by Bruce Wagner
Over coffee, Chester asks about the show. Maurie says it’s a “Desperate Housewives/General Hospital thingie, but real,” whatever that means. Chess doesn’t watch network, only The Shield reruns, Larry King, and occasionally Letterman if he happens to be up. Which isn’t too often. The 2 buddies always yammer about making a movie from Maurie’s scripts, Chess producing. Chester had a few scripts at home in “the Herlihy Archives” and occasionally broke them out to refresh himself on plots and characters over inferior coke and a few Coronas, scratching his head at who the fuck he might approach for financing. Maybe Brad Grey. Or the Bing guy. Or that guy Cuban who did Good Night, and Good Luck. He’d settle back, do a few lines, and read awhile then catch himself laughing. Maurie was actually a pretty funny guy, all Jews were funny, it was in their genes, he had to admit the guy knew story structure, the Jews were fuckin funny and knew story structure, but most of the time whatever genre Maurie was working in was slightly impenetrable. At least to Chess. Chess knew that wasn’t his strongsuit, wasn’t supposed to be, his job was to find the money, like the Saw guys. The hard part was, and this was Chess’s problem not Maurie’s, that you couldn’t really sum them up in a couple of sentences which is what the money people always wanted. Chess had to work on that. That’s where the beer and the blow came in.
They talk about the old scripts, Chess reminding him of some of the bits, but Maurie is psyched on this A&E thing. Chess asks what other locations they need and Maurie says a hospital is the priority. If they find the hospital, they can “dress” some of the rooms, and pretty much have everything covered.
IV.
Marjorie
MARJ Herlihy resides in Beverlywood, off Robertson. Until Hamilton passed, a few months back, she’d been married 27 years—her 2nd husband. They’d lived well even though Tremayne Clothiers always seemed on iffy financial grounds. (When his partner died 8 years ago, she told Ham to rename it Herlihy Clothing, or Herlihy-Tremayne, but he said that would only confuse the buyers. He finally agreed but never got around to it.)
After the fatal heart attack, she was surprised to learn a secret: long ago, Ham had bought a policy called “term life.” By paying a premium, her husband’s trust was insured for $2,000,000, all of which became hers. Marj wasn’t sure what the genesis of this idea was—she’d never even heard of “term life”—maybe he’d had a premonition. At death, he had already owned the policy 14 years and it wasn’t cheap, something like $7,000 per annum, but it wasn’t exorbitant either (considering the unhappily fateful returns), except for the fact that had he outlived the 20 year contract none of the payments were refundable; he had probably kept it from her because she would never have sanctioned such an arrangement. She might have called it wasteful. Now that he was gone, every time Marj turned around she seemed to be listening to an ad for term life on the radio or reading about it in the paper. By the time she paid off the house and various debts, there was over a million left.
She had loved Ham dearly but not the way she loved Raymond, her 1st. Hamilton was a bland, steady rock, fit and handsome, a golfer and compulsive tennis player. He was sociable and liked to tell people he “brought Marj out,” meaning out of her shell, because she tended to turn inward. Adopting her kids had been his idea, and made him such a bigger man in Marj’s eyes. The children loved him too but never warmed up to being Herlihys instead of Rausches; they never exactly understood, it was as if they had been forced to wear cloaks which kept them warm but didn’t fit. Schoolmates teased them about suddenly having different surnames.
When Chess and Joan came to the wake, it was the 1st she’d seen of them since Christmas. They didn’t show much emotion. Marj wasn’t proud of the fact she hadn’t spent much time with her kids—it felt like having strangers in the house. On bad days, she blamed herself for being the type of mother who’d been so determined not to meddle that she’d done irreparable damage all around; on good days, she blamed Raymond. The divorce had come so early and the family had been deeply fractured; never a good thing but sometimes there is perseverance and triumph. It was their lot never to recover, not even with name changes and the syrup of Hamilton’s mayoral good cheer. No one knew where Ray had gone and the kids didn’t seem too interested in finding out. (Probably for the best.) They got along with Ham, which was easy because of his sunny, silken handyman’s disposition. Still, there was always a disconnect. As time passed, Chess and Joan went their own ways, and the rare occasions they did come over they were on smiley autopilot, as if to trigger early release from visitors’ jail. They didn’t divulge much about their lives; neither Marj nor her husband had ever been invited to any of the places her son and daughter lived. She wouldn’t admit it, not even to Ham, but that pained her. He must have known.
