Bruce Wagner - Memorial

He was having 2nd “and 3rd” thoughts about the efficacy of the therapist, whom he was paying $20,000 a week to be on call for his son, and whose main clients in the last few years had been highly profitable, highly dysfunctional rockers trying to get it together for reunion tours. Lew vilified the man because he was part of a group of psychiatrists who’d rushed to Phuket ( and New Orleans; another scam—“hurricane counseling appropriations” were now above the 200,000,000 dollar mark). Freiberg scoffed at the presumptuous, demoniac do-gooders, “disaster bastards” he called them, hating that sort of hubris: Western professionals who thought they could help those who’d lost mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, dogs, houses — all through the magical art of talk and handicrafts. He also knew that part of the reason the shrink went to Tamil Nadu was to ingratiate himself with Lew, but it had the reverse effect; all that hidden disdain for indigenous healers and outlandish fixation on PSS made him puke. Oh, he’d learned a lot since his brother’s death — that’s why he was helping the animals. Calamity Jane already made 3 trips to the 9th Ward and was probably cheating on his wife with other trauma-chasing funhouse hotzone narcissists. Lew even read an article saying the Jungian high priests were having nervous breakdowns themselves, sobbing as they went door-to-door in Plaquemines Parish, distributing self-help guides and getting paid for it. Bunch of pussies.

“Did you know there is only one fucking psychiatrist in the entire country of Rwanda? Right on. Tell me what some analytical asswipe could do to restore the self-esteem of a woman whose baby was torn off her shoulder and thrown against a wall? By her own brother. And now she’s got a cow. That’s all she has left. A cow. 5 dead wall-slammed babies, you know, machete’d or stomped on, a dead hubby, she’s got AIDS from the daily Hutu gangbang, or the Tutsis, the Tutsi rolls, whoever, and now all she’s got left is a fucking cow. Oh yes! Call in the Antioch-trained grief counselors!”

Lew was captious — Joan knew better than to engage. Just ride it out. Besides, she liked to listen: it was only his juicily fractious ch’i talking, and he had a surplus. Ch’i was sexy. Soon it would be dusk and they’d start to drink and she’d fuck it all out of him, out of herself too. All that overt/covert energy would be put to good use.

DREA and Fanny were adorable. They were 9 and 3, with their own wing and handlers. Joan was glad that he wanted her to meet them, regardless of the brevity of the encounter. (Though maybe it doesn’t really mean anything.) She was a bit nervous around the girls, and at 1st they barely glanced at her. They were probably nervous too — not nervous, shy. That was natural. But what do I know.

The nanny supervised while Drea read aloud from The Adventures of Mark Twain. Lew said it was a special dumbed-down version all the schools were using now. Originally put together for kids with disabilities, the book had caught on and been approved for the larger student body.

JOAN thanked him for the gifts he sent to LA, murmuring they were “beyond extravagant.” She didn’t know what to give him in return (full well realizing her shorthaired pussy was enough) — but still, she had to bring something —which wound up being a-silk-wrapped piece of blood coral she got 10 years ago, scuba-diving on the Great Barrier Reef. It had always been precious to her, alien and astonishingly beautiful, a bony, corpuscular vessel, and Lew was dead-on when he said it looked like something Damien Hirst wished he’d come up with. Watching him stare at it as if it were under a microscope, even Joan began to doubt the “realness” of its provenance and thought maybe the object was something she’d dreamed. An aborigine told her it didn’t come from the world of vocabulary (it was like a letter in the alphabet of the nonverbal) and there was no need to describe it — but if one was determined, it could simply be called “the 3rd Unit.” The 3rd Space. The 3rd Twirl. Man likes codes and alphabets. This object is part of the code of a dreaming place called Red Sands. We regard language as an emblem. A word stands for something and then we fall in love with that word. This object is meant to pull you back to Energy, not Word. It was a thing that stood outside a pair; it was the “C corollary to A-B.” She didn’t understand. All Joan could tell Lew was that “it came from the ocean” and suddenly she felt like a liar, an impostor, impoverished of ideas, famulus to the Wizard of Oz. When she dutifully regurgitated the shaman’s explanation, it sounded like a crazy person’s verbigeration.

On that weekend of Lew’s b-day BBQ…not a barbecue, strictly speaking, because the chef frivolously served up deliberately kitschy Sara Lee (still in the supermarket box) along with the bison and foie gras, hearts of palm stuffed with fava beans and pistachios, blood orange gelatin, “McSweetbreads” and columbine, snapdragons and cornstarch paper and edible soyabean stamped with the flavorsome logo of Guerdon LLC ; they drank deconstructions of Bloody Marys — that’s what the chef called them, thinking everyone would be amused — Joan just thought it was stupid. The man only dug himself deeper when sharing that he’d recently attended a bachelor party in Vegas where after-dinner drinks cost $2,000 apiece. For dessert (the cake sat in its cardboard vitrine like an objet d’art) they ate marshmallows infused with lavender and a kerfuffle of “Kentucky Fried” sorbet that tasted like, well, chickenskin. A gustatory crew watched from cameras in the kitchen so they’d know when to clear, and when to proffer the next cryovac’d course.

The girls were sent to bed. Supporting cast and crew discreetly vanished. They were deliciously alone as evening fell. Over glasses of Belondrade y Lurton verdejo, Lew rambled on about black holes and bursts of gamma rays burning brighter than a trillion billion suns — but lasting only seconds — and one-square-inch star cubes weighing more than however many quadrillion planets put together. He made his usual racist jokes and ruckus, outright drunk now, pawing her chest, softly, absurdly goosing the crack of her ass through Kate Hepburn capris, and getting contemplative about plaque the doctor said he’d found in his carotid (right-side only) before railing on a fresh bevy of pet peeves. Then he gifted her with Zai skis, and the craziest thing she’d ever seen, called a Henk — a 30,000 dollar carry-on suitcase he’d bought in Vegas, at Wynn’s. Lew said it was made from the same material used for rockets. A briefcase was attached, of horse-hair and rare wood (no doubt). The monogram: JHA. She wondered how he found out her middle name was Alice. She’d always hated it.

IN the morning, on the way to the airport, Lew drove past the gallery site where his brother’s bequest of paintings and artifacts would be showcased, and where he planned to build a studio for his own modest artistic pursuits.

Lew Freiberg, billionaire sculptor.

Also, he said he needed a place to house his “curiosities”—like Clyde Barrow’s bullet-ridden blood-stained shirt that he’d bought at auction for $125,000, and a collection of 3-century-old books, accounts of murder trials bound in the killers’ skin. Richard Gluckman was designing it. She knew Richard and didn’t take it as a threat; a studio was one thing, a memorial another. Still, she was well aware that her New York friend had built spaces for Chuck Close and Richard Serra, and suddenly, that nagged — what if Gluckman had put something in Lew’s head to have Serra do one of those rusted jillion-ton Cecil B DeMille cookie-cutter Ss for the Mem?