Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  “You,” said Janis. “They know they’re talking to a private investigator when they talk to Ray,” said Janis. “But they won’t know they are also being watched by a second one during the day.”

  “In other words, you would act as the Westing’s gallerina, but you would be an informant, too,” the detective said. “Eyes and ears for Ray’s investigation.”

  My mind lodged on the last words. Ray’s investigation. Me assisting him. Not my story and not my reporting. Detective Ruiz didn’t see me as an equal in this, not Maggie the copy editor at the Rocque. And why would she? I glanced at Janis, waiting for her to interject, to insist I’d actually be gathering information for my own project—a pitch, an article, maybe even a series of articles. But Janis remained silent, holding the DVD case, staring down into the silver disc. She was going to defer to the detective’s perspective. Cautious inquiry now. Story later. Maybe.

  My face and neck went hot, like the full sun was still pouring over them, but I kept my voice cool.

  “The police aren’t interested in this?” I asked the detective.

  She shook her head. “They—I don’t see any evidence of criminal activity.” Now she sounded like she was weighing her words. “I’m actually here as a favor. To make absolutely sure Janis’s operation stays legal.”

  Ray spoke then, his voice low. “There is some kind of cover-up here. I’ve been digging into this, and it’s clear we won’t get the full facts by going after them directly.” His blue eyes finally met mine.

  I felt the force of his attention now, and it was full of warning. Let the dead go.

  Janis pursed her lips and folded the photocopy of Brenae’s pleading note. Brenae’s eyes had looked so glassy and lost in the video. The voice-over had implied her lover’s power over her. Lesson in Red. The title suggested a teacher, a school. Her position suggested she was being fucked.

  The sun was moving again, its wilting heat climbing my spine. The lunch crowds were filling in, mostly business and lawyer types from Bunker Hill, their conversation loud and self-important. For a moment it seemed like every man around me was looming, in a full suit, and every woman nodding, gazing up at him in some slip of a dress, her bare shoulders exposed. At the same time, I knew it was a mirage. That it was just what my mood made me see.

  “The regular gallerina there is taking some time off,” Janis said, “so you can tell people you’re a temp. Nelson de Wilde has promised to cover any major client questions himself. He was a big fan of Brenae’s, and he’s on board with this.”

  Nelson de Wilde. Hearing his name conjured an instant vision of the last time I’d seen him, in the crowd at The Oasis, a silver-headed man with a cunning, youthful expression and a tan so deep it looked like the sun had soaked beyond his skin, into his blood. He was the powerful gallerist who had once represented Kim Lord and had probably let a greedy collector rig her growing reputation. Maybe he was trying to make up for past failures. Maybe Janis had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  Now the three of them were watching me, waiting for my response. They wanted me to play gallerina while the students built their director’s show. They wanted me to eavesdrop on twentysomethings while I pretended to call clients and process purchases.

  Janis cleared her throat. “May I add one more thing?” she said and named an expensive boutique on the West Side. “You can charge a couple of good suits in my name there. I’ll call them,” she said. “I’ll get you out of your day job, of course. And as I said, you’ll be paid well, by me.”

  “There isn’t anyone else who can do this?” I said.

  I knew there had to be, and this fact made me more reluctant than anything.

  Ray folded one hand over the other, a gesture that reminded me of my father when he was caving in to some irrational request of my mother’s.

  Detective Ruiz said, “Assuredly. I’ve personally suggested some other investigators—”

  “But I personally don’t trust them,” Janis Rocque broke in. “Maggie knows this world. She’s smart and discreet. She worked for Jay Eastman. Her credentials add up. And we’re out of time. The installation begins tomorrow, and one of the assistants is talking about moving to New York. This may be the last stretch that they’re all together. So are you in?”

  “Don’t let her rush you,” said Detective Ruiz. “You can take a few moments.”

  Ray said nothing and kept his eyes on the table, his expression blank. I could feel the others watching me, but I studied him anyway, the subtle lines in his forehead, the slight hunch in his shoulders. I remembered him standing against the crumbly wall of The Oasis, gripping my arm. The fear in his face. I’d never seen it before. You don’t know me, though, okay? Something had made him afraid. And deep down I knew: that fear was why Ray was back in L.A.

