Bruce Wagner - Memorial

“That is lovely! Whatever you feel is best.”

“Maybe we should use the money to buy Pahrump that bed,” said Stein, in jest. “Or a Toto!” He turned to Marj. “These doggie palaces have custom mattresses. They’re Posturepedic, or whatever — made from that NASA material that ‘remembers’ body shape. I mean, it’s like a miniature of what you get at the Peninsula. The last place we visited had a bed that looked like a Mies van der Rohe — you know the chaise Amber and I have in the den, Mom? I asked them and they said it cost 2 grand! I kid you not. These dogs live better than we do.”

“Pahrump loves his own little bed just fine,” said Cora, worried that Marj might think her son had been serious about how they were going to apply her donation.

“Just don’t be surprised if he comes home spoiled. Amber and the kids dragged me to that store where Paris Hilton outfits her Chihuahua. You can get a Sean John sweatie with your dog’s name spelled in diamonds. 25 hundred. But the best is what we’re going to do for Pahrump when he’s back home with Mama.”

“No, no, no,” said Cora.

She was spirited now, enjoying her son’s antic attentions.

“We’re gonna get him a masseuse.”

“We are not,” said Cora. “He’s teasing.”

“Mrs H, I kid you not. There’s a pain management clinic for dogs with the Big C. I’m talking certified canine massage therapists! The hospital referred them. Ma, I am tellin ya, we are gonna do it.” He turned to Marj. “Mrs H, do I look like a kidder?”

SHE heated some chicken soup.

Marj didn’t know what Stein did, but thought maybe he was some kind of attorney. There was a piece on 20/20 about a lawsuit against the sweepstakes company Ed McMahon worked for, and the old woman remembered Cora saying her son had something to do with that. Evidently, they were no longer allowed to send letters to people saying they were winners when they weren’t really winners at all.

She wondered why Joan hadn’t phoned like she said she would; she’d probably just gotten busy. After the encounter with Stein (who she thought was a ruffian) Marj considered giving her own son a call but held back. She hated crowding her kids. Though this time she had a reason to call Joan — she could say she was worried she hadn’t heard back — but decided to wait a few days before getting in touch. Instead of making her daughter feel guilty, Marj idly wrote a scenario, out of pride: she would ring up and say she “didn’t want to miss her” before leaving on a little jaunt to the desert; that Cora invited her to come spend the weekend at her son’s house in La Quinta. She’d probably just get Joan’s machine, but that’s how she decided to handle it.

She rehearsed the lines in her head before drifting off.

SHE was about to call Marj when she checked her messages.

There was her mother’s voice, nervously hesitant, going on about La Quinta (where Hamilton liked to take her; they used to stay at the eponymous resort, in “Frank Capra’s former bungalow”), then something about the Taj Mahal. She knew it was a ruse, and it didn’t make her feel great; she had promised to call, then everything went out the window when she got her marching orders to go up north again. That’s what kind of whore she was. And, not to worry, Lew wound up fucking her in his brother’s house in Napa, on the Forbes 400 memorial acres, fucked and sucked her hard, left her sore as a week’s full of downward dogs, bruised and yeasty and burnt.

She thought some more about Full Fathom Five. The story of the couple left hanging in the branches had unhinged her but Joan wanted to avoid any treehuggers’ on-site plantings; best leave that to Sir (Sri?) Goldsworthy, the Dumfries shaman whose “Garden of Stones” Holocaust Mem at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, with its dwarf oaks emerging from holes within 18 13-ton glacial granite boulders (18 = the Hebrew alphabet correspondence with chai, the Jewish equivalent of ch’i ), would be hard to beat. (In the future, the acorns born of the dwarfs would be planted by children of Holocaust survivors. For real.) It was out of her purview and Joan knew there was always the danger a wily Lew might interpret such a gesture, from anyone else but Andy, as cliché. Still, she circled the idea of a vast reflecting pool; talk about cliché, but it was pretty hard not to go there. If she could do something “new” with water, if that were even possible, if she were good enough — a flat green slate pond engineered to remain at perfect ground level in the staggeringly elegiac meadow he’d selected might achieve the timeless, anonymous effect that had subsumed since the Lost Coast rumination. (Brilliant alternate working title: Lost Coast. ) She’d immersed herself in the tsunami — ancient legend come to life before the contemporary world. In some ways she felt privileged, because whether one knew it or not it was the defining event of hers, Lew’s, and everyone’s lifetime, like being on the planet during Vesuvius, Pompeii, Krakatoa. And maybe Hiroshima. (She knew it was all wrong and that it didn’t make sense, but in her mind the death of New Orleans was closer to the disappearance of the WTC.) She thought about the dogs and elephants that nudged people to higher ground, dolphins urging fishing boat captains to the relative safety of deeper seas, and afterward, when scarred, sentient pachyderms lifted detritus from the injured, or aided in the disinterment of the dead…All her life Joan had felt a strange closeness to that region, as her mother did, now racking her brains for this idiot’s assignment, something asinine and collegiate about it, civic science fair, building the Perfect Memorial, though if she had her way, not just for richies who got tree-bough-hanged but for everyone who died and everyone who lived, all the walking dead and miracle folk, the incognizant motherless children, a monument to the broken and unbreakable — impossible! How to memorialize a myth of such potency? Now was the Time of the Memorial. It was her time. Yet to note absence and the void — to note it — was a philosophical conundrum. There wasn’t syntax for such a challenge, architectural or otherwise. What would be the point? Was she capable of erasing herself, of banishing hubris? Only from Silence could the semblance of such a thing be born. Maybe that’s why she rode Freiberg bareback, subconscious thought being that life growing inside her was the only answer, an antidote to egotism. At least it would be a starting point. Womb to tomb. What was a grave, anyway? Something to mark the memory of a spirit. And what was spirit but the embodiment of Myth? (She laughed as she suddenly thought of Pradeep telling her how his favorite, Ali G, sang the last phrase of the national anthem as “your home in the grave.”)

Sri Lanka was called India’s teardrop: only this morning she read something in the paper about a killer convicted on the strength of DNA — tears the little girl had shed onto the seat of his car. We are all made of water

and again the images seized her, being fucked by Lew, fury of his DNA, her fury as well, he’d gripped her long hair, it had been 20 summers since some rough Berkeley Romeo did that in back of a stationwagon; mournful Napa wind howling through reconnoitered memorial grove as she got rimmed rattled and rolled (rimmed Koolhaus, rimmed reaper) in that haunted house lea, it began to rain, great blackwater sheets of it, then, Joan embarrassed at her own wetness, hoping it wasn’t a turnoff, it had been a turnoff for some of the men in her life but they were babies, that’s just how she was physically wired, she got so wet sometimes they’d assfuck her by mistake — there it was, so true, body as earth and tsunami, crass dumb analogy, fucking as access to Myth, fucking was Myth, recession and floodwater, corporeal heat and gaseous gale force cuntfart wind, magnificent oblivion as tears, secretions, and semen dissolved and commingled, the blacking out, animal rush of hearts and minds to higher ground, eyes opening, closing all veils, thresholds akimbo, atremble, reflecting pools reflecting ambient absence, sounds and swells and swelling, screams and shadows, gorge and engorged and failure to outrun the deluge, system collapse, that’s how we were wired, that’s how we vanished, kicking and screaming in sepulchral acquiescence, all the same, the sacramental memorial of 2 bodies as they rutted their way to birthing and deathing and grubby celestial silence. I’m a Mem. Yes I am, and I can’t help but love him so.