Broken Sleep (39 page)

Go where?
he thought.

The tunnel of love, as Moses and Jay had once affectionately nicknamed their home, now suggested a dank, abandoned subway tunnel. His and Jay’s bed was as welcoming as a water-soaked electrified third rail. Divorce papers he didn’t want to sign and decisions whether he could afford to buy Jay’s half of the house or sell and move awaited him after finishing his day at SCCAM and making the enervating drive from Pasadena to Venice. He spent hours reliving his meeting with his father. With each passing day, he felt better about how it had gone. He did not feel better about how he’d behaved with Jay. As a child, he’d sworn never to desert Hannah and that promise was kept. But he had failed miserably with his wife. He hadn’t physically abandoned her, but she was right—emotionally he had sealed himself off. He began to see that somehow his fear of his father had translated into behavior that helped ruin his marriage. He blamed no one but himself. Moses understood that free-floating fear and hate caused only self-destructive reactions. He could never attain peace of mind by hating, by being afraid. His least-troubled hours were spent in the classroom, re-creating the triumphs and tragedies of histories past, or gabbing in the cafeteria with his students while marveling at their youthful optimism.
He often procrastinated in his windowless basement office in the humanities department. All signs of his married life erased as efficiently as Malcolm Teumer’s war crimes past. Gifts from Jay no longer hung on the walls. Photographs of Jay with her head resting on his shoulder, which he’d featured prominently on his desk, now removed. He wondered if anyone had noticed.

The answer arrived one April evening when Moses, lying on the chocolate-brown office couch, was interrupted by a tapping on the closed door. He pushed himself up, rubbed his eyes, and opened the door to find Evie-Anne Baxter, an MFA music student who needed to pass his class to fulfill unfinished BFA requirements, flashing her evanescent smile. “Saw the light on under the crack. You mind?” Evie wore a white midriff T-shirt that left her belly and tattooed shoulders exposed. She closed the door and plopped down onto the sofa. She dangled her sandaled feet over the sofa’s arm, wiggling her toes. Moses propped open the door, his standard policy, before sitting upright in his swivel chair behind his desk across from the sofa.

“You’re here late.” Evie yawned as she spoke. “I could use a nap. Or a beer.”

“I’m still marking midterms.”

“Yeah? When my parents divorced, it was like, hell on my dad. He stayed late in his office, too.”

Taken aback, Moses paused before issuing a flat-voiced, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Clearly, his impending divorce was common knowledge.

Evie sighed histrionically. “I’m not doing great in your class, am I?”

“Great … No.” Moses turned around in his chair and pulled out Evie’s test paper from the stack. He reached to hand it to her but she didn’t move, so he placed it back on the desk. “You received a C-plus on your midterm.”

“Evie and tests, like bad combo. I need to get at least a B to keep my scholarship. What can I do?”

Moses issued his stock answer: participate more in class, study harder. Unable to veer his eyes away from her exposed skin, he asked, “If not that, what do you propose?”

She answered eagerly, “I propose you and I go for a drink and talk about it someplace less stuffy and more fun.”

“Evie, that’s not appropriate. Besides, I’m not a fun guy these days.”

Evie sat up, jutted her lower lip like a sulky child, and then sang, ad-libbing the last words,
“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they seen Paree … or spent some time with me … ee?”
He had begun his lecture on the Jazz Age by playing that song. “Not appropriate? Maybe for you, but for the other profs here, this is like the Harvard of horndogism. What’re you gonna do tonight? Like, watch the History Channel? C’mon.” She waved her hand to say,
Let’s go
.

“You’re obviously paying attention, so please participate more. That’ll help your grade.” He showed her to the door.

In the following weeks, Evie flitted in and out of class carefree as ever. Moses avoided prolonged eye contact or speaking to her alone in the halls. He realized he was acting as if something unseemly
had
actually passed between them.

In late May, the semester was officially over and all were preparing for the summer break. Moses was staring at a text
from Jay asking him not to cancel the meeting with his divorce attorney again, when Evie knocked on Moses’s office door. “Hey, Professor T, you got a minute?”

“Sure.”

Leaving the door open, Evie sauntered in, stood in the middle of the room, and grinned. “Thanks for the grade.”

“You did extremely well on your final exam. Scholarship intact, I presume.”

