acknowledging each other, but never really talking. Why would we? What Kim Lord and I have in common could be measured by the teaspoon: a childhood in the North, a tendency to stay quiet while everyone else chatters. Yet sometimes I think I’m the only one in L.A. who understands her: she is not a genius, but she knows how to package herself, how to make it sound like she matters. She looks the part, too—a gaunt, darkening blonde, size four in jeans. She has a neat little way of licking her lips before she speaks. It makes her seem younger, though she never acts eager to please.
Here, at the Gala tonight, I can’t tell Kevin-the-rock-critic any of this, so I just listen to Yegina say that Kim Lord is pretty easy to deal with for an artist who finishes paintings six months later than she says she will. And who refuses to do educational events of any kind because her work is “not for children.” And who always arrives dressed in elaborate disguises and insists on entering the museum through the loading dock.