“OK, Joanie. Chill.”
“You chill. I just don’t understand what you’re trying to get at. I mean, you’re stoned. Fine. It’s a weekday and you’re limping and you’re loaded. Look, if you need money, why don’t you just ask? Just come out and ask. You could have asked me over the phone, Chess. You didn’t need to spend your precious gas money to drive all the way to Abbott Kinney.”
The waiter brought the food.
She thought she might have been too rough on him. Then her sympathies quickly waned. Oh, fuck him. I’m not going to feel bad about his crazy shit.
Chess seemed humbled and began to eat. He let some of the smoke clear before he spoke.
“It’s just that you reach a certain age — I have a few years on you, Joanie — and you wonder, or start to wonder, what your origins are. The medical thing’s important too. I mean, what if our father had — or has—medical issues that are relevant?”
“What difference would it make, Chess? What difference would it make?”
“I’ve been talking to this friend about her dad. They’re estranged. (She’s not really a girlfriend, but I have my hopes.) Anyway, they’re estranged but she knows where he is and occasionally they talk. And my friend — this girl — she thought it was weird that I never at least tried to find Raymond.”
He waited for his sister to say something but she didn’t.
“Isn’t it weird that we never sought him out?”
“No. Not particularly. Why would we?”
“Here’s a guy who really impacted us. Our real father, right?”
“Impacted? How?”
“We’re both searching for a home. We always have been.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus, Joanie, look at what we do. I’m a location scout—could it be any more on the fucking nose? That’s what I do for a living: I look for places, mostly houses. I’m out there every week, looking for the perfect house. But what is it I’m really searching for?”
“You are so stoned.”
“Having this injury has given me time to think about shit, Joan. We take a lot for granted…and look at what you do. You build houses. Or at least you’re trying to. It’s not even like a metaphor with us, right? Do you see what I’m saying? And our relationships—or lack of them — I think, can be traced to this guy—Dad—leaving. I mean, neither of us can commit, right?” She grimaced, struggling to chopstick a tofu cube. “I don’t think either one of us has been with someone for longer than 3 years. Am I wrong, Joanie? Cause if I am, great. But I don’t think so. It’s all that abandonment shit, right? That’s the paradigm.”
“You’ve been watching way too much Oprah, Chester.”
“Maybe. Maybe so. Great woman, by the way. But I think — I think I’m going to look into it.”
“Go for it,” she said, aloof.
“I kinda have the time right now. And I guess I just wanted to get together and see if that — resonated.”
“I said: go for it, Chesapeake.”
That was the nickname Mom gave him. Raymond called him Chesterfield.
“Chesapeake,” he said, misty-eyed. She felt sorry for him again. “She hasn’t called me that in a long time. Anyhoo: I’m not asking for your blessings, Joanie.”
“No blessings, just cash. Right?”
He shook his head. “I don’t need your money. I’m fine. I just want to keep you in the loop.”
“Great. Perfect. Consider me in the loop.”
Maybe she had embarrassed him into rescinding his request. If that were true, she was prepared to feel minorly guilty. Joan didn’t know what to make of her brother’s oratory. He sort of had a point, bordering even on eloquence, but she just didn’t have it in her to care. It was his soap opera, not hers. She spent little time thinking about the man who walked away when she was 3. She knew their mother had loved Ghost Dad more than Hamilton — she’d tearfully admitted as much to Joan one night, after too much vino—but the daughter never probed further. Fuck Raymond Rausch. If he could live without her, she could definitely live without him. But things hadn’t turned out so well for Chess and it made sense, particularly in the throes of maudlin midlife and what sounded like a new love, to root around in that particular cellar. Rock on, Chesapeake Bay. Rock on with yer bad self. She thought his fantasy of Ray Rausch being a Master of the Universe was sad and hilarious. Money was always in there for her brother, one way or another.
Money shouted. Money sang. Money talked.
Money walked.
She remembered how Raymond used to read to them from The Jungle Book. One Halloween, he gave Chess a wig and red Speedo; the little boy trick-or-treated as Mowgli while their father comported in a raffish Baloo jungle bear number. (Maybe that memory wasn’t even her own. Maybe it was Marj’s, as-told-to.)
2 months later, just days after Christmas, he was gone.
JOAN got a call from Trudy, the original Travel Gal. After a light skirmish of How are you?s, Trudy advised Joan she had just returned from “a little vacation,” and heard from a coworker that Marjorie had expressed interest in going to Mumbai. Trudy said she tried Marj at home but couldn’t reach her, and was “just checking in to see if everything was OK.” She had tagged along with her mother once when the Travel Gals arranged an anniversary cruise to Alaska; her adoptive father was sick and Joan offered to help with planning, along with lending moral support. That was back when she was seeing more of her mom — she felt to blame for being somewhat of a stranger since Hamilton’s death. Add that one to the list. It should have been the other way around — she should have seen less of Marj while her husband was still alive, and more of her now. Whatever. It was all moot. She told Trudy she’d get hold of Mom and they’d come in together. Frankly, she was irritated the woman had phoned. She hated the folksy hard sell.
Besides, Joan had no intention of going to India with her mother, Pradeep, Thom Mayne, John Frankenheimer, Salman Rushdie, or anyone else you could think of. She needed to bag the Freiberg Mem and get her ass in gear, finish the maquette, have Barbet sign off, then fly it on up to Lew. The whole high-dollar dog-and-pony thing. She needed to wash that Mem right out of her hair and soak up the world press that would accompany her honor, propelling her to new worlds: the tony gallery rep for gouaches and watercolors, the crazy-cool furniture line, sex-sizzled signed and numbered condos, Sunday-magazine profiles, Robert Wilson collaborations, Taschen/Rizzoli Joan Herlihy: Builder book pub parties, and international university master classes. If everything turned out like she wanted, she wouldn’t be able to sleep for the next 10 years, let alone travel for pleasure or familial obligation.
Maybe her brother was on to something when he brought up the ticking clock. She had stopped taking birth control pills like her gynecologist told her to every few years, and hadn’t had a period in nearly 3 months.