Memorial

LXV.Joan

SHE deliberately hadn’t packed the vintage hippo-hide Velextra suitcase he bought her at auction, the one that belonged to Maria Callas. She said, You’ve really got a thing for carry-ons, huh. Well, it wasn’t actually hippo but “the skin of Ari O’s testes”—typical gross-out-mode Lew.

Her plan was to stay overnight then rush home to Mom. Maybe Pradeep could help with a referral, but the woman at the bank seemed on top of it. She wasn’t exactly sure what a lawyer would do other than steal more money.

Everything Barbet had said was beginning to feel like the truth. The trip seemed a ruse, more of a rendezvous to talk about the pregnancy than anything else. She was determined not to play that game, or capitulate to her own insecurities; she’d made a solemn promise to give it her best. Anyway, there was plenty to distract her. Aside from the thermodynamics of manipulating Lew Freiberg into saying yes to the commission, she needed to oversee the final details of Full Fathom’s chapel unveiling (Barbet’s impotent little PT Barnum extravaganza). She didn’t really have the energy. Her mother’s ordeal had sapped her; putting the nightmare on hold didn’t make it go away. One of the major comforts — that Mom wasn’t dependent on her for financial help — had been yanked from under her.

So she got out her voluminous Prada duffel and threw in a favorite Miss Sixty smock, the Bless skirtrousers, the Loro Piano cashmere hoodie and Van Steenbergen shift, the Judith Lieber minaudière, the Narciso Rodriguez devil-red housecoat, the Project Alabama T-shirts, a D&G tulle/lace babydoll pearl and crystal-encrusted dress (Lew got her that), the Marc Jacobs silk organza ruffle skirt (Pradeep) and Marni taffeta slip, along with Louboutin espadrilles, Comme des Garçons ballet flats, Manolo zebra-print pony slingbacks, MJ mary janes, a pair of black-and-white Converse; antioxidants, exfoliants, extracts, amino acids, and wrinkle reducers; L’Eau d’Issey, Dior J’Adore, and Le Couvent des Minimes creams, balms, and gels. She was a sucker for any kind of overpriced unguent purported to be made for hundreds of years by ascetic nuns or monks. The world was such a load of bull. Even the Pope wore Prada. They called it papal product placement. (Papal Bull.)

Onboard, she flipped through the pimp-ride Robb Reports they always have in private planes and limos. There was an article about a travel agency that specialized in arranging vacations for people and their pets — hiking tours through Provence, “tandem massages” at Las Ventanas Al Paraiso, charters that round-tripped from Jersey to Paris for a paltry $70,000. A sidebar detailed a new fad where people danced with dogs “freestyle”—specialty cruises where everyone got dressed up and big bands played “Footloose” while you boogied in white tie with Rover. They called it “K-9 dance sport” and “interpretive dance to music.” “Humans and dogs have essentially the same genes,” said an event organizer. “Every gene has a gene with the same function in the other genome. Did you know there are dogs who’ve been trained to sniff bladder cancer in humans?” She laughed and tore it out to show Lew because he was so big on helping the tsunami strays. Joan had perversely tried to swing some of his efforts over to helping 4-legged Katrina orphans, but ever since Lew heard about T Boone Pickens and his wife arranging Marines-assisted canine convoys to the New Orleans airport, 45,000 dollar trips on 737s to LAX replete with decon sponge baths, solicitous “caregivers,” quarantines, archival photographs (for the Internet), and microchip implants, he just didn’t want to hear about it. Operation Orphans of the Storm, Pet Rescue Katrina. That’s what they were calling it. The whole menagerie was heading for San Francisco, and Lew finally laughed when she told him that. He was moved to trumpet his favorite slogan: “We all have AIDS! We all have AIDS!”

— more articles on El Zorro! Right there, wedged between the usual glossy, photo-accompanied essays on 3,000,000 dollar timepieces and 7,000,000 dollar collection-of-Ralph-Lauren speedsters: ZH was truly the fortissimo fatass female genius-darling of the starchitectural cosmos. Team Hadid was putting up the “1st building on its home turf of London.” Well, hoop-dee-fuckingdoo. Team Hadid was building an entire floor of the Hotel Puerta América in Madrid — with “no furniture per se: the entire igloo-esque space molded from blinding white LG Hi-Macs, with ameboid walls, sprout shelves, and an iceberglike slab that doubles as a seat.” Her fat ass needs a double seat. The hostelry, built by Jean Nouvel, was going to have an Arata Isozaki floor, a Norman Foster floor, a Ron Arad floor, a John Pawson floor, an Eve Castro and Holger Kehne floor, a Whatever World-Class Whore They Wanted floor. But they didn’t want me. L’il ol Napa winemaker, me. Boo hoo hoo. And, ohmygod, it said Hadid’s rooms had her own branded linens! She was already doing linens! Next thing you know El Zorro would be redecorating Wormwood Scrubs…she was erecting a tower in Marseille for the French shipping firm CMA CGM. “Zaha Hadid’s office is on a roll.” Thus went the hyperventilated Robber Baron Report text, accompanied by ZH’s usual swoopy silverized stochastic cartoonlike computer renderings. El Zorro and her new BMW plant in Leipzig…Extra! Extra! Hadid Turns Auto Assembly Line into Catwalk! Had the world gone mad? Was it really such a slow news day? Was everyone all that interested? The critics were obsessed. Z was breaking down hegemonies and evoking the silent spacecraft of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Z was transforming assembly plants into choreographed, mechanized ballets. “Visually, her early work has all the dynamic energy of a Futurist painting by Boccioni or Balla, but its forms also reflect a desire to reverse Modernism’s dehumanizing effects.” Excuse me while I suck Pritzker dick. Cunt cunt cunt. Iraqi cunt cunt cunt. FatIraqifatIraqifatIraqi cunt. Fat Iraqi cu—