She was close with her neighbor. Cora was nearly the same age, and a widow too, though it seemed like her kids and grandkids were always dropping by. She subtly lorded her familial bounty over Marj but the old woman never let on that she knew what Cora was up to. Besides, the neighbor helped more than hurt and was wonderful after Hamilton died. Cora’s little Pahrump squealed and strangle-yipped all the time but when her Ham passed on, she relocated the spaniel to a different wing of the house so he wouldn’t grate on Marj’s nerves—a small act, yes, but one of great kindness. Long ago, the old woman told herself that people did what they could; that was an ingrained sentiment of her father’s. (She still had the needlepointed PATIENCE heirloom pillow Joan and Chess used to throw around when they were kids.) Overall, she felt blessed to have Cora next door. Steady, haughty Cora, loyal and royal in her own way, and vigilant.
Life after Hamilton Herlihy was strange because it was oddly the same as when he was alive, only now he was absent. Marj tried to express this conundrum to her daughter but Joan was so busy (for which Mom was grateful) that she listened as distracted loved ones do or anyone really who’s obliged to indulge someone trying to make sense out of the death of a partner or pet or relationship, glossing over whatever is said, skating away then skating back, concealing one’s distraction, and that was all right, Marj knew she was guilty of doing the very same thing herself. She never spoke to her son about how she felt; Chess had too many turbulent feelings of his own, and troubles as well. At least, that’s what she surmised. She was actually bemused when he came to the memorial and even more surprised he didn’t ask for money. Though she was starting to get a feeling in her bones, like she got before it rained, that he would soon call to ask, now that the mourning period, in his mind anyway, was officially ending.
Marj kept buying lottery tickets, never missing a day, not even when Ham was buried. Who knew? It might bring luck. The good and the bad always had a habit of coming one’s way when least expected (to paraphrase her father). She busied herself by visualizing the article in the Times, category: human interest, California section, Gift From Beyond—Widow Wins $93,000,000. It reminded her of that saintly couple who picked the right numbers a few years back, a husband and wife who raised money to bury newborns thrown into Dumpsters. O, the Lord worked in mysterious ways! Rich folks won the lottery and so did the poor and aggrieved. (The rich always fared better.) Goodness, she had just read an article about a couple with criminal pasts who won the Super Lotto and within a year, both were dead.
One thing Marj didn’t share with her daughter, Cora, or anyone, was a wild-eyed, magical idea that had grown inside her over the last few weeks with an ineluctable pull: Widow Herlihy had made up her mind to go to India and revisit the hotel Dad brought her to when she was a girl—the very best time of her life, a time she was convinced had made her the person she was today, suffusing her disposition, her entire existence, with a kind of diurnal poetry and peasant’s optimism, a time that allowed her to suffer all life’s vicissitudes, coloring her day-by-day mood with the lingering incense of nonsectarian spiritual hopefulness.
In the winter of her life, Marjorie Herlihy would travel to Bombay and check into the very suite that father and daughter once shared at the Taj Ma
hal Palace, a stone’s throw from the Majestic Gate of India.
V.
Joan
SHE was at ARK, in Venice, looking at the Rizzoli book: Zaha Hadid.
A dangerous object, 4 volumes of squiggly drawings and vaunted nonsense, each one a different size, slipcased into the special berths of a sharp-edged, thick, plastic, bloodred mothership. When architects and book designers met, it was a supercalifragilistic hagiographic clusterfuck. The collaborators reveled in making a fine arts tomb: a vanity memorial enshrining the master builder who’d become an ostentatiously overdesigned object himself, essayists and typographers working with pharaonic zeal, the book a sacred extension of the guru’s body, a highfalutin Pritzkerama requiring the dignified, calibrated, meticulous touch of latex’d surgeons in an amphitheater (patients aestheticized upon a table). But Joan thought this one just looked cheap, inside and out: vomitous tracts discretely en brève, with requisite untidily tidy references to Hegel, “excavations,” and other opaquely Boolean folderol embroidering endless built and virtually built projects of dubious digital coherence contained within. The print resolution was shoddy. Were they so Olympian they thought no one’d give a shit?
