Bruce Bauman: Broken Sleep

Sitting at the desk waiting for Cherry’s fax, he tried to conjure his father’s face from the one and only picture he’d ever seen, when he was five, his parents’ wedding picture. He remembered that afternoon clearly: His grandmother, who lived with them, had gone to the A&P grocery store so he sneaked into his mother’s bedroom closet, her haven against chaos with dresses, shoes, blouses, skirts, coats, umbrellas, and pocketbooks all in their assigned places. If he moved any object one inch, she’d know . He turned on the light and on an upper shelf he spotted stacks of papers and boxes, one labeled PHOTOS. With his little hands he tugged the black step-chair from the back left corner. He climbed up and reached as far as he could and pulled down a beat-up sky-blue metal safety box. A few days before, he’d spotted his mother crying while looking at the photos in the box. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the closet. He found pictures of himself as a baby and of his mother with her naturally auburn hair bleached blond. Then he found it — their picture. His father with a solemn demeanor and furnace-hot glare. Dark hair combed in a pompadour with a yarmulke atop his skull. The picture was black and white, but Moses also knew that his father had blue eyes; he, Moses, had small blue-gray eyes, unlike Hannah’s hazel eyes. Despite the perfection of her hair, the shine of her gown, the delicacy of her makeup, his mom looked sad in that photo. Beautiful, but irredeemably sad.

He put the box away, hurriedly trying to reproduce the order of the closet; his grandmother would be back from the store any minute. A few days later he again sought the photo, and only one half remained. His father was, once again, gone.

No sound. No smell. No taste. No touch. No image. No words. His father’s physical legacy: empty space and a name. He was Moses, son of Hannah and Malcolm, the father who had died in his heart in 1961. His struggle, before he consciously knew it, was to find expression for the inexpressible, the pain of a mother’s tears, and the blunted scream of loss that an abandoned child with no words feels when grasping for answers.

Over time, Moses compiled these few facts from vague memories and overheard conversations: Hannah was forced to leave the Yorkville apartment and they caravanned with relatives for over a year until settling into a serviceable, boxlike, and minimally furnished apartment in Stuyvesant Town on 20th Street. Moses’s widowed grandmother came to live with them. Soon after Teumer’s abandonment, Bickley & Schuster rehired Hannah. Suddenly, or so it seemed, this small-statured woman, who moved with the cautious gait of a shtetl Jew, acted with a fierceness and determination contradictory to all previous behavior. She began her career ascent, an obsession that excluded all except caring for her son.

William Bickley Sr. acted as a cross between guardian angel and parental watchdog while she worked part time and attended City College, where she excelled. She went on to Fordham Law School. After graduating, B&S hired her full time and she became a top-notch estate attorney. Moses was given love and whatever material offerings she could afford.

Yet there hovered, like the unseen particles of nuclear fallout, one unspoken condition: The name of Malcolm and the years they were together became unmentionable. Hannah directly informed her young son of only this one fact: “Your father’s experiences in the death camps made him unstable.” And with that, the young (and even now the older) Moses had asked no more questions. The language of silences and pauses and wordless expressions became Moses’s idea of hell.

Sitting at his desk, Moses’s upper back burned with stress; his head throbbed with the surging thunderclaps of a migraine, as a single thought pummeled: I have this schmuck’s genes and now I need him to save my life.

Drawing on the commanding component of his voice, which was as assuring as the crackling embers of a Christmas fireplace yet tinged with a Wellesian eminence (a formidable tool in the classroom), Moses yelled out from “his” room into the backyard where Jay had her office. “Hey, Jay, come on in.” He watched as she walked from her office and came down the hallway, admiring how she moved with the same fluidity and focus as she had in water, a former high school swim team captain. Her midback-length auburn hair swayed behind her. Their connection so strong, she felt his distress before he uttered a word. He recited Cherry’s news. She rubbed his back and cradled his head against her body. “What’re you going to do?”

Jay and Moses had met six years before at a fund-raiser for SCCAM at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Jay, then twenty-nine, after a decade of unfulfilling sexual serenades gone off-key, was simultaneously wary and hopeful that she could meet someone who could offer her the security she craved and stimulation she desired. Moses, at thirty-seven, was a scarred veteran of two failed long-term relationships, separated by years of aloneness, questioning whether he possessed the emotional wherewithal to make the final leap to lifelong commitment. They were equally astonished by the compatibility of their desires and lifestyle choices and how quickly they developed a synchronous nonverbal understanding of each other’s deeper emotional needs. As nonpracticing Jews (Jay’s father was Jewish, her mother Episcopalian) but proud of their Jewish cultural heritage, they were married by a reformed rabbi in a very small ceremony. Both believed their marriage would be forever. It had been a half decade forever which, with a stunning suddenness, was razed by the wrecking ball of Moses’s illness.

Jay, who possessed what her father termed “gravitas” and what others might call “attitude,” wanted him to go over to Teumer’s and, at least emotionally, decapitate the deadbeat.

“First, I need to call my mom.” Moses sat in the desk chair in his room, paralyzed. Jay picked up the phone and held it out to him. He did not reach for it. The phone had become a scepter that would unleash unwanted plagues.

Moses repeated, “I need to call my mom.”

“Are you sure now’s the time?” Jay asked.

“Yes, she needs to know.”

“She’ll be out here tomorrow.”

He shook his head. He took the phone and dialed her office.

“Hi, Mom.” Moses hesitated. This woman who had loved him, vowed to never let anyone ever hurt him, made him the sun in her solar system, would shudder at the idea that the soulless apparition, Malcolm Teumer, could be walking the streets of Los Angeles at that very moment.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah heard the tremors in Moses’s voice.

“Ma … I found him.”

He heard the breakdown on the other end of the line, the crack in the voice, the sigh expelling decades of encapsulated dread of hearing that singular phrase. “Did you see him? Talk to him?” Her tone almost pleaded for him to say no.

“Not yet. I have to.”

She sighed. “I know. I’m still trying to find out the name of your, you know … Do you want to wait for me and I’ll go meet him with you? The red-eye will get me in very early.”

“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: