by Bruce Bauman
“What, I’m a clown to you? Well, yeah, I guess I am.”
The band had turned up the decibel level to around twelve, and he thought I’d said “greasepaint.” I corrected him and said that I could taste his purity in my nose and throat.
He asked, “What do you smell like?” He’s the only one whoever turned it on me. The only one. Dr. Barnard Ruggles, my favorite shrink here at Collier Layne, tried to do it in the session after I informed him he reeked of little shards of rancid, mayonnaisy potatoes marinated in mothballs. Only then, as I told him, it was too late.
“I am half-burned, still smoldering autumn leaves left to wilt in the rain.”
“Is that good or not?”
“It’s not like the fresh, hopeful smell of leaves just after a cleansing rain but the odor of nature unnurtured and abandoned. Abandoned.”
He squinted and then his eyes widened behind his glasses, unsure of what to make of me. Urso, elbowing his way back between us, started pecking away again. “So Brockton, you making time with my fuck, are ya? Eat me or you’ll get burned.”
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. This shy not-so-shy guy was Nathaniel Brockton, Ivy Leaguer, Vietnam vet–turned–counterculture icon with the publication of his novel Tag, You’re $#it. His narrator, Bohemian Scofflaw, an aspiring anarchist who got kicked out of college, was drafted and sent to a futuristic land resembling Vietnam, where Scofflaw and his cohorts’ battle cry was, “Eat fire and burn, motherfucker,” as they savaged village after village. The phrase became a campus rallying cry.
Damn, did I feel stupid—and I didn’t feel stupid often.
I tried to recover by being so unnaturally obsequiouasskissy—“Oh I’m so, so—I love your—” Duchamp and his entourage, making their histrionic entrance, pushed into the room. Nathaniel coughed as if a brackish odor had oozed into Max’s, waved bye-bye, shrugged, and receded into the crowd. Suddenly, I felt so lonely. As if my atoms had deflected the atoms of everyone else in the room so we couldn’t connect. I found Horrwich in the bathroom getting sucked off underneath the graffiti that read FAME IS THE BLOW JOB OF THE WAR HOLES. I felt so unhinged. Startled, I felt Duchamp standing right beside me. Our eye contact said, “Let’s fuck,” and the game was on. “Ah, ma petite artiste, you are so vivacious looking tonight.” I’m not sure what happened next. This is where my memories mishmash. Maybe it’s repression. Maybe it was the joy drugs or the Collier Layne psychotropic shakes or their demonic hot wire. Maybe a spell. Probably all of them.
We ended up at his studio on 11th Street. He immediately disappeared into the bathroom and then waltzed out dressed in nothing but a woman’s wig, his face a mask of lipstick and rouge. It was laugh-out-loud outrageous—this old man as drag crone. His alter ego was Rrose Sélavy and I’d seen photos of him by Man Ray—pretty sexy, actually—as a woman. He grabbed my hand and tugged me into an enclosed room. He began to undress me and almost forced me onto a tarp on the floor next to a sculpture of a woman and got on top of me. The old farceur left me decidedly unravished.
“Look.” He rolled over and flicked on a single overhead lightbulb while I lay there, naked. “You cannot tell anyone you see this, especially Lez-lie. He would be so jalous. I am doing interviews with him, but I have not given him the privilege of a viewing.” My eyes focused on the nude woman. My body went limp. I started to shiver and sweat, and I said shakily, “She looks like Greta Garbo.”
A tiny leer crawled onto his thin lips. “A little this. A little that. A little her.”
“Did you know her?”
“But of course. We meet during the war at the apartment of the genial art dealer Betty Parsons. Have you been introduced to Betty?” I shook my head. “Ask Lez-lie. She would just want to eat you.”
“What about Garbo?”
“I see her often for the few months she says she is interested in serious art. She is not serious. Almost never after that.”
“What else can you tell me about her?”
“Nothing. You should dress and go.” An aggrieved scowl erupted and his features became exaggerated, as if to say, I had you, now get the hell out of here, you inconsequential putain. Normally, I would’ve dismissed him with my no,-I-had-you,-you-ancient-fart gaze. I couldn’t. I didn’t understand why he’d become so mean. I should have smelled it, but my senses were blocked. I asked, almost pleaded, “Why did you want to show me that? Because I look so much like her?”
