Broken Sleep (49 page)

When Lux goes to take a pee, I ask about that stuff he played for me a couple of years ago.

“It never came again. I’m waiting. Anyway, I’m not sure I’d ever release it.”

Even after twenty years, he don’t always make sense to me.

Tryx Are for Kids

L.A. felt purgatorial. New York resonated with the vacant chair that was Nathaniel. I wanted love. If not love, I’d settle for great sex. In the last years with Nathaniel I was left to devices of self-fulfillment. I needed my orgasms. I did not want sex to become a memory or fantasy. I considered hiring a younger male nurse. Ha. Too
Sweet Bird of Youth
.

Alexander Holencraft phoned that he was in L.A. for a week. He asked to meet for dinner in West Hollywood. He greeted me at the restaurant entrance with overblown flattery about how young I look. Even in the dim light, in his disintegration I saw my own. He took my hand. I followed him to the table. We were not alone. Persistence brought me Willibrordus Ildefonsus Ignatius Verdonk, a chief curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His name was virtually unpronounceable, so I called him Tryx. We’d met briefly during the Hammer show when the Sted bought
Pillzapoppin’
for their permanent collection. During Nathaniel’s illness, I’d ignored Tryx’s missives, so he hounded Holencraft to reintroduce us. As a twenty-six-year-old grad student traveling in Berlin, he’d seen my performance by the Wall, which ignited a twenty-five-year fantasy.

He wanted to make a documentary about me. With his soulsmell mix of sawdust and soldered silver, I had found a man who wanted to fuck me and who I wanted to fuck.

We set about to make the film
Remembrances of Things Past and Future
.

Tryx became my accompanist in Amsterdam and New York, choosing art, getting new photographs, and doing interviews for the doc. I could never reveal my mystagogues, so when questioned about my creative method I showed them a never-exhibited painting of red, white, and blue stripes with one word written in each stripe with ministar shapes:
Dream. Listen. Sing
.

I chose the music we used over Xtine’s montage of videos she’d taken of me working over forty years and mixed in some old photos of Dad’s. Alchemy did an interview that was funny and sweet about how I inspired him to be an artist. That’s when he wrote “Savant Sensation Bluz,” and he also picked other music.

Laluna did not contribute. Our relationship remained unflourished. Alchemy announced his retirement from touring and from the Insatiables. A few months before the opening and preview of the film, he flew to Amsterdam to tell me of my impending grandmotherhood.

Stunned. Overjoyed. Speechless is how I reacted to the news. Without sentiment, Tryx and I parted. I returned to L.A. after the huzzahs over the exhibition quieted. I needed to infuse my granddaughter with my songs.

Try, Try Again

A few months after the birth of Persephone, Alchemy and Laluna’s daughter, Moses took a day off from the foundation and motored up the 405 to the Skirball Center to attend a daylong symposium expounding upon the works of concentration camp survivor Levi Furstenblum on the twentieth anniversary of his suicide. In spite of, or perhaps because of the past years’ revelations, Moses’s fascination with the Third Reich’s craven depredations continued. How different his questions for Furstenblum would be now than if they’d met fifteen years before.

He sat in a middle-row aisle seat as the panel began debating the meaning of Furstenblum’s views on forgiveness and redemption. The moderator began with a quote from Jacques Derrida’s essay on “unforgiveness” followed by a passage from Furstenblum:

As Moses listened, he thought about how the burden of his anger and frustration had dissipated, and he had come to forgive the failures and mistakes of Hannah and Jay—those he loved most. Even for the unstable Salome, whose responsibility for her actions was suspect. His father hadn’t sought it, yet somehow he felt he had achieved forgiveness for him. His own search for self-forgiveness remained ongoing. And then, just as she was drifting away on the lightness of forgiveness, the moderator loudly announced, “Time to break for lunch,” returning Moses to reality. He made his way to the back of the room. Then he stopped, heart aflutter, mouth agape. Had Furstenblum’s words conjured the image?

“Hi,” Jay greeted him, almost too jauntily, and moved closer to gently embrace him as she whispered, “I hoped you’d be here.” His arms fell limply to his sides. Disarmed, Moses asked, “Eat something?”

