She went to Wells and got the money order (he told her not to “gossip” about what it was for, especially if the teller was “chatty”). Lucas said he’d come back sometime in the next few days. He wasn’t too specific about when—there were other winners to contact; one lived as far away as Ojai, and the federal rule was that he had to greet the winners himself. She dialed the number on his business card and got a recording: “You have reached the State of New York Blind Sister Beneficiary Hotline.” She quickly hung up, thinking that perhaps she’d violated some sort of protocol. It made her feel silly, yet glad everything was on the up-and-up. She almost broke out the Baileys again.
Marj left a get well note in Cora’s mailbox. She knew Cora and Pahrump were at the hospital, and wrote on the card how bad she felt, and that she hoped—was certain—Pahrump would soon be better. (She didn’t want to mention leukemia. She didn’t even know how to spell it.) Enclosed was a check for 25-hundred-dollars that she requested be given to any place that helped dogs and other animals who were “having a rough go.” Cora was well-off and she purposefully left the Payee space blank, rather than filling in her name, in the chance the neighbor might take offense and think she was offering money for Pahrump’s care, which certainly wasn’t the case.
Then she strolled to Riki’s.
She’d uncharacteristically forgotten to get a receipt for her balance while at Wells, so she went to an ATM a block away from the liquor store. Paying the cash machine fee was a luxury Marj could afford: her savings, CDs, and money market were in excess of $925,000. That was her worth — excluding Hamilton’s monthly pension and Social Security checks, excluding the value of her house (about a million), excluding the recent, salutary generosity of the magisterial State of New York.
They were open for business. Flowerpots and blackened, stuttering, or gutted half-broken votive candles still lined the sidewalk. The handwritten notices had increased in number. There was no one in the shop but Riki’s son. Marj smiled, albeit painfully, and he said hello, a little painfully too. She was worried about what to say — she’d made a few dry runs in her mind but no words had come — and the old woman began to involuntarily tremble. He was a kind, good boy and, seeing her distress, approached. Marj hadn’t planned to be the party who needed comforting but so be it. They looked in each other’s eyes and she told him how sorry she was. It was that simple, and thankfully the right words had come, without effort. God had given them to her. He asked if she wanted something to drink. An elegant, haggard-looking woman in a sari emerged from behind the curtain of the back room. She must be Riki’s wife; the poor boy’s mother! Marj smiled, steadier this time, walking toward her. The widow wasn’t as welcoming as her son but not unfriendly. A different generation, and a creature far more shattered by the loss. Mrs Riki’s head bobbled back and forth in greeting, just as her husband’s used to. They took each other’s hands, eyes starting to brim. Marj reached for her pocketbook and took out the envelope with the 2nd money order she’d gotten from the bank. She pressed it into the silently protesting widow’s hands. With the fortitude of a good witch in a fairy-tale, Marj made it clear she’d brook no refusal and perhaps because of her age, or simple aggrieved and grievous exhaustion, or because Marj was physically frailer than Mrs Riki, the widow acquiesced. Now there were freefalling tears all around. As the old woman left the store, she thanked the widow and son out loud. Later, she wondered if that was an odd thing to do — not the pressing of the money into her hands, but the thanking of them — then she thought, no, that was absolutely the right thing, God had given her words again, to thank them, to thank the spirit of the husband and father for the kindnesses he had showered onto the entire neighborhood in this small corner of the world, a corner so far from the one they knew. The State of New York would soon be thanking them as well, she was grateful to have played her part, and Marj wondered if the widow had been formally told. She’d forgotten what Mr Weyerhauser — Lucas — had said about that, but the notification of vendors and merchants was probably a duty left to someone other than the young man.
He couldn’t, afterall, be expected to do everything.
XXIX.Joan
LEW asked her to meet him where he lived. He actually said, “I really had a nice time with you” (she remembered a sweet jock once saying that), and he wanted to go hiking. Anilingus at the Bel-Air; now hit the hiking trail. Uh-huh. OK. Muy bueno. Muy bueno Sierra Club sandwich. He suggested they go to the Lost Coast; she thought that meant somewhere in Sri Lanka but no, it was apparently near his home up north. A rugged place without roads, the last of its kind. She’d never heard of it but that was appropriate. She was lost, with a capital L.
She packed flacons of Halla Mountain green tea and Chanel face creams, her favorite (and only) Yohji dress-up dress, blue jeans, Patagonian fleece and silk long johns, and went to Van Nuys where his jet was waiting. The thing was empty and looked like it sat 60 people. She’d deviously asked Barbet to come along, knowing he wouldn’t, and of course no invitation from Lew had been extended. (Her lame way of being inclusive. Or maybe more like having the pimp on watch outside the motel.) Joan was sure he’d already intuited that she and Lew had slept together — a ballsy roll of the dice. The irony was that in her eyes she had merely been careless; God’s way of giving her a shove off-bounds during the El Zorro/Fountainhead game. She never thought, deep down, that the fuck had bestowed any kind of competitive edge; if anything, she’d blown it. What was she doing, then? It’s a longshot but I want to be spoiled. Thanks for the Memories but just I want to be mobbed-up and married to a moneykiller. Does that make me a bad person? Barbet and Pradeep spoiled her but they weren’t proper pirates — they were little boys. Shit: any girl’d want to know what it felt like to storm the (bill) gates of billionaire heaven.
His company employed 15,000 people. He lived on a thousand acres in Mendocino. He was in the middle of a Promethean house-proud rebuild. The temporary contemporary was a cloud of colossal tents where he camped like a Bedouin king. The nomadic compound was designed by the same architects who put up similar ones for a resort in Rajasthan; each module 30 feet tall, full plumbing and heat-radiant tiles with the same floral inlay of pirtre dure that adorned the cenotaph of the Taj Mahal. (Other billowy canvasses had been modelled after Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 19th century Schloss Charlottenhof.) A retinue of servants reminded her, in their thin ties and closescrubbed style, of everything she’d read about Howard Hughes’s Mormon entourage. Freiberg owned 2 mountains: Motherfuck: Joan wanted to know what it would be like to own mountains and streams and the fauna and flora without and within. To own the very molecules…. Lew said he was changing his design ethos. (His word.) He was learning. He was eager. He was childlike, charming, autocratic, guileless. He was without mercy. He was openfaced and closehearted and mysterious. He was volatile and babyish and hedonistic, petulant and homely, but some days unspeakably, mystically handsome. She could be one of his aesthetic teachers. (His phrase.) Just like Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Ha. He kept saying how he wanted to buy houses in LA — he never bought just one of anything — with Joan as guide and muse. That’s what he said. He’d already looked at Gary Cooper’s classic A Quincy Jones; a complex in Holmby Hills with a Turrell skyspace; a cozy villa in Palos Verdes with Mudejar-style ceilings, based on computer software that mimicked the Alhambra palace’s geometries (recent tenant: Julio Iglesias); and a 2,000 acre working ranch high, or as high as you could be, in the Malibu Hills, with an underground Turrell (oy vey) Olympic-size swimming pool. He had this big “churchy thing”—that ethereal side. He wanted to make a copy of E Faye Jones’s Thorncrown Chapel in the Ozarks. And he was absolutely obsessed with Louis Trotter’s Bel-Air folly and final resting place — LA COLONNE. (He knew Louis’s son Dodd.)