Joan dipped into her briefcase. If she was going to be persuasive, she needed to do a little cramming. She’d brought along a monograph with the detailed history and charcoal renderings of a famous mem that was never built. The structure, called the Danteum, was supposed to have been a monument to fascism. The project, fervently embraced by Mussolini (one of the Florentine poet’s die-hard fans), was meant to reflect the ineffable canticles of the Commedia. The slim volume had an epigraph that gave Joan comfort, attributed to Le Corbusier: “In a complete and successful work there are hidden masses of implications, a veritable world which reveals itself to those whom it may concern — which means: to those who deserve it.” It made her feel better that Il Duce’s labyrinth had remained imaginary. The grimly intimate illustrations were nothing like the grandiose batshit digital Etch-A-Sketches of contemporary megalostarchifuckers, being sad and quixotic and almost macabre, with a precursory whiff of the art of the Outsider. She wanted to show Lew the quote (not the book). There were clippings on Goldsworthy in her briefcase as well; a catalog of pen-and-ink studies by the Romantic “sepulcher artist” Joseph Gandy, including the visionary “Design for a Cast-Iron Necropolis”; a totemic lucky-rabbit copy of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture (with its heavily dog-eared Altars section); a Penguin Classics The Rig Veda; plus a few of Rem K’s wham-bang pseudotrenchant overgraphicized overhyped colleague-condescending essays — all in all, not much in her quiver. Baby On Board. That’s what I really have, let’s face it, and in the end (or the beginning anyway) it was way more than nothing: Baby On Board. (Say it again.) (You can say that again.) Baby On Board — by far the heaviest blueprint in her portfolio these days. Nothin says lovin like something from the oven. Praise the Lord and pass the amniocentesis…

What had she to prove, beyond that?

She called her partner from the plane. He had whimsically decided to detour from Rancho Mirage to Wim Wenders’s favorite spa-tel, the Miracle Manor, in Desert Hot Springs. (In Barbet’s world, it wasn’t true Americana unless it was already staked, claimed, and fetishized by some defanged international auteur.) He told her he’d just spoken to “the boys” and Full Fathom had nearly arrived at the Freiberg Love Chapel. Thanks for the update. PT Barbet reiterated that Lew wasn’t supposed to see anything till “magic hour,” when it would be poised for maximum effect; she actually thought that was one of his better ideas. The dusky Napa light would look seriously beautiful leaking onto the X-Acto’d design through the church’s clerestory windows.

IT was cold when she disembarked. A muddy Range Rover met her. A steward handed her duffel to the driver, who confirmed that the model was on its way “to property.”

The chapel, right?

Right.

Right on.

HE was on the porch of his brother’s house, waiting.

They embraced then went in.

She was careful not to be too demonstrative, as if reflecting the superfetated sanctity of enceinte status. She sat in the living room; he vanished and returned. Without mentioning the issue, he treated her with nearly comic, infanticipatory courtliness.

He filled her in on what was happening with his son. When the boy set a small fire on the Mendocino property, the shrink made the bold diagnosis that Axel was out of control. Lew and his ex checked him into a hospital in Monterey. He was in lockdown, without family visits for at least 10 days — those were the rules.

Fanny, Lew’s 9 year old, bounced in, trailed by a nanny. The sweet, unguarded girl instantly seized Joan’s hand, wanting to show off the new playhouses. The Memorialist was charmed and so was Lew. The pigtailed child forcefully led them back through many rooms, past a smiling kitchen staff, out the rear entrance. For some reason, the relentlessly quotidian slicing and dicing of food preparation put a scare in Joan.

Around 50 yards off, there they were: 2 “chalets” with slide tubes and colorful rooftops connected by a bridge. “There’s electricity,” said Fanny. Her caretaker chimed in that a local lady put the whole thing up. Lew added that the same woman had built customized “kiddie-pads” for the broods of the Grateful Dead and the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” guy. As Fanny tugged Joan into one of the munchkin-sized entrances (she had to duck), Drea emerged from the other playhouse. The miniature structures had working plumbing, and were insulated so the girls could have overnights, with chaperones pitched in an adjacent tent. Lew said, “The things cost a hundred and 8 fucking thousand dollars.”

THEY had a light lunch.

