“Right! Saturdays: browsing for Milton’s Paradise Regained at Dutton’s Brentwood, then brunch at Axe, Percocet at Horton & Converse, Pilates with Demi at the little gym on Nemo, LP hunting for Lord Buckley and Stan Freberg at Amoeba, a jaunt to Maxfield’s to pick up that groovy little Rick Owens leather coat and the 20,000 dollar vintage Hermès strap-on I’ve had my eye on. At night? Sirk at the Aero and a salad on Montana — Locanda Portofino! But Sundays, I would sorely enjoy watching you shove said froggy dildo up Thom Mayne’s growling, hairy ass.”
“I wish.”
SHE’D been working with Barbet for 7 years, sharing the same bed intermittently for 5. After lust burned off, an unspoken agreement to see other people. He was still her confidant — maybe surrogate sib was more accurate — and no one made her laugh like he did. (Typical Barbet joke: “What did the SS guard say when the Jewish girl asked why Dr Mengele only experimented on her twin? ‘He’s just not that into you.’ ” Another: “Baraka is the new black.”) He knew she had an ongoing dalliance with Pradeep, the CG, which had incidentally worked to ARK’s advantage: to whit, the Freiberg Mem. It was business, so he was careful not to make any jokes about that relationship, nor inquiries — even the usual friendly insinuations were verboten. For that, she was glad.
They still fucked but things had definitely cooled since the (augural) coming of Lew Freiberg. Barbet was cagey; her affairs rarely dampened his ardor (the effect being predictably the opposite), but now the subtext was they had hooked the Big Fish and her partner didn’t dare befoul the waters. Joan needed to take care on her end as well — she didn’t like that pimped out feeling. Anyhow, she wasn’t at all sure what to do about the formidable Mr F and his low-flame fornicatory advances. The whole thing was incandescently taboo for a multitude of reasons. Billionaires were different from you and me. She was finished with Barbet — that way — at least for now. The last time she stayed over, Joan caught him, back toward her, douching in the shower after a shit. She stayed hidden as he washed his ass from the faucet with the same bar of soap she scrubbed her face with in the morning after shaving her legs. Payback: to sleep with this man out of incestuous convenience then cover her skin with the microbial cologne of his excrement to greet the new day.
At 50, Lew Freiberg had been married 4 times and was currently separated from his last, an aspiring children’s book writer. Soon after they met at the Ehrlichs’, he told Joan she was his “type”—pronounced with a kind of convivial semitic brazenness. He was always flirty and suggestive during Memorial design meetings; he would wait till Barbet went to the balcony for a smoke before tossing a crude bouquet of innuendo. She could handle it. In fact, it felt great to be desired by someone so inconceivably rich. As a girl, she had always wanted to be abducted by pirates.
ARK was far from being a frontrunner in the Mem competition. (Barbet liked to call them “the ark horse.”) There was Gehry, who Freiberg originally met through the Newhouses, though Barbet didn’t think Frank was all that serious about it. Frank didn’t seem to be all that serious about anything. There was talk of something being created by Andy Goldsworthy — the artist seemed a shoo-in to decorate the grounds of the main Mem — he of the Holocaust garden recently installed on the roof of a museum in Battery Park City; or maybe an outdoor installation by Tony Cragg. The usual rumors of Herzog & de Meuron (Lew liked the “Sydney Blue eucalyptus” they’d used at the De Young), or Jean Nouvel; the farther-out hints and whiffs of contenders such as sand sculptor Jim Denevan, David Hertz, Santa Monica’s Predock/Frane, Toshiko Mori, and England’s David Adjaye — of course OMA was in there too (Barbet called it “melanoma”), the agency of Special K, Auntie Rem, Barbet’s old mentor and perennial adversary. Joan knew it had been a fluke that ARK was in the regatta, and her seaweed sex, the body heat between herself and patron, was the kelpy glue that kept the firm in play. She didn’t care. She was too old and it was too late. She just wanted the job. Needed it. It was defining, and would define her.
She made a date with Lew to get together before he went back up north, but this time without Barbet.
XIV.Ray
HOW did it happen? The relationship hadn’t been sexual. A few days after he got home from the hospital, she got on top and guided him in. He wasn’t even sure he could do that anymore; a long time since he’d even felt himself hard.
Throughout, she kept herself covered with a white muslin blouse he had bought her in Artesia’s “Little India.” That’s where her cousins owned a shop, and where she was living when they 1st met, a week after going on the lam. Before, when in LA, she had a room adjoining the consul’s suite at a hotel in West Hollywood called the Wyndham Bel Age. Sometimes the CG would stay on a few days after his wife and children returned to San Francisco. In that case, Ghulpa joined her cousins at the house in Artesia. They’d cook and catch up and go to a concert in Cerritos.
When Ray finally met the extended family, everyone smiled with closed lips and bobbling heads. The thing the old man liked was that no one had to do any explaining, nothing was compulsory, he didn’t have to say who he was or why he was so old or what he did for a living or what he and Big Gulp were up to. Didn’t have to announce his intentions. No one was judgmental, just friendly. BG and the cousins spoke Bengali. Sometimes it was pretty obvious the ladies were talking about him but it seemed they wanted Ray to know it, all very coquettish and warm, lots of sweet laughter, and he soaked it in. He’d been away from women way too long. Hell, he wasn’t a bad-looking geezer and occasionally got the feeling they were extolling his physical virtues, not his decrepitude — could be a cultural thing. (He allowed he may have gotten that one wrong.) Now suddenly they were sleeping together, a for-real shackjob, a very adult arrangement, and he knew Ghulpa was too old to conceal it through pride; and old enough to share with the cousins whatever details she wished out of the same emotion. He didn’t know much from Indians but the onus on women of a certain age without a partner seemed universal. For all he knew, the ladies were sitting around asking Big Gulp when she thought the old fart would pop the question. Maybe he was remiss but he couldn’t fathom getting hitched. He’d always been extra gentlemanly with her because that part of his life had already peeled off, like shadows do if you walk quickly at dusk. He couldn’t know her expectations. He would cross that bridge when she led him there.
Straddling him, grunting, her sweat-beaded bindi like a tear in the 3rd eye, Ray Rausch wondered if his brush with death had made Ghulpa affectionate this way; accelerating the process, so to speak. He could smell the Cadbury on her breath but they didn’t kiss that much during the act, more with lips than tongues. (Indian gals sure loved their Cadburys.) He remembered that 1st day on the pier, he had wondered about her, if she was a loose woman, because her purse gaped and he caught a glimpse of a toiletry bag, zipper half-open as well, stocked with toothbrush, toothpaste, and tampons. Later, he realized most Indian ladies carried that sort of thing — and loved their sweets. Big Gulp always talked about having “floss on bamboo sticks” back in Calcutta. It took him a heck of a while to realize she meant cotton candy.
That was how it happened: dark, fathomless, Ghulpa’s almond eyes whitening in their sockets toward the end as he felt himself seize inside her while she clawed his gray-haired chest, threadbare patches from where bandages and EKG suction “thingies” (BG’s favorite word) had been roughly ripped away. He had the fleeting thought he might have another heart attack — die in the saddle — but there was no pain, only surprise, and then he felt the dig of her nails, that was what hurt, finally grabbing her tiny hands so she’d lighten up just a little. That’s when she seized, slowly arching her head, which ever so slowly came back down to bobblesmile its naughtily sated sumptuously wayward Cadbury grin. Everything old is new again.