He answered with an unsuppressed belch. “You must leave this room. I must work.” I stared one more time at the body that became his masterpiece Étant donnés. He gave me a push and closed the door. I dressed in the main room. I couldn’t bear to go to Horrwich’s right then, so I fetaled up on the couch and fell asleep. When I awoke, Duchamp and some other geezer sat at a table playing chess. Duchamp never even glanced up from the chessboard. He merely ordered, “Silence, please.” I left.
I thought about going to Greta’s and standing outside her window and screaming, “Why did you give me up?” Her melancholic Scandinavian heaviness, that forlorn face exhausted me. No. I wouldn’t succumb to groveling for my birthright.
I took a taxi to the Port Authority and bought a ticket for the next bus to Greenport. While waiting, I realized I couldn’t handle the Orient Point crowd. They might’ve stoned me. They would blame me for Art’s death. Suddenly everything about my childhood in Orient haunted me. It wasn’t simply the vision of Art’s disembodied corporeal being. I felt my baby churning and gasping and dying again inside my belly. I left the station. I couldn’t go back to Orient. I took a cab to Horrwich’s loft. He never asked where I’d spent the night.
5
THE CANTICLES OF HANNAH, II (2001, 1958)
Baby, Please Don’t Go
Cigarette in hand, Hannah paced in her room at the Miramar Hotel. She’d barely slept on the plane. She mashed out her cigarette, thinking, Why him? Why not me? I don’t want to live one minute more than him. Will he ever understand why I was forbidden to tell him sooner? Has he forgiven me? She recalled Moses’s quivering reaction as she’d emptied herself of the albatross of truth, battened down for so long inside her chamber of shame.
She lit another cigarette and stared out the window, not really noticing dawn’s streaks of light hitting the Pacific Ocean. Instead, she was reliving the day the “love of her life” never returned home. She had been frantic—Malcolm had mysteriously come into her world and then disappeared just as mysteriously.
Three days after his disappearance, while she was rocking Moses in her arms, she heard the key in the door. She placed Moses on the couch against the cushion where he couldn’t roll off. Dressed in her white flannel bathrobe, she ran to greet her husband. But it was Lively who stood in front of her.
“Is he okay?” Hannah begged.
“Let’s sit down.” Lively bulled his way past her before she could answer. She turned on some lights. She pointed to Malcolm’s favorite big brown leather chair but Lively chose to sit on the couch beside Moses. Hannah picked up her child and backed away.
“Hannah,” he pronounced her name as if he were her older brother, “please, sit by me.” He patted the couch cushion beside him. She sat down a few feet away. “It is unmanly, unchivalrous, that Mal chose to act in this fashion. I do not approve. But Mal Teumer is a man who makes his own choices.”
“Why did he make this choice? What can you tell me? Anything?” She deplored the meekness of her voice.
“Nothing is what it seems to be.” His words flowed in that low-pitched, indomitable rabbi’s tactic, if the rabbi were a Texan, that intimated he was privy to the will of God and she was not. “It’s best for you and the boy if you do not ask questions. Not now. Not ever.”
“What do you mean?” She knew very well that his placid manner belied threats he could make real.
“Mal is gone. He is not coming back.”
“What about Moses?”
“Mal has been persuaded to surrender his rights. The vixen he seduced, she gave up her rights
some time ago. She will be no bother.”
Hannah felt a sudden tightness in her chest. Lively, noticing her complexion draining of color, brought her a glass of water from the kitchen. “Just take a sip. You’ve had a tough few days. It will get better.”
She nodded, thinking, How could I not have guessed? Of course, the child is his. Yes, life can happen for a reason, if not always a reason that is immediately apparent.