There was only one thing she liked in the entire unappetizing enterprise: the ski jump at Innsbruck. No, not true; there was something else. As far as she could tell (she hadn’t skimmed everything, nor would she), there wasn’t a photo of Hadid. Maybe this was simply the pomposity of inverted egotism. How had this woman gotten so famous, anyway? She was even curating, no, “guest designing,” the content of literary magazines. (Dopey sci-fi computer renderings at the head of each short story that would have looked more at home on Wired subscription blow-ins.) Perhaps a paucity of female architects had dictated her arc—Joan’s ARK swallowed by Zaha the whale—or the mere miracle that she’d managed, with grace and alacrity, to remove herself from King Koolhaas’s shadow—a Grand Chess Master’s trick, Joan had to admit…or her dramatic looks, the Baghdad-born thing, feminist warrior-ship masthead, unclassifiable geodesic goddess in a woman-killing theocracy, the sheer improbability of it, plus unkempt Fat Actress kohl-smeared gypsy-soprano factor that made her rock-star notable. Of course none of Joan’s acid observations interfered with the awareness she wanted to be Zaha; wanted books written on her own work, international forums centered around her own ideas, phantom or realized, wanted her very own (Mary!) band of Lilliputians to clamber on the papal bull of her mons zero. But she (Joan) was still relatively young. That kind of momentum took time. Oh God—
If she won the Freiberg Memorial, Ms Herlihy resolved to be happily, gloriously nichified, for a few years at least, like the early Maya Lin. Lin cut her teeth on a few mems before moving on to that wonderfully minimalist library in Tennessee, private homes, sculptures, the whole 9 yards; she was probably already designing tea and coffee sets for Alessi, just like El Zorro, though it was unlikely the Target audience could possibly be interested in ZH’s cold, arcane “liquid metal piazza” or the “Z Island” Corian kitchen with verbena scent dispensers (commissioned by Ernestomeda) or the 80,000 dollar “Aqua” polyurethane resin silicone-gel-topped table she’d done for that Wallpaper kid’s pretentious Established & Sons (Barbet told her the “kid” was married to Stella McCartney) or the chandelier she created for Sawaya & Moroni and displayed at the Milan furniture fair. Next would come ZH chairs, ZH linen, ZH sunglasses…how about ZH dildoes? ZH superabsorbent adult diapers? ZH Fentanyl pain patches? But so what. Even Gehry had done a Wyborowa bottle. Now he was working for Tiffany.
OK. It was clunky, but she liked elements of Hadid’s Cincinnati museum though didn’t agree with whoever had said that it was the most important American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War, or with the surreally profligate comparisons to Malevich, Lissitzky, Balanchine, Duchamp, Sant’Elia, Breuer, and Saarinen. Maybe she did agree. Maybe comparison = rip-off = genius. Maybe Joan was too precious. Preciosity = Death.
One good memorial and you could write your ticket. You could rev up those museum extensions like Ratso Renzo; you could do the Hadid and knock off an Ordrupgaard. But Maya Lin was an artist as well, as like so many of them, a multimedia superstar, and, cum Meier, was represented by Gagosian. Naturally, Lin had a book out—de rigueur—with a close-up of her hand holding a smooth stone on the cover. (“I think with my hands,” she says in the text.) I think with my cunt, thought Joan. That’s my problem. The ARKitect hadn’t focused on sculpture or paintings or anything other than buildings that had remained unborn. As she got older, she thought it myopic, an error in judgment that caused latenight stress and remorse, an oversight born of self-loathing and petulant sloth, to have been so singularly fixated on having things built (that’s why architects were architects, she kept telling herself, though she never planned to be one “on paper” only), part of her thought if she’d have been able to just let go, the sheaves of renderings would have built themselves, harvest come home. Another delusion, no doubt. She knew she’d been grandiose, and didn’t have much to show for it. She had committed that most American of sins: failed to move laterally.
