“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not fifteen anymore. Don’t give me some Joseph Beuys I-was-a-susceptible-youngster bullshit. You’re both impostors in my book.”
“I do not regret my service. And I see you have not lost an ounce of your fiery energy.”
“You haven’t lost an ounce of the superciliousness I once mistook for debonair manliness.” Still ruggedly handsome, he was dressed meticulously in a dark blue suit. “Malcolm, no woman could ever be more relieved than I was that a baby of hers died.”
“Salome, Salome, poor girl.” He shook his head, leaned forward, and reached for my hand. I snatched it away. “He didn’t die. That was a ruse we all agreed upon. Your parents, Bickley, and I. Our son was alive then, and he lives today.”
I placed my hand on my belly and tried to feel the babydeath, or babylife. I started to panic, as if I were going to come apart and disperse into the dark matter. “No. No!” I threw the cognac in his eyes. I stood up and spilled the tea on his lap. He let out a room-piercing “Acchh!” I knelt beside him and pretended to dab his eyes with my scarf. “That is only a fraction of the pain I can cause you. Please, please call the police. I’d love to discuss your past with them.”
The maître d’ scampered to our table. In between his yelps, Teumer shook his head. “It … is … nothing. An accident.”
I stood up and saluted, “Heil Hitler.” I clicked my heels and marched into the lobby, where I told Gibbon that Teumer was a perverted stalker who I’d foolishly fucked. I ordered him to buy back all work of mine in his possession, even if I had to indenture myself to Gibbon for years.
Upstairs, in my hotel room, I vomited. I took some tranquilizers and called Nathaniel to confess the entire sordid mess. He heard distress in my voice and did his best to give me strength. “You and I together will face him. I won’t let him hurt you again.”
When I got back to Berlin (in another noncoincidence), Nathaniel told me he found Alchemy — almost the same age as me when I was with Teumer — having sex with two of Heinricha’s friends. I envied Alchemy’s freedom, the adventures ahead. I talked to him. “Sex is not good, it’s great. Never let anyone make you feel guilty or dirty. Or shameful. Be kind. Don’t lie. Treat women with respect. Treat them as your betters. Use birth control.”
I stopped going out. There’d been two deaths, and I feared another. My spirit, which once was enthused by Berlin, now became moribund. Nathaniel came to me one afternoon with a letter from Magnolia College, an all-women’s school in Virginia. He’d made the final list for a professor’s position and they had requested he come for an interview. He’d neglected to tell me he’d even applied.
“Do you still want us to go with you?”
“Of course. If this job really happens, I will be able to provide some security for us, and for Alchemy.”
“I still won’t marry you.”
“I never expect that you will.”
While we waited for Magnolia’s answer, I spent hours in my studio exhaling little drawings, reading, or just perched on my balcony dreaming into the Berlin sky. One evening I spied a woman, who must have been squatting, in a vacant building across the divide on the east side of the Wall. I tried to get her attention by turning on a spotlight above my head on the balcony, to psychically warn her that the East German police were coming to make one of their sweeps, looking for wall jumpers. She disappeared. I wondered if I’d reached her or if they’d caught her.
The next evening, I spotted a body zigging and zagging across the death strip. It was the woman I had seen the night before. The tower lights flashed. Orders echoed. I screamed, leaning far over the iron balcony. A barrage of gunfire. Howls of pain. She fell. Beside her — a baby. Its cries echoed across the Wall. I had to rescue them.
45 THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2008)
You’re Gonna Make Me Loathsome When You Go
Moses and Jay both sensed the flammability of their situation yet seemed incapable of defusing it. Teumer’s letter did nothing to alleviate the tension. Jay deflected Moses’s entreaties to stay at their house, even if in separate rooms. Jay packed some items and went back to Geri’s. Moses, forlorn and furious, remained alone in the house.
Teumer’s letter, instead of extinguishing Moses’s desire to see him, heightened it — he must meet the man behind that letter, the man who was half him. Moses asked Jay to go with him over an extended Presidents Day weekend. He hoped with her by his side he’d have the courage to confront Teumer and they could begin to repair all that had gone haywire with their life. Jay said only, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to go together.”
She did agree to see Butterworth for couple’s “almost conventional” therapy. They met in his office. Butterworth, sensing Jay’s hesitation, said, “Let me hear why you’re here, Jay.”
Jay recited Moses’s failings — and hers, too — not only of the last few days but the last few years. Moses shrank in his seat. Objectively, he understood the stresses on her — living with his illness, his heavier-by-the-day parental baggage and its aftereffects, her reasons for advising Alchemy to shield him from the psychic torpedoes launched in the letter — but he believed Jay had never adjusted her Livability Quotient to their new realities, and his outburst on the day of the opening unbalanced their tenuous equilibrium. When his time came to respond, he could only muster clichés — I’m sorry. I can change. We need to communicate better.
The session resolved nothing. Jay refused to return to their home. He offered to go to a hotel. No, she said, as if solitary confinement to the house was part of his punishment.
Before their third session in a week, Jay asked to speak with Butterworth alone. Moses waited in the outer office. When Butterworth summoned him and he entered, Jay averted eye contact — her eyes and nose were visibly red. Butterworth addressed them. “There are two reasons couples start counseling. One is to stay together. The other is to break up amicably. You are in phase two. I don’t practice that kind of couple’s counseling. I suggest you see someone else. I’ll give you some recommendations.”
Moses turned toward Jay; she blew her nose. “Who determined we are in phase two?”
“I did.” Jay dabbed her eyes with new tissues, her body shrinking into a protective pose. “I don’t know what I want. But it’s not this. I need space.”
“You’ve been saying we drifted too far apart. Now you need more space?”
“Moses, I can’t outargue you, but I need time and space to think. To not feel guilty.”
“I don’t like it, but okay. I do understand why you didn’t want me to see the letter. Parts of it anyway. I don’t blame you.”
“Yes, parts of it,” she spat out caustically. She heard her tone, stopped, and took a sip of water from a paper cup. “You’re angry. I’m angry. You’re disappointed in me and I’m disappointed in you. Everything we had that was good, great really, feels spoiled.” She leaned back and sighed. “I want to go now so you have time to talk to Ben yourself.”
“Are you going home?”
She shook her head.
“Call you later?”
“Okay.”
She left.
After a multiminute stare-off between Moses and Butterworth, Moses declared, “I want my pre-2001 life back.”
“That kind of wishful thinking is a prescription for a never-ending encore of suffering.”
“I want to stop this ache. I want to be happy. Not undermine my happiness. I can’t give up yet.”
Butterworth shrugged his muscular shoulders. “It’s your choice.”