Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  His concern for my physical health seemed genuine. Also spontaneous, as if he hadn’t thought to ask before now. Not last night, not at Café Francesca, not in Wonder Valley.

  “I guess I’m ‘healed up,’” I said, unsettled. “Why?”

  “You’ve got this expression now.”

  I stared at him quizzically.

  “I don’t know how to explain it.” He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Like parts of you are tensed to fight.”

  My ribs felt tight. “I’m fine,” I muttered.

  “Thank God,” said a voice behind us, and then a chair pulled back and the detective slumped down beside us. This morning, she looked like yet another person. She was wearing another pressed pastel suit, but her eyes were wild, her hair mussed. “I can’t deal with another . . .” She paused, absorbing the posh coffee-scented air. “I need the rest of this morning to be crisis-free,” she said in a smoother, more professional tone. “Now that we’re all here . . .” She focused harder on me and gaped. “Jesus. Did you freaking jog here?”

  “I walked,” I said.

  “You’re burning up,” she said. “I’m getting you an ice water.”

  She bounded up from her chair and stood in the coffee line, smoothing her own hair and casting suspicious glances back at me.

  I shrugged, then stripped off my jacket, keeping my face blank. But the air-conditioned room stung my bare arms and shoulders; the black tank top I wore was silky and thin, and I hadn’t expected to be undressing down to it, especially not in front of Ray. He had the good manners to look elsewhere. I understood Detective Ruiz’s reaction: Why would I take a stupid walk and ruin a look that had cost me more than a grand? To feel young and free? To insist I wasn’t caged by this city? Neither was true. It was Brenae. I’d wanted to distract myself from my corrosive anger at her case. I hadn’t succeeded.

  “Hey.” Ray leaned in. I smelled coffee and, beneath it, the scent of his skin and hair, which was dry and sweet, almost straw-like. “Two things. One, you are not the reason Alicia’s spazzing out now. Two, I am as interested in Steve Goetz as I am in my left toenail. Okay?”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “I mean about the toenail,” I said, and wished I hadn’t because something had been shifting in his face and I’d caught a glimpse of the same fear that I’d seen on the night in Wonder Valley. But now it abruptly vanished.

  “What?” he said.

  “A left toenail isn’t a thing.”

  “Not to a literalist Yankee, no,” he said.

  “Literalism isn’t regional,” I said.

  “Being a Yankee is.” A smirk tugged at his mouth. “You got some Yankeeness rubbed back on you when you went home.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It’s all over your voice.” He was gleaming with good humor now.

  “That doesn’t make any sense, either.”

  “Of course not.” He leaned back. “But I knew a pointless argument would cheer you up.”

  “You really ready to do this?” Detective Ruiz said as she slid my ice water to me. Her tone was apologetic, but her face remained dubious. “I hope so. I can’t handle more ‘emergency meetings’ with Janis. I want to be done.”

  I told the detective I would work the week at the Westing and then we could reevaluate to see what information Ray and I had. “I have a freelance assignment that I’m also—” I started to say, wanting to name-drop the actress.

  But the detective was already launching into an explanation about eavesdropping and wiretapping, and how neither Ray nor I could use a mic to record other people’s conversations unless an official felony law enforcement case was involved. I would not use any devices unless I got her permission.

  “Okay?” she said.

  I nodded. Ray nodded. Then Ray told me about the people I’d be observing. He described a close-knit group that had traveled to London last fall to premiere Hal’s Westing show: two men, Pearson Winters and Erik Reidl, and three women, Layla Goetz-Middleton, Zania de Wilde, and Brenae Brasil. A few significant facts lodged with me: Layla and Erik had been a romantic couple on and off for a year. Pearson had had a prior felony: an assault on another man. Zania was the gallerist’s daughter. All four were willing to talk with Ray today.

  “Any questions?” he concluded. “The interviews start at four o’clock.”

  “Does Hal know they’re participating?” I asked.

  “No,” said Ray.

  “Do you think any of them know about the video, or why it was erased?”

