Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  I told Janis that I thought there was a real story in Brenae’s death about the American dream gone sour and that I was going to quit my job in order to tell it. But not in the ordinary way. I wanted to record people talking about Brenae, and to piece together a tale from their impressions—her family’s, her crewmates’, her instructors’. Radio was probing into American life this way, and web versions of audio stories couldn’t be far behind. I wouldn’t be a Gay Talese or a Tom Wolfe, a man with crisp lapels and elegant manner, revealing America to Americans in language that was glossy, witty, discerning, and entirely his own. Instead, I wanted to organize a conversation, one that might be raw and inconclusive, but more authentically Brenae’s. And all of ours.

  Janis watched me with a closed expression, her eyes glinting from time to time. “And you want me to pay you to do this,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I want permission to interview you, too.”

  “Me.” She hitched backward in her chair.

  “If you hadn’t asked me to look, I wouldn’t have seen,” I said. “If Brenae hadn’t written to you, we wouldn’t have the video. You’re part of this story.” I was having a difficult time not choking up again. Fortunately, a friendly woman with choppy auburn hair arrived then with lemonade in frosty glasses and a plate of blond, sugary discs.

  “Thank you, Gigi,” said Janis. “Please.” She gestured to the drinks.

  I took a glass, a cold, sour, sweet swallow. A lemon taste. “You’re essential to it. To leave you out would mean leaving out one of the greatest champions of art this city has ever had—”

  I broke off because, over the years, I had seen Janis tired, angry, and even vengeful, but I had never seen this expression on her face: her right hand rising to cover her mouth and her eyes blinking fast. It was remorse. At my silence, she slowly lowered her hand to her lap and faced me, her chin set. Then the pieces clicked into place—why Janis had never confronted Hal directly, why she’d rigged this entire covert investigation before acting on Brenae’s behalf, and then only in the most tactical way.

  “You watched Lesson in Red before she died,” I said. “The whole story about the assistant you fired and the closet full of mail, it wasn’t true. You got the video before she died, and you didn’t believe it, either.”

  “I called Hal immediately,” she said in a scratchy voice. “He told me that Brenae was unhinged, and he was handling it. Hal and I never got along, but I respected him, and the school was his domain. I believed he was telling the truth. And to be honest, I didn’t like Brenae’s project. It was tawdry. I didn’t think it would serve a young artist’s future to expose herself like that. No one would see her talent. All anyone would ever see was her being . . . subjugated.” She paused, her lips a thin line. “But when Brenae died, I felt like I had failed her. I did fail her. I ignored my regret, because I was embarrassed. Then Still Lives started heating up, and Kim Lord went missing, and I got distracted. For months. Running a museum that became a murder site.” She spoke the next words with her old certitude. “I was wrong. You may interview me, and I promise to tell the whole truth.”

  I almost excused Janis then. I didn’t want her confession; it shadowed my reverence for her. But then I saw myself clawing those last lengths through the Westing ceiling, how Brenae had come to me, last of all my mentors. I had never wanted someone so broken and desperate to lead me, then or now, but she was my guide into her story. She had to be. “Thank you,” I said. “I know how much it costs you to say that.”

  “Speaking of cost, how are you going to afford to do this research?” From the tone of Janis’s voice, it was clear that she would be grateful to salary me, but I couldn’t take it. I needed autonomy.

  “I’ll find a way,” I said. “I can freelance as a copy editor. I’ll have a good reference.”

  Janis’s eyes moved over me, and I had the strange impression she was taking me in, really taking me in, for the first time, not my carefully chosen linen dress, not my blushing face and pinned hair, but the steadiness of my eyes, the set of my mouth, the tilt of my shoulders toward her, the way a queen would examine her newest knight, wondering how much courage he would bring, how much suffering he could bear, when suffering eventually came. And then her face contracted with an expression of approval, the deepest affirming nod.

  We sipped at our lemonades. The tart and sweet blended perfectly, but Janis grimaced. “Nothing tastes the same these days,” she said. “The flavor’s off, but I can’t remember what the right flavor is supposed to be.”

