These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

  “It’s all on my bio,” Marella says, handing her the press materials from the show.

  “It says you grew up in Los Angeles, but you went to middle school in Ojai.”

  Marella raises her eyebrows. “That’s not in my bio.”

  “So Ojai or L.A.?”

  “I lived with my aunt for a few years. Better schools.”

  Detective Perry looks up. “What happened to your cheek?”

  Marella’s hand flies to the bruise. “Boxing.”

  “And after Ojai you went to boarding school.”

  “In Los Olivos. And then to college and grad school in San Diego.”

  “And when did you come back to Los Angeles?”

  “I’m sorry, Detective, what’s going on here?”

  “How often do you box?”

  Marella shakes her head, startled by the directional shift. “Once a week. Maybe twice.”

  “Are you good?”

  “I suck.”

  “Why do you do it? Self-defense?”

  To control the violence. To experience it on my own terms. That’s the real answer, but what Marella says is “Kinda.”

  Detective Perry places her notebook on the desk. “So what I’m trying to do is establish a timeline here. You were gone from Los Angeles from 1998 to 2013?”

  “Pretty much,” Marella says.

  Click. Snap. Click. Snap. Between her gum and pen, Detective Perry is a full-on rhythm section.

  “Listen, Marella, I don’t know much about art, but I’m really wondering about this business of found objects.”

  “It’s from the French practice of objets trouvés—turning things that are not normally art into art. Basically, it’s the art of recontextualization.”

  Detective Perry pulls out her phone and starts tapping on the screen. “So how long have you been boxing?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Boxing?”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “About a year and a half.”

  “So just after you got back to L.A.?”

  “I guess. What—?” But Detective Perry beats her to the next question.

  “Where do you live, Marella?”

  “At home, mostly.”

  “So you live somewhere else, too?”

  The headache is settling in. Her skull feels as if it’s shrinking, compressing around her brain. “Would you like living at home at twenty-five? I move around.”

  Detective Perry glances up from her phone. “You know that you are showing photos of dead women in your show—murdered women.”

  Marella opens her mouth.

  “Is that what you consider a found object?”

  “Do I need to credit the photographer or something?”

  The detective is back on her phone, tapping away like a teenager on Instagram. “You’re twenty-five. You’re good on the internet and social media. I’m sure you know how to do a reverse image search.” She’s tapping away again. The sound of her finger on the phone’s glass is twanging Marella’s nerves. “Everyone imagines that pictures are two-dimensional. But not on social media. Not today, with everyone having a camera and documenting everything at once. Think of it this way—if you see a photo looking in one direction, there’s most likely a photo of someone looking in the other at the same moment. You just need to find it.” Detective Perry turns the phone around and hands it to Marella.

  It’s a Facebook photo. Marella recognizes the setting instantly. The same apartment where many of Julianna’s photos were taken. She recognizes the scene, too—the table strewn with the same late-night detritus that appears in one of her loops—the drugs, cigarettes, booze, Twilight paperback. Except in this photo the angle is reversed, the foreground turned into the background, and behind the table is Julianna holding a phone, capturing the mess in front of her.

  Marella scrolls through the pictures. She sees the account belongs to a woman named Coco, who appears in many of Julianna’s photos. The photos are messy, lazy, with none of the clarity of Julianna’s shots.

  “How’d you get the phone?” Detective Perry asks.

  Marella imagines this is how murderers feel when they are finally caught. Relief. Release. “I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “On the street.”

  “Exactly where on the street?”

  “She lives next door.”

  “Lived.”

  “So between our houses. On the little scrap of grass around a tree near the curb.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that you might have been in possession of evidence?”

  “I didn’t know she was dead when I found the phone.”

  “So you found it the night she died?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you understand the concept of evidence? A woman is murdered and you find her phone on the street. Her parents had the sense to call me right away.” Detective Perry closes her notebook and puts away her phone. “I suppose you think that now Julianna gets to live forever in your work.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Marella admits.

  The detective spits her gum into a wastebasket and unwraps another stick. “It’s real, you understand. The women in those photos really died. They were really murdered. The person who killed them hasn’t been found.” She stands up and heads for the door. Halfway across the gallery, she turns back. “Why are you interested in these sorts of images?”

  “I think I already answered that,” Marella says.

  “You tried to answer, but you didn’t. Don’t worry,” the detective says. “One day you’ll figure it out.” She continues to the door. As she opens it, she stops once more, the door ajar, the rain blowing in. “Marella.” She lets the name hang there for a moment, lashed by the storm. “Marella, do you have any idea who killed Julianna?”

  The question travels across the gallery, a bullet slowed down by a special effect so that Marella has time to observe it collide with her chest, take her breath away. “I—I . . .” Why would she? Why would she have any idea who killed her neighbor?

  “Or maybe the others,” Detective Perry says. “Maybe you know who killed Katherine Sims or Jazmin Freemont.”

  “Why—?” Marella begins.

  “I just thought I’d ask.” The detective pulls out her notebook again, then quickly crosses back to the office. “One more thing.” She’s holding out a phone number scrawled on the lined paper. “Do you recognize this number?”