  “Not sure. We’ll find out what we can,” said Ray. “I’m going to show it to each of them.”

  I tried to imagine the students’ reactions when Ray approached them. They must have been wounded by Brenae’s death, or they wouldn’t have agreed. I wondered what they’d think of being spied on. I didn’t feel sorry for them, but I wished they understood the stakes of what they’d see and might say.

  “Are we good?” the detective said, looking at Ray. “I have a mountain of paperwork at the office.”

  Before Ray could speak, her phone buzzed and she looked at the number. “Janis.” She sighed. “Didn’t you tell her to call you from now on?” she asked Ray.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, but the problem is, she likes you better.”

  She answered the phone and then handed it to me. “Last instructions,” she said.

  I took it gingerly and said hello.

  “Maggie,” said Janis. “Good. I explained to Bas that you were doing some important freelance work for my foundation and that this shouldn’t count as vacation days. You ready? Ray thinks the world of you, you know, and you’ll make the right team for this. It’s delicate. Hal’s not an evil man. He’s done a lot of good.” She sounded frail suddenly. “And this woman deserved better. You need to help me make sure people are held accountable. Okay?”

  I faltered at saying what was really on my mind: I’m sorry. “I will,” I said.

  “It’s almost nine thirty,” she said. “You better get going.”

  9

  I ENTERED THE GALLERY WITH the keys Ray had given me and headed for the desk where I’d been told to sit. Layla Goetz-Middleton was gone. Only the two men were left in the space. Pearson was sitting on a stool. Erik was squatting, his heels lightly raised, picking through piles of used shoes: sneakers, sandals, penny loafers, boots—some polished, some bent and stained, some missing laces. The room smelled faintly of canvas, leather, and old sweat. Spools of wire were piled against the wall.

  “This same crew has built Hal’s shows for the past two years,” Ray had told us at the coffee shop. “It’s a coveted role, apparently, as they go with him expense-free when his shows travel, and former crew members have moved on to star careers.”

  Pearson was a devoted LAAC alum and the secret sauce to Hal’s shows since 1996—whatever Hal envisioned, Pearson executed. He lived alone in North Hollywood, working intermittently on lighting for movie productions, then accompanying Hal’s shows on the road to make sure they were installed correctly. Pearson had a sturdy, capable look—all his limbs were large for his frame—even so, his head seemed over-big, and shiny, lacking any hair to cap it. He wore a blank, placid expression, as if he were processing a very slow thought.

  If Pearson was the organizing genius, Erik was the craftsman, a native of Vienna who had come to L.A. five years ago, first USC, then LAAC, where he’d quickly become a favorite of Hal’s. Erik had grown up in American international schools; he wanted to stay in this country for good. He was taking an extra semester to finish his graduation project: Bull, a herd of fifteen-foot-tall animals made from silver-blue cans of Red Bull. Rumor had it that Steve Goetz had already bought Bull, unfinished, for a large price tag, and other collectors were clamoring for more work. Erik was the physical opposite of Pearson—curly-headed, small, lithe, in constant motion. Yet he, too, seemed to have studied the art of expressionlessness, and I couldn�
��t get a read on how either felt about the installation.

  “Color? Texture? Shape?” said Erik, tossing a high-heeled red pump. “What are we supposed to go on?”

  “Hal gave us his key.” Pearson turned to me. “In case you were worrying.”

  I greeted him and introduced myself as Mary. “Temporary replacement,” I added.

  “I need a temp replacement.” Erik shook his head at a strappy white sandal, chucked it. It clunked a wall.

  “How many shoes are there?” I said.

  “Less than half of what we need,” said Erik glumly.

  “Direction,” Pearson said to Erik. “This space is loftier than London, but we still need to build from the ground up.”

  If Erik, the native Austrian, had surprisingly no accent except a slight Californian uplift, Pearson’s voice carried a faint impression of the nasal vowels and burred r sounds that I recognized from my own childhood in the Northeast. A rural working-class inflection, just a smidge of it, but recognizable. An odd inflection for someone with such a pretentious name. Pearson Winters.

