Worse, with great pride Venasque said his wife had decorated the house and he hadn’t changed a thing since she died.
The kitchen was no different. The touching thing was it looked and felt like the favorite, most lived-in room of his whole house. It was easy to envision the two old people in there, one leaning up against the fridge while the other bustled around, getting their meal ready. I could understand why he wanted me to change its too-familiar face.
“How do you want it, Venasque? Sexy? Mediterranean?”
“What’s a sexy kitchen?”
“White. Silver. Sleek.”
“Sounds like an operating room. I don’t take out tonsils here, Harry. Make me something nice and alive.”
I’d designed buildings that, even on paper, shamed every other structure in the neighborhood both in look and stature. Houses, skyscrapers, factories … the gamut. But coming up with a dumb twelve-foot kitchen for the old man was a real pisser. I wanted to give him my very best in return for all he’d done. When I told him that, he patted my face and said, “Just make sure to leave room for the microwave.”
First I thought Adolf Loos. Venasque would like the Loos style, wouldn’t he? Clean simplicity that went right to the heart of the matter. I showed him pictures but he shook his head. “I’d get cold in a house like that, Harry. The man forgot to use his heart.” Out went the king of twentieth-century Viennese architecture. Ditto Gaudi was “too crooked,” and Frank Gehry’s work looked like “the fence around the schoolyard.”
And what did the shaman think of Harry Radcliffe’s work?
“Some of the buildings are beautiful, but others look like a lightbulb that’s been left on during the day, or a telephone ringing in an empty apartment.”
Besides being hurt, I had no idea what he was talking about—lightbulb? Empty apartment? Later I discovered the line came from Cocteau’s journals, literally word for word. But that was no help in deciphering what he meant. Only later, when I was in Saru and looking at the proposed site for the dog museum, did it come clear: You can always fill space with form, but it’s like filling an empty room with light, i.e., what good does it do if the light has no real purpose? Or there’s no one to hear the phone’s message? He never said it, but I’m sure Venasque thought I’d clevered my way to prominence while, along the way, forgetting (or consciously neglecting) to use what I was best at, rather than what I was capable of.
Naturally that was an even greater incentive to design a kitchen that would knock his eyes out. I showed him the work of architects as diverse as Bruce Goff, Richard Meier, and even Daniel Liebes-kind. I showed him buildings, furniture, kitchen utensils. Anything to get even the smallest feeling for what he wanted, but he was of little help.
“I don’t know what I want, Harry. I want a kitchen where I can cook a good meal and where the animals and me’ll feel comfortable just sitting around, relaxing.”
So I sat down with my pens and paper and designed a kitchen. Black and white tiles, bird’s-eye maple, German stainless appliances. A few original bits and a few surprises. I liked it. Venasque did not.
“This is nothing, Harry. This is for anyone. I want a kitchen that’s mine. Venasque cooks here—not Betty Crocker or Julia Child. This drawing is Harry Radcliffe, Mr. Famous Architect’s kitchen. But this isn’t your place, remember, it’s mine!”
He rarely became angry, but this time he glared at the drawing. I was ashamed although I honestly believed the plans had been done with him foremost in my mind.
“Give me a thousand dollars, Harry. I want you to write me a check right now.”
Without a thought, I wrote the check and handed it over. He looked at it, shook his head, put it in his pocket. “Every time you draw something that’s not mine, I want another thousand dollars. Do you understand? Maybe that’s the only way to get you to learn.”
“Venasque, I’m telling you, I did that design—”
“Shut up! Shut up and go back to work! You’re not crazy anymore. You don’t have any excuses. Just remember, a thousand dollars each time you design for yourself and not for me!”
I worked like a paranoid student preparing for the final examination. I thought kitchens most of the day and did more drawings than I had for the forty-floor Andromeda Center in Birmingham. Only when I was sure I had it this time did I dare go to the old man and nervously hand over what I thought was surely it this time.
