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.
They tried to revive The Twilight Zone a few times since the Golden Age but never got it right. Maybe it was something about being filmed in black and white or the extinct theatrical craft of actors like Agnes Moorehead and Burgess Meredith. The old man thought the writing was superb. Rod Serling was one of those special characters — Ray loved that he smoked on camera, just like Ed Murrow, and even Johnny Carson — a real creator of mood and dialogue. That era, Playhouse 90 and Paddy Chayevsky and those General Electric shows, was gone forever. He tried watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and Deadwood but they left him cold. Either the comedy couldn’t hold a candle to Skelton, Burns, and Berle, or the “Western”’s language was so vulgar he forbade the sometimes curious Big Gulp to tune in. (Though he did enjoy Rescue Me.) Even the big network commercials were obscene. One of them showed a handsome older couple dancing. It said “Second Marriage”—and turned out to be an ad for adult diapers. She could watch that crap with the cousins. Not in his house.
He only kept the cable for his Cold Case Files.
VII.Chester
SOMEONE called from the LA Times—the “My Favorite Weekend” feature.
Each Thursday showcased a half-celebrity nitwit expounding on how they typically wiled away their Friday through Sunday. The lady on the phone said they wanted to do something different, and focus on an Industry person who was “below the line,” kind of like those promos for the Times in movie theaters that show animators or key grips or bestboys in their habitats. She’d been given Chester’s name by a location manager of a Hyundai commercial he had scouted, and especially sparked to the idea that Chess was a guy who made his living knowing Los Angeles inside and out. He certainly knew where the Lautners, Lloyd Wrights, and Googie coffeeshops were buried. She wanted to email some questions and follow up with a phone interview.