by Maria Hummel
Lesson in Red
ALSO BY MARIA HUMMEL
Still Lives
Motherland
House and Fire
Wilderness Run
for Margaret Parmelee Hummel
There is a wonderful kidnapped hunted raped and betrayed girl
In fairy tales. She has a name, but the vowels and subjects
Around can’t be switched to fit.
She wants to escape but letters won’t let her.
She never thinks about darkness or dying because they’re natural
And don’t require thought.
She carries her darkness everywhere.
What is not natural
Is being here an utter stranger.
And flight being no metaphor.
—FANNY HOWE, from “The Definitions”
Contents
Cast of Characters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters
The Rocque Museum
Maggie Richter, copy editor
Yegina Nguyen, exhibitions manager
Janis Rocque, founder and chief donor
Hiro Isami, grant writer, Yegina’s boyfriend
Dee Rager, crew manager, Janis’s girlfriend
Lynne Feldman, chief curator
Phil and Spike Dingman, graphic designers, twins
Bas Tarrant, museum director
The Westing Gallery
Nelson de Wilde, gallerist
Hal Giroux, LAAC MFA director
Pearson Winters, former LAAC student
Layla Goetz-Middleton, LAAC student
Erik Reidl, LAAC student
Zania de Wilde, LAAC student, Nelson’s daughter
The Investigations
Brenae Brasil, LAAC student, deceased
Ray Hendricks, private investigator
Calvin Teicher, art history scholar, half brother of Ray, deceased
Alicia Ruiz, LAPD detective
Davi Brasil, musician, brother of Brenae
Nancy and Fernando Brasil, parents of Brenae
Jay Eastman, journalist, Maggie’s former boss
Nikki Bolio, Maggie and Jay’s informant, deceased
Art World
Steve Goetz, collector, father of Layla
Kim Lord, artist, deceased
James Compton, 1990s artist and organizer, deceased
Lesson in Red
1
SOON AFTER I MOVED TO Los Angeles to start a new life, I went to an anniversary screening of Dr. Zhivago in the dark, ornate theater where it had once premiered. Afterward, the art director took the stage to tell some stories about the filmmaking.
“Remember the scene on the moving train,” he said, “where the peasant woman runs and leaps into the speeding car? She’s wearing all that heavy wool, and she almost doesn’t make it up through the doors in time.”
That was because the actress had to do the jump twice, weeks apart. “The first time she tried, she slipped, and the train badly smashed her legs,” the art director said, nodding at the gasps in the audience. So the woman had to heal, and then hurl herself again. The second time, she succeeded. “Her sacrifice was a sign of everyone’s devotion to the movie,” he marveled. “She caught her train, and the scene was saved.”
Yet when they cut the film together, he added, they spliced in the footage from the first take, when the woman knows she won’t make it. You can watch the fear flash and deepen in her face. “You hear her scream,” he said. “The scream is real.”
I could have told this story when people in my Vermont hometown asked me what L.A. was like. But I didn’t. Sunny. Crowded, I replied instead. I saw some movie stars. I miss the fish tacos. I said these things, because it was easier to offer up what my rural neighbors expected. To let them conclude I was over the city, and back in Vermont for good. They laughed and let me alone, relieved to have their convictions confirmed. If anyone probed deeper, I talked about my job at the art museum and my Hollywood bungalow, but the tales were flat and they had no endings, because I couldn’t say the truth. I lost a love in L.A. I almost died there. And hardest of all: For one brief hour, I was certain I had all the clues to save a missing woman, a brilliant and generous artist, probably a genius. And then someone told me she was already dead, murdered and abandoned in a shallow grave.
I did miss L.A., though. I missed it in pieces. Hiking the steep, sunny sides of Runyon Canyon. Eating frozen rosewater topped with saffron ice cream. Ducking into dim bars in Echo Park, loud guitars blistering in my ears. I even missed the rush-hour river on the 101, how it made me stay late downtown for happy hours on hotel rooftops, until the dazed afternoons grew cool and sharper with darkness, under heat lamps and towering skyscrapers. And I’d had good friends in L.A., women, mostly, also living on the sliding edge of our late twenties, torn between who our mothers had been and the career divas we were told we could become. Together, we’d catch our reflections in long windows, those slim, agile strangers gliding to the next block.
But when I thought about my last month in Los Angeles, of the night I had driven across the city, mad with fear, and climbed into my ex’s empty bed and put on his missing girlfriend’s clothes, it made me curl into a tight ball inside. Who was that Maggie, and how had she become so unhinged, so obsessed and reckless? I didn’t want to meet her gaze in the mirror. Yet I knew her well. That Maggie had been inside me for a long time, ever since a freezing spring years ago, when a young woman’s body had washed up on a Vermont lakeshore. The third day I was home, I drove past the bay where my source had been murdered, and my neck ached all the way down to my fingertips, as if I had been holding myself rigid for hours.
