Broken Sleep (12 page)

He laughed and put up his hands. “Okay, I stand reprimanded. I saw you in the Matisse
Swimming Pool
and you were humming ‘row, row your boat, gently down the stream …’ not noticing a soul.”

“Communing with my child. Levitating out of my body, exactly the way Matisse wanted us to do. It felt glorious. So, how are you?” I’d kept tabs on his career the best I could. I’d seen him on TV when that porcine-faced Mayor Daley had his cops arrest him at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago. I’d also read a few newspaper and magazine articles by or about him.

“It’s going better than
Time
magazine would have you believe, but not so well if you’re an American grunt or Vietnamese peasant getting a napalm skin tan.” Nathaniel had been on the front lines of the Movement for seven or eight years by then, but he still managed a well-balanced mix of rage and optimism.

“I meant you personally.”

“The life of a full-time revolutionary is a big gig.”

“Unless you want me to go back to my dreamworld, you have to
talk
to me.”

“What do you want to know? I spoke at over a hundred colleges the last two years. Not as much fun as a rock star. Sure as shit doesn’t pay like an arms contractor for the Pentagon. Still, I dig it. I guess I’m part of the new class of rev celebs. Warhol’s a bloodsucker, but I’m afraid he’s right about fame and its currency. I’d give up whatever minor recognition I have in a second if the war ended. That’s my life.”

He shrugged and moved his satchel from his left shoulder to the right. “I saw your
Do Not Disturb
exhibition. Damn
good. I wanted to send you a note or something. You working on a new show?”

“Not seriously. Mucking about.” I followed what came naturally in these situations, to say exactly what I was thinking. “Can you take some time off from bringing down the American Empire and spend a few days with me in Orient?”

Without answering, he stood up and then bent down to tie the shoelace on his combat boot. With his head tucked into his chest, he said in a muffled voice, “I’m sorry. Please don’t say another word.” He stood back up, about-faced, and scurried away.

Fuck, that startled me. And hurt. My reflexive action would be to follow him and give him hell. Just because he had all these political ideals didn’t mean he could act like a dickhead. I tried to lose myself again in the painting. I couldn’t concentrate. I canceled my plans and took the bus back to Orient.

Two days later, as I was painting the porch a vibrant gold, a taxi pulled up. Out bounded Nathaniel with a bouquet of sunflowers and a copy of
Catch-22
.

“Hey, so sorry, but a Clouseau showed up.” That’s what he called the Feds. “I didn’t want him to catch me talking to you. It took me two days to lose them.”

Nathaniel later discovered he’d made Nixon’s Enemies List. He got hold of his FBI and COINTELPRO files during the brief time when the Freedom of Information Act was being enforced. I found out later they still didn’t divulge everything.

We spent the first three enchanted days together—without having sex. He was totally understanding after I explained why I was so scared of losing the baby.

Also, I didn’t want to rile Hilda. We’d been getting along. Nathaniel behaved with the cordiality of a 1940s gentleman caller despite his appearance, which resembled a
Mad
magazine version of an anarchist. He gave her the flowers and asked her to show him to the extra bedroom. Later, he treated us to dinner at the Yacht Club. His natural sweetness won her over. Me, too.

The day before he left, we went for a bike ride out to the fields by the Sound and I took him to my and Kyle’s beach. Because the brush was so high, over six or seven feet, and thick, almost no one bothered to trudge through to the clearing. (The developers tract-housed my mini-Eden years ago.) Nathaniel chilled as if I’d slipped him a quaalude. He lay on his back. I took off his eyeglasses and put them by his side. He closed his eyes and, for the first time, remained still with none of his bouncing or body shrieks. Although we’d had some good talks, he hadn’t revealed the deeper Nathaniel, the pure soulsmell that made him, and I yearned to hear it.

“Nathaniel, why do you do what you do? No Vietnam horror stories or superanalytical lecture on protest movements in America allowed!”

He pushed himself up with his palms and patted about for his glasses. I put them on for him and he straightened them out. He began to speak, almost apologetically.

“I told you my parents were blue-blood Americans, right?”

“That’s all you said.”

