Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  So I started scouring farther on the West Side, into the boring grids and bland, agreeable, beach-adjacent wealth scorned by many of my Rocque friends. The sea layer cooled the heat the closer I got to the Pacific, and my temporary home’s location on the rim of Venice’s posh single-family homes meant that there was only a wall and a gate surrounding the property, and not bars on the windows. At night, I could hear someone’s kid practicing trumpet. It reminded me that once, a long time ago, I’d lived among families.

  When I got out of my car, I tasted dust and the flat, stale air of a city that needed a storm to freshen it. No rain for months. Even the West Side was slowly baking to dusty, pastel kindling. A week ago, the smog was so thick downtown that the morning light had turned as orange-gold as evening, and when I’d strolled up the steps to the museum at nine, I’d had the odd feeling that the day was done and I ought to be heading home. Today was the opposite. I was home already, and I wished I was still at work. The afternoon had left me jittery and I didn’t want quiet and isolation, but here I was.

  The olive-green suit floated like a wing behind me as I took the stairs to my second-floor flat. The suit cost a whole paycheck and a half. But I would look better than I ever had before in L.A., and I needed that.

  I unlocked the door to my hodgepodge decor. A plush blue sofa plumped beside a knockoff Eames dining room set. Lamps jutted in corners like twin rockets. Black-and-white photos of empty sidewalks hung on the wall. The sunlight in the apartment made the least effort and offered the most comfort—the long windows boasted no view but a busy street, yet they cast a lovely glow across the rooms. The woman who had sublet the place to me was a single, globetrotting airline food consultant who was gone for long stretches. She was groomed to the last cuticle and name-dropped her visits to international cities with a determined pleasure. And yet there were three dressers in the bedroom, a lot of expensive matching dishes tucked away in a closet box, and it was clear she’d owned a cat—the sofa was scratched. I wondered if she’d had a different life once.

  I grabbed my stack of notes and sat down on the couch to page through them. In a few days, the actress was going to New York to play the real, still-living Françoise Gilot in a Broadway production of Pablo Picasso’s life. At age sixty-one, in Nazi-occupied Paris, Picasso had wandered up to two attractive young women sitting at a café table and offered them cherries. One of them, Françoise Gilot, was an emerging painter with a gallery show. Gilot had a luminous face—a long nose, dark eyebrows, and lush dark hair—and an intellectual and emotional fearlessness that drew Picasso to her, and she to him. They became confidants, then lovers, and later Gilot became the mother to two of his children. She also famously dumped Picasso in 1953.

  In one of my fantasies, the actress and I would eat our requisite salads with dainty sides of grilled cheese and share our secret, abiding love for Gilot. Centuries of Western Civilization have seen many female beauties, geniuses, and queens, but only the most powerful, lovely, or prolific have made it into history books. Gilot happened to be all of the above, and she carved her own path despite Picasso’s vindictive attempts to squash her career. “If you attempt to take a step outside my reality . . . you’re headed straight for the desert,” he said when she told him she was leaving him. “And if you go, that’s exactly what I wish for you.”

  Lying on the couch, I lingered over a splendid photo of Gilot and Picasso on the beach in Antibes in 1946, early in their relationship. She walks ahead of him, beaming, in a straw hat, a narrow-waisted beach dress, a necklace of chunky white shells. Her arms swing, her head is thrown back, her hair falls to her shoulders. Behind her follows Picasso, hoisting an enormous umbrella, its white fringe shining in the sun. Picasso, too, wears a smile, but the lines of his aging face make it a frowning smile, his eyes darkened with dread.

  That Antibes beach photo and I had a long history. I’d once had it posted on my wall at college. I’d hung it in honor of a mentor whom I’d loved desperately, and without return.