“Now, Hannah, everything will be taken care of just right. Moses will remain with you …” Still standing above her, he clasped his hands together “… as long as you follow my advice.” Advice? Orders were more like it. “You understand that if you ever breach our agreement, and there will be a legal agreement, everything will be rescinded. There will be consequences.” He stared at Moses and began edging even closer to Hannah. She felt his animalistic lather. It petrified her. She held Moses closer to her breast. Lively cupped his huge hand on Moses’s head, and he bared his filmy teeth. Moses opened his eyes and smiled, and whatever sick thoughts were percolating in Lively’s head, Moses’s cherubic gurgle stopped them, and he left.
A call interrupted Hannah’s thoughts. “Hey, Ma, I’m downstairs, you want to come down for coffee?” Moses’s voice bounced with its usual amiability, and Hannah was so proud, because no matter the gruesomeness of most people or his inner despair, he acted with kindness to friends and strangers alike.
“Moses, are you …” She couldn’t finish her sentence.
“I’m fine. Worried about you.”
“I’ll be better when I see you. Why don’t you come up?”
Moments later, Moses walked apprehensively into the room. They embraced. Even though she’d seen him two months before, as she felt the bones in his rib cage and back, his frailty renewed her agony. She wondered if Moses meant it when he said he had forgiven her. She steeled herself.
“Mom, why are you shaking? Are you all right?”
“I have good news. For you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
Before she started to speak, Hannah breathed deeply, trying to calm her palpitating heart. “William III finally gave me the information on your biological mother. After all these months resisting, I don’t know why, but last night Bill Bickley Jr. gave his son permission. Her name is Salome Savant. She was an artist of some sort. You can find her here.” She took a typed piece of paper off the dresser top and handed it to him. “It’s the Collier Layne Health Facility in western New Jersey. William III said arrangements have been made. The head psychiatrist is expecting you.”
Hannah tipped backward, her legs buckling, and collapsed into a luscious green velvet armchair. Panicked, Moses exclaimed, “Ma, should I, are you—?” Both of her parents had died of a heart attack in their sixties.
“No, no. Just anxious.” Hannah sighed. “Can you get me a Valium from my purse and a glass of water?” She took the pill and swallowed it. She almost wished she were having a heart attack.
Moses sat precariously on the edge of the bed and looked at the name on the paper. “Yesterday, in his apartment Teumer shares with this guy—”
“You didn’t see him?”
“No, we talked to Laban Lively.”
“My God! Lively and Bickley Sr., they introduced me to Malcolm.” She’d never had a reason before, in fact went out of her way never to speak of Lively.
“He claimed he’s Teumer’s business partner. There’s a piece of her art in their apartment.” Moses stood up, arms crossed over his chest. Hannah shook her head, aghast—Moses could never have known that he’d inherited his father’s signature stance when confronted with unpleasantness. “I don’t know what any of this means except I have to go see her. Ma, I’m sorry this has been impossibly hard on you. You’ll always be my mom, and I love you. I have to, you know. Get some sleep.” He sighed.
They hugged. Hannah held him as if she needed him to save her from drowning in her own tears.
“I’ll call as soon as I know anything. Call Jay. She’ll come over.”
6
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Happy Mothers’ Day
Outside, the early-morning August marine layer gave the air a gluey mist. For a moment Moses imagined himself gumshoeing in a black-and-white movie, with a crater-eyed Peter Lorre tracking him. He winced; he’d often jested that his students lived so solipsistically, it was as if they were starring in their own private film. During the short drive home, he realized that if he had not been ill this never would have happened; that, triteness aside, ignorance can be, if not bliss, then at least a compensatory manner of living.
He kissed Jay, who sat crouched and crossed-legged on her chair. She looked bleary-eyed, hair tied back in a ponytail, coffee mug with a Salvador Dalí design cupped between her hands. She had been staring at the computer, reading her e-mail. “How is she? How’d she react?”
“She reacted by telling me my mother is Salome Savant.”
Jay, now wide awake, mouth agape, screamed, “Holy shit! What the fuck?! Oh, my God, Moses. What does this mean? Are you sure? When did she find out?”
“Just yesterday. My life gets wilder and stranger by the hour,” he said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head in total befuddlement. “Any moment, I’ll find out my true parents were crustaceans from Mars.” Still trying to gain perspective, he felt the truth of a historical maxim. “Remember what I’ve said about the Watergate break-in and other scandals, that the cover-up compounds the crime?” Jay nodded. “I won’t say her silence was a crime, but I sure wish she’d told me before.”
