by Bruce Wagner
All laughed heartily.
Everything was being filmed.
“Your friend set you up!” said the clipboard man.
“C’mere,” said Maurie. “Gimme a hug.”
The 2 friends embraced and a relieved Laxmi joined them as the crew laughed and hooted and patted Chess on the back like he was way cool for having aced a reality show rite of passage.
XII.
Marjorie
PAHRUMP had his diagnosis: leukemia.
The awful thing was that Marj had just read in the paper about a pet hospice in San Francisco. A woman there specialized in putting the animals down. She let them lick peanut butter or cream cheese from one hand, if that was the kind of food they liked, while giving them a fatal injection with the other.
She sat with her neighbor as she cried. Cora said she was going to spend whatever it took to get “my baby” healthy again. Pahrump didn’t seem so bad; Marj asked if she was going to get a 2nd opinion. Cora said she had the best doctors “on the West Coast” so why would she?
“The worst thing is, Mr P just got accepted to day care. Heads ’n’ Tails, on LaCienega, by San Vicente—it’s very hard to get into. That’s where Reese Witherspoon keeps her dogs. The poor thing went through the most rigorous peer review. Marj, it’s worse than preschool! And he sailed through. Everyone loved him! Reese’s dogs loved him. They said he was ‘gifted’—didn’t they, Mr P? But now…”
The neighbor quickly composed herself then buzzed around the kitchen making dinner “for my Rump.”
She showed Marj the bottle of custom canine water that she poured in the doggie bowl. Pahrump was finicky about his H2O and always a little dehydrated, but now Cora gave him a special kind that came all the way from a river at the bottom of a glacier in Washington.
“Mount Rainier—Jerry and I were there once, in a custom RV. Can you imagine me camping? Have you ever drunk mountain water, Marj?” She looked down at a somewhat forlorn Mr P, who eagerly awaited his supper nonetheless. “No chlorine or fluoride, which are tough on the kidneys.” She said Pahrump’s rank breath seemed to have “improved.” He’d been putting on weight—this was months before the diagnosis—so she had him on a strict diet. Now she regretted it. Well, that was going to end today. From now on, she’d have Stein FedEx “grub” from New York. A place called the Barkery. “And a shop called Pawsitively Gourmet, isn’t that adorable?” Cora said the food was actually made for human consumption, so she and Pahrump could have dinner together. There were desserts like truffles and “pupcakes” (from the “pawtisserie”), almond butter waffle cones topped with carob, and oatmeal biscuits in the shape of fire hydrants. She couldn’t resist pulling her neighbor into the bathroom and showing off Mr P’s array of beauty products: tea tree oil shampoo, nail polish from Paul Mitchell, Earthbath Mediterranean Magic, and a misty spritz for his coat that was “kind of like eyeshadow.” Some of the products were very important because they stopped P from itching; Lord Rump had been known to scratch himself raw. Once a week, Stein sent over a mobile pet spa that gave her baby a hot oil treatment with Bulgarian lavender and African sage soil. As she spoke, she occasionally broke into quickly suppressed tears. Why had this befallen her little prince? Why? Marj touched her neighbor’s arm and said there were some questions that could never be answered. But she had a feeling that Pahrump would be “just fine.”
THE old woman went home and sat in front of the TV. She was in the middle of reading a slim book about Jesus’ visit to India as a young man. A lot of people questioned if he ever really made that historical trip to Orissa but Marj didn’t doubt it in her heart. Jesus reputedly gave sermons and traveled as the Buddha did amongst people of various castes, and learned the art of healing in the holy city of Benares. She had seen pictures of Benares and it reminded her of Venice. It was supposed to be a city of death but seemed so alive.
Marjorie thought more and more about her own journey. She would have to start planning soon. At night she sat in bed and steeped herself in delicious memories of the Taj Mahal Palace, her conjurings enhanced by a trove of clipped and yellowing pages from Look magazine. The colonial wedding cake of a hostelry, filled with marble halls, dark incense-laden recesses, and a seemingly limitless army of servants clad in shiny boots, turbans, and maroon or blinding white linen, was in a most enviable section of that dense, aromatic, splendiferously beleaguered city: just behind the legendary Gate of India, a tiny Arc de Triomphe perched like a launching pad for genies on the Sea of Oman. (Both hotel and Gate were at the very beginning of David Lean’s glorious film as well, just before Judy Davis and Dame Peggy board the Deccan Queen.) There was an island her father took her to by motorized dinghy—the Elephanta Caves—you could actually see the water-bound site from their hotel room, and, remembering, Marjorie’s eyes teared up at the exoticism of it.
