Broken Sleep (30 page)

No Exit Interview

The day Nathaniel departed, I took refuge in Orient. I didn’t want to beg him to stay. Still, I wrote him often, and although I missed him, through autumn I contentedly flaneured about.

At Alchemy’s Christmas break we flew to Paris and stayed at Nathaniel’s flat on Rue du Cherche-Midi. The three of us would lah-di-dah to the Luxembourg Gardens, where we read Alchemy the French canon of subversive lit.

Nathaniel often convened with the Babacools, a group of aging or neo-hippies, at the Rond Point café for a nightcap or three. In another noncoincidence, one night Marlene Passant, the
Nouvelle Obs
arts writer, rumbled into the café flanked by two aspiring artists. She shed them and sat beside me. After ten nonstop minutes condemning America, praising me, and a candid admission, “I, too, have been incarcerated for unbecoming societal behavior,” she fluffed her henna-colored hair and grinned like a feral cat. “I both detest and comprehend French sneakiness so I am sneakiest of all. You could use a viper like me on your side. Gibbon is selling the works you release to him too cheaply. You don’t have an exclusive with
him, do you?” I shook my head. Marlene was a surefire homicider with a soulsmell mix of shag carpet soiled with dried semen and freshly minted French francs.

She called the next day. “I secured a commission from a collector for forty thousand dollars. Do whatever you want. I have access to a studio on Rue de la Roquette that you may use.” With a rush of adrenaline, I finished a
Scourge
painting: Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People
with the face of Arletty (a famous pre-WWII French actress who became infamous because of an affair with a Nazi officer) as Liberty leading faceless Holocaust victims to the camps. On the painting I scrawled my version of the French motto: “Liberté, Egalité, Mendacité.” Marlene and the collector were more than pleased. She paid me sixty percent rather than the usual fifty.

After Christmas I flew off alone to London, ostensibly to see an exhibition of work by the conjurer William Blake. My true motive was to infiltrate the spirit of Phil Bent, Alchemy’s genetic dispenser. I located him through an executive at EMI, Bent’s former record company, who arranged the meeting but warned me to expect “a rather decrepit and pitiful sod.” I checked into the Hotel Russell Square, and the next morning I took the Underground to Earls Court. A gray and matted-haired
Macbeth
-like witch, with a golden front tooth, answered the door of the ground-floor hovel. If it weren’t for his scraggly three-day beard, I might’ve thought it was his mother. He reeked of old sweat, hard snot, vomit, beer, cigarettes, and greasy wrappings of fish and chips. “Who de, heh, fu—Salome? Wha?” Next to him, Keith Richards would’ve
sounded like Churchill. I didn’t know if he’d forgotten our appointment or he was pretending. I blurted out, “You stink. Why don’t you take a bath?”

He regained a speck of lucidity. “It’s cold in ’ere and ain’t got rot to ’eat up the water.” The tub’s heater only worked when you deposited some coins. “Maybe you could gimme a nice body wash. You always did get ’ot in a loo.” He lamely reached to grab my right tit. I slapped his hand.

“The kid with yer?”

“Do you want to see him?”

“What the bloody fuck for?”

“Good goddamned question.”

“That why you ’ere? ’Ow much is it worth to yah?”

He was collecting royalties, though perhaps not much, from the Baddists’ records. “Fast Enough” remained a staple of oldies rock radio stations. Any money I gave him would go for heroin, pills, and alcohol. I muttered, “Nothing.”

I cursed myself all the way back to the hotel. I wished he were dead. Terrified of the frailties he, and yes, I, too, had given to my son. I called the apartment. No one answered. I checked out of the hotel and left London a day early without going to see the exhibition.

I got back to the Paris around 8 P.M. Ana, the wife of the Portuguese concierge, was babysitting Alchemy. I found him in Nathaniel’s office, which we’d temporarily converted into a bedroom, lying flat on the top of Nathaniel’s desk listening to Captain Beefheart’s
Trout Mask Replica
, which along with Brautigan’s
Trout Fishing in America
Nathaniel
had bought him for Christmas. I stood silently in the doorway until he sat up. My almost-thirteen-year-old-going-on-forty son turned his head and winked at me. I winked back. “Do you like it?”

“It sure is different. Nathaniel told me I had to listen a few times before it made sense. I’ve listened to side one four times.”