  A shadow fell over me, and Ray raised his head; he was gazing behind me, eyes widening. It was our food—three huge trays of fries and sandwiches and salads riding on the shoulders of three waiters, all of them sweating in the white sunlight.

  “Dear God,” said Janis Rocque. “It’s not all supposed to come at once.”

  It wasn’t all supposed to come at once, what you wanted, what hurt you, and what made you want to risk everything, but sometimes it did.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I can help you.”

  5

  I’D SAID NO TO THEM, and I’d left the café without eating lunch because what more was there to say? Janis wouldn’t look at me. When she told her driver to call me a cab back to the museum, her low voice dropped another octave, as if her throat had opened to a bottomless pit. The detective seemed relieved, Ray inscrutable. I hadn’t given them a reason, because I didn’t want to tell Janis that it violated a central principle of my journalistic training to deceive people into yielding up their stories, and though I respected Ray, joining his investigation would not benefit me in the slightest. In fact, for my own sanity, I refused to involve myself in another woman’s violent death.

  On my way home in my own car, I called Yegina and left a message. She was on a plane to a conference in D.C. At our director’s behest, she’d started traveling a lot for the museum, speaking on panels, courting international donors. She came to work now with crisp ruffled blouses, a razored bob, and a new polished attitude that was hard for anyone to say no to. She was climbing, career-wise, and would be intensely interested in the potential downfall of Hal Giroux.

  Regardless of what Janis and her team found, Hal had to be reaching the end of his tenure as director of LAAC’s star-studded MFA program. A show at the Westing Gallery in Venice might be seen as a nostalgic return for Hal, who’d cut his teeth there in the 1960s, in the assemblage and Finish Fetish studios scattered among the oil derricks. Venice was Hal’s origin story, written in sultry beach air and the smell of molded plastic.

  But a show at the Westing was still a gallery show. It was not a museum show. It was the rock-band equivalent of selling out a small auditorium instead of a stadium.

  I had seen Hal often at openings. He was a small man with a beard and glistening brown eyes, his attire neither formal nor sloppy, neither youthful nor old. He wore suit jackets and belted jeans or cords, and rumpled denim button-downs with an open collar. He spoke to most young people in benevolent but scolding tones, as if we were all beautiful children trespassing in his garden. Very few protégés he took seriously. Those, I’ve been told, he saturated with approval and a demanding exactitude so intense that they invariably transformed into stars.

  In his first decades at LAAC, Hal had revolutionized the L.A. art scene by adopting and rearing the scruffy outliers who didn’t fit with the Venice studios’ frenzy for surfaces or with the fine-art standards of the stuffier city schools. Many of Hal’s students had been male performance artists: showy, good-looking, confrontational guys who used their bodies as art, burying themselves alive or rolling around New York inside oil drums. Others had painted, but rarely with paint, or had made video art when video was sti
ll new. Hal’s support had launched numerous careers. As his early students thrived, so did Hal, commanding major retrospectives in London and New York for interactive installations that walked the line between silliness and horror. His 1981 artwork Showers got frequent mentions in textbooks. We showed it at the Rocque once; it was hellish to install—a darkened gallery with four flowing, curtained showers that drained beneath the floor and sent the water up through the heads again. Each illuminated shower hid a silhouetted human figure inside. Beneath the rush of the water, three of the silhouettes sang the same steady, wordless song in harmony. The fourth screamed it. The room’s eerie noise shifted between pleasure and violent discord. It was Gregorian chant, the showers like giant altar candles. It was also Psycho. Visitors loved it.

  But something had slipped for Hal in the past ten years. He was approaching sixty, his shoulders had begun to hunch, and he kept resisting the same premodern convention that art was a made thing, instead of the idea of making in the mind of the artist. Everyone knew Hal commandeered his most talented students and alumni to build his installations, and then took credit for their skills. In the seventies, this was an upstart move, but now it looked like indentured servitude. Meanwhile, a mounting number of women and people of color at LAAC had started to complain about the masculine, bravado-puffed ethos of the school, claiming that its scholarships and grants always went to the same kind of white male.

  No one had ever claimed sexual harassment, though. In all my encounters with Hal, I’d never seen him touch anyone, not even in greeting. He simply didn’t breach the gap between bodies. He materialized right next to people, but he was short and his arms stayed glued to his sides. He popped up, exchanged cutting banter, then vanished and popped up elsewhere.

  “He’s like a social whack-a-mole,” Yegina had muttered to me one night. “Where’s my hammer.”

  Yegina hated Hal because Janis Rocque had hated Hal for decades. The two had started as pals, young groundbreakers with common goals—Janis downtown and Hal in Valdivia. In 1976, shortly after Janis had signed off on a major gift to LAAC, a group of the college’s women artists had transformed every room in an old East L.A. mansion—from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom—into a bower of feminist art. It was called Womb/House. Thousands had come to view it, elevating LAAC to a media phenomenon: the new West Coast art school that was suddenly outshining New York. Janis asked Hal to use her donation toward buying Womb/House so that the college could own it in perpetuity, but Hal refused, saying he had already earmarked her funds for general operating costs. She could give more if she wanted. Janis said fat chance. The installation had been dismantled and lost to time, and a new enmity had sprung up in the L.A. art world. Ever since, Janis and Hal had clashed over the city’s creative future. Personally, I thought the contemporary art scene had largely benefited from the war between them, two titans, each equally mighty. And yet. I couldn’t erase Brenae’s staring face, her voice-over, from my mind.

  As I crept west on the crowded freeway, my phone vibrated. I let it go to voicemail and then pressed speaker to hear the message. It was my friend Kaye, who’d become a birthing doula for Hollywood royalty. At a party at Kaye’s last week, I’d struck up a conversation with an up-and-coming actress. The actress was an intense person, allergic to chatter and self-help advice, and had ended up bored and adrift in a corner of the patio, staring at her wineglass. I knew that she was about to play Françoise Gilot in a play on Broadway, and I knew about Gilot, a painter who had become Picasso’s lover when she was twenty-seven and he was sixty-one. We’d talked for an hour, and then I’d given her my number and told her to call if she ever wanted me to pitch a profile on her.

  Kaye’s excited voice made me nearly swerve into someone’s white Jeep. She wants an interview tomorrow. Noon?

  A wave of stubborn pride washed through me. I could sell a profile on the actress in a heartbeat, to any number of publications. She was on her way to becoming a major star. This was the kind of uncomplicated, sure-to-succeed opportunity that never happened to me.

  Now it was happening. I took the freeway exit for the boutique that Janis had named earlier, parked, and returned Kaye’s call. “Yes, please,” I said. “How’d you do it?”

  “I didn’t! She called me. She really liked you.”

  “But I owe you anyway.” I tried unsuccessfully to thank Kaye for several minutes, and then told her I needed to go. If I didn’t enter the boutique soon, in the flush of my victory, I’d get practical and self-deprecating and change my mind. The rumble and rush of the city rose around me as I slid out of the car, conscious of my sandals on the sidewalk, the steps to my next career. As much as I loved the Rocque, as bad as I felt for Brenae Brasil, I needed this chance. And I needed the right suit, the Tom Wolfe suit, the Gay Talese suit, the snappy, refined costume that said you knew what you were doing, that people paid you well to tell their stories.

  My reflection rose across the window of the boutique, my eager face layering over the immobile features of the mannequins. No living person could lean back at their angles, but their clothes were gorgeous. Even through the storefront glass, the cut and the fabric made a laughingstock of ordinary brands.

  I stepped inside, breathing in the sharp, clean air. It tasted as if someone had polished it, lovingly, molecule by molecule. The racks were few, and the eyes of the clerks roved over me, their smiles judging. They were twenty percent prettier than the prettiest girl I’d known in high school, and almost twice as old. I stepped toward the suits. My hands flicked through a couple of unmarked ones before a clerk appeared behind my shoulder.