“I’m a descendant of Mawbridge Brockton on my father’s side. He was a Virginia signer of the Constitution. My mother was old line Dutch, of the Van Buskdraats of New Amsterdam,
who were entrenched long before the English docked their boats on Wall Street. They made a fortune in the “shipping trade,” which meant slave trade. Down the line they became abolitionists. By the time we got to my parents, the money was gone and their main occupation was drinking and behaving like unappealing Southern gentry.

“My father could either be imperious or charming. Mr. Political Science Professor preened around the U.Va. campus like he was carved from one of its stone pillars, looking for boys to verbally emasculate and coeds to copulate with. My mom, when sober, was a petite, timid woman of leisure, who knew how to hold a teacup, precisely like so.” He held up his right hand as if he were holding a cup with his knobby pinky sticking out.

“When drunk, which took up too many of her waking hours, she turned into a violent shrew. She once slung a shot glass and knocked out my sister’s tooth for purposely using her maiden name when singing ‘Who’s Afraid of Audra Van Buskdraat?’ ”

I rubbed his back, and his posture, which had sunk, straightened up. “I know talking about yourself is not your style, but Nathaniel, that was about them—not about you.”

“What is this, the Salome Rorschach?”

“If you like to think that, then yes. Tell me something that made you
you
.”

He leaned back and gazed at the clouds breathing by, and sat back up. “When I was six years old, Adele, who worked as a cook for my parents and was very cute and very black, and my uncle George Turnbull Brockton—that’s how he
referred to himself and made us do the same—they had a terrible row. It was a summer morning and I was zipping around in my red fire truck in the backyard. I heard this scream and looked up and saw Adele and Uncle George entangled on the second-floor veranda. The next moment she came flailing to the ground. She broke her arm and a leg but survived. I never saw her again. I guess ‘row’ is Orwellian family-speak. Families perfected it before governments—”

“No politics. What happened next?”

“We were told that Adele was ‘slow’ and Uncle George had been attempting to persuade her not to jump. That was life among ‘colored’ and white in Virginia in the ’40s.

“When I was fourteen, I had an argument with my father about the South’s peculiar racism. I brought up Uncle George Turnbull Brockton and Adele, and said I thought they were having an affair. He shook his head condescendingly and told me I had a creative imagination and my notions of race and American history were silly and clichéd. I answered that he lived a life of privilege based on maintaining the racist status quo. Boom. He went to slap me across the face. My reflexes were quicker than his and I caught his hand in midair, and I just held it there. I’d never defied him before. I let go and he stormed out of the room. That fall it was, ‘Pack your bags, Nathaniel. You’re on the next train to Exeter.’

“The day I left, I went to say goodbye. Robert, one of the ‘workers’ in our family for years, was driving me to the station. I looked in on my mother in her ‘studio,’ already soused, some Charlie Parker coming off the record player while she gadded
about in her free-form modern dance. I didn’t even bother to interrupt her.

“I knocked on the door of my father’s study and peeked in. He tilted his head up—I’ll never forget the book he was reading,
The Lonely Crowd
—and said, ‘Remember, you are a Brockton. Do not disgrace us. We’ll see you at Thanksgiving.’ ”

Nathaniel’s eyes were so bleak, I cupped his cheeks between my hands and placed my forehead against his and held it there for a moment. “It’s because you are you and the way you were born—honest and good—that you do what you
do
.” I kissed him. He tensed. An egret flew over and cawed—it was Kyle. I clutched Nathaniel’s arm. “You won’t hurt me. You’re no homicider. I told Alchemy about you last night.” The way I talked to and about Alchemy made Nathaniel a tad nervous. “Jesus, Nathaniel, people talk to God all the time, do you think they’re all crazy?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I do.”

“My baby is real and he can hear my voice.” I kissed him again. I envisioned we’d end up together, at least for a while, when the time was right. I never would’ve guessed it’d take another five years! I wanted him then. The sex didn’t make the highlight reel. I didn’t care. Although he wasn’t the father, I treasured the idea that Nathaniel’s seed swam within me and the unborn Alchemy.

He left the next day for a college speaking gig. He promised to be in touch very soon. When I didn’t hear from him, I told myself the untruth that I didn’t care. Then I heard the news on the radio: The Feds busted him for dealing drugs and he jumped bail. I knew they’d set him up. I followed his
exploits the best I could from the mainstream and underground papers. I read a piece he wrote in the
Voice
and heard a couple of taped interviews on WBAI. After almost a year I got a call from a guy who didn’t give his name. “Nathaniel says he is sorry, but he can’t contact you and he hopes you understand.” He hung up before I could get more information or say, “Send him my love.”

