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 pulclass="underline" 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 Mahal 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.