Memorial

XXIX.Joan

LEW asked her to meet him where he lived. He actually said, “I really had a nice time with you” (she remembered a sweet jock once saying that), and he wanted to go hiking. Anilingus at the Bel-Air; now hit the hiking trail. Uh-huh. OK. Muy bueno. Muy bueno Sierra Club sandwich. He suggested they go to the Lost Coast; she thought that meant somewhere in Sri Lanka but no, it was apparently near his home up north. A rugged place without roads, the last of its kind. She’d never heard of it but that was appropriate. She was lost, with a capital L.

She packed flacons of Halla Mountain green tea and Chanel face creams, her favorite (and only) Yohji dress-up dress, blue jeans, Patagonian fleece and silk long johns, and went to Van Nuys where his jet was waiting. The thing was empty and looked like it sat 60 people. She’d deviously asked Barbet to come along, knowing he wouldn’t, and of course no invitation from Lew had been extended. (Her lame way of being inclusive. Or maybe more like having the pimp on watch outside the motel.) Joan was sure he’d already intuited that she and Lew had slept together — a ballsy roll of the dice. The irony was that in her eyes she had merely been careless; God’s way of giving her a shove off-bounds during the El Zorro/Fountainhead game. She never thought, deep down, that the fuck had bestowed any kind of competitive edge; if anything, she’d blown it. What was she doing, then? It’s a longshot but I want to be spoiled. Thanks for the Memories but just I want to be mobbed-up and married to a moneykiller. Does that make me a bad person? Barbet and Pradeep spoiled her but they weren’t proper pirates — they were little boys. Shit: any girl’d want to know what it felt like to storm the (bill) gates of billionaire heaven.

His company employed 15,000 people. He lived on a thousand acres in Mendocino. He was in the middle of a Promethean house-proud rebuild. The temporary contemporary was a cloud of colossal tents where he camped like a Bedouin king. The nomadic compound was designed by the same architects who put up similar ones for a resort in Rajasthan; each module 30 feet tall, full plumbing and heat-radiant tiles with the same floral inlay of pirtre dure that adorned the cenotaph of the Taj Mahal. (Other billowy canvasses had been modelled after Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 19th century Schloss Charlottenhof.) A retinue of servants reminded her, in their thin ties and closescrubbed style, of everything she’d read about Howard Hughes’s Mormon entourage. Freiberg owned 2 mountains: Motherfuck: Joan wanted to know what it would be like to own mountains and streams and the fauna and flora without and within. To own the very molecules…. Lew said he was changing his design ethos. (His word.) He was learning. He was eager. He was childlike, charming, autocratic, guileless. He was without mercy. He was openfaced and closehearted and mysterious. He was volatile and babyish and hedonistic, petulant and homely, but some days unspeakably, mystically handsome. She could be one of his aesthetic teachers. (His phrase.) Just like Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Ha. He kept saying how he wanted to buy houses in LA — he never bought just one of anything — with Joan as guide and muse. That’s what he said. He’d already looked at Gary Cooper’s classic A Quincy Jones; a complex in Holmby Hills with a Turrell skyspace; a cozy villa in Palos Verdes with Mudejar-style ceilings, based on computer software that mimicked the Alhambra palace’s geometries (recent tenant: Julio Iglesias); and a 2,000 acre working ranch high, or as high as you could be, in the Malibu Hills, with an underground Turrell (oy vey) Olympic-size swimming pool. He had this big “churchy thing”—that ethereal side. He wanted to make a copy of E Faye Jones’s Thorncrown Chapel in the Ozarks. And he was absolutely obsessed with Louis Trotter’s Bel-Air folly and final resting place — LA COLONNE. (He knew Louis’s son Dodd.)