“I studied hard. And I did really love your class. You’re the first guy that ever made history like fun. Hey, my band is playing at the Smell tonight. Evie and the Bralasses. I’d love it if you came. Some of my music profs are coming.”

Moses demurred. “Previous plans.” He did have a meeting with his divorce attorney.

“Another time, then.”

Moses mumbled, “I don’t think so.”

“Professor T, don’t you get it? Your marriage is
history
.”

Annoyed, he asked rather curtly, “How do you know about that?”

“The Itch List knows everything.” The Itch List was a student-only Web site, which apparently carried more information than just about teachers and their classes. “I like older dudes whose faces have life lived in them. And you’re so smart.” Evie spread her arms, with her palms at forty-five-degree angles, and bowed her head as if she were onstage. She held the pose for Moses, who stared at the green lace top that didn’t do much to hide her freckled breasts, and she pronounced, “It’s my abandoned child thing. My dad—my mom kicked him out for good reasons—after a while he decided he didn’t need to see me or my sister.”

“I’m sorry. It’s terrible when parents punish their kids for selfish reasons.”

Evie shrugged. “So, tonight?”

Moses thought,
Evie, you need to be around men your own age. I’m not a cure for your problems
. “I’m sure you and your band are terrific. But I can’t.”

With the semester’s end, Moses found himself adrift in space and time without the usual soothing summer routine. No vacation with Jay. No visit to New York to see Hannah and old friends. Mostly he ate takeout or frozen dinners alone in the empty house. Sometimes he felt so lonely he wished for a solicitor to call. But when he’d meet with friends, he almost always wished he had stayed home.

He found himself languishing in memories of his Jay-life. He thought about returning to Budapest, where the inexplicable out-of-body vibrations of the dead entered his body, tears welling unwillingly in his eyes, as he sat in the Great Synagogue desecrated by the Nazis and their minions in the Hungarian Arrow Cross. What foolishness—that out-of-body idiocy—for a descendant not of the slaughtered but of the slaughterers. If he returned, he’d be looking for an entirely new set of clues to his past. No, he couldn’t go back.

The land mines exploded, the shrapnel of divorce lodged in his lungs, he reflected on his new identity and what the cancer had wrought: Was he no longer the same person? For centuries, Jews had pretended to convert to Christianity to save themselves. Others had converted out of belief. How had that changed them?
How would this change him? He had often been perceived as a type—a transplanted New York Jewish intellectual. Would he unconsciously surrender his invisible yarmulke and unmask a secret identity previously unknown to himself? No, he was still Moses, only non-Jewish, motherless, unmarried yet unfree. A lost man with a surfeit of wars still raging in his soul. Would he even find peace in the arrival of eternal nightfall?

Moses cursed Butterfield for his sly way of giving up on him. He began therapy with a psychologist in Santa Monica. After one disappointing afternoon session, he drove to Bergamot Station, hoping to find Jay perusing the galleries, as she often did for her clients. He drifted to the café, took a seat in the outdoor patio, and scanned the parking lot and open spaces, pleading for his soon-to-be ex-wife to pass by, when, from behind, he heard a cooing voice. “Pro-fessor …” He recognized Evie’s voice as she approached and stood by his side. “You mind? Or is this off-limits, too?”

“Please. Not at all.”

Before she sat, she pulled her sweater over her head, and Moses stared at her tattered, sleeveless T-shirt (it read
THE JAM
). “Getting hot.”

“So, Evie, what brings you so far west of the 405?”

“Stalking you,” she teased. “C’mon. I came to see Exene Cervenka’s collage exhibition. One of my idols. She was the lead singer for X.”

“Someone once dragged me to see X after I first moved to L.A.”

“Knew there was a hip dude hidden under that buttoned-up shirt. That why you’re here?”

“No. I’m here because … I was hoping to run into my wife.”

“Sorry. I’m not her. But you got me. You believe in fate?”

“No.”

“Dude, you sure know how to charm a lady.”

Moses half laughed. “Evie, I am glad we’ve run into each other. I did not handle our last conversation particularly well. You mentioned problems with your father, and I was hastily unsympathetic.”

“You were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology almost accepted. How about we finalize it and go someplace less oinky for a real drink …” She reached for his hand and dragged him out of his chair and toward her car. He resisted. Why? She was damn cute. Seemed kind of goofy. He had nothing to go home to. He needed to change his life and he still regretted his youthful timidity with women. So … he surrendered and suggested Chez Jay, the forty-year-old dive of the older “hip” crowd. There was little chance either his students or Jay would see them there.