I gave him seven drawings, which immediately resulted in handing him seven checks for a thousand dollars. Once, when writing the sixth, I thought to myself not only was he getting a free kitchen, but two thousand bucks more than his previously stated fee. As I wrote my name on the check, Venasque said, “Lucky I have such a rich and famous architect to sponge off, huh, Harry?” Which was the first time I realized he could read my mind. I was embarrassed, but not surprised.
His reaction to my seventh idea was novel. We were out on his patio, the pig and dog sitting at our feet. He took the drawing, looked at it for perhaps a second, then put it down on the ground between the animals.
“What do you think of this one, guys?”
The pig sniffed the paper loudly and put her head down again. The bull terrier got up, moved a bit over, and calmly pissed on my drawing. Pissed and pissed until urine ran off the expensive paper onto the concrete.
“What the fuck do you want from me, Venasque? I’m giving you a hundred percent! I can’t help it if you don’t like them! Can I help it if you don’t understand architecture?”
“You can go crazy again, Harry, but stop being an asshole so much. You make me tired.”
I got up and started away on angry feet. “I’m not wrong about this, Venasque. I’m giving you a hundred percent. I don’t care how much you know. You’re just not seeing that.”
“Go make me another thousand-dollar drawing.” He flicked a dismissive hand at me, leaned down and petted the pig.
We didn’t speak for two days, although I didn’t come out of my room much, doing drawing after drawing in a rage of “I’ll show that fucker!” But what came of my creative fury? Very little. What I realized later was he probably goaded me into that anger to see if I could get mad without going mad.
He set meals out on the dining table—always sandwiches, always delicious—and stayed away, except for the occasional meeting in the hall where he’d either wink or ignore me completely—both of which were infuriating.
How I struggled to get it right; how I yearned for his approval. Our real fathers are not always the ones who give us the final, necessary approval. If we’re lucky, we’re able to recognize and work toward the right one. If not, confusion and dissatisfaction sit like dust on the rooms of our lives.
I was lucky, but that didn’t make it easier. The calmer and more normal Venasque acted, the more paranoid I got. What did he know that he wasn’t telling me? What was so wrong with my drawings that he put them down to be pissed on?
Nothing. Nothing was wrong with them.
I could spend a lot of time describing how I came to that correct conclusion, but there’s so much more of this story to tell that it’s time to move on, even if it’s in the middle of a long and rich Venasque story. He would forgive me the abridgement. In another context, he once said, “The future is hungry, Harry. It’s waiting with its big tongue out and a knife and fork like the giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ Fe Fi Fo Fum! I smell the life of Harry Radcliffe! Then spoink! He spears and eats you.”
“What am I supposed to do about that? Talk him out of it?”
“No. Learn to be eaten. Then learn to see in the dark as you go down his big throat. Some parts in there are boring and you can skip ’em, but most are interesting.”
So I’ll cut to halfway down the giant’s throat and tell about how I stood up from the desk, took the first drawing I’d done (seven thousand dollars ago), and walked into the living room where the old man and his animals were watching “Miami Vice.” I went up next to the couch and shoved the picture at him.
“This is it, Venasque. You were wrong before. This is the one.”
Without looking, he put out a hand and casually took the paper from me. He glanced at it and handed it back.
“Good. Tell me what materials you need and I’ll order them.”
“Wait a minute! Did you look at this? It’s the first drawing I did. The one you said was shit.”
“Right. Now it’s good. I like it.”
“Why now and not then?”
He looked at me for the first time. “Because when you first showed it to me, you wanted my approval. This time you thought it through and know for sure it’s the right one. You have your own approval and that’s enough. I accept it now. I like it. Let me see the end of this show and then we’ll talk.”
“And what about my seven thousand bucks?”
“I bought a new Mitsubishi entertainment center with it. Big wide-screen TV, beautiful wood cabinets … top of the line. You should see it.”