His brother Samuel’s death in Tamil Nadu had frightened and galvanized him. Lew Freiberg was 48 years old and had only recently embarked on creating one of the epoch’s great art collections. Before the 1st year anniversary of the tsunami had passed, he’d spent $300,000,000 raiding fiscally challenged museums of their French Impressionist art. He had inherited Sam and Esther’s vast trove of Buddhist antiquities, the Goyas, the Fra Angelico altarpiece, Rothkos, and Pollocks (Lew’s favorite “spatterfuck” was Full Fathom Five), and their quintet of fine art modernist armchairs, at $100,000 apiece. He gave Joan a tour of the 15,000 square foot cave tunneled into a mountain that would eventually contain 2 kitchens, 6 sleeping rooms, and a computer-retrievable 200,000 bottle wine reserve. Excavated 50 feet beneath the earth, it was a kind of medieval, meditative humidor — aside from the mosaic’d, brightly lit ballroom that was to be a replica of Moscow Metro’s Komsomolskaya station, complete with subway cars as lounges. There was going to be a grotto down there too and because of dampness vs delicate electronics, a corps of engineers had designed a system to completely recirculate the air at least once a minute. That would cost 2,000,000 alone, the side benefit being that people could watch Lew’s favorite Capras while soaking in a lava rock pool. Sylvia Sepielli and Michael Stusser (of the Osmosis spa and meditation garden in Sonoma) and one of Spielberg’s production designers were building a Kyoto-style ryokan and authentic bathhouse within, to which Guerdon planned to import an authentic full-time okami, or lady innkeeper. There was the half-built observatory; what really interested Lew at the moment was “an outlaw star” that had been ejected from the heart of the Milky Way. He loved the idea of an outlaw star — that’s what he was — and sang Joan a sweetly off-key “Desperado.” A chef and his wife lived in one of the tents, cooking for Lew and the children, when they weren’t with their mom. The new house would be built with virgin old-growth timber, dead-head cypress, and pine from rivers in southern Georgia, hand-hewn logs dredged by divers from lakes where they’d been submerged for centuries. Cold, river-bottom wood didn’t rot and was exceptionally beautiful. It was 10 times more valuable than ordinary planks.

3 hours after her arrival, Lew’s 10,000,000 dollar twin-engine Bell/Agusta AB-139 faerie’d them away at 200 miles an hour. He leaned close — their faces touched and his hand lightly gripped her thigh — to peer out one of the huge cabin windows on Joan’s side. There it was, the Lost Coast: coniferous forest of fetid adder’s tongue giving way to melancholic, barren swatch of no-man’s-land — like the smudged, empty margin of a book where a crazed scholar’s pencil notes reside — then rocky drop-off of hyper-graphic de-illuminated text into foamy wind-tossed void where the rest of the pages of the Infinite are buried. Lew said it was the longest stretch of undeveloped shoreline in the States. (Naturally, he was one of the few “inholders” to own private land within a federal reserve.) The desolation made her shiver. As the fog rolled and the helicopter banked, her head slowly cleared.

She was finally starting to get ideas. She wanted to visit the site in Napa before going back to LA. (Joan knew what he was up to and wondered why he hadn’t already jumped her back in the Cirque du so-so lay Mogul Tent. It was better for them to keep their mitts off each other anyhow, until the Mem issue was settled — like boxers before a match. She was having a reptile brain moment: if they got intimate again, what of the tenuous sap now suddenly rising?) Without pen and paper she mentally grafted her thoughts onto the primeval grid, mnemonically marrying them to the mossy, fuzzy, scary-crazy-ecstatic carpet below.

They landed. They walked a mile or so, passing the lean-to of a sculptor Lew had befriended, a Robinson Jeffers type who famously worked with wood and was allowed to lease a parcel of land out here. He wasn’t home. They poked around his frontyard, if you could call the stupefying cauldron of the Pacific a yard. Lew said the guy’s work reminded him of “Andy” (she’d heard enough of Mr Goldsworthy, thanks very much). As they hiked, conversation segued to the furniture of Nakashima and Noguchi — Lew had just bought a little postwar table for $800,000, at auction — Strange, Houshmand, and Walsh. He spoke of the sundari where the body of his sister-in-law was found, without mentioning Samuel; she wondered about that, and remembered what Pradeep had told her about the “spirit tree.” Maybe the topic of his brother was just too painful. They talked about the tidal wave catastrophe in general, which proved amenable enough to an ocean that seemed to roar, hiss, wallop, and sting for its supper. Lew shook his head and laughed about the shrinks who’d flown to Banda Aceh as grief counselors. It was so loud that he had to shout. He asked Joan if she knew about the supplies sent over in bulk: shipping containers with hair conditioners and gel, bikinis and disposable pink razors. Another riff on the obscenity of corporate America’s largesse. (His phrase.)

He told her how “Sam and Esthie” were in Kerala and Kochi — he had all the emails and digital photos his brother sent from the trip (there weren’t too many) — how they’d visited a place called Jew Town with an amazing 16th century synagogue, “the Paradesi,” its roof strung with dangling oil lamps and crystal chandeliers. Sam said that most of the Jews had gone to Israel, and only a few were left: “ ‘black Jews’ and ‘white Jews’ (orthodox) but today we saw a deeply taciturn woman sewing who went by the unlikely name, or likely, if you wish, of Mrs Cohen.” Deeply taciturn. His brother was a good writer, with a droll, subtle way. Lew had culled from the computer correspondence to make a booklet for the family service.