One cool night in May, not long after, I found myself in the same bed where I had slept as a teenager, tossing, awake. I had to face down that other Maggie, and I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to confront her alone, so far away. At three in the morning, I rose and went to my parents’ study, quietly closing the door to cover the whistle of their dial-up modem. My fingers typed an online classified ad for my Hollywood courtyard bungalow, offering it as a cheap sublet until September. By morning, I had fifty applicants. At least ten seemed polite, reliable, and incredibly desperate. I drove by your bungalow and it’s so cute. It looks lonely, too. I’ll take great care of it. The more letters I read, the more the apartment slipped from me, and my return to Los Angeles as well. I’d had my shot at L.A. Maybe it was time to give someone else a chance. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the city on my own; I had only ventured there because my ex had accompanied me. The next day, I sublet my bungalow to a couple who were uprooting from Boston and wanted a soft landing. He was a TV editor; she was a private-school history teacher. They had both gone to Ivy League schools, and one of their references was from a modestly famous writer, who adored them and teasingly chastised me for luring them away.
The couple knew that I intended to come back in the fall, but could they have the place until January 1? We know it’s asking a lot, but it would make thing
s so much easier for us.
Let me think about it, I wrote back. And the next day, heart pounding, I said yes.
I told my parents and best friend, Yegina, about the sublet but not the extension. As long as I didn’t acknowledge it aloud, my bungalow was still mine, and I could return to it and to my job when my medical leave concluded at the end of September. At the same time, I left open the possibility that I would not fly west, and that the Rocque Museum would have to fire me. In truth, I dreaded either future: staying in Vermont with my parents, or rebuilding my life in Los Angeles. Instead, I liked to imagine the history teacher, perched on my yellow couch, delighting in the avocado tree on the patio. She might even start gardening a little, setting out terra-cotta pots of basil and cherry tomatoes, glorying in her first California sunshine.
I talked to Yegina once or twice a week that summer, catching up on museum gossip and relating my mother’s perplexingly animated engagement with my hometown’s solid waste committee. We laughed a lot and kept things light. Still, it felt like someone was laying down more miles between us every time we spoke. When Yegina asked me one warm August day when I was returning, I said the same thing I’d always said: late September. But still I hadn’t bought a ticket. I didn’t name a date.
“Still Lives is closing September 15,” she informed me. “We had a big debate about extending the dates, because it’s still drawing a lot of visitors. But Janis wants us to move on. She says we’re not in the business of ‘titillating tourists.’”
I laughed at Yegina’s imitation of our museum leader’s deep, brusque voice, but it was hard to imagine our crew taking down the paintings of murdered women, hanging them on racks in our crowded storage room, shrouded by cloth. All those panicked, lovely, and shuttered expressions, all those Kims looking out from the horror of their deaths, soon to be locked away.
“I thought, maybe, Still Lives was one of the reasons you haven’t come back,” Yegina said tentatively. “It’s been hard for everyone at the museum. Every day the visitors come to see it, we have to keep reliving what happened. But you won’t have to, if you return after the fifteenth.”
“I sublet my place till New Year’s,” I admitted.
There was a pause as the news sank in.
“But your job,” Yegina said. “The designers are already falling apart. The museum can’t extend your leave until 2004.”
“I know they can’t.” I told her how happy the Ivy League couple seemed, how grateful, how eminently successful. He’d landed a position with Universal. She was applying for a PhD at UCLA. They were thrilled by my bungalow’s location and hoped to find a place exactly like it. Hint, hint.
“So you’re quitting the Rocque,” Yegina said.
“No. Not yet, anyway.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re abandoning your whole life here to make a couple of snobby strangers happy.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But I have to practice letting go for real. I have to try it out. So if I go back to California, it’s for the right reasons.”
It was hard to convince Yegina that a Hollywood bungalow rented below today’s market value wasn’t reason enough, but we ended up riffing happily together over the ridiculousness of California real estate. I was relieved that she finally knew the whole truth. She, too, seemed lightened by my honesty, though her voice hollowed when we said good-bye. So did mine.
I hung the phone on its hook, made small talk with my mother, and ate a fresh tomato sandwich. Then I wandered to the creek to watch where a tributary came in, thinking about the scientist who claimed that time could branch, that it could contain two futures at once. All I’d ever seen was the opposite: two rivers blending into one, then another joining from elsewhere, the current deeper, mightier. One stream formed from many: that was time for me. And the present, my present, held multiple, powerful pasts.
“You look stronger every day,” my mother commented to me when I came in, muddy and mosquito bitten. She stood at our kitchen counter, graying blond hair lit by sun, her fists deep in bread dough. “Does your side still hurt a lot?”
“No,” I said, flipping through the mail, letters and bills, none of them for me.
“There’s a cider festival this weekend in town,” she said. “Might be fun.”
I didn’t want to go to a cider festival in town, but I knew that saying this aloud would come out wrong. “I do feel stronger,” I told her sincerely. “I’m grateful for all you’ve done for me.”
My mother gathered the edges of the dough, thumped it, and pushed into it again.
