Broken Sleep

by Bruce Bauman

“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.”

  50

  THE SONGS OF SALOME

  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 tur
ned 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.

  I tried to live my life as Salome the artist, not as mother of superstar. I thought about finally exhibiting the Baddist Boys collages, but my psychopomps’ undulating warnings whispered, “Too soon, too soon.” I listened.

  I prepared a smaller exhibition for the Grand Dame of the L.A. art scene, Lily Fairmont. As the title of the show, I truncated the Diogenes quip, “It’s not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours,” into My Head IS Different. Using the garage in the Silver Lake house as a studio, I painted a series of portraits of other Collier Layne vacationers. I defined them with quasi-abstract squiggly profile lines, color, and brushwork. I can’t say I made one intimate friend during any vacation. I never had a single violent or sexual interaction with any other guest. I only watched and listened. I’ve purposely refrained from detailing the barbaric and profane treatments of group therapy, electroshock, and mind-raping drugs given to others. It is not my right to tell their story. I wouldn’t want any of them to reveal their version of mine.

  Some days after the opening, Lily called. Her voice dripped with her sardonic tone, “Honey, two not at all amusing elderly gentlemen want to buy some pieces.” I asked her to describe them. They were standing right there, so she held out the phone. I heard the unmistakable voices: Lively’s slow-winding-lariat-snap drawl and Teumer’s strident Teutonic grumblings. Lily, the anti-Gibbon, agreed that certain people should not have my work. I asked her to put them off and have them return the following afternoon.

  The next day, nurse-nanny number one drove me to the gallery. She waited in the car.

  I arrived before them and hid in the back room. I watched as she denied them the paintings. Teumer was bloated, rounder, and no longer even vulgarly sexy. Lively, hulking as ever, appeared uneasy. Teumer kept trying to change Lily’s mind and she kept insisting, “Honey, there’s not a chance.”

  Unexpected reinforcements arrived in the form of Absurda, Mindswallow, and Pullham-Large, who had missed the opening—not that I cared. They were dropping by before going to a recording session.

  I uncloaked myself and emerged from the office. I mouthed to Lively and Teumer, “Stay there,” while I draped the others with histrionic hugs. Absurda and Pullham-Large perused the pieces in the back of the gallery. Mindswallow leaned against the front wall, drinking a beer; art interested him about as much as football did me. I turned to face my nemeses.

  “Pig meat sweat! I smell pig meat sweat fresh from the inferno.”

  Teumer sneered at me. “This is how you welcome your old friend and lover?”

  “Malcolm, if I could undo only one night of fucking, I’d undo the night alone with you.”

  “Oh, it was more than one night. And our offspring lives here in Los Angeles. Would you undo that, too? Perhaps we should go visit him.”

  The repressed vision of our son alive arose from the foggy years I was under Ruggles’s drugs. I almost believed him. I stared at Lively. “He’s lying.”

  “ ’Fraid not.”

  “Mr. Mindswallow?”

  “Yo.”

  “Do you understand the piety-filled corrupt language of liars? It’s the language of those who reek of pig meat sweat.” I heard my voice nibbling at the edges of hysteria. So did Teumer. Expecting me to hit, spit, or tackle, he slid back next to Lively. I edged toward them. Teumer raised his right arm. In a flash, Mindswallow snatched his wrists and arched his arms behind his back. “Not a smart move.”

  Teumer whined, “Let me go!”

  “I ain’t into hurting an old man, but I let you go and you try something, I’ll hit you so hard it’ll knock your gonads into your mouth.”

  Lively pacified the situation. “No need, son. Let go of my friend, and we’ll be on our way.” Mindswallow released his grip. I stood between Lively and Teumer, put one hand on each of their arms, and walked them to the glass doors. “Never a pleasure doing business with you two.” I turned and smooched Mindswallow on the lips. “Absurda, you’re a lucky woman to have such a chivalrous killah bee by your side.” Mindswallow yawned.

  Nurse-nanny drove me to the ocean. After a stroll on Venice Beach, on the way back to Silver Lake we detoured to the Sunset Boulevard recording studio. Pullham-Large paced nervously outside the control room. Without my asking, he fetched Alchemy.