A few hours later, dizzy, besotted by liquor and lust, Moses found himself laying out his credit card for a room at the nearby Loewes Hotel. Once inside the room, Evie, in a series of swift motions, slipped her iPod into the room’s player and turned up her band’s CD. She pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Evie, I don’t …” She thrust her breasts in his face, which Moses found himself kissing frenetically before she slunk
down between his legs. She unzipped his pants, dismissing Moses’s halfhearted admonishments.

“Tastes good.”

Moses, enthralled at being seduced so boldly, suppressed his rising panic.

“Professor T”—she giggled, pulled off her jeans, and sat on the bed—“now suck me then fuck me.” She put her legs on Moses’s shoulders and gently pressed him into a kneeling position as she lay on her back. Moses surrendered. Consequences be damned.

A few hours later Evie woke Moses. She was already dressed.

“Geez, how long have I been asleep?”

“Not that long. It’s only ten. Sorry, but I have to go.”

Nonplussed by the sight of this young woman he hardly knew standing over him in a hotel room, Moses mumbled, “Oh, okay. I guess.”

“I’m meeting my band at eleven. I don’t want to have to explain why I can’t make it.” Evie bent over and kissed him. “That was very nice. And don’t worry, Prof”—she pulled her hand across her lips as if zipping them shut—“our secret. Maybe next time I’ll stay, if, ya know …”

“Yes, I think, yes, I would really like that.”

The Collector

I want to be grateful—my son’s stardom and wealth unshackled me from Collier Layne and Billy Bickley Jr. But I’m not. Do not condemn me yet.

For almost three years I wandered in the haze of grainy, bleachy fumes caused not by the fire but the embalming fluids of a “new” psychotropic concoction that clouded my mind. I was Lady Tiresias trapped in asphodel, visited by stygian visions of the first son undead, the descent of Nathaniel, and Alchemy’s death by envy.

When Ruggles finally reconfigured my drug regimen, I emerged from my exile. Alchemy appeared with the guttersnipe Mindswallow in tow, on their way to L.A. We’d missed celebrating Alchemy’s twenty-first birthday. I was so thrilled to see him.

Unfortunately, the immediate joy was tempered by the mention of Billy Jr., who’d “summoned” Alchemy to a meeting. Alchemy told me that after the Lively box cutter performance, as part of the deal not to prosecute me (which everyone had hidden from me) and put me in Collier Layne, Greta had appointed Bickley Sr. as my official guardian and trustee. She wanted no more to do with it.

Nathaniel’s marriage proposals now made sense. If we’d married, instead of the Bickleys he could’ve attempted to become my guardian and keep me out of Collier Layne.

Bickley Sr. died in 1989, after my incarceration and just before Greta’s death. Evil Billy Jr. became my guardian and trustee, so he controlled the dispersal of funds. He and Ruggles successfully completed Alchemy’s army hardship discharge. Ruggles hoped that freeing Alchemy would be healthy for me. But during their meeting, Billy Jr. explained that with the discharge papers completed, when Alchemy turned twenty-one and was no longer in college, there was no legal obligation to give him another cent, and besides, he needed to conserve the money to keep me in Collier Layne. And then he almost giddily added that if the trust ran out of money he’d personally drive me to a “public dump.”

After he dutifully relayed the bad news, we spent the afternoon laughing and reminiscing about good times. Those precious few hours with Alchemy brought me such joy. As we walked to the lobby, he sensed my onrushing despair and promised to return to rescue me.

Good to his word, Alchemy used his signing bonus to sic the Sheik’s lawyers on Billy Jr., and my son became my guardian and gained control of the trust. He moved me to L.A. I lived in his newly bought home for a bit. Nathaniel took a sabbatical and joined us when the Magnolia semester ended, and we (and the first of many “nannies”) moved into a small rented house in Silver Lake.

From the first time I visited L.A., the town’s ballyhooed clichés of eternal sunshine, apocalyptic winds, and lemming-like pursuit of froth and fashion spoke a language of living that eluded my sensibilities. Its soulsmell of a smoldering surfboard, drive-thru ice cream, and tattoo and gun parlor sensated me with intestinal panic.