  “We should start with the nave,” Pearson added.

  “That high?” Erik tipped his head to the gallery’s twenty-foot ceiling, his curly hair falling back. “Layla won’t do ladders.”

  “Layla doesn’t have to,” Pearson said, then turned to me. “Anything you need from us?”

  “No.” It was time for me to act like I had a job to do. I walked toward the gallery desk. “Keep on with your knavery.”

  They looked startled at my pun. No doubt I came off as stuffy and middle-aged, with my suit and heels, even though Pearson was older than me. They were both wearing T-shirts and jeans—the loose, faded, but expensive kind that emitted a scripted nonchalance. Their shoes gave away their fashion origins. Erik was the surfer, slapping around on canvas shoes, and Pearson the post-punk strutter in leather boots. They seemed comfortable together. And yet did I detect a small tension about Layla radiating through their banter?

  I sat down at the chrome desk and turned on the computer, typed the temporary login and password I’d been given. It led me to something like a library page, only the internet available, the home page the gallery’s website. No inbox. No gallery files. No price lists. What should I pretend to do now? Not for the first time, I wondered why Nelson de Wilde had approved of this plan. Janis said he owed her, but still. I was spying on the crew of one of his artists, a prominent figure who could connect him to many rising future stars.

  After a moment, Erik called after me. “Does your agency employ serfs? We need about thirty.”

  “The serfs are all working on the latest Michael Bay movie,” I called back, and regretted it, because again the response was silence. Mystified silence? Social condemnation? I should be acting more formal. Driven. A gallerina was polished. She was ambitious. She was overqualified, with an impressive art history degree and letters of reference from prominent collectors. She dreamed . . . of what? Of learning the business here so that she could go work at Catesby’s or another auction house, so that she could go into consulting. Mostly she dreamed of building her own modest collection. An artist sought meaning. A curator sought significance. The gallerina sought taste. The longer and harder she worked, the more she looked the part, the more she became an arbiter of what others should own.

  I hadn’t seen too many gallerinas at the Rocque, but sometimes a female intern left the museum for that path. Invariably she had been born wealthy, had a real collector in the family, and possessed some flawless physical trait: her skin, her hair, her figure. The gallery side of the art world, where the deals were made, would pull her like a magnet from the museum side, because she enjoyed the commerce and because she could become the living representation of the formality of those white cubes—austere and classical, splashed by well-chosen color.

  Now that I was here, I could see the attraction of the gallerina life. My new suit made me feel like the air around me parted differently, that my waist and hips formed a perfect contour, and my shoulders lanced above my breasts, strong as a man’s, but finer. If only the garment worked on my eye and my conversational abilities and plane tickets to Miami and Basel the way that it worked on my body. I could see myself gliding through this sophisticated life, making the right choices about which art would stand the test of time.

  A neat stand-up file perched on one edge of my desk. I grabbed a folder and opened it. A list of names, some of them wealthy collectors, some with check marks, then a tally below for RSVPs. The invitation list for the opening? I noticed Janis Rocque on it, but no check next to her name.

  I shoved the folder back, grabbed the next. A gallery guide, marked PLEASE PROOF. Phew. Proofreading was familiar ground.

  Hal Giroux’s Shoe Cathedral

  Longtime Los Angeles luminary Hal Giroux brings his monumental installation Shoe Cathedral to the Westing Gallery from November 2–December 22, 2003. An exclusive invitation-only reception on November 1 will be followed by open gallery hours Tuesday–Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

  Known for interactive installations that question and refigure the quotidian in our lives, Giroux will juxtapose the heights of human architecture with earthbound human apparel to examine the connections between religion and commercialism in contemporary life. [Oh-kay. And the emperor’s new clothes are smashing, too.] Giroux has been the director of the MFA program in visual arts at LAAC for twenty-two years.