  Alchemy, smoking, looking displeased, slowed his walk from harried musician to concerned-and-in-control son as he approached me. “Mom, you all right?”

  “The sand and salty air sanitized me after the filthy exhalations of Lively and his friend who came to the gallery. I’d like to move closer to the ocean.”

  “What did Lively want? Maybe I can help.”

  “His friend’s a collector and wanted to buy some pieces. I don’t need your help.”

  “Okay. Dinner sometime later this week?”

  “Yes. Go back to making music.”

  So, you see, my seeming bratty ingratitude has warrant. Instead of gaining me my freedom, Alchemy’s fame tightened the noose of dependency around my neck. When a child becomes father to the mother, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

  51

  THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2008)

  I Prefer Not To

  Moses got up before 6 A.M. and took a taxi back to Bergamot to retrieve his car. When he got home, he turned on his computer hoping for an e-mail from Jay, but no. To his surprise there was an e-mail from Evie. She’d sent it at 5 A.M., probably when she was first getting to bed. She asked if they could meet the following night. Moses answered from his private e-mail. They met at the Marina Hotel, a somewhat run-down and inexpensive hotel used mainly by flight crews because of its proximity to the airport, and where there was scant chance of being noticed. They ordered room service, had sex, and watched To Have and Have Not, which Evie had never heard of, much less seen. Moses told her how the forty-five-year-old Bogart and the nineteen-year-old Bacall had met while making the film.

  “That why you picked this one?”

  “Partly.”

  “I’m twenty-six, not nineteen. Guess she had daddy issues, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Professor T”—she didn’t like calling him Moses—“you’re like an old guy, but I wouldn’t be with you if you were a clown.” Moses looked confused.

  “You haven’t heard that?” Moses shook his head. “C-L-O-W-N. Creepy Lecherous Old White Nympho. It’s what we call some of the teachers.”

  “Well, I’m flattered, I think.”

  Thus their afternoon encounter turned into an affair. He’d wait for her to contact him—which she sometimes did two days in a row and then not for four or five days. Still incapable of embracing any notion that life has a bottom, Moses allowed himself a dollop of hope that Evie’s arrival, however dubious their “relationship,” signaled at least a lull in his de
scent.

  Things continued in this way—erratic, guilt-laden, yet invigorating. The attention of such a young and attractive woman began the repair of his frayed ego. Moses spent much of his time reading and going to the movies alone. One of his old college friends, who taught at Columbia, encouraged him to start writing down his ideas comparing the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1968. He never got past jotting a few notes and listing the books he’d need for research. He perused a long proposal that Alchemy had sent him outlining ideas for the Nightingale Foundation, which he envisioned as both beneficial for society and as the jumping-off point for entering the political arena. He wanted Moses’s input.

  At the end of July, Evie and Moses met at the Marina Hotel—he still didn’t dare see Evie at his home or hers. They watched The Palm Beach Story from bed while Moses rhapsodized about Preston Sturges (he relished the role of cultural mentor). Then Evie nonchalantly put forth a question Moses had expected for some weeks: “You told your ex-wife about me?”

  “I’m not officially divorced. Very soon, though. And no, not yet.”

  “Hey, no prob. I’ve told none of my friends or other lovers about you.”

  “Best way to go for now.” He was relieved not only by her circumspection but also that she had other lovers.

  “How about your brother?”

  “Who?”

  “Isn’t Alchemy Savant your brother? Figured you might exchange, you know, stuff. Guys being guys.”

  “My half brother and I are not exactly on a ‘guys being guys’ terms. I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “Be a playa. Show me off to him! Show off my music! You got more PILF points than you know.”

  “PILF?”

  “Professor I’d like to fuck.”

  He laughed silently, but with some pride, at the idea of Moses the Lothario. “Let me think about it.”

  “If it’s so upsetting, forget it.”

  AlchemyAlchemyAlchemy, his name compressed and shrank Moses’s balls. “Maybe I’ll send him a download of your music.”