She would soon be there!
The most phenomenally eccentric thing about the Taj was the chestnut she insisted her father recite (after a draught of Kipling) each night before bed. It seems the English architect who designed the palace went home during its construction; upon returning from London his eyes told him the workmen had built the hotel the wrong way round—its facade faced the water and its back, the city! Mortified by the error, he drowned himself in the bay. Whenever Dad told that story she trilled with glee and he tickled her and said that his Marjorie Morningstar was a bonafide scoundrel and a scamp too. How she adored him! She could smell him still.
She would use the same agency that handled the holiday trips she took with Ham to Italy and Alaska; her husband had never favored a “passage to India.” Trudy always got the best deals. Marj didn’t know if India was a specialty but the Travel Gals were generally pretty well versed, and where there’s a will (Ham’s), there’s a way, No pun intended. She laughed aloud at her little joke then lazily drew a finger over the page of the atlas from Bombay to Bangalore to Madras to Calcutta to Benares to Agra to Delhi to Jodhpur and back to her precious Bombay, the trail always like a gloriously twisted wedding ring of 22 karat gold.
EVERY few days, she visited her Wells Fargo home branch and the teller wrote down Marj’s balance. She’d never had that kind of money in her life. She thought of calling Joan and talking to her about the trip though she didn’t like to bother her busy daughter. Still, she knew that her youngest shared a love for the subcontinent as well. It was “genetic.” Straight through her teens, she adored the Indian saris and statues Marj brought home from shops and flea markets; she read to her little girl about Ganesha, remover of obstacles; they made pilgrimages to the zoo to marvel over the elephants. (She was entranced when told of the Elephanta Caves, where Mama had visited with Joan’s grandfather.) The pale, pretty child drew pictures of the Taj Mahal—not the hotel but the real Taj Mahal—and even then showed an extraordinary talent for detail and perspective. Marj was so proud: proportions always so beautifully done, with fastidious decorations, crosshatchings, and subtle hints of pastel evoked with a stubby pencil and crude crayons. Even as she grew older, Joan asked if they could one day visit the memorial in Agra, and while Marj didn’t say it, she knew Hamilton wouldn’t look kindly on mother and daughter traveling alone, and that he’d never consent to join them. Maybe now Joan might want to come, for at least part of the trip. The old woman decided not to make any proposals. She would mention her plans to visit Bombay, and leave the rest to Joanie. She wasn’t going to bend anyone’s arm—that wasn’t any fun.
Besides, Marj felt perfectly fine “flying solo.”
XIII.
Joan
JOAN kept seeing Thom Mayne at Peet’s, on Montana. She and Barbet were already taking meetings with Lew Freiberg about the Mem. Lew was in the middle of buying a house in Bel-Air. (He was in the middle of buying houses everywhere.) He was staying at Shutters, which he kept saying he couldn’t stand. Thom Mayne was ridiculously tall, cranky-looking, and gorgeous, and Barbet hated him more than ever since he’d won the Pritzker.
One morning before
they met with Lew, Barbet triumphantly brought in a page he’d torn from the “My Favorite Weekend” section of the Times. The headline: ALWAYS ON THE GO, EVEN WHEN HE’S AT HOME. Barbet read out loud, punctuating each of Mayne’s sentences with great, insane flourishes.
When I get home, I just want simplicity, stability, and routine. Just walking our dog, Isis, going to get a cup of coffee, and looking for heirloom tomatoes at the Santa Monica Farmers Market. 8:30 on a Saturday night will usually find us at Table in Venice, a new restaurant opened by David Wolfe of 2424 Pico fame. The place is funky and laid back, very 70s Venice…Surfer son Cooper often accompanies us as he’s an adventurous eater and loves David’s cooking. I had real severe back problems about 10 years ago…so my wife, Blythe, got me going to yoga…My back problems have gone away. But I’m not at all into yoga as a spiritual thing.
