Broken Sleep (36 page)

“I don’t like it, but okay. I do understand why you didn’t want me to see the letter. Parts of it anyway. I don’t blame you.”

“Yes, parts of it,” she spat out caustically. She heard her tone, stopped, and took a sip of water from a paper cup. “You’re angry. I’m angry. You’re disappointed in me and I’m disappointed in you. Everything we had that was good, great really, feels spoiled.” She leaned back and sighed. “I want to go now so you have time to talk to Ben yourself.”

“Are you going home?”

She shook her head.

“Call you later?”

“Okay.”

She left.

After a multiminute stare-off between Moses and Butterworth, Moses declared, “I want my pre-2001 life back.”

“That kind of wishful thinking is a prescription for a never-ending encore of suffering.”

“I want to stop this ache. I want to be happy. Not undermine my happiness. I can’t give up yet.”

Butterworth shrugged his muscular shoulders. “It’s your choice.”

“Do you believe Jay and I are in phase two?”

“The other day I asked you to try to understand why she advised Alchemy not to give you the letter, and I asked her to assume your position in regard to her fling with Alchemy. Neither of you could do it. My experience tells me when both people are trying to assert their rightness over attempting to understand, the road back is closed.”

Moses changed the subject. “I’m scared of seeing Teumer, but I’m going. He could spurn me again. I have to take that chance.”

Butterworth pressed his hands against his matted hair as if he were squeezing it dry. “That might help with your future. It’s my opinion that it will not help with Jay. I’ve tried to guide you to a route that would free you from the self-imposed prison of a past that colored your present and colors your future. I failed. It’s time we reevaluate our situation.”

“What does that mean? I’m going to see Teumer. It’s not my fault they didn’t give me the letter.”

“No. Maybe. Had you acted sooner or differently, neither of them would have had to make that choice.”

“That’s damn harsh. You said it would be a slow process.”

“Yes. One must decide if time is being wasted. I’m not abandoning you now. In due time we’ll take stock. If need be, I can help you transition to a more traditional therapist.”

“Are you tossing me out because of Alchemy? Because it’s a conflict? Did Alchemy tell you about the letter before?”

“That’s confidential. Besides, I’m not tossing you out. I’m suggesting options. I’ve never discussed your therapy with him. That would be grounds for malpractice.”

Moses limply left the office. At home, in each corner and crevice, he missed the presence of Jay. If she were there, if things had been the way they used to be, they would have laughed about his shrink getting ready to “fire” him.

In the following weeks, they e-mailed almost daily, but Jay avoided a face-to-face meeting. She cursed herself for being
so selfish, but sometimes selfishness is a prerequisite for self-preservation. While Moses was out teaching, she picked up any necessary items. An actress friend of hers away on a shoot offered her a three-month house-sit, which she accepted.

Four days before Moses was to leave for Rio, Jay proposed to meet him at his every-six-months appointment with Dr. Fielding. Fielding revealed reassuring blood test results and announced that Moses had now passed the seven-year marker, which indicated that long-term survival was more and more possible, but that testing remained necessary—probably forever. Moses clasped Jay’s hand. She didn’t resist. He asked if she wanted to grab coffee or a bite. She demurred. She was meeting clients in less than an hour. They walked wordlessly to the Cedars parking lot. Jay stopped, waded in place. “I’m, um, over there.” Her chin pointed toward the left corner of the lot. “So, see you. Good luck with, you know, him. I hope you get what you need.”

“Me, too.” Jay turned toward her car. Unprepared to believe that his marriage was over, Moses bolted to her side. “Jay, I still want you to come with me to Rio. Let’s try. C’mon.”

“I’ve thought about it. No, no I can’t.”

“Why’d you come today?”

“I had to see, to be sure …”

“If I’m healthy?”

“Yes. And I hoped my anger, hurt would go away. It …” Jay stopped herself. “I needed to see if this, separating, is right …” Her posture collapsed.

“Jay, it’s not right. It’s killing me that I don’t know when I’ll talk to you next. I talk to you every day in my head. Two hundred times a day. Can’t you forgive me? Can’t we try?”

“Not now, I wish I … I can’t.” Her eyes blinked rapidly, trying to fend off tears.

Moses silently vibrated with pain. What good would words do? Jay’s emotions were now irreversible. Reason is powerless to repair the ruptured heart.