Lew spoke about acquiring art. He said he wanted to be more of a “radical curator,” and not just “play musical chairs” with other collectors at auction. He asked for Joan’s general opinion on a few things, nothing heavy or loaded. He told her he’d been thinking about building a large space for a piece by a New Yorker whose latest installation was basically composed of 50,000 lbs of Home Depot topsoil blended with compost, the latter of which came from Rikers Island Prison. He also liked the work of an artist who literally ate her way through drywall — he thought that was “ballsy.” When she didn’t respond, he said that “Andy”—as in Goldsworthy — had turned him onto the photographed work of Ana Mendieta, “the chick who jumped out the window.”

“Jesus,” said Joan wryly. “Pretty soon you’re gonna want to ‘collect’ that woman who films herself fucking her patrons.”

Lew laughed and said, “I haven’t heard about her — but now I’m going to find out.”

HE smiled and took her hand as they strolled. Her mind felt clunky; she tried to read the meaning of his gesture, but failed. Everything was failing her, even the light.

She got butterflies, thinking of Full Fathom Five ensconced in the chapel where they’d held services for Samuel and Esther, a honeyed, harmonious paradox of modernist design infused by the wabi sabi aesthetic of George Nakashima, the exterior resembling a concretized origami folly, the interior filled with shoji screens commingling with lustrous walnut, English oak burl, and even the 18th century ball-and-claw mahogany footware of John Townsend. But mostly, it was Nakashima’s show. She remembered Pradeep telling her that the legendary sculptor had been the disciple of a guru in India, and helped design an ashram there; he’d built temples and other worshiperies in Japan, and a monastery in New Mexico too. Lew admitted that his sister-in-law was actually the one who’d turned him onto the old master. Having dutifully done his homework (he was really good at homework), the well-tempered dilettante felt comfortable enough regurgitating someone else’s description of Nakashima as “part hippie-Buddhist and part Shaker, a tie-dyed Japanese Druid.”

It was golden time.

They were getting closer to the church.

“Look,” he said, “this is going to be hard, but I want you to know that I’ve gone in another direction.”

She didn’t have a clue what he meant. Was he talking about their child? Had he somehow managed to have it aborted without her knowing? He saw she was perplexed, and segued into the crudely inenarrable.

“You’re going keep it. You’re going to have the baby, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve already won the competition.”

Joan looked at him as if she were lucid dreaming.

They kept walking as he spoke.

“I fired Mr Koolhaas — he’s a Royal Dutch pain in the ass. He likes to ‘waste space’—that’s what he said! He can waste someone else’s—and their time too. I do want to look at what you’ve come up with, hell, I know how hard you’ve worked, Joan, and maybe we can wind up incorporating some of it. A compromise. That’s why I wanted you up here…and for selfish reasons as well.”

“You haven’t even seen what we’ve done.”

“That’s not the point, Joan. It never is. And you know it.”

She was in the midst of choosing not to hate him — like being in a wind tunnel filled with thousands of delicate, whirring gears, unmoored, pelting her like moths and molecular machines. It all happened with lightning speed, and once she was finished armoring she would have to reenact the same process, so as not to hate herself.

“I’m going to do something different.” Pause. “I’m going with Santiago.”

“Santiago?”

“Calatrava. I just fell in love with his spanwork. I think that’s what this thing’s going to require. Have you seen the bridge he did up north? And the winery in Spain? The Bodegas Ysios—for Isis, the Egyptian god. Am I pronouncing it right? I saw him on Charlie Rose and something clicked. I’ve already bought 2 of those ‘Torso’ townhouses. Gonna be the 6th tallest building in the city (if it ever gets built), and I got the top 2 cubes.”

Not hating him would be harder than she thought.

She struggled to regain her footing — now she was on one of those bridges (not a Calatrava) from old movies, the threadbare sort spanning mile-deep gorges. She knew his “spanwork” but wasn’t familiar with the winery; Lew probably saw it in Dwell, or the big Phaidon book. Calatrava was all right; at least he wasn’t a grandstanding ass like the others. A plainspoken, humble engineer. Gifted. Still, if Lew was going to “do something different,” she would have put her money on Herzog & de Meuron.

She broke away, jogging to the site where her calibrated flatbed pond would have lain. Bullshit amateur hour idea anyway. He chased after as she cantered toward the meadow through a fledgling allée of young trees, reveling in the light and open space, the windchill that preceded darkness. He should just leave it like this, she thought. Open, without markings. Anything human would ruin it. That’s what Goldsworthy would do. Maybe that’s what Calatrava had in mind — a big John Cage nothing. Maybe the engineer suggested putting his signature batwings someplace you couldn’t even see, 2 white little boomerangs high in a tree, maybe Lew loved that and was going to pay millions of dollars for tiny trademark))s wedged in a tree…

That would be the perfect memorial — more perfect than a bastard child.

She was crying like some idiot now and Lew offered apologies, but that’s not what she wanted. He caught up right around where the ashes were to be buried, and Joan brought him down onto her, in the grove of crepuscular light.