“I’m sure she does, too. It was a choice made out of love, not malice.” She smiled wanly and reached out for his hand, her even keel of calm restored. Moses felt grateful for her affectionate display.
“I want to get going. I’ll take the first nonstop. Drive me to the airport?”
“You don’t want me to come?” Jay’s unblinking eyes beseeched him to say yes. He shook his head. “I need you to stay with my mom. Please take care of her ’til I get back.”
“I’ll go meet her at the hotel and stay with her if she wants, or invite her here.”
“You can go over and use the pool. Maybe get her to swim some laps with you.” Moses half smiled. Hannah’s idea of exercise was sitting in a lounge by the pool and doing arm lifts with her cigarette. “She’ll appreciate you being there and so will I.”
Jay called the airlines, spoke to a supervisor, and managed to get a seat using their frequent flyer miles, while Moses gathered a few items and tossed them into a carry-on. He gobbled down a bagel, cream cheese, and lox, and they got in the car. Jay drove toward Lincoln Boulevard, then south to the airport.
“So, do—hey, watch out.” The car next to her had swerved too close to the other lane, but she continued, “Do you think Alchemy knows your father? That you two will meet?”
“Why would he know him and why would we meet?”
“Because Salome Savant is your mother, and your father has her artwork in the apartment.” She stated this factually and with slight incredulity.
Apparently, his mom had informed his behavior because he’d erected a mental block the size of the Great Wall of China. Only now did it fall away as he made the still unimaginable connection: Alchemy Savant, People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” was his younger brother.
Like any semisentient being of the past decade, Moses had absorbed plenty about Alchemy. There was no way not to have heard of him and his band, the Insatiables, in the 1990s. He’d even seen them perform in late ’95 at a rare club concert at the Whisky, in a benefit for the antiglobalization group Ruckus Society, when Jay, then his soon-to-be wife, scored them a pair of VIP passes through her connections at Kasbah Records. He had been entranced, along with everyone else in the club, from the moment the lights went up and Alchemy, like a ballet dancer pirouetting on a snowflake, spun slow motion in space and turned to face them, swilled a half bottle of scotch in a series of fast gulps, and with his eyes and body subtly signaling mul
tiple allusions, he stage-whispered one of his catchphrases: “Ask not what your rock band can do for you, ask what you can do for your rock band …” On cue, the band launched into “E Pluribus Unum Wampum.”
Moses turned around and rifled through the CD case in the backseat of the car. He pulled out an Insatiables CD, imagining a thought balloon popping over his head and in exaggerated Lichtenstein canvas fashion exclaiming, “Alchemy is maybe the one person out of six billion on earth who can save your life!” The possibility dazzled. He shook his head as if he were drying his hair after a January dip in the Pacific.
“You mind if I play this?” he asked.
“Not at all.”
He played his favorite cut, the trancelike anthem, “Blues for the Common Man.”
Evil brothers, singing so saintly
Dreams in shatters, smiling faintly
Hoping high, laying low
It’s the blues
The blues for the common man
“His voice, I’ve never thought about it before, but your voices are remarkably similar.”
“Really?”
“Maybe it’s just the power of suggestion.” Jay paused. “He might be hard to find. You know that Absurda Nightingale OD’d earlier this year?”
“Right, it was horrible. Some of the female students at SCCAM played a midnight tribute concert for her.”
“Well, I saw on TV that Alchemy went into seclusion.”
“I get that.” He hesitated. “Jay, you understand why I want to go alone? I need you to take care of my mom.”
Jay’s “yes” was surrounded by silences exclaiming, yes and no. I want to go with you, but what can I do? She didn’t see the purpose in pushing him. If he changed his mind, he’d ask her. He read the hurt in her teary-eyed silence yet couldn’t muster a cogent answer beyond “Thanks.”
Standing on the curb at the airport, they hugged. Jay held him tightly, in a painful silence. Moses couldn’t explain his desire to be alone when he met his mother. There arose in him the vague terror that he’d be a far different Moses Teumer upon his return.