Bruce Wagner - Memorial

Besides, Marj felt perfectly fine “flying solo.”

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.

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.