Memorial

LIII.Joan

JOAN and 3 interns tweaked the maquette of the Freiberg Mem. It was huge — about 10 by 4—and Barbet kept saying how amazing it looked.

The finely detailed creation comprised the valley void itself, ringed with artfully xeroxed leaf cutouts of weeping spruces and blue elderberry. The “water grove” of green-veined marble was a rectangular trough, theoretically difficult to apprehend unless one were very close — not to the model, but the eventual elegant gutter itself — the set piece’s formal entrance being a walkway through a pair (representing Samuel and Esther) of yew-carved rooms. The tub was just 18 inches deep; through a complex computer-calibrated system of ducts, drains, and siphons, it would always remain level with the meadow floor, after, or even during, minatory Napa downpours. Joan got the idea from a book on the Ajanta caves in Western India — an early, stalwart survivor of her messy Freiberg archive — where 2nd and 3rd century artists used sunlight caught by centralized pools to illuminate the recesses of honeycombed darkness so as to be able to make filigreed paintings of gods and goddesses (the scholars’ theory, anyway). Barbet occasionally had a numbskully idea — like the notion of the grand groove periodically flooding over, à la human tears — something so asinine it made Joan question the forces of nature that had adroitly conspired in favor of their partnership, in both business of design and sexual congress.

Lew called from a bungalow at the Bel-Air.

She went right over.

MORE gifts — bangles and cuffs made from exotic maples and milo wood. Lew muttered that the Indian government had officially denied his request to uproot and export “the hangman’s (spirit) tree.”

He muted the TV. The tsunami anniversary was upon them, and CNN was rerunning Larry Kings.

“Larry’s such a horny old fuck! And he farts. I know people who’ve been on that show — he farts during breaks! Just lets it rip!” He rang room service for drinks and steak. “Look,” he said, pointing to the silent screen. “It’s that supermodel whose fiancé died in Phuket. Larry just asked if she was in the shower when the wave hit. The shower! Dream on, Larry! That musta got him farting, big-time! So Miss Supermodel says, No. She’s trying to be dignified. And Larry says, ‘I understand the force of the water tore off all your clothing.’ Look! Watch! He says ‘You’re nude during all of this?…nude out in the sun 8 hours. Did you have skin damage?’ ” Lew slapped his knees in jubilation. “Not only is ol Larry farting like a goat but now he’s got a righteous furry goat hard-on! Then he specifically asks about her pelvis.”

He was relishing his role as Human Subtitler.