Now the Napa commission would save her.
JOAN was introduced to Lew Freiberg by Pradeep, the Indian consul general she had an affair with a few years back. (He of “Mound Zero.”) The occasion was a party in Brentwood. A genteel gathering: the screenwriter Melissa Mathison, the architect Steven Ehrlich, the gardener Nancy Jones, the actress Phoebe Cates, the editor of Tricycle, the editor of the Jewish magazine Tikkun, a puckish travel writer named Pico (like the boulevard), a surgeon from Médecins Sans Frontières. The cappuccino klatch was ostensibly about raising money for victims of the Tsunami. There were a lot of professional Buddhists on hand, whose smug West Side affluence always set Joan’s teeth on edge. They loved to hear themselves talk, loved going on about meditation decathlons, death and impermanence (and how amazing the caterers were), when the truth was they’d be the 1st to snitch off friends when their hour with God—or the torturer—came.
Lew Freiberg was unlike the others. He was abrasively charismatic, cocky, a skeptic without being cynical. Head slightly bowed, eyes looking up at the blissed-out power-minglers through longish lashes, he seemed to judge everyone with his heart. Lew lost his brother to the Big Wave. Pradeep had known the Freiberg clan a long time, and the dead ones, Samuel and Esther (Samuel’s wife), as well. The family had a longstanding interest, not to mention an attendant antiquities collection, in all things Indian. The assorted holding companies were stitched together by around $7,000,000,000, the tiniest portion of which Lew wanted to spend creating a memorial to the couple on his drowned brother’s 400 acre property in Napa, land that would remain in trust in perpetua.
At the end of the evening, Lew asked Joan if she wanted to visit the site.
VI.
Ray
NIP had been transferred to West LA for surgery. (The lawyer handling Ray’s case was handling the Friar’s too.) The old man was still in the CCU and Big Gulp said she was going to raise holy hell the minute she got a bill for a single thing, and that meant either Ray’s or the dog’s medical care.
So far, so good.
Ray had his own DVD in there. Big Gulp brought him ribald American comedies, old Twilight Zones, and her collection of Nip/Tucks. There was a Forensic Files marathon in progress on Court TV but the facility didn’t have the cable thing together so he defaulted to his Rod Serling favorites.
A few of the classic half-hours actually took place in hospitals and that tickled him. One was about a woman who had a recurring dream each night of sleepwalking past the nurses’ station to the elevator. She always went straight down to the morgue. In the basement, somebody with a joker’s smile appeared at the steel doors and said, “Room for one more.” Big Gulp pretended the shows were silly but Ray could see they scared the bejesus out of her. Another episode, a famous one, was about a disfigured gal going one more round with the plastic surgeons. No one ever said what was wrong with her, just that
she was born looking a certain way. What intrigued Ray was how the whole thing took place sometime in the future, where being ugly was an offense punishable by excommunication and forced segregation. He wasn’t a sci-fi buff but the old man liked how artfully it was shot: you never saw anyone’s face, neither the woman’s nor her doctors’. Damn innovative. At the end, they reveal that the surgery has completely failed, but when they finally unbandage the gal’s face you can see she’s a real beauty—it’s the doctors who are monsters. That one always sent Big Gulp running for the door with a shudder. (He couldn’t quite figure her; those Nip/Tuck shows weren’t a walk in the park in the gore department.) The funny thing was that Ray remembered watching that episode with his ex-wife, and how Marj had burst into tears; at 1st he thought she was faking. (When he saw the crying was for real, he thought it terribly sweet.) Ghulpa was a little tougher. The only thing that could make her yelp like that would be the sight of one of those Bengal tigers she was always going on about.
Another of Ray’s favorites starred a very young Robert Redford. An elderly woman’s apartment building was slated for demolition. She was the last tenant left but refused to move. Redford played a cop who gets shot nearby and is asking for help. At 1st, she stands at the door, paranoid, thinking he’s “Mr Death.” But Redford is injured, and so fresh-faced—Jesus, he must have been in his early 20s—that she finally lets him in. A bond develops. He’s the 1st person who really listens to her, and the 1st company she’s had in maybe years.
