His brother Samuel’s death in Tamil Nadu had frightened and galvanized him. Lew Freiberg was 48 years old and had only recently embarked on creating one of the epoch’s great art collections. Before the 1st year anniversary of the tsunami had passed, he’d spent $300,000,000 raiding fiscally challenged museums of their French Impressionist art. He had inherited Sam and Esther’s vast trove of Buddhist antiquities, the Goyas, the Fra Angelico altarpiece, Rothkos, and Pollocks (Lew’s favorite “spatterfuck” was Full Fathom Five), and their quintet of fine art modernist armchairs, at $100,000 apiece. He gave Joan a tour of the 15,000 square foot cave tunneled into a mountain that would eventually contain 2 kitchens, 6 sleeping rooms, and a computer-retrievable 200,000 bottle wine reserve. Excavated 50 feet beneath the earth, it was a kind of medieval, meditative humidor — aside from the mosaic’d, brightly lit ballroom that was to be a replica of Moscow Metro’s Komsomolskaya station, complete with subway cars as lounges. There was going to be a grotto down there too and because of dampness vs delicate electronics, a corps of engineers had designed a system to completely recirculate the air at least once a minute. That would cost 2,000,000 alone, the side benefit being that people could watch Lew’s favorite Capras while soaking in a lava rock pool. Sylvia Sepielli and Michael Stusser (of the Osmosis spa and meditation garden in Sonoma) and one of Spielberg’s production designers were building a Kyoto-style ryokan and authentic bathhouse within, to which Guerdon planned to import an authentic full-time okami, or lady innkeeper. There was the half-built observatory; what really interested Lew at the moment was “an outlaw star” that had been ejected from the heart of the Milky Way. He loved the idea of an outlaw star — that’s what he was — and sang Joan a sweetly off-key “Desperado.” A chef and his wife lived in one of the tents, cooking for Lew and the children, when they weren’t with their mom. The new house would be built with virgin old-growth timber, dead-head cypress, and pine from rivers in southern Georgia, hand-hewn logs dredged by divers from lakes where they’d been submerged for centuries. Cold, river-bottom wood didn’t rot and was exceptionally beautiful. It was 10 times more valuable than ordinary planks.
3 hours after her arrival, Lew’s 10,000,000 dollar twin-engine Bell/Agusta AB-139 faerie’d them away at 200 miles an hour. He leaned close — their faces touched and his hand lightly gripped her thigh — to peer out one of the huge cabin windows on Joan’s side. There it was, the Lost Coast: coniferous forest of fetid adder’s tongue giving way to melancholic, barren swatch of no-man’s-land — like the smudged, empty margin of a book where a crazed scholar’s pencil notes reside — then rocky drop-off of hyper-graphic de-illuminated text into foamy wind-tossed void where the rest of the pages of the Infinite are buried. Lew said it was the longest stretch of undeveloped shoreline in the States. (Naturally, he was one of the few “inholders” to own private land within a federal reserve.) The desolation made her shiver. As the fog rolled and the helicopter banked, her head slowly cleared.
She was finally starting to get ideas. She wanted to visit the site in Napa before going back to LA. (Joan knew what he was up to and wondered why he hadn’t already jumped her back in the Cirque du so-so lay Mogul Tent. It was better for them to keep their mitts off each other anyhow, until the Mem issue was settled — like boxers before a match. She was having a reptile brain moment: if they got intimate again, what of the tenuous sap now suddenly rising?) Without pen and paper she mentally grafted her thoughts onto the primeval grid, mnemonically marrying them to the mossy, fuzzy, scary-crazy-ecstatic carpet below.
They landed. They walked a mile or so, passing the lean-to of a sculptor Lew had befriended, a Robinson Jeffers type who famously worked with wood and was allowed to lease a parcel of land out here. He wasn’t home. They poked around his frontyard, if you could call the stupefying cauldron of the Pacific a yard. Lew said the guy’s work reminded him of “Andy” (she’d heard enough of Mr Goldsworthy, thanks very much). As they hiked, conversation segued to the furniture of Nakashima and Noguchi — Lew had just bought a little postwar table for $800,000, at auction — Strange, Houshmand, and Walsh. He spoke of the sundari where the body of his sister-in-law was found, without mentioning Samuel; she wondered about that, and remembered what Pradeep had told her about the “spirit tree.” Maybe the topic of his brother was just too painful. They talked about the tidal wave catastrophe in general, which proved amenable enough to an ocean that seemed to roar, hiss, wallop, and sting for its supper. Lew shook his head and laughed about the shrinks who’d flown to Banda Aceh as grief counselors. It was so loud that he had to shout. He asked Joan if she knew about the supplies sent over in bulk: shipping containers with hair conditioners and gel, bikinis and disposable pink razors. Another riff on the obscenity of corporate America’s largesse. (His phrase.)
He told her how “Sam and Esthie” were in Kerala and Kochi — he had all the emails and digital photos his brother sent from the trip (there weren’t too many) — how they’d visited a place called Jew Town with an amazing 16th century synagogue, “the Paradesi,” its roof strung with dangling oil lamps and crystal chandeliers. Sam said that most of the Jews had gone to Israel, and only a few were left: “ ‘black Jews’ and ‘white Jews’ (orthodox) but today we saw a deeply taciturn woman sewing who went by the unlikely name, or likely, if you wish, of Mrs Cohen.” Deeply taciturn. His brother was a good writer, with a droll, subtle way. Lew had culled from the computer correspondence to make a booklet for the family service.
He recounted by rote how the couple were in Chennai before heading south to Mahabalipuram, where they perished. When the waters receded at the place their lives ended, ancient carved elephant heads and long-buried running horses were miraculously uncovered. Not many died there besides Sam and Esther. They were among “the lucky ones,” said Lew sardonically — of ¼ million, only a few hundred Americans were killed. He’d come to believe it was their fate, their appointment in Samarra. With a doff of the cap to his Buddhist sister-in-law, Lew wittily amended: appointment in samsara.
(A conjuration of Buddhist stuff had been on Joan’s mind from day one and she envisioned a sand mandala Mem, with a nod to Kyotan Zen gardens. A walking labyrinth, like that September 11th installation in Battery Park — something akin to Roy Staab’s arrangement of reeds and knotweed in the Hudson River would, like a mandala, be obliterated in mere days’ time, but she dismissed its transitoriness as too “Andy.” Damn him. {As Jon Stewart might say.} She dredged further from her mental file: the 93 WTC granite shrine, and small stubborn chunk that still remained after 9/11—a memorial of a memorial. She thought of all these things and it was excruciating to realize that her “sappy” frisson had been spurious and she didn’t have an original idea in her semen-filled head. Zaha wasn’t Zaha for nothin.)