“She says, ‘Vell, yes’—she’s got that supermodel accent—‘but, Larry, you don’t even sink about being nude.’ So she’s in a palm tree, in her birthday suit, and these guys come along and she says they try to lift her but she’s in too much pain — did you read about this chick, Joan? Remember her? She was all over the place, cover of People—really milked it. Broke her pelvis. Shattered it. Wrote a memoir, formed a charity—‘Give2Asia Happy Hearts.’ I’m serious. Give2Asia Happy Hearts! Give to Larry’s Happy Farts! Brilliant, huh? A real Vassar chick. So Our Lady of the Martyred Supermodel says the guys leave and she doesn’t think they’re coming back. She’s nude in a tree, looking the way she looks, probably shaves her bush, waxes her poo-hole, and she doesn’t think they’re coming back! Fuck no, course not! Why would they? They’re gonna go rescue some fatassed village women instead! They’re going to go save some babies. They’re gonna dig a cow out of the mud. So Supermodel says, Lo and behold—the guys come back! And she’s so shocked at their fucking kindness! You know how teary-eyed and grateful supermodels get when someone lends a helping hand. But this time, she says, not only Thai guys, but Swedes and Bulgarians and whomever show up! Like, a whole brigade. You know what’s funny, Joan? This stuff I always find fucking interesting. Larry asks about the fiancé, if they had a wedding date set, and Supermodel says no. But they talked about it, she says, on the night before the tsunami. The night before. Supposedly she says in the memoir that when the 2 of them met on a photo shoot, ‘there was no bolt of lightning.’ Like, a dead connection. Then, 6 months later in Majorca on another shoot, she suddenly realizes they’re soulmates! Soulmates, Joan! Did you ever notice how in big tragedies people always seem to be talking about really important shit the night before? Planning out their whole fucking lives together. Like that couple who died in the earthquake in Iran…I don’t know why this crap sticks in my head. That’s how whacked out I am, bet you haven’t noticed, huh. The Iran thing: this American couple — I think they were from the Bay Area, maybe that’s why I remember. Both kind of eccentric, not so young, been dating awhile, have a little money between them, love to travel, they’re on one of their chic weekend getaways strolling along the Champs-Élysées and one of em sees a poster in a travel shop. For Iran. So. Being the intrepid soulmates that they are, they decide to go to Iran for a fucking holiday. Where do they go? To the quaint city of Bam, right when the earthquake hits. And in every single interview — it’s all about the interviews, honey! — the woman — she’s the one who survived — why does it always seem to be the woman who survives? though I guess sweet Esther would argue with me about that one — the woman, in all the interviews, says that the guy proposed to her the night before. There it is again: the night before! Of course, the next day, the quake hits and a ceiling fan goes right through her fiancé’s chest. But at least he got the chance to get down on his knees and propose! I mean, it’s like all these victims have the same fuckin publicist! Look! Joan, look!” He pointed to the screen like a 10 year old on a sugar jag. “There’s Larry, asking Our Lady of the Martyred Shtupermodels about the funeral for her fiancé and she says — Joan, you gotta look at her! Dumb as a fuckin pony! — she tells that horny farting goat about the funeral. In her memoir, she says they toasted the deceased with some drink called a Slippery Nipple! Jesus! That’s what her memoir says, I am not shitting you! The guy is fully ignited and she writes about how she’s getting ‘tipsy’! I guess that’s what you call a Polish cremation! And by the way, I think she semi cops to being addicted to laxatives (I can’t believe this diarrhea is actually in my head) which her soulmate was in the process of detoxing her from right before the wave took him out! And the funeral’s in London or wherever and she’s going on about how Superfiancé wouldn’t have wanted anyone to be sad, he’d want everyone to have a good time—I hate that. When people — if you can call a shtupermodel a person — when people make that bizarre fuckin leap in their heads so they can feel better, you demean the dead by projecting how instead of mourning they’d have wanted you, you know, to have the big celebration and fight for your right to party! So they all go out and dance. I don’t even want to think about the motley crew who showed up for Shtuperfiancé’s burial. That’s too fuckin horrible. They dance through the tears! The poignance of it all! Yeah right, I’m sure, that’s exactly what Sir Soulmate would have wanted! ‘I died drowning, getting thwacked by garbage and dead babies breaking the bones in my face as I screamed and my lungs sucked in animal feces and gasoline — but party on! And now I’m in some kind of waterworld Dante-esque hell, but you should be dancin, dancin, dance the night away!”

He looked back at the TV, finally unmuting it.

He was drunk.

Joan was drunk.

“You dumb cunt,” he said, staring at the model. “Oh! And people are calling in to ask her shit. I’m telling you, Joan, I have this fucking show memorized!”

“I can see that,” she said, with a smile.

“It’s on my hit parade! I had someone at Guerdon burn DVDs, I’m serious, I’m givin em out for Christmas. (Don’t tell Axel!) She keeps talking about the garbage, crushing her pelvis! Look, look,” he said, raising then lowering the volume. “One of the callers — a guy, of course — is asking Shtupermodel if she’ll need ‘further surgery’ on her hips! On her hips! Loose lips sink shtuperhips! He was just like Larry, a horny motherfucker, you could tell all he really wanted to know was When can you get back to spreading for cock. A woman calls and says, ‘Think you’ll ever fall in love again?’ and Shtuperwhore says something like, ‘Ya, ya, it’s too soon,’ blah. ‘Ya, it’s too soon, but I am looking for the future, whatever it brings.’ Bringing up baby! Coming soon to a theater near you! Coming soon on her shattered pelvis! Another guy has trouble spittin out a question but finally says he was a survivor—that’s why Larry’s people probably patched him through — says he was just up the beach from where Slippery Nip Shtupmod was stuck in the tree, but oh! Larry’s a hardass! Toughass Jew. Man, he was rough on this call-in motherfucker! Ol cardio-fartin Larry keeps cuttin the slob off, saying, ‘What’s your question, what’s your question?’ just like he was at Nate ’n’ Al’s with the gang — then he hangs up on the guy! See, Larry doesn’t want any fellow victims bonding with her, she’s his, he wants that wet, fractured pussy all to himself! The answer my friend is blowin in his wind! See, Larry doesn’t dig the idea of some guy who was on the same beach when the wave hit — he don’t dig it at all. So Larry’s passin gas under the desk, sounds like fucked-up muffler, soiling his jock, marking his turf! Surf and turf! I’m tellin you, look at him, he’s got new suspenders — look! — new suspenders, a fresh haircut, and horny as hell! I look at that bitch and all I can think of is my sister-in-law, impaled on that sundari. I guess God smiles on the beautiful. Esther was no prize. And let’s face it, Shtupermodel Fiancée is beautiful. Up in the tree for 9 hours, it held her in its arms, that’s what she said—Esther’s whorefuck tree wasn’t so benevolent. At least they found the boyfriend’s body. Poor Superfiancé. Samuel wasn’t that lucky. Maybe if he had a manicured bush, the bureaucrats wouldn’t have ‘misplaced’ him. Stupid fucks.”