Back to School

Nathaniel said I tried to scale the Wall as the police removed the bodies of the woman and her child. That memory is—whoosh—gone. The German doctors drowned me in Thorazine and shipped me back to Collier Layne. After a mercifully short vacation, I joined Nathaniel and Alchemy in Virginia, where Nathaniel had secured the professorship. It had a soulsmell of sunlit verdant fields fertilized with the entrails of dead slaves.

Often alone in the studio supplied by the university, unenthused to make art that would enthrall or enrapture, I fretted: Will my odyssey end in a tedious erosion into the nothingness of Harlottesville, Virginia? I became the Salome of Hilda’s dreams, wearing the costume of the servile “woman,” riding horses, gardening, and making dinner for the family, though Nathaniel was the better cook. Beneath this façade of domestic harmony—obeying the false boundaries of imposed time, emotionally and sexually bound by psychotropic cocktails—I became unrecognizable to me as
me
. And irrelevant to my beautiful man-boy who became a fleeting visage of teenage lust scampering among the adoring cadres. Worst of all, Alchemy
started calling himself Scott at school. The ignoramuses had taunted him as “Chemistry” or “Al.” I passively accepted this as teenage rebellion, though he appeased me by calling his band the Alchemists. He added new decorations to his room. Posters of bands and hot babes were replaced by one image on each of the four walls: a painting of Julius Caesar and photos of Indira Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Fela. Above, taped to the ceiling, a photo of the Plexiglas booth with Art Lemzcek staring at me as I blew him a goodbye kiss. He found the picture when he and Nathaniel unpacked stuff stored in Orient. Every time I tried to talk to him about the room, he rendered me speechless with, “It’s
my
art installation.” Intentionally or not, he made me feel so distant from my former lives in Orient and Manhattan.

New York might as well have been as far away as Jupiter. I refused offers to visit the city and no one visited us. Nathaniel, not entirely upset that I’d lost contact with most of my former party pals, attempted to attend to my desires and needs. His political zeal eradicated by what he called “the moribund American left,” he often spent non-Magnolia time overseas. There, he was revered instead of reviled or forgotten. But those forays didn’t sufficiently energize him to overcome his inability to complete his memoir or his new Scofflaw novel. So began the creeping stultification of his Gravity Disease.

I dissolved into a southern gentrified inebriation, like ice in an old Virginia mint julep on a sweltering July afternoon.

Ruggles, who I talked to at least once a week on the phone, demanded that my medicine intake be monitored at U.Va. Hospital. He and Nathaniel conspired to have Mark Somersby
“befriend” me. Somersby had served as a resident with Ruggles at Collier Layne in the early ’80s, but rather than pursue a career as a psychoslicer, he’d retreated to his Virginia family home where he assumed the role of the local foppish bon vivant who adored his drink. I nicknamed him Scarlett O’Somersby because of his carefully coiffed graying locks, delicate cheekbones and nose, blue eyes enhanced by eyeliner, a voice that pitched too high, and his often donned scarlet cape. I pegged him as too repressed to step out of the old plantation’s closet. Yet only
he
encouraged me to make art. Any art. The closest thing to an oddball of my ilk, we became companions.

Alchemy would soon be deserting me for Juilliard and the delectable life of New York. Served me right for brainwashing him that New York is the center of the world. I descended into the caverns of deep Savant Redness. None too subtly, I tried to persuade Nathaniel to take back the New York sublet so Alchemy could live there and I could visit. He insisted that, at sixteen, Juilliard required Alchemy to live in the residence hall. Bullshit. Nathaniel long ago mastered the art of circumventing rules.

We “celebrated” with a BBQ on Labor Day, the day before Nathaniel would drive Alchemy to New York. He’d stay the week and see some old friends. Alchemy preferred to say goodbye to me here. I think we were all afraid of what might happen if I went to New York.

That night, my son and I strolled around the Magnolia grounds before sitting on the lakeside dock, feet dipped in the
warmish water. Feeling a bit shaky, I expressed regret about our peripatetic life and asked if he had any regrets of his own. He teased me, “Not really. Besides, Mom,
stability
of any kind is not your strong suit.” I laughed and asked him one favor. “Please, no more Scott. You are Alchemy.”

