Broken Sleep

by Bruce Bauman

  “Salome, Salome, poor girl.” He shook his head, leaned forward, and reached for my hand. I snatched it away. “He didn’t die. That was a ruse we all agreed upon. Your parents, Bickley, and I. Our son was alive then, and he lives today.”

  I placed my hand on my belly and tried to feel the babydeath, or babylife. I started to panic, as if I were going to come apart and disperse into the dark matter. “No. No!” I threw the cognac in his eyes. I stood up and spilled the tea on his lap. He let out a room-piercing “Acchh!” I knelt beside him and pretended to dab his eyes with my scarf. “That is only a fraction of the pain I can cause you. Please, please call the police. I’d love to discuss your past with them.”

  The maître d’ scampered to our table. In between his yelps, Teumer shook his head. “It … is … nothing. An accident.”

  I stood up and saluted, “Heil Hitler.” I clicked my heels and marched into the lobby, where I told Gibbon that Teumer was a perverted stalker who I’d foolishly fucked. I ordered him to buy back all work of mine in his possession, even if I had to indenture myself to Gibbon for years.

  Upstairs, in my hotel room, I vomited. I took some tranquilizers and called Nathaniel to confess the entire sordid mess. He heard distress in my voice and did his best to give me strength. “You and I together will face him. I won’t let him hurt you again.”

  When I got back to Berlin (in another noncoincidence), Nathaniel told me he found Alchemy—almost the same age as me when I was with Teumer—having sex with two of Heinricha’s friends. I envied Alchemy’s freedom, the adventures ahead. I talked to him. “Sex is not good, it’s great. Never let anyone make you feel guilty or dirty. Or shameful. Be kind. Don’t lie. Treat women with respect. Treat them as your betters. Use birth control.”

  I stopped going out. There’d been two deaths, and I feared another. My spirit, which once was enthused by Berlin, now became moribund. Nathaniel came to me one afternoon with a letter from Magnolia College, an all-women’s school in Virginia. He’d made the final list for a professor’s position and they had requested he come for an interview. He’d neglected to tell me he’d even applied.

  “Do you still want us to go with you?”

  “Of course. If this job really happens, I will be able to provide some security for us, and for Alchemy.”

  “I still won’t marry you.”

  “I never expect that you will.”

  While we waited for Magnolia’s answer, I spent hours in my studio exhaling little drawings, reading, or just perched on my balcony dreaming into the Berlin sky. One evening I spied a woman, who must have been squatting, in a vacant building across the divide on the east side of the Wall. I tried to get her attention by turning on a spotlight above my head on the balcony, to psychically warn her that the East German police were coming to make one of their sweeps, looking for wall jumpers. She disappeared. I wondered if I’d reached her or if they’d caught her.

  The next evening, I spotted a body zigging and zagging across the death strip. It was the woman I had seen the night before. The tower lights flashed. Orders echoed. I screamed, leaning far over the iron balcony. A barrage of gunfire. Howls of pain. She fell. Beside her—a baby. Its cries echoed across the Wall. I had to rescue them.

  45

  THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2008)

  You’re Gonna Make Me Loathsome When You Go

  Moses and Jay both sensed the flammability of their situation yet seemed incapable of defusing it. Teumer’s letter did nothing to alleviate the tension. Jay deflected Moses’s entreaties to stay at their house, even if in separate rooms. Jay packed some items and went back to Geri’s. Moses, forlorn and furious, remained alone in the house.

  Teumer’s letter, instead of extinguishing Moses’s desire to see him, heightened it—he must meet the man behind that letter, the man who was half him. Moses asked Jay to go with him over an extended Presidents Day weekend. He hoped with her by his side he’d have the courage to confront Teumer and they could begin to repair all that had gone haywire with their life. Jay said only, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to go together.”

  She did agree to see Butterworth for couple’s “almost conventional” therapy. They met in his office. Butterworth, sensing Jay’s hesitation, said, “Let me hear why you’re here, Jay.”

  Jay recited Moses’s failings—and hers, too—not only of the last few days but the last few years. Moses shrank in his seat. Objectively, he understood the stresses on her—living with his illness, his heavier-by-the-day parental baggage and its aftereffects, her reasons for advising Alchemy to shield him from the psychic torpedoes launched in the letter—but he believed Jay had never adjusted her Livability Quotient to their new realities, and his outburst on the day of the opening unbalanced their tenuous equilibrium. When his time came to respond, he could only muster clichés—I’m sorry. I can change. We need to communicate better.

  The session resolved nothing. Jay refused to return to their home. He offered to go to a hotel. No, she said, as if solitary confinement to the house was part of his punishment.

  Before their third session in a week, Jay asked to speak with Butterworth alone. Moses waited in the outer office. When Butterworth summoned him and he entered, Jay averted eye contact—her eyes and nose were visibly red. Butterworth addressed them. “There are two reasons couples start counseling. One is to stay together. The other is to break up amicably. You are in phase two. I don’t practice that kind of couple’s counseling. I suggest you see someone else. I’ll give you some recommendations.”

  Moses turned toward Jay; she blew her nose. “Who determined we are in phase two?”

  “I did.” Jay dabbed her eyes with new tissues, her body shrinking into a protective pose. “I don’t know what I want. But it’s not this. I need space.”

  “You’ve been saying we drifted too far apart. Now you need more space?”

  “Moses, I can’t outargue you, but I need time and space to think. To not feel guilty.”

  “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.

  46

  THE SONGS OF SALOME

  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 exa
ctly 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.