  “We usually find options for you,” she said smoothly. “You like this style?”

  I said yes and meekly gave her my size. She nodded as if she already knew it and pointed to a dressing room. There were no price tags, and apparently there was no private shopping. I chose a curtained room with a velvet couch, and there I sat, cradling my car keys, heart racing, wondering how much the garments really cost here. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. I had to be impressive tomorrow.

  Beyond the curtain, shadowy forms moved to and fro across the vaulting space of the boutique. I heard the soft jangle of hangers.

  “Try these,” said a voice, and a pink-manicured claw extended three suits through the opening. I took them. They weighed so little. The soft, melty fabric of the first—olive green—glided against my knuckles. I opened the jacket, button by button, the plastic slipping against the threaded hole. The pants were on when my phone vibrated. Yegina.

  “So?” she said in my ear. “How did it go at lunch?”

  “Hang on,” I said, zipping. “Guess who I’m meeting tomorrow for an interview?”

  “Way to go!” Yegina said when I told her the name. “That’s incredible.”

  “I know. Hold on again,” I said and pulled on the suit jacket. The ensemble fit perfectly. It hugged my shoulders, my waist, my hips. It defined me. I stared at my smooth, elegant self.

  “Where are you?” said Yegina’s voice.

  The clerk, sounding very close, said, “How are things?”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “I’ve just tried on the green one, but you got the right size.”

  “You’re shopping? You?” said Yegina.

  I named the boutique.

  “Damn,” said Yegina. “But what about the meeting with Janis?”

  I told her in my quietest tones about what I’d learned at Café Francesca. “I said no. It’s not the right opportunity for me.”

  I waited for a plethora of questions, but instead Yegina went silent. “You said no to Janis?” she said after a moment. “She was offering you paid time off and free designer suits to do her a little favor.”

  If I revered Janis, then Yegina worshipped her. But still. There was something extra in her voice. A thin wire of anxiety that I’d never heard before.

  “It’s more than a favor, and I’m not the right person for it,” I said. “And now I have this interview tomorrow anyway.�
�� I told her how easily the actress and I had fallen into conversation, how much there was to discuss about her next role, but as I was speaking, I saw Brenae on the bed, her slack mouth jiggling as the man thrust into her. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and the suit suddenly felt slick and heavy.

  The clerk’s shadow passed beyond the curtain. “Let me know what else I can find for you,” she said.

  I undressed clumsily, still holding the phone. “I will.”

  “I want to see the play,” said Yegina. “Maybe if you sell the story, we could fly to New York and get tickets. Just us two.”

  “It’s a deal,” I promised, wondering why she still sounded upset. Was her family okay? Fine. Hiro? Great. He was flying to D.C. to meet her. I asked her what question she thought was most important for me to pose to the actress.

  “Why don’t you ask her what her dream role is?” she said. “That says a lot about a person. Even if they don’t know.”

  “Should I really buy this?” I said, transfixed by the olive suit. “Should I try it on again to make sure?”

  “Of course you should,” said Yegina. “And try it on again at home.”

  Only on the drive back did I wonder what my own dream role was, and if Yegina had meant for me to turn the question on myself.

  IT WAS BARELY THREE O’CLOCK when I pulled up to my sublet in Marina del Rey. My new digs—a one-bedroom flat in a noxiously pink adobe complex with a carport underneath—had the distinction of being available, safe, expensive, and utterly forgettable. I’d found the place after a week of examining worse options—hot little boxes with kitchenettes in Mid-Wilshire high-rises, a top-floor Hollywood apartment with a leering landlord named Don who was a locksmith by trade and lived right below. After extracting myself from Don’s sweaty handshake, I drove past my old bungalow and stared at the blooming bougainvillea beside my stoop, waiting for the Ivy League couple to come out. They didn’t, though once I saw a shadow cross the glass. Clearly, they were happy inside. Silver Lake and Echo Park were total busts for me; every time I made an offer, I was beat out the same day by a trust funder with freshly inked arms and their dad’s cash.