One day when Angus was off plumbing the depths, as he liked to say, of Albuquerque’s soul, I shook myself free from the spell of cable television and went back to the UNM library to check my e-mail. There was a message from Michael saying exactly what I’d expected.
Dear Lynn,
Delighted to hear that you’re having such a terrific time of it in New Mexico; I hope the state’s much vaunted natural beauty continues to inspire. I always knew that given the right topic your talents as a scholar would rise to the fore. It almost makes up for your absence here in Paris.
I would suggest you collect all available biographical data on this painter of yours, and make the strongest possible case for the lineage and context of the work. Also, work on a detailed formal analysis of the two paintings and relate them to her contemporaries, both male and female. Your final two months of fellowship work should be extremely productive. I look forward to reading your work.
Cheers,
Michael
This was quintessential Michael, cheerful and dismissive at the same time: the slightly patronizing remark about New Mexico’s natural beauty implying, by omission, its lack of cultural substance. (My first six months in grad school, he’d flirted with me by asking, practically every time we met, whether I liked New York better than Arizona; then he would stand back, his lip slightly curled in anticipation, and wait for me to correct him.) The backhanded compliments suggesting both that he had faith in my talents and that I had yet to actually demonstrate them. The quick forgiveness of my standing him up making clear how little he was hurt by it. His reminder that I had only two more fellowship months left, and no more institutional support after that. And then cheers.
I gritted my teeth and set to work. I pictured the two desert paintings in my mother’s house, turning the images over in my mind. There was a certain amount of suppressed violence in both paintings. In The Wilderness Kiss, no actual kiss was depicted, yet the painting was clearly sexual; its arrangement of bodies, with the woman’s legs wide open, hinted that something wild was about to happen. The same was true of The Ball and Chain, in which the same woman lay collapsed and prostrate on what seemed to be her own son. They really didn’t seem like paintings a secretary would buy on behalf of her boss, and it was even harder to imagine my father choosing them as an appropriate gift for his wife. Then again, it was the seventies, and maybe things were different then, even in Albuquerque. In any case, I needed to find more about the real Eva Kent, where that violence had come from and what I could make of it.
I spent the next few days searching for her in online sources, phone books, real-estate listings, school records. It was mind-numbing and time-consuming, but I liked it, even the paper-cut dreariness of it, for the form it gave to my days. I ran into problems, however. There were Kents in Santa Fe and Las Cruces and Albuquerque, and none of them were Eva. Nor did any of them know any Evas. I got hung up on, most of the Kents assuming I was a telemarketer choosing names at random and harassing them.
“Eva? I told you my name was Ed! Leave us alone!”
“Is this the collection agency again? I already said we don’t got no money.”
“I knew an Eva once. Eva Chan. Lovely Chinese girl. Married an army fellow, I believe, and moved to California.”
In the evenings, flushed with my exertions, I met up with Angus and drank gin and tonics on the balcony of the motel or, if it was too hot, inside the room with the curtains drawn and the ice bucket sweating on the dresser. I insisted on dates and he agreed: we went dancing, to the movies, back to hear Jeanine sing her songs in the lounge. Afterwards we had sex and then I fell deeply asleep, velvet in relaxation, and never once remembered my dreams.
This went on for almost a week, after which two things happened. First of all, I found a connection to Eva Kent. And second, Angus brought Wylie and me back together again.
I was in the library looking through the annals of a Southwestern art association, rich with everything I hated about New Mexico: the parochial smallness of it, the manufacture of folk art into tourist kitsch, the white people declaiming about Navajo culture, the hippies raving about the mystical qualities of desert light. This was how an actual place turned unreal. I was getting more and more irritated, shaking my head and frowning and making little clucking sounds with my tongue. A young librarian kept passing by my table and I realized she probably thought I was deranged.
The pages of the society’s records were first yellow and typed, then purple and mimeographed, the smell of aged reproduction machines still clinging to them. There wasn’t a single reference to Eva Kent. My mind was wandering, and I’d realize after a few minutes that I had read the same paragraph four or five times.
In the sunny dusty light I turned more pages and was rewarded, finally, by the fact that the keynote address at the society’s annual meeting in 1978 was given by “local art dealer Harold Wallace,” who spoke on “The Woman Artist: No Longer an Oxymoron,” which I supposed was progressive of him. In a black-and-white photo printed six months later in the society’s newsletter, he looked like a seventies playboy, with long, feathery dark hair, a leather jacket, and a big grin. There was a touch of Peter Fonda about him, and one of his eyebrows arched higher than the other, lending his smile a rakish effect. He had been instrumental, the newsletter claimed, in bringing fame to the artists he represented — but not Eva, I thought— and exhibited at the Gallery Gecko in Santa Fe.
I went downstairs and checked the phone book. Gallery Gecko was no more, but an address and phone number were given for Harold Wallace, who to my surprise answered on the fourth ring, sounding aged and slightly sleepy, nothing like Peter Fonda at all.
“Eva. Eva Kent,” he said. “I’m not sure I remember her. Was she kind of a stout gal, blonde, came from hard-drinking German stock?”
“I’d guess she was on the thin side,” I said. “Long, dark hair parted in the middle? She made a pair of paintings, Desert I and Desert II, that belong to my family. I’m interested in learning more about her.” I was calling from a sun-blasted phone booth outside the library, and the receiver was hot and slippery in my hand.
“Well, I’m not too sure,” Harold Wallace said. “There were a lot of those girl painters around in those days. Swarming around, if you know what I mean.”
“Right,” I said.
“We had some fun parties with all those girls. Ah, yes. Good times.”
“Could you check your files or something?” I said. “It’s really kind of important to me.”
“Files,” he said softly, as if he were about to drift off into either contemplation or a nap. “I’ve got some files somewhere.”
“Maybe I could come by and take a look.”
“Well, sure you can,” he said. “Come by any time, sweet-heart.”
“How about now?”
“Persistent little thing, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said, and hung up before he had a chance to refuse.
I sped north in the Caprice along the parched interstate, which was adorned with the shreds of blown-out tires and flowered crosses marking the scenes of car-related deaths. I passed another billboard advertising the imminent construction of Shangri-la; in this one a man and a woman, their hair blond, their jewelry gold, sat drinking white wine at a bar overlooking a golf course as expansive as a sea.