Memorial

by Bruce Wagner

  SHE forgot where the Imperial was parked then had a violent attack of diarrhea. She found it, almost by chance.

  There was a vending machine with free papers and she grabbed some to sit on so she wouldn’t stain the leather seat. On the way home she was almost struck by another car and winced at the imprecations of the driver as he reentered traffic.

  She stripped off her soggy dress, put it in a Glad bag, and ran a hot bath. She got the notepad with the numbers on it and called Joan’s house, thinking it was her cell, but hung up before being connected. She rang again, got a message, then put down the receiver without leaving word. She thought of phoning Lucas—maybe everyone had been wrong about him and the Bonita gal, but who was everyone?—and wanted desperately to call Jeff Chandler and the woman from Wells too, kicking herself for having left their cards at the bank. How could she have left their cards with those bloodless people? Though maybe it was best to sit tight: the pair were possibly “scammers,” that was the word her daughter used, even though Marj couldn’t believe it. They had been so kind! They were real. She didn’t trust the thin man, the black, or their double-doored nonsense as far as she could throw them. She thought of calling Joan again…she wished Ham were there, her white knight, always so protective, like her father was, so polite and respectful yet intimidating, he would have known how to deal with these people, he wouldn’t have allowed anyone into the house in the 1st place, and now she wondered about that bureaucrat who said he was going to call the police—what police? Was it really her bank, or something that looked like her bank? It sure seemed different. She didn’t recognize anyone there either. (It was as if they were actors.) Hadn’t she been there just a few days ago? How would they have put those double doors in so quickly? That was a big job! Maybe she’d ask Cora about it, but Cora did her banking at Fremont, on Wilshire. Maybe Stein would know. Stein probably used a lot of banks. Yes, she would ask Cora to ask Stein if he’d noticed any renovations at Pico-Robertson. He might even have “information,” like businessmen sometimes do. Maybe he would know if this particular branch was notorious for defrauding the elderly.

  She turned off the faucet.

  It simply couldn’t be true that she had no money in her accounts! The agent and the Wells lady made her write a series of checks because they said it was absolutely necessary, in order to catch AKA Mr Weyerhauser in the act, that was the way the Bureau did it so the charges would stick. The Bureau insisted it be done like that or else the gang would “strike again.” Besides, there was always the chance it was an inside job and they said that if the money was in their hands, there would be no question of its being safe. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. So she wrote out the checks and they gave her receipts and told her what time to go to the bank because they would need her to identify AKA Mr Weyerhauser—they always called him that, AKA Mr Weyerhauser—they said exactly when to come because she was “critical” to the arrest, the eyewitness who would seal the ringleader’s fate. They needed her to ensure this would never happen again.

  (She remembered the agent had said, “You are my hero.”)

  Marj climbed in the tub, along with her soiled slip and underwear. That was dumb, she thought, she should have washed herself 1st, but what was done was done. They floated around her like flotsam from the Titanic. She soaped up her itchy behind. The phone rang and she leapt from the bath, and barely caught herself from falling, thinking it was someone from the bank. Trudy, from the Travel Gals, was on the line. She’d put together a wonderful “mother-daughter package” at a phenomenal rate—a 2 week trip that took in Bombay, Delhi, and Agra. Marj stood there sopping and shivering and said that she couldn’t talk just now. She was on her way back to the tub when the phone rang again.

  “Mother?”

  “Who—Joan?”

  “Mommy, it’s me! I was in an accident!”

  “Joan! Where—where are you? My God—”

  “I—it was my fault. Oh God, Mother! The woman—she’s hurt! I’m going to miss my plane. I’m going to lose the job! I’m going to lose the entire fucking job and all the work I’ve done!”

  “Where are you? Baby? Baby! Are you all right?”

  “Yes!” She took a moment to pull herself together. “I’m—I’m OK.” She started to whimper. “The man says it was my fault and he—he wants to talk to you…”

  “Hullo?”

  “Hullo?”

  “Hello, who’s this?”

  “This is Arnold Mathers, who’s this?”