He turned serious and his eyes gazed into a beyond. My son was no longer a teenage boy. Consciously or not, he had transcended linear time. His voice, inhabited by the DNA of lives past, echoed with such resolve and steely calculation that he unnerved me with his certainty. “No one who wants to change the world can be called Alchemy. And I intend to change things.”

“Change what? You’re a musician. An artist. You can do anything by being you.”

He put his arm over my shoulders and nuzzled up close. “Mom, I am going to justify your faith.”

I wish I’d believed in him a little less. Challenged him that night on exactly what he intended to change. Told him that whatever he did, even if it was hanging on a street corner playing his guitar for a nickel, it would satisfy me.

Back at the house, after Alchemy went to bed, I went into the dark bedroom. I stepped to the bedside, turned on my flashlight, and pointed the light at the sleeping Nathaniel.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, panic in his voice.

“Why did you tell Alchemy to call himself Scott?”

He reached to turn on the nightstand lamp. I stopped him and kept the flashlight’s focus on him. “Salome, I didn’t.”

“Maybe not directly. What
did
you say?”

“It was years ago. I vaguely remember saying, ‘Do what you want.’ ”

“That’s it? Be an honest man.”

“We’d been musing about art and politics, and I joked that Abe, Tom, and Franklin were our greatest presidents, and guys with names like Grover, Ulysses, and Lyndon, not so much.”

“Not funny. Did you encourage him to leave me?”

“No. Never. Still, it’s healthy for him to get away from both of us.”

“That’s one man’s opinion. Being around me is not unhealthy for my son.”

Furious, I left a note, stormed over to the Magnolia stable, saddled up, and under the moonlight rode off into the Shenandoahs. I napped for a few hours in a meadow and returned when I was sure they were speeding up the Jersey Turnpike.

In the midst of a second night of fast-tempo sleeplessness, Frau Lou appeared and raged, “Don’t you see that you and Nathaniel are reenacting your version of
his
parents’ lives? Stop it, now!”

Over forty-eight frenetic hours I painted two series of twenty-four 6-×-6 V-shaped boards numbered 1–12, and then set them down on the floor using each piece as a number in a diamond-shaped clock. I painted “i deny time” and “be beyond time,” “time kills in time” and “let’s fuck time.” I used Savant Red or Savant Blue for the backgrounds and white letters for A.M. hours and black letters for P.M. hours.

Finally finished, I collapsed on the cot in my studio. When my eyes opened, Somersby was kneeling beside me, his long eyelashes fluttering. “Nathaniel called. I raced over. He’s been trying to reach you for two days and—”

“He presumed I’d done something unhealthy.”

“Worried more than presumed. He’s just being cautious,” Somersby stroked my hair, knotted from dried sweat and paint, with his manicured fingernails.

“I need to wash up. I’m a mess.”

“An undeniably lovely mess.”

“Somersby, are you flirting with me?”

“I’d say more than flirting …”

Somersby turned out to be quite a bit more Scarlet Pimpernel than Scarlett O’Hara. We enjoyed a fun few days in my studio and his house, but never inside our house. Somersby assured Nathaniel that I was “doing just peachy,” and I avoided talking to him. Hours before Nathaniel’s return, we relaxed with an afternoon refreshment in the gazebo on Somersby’s back lawn. He asked, “So?”

“So nothing. Was fun. Over.”

He exhaled. Relieved. “I will talk to Nathaniel about my breach of honor,” his tone lugubrious.

“So noble of you. Men! You always act like triumphant cavemen when you ‘had’ another man’s woman. We fucked because I chose to do it. I decide if and when to tell Nathaniel.”

When Nathaniel arrived, exhausted from the seven-hour drive, I threw my arms around him with genuine affection.

He drank a beer while talking about how Alchemy had already started a band with Amanda, who later became Absurda Nightingale. He asked if Somersby had taken good care of me.

“Yes,” I said perfunctorily, although I could not look him in the eyes.

“How good?” He twitched and fidgeted as if he suspected something.

“Very good.”

“What does that mean? Exactly.” His right foot tapped uncontrollably against the floor.

“Polyamorously good.”

He slammed the bottle on the counter and his voice trembled. “You did this because you’re angry at me.”

“You think I planned it?”

“Not consciously. You’re too impulsive. But when you’re angry, sex is your weapon. You seduced him to hurt me.”