SO WE BUILT HIS kitchen and I returned to sanity.
In the months that followed, Venasque died of a stroke, Bronze Sydney and I divorced, then I got involved almost simultaneously with Claire Stansfield and Fanny Neville.
Claire was tall and fragile-looking. A living breeze. Air with brown hair. Like a figure in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, she often appeared on the verge of either levitating or drowning in the complexities of life.
Fanny was pure Antaeus—bound to the earth—short and intense, a chain-smoking, eat-with-her-fingers realist who’d fooled (or frightened) a lot of people into thinking she was very tough.
But I don’t really want to talk about either woman now because although they are a large part of my story, it’s not this part. So excuse me, girls, if I only make introductions here, then open a trapdoor and disappear you both until the next act.
Zip. Gone!
Suffice it to say I met them and was intrigued enough to end up commuting back and forth from one to the other like a crosstown bus.
The most profound effect this semi-demi-madness (and the subsequent events) had on me was a yawning indifference to my job. Our firm was in the midst of several important projects when I went on my self-imposed vacation to deep left field. And although my recovery was quick, on returning to the office I looked at these projects as if they were advertisements for lawn furniture with a seahorse motif.
I just wanted to hang around. Shrug. Drink beer, watch lots of daytime television, watch my divorce happen … . Shrug.
Before, I had been driven both by a hundred-megaton ego and a will to succeed that knew no limit. Now … shrug.
Look at it this way: Have you ever noticed how difficult it is for fat people to put on their coats? One first assumes that’s because the person is so damned big they simply can’t find or maneuver themselves into the armholes.
But seen from another angle, maybe it’s because the coat can’t handle their demands. Until I needed Venasque, life had been a too-small coat I was always stretching to fit myself into.
After he’d helped me, I realized one day how easy it had become for me to put on this same “coat.” That in itself was okay, but as I grew increasingly more apathetic, the thing grew (or I shrunk) until it was almost too big and heavy for me to even carry, much less put on and wear. Does that mean I was suicidal? No, because potential suicides strike me as being full of desperation, and that emotion took far too much effort.
When Venasque died, I inherited Big Top the bull terrier and the two of us lived alone for a while in the Santa Barbara house. But that was too beautiful and lonely, so I moved us down to L.A., where I met a few times a week with Bronze Sydney, who was holding the fort of our business until I either returned or drifted away, never to be heard from again. The rest of the time I spent with Fanny or Claire, walked the dog, saw few people, and one day came across a little poem by Emily Dickinson which stuck in my mind.
My life had stood—a loaded gun
In corners—till a day
The owner passed——identified
and carried me away.
The Sultan was wearing skis.
I always wanted to begin my memoirs with some unbearably pompous line like “My mother told me the night I was born, there was an eclipse (tornado, red scarf of cloud across the moon …) which meant fate was up to no good.” Or “There was a time in my life when I only loved beautiful women with bad teeth.” Memoirs written in a gloomy Swiss hotel by an old fart who’s the only one in town amused or interested by his memories.
Now, whether this constitutes a memoir or not, I must begin with “The Sultan was wearing skis” because that’s really where I began, notwithstanding a four-decade history, a family, a shaman, various experiences and fame that had already marked me.
The Sultan of Saru was standing in front of a full-length mirror wearing a kaffiyeh on his head, a yellow, purple and black ski suit like you see on the slopes of St. Moritz, and fire engine red boots and skis on his feet. We’re talking about a hotel room in Los Angeles in the middle of eighty-degree weather, mind you. Out of the corner of my eye I saw sweet little Fanny Neville sitting on one of the many couches in the room.
I crossed to her and sitting down, purposely bumped her with my ass to let her know who was boss.
“I didn’t know you were a skier, sir.”
“I am a very good skier, Harry, There are very wonderful mountains in Saru.” He turned to some of the other men in the room who were sitting around with nervous smiles. Professional smilers. “The only problem with our mountains is they are inhabited by our enemy these days.”