“And?”

“I’d like to meet the Captain and ask who he listens to.”

“Maybe Nathaniel can answer that for you.” I cozied up on the desk beside him. I hugged him, trying to exorcise the demon seed residue from Phil Bent that flourished in him no matter how much I wanted to deny it.

Nathaniel hadn’t told Ana or Alchemy where he was going, only that he’d be home around midnight. I traipsed over to the Rond Point. From the window I spied Marcel, the reformed mobster maître d’, pouring a drink into a glass for Nathaniel. Across from him fawned a luscious-looking girl. Jealous and thrilled, my instincts were to swoop in, pluck her from him, and devour her myself. I went back to the flat.

Nathaniel sauntered in close to 1 A.M. He told me he’d gone to see
Duck Soup
at the Pagoda cinema with some colleagues and then got a few drinks at the Rond Point. I didn’t ask who the colleagues were. I didn’t want to hear his wiggly words as lies or truth.

Nathaniel focused instead on my anguish and listened patiently as I told him about my disastrous trip to London. I realized how fortunate I was to have him instead of the
Bents, Horrwiches, or even the Holencrafts of the world. Then we fucked.

Overnight, my excitement at seeing Nathaniel flirting with a young hottie turned my spirits Savant Blue. I felt the pull of the dark matter. To Nathaniel, I pretended meeting Bent was the only cause. I had to confront him. Two nights before Alchemy and I were to leave Paris, Nathaniel and I went for dinner at the La Moule en Folie.

“Nathaniel,” I began. His eyelids twitched. “The night I came back from London I saw you with a woman in the Rond Point. I don’t care or want to know if you are screwing her.”

He began tugging at his glasses. I clasped his wrists inside my hands. He tried to speak. “I, no—”

“Stop.”

“But—”

“No! I’ve forfeited the right to know. No matter what you do, I will always be faithful to you in my fashion. I told you to go have affairs. But Nathaniel, first you came here without me and now there is someone else.”

“Salome, there’s no one else. A group of us went to the movies. We went for a drink after and then the others left.”

I trusted his explanation. I also sensated a deeper disloyalty. “If I can’t have you on my terms and that means I can’t have you at all, it is my fault. Not yours. Nathaniel.” My chest tightened, but I had to ask, “You have to tell me if you aren’t coming back to New York when this semester is over.”

“I don’t know where I’m going next.” His expression colorless, tone glum, gaze teetering into vagueness. Gravity Disease was beginning to infect his soulsmell with the deceitful scent of a rusty galvanized water pipe, and I was the cause. I fretted all through the night. All I could think about was removing myself from a life where I could hurt and be hurt by others—and if he were to desert me, I feared I’d end up inside Collier Layne.

I Read the News Today, oh Boy

When he got home from the dinner with Alchemy, Moses asked Jay if she’d heard about Salome’s upcoming exhibition. She admitted that she had, however she’d hoped it wouldn’t happen so she’d stayed silent. (She remained mum about her visit to Kasbah’s offices, where she confronted her “new” brother-in-law and testily explained that if he didn’t warn Moses about the exhibition, then she would.)

This Salome news did nothing to dispel the discomfort that had infiltrated the home of Moses and Jay like an odorless California fungus over three limbolike years.

Moses had finally regained much of his strength. He had resumed teaching a three-quarter course load and doing research for his proposed book on Holocaust survivors and their relations to God. Despite adhering to an exercise regimen and healthy diet, the illness had noticeably aged him. His hair had grown back with streaks of gray. At forty, Moses’s demeanor had retained an energetic boyishness, but by his late forties his being was characterized by a wizened frame, eternally puffy eyes, and an emotionally brutal fatalism that a long life would not be his, which earned him a new Alchemy
appellation: Early Eminence Grizzled. At thirty-eight, Jay, who could still swim twenty laps with ease, was in the prime of her life. The Bernes & Allen consulting business forged ahead, spurred by a booming economy for the wealthy art-buying strata. With the outer trappings and inner dynamics of their postillness life evolving, Moses adjusted his Livability Quotient and now nurtured a commodious solitude within himself while subsisting on
the little pleasures of life.