“Who the fuck is he kidding?” said Barbet. “His dog Isis and his Adventurous Eater Surfer Son—oh, he fancies David Wolfe’s cuisine!—whoever the fuck that is, ‘of 2424 Pico fame’—how fucking adventurous! How fucking adventitious…”
“Adventitious? What is ‘adventitious’?”
He ignored her query. “And that bit about the yoga—God forbid we think Mr Morphosis has a spiritual side! Mr Polymorphosis Perverse! What a sanctimonious prick-monster.”
“Oh come on, Barbet, you’d love to be telling the LA Times about your ‘favorite weekend.’ ”
“Right! Saturdays: browsing for Milton’s Paradise Regained at Dutton’s Brentwood, then brunch at Axe, Percocet at Horton & Converse, Pilates with Demi at the little gym on Nemo, LP hunting for Lord Buckley and Stan Freberg at Amoeba, a jaunt to Maxfield’s to pick up that groovy little Rick Owens leather coat and the 20,000 dollar vintage Hermès strap-on I’ve had my eye on. At night? Sirk at the Aero and a salad on Montana—Locanda Portofino! But Sundays, I would sorely enjoy watching you shove said froggy dildo up Thom Mayne’s growling, hairy ass.”
“I wish.”
SHE’D been working with Barbet for 7 years, sharing the same bed intermittently for 5. After lust burned off, an unspoken agreement to see other people. He was still her confidant—maybe surrogate sib was more accurate—and no one made her laugh like he did. (Typical Barbet joke: “What did the SS guard say when the Jewish girl asked why Dr Mengele only experimented on her twin? ‘He’s just not that into you.’ ” Another: “Baraka is the new black.”) He knew she had an ongoing dalliance with Pradeep, the CG, which had incidentally worked to ARK’s advantage: to whit, the Freiberg Mem. It was business, so he was careful not to make any jokes about that relationship, nor inquiries—even the usual friendly insinuations were verboten. For that, she was glad.
They still fucked but things had definitely cooled since the (augural) coming of Lew Freiberg. Barbet was cagey; her affairs rarely dampened his ardor (the effect being predictably the opposite), but now the subtext was they had hooked the Big Fish and her partner didn’t dare befoul the waters. Joan needed to take care on her end as well—she didn’t like that pimped out feeling. Anyhow, she wasn’t at all sure what to do about the formidable Mr F and his low-flame fornicatory advances. The whole thing was incandescently taboo for a multitude of reasons. Billionaires were different from you and me. She was finished with Barbet—that way—at least for now. The last time she stayed over, Joan caught him, back toward her, douching in the shower after a shit. She stayed hidden as he washed his ass from the faucet with the same bar of soap she scrubbed her face with in the morning after shaving her legs. Payback: to sleep with this man out of incestuous convenience then cover her skin with the microbial cologne of his excrement to greet the new day.
At 50, Lew Freiberg had been married 4 times and was currently separated from his last, an aspiring children’s book writer. Soon after they met at the Ehrlichs’, he told Joan she was his “type”—pronounced with a kind of convivial semitic brazenness. He was always flirty and suggestive during Memorial design meetings; he would wait till Barbet went to the balcony for a smoke before tossing a crude bouquet of innuendo. She could handle it. In fact, it felt great to be desired by someone so inconceivably rich. As a girl, she had always wanted to be abducted by pirates.
ARK was far from being a frontrunner in the Mem competition. (Barbet liked to call them “the ark horse.”) There was Gehry, who Freiberg originally met through the Newhouses, though Barbet didn’t think Frank was all that serious about it. Frank didn’t seem to be all that serious about anything. There was talk of something being created by Andy Goldsworthy—the artist seemed a shoo-in to decorate the grounds of the main Mem—he of the Holocaust garden recently installed on the roof of a museum in Battery Park City; or maybe an outdoor installation by Tony Cragg. The usual rumors of Herzog & de Meuron (Lew liked the “Sydney Blue eucalyptus” they’d used at the De Young), or Jean Nouvel; the farther-out hints and whiffs of contenders such as sand sculptor Jim Denevan, David Hertz, Santa Monica’s Predock/Frane, Toshiko Mori, and England’s David Adjaye—of course OMA was in there too (Barbet called it “melanoma”), the agency of Special K, Auntie Rem, Barbet’s old mentor and perennial adversary. Joan knew it had been a fluke that ARK was in the regatta, and her seaweed sex, the body heat between herself and patron, was the kelpy glue that kept the firm in play. She didn’t care. She was too old and it was too late. She just wanted the job. Needed it. It was defining, and would define her.