  The guide included a late-1970s picture of Hal slouched on his elbows on an airplane wing in an airplane graveyard. The young Hal was bearded and bushy-haired and grinned with impish glee. He looked only a few hours older than his students, who posed around him, all white, all sporting long locks and tight flared pants, their faces adoring. The guide listed Giroux’s awards and a few earlier works and quoted an art critic who said, “Hal Giroux demands his viewers to reconsider their place in the world of objects. His made things are things made visible.” Blurbs were often overblown, but this one made little sense. The installation itself seemed a bit perky and obvious. Shoe, cathedral. Let’s take sacred iconography and smear it with the mundane or vulgar. It’s Piss Christ! It’s the Virgin Mary painted in elephant dung, only much less risky. I felt inclined to join Janis Rocque and Yegina in their scorn for Giroux, then reminded myself I had no real talent for scorn. I was much better at trusting the best in people. At being trustworthy. In two and a half hours, I’d leave for my interview and prove this. The suit made me feel like I could manage higher heels, though. I wondered if there were any in the heaps of shoes around the gallery, and if anyone would notice me borrowing them.

  A white cup slid across the low wall that circled my desk.

  “I got it extra frothy because that’s what the other gallerina liked,” said a husky voice. “I know you’re not the same person. But you can have it anyway.” I followed the French-tipped fingers holding the cup to a plump pale arm, a white sleeveless shirt, red hair. Layla smiled when I met her eyes, but it was a smile that splashed like salt, and it seasoned her words with sharpness.

  I thanked her and took the cup, wincing at the heat, nearly dropping it. It thunked to my desk, making a tiny, creamy splash. I didn’t know what to wipe it with.

  “Oops, extra hot, too,” Layla said. “My fingers aren’t very sensitive.”

  “I’ll let it cool,” I said. The droplet glistened on the chrome.

  Layla didn’t leave. She looked over at Pearson and Erik and shook her head. “Two-thirds of the shoes got delivered to LAAC by accident,” she said and sighed. “They should be on their way now.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said in what I hoped was a proper intonation. “Will it delay you much?”

  Layla leaned against my desk.

  “Do you know about the RSVPs?” she said. “Hal wants to see the final numbers.”

  I handed her the folder with the list in it. “I’m guessing the checkmarks are yeses.”

  Layla scrutinized it for an uncomfortably long time. I had the impres
sion she was working up the right words to say to me.

  “Have you temped in a gallery before?” said Layla, making a note on the list.

  Yes? No? “I’ve just been interning,” I said vaguely, wiping the droplet with my finger, noting that my emergency manicure was already chipping.

  “Well, piece of advice,” said Layla, returning the folder. “Never show anyone anything when they ask for it.” She smiled that same assaulting smile. “I have to go help these oafs.”

  Layla walked away with a sway in her step. She had the body of a fifties starlet: busty, with hips that seem shocked at the smallness of her waist. Her long arms and her preening confidence were the only signs of her genetic relationship to her father, Steve Goetz.

  Layla strolled into the installation, trailing her hands over shoes and wires. Pearson and Erik hadn’t spoken for the last hour, and they greeted Layla with silent nods and kept working. No discussion. It was possible that they might not talk about Brenae or Hal the entire week. They might hardly talk at all, making my eavesdropping a waste of time.

  The shoes were rising in columns, some already two feet high. The men had found a way to stack them, crisscross, and Erik was wiring them in. Pearson sorted for him. The columns, with their toes and heels, gave off a sense of wrong burial, of bodies stacked and piled. Layla joined the sorting. She seemed to dislike touching the shoes, holding them with her fingertips as she soldiered on, her face dutiful. Only when she handed things to Erik did her expression change, growing shadowed with doubt. According to Ray, Layla and Erik were the couple, together and apart since last year. I wondered how Erik liked dating the only child of a famous collector and a pharmaceutical fortune heiress, photography concentration at LAAC. I could see why Layla liked Erik. He was adorable, with that tumbling brown hair, nimble build, and ready smile; he had already landed his own solo show in Chinatown and had won a fellowship to Rome for next year. Yet in Layla’s presence, Erik’s shoulders hunched and his eyes were evasive. They flitted to Layla when she wasn’t looking, and flicked away when she was.