Jay spotted the graffiti artist known as Krankey. Moses nudged her. “Go. I’ll let you know when I need you.” Moses watched Jay grab a second glass of champagne off a waiter’s tray as she made her way toward Krankey. Behind her he saw Barker being escorted to his meeting with Alchemy.
As he entered the cluttered office, Barker seemed to be addressing, possibly praying to, the gaudy silver insignia necklace that hung to the middle of his kurta, bequeathed to him by the church’s deceased founder. Alchemy shook his head, dismayed. How could anyone, especially Laluna, take him seriously? Alchemy pointed to a chair.
“No. I’ll stand. I’ve been expecting your little reprimand. You can’t tell me not to talk to Laluna.” Barker’s voice took on the yogi-esque air of the unruffled transcendent.
“Not my intention.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Last week Laluna brought you to my mother’s studio again. You proceeded to lecture her that psychiatrists and psychotropic drugs caused her illness and that if she and Laluna joined your church, you ‘guaranteed’ the tension between the two of them would end. True?”
“Let them undergo Cosmological Kinetic purification and I’ll be proven right. Your problems with Laluna and your mother far exceed your abilities to fix them.”
“Perhaps. But it is my problem, not yours. Your problem is dispensing disreputable information to the Committee on Anti-American activities about me that you insinuated came from Laluna.”
“That’s slanderous. I’ve never talked to anyone on that committee. Don’t blame me because you’re jealous of Jack’s relationship with Laluna.”
“I don’t. I blame you for being a charlatan.” A scene with Crouse and Barker, messy as it might be, suited Alchemy just fine. It would leave no doubt that their association was one-sided. “You can see Laluna whenever she wants, but you are not welcome here or anywhere near my mother. Tomorrow morning a judge will be granting a restraining order against you and you’ll be properly served.”
“What? How could you? I’ll fight it.”
“Go ahead. Enjoy the festivities.” Alchemy exited, leaving the door wide open behind him. He addressed a muscular security guard stationed in the doorway: “Dave, please escort Mr. Barker downstairs.”
Moses took a sip from his water bottle, and suddenly, for the first time in months — a daymare.
I’m sitting alone in the back row of a roofless Budapest temple. It’s pouring but I can’t move. Beside me appears the dybbuk, Shalom, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans. She touches my cheek.
— Moses, now is the time.
— For what?
— Redemption.
— I have done nothing wrong.
An apparition hovers above her.
— Moses, she warns as he lifts her away, doing nothing wrong does not mean you have done something right. Act and I will love you in the dimension of forever.
The apparition exhales. A fiery gas bubble pops and sends sparks through the air.
— Act and feel my blood surge within you.
“Unc Mose.” Persephone climbed onto the chair formerly occupied by Jay. “I want to show you the pool I painted with Granmamma.” Persephone led him to the cordoned-off side of the house and the empty pool, its floor and walls a psychedelic mishmash of colors. She fingered a necklace of papier-mâché “Black Sea” pearls. “She taught me a song she made up.” Persephone, giggling, sang, “Black Sea pearls are worn by little girls, who take trips around the world, and get a big kiss and find their bliss …” She stopped and ducked her head against his thigh. “I forget the rest. Granmamma says I am a better drawer than singer.”
“I think you’re aces at both.” Moses’s phone beeped. A text from Alchemy: Winslow. Now. “Perse, honey, I need to talk with a friend. Let’s find Auntie Jay. Wait with her and I’ll be back in a jiffy.” They found Jay talking with Krankey, who was hoping she could get him past the security guards to meet Salome. They had orders not to let anyone near her cottage. Moses exhaled, “Jay, game time.”
The “jiffy” took longer than anticipated, and Perse, restless, asked Auntie Jay to take her inside so she could play with her newest art-making computer program. Laluna caught up to her on the second-floor landing and stopped Jay outside the doorway to Persephone’s room.
“I need to ask you a big favor.” Jay nodded. “Did Mose tell you that Alchemy and I are going to take a three-week vacation by ourselves?”
“He mentioned something. Costa Rica? Maybe Argentina? Either sounds great.”
“We’re still checking. But we also want Perse, if you’re okay with it, to stay with you and Mose. I’d like it if you’d stay up here.”
“That’s not a favor, that’s a pleasure. Moses would love it. But up here for a few weeks, with Salome so close?”
“I wouldn’t do that to Mose. She’s been getting crazier. When she heard Perse might stay with you, she said, ‘I won’t allow it.’ Don’t worry, she can’t stop us. I, we can’t have her here anymore. I wrote some music inspired by her Petra Sansluv drawings. Salome said they have a ‘larcenous and putrid soulsmell,’ whatever the hell that is, which disqualifies them from being played for ‘my granddaughter with my drawings.’ ” Jay winced. “She and Alchemy will decide if Salome’s going back to Collier Layne or her own place.”
“If that’s the case, I don’t see any problems. Except, after that long a time, it might be hard for Moses to give her up.” The champagne had disarmed Jay’s usually stringent self-editing skills. “His relationship with Perse makes him so happy, but it also hurts him.”
“Hurt, Mose? Why?” Laluna looked perplexed. “Because of the way Salome treated him?”
“No. Not that. It’s so goddamned hard for him to keep up the pretense of ‘Uncle Mose’ when he’s really ‘Daddy Moses.’ ”
Laluna pushed Jay almost too forcefully down the hallway. “Who told you that? Moses?” Laluna crossed her arms across her chest and scratched her fingernails against her forearms.
“What?… Wait … Shit.” After disobeying the Savant Code of Omertà, Jay flailed haplessly, seeking to forestall the now inevitable firestorm. “I’m sorry. I’m drunk. Yeah, Moses, he must’ve dreamed it up.”
Laluna said coldly, “No, no. I don’t think he did.”
“Hey, Mommy.” Perse walked into the hallway and Laluna and Jay stared at the blue-gray-eyed, stubby-legged Persephone. “Can you come help me?”
Moses spotted Dewey Winslow schmoozing with Chipper Ronan. Winslow now sported a goatee instead of his sliver of mustache, and with his gold-framed glasses he looked more like a professor than a professional political shark. Moses signaled to him with his eyes. Winslow placed his glass on the tray of a passing waiter and sucked traces of mustard off his fingers. He and Moses moved away so as not to be heard. Moses began filling him in on the morning’s polls that had Alchemy with a seventy-plus percent positive Q rating, with only twenty-three percent negatives among all groups and economic and education levels — higher than anyone else in politics.