by Bruce Bauman
“Jay is going with me.”
“Okay. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Can’t wait. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Moses hung up. He exhaled air that smelled as if it’d been hiding in the dark caverns of his body for forty years, leaving an emptiness behind. He didn’t know why, but he needed to have sex. He tugged Jay close to him and she felt his hardness. “You sure it’s safe?” The cancer caused his body to bruise from the merest bump; she touched him always with such delicacy. “Yes, I’ll be fine.” Jay’s eyes, which had the hue of a powdery sulfurous brown, closed slightly. She unzipped her jeans and lay down on the gold-and-red Turkish rug they’d purchased three years before on a glorious vacation. They began to make love. Slowly. He did not surrender to her lovely breath and verbal caresses; his body made the motions of love while he lived another daymare:
Nazi jackboots rain down from the sweltering Berlin summer sky, the troopers’ stomp trembles the halls and stairwells and young Malcolm glances to the window. A helmeted SS officer sprays piss from his uncircumcised dick over Jewish graves, saving the last drops for his father, cowering on the ground. His sister Magda holds her dog Toffee close to her chest. A baby-faced soldier lances Toffee with his bayonet. He bleeds, squirms, squeals, and dies slowly as Magda sobs, thrust down the staircase. The slaughter cars rumble to Theresienstadt, and Magda is raped repeatedly. He swears he will never die like Kafka’s K., like Magda’s dog. Licking snow as manna, he questions the god who allows the human incinerator filled with melted flesh, aging women beaten for uttering a wrong syllable, babies tossed in the air like clay pigeons and shot for fun. Some who survive grow larger. More human. More generous.
He is not one of them.
Hate consumes him. All other emotions have been exterminated …
“I … can’t … Ugh.”
He knows it is cruel,
“Hold … Jay …”
yet it is less cruel
than if he had come …
Jay, feeling him slip away, hurriedly finished alone.
… home.
They lay silently side by side, holding hands. “Let’s drive over there now,” Jay said. “Let’s surprise him.”
While Jay dressed, Moses stood in the shower thinking, I’m finally going to confront him. His excitement was tinged with trepidation. The anguish he’d carried for so long like an empty sarcophagus, which he’d believed he’d discarded, returned.
What would he tell Malcolm Teumer? How, because of him, in his late teens he’d become obsessed with the literature and films of the Holocaust: Levi, Wiesel, Appelfeld, Furstenblum, Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity, and countless others? That he’d moved to Israel after graduating from Columbia and played Abbie Hoffman with a yarmulke on a radical kibbutz? That sojourn ended after two years when he attended a debate between two spittle-tongued kibbutzniks whose only disagreement was whether to nuke all of Israel if they knew the Arabs would win a war or just the Arab capitals and oil fields. For him, too many Israelis remained hopelessly embedded in a mind-set circa Masada A.D. 72. He moved from Israel to L.A. in 1982 to attend USC grad school, where he wrote his dissertation on “Divorce Rates Among Children of Holocaust Survivors.” He would relate to his father how he had begun researching a book before the onset of his illness, Children of Holocaust Survivors and Their Relations to God, studying the problems of survivors, their family problems, their marriages and divorces, their suicides, their depressions and guilts. How this immersion had served up unending sources of excuses for his father’s behavior.
Instead of falling into emotional paralysis—Moses’s customary reaction to any mention of his father—he excitedly grabbed his L.A. Dodgers baseball cap. Moses didn’t like baseball, in fact he considered sports an opiate of the masses, but he had started wearing hats all the time after the chemotherapy. His pate was still patchy.
With Jay driving their Honda, they headed from their cozy home on Marco Place in Venice to Santa Monica, Ocean Avenue and Alta. They parked across the street by Palisades Park in front of a high-rise condo overlooking the Pacific. Moses and Jay had strolled past this building scores of times gazing at sunsets. As they sat in the car, Moses remembered how, when he first moved to L.A., as he had in Israel, he’d scoured his surroundings for men he imagined were about his father’s age: in bookstores; along Venice Beach; in delis like Canter’s or Nate ’n Al; in movie theaters like the old Fox, Nuart, or the Egyptian that showed foreign films; at the Melrose galleries; and more often than any other place, in the supermarkets, fantasizing that any of them—one of them—could be him. Now he knew that in this very park, as he and Jay had lolled hand in hand, his father could have been standing right beside him. This knowledge calmed Moses’s roiling emotions. No sweaty palms, no heart palpitations. No waves of desire to melt into easeful death. Nothing like he’d expected.