  Sadness for her flooded me. Her long reign was ending, or changing in inexorable ways. For a moment she seemed to shrink farther into the folds of her white blouse, but she shook her head when I started to speak. “You going to miss it?” she said. “The Rocque?”

  I tried to picture the museum without me in my little office on the fourth floor, overlooking the concert hall that was finished now, and the Next Museum that would rise between, filled with art. The very streets around us would change, day by day, as more people poured in to see the new cultural destination, and the Rocque would become smaller, less visible. An annex instead of a fortress. Its old, defiant outlier spirit would fade, too, no matter how vital and exciting Yegina kept its programming.

  “I’ll miss what it was,” I said honestly. “I think everyone will.”

  Janis made an appreciative noise. She took another sip of lemonade and winced.

  “My father never thought his museum would last,” she said. “He called it a stepping-stone, for someone else to reach the other shore. I always thought that person would be me.” She gazed down over the green expanse of lawn, the sculptures casting their shadows across it. “But maybe there is no other shore here. Our downtown’s potential is that vast.”

  “Can you say that on record?” I said.

  “I’m not finished,” she said. “Maybe the point is that we’re always seeking. And it, whatever it is—hope? greatness?—is always retreating.” She coughed. “There I go, sounding like I’m about to die. And like I haven’t spent a lick of time in the tent cities east of Main. Watch out,” she warned, her eyes crinkling. “I might only talk to you about the Dodgers.”

  28

  THE CAR RIDE TO SAN Pedro was strange and long. I knew Ray, but I didn’t. His body in the seat beside me seemed profoundly familiar yet foreign, like something I’d read about before but never seen. He was driving one-armed, his black eye faded to a jaundiced bruise. The afternoon I’d met with Janis, he’d called and asked me if we could postpone our meeting for one more week, and then a few days more. But finally we were riding together down the Harbor Freeway, flanked by massive trucks heading to the port. The picnic he’d brought filled the car with a salty, roasted scent, and I saw the top of a bottle of wine peeking from one bag. It was a real date.

  Oddly, this fact eradicated my confidence. I was not sure we were meant for dates, Ray and I, that somehow we’d already gone far past them and yet would never get to them, either. For his part, at first, he barely looked at me, and our conversation circled awkwardly around Nelson and Layla. It would take some time to gather the evidence necessary to convict Nelson of Calvin’s death, as well as his attempts on our lives. Layla’s testimony was key to this, and she was insisting she’d been manipulated by Nelson since she was a minor and should be prosecuted differently. It was all very complicated, and I sensed that Ray was obsessing over the details on a daily basis.

  “I still don’t understand how you lost a fight with him,” I said.

  “I didn’t lose. I made him mad enough to kill me,” Ray said, his tone matter-of-fact. At my inquiring silence, he went on. “When he left my brother, Calvin was still alive. Calvin drowned in the bathtub later. So the whole time, I knew I was looking for an almost murderer—someone who would mess up, somehow. Someone who was afraid to strike again. I had to force him to strike, and then I had to fight back enough to make him want me dead.”

  I tried to picture the blow that shattered R
ay’s shoulder, but the image that came was Nelson’s bloody, dangling ear. Ray had ripped it from his skull with his bare hand. The force it must have taken.

  “How did you know he wouldn’t just kill you then, in your own apartment?” I said.

  “Because he needed to be rid of me. I knew about his secret room,” Ray told me. “I guessed he was hiding black market goods somewhere. He owns no properties except the house and the gallery. When you mentioned the wine cellar entrance to Nelson’s house, I went and looked there. I left behind enough hints of my presence to rattle him. By then, I figured it had to be the Westing. Something about that long hallway you said you had to drag the shoes down, and only one door. It didn’t add up.”

  Then his tone dropped its pride and turned formal, humble, as if he were arguing a losing case. “The thing is, because he saw you digging in his trash on the surveillance camera, he connected me and you, and that put you at risk,” Ray said. “When I pushed him, he went after both of us.”

  “You didn’t make me do anything.”

  “I should have recognized that you would become a target,” said Ray. “Though if you hadn’t, I might not be alive. I’m caught between apologizing and thanking you, and both seem too weak to be appropriate. In this circumstance.”

  Did I want an apology? Or gratitude? Why was the conversation about what Ray needed to give me? The word circumstance bothered me, too. I did not feel like Ray and I were a circumstance, but I did not know what we were, riding together today, only that it felt far distant from the night I agreed to go with him to watch Davi play, certain I would never see Ray again.

  Finally, we exited the freeway and cruised through commercial blocks to the neat adobe neighborhoods of San Pedro. As the city petered out to a few streets and an open horizon, I tasted the sea air seeping into the car. A picnic at the beach. For us.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s your kind of place, where I’m taking you. It’d get an A-plus for historical value and decrepitude.”

  He parked in a block of pastel ranches punctuated by palm trees, hopped out, grabbed the paper bag awkwardly with his free arm. There was green space beyond, blocked by a tall black fence, and beyond that, the glittering Pacific.

  “Let me carry it,” I said.

  He shook his head. “We just have to follow the fence a ways,” he said, and walked off into the weeds, as if eager to put distance between us. “Hey, there’s Catalina Island.” He gestured out to the smoky gray shape of land in the distance.

  The tall weeds slapped at my calves. I’d chosen a simple cotton dress and practical sandals. My bare legs felt whispery warm and smooth beneath the dress, my body free. I noted a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  Ray stopped at a spot in the fence where the bars had been bent to the side, making a larger gap. “I think there’s a better one farther down,” he said, and tramped off.

  “We are trespassing,” I said.

  After another futile march down the fence, we looped back. During that interval, I kept sniffing the lunch. It smelled so good.

  Too good.

  I stopped in my tracks, aware of what was happening. What I should have expected would happen.

  Ray didn’t notice. He was preoccupied with the gap. “I did this a few weeks ago, before all this—” He patted his sling. “Well. Here goes.”

  He stepped through the fence sideways, with his good arm first, his hips smushing against the bars, then his sling. A look of pain crossed his face.

  “We can just go to the beach,” I said. “We can just sit in the car.”

  He kept straining, the pain in his face deepening.

  “I don’t even need this picnic,” I said, hefting the bag, with its white-wrapped parcels, its bottle of wine. “I know you brought me here to say good-bye. The real good-bye, the one we’ve both rehearsed in our minds since the moment we met. Your good-bye is ‘Here’s the beautiful ocean and the cliffs and some tasty caprese sandwiches and wine,’ and you saying how much you’re attracted to me, maybe more than anyone you’ve ever met, but you’re going home, because you’re not trustworthy, and because I deserve a good life, not one dating a rural cop with a kid who needs him, and blah, blah, blah. And my good-bye is saying, ‘You’re right. I can’t leave L.A., or my new career. So go. You’re free.’ Maybe you’ll kiss me. Maybe you won’t. Maybe we’ll have great sex a few times. It’s all up to how we take the news, I guess. Maybe if I start crying, you’ll just hold me.”

  Ray stared at me, stuck in the stupid black fence, his legs bent.

  “Well, I’m not crying,” I said, setting the bag down. “But I might eat one of your sandwiches before I go.”

  Ray gave a big push and staggered through to the other side. “Just come see it. I really want you to see it.”

  Through the bars, I saw his good shoulder slumping and his face looking anxious.

  “It’s called the Sunken City,” he said. “It’s a neighborhood that fell into the sea in 1929. Big chunks of road are still there. Old foundations. You love ruins,” he said. “You won’t want to miss it.”

  I peered past him to a fat palm rising from some juts of square rock. Not rock. Walls. Someone’s former home, broken to pieces.

  “You came all this way,” he said.

  “I see it,” I muttered.

  “See it with me,” he said, and he wasn’t begging, but I’d never heard such emotion in his voice, and the look in his eyes was unbearably open and true.

