Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“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.

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 exactly 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.