Marj wobbled toward the house.
“Let’s go see a movie!” Cora called after her. “Let’s see what’s at the Pavilion.”
The old woman had turned away from her neighbor and was focused on getting to the front door.
“My poor Pahrump — he starts treatment tomorrow. Poor baby! You’re going to be a brave little soldier, aren’t you, Rumpus? You know why we named him Pahrump, Marjorie? Did I ever tell you? When Jerry and I bought him, it was Christmas-time. And Jerry always loved the ‘Drummer Boy’ song. That’s why we call him that: Pah rum-pum-pum-pum. Me and my drum. And because he’s got a tiny supermodel rump — don’t you, Rumpelstiltskin!”
Marj made a beeline for the La-Z-Boy. Her blouse was soaked in perspiration and after a minute or so, she was fast asleep.
XVII.Joan
IN bed with Pradeep at the Wyndham Bel Age — talking about Lew Freiberg.
Watching Larry King. The topic: migraines.
A few experts were on, plus a passel of longtime sufferers, including Larry’s wife (the old Jew had chutzpah), and actress-turned-director Lee Grant.
“Did you see Lee Grant’s face?” said Joan, nonplussed.
“I tried not to look.”
“Did you see it was out of focus?”
“Not really.”
“Oh my God, Pradeep, look! You have to! It’s like that Woody Allen film! Pradeep, you have to look.”
She forced him. Larry King’s wife was on the left, in clear focus. Lee Grant was on the right — a blur.
“They have a gel on the lens!” she shrieked.
“The woman’s in New York. Maybe it’s a technical thingie.”
“That is insane. I am telling you they have something on the lens — or in front of it. She would have to have requested that. It’s the most bizarre thing I have ever seen.”
“So what?” he said, ever the diplomat. “Why make a fuss? Warren Beatty does it. Whenever he gets photographed, he brings his own lighting people. What’s the problem?”
“It’s so sad.”
“Zaha Hadid had it on Charlie Rose.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
For a moment, he got her attention.
“I know you have a thingie about Zaha.”
She turned the channel in antic disgust.
THEY had originally met at some welcome-to-the-neighborhood fete for Frank Gehry. Pradeep made frequent trips to LA; when his wife wasn’t visiting her parents in Delhi, she preferred to remain in the Bay Area with their 2 young children. There was an instant attraction between them which Joan thought weird, from her end anyway. He had Bollywood good looks, or at least that was her idea, because she’d never seen a Bollywood film. Not really her type.
The party was at Dennis Hopper’s metal house in Venice. There were a lot of artists there (Hopper considered himself one of them) — both Eds: Moses and Ruscha; Robert Williams and John Baldessari. In profile, Ruscha’s wife, Danna, looked like an empress on a Roman coin. Bono and Kirsten Dunst and the 2 Germans, Wenders and Herzog, and even a Caltech Nobelist. Joan just felt stupid. She was starstruck and her usual engine of contempt had been flooded — she stalled out and got drunk. Funnily, she found herself as attracted to Gehry as she was to Pradeep, and spent half the night with an eye on both. Barbet wanted to introduce her to Frank but Joan was too filled with self-loathing. What was the point? Gehry was gemütlich and gnomishly, gnostically bewitching, a wizard-changeling sitting on a bus bench at Fairfax and Beverly — a wolf in gefilte fish clothing. He was like a creature out of Bellow, I. B. Singer, or whatnot. He showed off a watch he designed, with his name etched on the back, and an aggressive starlet asked if she could wear it awhile. He graciously acceded. An hour or so later, with Jack Benny timing, he said, “So, can I have my watch back?” The tough little gamine didn’t look like she wanted to part with it just yet and that’s when Gehry gallantly said, “You can have it.”
The rest of the evening, attended by his gorgeous young son, he told everyone, in that nearly imperceptible voice, how the famous gal had stolen his watch, words modulated like a deadpan imp, he got a great kick out of it, which made it all right. Still, Gehry was hard to read. He could look right through you and that scared her. He jetted around the planet kibitzing like a cosmic potentate, and Joan noticed how his face could darken into impenetrability as easily as becoming mawkish at the mention of a recent visit to his old Canadian grade school where they sang to him the national anthem. Once, cheating on Larry King, she watched pre-heart attack Charlie Rose. (Letterman was the pioneer. Months later, Joan saw Rose on Larry the very night before Larry guested on Rose—it was like swapping spit. The whole near-death thing disgusted her. Charlie Rose was about as near death as Karl Rove was to enlisting. Cardio-Charlie was telling Larry — they shared the same Manhattan surgeon — how he was in Syria having shortness of breath and how he got their doctor on the line and their doctor said you better get your butt to the City of Light and Charlie of course happened to have an apartment in Paris, and happened to know Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Bernard-Henri Lévy happened to know a cardiologist willing to see him at 7:30 Friday night, and the cardiologist happened to know the best mitral valve man in the world who happened to be out of the country but happened to return on Monday to give Charlie the once-over. When Larry asked how the trip back to the States was after his recovery, Charlie said fine, a friend from New York sent a jet, and there was a doctor onboard. Joan kept thinking, what if you’re some poor schmuck with 4 kids and a fatass wife in tow on some National Lampoon European Vacation and you’re having chest pains and shortness of breath? What if you’re not motherfucking pigvalve man-about-town Charlie Rose?) His guests were Gehry, Renzo Piano, and that relic Ada Louise Huxtable. Piano was like an Italian Thom Mayne, a bad actor playing an arrogant duke (his dukes were always up); Huxtable, a doyenne courtesan, mummified madame out of 120 Days of Sodom, some Edith Head — wardrobed Fountainhead buzzard. Charlie Rose was an incorrigible architect buff and wanted the whole world to know it. (He’d even done a whole hour with David Childs, who looked and talked like a cousin of BTK. CR said, “David, I’ve had the ‘signature’ architects on this show — you know who they are. But here’s what the world says about David Childs: 1) You’re the guy who gets the building built; 2) You get along remarkably with your clients and patrons….” Joan hung on her chair, waiting for number 3: You are a bloodless bureaucrat without talent or vision—but the unctuous host never delivered.) Rose looked like a ghoul with a hairpiece, a cross-dresser doing roadshow Guys and Dolls; those idiotic gesticulations of faux passion and creepily orchestrated adolescent enthusiasms made Joan cringe. (Other times, he’d morph into a rouged-up 2-bit Casanova.) The frank Piano player got the architects to shoot the usual no-brainer shit, the Bilbao Effect, all that deadly dialectic about museums servicing art or museums as art-in-themselves, Rose and Huxtable with their heads so far up the celebrated men’s asses — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! — you could practically see their scalps crowning in Frank and Renzo’s mouths. Renzo had his head up Frank’s ass (the ultimate museum add-on) all the while pretending he wasn’t a man to suck up to anyone but G-d — how it nauseated her! Piano actually said, “I am a craftsman — I do work with my own hands, so I never take on too much. Yes, we have 100 people in the office, but…”