Jay got out and looked up at the terraces. She came around to Moses’s side of the car and knocked on the window. “C’mon. Let’s get this over with.” They walked across the street, where a well-dressed doorman opened the glass doors and stopped them.
“We’re here to see Malcolm Teumer, 10C,” Moses said in a monotone.
“Who should I say is calling?” asked the doorman from behind a four-foot-high glass vestibule and in front of a second-rate Sam Francis imitation canvas.
“His son, Moses.”
He raised his eyebrows ever so slightly. “I’m not sure if Mr. Teumer is in.”
“I saw someone on the terrace,” Jay said spontaneously.
“It must’ve been his friend Mr. Lively.”
“Just buzz, please,” Moses said politely, but with as much authority as his voice could muster.
The doorman turned his back so they didn’t hear the few words that were exchanged over the intercom. An elevator man escorted them to the tenth floor.
When they exited, a man at the end of the hall leaned against a half-open door. He stood a few inches over six feet tall, with a body frame better suited to a creaky wicker chair than human flesh. Under his wide shoulders, he hunched over as if stones in his jacket pockets weighed him down. His big hands cupped the handle of a wooden cane. His thinning brown hair, with touches of gray, was combed back and high and held in place by a gusher of hair cream. On his large feet were scuffed cowboy boots. This, Moses assumed, was not his father.
At the doorway, the man reached out to shake Moses’s hand. A huge high-school championship ring glistened on his finger. Moses introduced Jay. The man did not introduce himself.
In a Texas drawl, he politely invited them inside. “Please sit yourselfs down in the living room.” Up close, the man’s face was withered like a worn-out overcoat, with too many and too large yellowed teeth. Wolfish eyebrows with no visible skin between and big triangular sideburns, leftover from the Elvis era, framed a face as inviolable as an icon atop a pharaoh’s tomb. His bland brown eyes added softness to his otherwise harsh expression. “Your father is not here, but we can talk.”
They followed him deeper into the living room. Cabinets filled with Hummel statuettes of boys and girls drumming and marching, and sets of multicolored Fiestaware lined the hallway and much of the living room. Two shelves in a credenza were stocked with books that had the look of the unread. Movie posters dating from the 1920s to the present hung on the walls. From the largest poster, framed in gaudy gold leaf and reading Gösta Berling’s Saga, loomed an imposing photograph of the unsullied yet sullen Greta Garbo. No photos of any real people were visible anywhere.
Off-white drapes covered windows and a door that opened to the eighteen-foot-long terrace. Beige pole lamps stood in the corners of the room. Moses and Jay sat on a beige sofa. Moses noticed half-filled shelves of cassette tapes, DVDs, and CDs but saw no sign of a TV or audio system.
The man positioned himself in the chair with his back to the drapes. The chair was four inches higher off the ground than the sofa so that he
always seemed to peer down at them.
“My name is Laban Lively, and I’ve been a friend and business partner of your father’s for decades.”
“Are you his special friend?”
“Boy,” Lively said, his voice dripping with an even-toned I’ll-drop-you-dead-right-here brusqueness, “let’s be straight. Your father is many things, but he is not a sodomite.” Moses couldn’t help thinking, Who the hell is this Bible-thumping cowboy?
“Does that mean you know who my mother was?”
Lively crossed his long legs and wet his cracked lips with his tongue. “What do you mean? Hannah is your mother.”
“No, she only raised me as my mother.” Moses straightened his spine and leaned forward, his posture strict. “I’m here because I am sick and I need a donor. All other treatments have failed. I need to know if he can help me or if he has any relatives who can. Or if my mother is alive and if she had any other children. I want nothing else from him. Nothing.”
