Fanny, Lew’s 9 year old, bounced in, trailed by a nanny. The sweet, unguarded girl instantly seized Joan’s hand, wanting to show off the new playhouses. The Memorialist was charmed and so was Lew. The pigtailed child forcefully led them back through many rooms, past a smiling kitchen staff, out the rear entrance. For some reason, the relentlessly quotidian slicing and dicing of food preparation put a scare in Joan.
Around 50 yards off, there they were: 2 “chalets” with slide tubes and colorful rooftops connected by a bridge. “There’s electricity,” said Fanny. Her caretaker chimed in that a local lady put the whole thing up. Lew added that the same woman had built customized “kiddie-pads” for the broods of the Grateful Dead and the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” guy. As Fanny tugged Joan into one of the munchkin-sized entrances (she had to duck), Drea emerged from the other playhouse. The miniature structures had working plumbing, and were insulated so the girls could have overnights, with chaperones pitched in an adjacent tent. Lew said, “The things cost a hundred and 8 fucking thousand dollars.”
THEY had a light lunch.
Lew spoke about acquiring art. He said he wanted to be more of a “radical curator,” and not just “play musical chairs” with other collectors at auction. He asked for Joan’s general opinion on a few things, nothing heavy or loaded. He told her he’d been thinking about building a large space for a piece by a New Yorker whose latest installation was basically composed of 50,000 lbs of Home Depot topsoil blended with compost, the latter of which came from Rikers Island Prison. He also liked the work of an artist who literally ate her way through drywall — he thought that was “ballsy.” When she didn’t respond, he said that “Andy”—as in Goldsworthy — had turned him onto the photographed work of Ana Mendieta, “the chick who jumped out the window.”
“Jesus,” said Joan wryly. “Pretty soon you’re gonna want to ‘collect’ that woman who films herself fucking her patrons.”
Lew laughed and said, “I haven’t heard about her — but now I’m going to find out.”
HE smiled and took her hand as they strolled. Her mind felt clunky; she tried to read the meaning of his gesture, but failed. Everything was failing her, even the light.
She got butterflies, thinking of Full Fathom Five ensconced in the chapel where they’d held services for Samuel and Esther, a honeyed, harmonious paradox of modernist design infused by the wabi sabi aesthetic of George Nakashima, the exterior resembling a concretized origami folly, the interior filled with shoji screens commingling with lustrous walnut, English oak burl, and even the 18th century ball-and-claw mahogany footware of John Townsend. But mostly, it was Nakashima’s show. She remembered Pradeep telling her that the legendary sculptor had been the disciple of a guru in India, and helped design an ashram there; he’d built temples and other worshiperies in Japan, and a monastery in New Mexico too. Lew admitted that his sister-in-law was actually the one who’d turned him onto the old master. Having dutifully done his homework (he was really good at homework), the well-tempered dilettante felt comfortable enough regurgitating someone else’s description of Nakashima as “part hippie-Buddhist and part Shaker, a tie-dyed Japanese Druid.”
It was golden time.
They were getting closer to the church.
“Look,” he said, “this is going to be hard, but I want you to know that I’ve gone in another direction.”
She didn’t have a clue what he meant. Was he talking about their child? Had he somehow managed to have it aborted without her knowing? He saw she was perplexed, and segued into the crudely inenarrable.
“You’re going keep it. You’re going to have the baby, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve already won the competition.”
Joan looked at him as if she were lucid dreaming.
They kept walking as he spoke.
“I fired Mr Koolhaas — he’s a Royal Dutch pain in the ass. He likes to ‘waste space’—that’s what he said! He can waste someone else’s—and their time too. I do want to look at what you’ve come up with, hell, I know how hard you’ve worked, Joan, and maybe we can wind up incorporating some of it. A compromise. That’s why I wanted you up here…and for selfish reasons as well.”
“You haven’t even seen what we’ve done.”
“That’s not the point, Joan. It never is. And you know it.”
She was in the midst of choosing not to hate him — like being in a wind tunnel filled with thousands of delicate, whirring gears, unmoored, pelting her like moths and molecular machines. It all happened with lightning speed, and once she was finished armoring she would have to reenact the same process, so as not to hate herself.
“I’m going to do something different.” Pause. “I’m going with Santiago.”
“Santiago?”
“Calatrava. I just fell in love with his spanwork. I think that’s what this thing’s going to require. Have you seen the bridge he did up north? And the winery in Spain? The Bodegas Ysios—for Isis, the Egyptian god. Am I pronouncing it right? I saw him on Charlie Rose and something clicked. I’ve already bought 2 of those ‘Torso’ townhouses. Gonna be the 6th tallest building in the city (if it ever gets built), and I got the top 2 cubes.”
Not hating him would be harder than she thought.
She struggled to regain her footing — now she was on one of those bridges (not a Calatrava) from old movies, the threadbare sort spanning mile-deep gorges. She knew his “spanwork” but wasn’t familiar with the winery; Lew probably saw it in Dwell, or the big Phaidon book. Calatrava was all right; at least he wasn’t a grandstanding ass like the others. A plainspoken, humble engineer. Gifted. Still, if Lew was going to “do something different,” she would have put her money on Herzog & de Meuron.
She broke away, jogging to the site where her calibrated flatbed pond would have lain. Bullshit amateur hour idea anyway. He chased after as she cantered toward the meadow through a fledgling allée of young trees, reveling in the light and open space, the windchill that preceded darkness. He should just leave it like this, she thought. Open, without markings. Anything human would ruin it. That’s what Goldsworthy would do. Maybe that’s what Calatrava had in mind — a big John Cage nothing. Maybe the engineer suggested putting his signature batwings someplace you couldn’t even see, 2 white little boomerangs high in a tree, maybe Lew loved that and was going to pay millions of dollars for tiny trademark))s wedged in a tree…
That would be the perfect memorial — more perfect than a bastard child.
She was crying like some idiot now and Lew offered apologies, but that’s not what she wanted. He caught up right around where the ashes were to be buried, and Joan brought him down onto her, in the grove of crepuscular light.
LXVI.Ray
GHULPA started to hemorrhage and had to go to the hospital.
The doctor said she should stay because he wanted to make certain she wouldn’t get out of bed. He didn’t even want her up to use the bathroom and wasn’t sure she would follow his orders, if at home. The cousins came and went, riding bedpan herd, and giving her spongebaths. They put a cot in the room; there was a futon too. The old man was lonely and slept over a few nights but she finally kicked him out. Ghulpa said he was in the nurses’ way, and besides it wasn’t proper since they were unmarried. He said he could remedy that, though now whenever Ray mentioned “getting hitched” she grew stern, saying it was impossible, if anyone were to ever find out where she was she’d be sent back to “that terrible country,” and because of her ingratitude, she couldn’t rely on the CG — Pradeep or his wife, the saintly Manonamani (she cried as she mentioned her name) — to help, especially considering her “illegimate” condition.