“Sure.”

Even after four years of divorce, they still e-mailed, if only sporadically. Jay would inquire at least once a month about his health. Jay’s mom had finally passed away ten days before, after years of not really being present, and Moses had sent flowers and a card to which he received a thank-you e-mail.

They filed out of the room, and he followed her toward the cafeteria. Her once midback-length hair was now cut to the nape of the neck. “Let’s sit and talk first.” They veered off to cement benches and sat under the shadows of the Santa Monica Mountains.

“Jay, why didn’t you just call or e-mail that you were coming?”

“I was afraid. I don’t know your situation.”

“I’m not situated.” Moses noticed Jay’s slightest exhalation of relief. He refrained from asking the reciprocal question.

“With my mom passing …” Her voice trailed off and she sighed. “I just wanted to see you.”

“I am so sorry about your mom.”

“She’s better off. I’d been missing you and thinking about you. And whenever my father complained about the ‘burden’ of my mom, I thought about what we went through together. And I wished you were in Miami by my side.” Moses didn’t offer that if she had asked, he would’ve been on the next plane. “Moses, we shared something so rare, and we blew it.”

“Yes, we did,” Moses said hesitantly.

“Moses, what are you thinking?”

He didn’t say what he was thinking. Death and mourning leave one so vulnerable, and although it is not uncommon, it is
a treacherous time to seek to rekindle the embers of love lost. His desire to hold her, swear his enduring love, stalled at the barrier of the unknowable. Can this past be recaptured, a present restored, a future remade?

Instead, constrained by the memory of his outburst that signaled the death knell of his marriage, he offered blandly, “I need to grab a bite and then I’m going back in. You staying?”

“Is it too late for forgiveness?”

“Neither of us can answer that now.”

“Will you call me so we can answer it together?”

Moses recalled a graduate school history professor of his who scoffed, “The idea that most people claim to be brutal realists proves the opposite. Most of you fall into one of three categories of gullibles: those I classify as the less gifted, the willfully ignorant, and the perpetually delusional.”

For much of his life, Moses considered himself to be among the brutal realists. Later, he conditionally reclassified himself as willfully ignorant. Finally, he descended to the perpetually delusional. He researched and discovered that almost 10 percent of all divorcees remarried or lived again with their former spouse. He found no information detailing for how long or whether they stayed together.

He invited Jay to the premiere of a play written by Nightingale Grant recipient Hilaria Diaz.
The ICEman Cometh
was not O’Neill’s classic play but one portraying the plight of illegal immigrants. Moses thought that if he and Jay were to make a go of it, both of their Livability Quotients needed
reformulating, and that formula now included his relationship with Laluna and Alchemy and his nonrelationship with Salome, all of whom would be there.

Alchemy and Jay greeted each other with amiable if jittery hellos. Laluna, who disguised her awkwardness in public appearances by feigning boredom, flashed a rare radiant smile of welcome. Jay took a bathroom break during the intermission, and Laluna, after edging her way to Moses, shifted her eyes in an exaggerated side-to-side toward a loitering Salome, who suddenly darted up the aisle. After they watched her disappear into the lobby, Laluna leaned over and whispered, “Mose, it makes me really, like really happy, to see you with someone.”

Throughout the evening, his emotions roiled—desire, resentment, distrust of Jay’s motives and his own, and the facile hope that love really could conquer all. Jay wanted to go out after the show. Moses claimed fatigue and asked if they could meet later in the week. They did, at an Indian restaurant on Pico. Over appetizers, they made small talk about the difficulties of her work after the economic crash, his contentment working at the foundation, and his mixed excitement and angst over establishing the Nightingale Party. Moses, blinders off, saw Jay at forty-five years old with tiny crevices arching out from the corners of her eyes, the crinkling of her lips, hair dyed to hide the creeping gray, glasses necessary to read the menu. To him, she sparkled as attractively as ever.

