Still Lives

Then Kevin asks how we decide which artists get the green light for shows at the Rocque, and Yegina goes into another long-winded answer.

“It’s a pretty collaborative process, except when your director forces something down your throat,” Yegina finishes, loathing in her voice. “As in Art of the Race Car. Next year, September 2004. I kid you not. George W. Bush will be running for reelection, and Bas wants to park a Corvette in front of the museum.”

For years, the brilliant shows at the Rocque have made up for other failures in Yegina’s life: the museum’s failure to promote her, Chad’s failure at staying faithful to her, and, most of all, her parents’ failure to understand any of her artsy, leftist, cash-poor choices. I half wish that her brother gets rejected by med schools again so that he can share the burden of disappointing them.

“And then Bas wants to tear down this building and make something huge,” she adds. “He doesn’t understand that people actually find us because we’re a break in the skyline. We’re at a human scale.”

A break in the skyline.

I remember the last time I saw Kim Lord. It was yesterday, almost lunchtime, and I was heading downstairs to grab Yegina for our toning class at the gym. As I held the rail, gazing out on my favorite view of the avenue below us, I caught sight of a woman in a platinum wig and trench coat, hurrying downhill, away from the museum and toward Pershing Square. She jumped as if something had startled her, patted herself, and then kept hustling west. In that moment, I didn’t register what I was seeing. Scarcely a day goes by in Los Angeles when I don’t witness something odd on the streets. But the woman was Kim Lord. And she was fleeing the Rocque.

I excuse myself to use the restroom, which is inside the building. As I totter through the increasingly younger outer circles of the dinner tent, I catch sight of manicured hands cupping glasses, smooth bare legs extending from slitted dresses, unbuttoned tux collars, gleaming watches. I hear snatches of conversation.

“Her shows are never worth the hype, but I still want to see it.”

“When was her last one, when Reagan was president?”

Kim Lord’s Noir exhibition had bombed so badly that it shadows her reputation almost as much as her early success brightens it, and there are some, possibly many, here who expect to be underwhelmed again. Another night, their derision might privately cheer me, but now I’m glad when I make it out of the humid clouds of talk to the cooler, grittier open air of the underpass.

The dock looms like a tomb. It used to be the basement for the police-car garage. The architect retrofitted the walls and beams to be earthquake-safe and extended the museum’s underground level two stories so that we could use the same delivery underpass as our neighboring skyscrapers. The Rocque’s remodel is considered a subterranean masterpiece, because the architect retained the drama of the old walls and arches while making the space much larger and more modern. Our garage door is forty feet tall, and when it’s up, as it is tonight, you see a dark cathedral of art crates and shelving, the thresholds that lead to the registrar’s office and the carpentry room, and another massive door at the back, where much of our permanent collection is stored.

Security guys in white shirts stand, arms folded, all over the dock, but they don’t recognize me and I don’t have my badge or an official wristband for the evening. I bob along them like a horse looking for a break in the fence until I find Fritz, our main daytime dock guard, a short, robust, close-shaven guy who sports tinted glasses and a friendly air. Fritz likes me because I helped his daughter with her college essays last year and she got into UCLA. He beckons me in with a smile, and I pass into the underground vault of the Rocque, with its smells of fresh carpentry and old paint. I cross the hard cement floor and hide in the restroom, unzipping my boots down to the ankle to pop out my complaining feet.

My toes flex, prickling. They feel like little knobs pounded into the ends of my feet. Kim Lord should be at the Gala by now. Her absence is a wind, invisibly touching everything. The last time I felt this sensation was six years ago, the cold spring day when Nikki Bolio, my source, was found dead on the shore of Lake Champlain.

I hear the bathroom door swing open, and two guests talking.

“Hurry, okay?” says one. “I don’t want to get stuck behind a massive crowd. I hate craning my neck.”

It must be seven already. Still Lives is open for viewing. Starting with tables one and two, guests may take the freight elevator up to the galleries, or they can take the long way, walking up the staircase and coming in through the museum’s front doors.

I shove my boots back on and hobble from the restroom and into the shadows by the staff elevator. Moments later, Janis Rocque and the rest of the head-table guests flood the loading dock.

Is Kim Lord finally among them? No. Neither is Greg. I hang back to watch, trying to imagine which group a stalker would infiltrate.

First come the wild gray heads of the renegade artists who once carved out studio space among the oil derricks of Venice Beach. They built their art from junk piles and car paint and light. One got arrested for obscenity and some died, but a surviving few have become rich old men. They chuckle and nudge each other, and their eyes have a sharp brightness; they know they are the youngest people here.

A more proper, more resplendent group follows. These are the male board members: CEOs, bankers, music industry magnates who have spent their lives leading meetings and driving up profits. Although their looks range from svelte to plump, they all have the same restless gleam, as if they can’t help jockeying for power, even now.

The last cluster comprises the women on the board and the wives of the men. Mostly platinum-haired, graceful, and over forty, they fall into two categories, the born rich and the born beautiful, rarely both at the same time. An occasional young, foxy girlfriend dots the landscape of older bodies, and she trips along self-consciously in high heels, smiling hard. Of the three groups, only this last one shows any anxiety at Kim Lord’s absence; I catch sight of a couple of ladies glancing back over their shoulders at the glare of the party, and another tightening her silky wrap as if chilled.

Tailing all these groups is one misfit, walking alone: a dark-haired guy, early thirties, with a mustard-colored corduroy suit jacket thrown over jeans. There’s something familiar about him. Not familiar as in we’ve met before, but familiar in type. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s from somewhere rural and East Coast. Overdressed for the warm night, underdressed for the occasion. No interest in fanciness except to flout everyone else’s high opinion of it. His blue eyes look sleepy, as if someone just woke him up and dragged him here. He sees me staring and gives me a wink. I look down at my aching feet, first embarrassed by my scrutiny, then irritated by his cheek. He clearly didn’t dress to blend in.

The massive doors of the freight elevator slide open. In its day, the freight elevator has carried paintings the size of pools and an entire crumpled Volkswagen. It’s hallowed ground, this scuffed metal box; along with thousands of artworks, this freight elevator has lifted L.A.’s reputation, putting our city on the map of critics and collectors. But the cabled mechanism also rattles and lurches, and the interior panels are in dire need of replacement. The guests file in, dwarfed by the elevator’s size. In its silvery light, their faces and bodies are suddenly blank and interchangeable, except for their leader, Janis Rocque. She wears the stoic scowl of a human about to enter an alien spaceship.

Where is Greg? I’m surprised he isn’t keeping up with his crowd.

There’s a flash of blue and tweed beside me: Yegina and Kevin, looking breathless.

“Come on, we can take the staff elevator. Everyone’s walking up the staircase way. They don’t want to wait,” says Yegina, waving her all-access badge on the security pad. “It’s going to be mobbed.”





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