  Teague had been my TA. At the ancient age of twenty-five, he had presided over my discussion section for a European art history class. A tense, short, muscular guy with red hair and a flat gaze, Teague had been prone to wearing the same jeans and ratty canvas sneakers daily, while his shirts shifted radically between obscure heavy metal bands and uniforms from the many blue-collar jobs he’d worked. His voice was low, rich, and emphatic. When I closed my eyes to think about him at night, I never saw Teague; instead, his voice came to me, its mutters and rejoinders, the way it goaded me to think harder, think harder.

  There’s more here, Maggie. Whenever Teague said those words, I felt the sharp prick of my own insufficiency. Naturally I wrote my paper on Françoise Gilot. Teague praised it warmly. In our last class, I told him I was thinking of getting an art history degree, maybe specializing in postwar Paris.

  “Why?” Teague said. “What are you, Maggie, a freshman?”

  I nodded, stung by the scorn in his deep, brutal voice.

  He scrunched his nose and sighed. “Gilot isn’t an end. She’s a means. She’s a reason to engage in your world. This world. Here. Right now. Don’t lock yourself away for her sake.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me then that Teague had been probably talking himself out of his PhD, and soon another blue-collar T-shirt would be added to his rotating collection. At the time, I’d merely assumed he’d seen through my transparent attempt to appeal to him. I’d thrown the Gilot essay in a drawer and ripped down the photo, never to think about them again until a couple of weeks ago, when Kaye had brought up the actress and her new role.

  Sitting there, holding Gilot’s smiling, tilted face, my own young, raw longings came flooding back. I had loved her book and her work, but I had listened to Teague’s advice. I’d studied journalism. I’d paid attention to this world. My world. It had led me to Jay Eastman, his book on the drug trade in Vermont, and then the murder of Nikki Bolio, and a lot of running away, until I entwined myself in Kim Lord’s case last spring so deeply that I almost didn’t get out. The one thing I should avoid now was studying another woman’s death. I knew that. I knew it like I knew the sound of my own name.

  “I’m glad I said no,” I said aloud to the photos of sidewalks on the wall. My voice was loud and hollow, as if having no listener had punched a hole in every word.

  But then I tried to picture a pretty, ineffectual not-me sitting in the gallery, talking to Ray afterward, and I thought about Gilot and how she refused to be afraid. She didn’t scare at the judgment of her friends and family. She didn’t fear Picasso. She didn’t care if the world rejected her for leaving him. She made her own brave choices.

  I slid the Gilot picture to the bottom of the stack, made a mushroom barley soup, and dug around for a Jane Austen novel to read while I spooned up the broth. At twilight, I unlocked my front door, checked the empty street, locked the door again, tugged the handle, went to each window to verify each bolt, and pulled the shades low, as I had done every night since I’d moved in. Then I read more until I dozed, trying to block out the memory of Brenae Brasil’s eyes in the video, how they winced, went blank again, winced, went blank.

  6

  THE BUZZER WOKE ME, AND I lurched up from the couch, hair matted to my cheek like seaweed. Fumbled with a lamp. It was eight thirty at night. Not too late for a mistaken food delivery.

  I pressed the intercom. “Hello?”

  “Maggie.” A man’s voice, flattened by the speaker. I couldn’t place it. Then I could. But how did Ray know my address?

  “I need your opinion on something.” His words sounded hasty. “Just tonight, I swear. Come with me. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to go anywhere with Ray. Or rather, I wanted to go exactly nowhere with him. Ray was a where I was successfully avoiding.

  “It has to do with the Rocque,” he said. “It’s important.”

  What could Ray know about the Rocque that I didn’t? I asked him.

  �
�I’d rather not shout it on the street.”

  “Fine,” I said. One night. “I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

  THE AIR WAS COOL AND dry when I emerged, the sky rubbed orange by thousands of lights, the wind carrying a slight tinge of smoke. I hadn’t been out after dark since the trip to Wonder Valley, and instantly missed the nocturnal openness and possibility of the desert. I missed the way the band’s chords seemed to touch the horizon. Here, every noise layered upon another noise: loud horn, tire screech, the creak of the car door that Ray opened for me.

