“Was it Mose?”
“If I cared enough, I would’ve called you.” She paused, allowing Alchemy to reevaluate the idea that he’d had her, rather than she had him.
“Jay, okay.” He stared right into her eyes. “It can’t be undone. The most important issue now is Moses. We need to protect him.”
“Too late.”
“You told him? Jay, why?” Vexed, he continued, “How much?”
“Very little but enough. He always says the cover-up is worse than the crime. I won’t lie to him. I’m not ashamed. I wasn’t a nun. He knows that. He won’t ask any more questions. I know him.” She paused as if to emphasize and you don’t. Not telling Moses about their affair would be, to her mind, unjust. Unlike Moses, for whom truth was subjective and mercurial, or for Alchemy, for whom truth was situational but potentially knowable and informationally advantageous, Jay held fast to a belief in her objective, knowable, and universal truth. Once she admitted the affair, there was no lie. Jay believed that withholding certain information was never more inflammatory than a blatant lie, and saying little about a meaningless affair was more truthful than trying to explain it as meaningless.
“Alchemy, you and I can never be seen alone together, or he will drive himself mad. He may be forty-three and imagines himself a cynic, but he doesn’t really live cynically. I can’t bear the thought of hurting him anymore. Do you understand?” She drilled her stare into Alchemy’s round gold-flecked brown eyes, the same eyes that had entranced her years before but now seemed impenetrable.
“No. Not totally. But mum’s the word. He worships you.”
Jay’s tone and attitude remained arch. “One piece of advice: Watch yourself with Hannah. When it comes to Moses, she may not be his mother, but she is his mom.”
“Thanks for the tip.” He gave her a subtle yet visible once-over. “I’m sorry you’re having a tough time now. You’re wearing it well. You look as good as the night we met at the Dresden.”
She took pleasure in his remembering the party where they first met, and his compliment, which she refused to acknowledge with even the wisp of a smile. She wanted to believe that Alchemy wasn’t being a cad, that he wasn’t coming on to her, that he was genuinely concerned and was being open and penitent. With him, she decided, one could never be sure. She closeted her ego. “Never, never say that or anything like it again. You call the hospital in two hours to talk to him, and he will give you a time to visit. This conversation never happened.” With that, Jay stepped out of the Jag.
Ten minutes later, after a quick stop in the cafeteria for coffee, Jay arrived in Moses’s room, unusually harried. She tied her hair back in a ponytail and donned the necessary masks over her mouth and nostrils. At his bedside, she explained that his mom was taking the day to rest. Moses nodded, relieved, because in no way could he describe his Visitation in front of his mother. “Jay, I was there. I felt, smelled, tasted the air. The blood. The rain. Heard the screams. And that woman Shalom, freaking eerie.”
Normally, when he told her of his daymares, Jay was sympathetic, if overly analytical in her dissection of their meaning. (She called them nightmares and Moses stopped correcting her because, although she denied it, the idea of a waking intrusion on reality unnerved her.) This time her response bordered on the callous. She insisted the nightmare arose from his fear of dying without belief in any salvation. “Maybe you should convert and be saved.”
“Jay, don’t go snippy on me now.”
“Come on, Moses, you’re still high from the drugs.”
Later, as they held hands, he in bed and she sitting in a chair beside him, watching Idiot’s Delight on AMC, she turned to him. She said, almost apologetically, “I have another interpretation of your dream.”
“Shoot.”
“You’re absorbing the fact you’re like me, only half Jewish. Now you sweat and you schvitz.” Jay was needling Moses’s belief in this cultural or perhaps glandular difference that means WASPs, if they perspired at all, sweat. Jews schvitz.
“I’m not sure, but possible,” Moses conceded, for the sake of avoiding a debate. He acknowledged the discovery meant he was not a full-fledged Jew, but he paid no heed to that. He didn’t suddenly become born again or a believer, or doubt his true religious identity. His father was a Holocaust survivor and Hannah had raised him as a Jew. He’d been bar mitzvahed. He still felt Jewish. Besides, he knew well that from the Inquisition to the pogroms to the Nazis, those goyim would have invited him to be a main course at one of their lovely human desecrations.
Perhaps the greatest implication of the vision, to Moses, was his new obsession over losing his grip on his sanity, a paranoia that was heightened by knowledge of Salome’s psychosis. He continually questioned the rightness of meeting his father, who had disinherited him in every way, yet from whom (he now worried) he had inherited a perhaps sociopathic ability to emotionally disconnect. These fears propelled him into a world where the pain of the past overwhelms. He sometimes lost perspective, forgetting what history had taught him: Only a fool believes that the future is not at the mercy of the past.
Dr. Fielding recommended resuming psychotherapy as a necessary component of healing after the operation. The therapist Moses had begun seeing after his initial cancer diagnosis visited him at home. Moses did not care to talk about his illness, his mortality, or even Jay’s affair. He couldn’t repress the unshakable images from his daymare and the implications of his new mother being “crazy.”
“Yes, if indeed your biological mother is schizophrenic, that could increase the chances. At your age, it probably would’ve happened already.”
This almost amateur bit of diagnosis didn’t serve as the mind-settling sedative answer he wanted to hear. Instead the doctor suggested “the new apple, an antidepressant a day keeps the demons away,” which Moses rejected.
Fearful that he could one day he could wake up inside Collier Layne beside his mother, whenever he thought about confiding this Visitation to anyone else, he stopped himself. He recalled a passage he remembered from his college days:
Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was — there is no man can tell what.
24 THE SONGS OF SALOME
When You Wish upon a Star
I’m feeling better today, though somewhat melancholic. I want to get on with my story before my corporeal disintegration renders me voiceless.
My first “vacation” years, from ’76 through ’79, were fraught with bouts of insulin therapy. I was drawn and quartered while the hotwire singed my synapses and rearranged my molecules. It caused the opposite effect of its intentions, made me heavier and deepened my Gravity Disease. My body was a blizzard of glassy windblown snowflakes scudding aimlessly. I feared I would melt to the ground and dissolve into the universe. The world inside me smelled like a decomposing cat picked clean by the buzzards of the art world and the witch doctors that first “treated” me here.
Good days were rare. Mostly, I was alone. When Anaïs Nin passed, Xtine brought me some copies of Nin’s diaries and I made three penis and three vagina papier-mâché sculptures from them. Then we burned one of each in her honor. I gave two to Xtine and two to Gibbon, who claimed that because of me, Lively had sicced the IRS on him.