She made a date with Lew to get together before he went back up north, but this time without Barbet.
XIV.
Ray
HOW did it happen? The relationship hadn’t been sexual. A few days after he got home from the hospital, she got on top and guided him in. He wasn’t even sure he could do that anymore; a long time since he’d even felt himself hard.
Throughout, she kept herself covered with a white muslin blouse he had bought her in Artesia’s “Little India.” That’s where her cousins owned a shop, and where she was living when they 1st met, a week after going on the lam. Before, when in LA, she had a room adjoining the consul’s suite at a hotel in West Hollywood called the Wyndham Bel Age. Sometimes the CG would stay on a few days after his wife and children returned to San Francisco. In that case, Ghulpa joined her cousins at the house in Artesia. They’d cook and catch up and go to a concert in Cerritos.
When Ray finally met the extended family, everyone smiled with closed lips and bobbling heads. The thing the old man liked was that no one had to do any explaining, nothing was compulsory, he didn’t have to say who he was or why he was so old or what he did for a living or what he and Big Gulp were up to. Didn’t have to announce his intentions. No one was judgmental, just friendly. BG and the cousins spoke Bengali. Sometimes it was pretty obvious the ladies were talking about him but it seemed they wanted Ray to know it, all very coquettish and warm, lots of sweet laughter, and he soaked it in. He’d been away from women way too long. Hell, he wasn’t a bad-looking geezer and occasionally got the feeling they were extolling his physical virtues, not his decrepitude—could be a cultural thing. (He allowed he may have gotten that one wrong.) Now suddenly they were sleeping together, a for-real shackjob, a very adult arrangement, and he knew Ghulpa was too old to conceal it through pride; and old enough to share with the cousins whatever details she wished out of the same emotion. He didn’t know much from Indians but the onus on women of a certain age without a partner seemed universal. For all he knew, the ladies were sitting around asking Big Gulp when she thought the old fart would pop the question. Maybe he was remiss but he couldn’t fathom getting hitched. He’d always been extra gentlemanly with her because that part of his life had already peeled off, like shadows do if you walk quickly at dusk. He couldn’t know her expectations. He would cross that bridge when she led him there.
Straddling him, grunting, her sweat-beaded bindi like a tear in the 3rd eye, Ray Rausch wondered if his brush with death had made Ghulpa affectionate this way; accelerating the process, so to speak. He could smell the Cadbury on her breath but they didn’
t kiss that much during the act, more with lips than tongues. (Indian gals sure loved their Cadburys.) He remembered that 1st day on the pier, he had wondered about her, if she was a loose woman, because her purse gaped and he caught a glimpse of a toiletry bag, zipper half-open as well, stocked with toothbrush, toothpaste, and tampons. Later, he realized most Indian ladies carried that sort of thing—and loved their sweets. Big Gulp always talked about having “floss on bamboo sticks” back in Calcutta. It took him a heck of a while to realize she meant cotton candy.
That was how it happened: dark, fathomless, Ghulpa’s almond eyes whitening in their sockets toward the end as he felt himself seize inside her while she clawed his gray-haired chest, threadbare patches from where bandages and EKG suction “thingies” (BG’s favorite word) had been roughly ripped away. He had the fleeting thought he might have another heart attack—die in the saddle—but there was no pain, only surprise, and then he felt the dig of her nails, that was what hurt, finally grabbing her tiny hands so she’d lighten up just a little. That’s when she seized, slowly arching her head, which ever so slowly came back down to bobblesmile its naughtily sated sumptuously wayward Cadbury grin. Everything old is new again.
Ghulpa went to the powder room and after a minute returned with a hot cloth. She wiped him down then covered her man up in the thin Target comforter just like swaddling a baby. She disappeared again and he lay there dreamy as a girl. When she came back, BG turned on his television, kissed his cheek, and went to the kitchen to cook. He felt mannish, restful, and comfortable in full measure.