“We’re glad to have you home,” she said. “Does it feel like home?”
“Sometimes.” My voice caught in my throat. “It feels familiar.”
“You still miss California,” she said.
I nodded.
“Do you miss someone in particular?” She kept her eyes on her kneading, but her voice circled me gently.
“No,” I said. I wasn’t lying. The same person had kept materializing in my mind that day, but we weren’t friends. I didn’t miss her. I had no right, no claim of personal relationship. Instead, Janis Rocque was an icon to me, brimming with power and influence. Yet we’d struck up an odd correspondence over the summer, and her last message, this morning, was the most strange and compelling of all.
“How can I help out today?” I asked to distract myself. “Give me a job.”
My mother stopped kneading and regarded me. I could tell she wanted to probe more, but I kept my expression blank and friendly, and she gave in. “You could pick up the drops,” she said, gesturing out the window with a floury hand. “Around the pear tree. I can’t keep up with them.”
BUCKET BESIDE ME, I GATHERED the pears that had fallen from the backyard tree, reaching carefully to avoid the bees that drank themselves silly on the sun-fermented fruit. As the green orbs piled up, I thought about Janis. At Rocque planning meetings, Janis always sat erect, with her feet crossed in practical black flats. The suits she wore—navy or gray, and never a skirt—seemed designed to erase any impressions her body might deliver, and emphasized instead her fierce, ageless face. Her nose was long but shapely, her hair swept forward over a high forehead, and her gaze had the depth of a cauldron. Her alto voice cut through chatter and commanded silence. No one knew what would come out of her mouth: rousing praise or a precise and painful rebuke; art-world gossip; imperious pronouncements, sometimes wise, “We don’t look at great art and think That’s beautiful; we think That’s true,” sometimes bizarrely regionalist, “San Francisco is for gamers and toadies.” But Janis wasn’t a performer. She only talked when necessary. Her dark head cocked to listen to our curators, and bent, frowning over some new report on the Rocque’s depressing finances. She nodded when new staff members spoke up, encouraging them. She steered the museum through the entire Still Lives crisis with firm kindness, transforming my fears at incurring her disapproval into an abiding yearning to impress her.
Back in July, Janis had sent an inquiry into my health, and a request. I know you are off duty these days, but I need the right person to write about Kim Lord. When Still Lives comes down, two of her paintings will be installed in our permanent collection. We need a good wall text to go with them. Nothing sensational, but the facts must be there.
I labored over the assignment for three days and sent Janis the results. She quibbled with a line and then wanted more, and soon we found ourselves in a correspondence that ranged beyond the text to what had happened to us at the museum when Kim was murdered by another Rocque employee, and a rich collector confessed to rigging the artist’s career. In person, Janis would never have opened up so much to me. I was sure of it. But something about my distance and my injury complicated her usual conduct with personnel. She’d seen me carried, bleeding, away from her property. She knew what I’d done. She felt sympathy for me, and she needed to make sense of the tragedy with someone who wasn’t at the museum, walking among all her shocked and hurting staff.
Yesterday, Janis s
ent me a new message: terse, a few lines. She said she was glad that I was returning soon, and she wanted to know if I had gone to Los Angeles Art College and knew anyone there.
No, I wrote back. I have not gone to LAAC or any art school. I am not an artist or hoping to be, though I love writing about art. I once worked for Jay Eastman, and he told me that “you know that you’ve found your subject when it changes how you see the world.” Mentioning Eastman was a little brag. I knew Janis would recognize the name of the famous reporter.
I’m flattered to be asked, though, I went on. To be a graduate of LAAC was, I knew, to be an inductee into one of the most selective art circles in L.A. The small school in nearby Valdivia had produced a long list of stars, from all the way back into the eighties. Our designers at the Rocque went to LAAC, and they have told me terrific stories of the place.
Why? I added. And then I erased the word. It sounded so bold. I wrote it again, a different way. Why are you curious? Erased that, too.
Let me know if I can be of any help, I typed finally, and left it at that.
Janis responded this morning.
Maybe you can, she wrote. There’s a tragic story involving LAAC, and someone discreet needs to tell it. Let me know when you’re back.
2
“ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH AIR back there?” Yegina said, twisting to check on me for the fifth time since we’d left her house in Silver Lake. Huge round sunglasses obscured her eyes.
“If you can call what we breathe air,” I said agreeably.
Air wasn’t my problem in the cramped back seat of my best friend’s yellow Mazda. It was leg room. Yegina and her boyfriend, Hiro, had packed as if they had been evacuating Paris instead of spending a night in the desert outside Twentynine Palms, looking at new art installations. Duffel bags bulged beside me, their zippers straining. Grocery sacks filled with snacks and drinks enough for twenty. And I knew that a large canvas tote held Yegina’s snowy comforter. She couldn’t sleep under hotel duvets. Most hotels washed their coverlets only a couple of times a year, she had informed me once, a statistic I could have guessed at, but then we all have obvious facts we like to ignore.