Between the appetizer and main course, small talk over, Moses took the plunge. “Jay”—he took a gulp of his water—“I don’t believe in more than incremental changes in our essence.
Whatever you loved about me before still exists, and what you
didn’t
, that does, too. I am still the guy you no longer wanted to be with that day in the Cedars parking lot.”

Jay took a sip of her white wine.

Moses consciously chose not to push the Alchemy button by spitting out what he was thinking:
I am never going to be a big enough guy to say, “So glad you screwed my brother.”
He understood all partners lie, deny, omit, rearrange, and censor to avoid hidden relationship land mines. Only now, he couldn’t locate the danger line separating honesty and mean-spiritedness, so he continued cautiously. “The monstrous thoughts that stream into my head, well, I have to believe that everyone has them, only my filter is thinner than most.”

“I know that. But I can tell, just in the way you were at the play, I can feel even in our e-mails—you have changed in some way. Somehow seeing your father helped you.”

“I guess so, as horrific as it was. I’m sleeping better. My daymares, they’re much less frequent.”

“It’s not like you ever kept your, um, daymares a secret. I just didn’t think they included
me
.”

“If I could control them, I would have.”

“Moses, whatever it was that made us work so well for so long, to be silly and feel safe, I never found elsewhere. With us, I never felt alone. Not until, you know. And Moses … You?” Jay pressed her lips together, awaiting his response.

“I pretty quickly adapted to being alone. My life mostly revolves around the foundation and my brother and—you know they have a daughter?”

“Sure. Your niece.”

Moses bowed his head and moved the bread crumbs and bits of spilled rice in a circular motion on the white tablecloth. He knew he must tell her, even if this truth reopened the wound that helped destroy their relationship, even if he risked losing Alchemy’s trust in him. Moses unbowed his head and stared into Jay’s eyes. “Persephone is
my
daughter.”

Her expression transformed from quizzical to shock when she realized he wasn’t joking. Moses explained the sequence of events. Jay nodded ever so slightly, still half disbelievingly, until Moses pronounced, “I am not delusional. I am not making this up. Persephone will never know. I am now complicit in my family’s, all of my families’, cycles of deception.”

“My God. Moses, this must be impossibly difficult for you.”

“It is and it isn’t.” What he wouldn’t admit to Jay, and only belatedly admitted to himself, that the least flattering of his reasons for agreeing was it allowed him to feel superior to Alchemy in this one way. “Laluna and Alchemy don’t make me feel like an outsider. So far, at least. Persephone will get all the advantages of being rich and enjoy the love of a mother and two fathers.” He shrugged. “Jay, I don’t know how to say this or if this is the wrong time or what is going to happen, but when I was so scared and lost, I always looked
to the time with you to keep me awake and alive.”

Jay clasped Moses’s cold and shivery hands in hers, thinking,
My Moses, abandoned by his parents, and yes, abandoned by me. We only wanted to love each other and failed
. And so she said, “Moses, come home with me tonight.”

Flushing Flashback, 2013 – 2015

In my second Insatiables afterlife I don’t see Alchemy or Lux much, and one more time I’m trying not to drown in a shit hole of my own making. I gigged with other dudes, but it don’t have the same fire. If Ricky Jr. ain’t visiting, all I do is play video games, watch sports, and try to stay away from losers who only wanna get high. I can’t find no woman I want to stay with for more than two days. Or maybe they don’t want to stay with me. I’m so bored I visit my brother and father in upstate New York so I can see the house my money bought and what they do with the $2K a month I still send them.

I hardly recognize my dad slothing around with a belly and balloon-size face and like three strands of gray hair. He still spits and snarls like he wants to stick thumb tacks in your eyes. My brother is a massive mashed potato blob of tattoos and half his teeth are gone or chipped. The two of them and my brother’s girlfriend all got DUIs so none of ’em should drive. We take a few days’ vacation in Lake George. My treat. We’re cool until we get back to the house. We’re all pretty wasted and watching some story about the pervey priests on TV, and my brother’s girlfriend says it’s a Jewish
conspiracy against the Catholic Church. My father laughs, “Ya idiot, they just followin’ tradition because Jesus and his pals was a buncha Jew fags and Mary Magdalene was the first fag hag.”