  I’d resisted fixing myself up for him, and wore minimal lipstick, a T-shirt, and jeans. Ray slid in next to me, also dressed casually. I tried not to observe the way his bare bicep swelled out his T-shirt sleeve when he switched gears. He didn’t look me over either, except once, to make sure my feet were in before he shut my door. There was some discordant song in another language playing on the stereo, and Ray turned it low.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Ray named a club in West Hollywood. “Brenae’s brother is in a band. I was hoping we could catch him on a break between sets. He blames LAAC for her death.”

  “I’m not participating in this, though.”

  “I know.” He sounded guilty or nervous, I wasn’t sure which. “I just need your advice on something.”

  I wasn’t sure how giving advice constituted not participating, but I didn’t object to hearing some music. I’d been to the club a few times, for bigger shows. If its fifty years of performances could have been recorded by its wooden walls, it would have been a World Heritage Site for musicologists. Elton John. Joni Mitchell. Guns N’ Roses. Already I could sense its dank, vaulting interior, the glow on the drums, the dark headstones of the amps.

  “You doing all right?” Ray said as we nudged east on Venice.

  Was I supposed to answer that truthfully or not?

  “I’m here,” I said. “Keeping busy.”

  He glanced at me. “You were asleep at eight. You’ve got a couch-pillow line on your face.”

  “It’s a big couch,” I grumbled. “It takes up half the apartment.”

  Ray smiled at this, then shot into a gap. He had impeccable reflexes in traffic. He was also the kind of driver who hawked his mirrors, minding the road behind him as obsessively as the one before, scowling at tailgaters, and flashing his brakes. It amused me to watch him.

  “What?” Ray said, looking over.

  “Nothing.”

  “You know any recent LAAC grads through the Rocque?” he said. “I mean someone who could be discreet.”

  “Some,” I said, thinking of several coworkers. “I can give you their names.”

  “Much obliged,” he said.

  “Was that it?” I said, my hand on the door handle. I obviously wasn’t getting out, but I wanted to give the hint. “The advice you needed?”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. The headlights of an oncoming car illuminated his face, and he looked suddenly skinned by the glare: stark and pale.

  “What then?” I said.

  “There’s something you should know about Janis,” said Ray.

  My memory rewound to the meeting at the café, Janis’s hesitation, the drop in her voice, and her and Dee’s sudden, inexplicable absence in Wonder Valley. “Is something wrong with her?”

  He glanced over at me, his mouth grim.

  It was hard to form the words again. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She has breast cancer,” he said. “Stage two. But it’s been aggressive.”

  My whole body went icy and rigid. I stared at the glove compartment, the light scratches on the gleaming black vinyl. Its little silver lock. It was as far as I could look.

  “I didn’t figure I’d be the one to tell you,” he added, sounding genuinely sorry. “But if you didn’t know . . . The thing is, she didn’t expect you to say no today.”

  “Who else has heard this?” I said.

  “Just a few people,” said Ray. “Dee, Bas. Me and Alicia.”

  “Yegina,” I said. Yegina knew. On the phone, she’d sounded like she was already grieving. Of course she was.

  “Probably,” agreed Ray. “Not much escapes her.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, even though all the way back in Wonder Valley, when I’d seen Ray’s face for the first time, I’d known something was off.

  What did Janis matter to him? He talked of her like an old friend.

  What did Janis matter to me? It wasn’t just me; it was us. The museum. Her approval, her leadership—how could I calculate how much we all lived for it at the Rocque? Janis was our brave, intelligent, idiosyncratic presence in L.A. She was every exhibition we’d ever had.

  “You ever dig into the Rocque’s history?” Ray said.

  “I wrote a short book on it a couple of years ago for our twentieth anniversary.”

  “Who owns the land that the building is on?”

  “Well, that’s one of the great things about it,” I said, puzzled by the question. “The city rents it to us for ten dollars a year. Janis’s father paid for the construction costs, but without the city giving him the land, the museum would not exist.”