Don’t Know Much About History, 1992

After we left Collier Layne, I postulated we’d beeline it to the California surf ’n’ sunbathing society. I mispostulated. I could get around the subway blindfolded, and my compass said Northern Boulevard runs east-west across Long Island, and if I head north I end up drowning in the Sound and that the East River is
west
of Flushin’, but Iowa, Idaho, all them is the same. So I got no clue we’d sort of detoured in the wrong direction as Part II of the Alchemy Experimental Family Tour. When we stop for taking leaks and gassing up, I see a sign that says
D.C. 30 MILES
, and I think we’re halfway to L.A.

“We gonna go have a cocktail with the prez? Got some advice for him from my brother and my dad. My brother got back from Iraq last year, and my dad, who was in Nam in ’69, they love Bush and they think nukin’ Hussein and taking the damn oil fields is the right fucking move.” I think he’s surprised I know who’s the president and even more surprised that I’m clued in to Hussein and oil.

“We’re skirting D.C. and heading to the Shenandoah Mountains. We need to swap cars. I need some clothes and cash or we’ll be hitching to L.A.”

He ignored my family’s input on solving the Iraq situation.

“I still say we hit up the prez for some dough. His family’s loaded.”

“I don’t take gifts from an Ivy League warmonger who once was Chief Spook.”

“That’s exactly the cheese balls whose palms I wanna tickle. Makes ’em feel superior and gets me on their good side. Besides, he’s still the prez. Even you,” I razz him, “must respect that.” He just nods like he’s keeping score of my answers. He had this way with everyone, almost never saying out loud that he is judging you so
you
couldn’t call him on it, but I damn well sensed it.

He announces we’re seeing Nathaniel Brockton, like he’s the pope or maybe Ozzie Osbourne. I inquire, “Who the fuck is that?”

“Nathaniel’s been my mom’s main man off and on for years.” I’m guessing they’d met at a biddy-bip-bippers convention. “He’s been a leader in antiwar movements from Vietnam to Iraq. He just came back from Yugoslavia. It’s unconscionable that we’re letting that happen.” I got no inkling of what we’re letting happen. “He’s a great patriot and the most
just
man I know.”

“My dad and brother hate antiwar wimps. Me, too.”

“Re-ally?” he says, all sarcastic. “Do us both a favor, don’t argue politics with Nathaniel.” Alchemy takes a sec, then mutters, “Or maybe I should tell you to
start
an argument, since I’m beginning to see a pattern of contrary behavior that is all too familiar.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. So, why the fuck not?”

“If you want to spend the night listening to me and Nathaniel debate the intricacies of the failure of American democracy, be my guest.”

“Nooo thank you. Where’s the next stop?”

“Magnolia College. We lived here for a few years when I was a teenager. We, no, my mom was good here. For a while. Nathaniel took a position here because he thought it’d be a tranquil place for my mom.”

We turn down this tree-lined road, and he tells me about the school and the campus and how it was founded by some lady named Sylvia Lancaster in honor of her daughter who died when she fell off her horse and whose nickname was Magnolia. The girl, not the horse. We turn down a road, and I see these gigundo three-story houses. Brockton’s was painted with orange, red, and yellow boxes. Even then I could surmise that was a Salome job.

Brockton ain’t there. The door is unlocked, so we slip in and take a few beers and some slices of roast beef from the fridge. The place is like some minimuseum with paintings and photos covering the walls. I was staring at a black-’n’-white with Brockton and a real young Dylan.

“He hung out with
him
?”

“Way back. A little.”

“Ya meet him?”

“No.”

“Who’re all these others?”

He names the faces as we move down the living room wall. “Allen Ginsberg. Angela Davis. Abbie Hoffman in Chicago
during ’68. Joan Baez. That’s a cover of
Osawatomie
, an underground magazine from the ’60s.”

I heard of Baez, she being Dylan’s babe in her prime. I had a vague idea about Abbie Hoffman ’cause Pete Townshend clocked him with a guitar at Woodstock, but that’s it. “Who’s the dogfaced old fart with the funny eyes and big glasses who looks so cum-fucking happy nestling with all them young titties?”