The smilers didn’t know how to react to that—their uncertain lips flapped up and down like wash on a line in the wind until the Boss opened his mouth and laughed loudly. He was quite a sight, guffawing in that ski get-up. I looked around the room like I’d landed on another planet. Fanny pinched my leg.
“Ah, Harry, I’m a funny man. A funny, funny man. We have our enemies, of course. Led by a madman named Cthulu who’s sure he should rule. But he is a speck of dust on my pants. What is unfortunate, however, is that our people can no longer ski in their own mountains because this Cthulu and his men have interrupted our ski trade for the time being. A terrible shame. However, after this trouble is cleared up, I envision Saru one day as the Kitzbiihl of the Mideast.
“In the meantime, we spend part of each winter in the beautiful mountain town of Zell am See, Austria. Superb skiing and a very lovely lake. Do you know it? About an hour from Salzburg? You must come and visit when we’re there. Last year we bought some land.”
Knowing the Sultan’s vocabulary, I envisioned “some land” as being two or three thousand acres, if not an entire mountain.
“I’m not a skier, Your Highness.”
“What do you do for exercise, Harry?”
“Stumble and fall into a coma.”
Fanny creased with laughter, but the Sultan and his smilers didn’t move a lip for about ten seconds. Then out of courtesy, he smiled a millimeter. Thus cued, the boys gave me a millimeter too.
Good old Fanny laughed so hard she started coughing. I decided not to tell her the line was Oscar Levant’s and not my own. With wit, I’m always happy to take credit where it’s not due.
“Harry, what can we do to convince you to design this museum? You are my only choice for architect.”
“Sir, since you originally asked, I’ve been doing a little research. According to Muslim law, aren’t dogs ‘haram’?”
The temperature in the room dropped several hundred degrees.
“Yes, Harry. That’s true.”
Fanny knelt over and pretending to cough some more, whispered, “What’s haram?”
“Forbidden.”
“According to the Prophet, there is something in their spittle and breath that is detrimental to man’s spirit.”
“Then how can you even consider building a dog museum in your country?”
“I believe it is my responsibility.” He smiled. “Because my life has been
saved by dogs on three separate occasions. One time perhaps is coincidental, but when you are shielded from death three times by something as small and unimportant as a dog, Harry, then there must be very large forces working. Do you understand?”
“Can you tell us about the three times?”
“No, because I must give it to the people of Saru first. My story will be told in one part of the museum. Afterwards the world can know, if it is interested. That is a major reason why I want this place built.”
“But won’t you get in trouble with the fundamentalists over there?”
“Yes. That is a difficulty.”
Ski outfit notwithstanding, the Sultan of Saru was one of the most dignified people I had ever encountered. He said this last small sentence with so much cool and grace that it sent a shiver of admiration through my heart.
To rule today in the Mideast is tantamount to a lifelong sentence. Cynicism toward politicians aside, it astounds me how these people withstand years of bullet-proof cars, bodyguards, no moment when you can swim in the open sea or eat pizza without someone nearby holding a gun or carefully watching your every move.
“I’m not a political man, Your Highness. Plus, the idea of designing a building that could be the death of us all isn’t great incentive.”
Fanny piped in, “Oh come on, Harry. You built the Jarrold Theatre in Belfast. Said every night you heard something blow up there. What’s the difference?”
“The difference, dollink, is that too many people don’t like dogs in Saru. Remember haram. They do like theater in Northern Ireland. The chances of survival there were greater.”
“Chicken.”
“What did you call me?”
“A chicken!”
Then the earthquake hit.
Around an 8.3 on the Richter scale, I first noticed it when Fanny’s head started bobbing up and down like one of those dolls on springs on the back deck of a car. It took a moment to realize she wasn’t fooling around.
Outside the Dog Museum Page 5