  “That’s my parents’ landline from when I was little.”

  “That’s what I thought.” And without waiting for a response, Detective Perry exits to the rainy street.

  8.

  THE RAIN POUNDS THE WINDOWS AS IF IT INTENDS TO BREAK them. The gallery is dark. The only light comes from the glow of the monitors and the streaky headlights from cars rushing down Washington. Tomorrow Marella will add Julianna’s name to the tag on Dead Girl #3. “In collaboration with Julianna Vargas.”

  She turns out the lights. She doesn’t want to be visible alone in the gallery.

  The street is dark—the windows streaked with rain. She can barely see out.

  She finds a bottle of wine and tips it into a discarded cup. She’s not sure she wants to go home. It’s probably best to let her parents’ absence go unremarked.

  Detective Perry’s question hovers in the gallery.

  The monitors whir and click. The videos run on their loops. Julianna’s life slides past.

  Do you have any idea who killed Julianna?

  The question opens a door. Summons a fear. Does precisely what Marella hoped her art would do. It upends her sense of safety in a place that is her own.

  She glances around the gallery, checking the corners. She lets her eyes drift to the street. But she can see nothing beyond the window. She feels alone and on display.

  Something shifts along the floor. Marella’s heart catches. But it’s only headlights from an idling car that have reconfigured the shadows inside the gallery.

  She wants to tu
rn off her installations. But that will leave her in the dark.

  Fear is fickle. Last night alone with her work Marella felt nothing but courage and pride. The images were powerful, made her feel powerful and in control. But now she sees dead women. She sees their desperation. She sees they were doomed.

  And what’s worse, she’s turned herself into a victim, filmed herself being chased down the streets, cornered. She thought that by turning her fear into art she’d master it and get the jump on it.

  But she’s not in control. Not now and not when she was making and creating.

  It’s an illusion, a feint. Just like in boxing. For an hour in the gym she can pretend she’s got the upper hand on the impending violence, that by submitting to it on her own terms, she controls it. But the high only lasts until she has to step out onto the street.

  She lets her eyes linger on Dead Body #2—the loop that shows her being chased through the streets from her pursuer’s perspective as she sheds clothes, gets bruised and bloodied, her self scraped away until she collapses. Then she turns to Dead Body #3. The image on the left is Julianna’s face underneath the Larry Sultan banner.

  It’s one of the last pictures on the phone and one of the few that actually shows Julianna.

  It was the one that first caught Marella’s eye—the one that told her Julianna’s images were intentional, not accidental. That she was a photographer, an artist. That she was a storyteller, a memoirist.

  This was the image that inspired Marella to do what she did.

  But now in the disorienting wake of the detective’s question she sees something else in the picture. A woman on a death march. A countdown clock.

  How long had Julianna lived after this photo? Marella could check the file on her computer. But she doesn’t want to know.

  She looks at Julianna’s defiant stare and sees her mistake. She doesn’t own the streets. It’s the other way around.

  Click. The picture vanishes, replaced by another. A white sheet on a bed. A woman sleeping facedown. On her right, a box of half-eaten Winchell’s donuts. On her left, a tipped-over coffee cup, draining pale brown liquid onto the covers.

  The woman’s legs are bare. She’s wearing a short robe. Underneath it a sliver of a teal lace thong is visible.

  This sliver of lace—this suggestion—that’s what turns the watcher into a voyeur and makes her feel as if she’s seeing something she shouldn’t. It tempts the eye higher, makes it crave more, makes it confront its carnality.

  Marella stares. She can’t help herself. Her eyes travel from the depression between the sleeping woman’s legs up to the hem of her robe where the lace is a bright light in the shadow. Her gaze lingers, prying, frustrated at the limited reach of the photograph.

  And then, as she’s staring at this woman’s body, wanting to see more than she should, a man’s face appears. It materializes on the screen, perfectly framed in the center of the photo. His eyes are hidden in the dark spill of coffee, but he’s there. He’s gazing out from the picture—an apparition, staring directly at Marella.

  She screams and turns from the monitor. Her heart is galloping.

  Now, through the dark onslaught of rain, she can see her mistake. The man isn’t staring out from the monitor, he’s staring into the gallery from the street, his face captured and reflected in the glowing screen in front of Marella.

  She doesn’t want to, but she shades her eyes and squints out into the dark street. There’s no one there. She turns back to the monitor, which is now showing a picture of a woman removing her makeup in a cracked mirror. All she sees is the photo.

  She checks the window once more but sees no one.

  The door to the gallery rattles. Someone is knocking and pulling on the handles.

  “Marella!”

  She is startled by her name.

  “Marella!”

  For a moment she thinks she’s imagining it.

  She takes a deep breath and shades her eyes so she can see beyond the glass.

  Roger. Her father. Standing in the rain, his bushy, graying hair plastered to his head, his beard dripping. “Marella, are you going to open the door?”

  For a moment she is too stunned by this apparition of her father to move. A day ago he’d been in one of his fugues, barely capable of eating, unable to acknowledge Marella or her mother. And now, here he is back in the world and calling her name.