  “Marjorie Herlihy. I’m her mother. Is she all right—”

  “Well, I’m the guy whose car your daughter just hit! My wife is having a fuckin miscarriage! Your daughter hit my wife! I think she’s drunk, or on drugs!”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean—”

  “We are very badly shaken up. The paramedics are here and my wife is bleeding from between her legs!”

  The man started choking back tears.

  “We’re going to lose the baby!” cried a woman.

  “Take deep breaths, darling. It’s gonna to be OK.”

  “What can I—how can I—”

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  “This is Marjorie Herlihy! May I please speak to my daughter?”

  “This is Antonio Borgosa. I’m a lawyer—I saw the whole thing. Your daughter was clearly at fault. It’s Joan Herlihy, correct?”

  “Yes—”

  “We’re calling from the County of Marin. Did you know your daughter was up north?”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, she’s in trouble, big-time. The woman she ran into was 6 months pregnant.”

  A man said over and over, “I have to go with my wife! I need to go with my wife to the hospital!”

  “Listen,” said the lawyer. “There’s something you can do and the gentleman said he won’t press charges.”

  “What is it? Tell me—”

  “Hullo?”

  “Hello? Who is this?” said Marj.

  “The father of the baby your hopped-up daughter just snuffed!”

  “Oh God!”

  “That’s right—killed. Now you listen to me—”

  Joan cried out, “Mommy, do what he says, do what he says!”

  “Oh Lord Lord Lord Lord.”

  Marj sat on the floor, the shit pouring out of her. She was cramping and blanching, her eyes watery from pain. She put a fist in her mouth and bit down.

  “Just listen to me. I don’t want to deal with the insurance companies. I hate insurance companies.”

  “Mommy!” Her daughter grabbed the phone. “Mama, I think my insurance lapsed. I don’t even think I have insurance! Oh God, am I going to lose my job? The job up north? And the condo? Mama, if I can’t get on the plane I am going to lose everything!”

  “But they said you already—that they were calling…”

  The nasty man got back on the line.

  “I want you to get your jewelry and put it in a little suitcase—everything you have. That means wedding and engagement rings, necklaces, pins, all the crap that dead prick husband ever gave you, understand? Put it in a bag, get in your car and bring it—now!”

  “Please! I don’t know where—I don’t I can’t I—”

  “Bring it to me now, you hundred-year-old monkeycunt, or you will regret the day you were born! My wife is bleeding internally and our baby is dead! Because of your fucked-up daughter! You spawned her! A junkie pig who turns tricks in Porta-Potties!”

  “Mister, please! She’ll do it! She’ll do it! Mommy!”

  “Get the jewelry.”

  “Mama, I’m so scared! There’s blood, everywhere!”

  “Get the jewelry and don’t forget the opal! You are human garbage, do you understand? Get the rings and the diamonds and the everything, put em in a bag, and sit your skinny terminal gullible ass in the car and wait. In the fucking driveway. And don’t fucking talk to anyone or I will dig the eyes from your daughter’s head and fuck her skull with doggie-dicks. Am I making myse
lf clear?”

  “Mommy!”

  “The baby’s dead! The baby’s dead!”

  “I will lock little Joanie in jail with maggots and animals. Do you hear me, you deaf and dumb geriatrical cunt? I’ll be there in 5 minutes, OK, senile shithole? 5 minutes—or I will kick your daughter in the stomach till she bleeds from her ass and her eyes!” He started to sob. “My baby is dead! Do you understand, Mrs Herlihy? Your daughter killed my little girl!”

  “Mommy! Help me! Help me! Help me!”

  “Let me talk to my daughter! Let me talk to her!”

  “Hi! This is Antonio Villaraigosa again! I am a personal injury attorney with many, many years experience. Listen, this gentleman is agitated, he is very emotional, but I think it is best from the legal point of view that you do as he says.”

  There was a muffle of laughter and sirens and shouting before a breathless Joan got on the line. “Mommy, are you going to help me? Are you going to do as they say?”

  “Yes! Of course,” she said, already struggling to remove the ring, the ring she hadn’t taken off in more than 30 years. Her finger was swollen and she went to get soap. “I will, baby! Hold tight! Hold tight!”

  “Hurry!” screamed Joan.

  The line went dead.

  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.