“A one-night thing?”
“It was so not serious.”
“When?”
“It started before I met you.”
“And ended?”
“When I met you.”
“How soon after we met?”
“Soon. I don’t remember exactly. Soon.”
Jay, who had remained free from the increasingly mangled sexual web of his “family” was now intractably and unalterably linked to Alchemy in the one way he could never have imagined, and now could never forget.
“Kasbah rented the Dresden for a party and Randy Sheik invited me and introduced me to him because of the art connection.”
He stopped hearing her words and descended into the suffocating space of a daymare.
Moving with a graceful locomotion that radiates sex, he approaches her at the Chateau Marmont bar for what she knows will be the last time. Before they finish the second drink, they’ve tongued their way to an upstairs room, where immediately his mouth sucks her ass. He whispers — I want you here. The head of his “most glorious cock in rock” reaches virgin spaces. Moments later, under the shower’s driving water, she takes him inside her mouth. Finally, hungrier than she’s ever been to be fucked — she feels him inside her — each thrust a lightning shock of pleasure. She comes and comes again and again. And again. And so does he. No man has come inside her so many times in one night. No one ever will again.
“Hey, Mose, your mom, Hannah, is on the cell phone,” Alchemy calls from the front of the house.
In the morning they share champagne. She wants him one more time. She holds him inside her, fingers digging deep into his flesh, wishing the moment would never end.
The landline rang and the answering machine picked up. “It’s Sidonna Cherry. If you’re there pick up. Okay, call me. I found your father’s address in Brazil.”
She hustles to her small cottage in Los Feliz, changes her clothes, and readies herself to apologize to this new guy for canceling last night’s dinner because she had a sudden meeting with an important client.
“Moses, it was nothing. Nothing. I love you.”
She fantasizes about feeling his cock inside her when she is alone, or when she is having sex with me, her husband.
Tears misted in Jay’s eyes. Moses crossed his arms against his chest, bowed his head, and shut his eyes tight. A wave of nausea overcame him. He felt as if he needed to expel an internal projectile of irrational jealousy. He tried to quell the impulses of self-annihilation surging in him. He imagined the blackening blood cells expanding at an ever-increasing rate, mocking him.
“Jay”—he reached out and held her hand—“can you get yourself in shape to come down in five minutes?”
“Moses, I love you. Only you.” Jay reached over and hugged him. “Make it ten. I need a shower.”
“I love you, too. Take your time.” He squeezed her hand, bent over, and kissed her gently on the lips. He pushed himself off the bed and slouched down the hall, trying to decode his own roiling emotions, the clashing of jealousy and empathy.
“She okay?” Alchemy flipped the phone back to Moses, who fumbled it but caught it before it hit the ground.
“Got a killer migraine. Lot of tension lately. She’ll be out soon.”
“I told Hannah, your ma, that’d you’d call her back in ten minutes.”
“Thanks.”
“Change of plans. Andrew’s driver will be here any minute. We have some serious business to untangle. Kasbah is being taken over by Der Saurbrugger Gruppen,” he overenunciated the corporation’s name in a Chaplinesque German accent, “and we have buyout or bonus clauses in our contract. I’ll stay at his place tonight and meet you at Cedars-Sinai tomorrow at eleven.”
Moses exhaled. He’d been spared the indignity of the renewed meeting of his brother and his wife until he had a chance to process their relationship.
A black four-door BMW pulled up. “Good trip. Was a good trip. And Mose”—Alchemy touched his shoulder, then hugged him—“you’re gonna be fine. Probably outlive me.” He disappeared behind the frosted windows of the car’s backseat.
Moses stepped onto the small porch, the front door still open, where he stood stupefied. Once again everything had changed, yet truly nothing had changed, and he attempted to escape this irrationality by imposing an almost perverse dialectic: Did Jay love him less? No. Had their years together somehow been nullified and degraded? No. Had she betrayed him? No. But still … History had taught Moses that all nations — and individuals, too — must, in order to survive, obfuscate, deny, and rearrange the exact composition of the smelted logic of lies and silences into “truth.” He had formulated a General Principle of Livability: Hope + Need — Denial = your Livability Quotient. Now, his “truth” undone, he wondered if could rebalance the equation. If it even mattered anymore.
20 THE SONGS OF SALOME
The Waves
I had another “episode” last week after suffering three nights of exile from my sleepself. Thankfully, these new burns are not severe. Dr. Bellows did not exactly react with compassionate rectitude as I tried to explain the terror of clarity.
The terror begins when I see my life as one long nocturnal arc of sleeplessness. I become enraptured by visions of such persuasive and vital detail — when the veils that divide the mist of real and dream, past and future, fall — and all the timeless dimensions stretching between Dream and Reality become one. These dimensions, except during the “clarity,” are as unseeable as the eighty percent of the universe that is hidden, dark matter. The invisible tentacles of light eviscerate my soulsmell. I feel the light tentacles transforming into laser blades that slice into my synapses, which sets off an uncontrollable panic that I will be separated from my body. The psychic protons that hold me as a consciousness are jettisoned, and I am disseminated into the universe, into nontime, lost in the dark matter. I fear I will never again find myself whole.
This is not at all similar to the transcendent out-of-your-body creative experience that is familiar to every true artist. Or when I am communing with my DNA. The clarity is no spiritual reverie. No, I am ripped from my essence, my body and soul. I never know if I will come back to myself or if I will forever be torn, trapped in this unforgiving, odorless realm.
It happened again last week, the same way it first happened when I was teenager. After the baby died — and he did die to me! — I awoke during the night and ran shrieking into my parents’ room. They stayed awake with me all night as my body trembled. Hilda put warm compresses on my head. Dad rubbed my feet. It happened once with Horrwich, too, on the night of my ungraduation party. It happened when Alchemy was murdered.
When I hurt myself or hurt others, it is because this terror is seething and I can feel the waves beginning. My cuttings, my burnings are my declaration: I am real. You are real. I can hurt myself and hurt you and I can bleed. I will remain tethered to this reality, no matter how painful. The doctors think my behavior reflects self-loathing or a desire to escape. It conforms to none of those categories. It is unclassifiable.
Only in those etheresque episodes, sucked into the invisible dark matter, have I felt unvarnished fear. I have no fear of what has been done to me or what will be done, because nothing has power over me except for that one incurable terror. I never want to feel it again. Yet I always know that I will.
Now that Alchemy is gone, I have no one who understands. If only I could see my granddaughter, Persephone.