As the months rolled on, Jay spent more and more time attending to her business and socializing with clients. Unlike pre-illness times, Moses abstained from joining her, preferring to stay home or occasionally meeting with his “history pals” from graduate school. And Jay had stopped accompanying him to SCCAM events.

They resumed their usual summer and spring break vacations. In the past they had alternated on who chose the destination. Now Moses ceded the decisions entirely to Jay. More often than not, citing fatigue, he would remain in the hotel room reading while Jay toured, hiked, or whatever. Moses felt that as long as they spent dinner and evenings together, all was well.

During a spring break trip to the Grand Tetons, Jay announced that she no longer wanted to use birth control. “Moses, how about we let fate decide?” Moses, while making his usual case against fate in general, and specifically his worry about leaving her to raise a child alone if his cancer returned, saw Jay’s body deflate. Joylessly, but wanting to please her, he surrendered. “Okay. Let’s give it a shot.”

Over time, Moses’s resistance took a more passive form: He no longer initiated sex. When Jay did, he often found an excuse
and said, “Not tonight.” He tried not to worry over their diminished sex life until one night when Jay called from a MOCA party and asked him to look for the diamond pendant that once belonged to her mother. She could’ve sworn she’d put it on but now she hoped she forgot. He found it in her sock and stocking drawer, alongside a fairly new vibrator. How could he complain? Better she fantasize than slip off with another man—as long as that fantasized lover was not named Alchemy.

Butterworth and Moses explored the gnawing whispers of what other “meaningless” affairs Jay had withheld. Moses found no portents in any other past affairs, hidden or not, that could imperil their future; that responsibility fell upon his insecurities.

During one afternoon session, Butterworth, in an uninterrupted and evidently prepared speech, dismantled Moses’s equivocations with unsentimental precision.

“Your parents’ abandonment, your mother’s death, Jay’s dalliance with Alchemy—all are fixed actions beyond your control. You possess the power to change your perceptions and therefore their effects. Knowledge is power, but there are times when knowledge is painful and counterproductive. Is this the right time for you to answer some hard questions? Would it have served you better to be raised by an unstable Salome and an emotionally ill-equipped father? Would you be better off never to have met Jay? Or screwed her and left her and been alone when you became ill? Would you feel more masculine if you’d balled those coeds? You’ve chosen not to initiate a meeting with either of your biological parents. You’ve chosen to stay with Jay. The manner in which one perceives the past can alter the way one exists and acts in the future. When you got sick,
you acted. You saved yourself. You can do the same with your past and your future.

“It will take time. The unconscious, with its diabolical intricacies, is the greatest trickster of all. This will be no Pauline conversion. Shedding habitual, unhealthy behavioral patterns, letting go of both the trivial and large hurts we all suffer, the envy of what others have or have done, and thus reordering perceptions and gaining acceptance—this takes immense time and incalculable effort.”

Moses, shell-shocked by Butterworth’s barrage, could only nod along with a spate of “I knows” and “I sees.” In time, he accepted the challenges. Butterworth was right. It was not an epiphanic journey, more like a never-ending Escher maze with no destination in sight. But Butterworth’s methods appeared to be more than Band-Aids on open wounds. Rarely did a new daymare slip through the sluice that emptied unmasked fears into his conscious mind. Months passed without falling under the spell of previous daymares. He slept less fitfully most nights, when Butterworth didn’t call.

On a Sunday morning in October 2007, as he sat down at the kitchen table to eat his whole wheat bagel with light cream cheese, Moses picked up the
Los Angeles Times
. As was his habit, he read through the news section, then flipped to the Calendar section. His eyes immediately fell upon on a photograph of Alchemy and Salome, arm in arm in the Hammer Museum, under a headline that announced Salome’s upcoming retrospective.

The moment of reckoning had arrived. Moses began hyperventilating.

Too agitated to wait until Jay awoke, he marched into what they still called their bedroom and hovered beside their bed, like an impatient child waiting for his mother to make him breakfast, staring and shuffling the paper until she reluctantly opened her eyes.

“What?” she mumbled sleepily.

He read aloud the opening paragraph. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“I got a mailer with listings for upcoming shows last month. No idea about the article.”

Moses bit into his bottom lip with his front teeth; he wanted to lash out. He couldn’t. She’d heeded his wishes to keep mum about what she heard about the exhibit unless he inquired.