“Who told you Hannah isn’t your mother?”
“She did. For over forty years I lived that lie.”
Lively shook his head. “He left the country this morning. Not sure he’ll be back.”
Moses, sensing perhaps this was his only chance to gather new information, pressed on. “You must have known his sister, Magda? The detective couldn’t locate her with the little information I had.”
At seventeen, Moses, with Hannah’s reluctant help, located Magda in North Carolina. When he called, she lambasted him sourly, “I have not’ing to say to you. I don’t know where he is. I have not seen him in years. I am not his keeper, and thanks God, he is not mine. Do not call me again.” With that, she hung up. Moses, defeated, gave up his search for Malcolm.
“After three, maybe four marriages, Mal refused to help her financially anymore. They lost contact until he was notified that she passed six years ago.”
“I’ll tell the detective. Did he tell you about his time in the camps?”
“I think it is Mal’s responsibility to tell you about that.”
“Why would he? Because he’s acted so responsibly for the last forty-five years?”
Lively crossed his right leg over his left leg and slowly shook his head. “I am sorry.”
“Mr. Lively, if you or he won’t help me, I am going to die.”
Lively’s expression went dark, as if the fuse to his emotional box had blown out. He uncrossed his legs and leaned back. “I’m leaving for Houston later tonight. It’s my granddaughter’s sweet sixteen tomorrow and I am not missing that. Family means something to me.” His slow Texas accent, laden with the air of gentility, unnerved Moses.
“If I can’t see him, I at least need to talk to him.”
Lively leaned forward. “May I be so bold as to ask you a favor?”
“Sure.”
“When you talk to your mother Hannah, say hello for me.”
“You knew her?”
“We met when they were still married. Attractive woman.”
“So you’ll help me?”
“I’ll try.” Using his cane, Lively pushed himself up. Moses and Jay followed, and all three turned toward the door.
“Can I use the bathroom for a second?” Moses didn’t really have to go; he wanted to poke around. Lively nodded and pointed down the hall. Moses saw nothing of any consequence; still no photos of anyone. He checked the medicine cabinet but found nothing exceptional.
When he came back, Jay and Lively had moved to the far corner of the hallway leading to the door. They were examining a sculpture, which he had not noticed upon entering. Jay had seen the strikingly different piece among the banal furnishings of the apartment and stopped to look as she made her way back to the door. She was kneeling beside a miniature guillotine with a life-size head of Richard Nixon cut off from its body. The headless body was made of the faux aged and crinkled yellow paper that you get when you buy a cheap copy of the Declaration of Independence, which upon closer inspection it turned out to be. The words DO NOT DISTURB hung above Nixon’s head.
Moses heard Lively answering what he assumed was Jay’s question.
“It was a gift from a friend—”
“Who?” Moses interrupted, almost too aggressively.
“A friend.”
Jay, noticing Moses’s reddening cheeks, stood straight up and interjected, “That’s a Salome Savant piece. It’s very rare. She destroyed much of her work before she was institutionalized and doesn’t like to sell it. When I was working with Kasbah, I tried to get her son, Alchemy Savant—”
“Excuse me.” Lively abruptly put his big hand on Jay’s shoulder while looking at Moses. “I’m sorry to be ill-mannered, but I have a meeting before my flight. I will call you. I know how to find you.”
Jay and Moses rode the elevator in silence, attempting to absorb what they’d just seen and heard. As they stepped gingerly outside and crossed the street, Jay squeezed his hand. She whispered, “You’re a good man, no matter who your father is”—she half grinned—“or how distasteful his friends are …”
That night, Moses, listening to Jay’s steady breathing, fell in and out of the semialert state where dreams seem real and reality seems dreamlike. At 6 A.M., he pushed himself out of bed, the maxim he often stressed to his students racing through his head: One person’s version of history is another person’s version of an incomplete truth. He slipped quietly into his room, where he read an e-mail from his mom saying that she’d checked into the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, just blocks from his father’s apartment.