  Marella fumbles with the deadbolt.

  Roger enters with a gust of wind and rain.

  “I missed it,” he says. “I lost track of time.”

  “That’s okay. You’re here.”

  Marella tells him to wait. Then she fetches a towel from the back and watches as her father shakes the rain from his hair and shoulders and brushes it from his beard. She flips on the overhead and the room comes to life. The colors on the monitors recede.

  Roger looks up from the towel. His eyes are animated.

  “So,” Roger says. “This is it. This is what you do.”

  When was the last time Marella had been alone with her father? She can’t remember. Anneke was always there.

  Roger hands her the towel and glances at the installations.

  “Mom didn’t want to come?”

  He’s peering across the room. “So that’s it?”

  “Where’s Mom?” Marella asks again.

  “Tell me about all this. You made this?”

  “Mom didn’t want to come?”

  “I don’t know,” Roger says. “I just left.”

  “It’s better if you look at it up close,” Marella says. “From over here it’s just a bunch of monitors and screens.”

  Her father doesn’t reply. It’s almost as if he doesn’t hear her. He moves away from the entrance toward the installations. He starts with Dead Body #1. He stands in front of three stacked monitors. Marella wonders if he recognizes the beach behind their old house in El Salvador.

  She’d paid for the trip from a grant she’d received at SDSU that funded works of art in Central America. She never told her parents about returning to La Libertad.

  She expects him to spend a few polite minutes in front of each of her works and move on. But Roger is watching. He’s seeing. For a full five minutes he doesn’t move from Dead Body #1, his eyes absorbing the videos on each monitor in turn, giving them their due. He’s patient. He has the eye of a collector, a critic.

  “You like it?” Marella didn’t mean to ask such a needy question. She knows it’s not what you ask about art, ever. It’s not a meal you’ve prepared, a scarf you’ve knitted. It’s not meant to please.

  Roger doesn’t answer. He just keeps his eyes on the monitors.

  “Dad?”

  Marella is tempted to shake him.

  “Dad?”

  “Who’s that?”

  Marella follows his gaze to the bottom monitor.

  “Who’s that in the video?”

  “On the bottom?” She can’t believe she even has to answer this question because it should be so obvious, especially to her father of all people. “It’s me.”

  “What’s you?”

  “On the screen, that’s me.”

  He doesn’t take his eyes from the monitor. “You.”

  “You remember the dead woman in the water in El Salvador?”

  Roger turns from the monitor. “But that wasn’t you. That wasn’t you at all. She was just some whore who came too close.”

  Whore. Marella’s never heard this kind of language from her father. Sex worker. Prostitute. But never whore. “Too close to what?”

  Roger doesn’t answer. “Now the world has seen you naked,” he says. “I don’t like that.”

  It’s not exactly the world. But Marella doesn’t correct him.

  She wouldn’t have made this piece if she had a problem with people seeing her naked, her parents, friends, anyone else. Her art desexualizes her, takes away the thing that makes her vulnerable. It’s barely her body or a body at all on the screen. It’s an erosion doused in blue
paint—a reversal of the piece she’d performed at the fund-raiser for the derelict mansion. It’s not a celebration, an invitation, or a taunt. It’s the opposite. It’s the aftermath.

  It’s supposed to revile, repulse, repel the suggestion of decay and violation. But that’s not how her father is looking at it. His eyes are hungry—each ladle of blue paint that covers Marella is a disappointment.

  “Your body doesn’t belong to others,” Roger says.

  “You sound like Mom.”

  Marella steps behind the monitors to get a better view of Roger’s face.

  He’s staring at the video the same way she’d been looking at the photo of the woman lying facedown on her bed, the flash of teal lace inviting the eye to want more. The teal thong excavating a dirty desire.

  He’s not watching the loop the way you are supposed to look at art—appraising, critical, considering—but the way you look at something when you are alone, when you permit yourself the impure thoughts of lust and disgust.

  “Dad? Daddy?”

  Car tires skid, shriek, and slosh. There’s a squeal of brakes.

  “Dad.”

  Roger looks up. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the world away from the monitor, to dial Marella in.

  “Interesting,” he says.

  His voice is distant, like the echo of a voice. The wind and rain batter the windows. The world outside the gallery seems far away. There is only the gallery, the installations, Marella, and her father.

  He’s looking at her strangely. Marella backs closer to the wall behind the monitors, hoping Roger will move on to the next piece. There’s a twang in her nerves, a premonition that anticipates impact.

  His eyes are roving over her body. She’s not sure whether he’s trying to reconcile the woman on the screen with the daughter in front of him or if it’s something else.

  “Dad?”

  Marella folds her arms over her chest, rounds her shoulders, caves inward.

  A dark look clouds Roger’s face as she tries to shrink away.

  “Dad, what are you looking at?”

  “You,” he says. “I’m looking at you.”

  Marella squirms against the wall, driven there by her father’s stare. “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t. Not like that. The work’s not sexual,” she adds. “It’s challenging. That’s the point.”