He recounted by rote how the couple were in Chennai before heading south to Mahabalipuram, where they perished. When the waters receded at the place their lives ended, ancient carved elephant heads and long-buried running horses were miraculously uncovered. Not many died there besides Sam and Esther. They were among “the lucky ones,” said Lew sardonically — of ¼ million, only a few hundred Americans were killed. He’d come to believe it was their fate, their appointment in Samarra. With a doff of the cap to his Buddhist sister-in-law, Lew wittily amended: appointment in samsara.

(A conjuration of Buddhist stuff had been on Joan’s mind from day one and she envisioned a sand mandala Mem, with a nod to Kyotan Zen gardens. A walking labyrinth, like that September 11th installation in Battery Park — something akin to Roy Staab’s arrangement of reeds and knotweed in the Hudson River would, like a mandala, be obliterated in mere days’ time, but she dismissed its transitoriness as too “Andy.” Damn him. {As Jon Stewart might say.} She dredged further from her mental file: the 93 WTC granite shrine, and small stubborn chunk that still remained after 9/11—a memorial of a memorial. She thought of all these things and it was excruciating to realize that her “sappy” frisson had been spurious and she didn’t have an original idea in her semen-filled head. Zaha wasn’t Zaha for nothin.)

Then he said something heavy that she hadn’t been aware of.

The body of his brother had been recovered then misplaced by authorities. Only the cremains of his pain-in-the-ass sister-in-law — that said with a smirk not devoid of warmth — would be buried on Napa grounds.

“You know,” said Lew, philosophically. “Memorials are hilarious. I mean, the idea of them. A grave is a grave. But…everything we do is a memorial. Eating’s a memorial. Shitting’s a memorial. Fucking’s a memorial. Do you know about Malcolm Forbes?”

“He rode in balloons and laid Fabergé eggs. He took Liz Taylor on a Harley and threw Brokeback chopper parties.”

“Right! And he’s buried on an island in Fiji — only a few people know this. Mel Gibson wound up buying in the same neighborhood. He just had an 8 lane bowling alley shipped over, by the way: not Malcolm, Mel. A man has to bowl…the passion of the Mel! Gotta hand it to the guy — I mean you better hand it over, or he’ll take it. Mel’s crazy, but I like him; I’ve been to his father’s church. Been to Mago too. But the Forbes place — the most beautiful place on Earth. (Aside from where we are now.) The Forbes family actually had a written contract that said when they sold the island, they would come pick up the body. Exhume ol Talcum’d Malcolm, Fabergé balls and all! What if Malcolm-Ex thought he was going to be spending an eternity under white Fijian sands — oops! Sorry! You’re in purgatory now — Malcolm in the Middle.

“Remember that Jap who bought a Van Gogh? What’d he spend, a hundred million? For a Dr Gachet? And that was back in the 80s. Or 90s. I think he was a ‘department-store king.’ Super Salaryman. Did you know that when he died, he was gonna have the painting cremated along with his body? I’m serious! Never happened. I think he was in debt and the banks took it back. Poor little slope. Hell, I’d pay good money to watch a Gachet burn. Nothin lasts forever. My brother sure didn’t.

“So much for memorials and the wishes of the dead.”

BY the time she got back to LA, Joan had a name for the Freiberg Mem, even if she couldn’t quite summon the thing itself.

She went to ARK and rushed to her portfolio — this time scanning the Esther/Buddhist section. She reread the sutta, Buddha’s words to a god who had tried in vain, by ceaselessly running, to reach the end of the world. (Maybe Joan would just wind up forging a great and beautiful prayer wheel, to signify “mindful” running, or turning. It could also signify spinning my wheels.) Samuel was a marathon runner, so it was a good thematic fit:

Thus have I heard: The end of the world can never be reached by walking. However, without having reached the world’s end, there is no release from suffering…

I declare that it is in this fathom-long carcass, with its perceptions and thoughts, that there is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world.

How beautiful — that this tireless, needless runner should be covered over by waters, turbulent then still. Receding…. It reminded her of Lew’s “running horses,” freed at last from the Great Wheel of Rebirth.

That’s what she would call it, and she couldn’t wait to tell Barbet: Full Fathom Five.