4
THE SONGS OF SALOME
Ready and Made
The night after the Art Is Dead happening, the scenesters gathered in the back room of Max’s Kansas City. Andy, who I think always wished his body were a mesh serigraph, tiptoed in with Viva and a new companion I nicknamed Velveeta. I must say, I outshone them all. I wore an all-plastic see-through top over a silk-and-lace bra and a microminiskirt made of flattened Coke cans (which I figured Andy would appreciate) with thigh-high red boots. I draped a black cape over my shoulders and knotted a red bandana around my forehead. When Horrwich saw my outfit, he susurrated lasciviously, “You’re one radioactive treat wrapped inside a cellophane coating.” Xtine couldn’t stop fawning. “You must come over to my place at the Chelsea. I must photograph you.”
Everyone kept handing me drinks. Leslie Tallent, wearing red socks, Homburg hat, bow tie, and the beginnings of a goatee, read aloud his essay, which he intended as the ultimate analysis of the work “as a new kind of art that is the offspring of Duchamp. It poses the question: Is art, like God, now dead?”
I kissed him on his cheek. “Perfect, Leslie. I’ll leave the analyzing to you.”
I bathed myself in the sweet bacchanalian fever until Raphael Urso, a misogynistic beast who happened to be a lovely street urchin poet, cornered me with his two playmates—some shy guy I didn’t recognize and Blind Lemon Socrates. Socrates is all but forgotten now, but back then he was a sardonic old junkie with a cult following of joy boys who wanted a blow job from the author of Sonic Nudewords and the underground film Hooked. Urso kept calling me his “fuck for the night” and introduced me as “the soupçon du jour who you better fuck now ’cause she’ll be opening soup cans in suburbia for her babies in no time …” I rabbit-punched Urso in his shoulder. He snarled. Socrates and Urso moved on. I was left standing in front of this shy guy who just lowered his head and turned his swamp-water-brown eyes behind gold-rimmed circular glasses away from me. He had dark, short hair covered by a camouflage baseball cap and a reddish-brown five o’clock shadow, and wore scraggly jeans, a beat-up khaki jacket, with a satchel slung over his shoulder. His fists were clenched, not in anger, I sensed, but in defensiveness. I pictured him as a human hand grenade waiting for someone to pull the pin.
“So, did you like the happening?” I asked him.
“Do you want me to answer that extremely egotistical question honestly?” His voice edged out with a slightly patr
ician Southern accent, yet still sounded kind.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I quite liked your ARTillery show.” That was my first solo show from a year before.
“Really?” I sounded too excited. “I got the idea from this military museum in Riverhead. When I was a girl, my dad and I would drop by and I played with the tanks and jeeps and all kinds of phallic equipment on the grounds.”
“I liked the way the humor underlined the seriousness. The way you symbolized how the establishment keeps the war game going and how you manipulated toy tanks, guns, and bombs into art objects. I especially liked the ‘lamps’ and ‘dildos.’ I came to one of your performances with the cannons.”
“Thank you. Only I suppose that means you didn’t like yesterday’s um … performance.”
“I support euthanasia in its place, but this represents nihilistic flimflam. Someone died.”
“He wanted to. I loved Art. He was very sick. I would never have done it otherwise.”
“Maybe.” His fists slowly unclenched as he talked. “Or maybe it’s money for you and that vampire Horrwich and Murray Gibbon, and for your mutual fame. The world is undergoing a revolution because it has to, or we are doomed to a virulent extinction. These people here”—his eyes indicted them—“with a few exceptions, are a bunch of monomaniacal bullshit artists.” He crunched his lips together. “And that sucks. That art should be dead.”
His abject negativity stunned me. Everyone else had been so enthusiastic. Even the ones who were repulsed had found some merit to it, or so they claimed to my face. Some were jealous. I expected that.
“I want to change the world,” he continued. “Irony without empathy is empty and juvenile. Art is not dead. Real art is alive.” He sounded so sure of himself. I leaned over and inhaled. He backed away. Amid all the pot and cigarette smoke and cooking fish coagulating into a hardened plume of nauseating odors, I inhaled his essence, his soulsmell.
“You inhale like wet greasewood, it’s the best smell in the world.”