Joan brought up a Faulkner story she’d read in college about a Mississippi River flood. A pregnant woman, stranded in a tree. (Indirect reference to Katrina, which she always tried to avoid around him, but she was inebriated and couldn’t help it.) A convict rescues her.

Then Joan blurted out that she was pregnant, she, not Faulkner’s lady, not Esther, not Superwhoever, but she, Joan Herlihy, and Lew was quizzically, quietly uncomprehending before soberly nodding his unsober head. She hadn’t expected such speedy, almost elegantly impersonal acquiescence, but that was why he’d made billions, he could reframe and conform his energies to the wildly brand-new. His expression became that of someone listening to a confession of illness, humbly attending the details of what could or couldn’t be done to effect a healing.

She didn’t stay much longer. He asked her not to leave, but suddenly Joan got nauseous and emotional and didn’t want to be that way around him, not now, not tonight, and didn’t want to hear the inevitable question: whether she was certain, but more, whether she was certain it was his, didn’t want to hear that now, not tonight. Joan knew she would have to take a paternity test, both parties would demand it — she would reserve the right of dignity to beat him to the punch and suggest (she would need to move soon: tomorrow morning) what she knew his attorneys would require anyway — she was going to keep this child, Joan knew it was his and she wanted to raise it, but not tonight, she did not want to discuss any of it tonight, did not want to feel anything more, no strength or will or heart or bowels to engage in dialogue, spoken or unspoken — not tonight.

AT home, she dreamed of the Lost Coast. It was carpeted by a macadamized boulevard that morphed into Eisenman’s Mem to the Murdered Jews of Europe, pillar after pillar, slab after slab, until the touristy petrified forest resembled a jail for villains in a Marvel comic. But the vast necropolis had a teeming underground life — in her netherworld, things went topsy-turvy, the dead lived aboveground and the living, below — as in some bad Czech sci-fi novel, dark figures clambered amid the labyrinth, scavenging among darkly crosshatched monoliths, fudgey tooth-some mugwumps, extraterrestrial carpetbaggers and the like, deaf and dumb silhouettes floating in mimed and weirdly gesticulative dreamworded rotomontade, the whole memorial metastasized in stop-motion, slowly unfurling red-carpet black-tie Gehry gala, a granite, boulder-holed, dwarf-oaked Ajanta unfurling, dripping slate-gray basins and ornamental asphalt bodhisattvas that crushed the populace and drove them to grottoes, besotted dilatory shadowclumps futilely attempting to outrun the cubist tsunami lava that slowly and surely advanced over all the acreage of this gob- and Godsmacked earth until every living-now-dead-

thing was sheathed in stone, hardcloth’d dandified forest curated by Lagerfeld, incapable of nourishment yet paying blackened homage to that which once had nourished and been nourished in return: now everything in static, ecstatic haute couture, a dynamically moribund gorgeously abstract iron maidenhead machine. Somewhere in the nightmare came Rem and Zorro with their shticks and dirty tricks, and somewhere came this baby, their baby, Baby Jane Doe (née Herlihy-Freiberg), and the Faulkner tree-house woman’s — and Larry King, and her mother Marj, and the Taj Mahal and Domino’s elephants, and the city of Madras AKA Chennai where Esther Freiberg was gutted and pilloried by a spirit tree whose roots, having giddily performed their sacred dilatation & curettage, now covered the entire universe itself (Joan would scribble it down best she could upon awakening), the 18-inch-deep inverted sarcophagus of Napa too with its inconceivably expensive, minutely calibrated pumps and drains overseen by mean old Calvinist Thom Mayne, his no-foam latte dispensed from her Impressa at Pritzker High in Diamond Ranch; woven into the somatic tapestry like cheap golden thread were all of Joan’s failures and all of her lusts and all of her loss of desire.

All there:

The Perfect Memorial.