  He nodded. “Any idea when the lease runs out?”

  “Oh, every ten years or so, but they always renew it.” Suddenly I realized what he was implying. “Why? The city’s not renewing it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ray. “But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why a possibly terminally ill woman was so hellbent on taking down Hal Giroux, until I was talking with another collector about . . .”

  Ray kept speaking, but I stopped listening. The words terminally ill dug a fresh hole in me. I’d just seen Janis today. She hadn’t looked ill, but she had looked exhausted.

  “. . . and how he’s been backed by a couple of key collectors quietly looking for seed money to build a big new contemporary art museum downtown.”

  “Downtown,” I said, slow to process what Ray was saying.

  Hal Giroux wanted to build a museum that would supplant the Rocque.

  “Your CFO ever give reports on your building, how much renovations would cost?” said Ray.

  There had been reports. For years. The Rocque building was old by L.A. standards and would need further retrofitting for earthquakes. We just kept vainly hoping that increased donorship and numbers at the box office would boost us to a bigger budget. But a competitor in the same neighborhood could destroy us.

  “Janis wants dirt on Hal, and she thinks it’s there. I honestly don’t know if she’s right, Maggie”—he cocked his head—“but I can tell you that I’ve looked into the scholarship recipients in visual arts for the past ten years, and eighty percent are male. Hal Giroux brings in the biggest funders to the college, and they must let him divide the spoils how he wants.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me today?” I said, though I knew why.

  “I assumed she would,” he said. “I guess she chickened out. Can’t blame her.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The idea of Janis seriously ill or dying trumped every other thought I had.

  “I know,” said Ray quietly. “It hurts.”

  After a moment, he turned up the volume on the stereo. A mournful, soulful singer filled the small box of space around us, her foreign words punctuated by quick, harsh strings. Her voice was unbearably sad. We sat shoulder to shoulder for the whole song, staring at the ghostly windshield and beyond it, into the glittering pattern of red lights on the 405. When the music ended, my heart felt like it had been pummeled.

  “Is this what you’re taking us to hear tonight?” My throat was hoarse.

  Ray ducked his head. “No, that’s real fado.”

  I didn’t know what fado was. “I don’t think I can go to a club right now, Ray.”

  Ray sighed.

  “You think I don’t care how Janis feels?” he said. “She has her heart set on this whole thing: me investigating in my way, you gathering research for a pitch, everyone worki
ng together to find all the angles—”

  “She didn’t say that at all,” I said. “That’s not the picture I got.”

  “Well, she meant it.”

  “No, you mean it,” I said. “That’s different. You’re her contractor; I’m her employee. That’s how she saw my role. I’d take directions from you. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was supposed to fetch you your coffee.” This was going too far, especially after the news, and my mouth went sour, but Ray didn’t contradict me or say anything further. He inched us along the freeway, alert for gaps. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful to him or not.

  “I’ll get the first exit,” he said. “Take you home.”

  I didn’t want to be home, alone in the woman’s mismatched apartment, with its air of desertion. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not doing the gallerina thing. But I’ll go with you tonight.”

  THE MURKY SPOTLIGHT LOVED DAVI Brasil. He had a soulful gaze and dark curls, a wide frame that might grow pudgy with age but was underfed now and poked out his clothes in sharp angles. His hip bones held up his trousers; his rib cage jutted against his white tank top. His songs were not hoarse and wrenching, not like what Ray had just played for me, but their pleasant pop cousin. And the way he carried his voice, the way he commanded center stage, he seemed like a star. Another star from the same Brasil family. I wondered what their parents were like.

  Ray stood beside me, sipping at his usual grapefruit juice. I ordered a cola to stay awake. I finished it in three cloying swallows. Then we watched. Ray seemed content to listen to the band, though he sometimes glanced around to measure the crowd, which was filling the club’s first floor but not its balconies, and the merch table, stacked with T-shirts no one was buying. Davi was still building his fan base. Someone was taking a risk on him.