  I knew what would happen if I went through the gap, I knew even then, and the prospect sent a tide of dread and hope through me. I nearly buckled under its force, and it felt like something temporarily wiped the backs of my eyes, making the ocean and island flicker in the distance. I circled a bar with one hand, feeling the hard, thick rod of it, wondering who had been strong enough to bend such a thing. I looked back to Ray’s car, an ordinary gray sedan perched on an ordinary California street.

  Ray didn’t say anything more. He just wiped his forehead and waited, watching me.

  A siren went off in the distance, an urgent sound. Another emergency somewhere. Maybe another death.

  I silently dipped to the paper bag and passed the picnic, piece by piece, through the gap. There were big sandwiches, a bag of cookies, fruit, and wine. Ray repacked the bag and set it down.

  A second siren joined the first, then the long, gouging call of a fire engine.

  I took a breath and mashed myself into the gap, feeling the bars crush my breasts and my hips, feeling myself wedge deeper, unable to go forward and back. My chest and pelvis hurt.

  “Where am I going?” I mumbled. I felt Ray’s hand take mine, warm and strong.

  I shoved again and tumbled though, staggering to my knees in the long grass and dandelions. Ray caught me, one-armed, and lifted me, and I want to say I kissed him first, because I did—I found his lips before he found mine, the rightness and the heat crushing through me. His good arm closed around my waist, he held me hard against him, his mouth urgent, and for a few long moments, even the ocean beyond us vanished. Then he raised his head and whispered something into my hair, and it was all back, the smog-white sky, the crumbling cliffs, the barred fence behind us, the sling across his chest.

  “What did you say?” I asked as Ray’s fingers rose and brushed my collarbone then slid behind my head, twining there.

  He smiled. “You’ll have to find out.”

  And this time, he kissed me.

  29

  Seven Months Later

  AT NIGHT, CAST IN AN upward glow by lights from below, the central LAAC complex looked less like a hive and more like a space station set in a hilly grove, surrounded by silver miles of parking lot. I drove around for a long time before finding a space, reluctant to go in. Around me, a pilgrimage of young and old Angelenos made its way to the graduation projects on view in the buildings and studios.

  Brenae would have been twenty-three this month. Erik was twenty-seven. Hal, fifty-eight. Of the three of them, only Hal would be h
ere to see Brenae’s vision come to fruition. He’d been working the personal-redemption angle all winter and spring, fund-raising and advocating with his former employer for Brenae’s art to appear in a posthumous exhibition at LAAC during the May week that the second-year MFA students showed their final work. Janis had helped with promotion and even privately invited Erik. While I know the video will embarrass you to view, I hope you will consider the message this might send to other young men. Erik had responded from his fellowship in Rome with a letter about his regret for Brenae’s death. But he refused to attend.

  As I entered the streaming crowd, I couldn’t decide if I despised Hal for using his position to manufacture a grand apology that might inflict further pain on Brenae’s family, or grudgingly admired him for owning up to his mistake and honoring Brenae’s wishes to make the statement she wanted to make. I wondered if people were here to see the apology even more than the art.

  When I reached the central room where Ray, Janis, and I had once waited for a tour of LAAC’s studios, there, in the hub of it all, a giant projection flickered, showing a younger, scrawnier Brenae sitting cross-legged in front of a tent in a living room with graffiti tags and dirt streaks on the walls. She was holding a stick over a tiny camp stove, a marshmallow on the end of it. With slow, deliberate motions, she turned the stick, then raised it and blew. The camera zoomed in: a close-up, as Brenae bit and burned herself, flinching. Then she kept eating anyway, the thick white goo clotting her mouth. It was as mesmerizing as it was hard to watch. This was the first film she’d made with Erik Reidl, and already he had packaged her: the tempted virgin consuming the forbidden fruit, the pain and pleasure in her face.

  A placard announced that Camping would run on a loop with After-Parties, while Packing and Lesson in Red would only show once, at 8:00 p.m., introduced by the new LAAC director, and then Lynne Feldman and Hal Giroux. I had nearly an hour to kill before the main event.