“Is that me?”
“Oh, yes. I need you to sign it.”
“Why?”
“When you awaken tonight, you’ll know why.”
He mumbled “nutcase” and started packing his things.
Bellows knew me well enough to see I was joking, but not well enough to understand my motivation. Once Palmer left, I said to her that he was trying to intimidate me. People like him are afraid of anything that smacks of the extraordinary. I did what I could to intimidate him back. I admitted to her that I only vaguely remembered the fire. She answered, “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
So many memories are etched on my brain like ineradicable ancient pictographs, and others, so soluble, have been washed away by the waterfall of human aging and Collier Layne cocktails.
Too clear in my memory is the hollowness of the Harlottesville house. The shadow of my Somersby diddle-daddle ended the pretense of my adaptability to a southern belle jar domestic life. I hoped for a change in the slavish air when Alchemy returned at Thanksgiving. A vicious migraine struck me and ruined the dinner. After hours in my lightless room, I woke up feeling worn-out and unmoored. I stepped gingerly downstairs. Deep into their drinks, Alchemy and Nathaniel were talking intensely while listening to the Louis and Ella sessions. I halted in the hallway and overheard Alchemy ask Nathaniel, “Why do you put up with her antics?”
Antics? I jammed my jaw shut.
“A question I have asked myself, oh, a thousand times. I think she’s as beautiful as the day I first saw her in Max’s. She’s an artistic genius and, at the same time, a child who needs me to take care of her. Her moral compass may seem askew, but she’s never been a phony. She is exactly who she presents herself to be. And she may not see it, and you may not see it, but I need her.”
“I see it but I don’t totally get it.”
“So much of what I struggled to achieve is being trampled by the forces of regression. If it weren’t for Salome, I might’ve fallen into my cups and given up. When she is her best self, she acts with absolute faith in her abilities, in mine, in yours. When she is in a red or blue period …” His voice trailed off. “The year in Paris, when you two stayed in New York, I was miserable without her. I took this teaching gig because I thought it would help us. Ruggles thought so, too. We were both wrong. What can I say? She drives me almost as batty as she is”—he laughed—“yet I always love her madly.”
“I can’t imagine life with my mom and what it would’ve been like without you. I won’t ever forget.”
How could he not understand how much I’d done for both of them by being with Nathaniel?
I eagerly returned to New York after the New Year while Nathaniel stayed in Virginia. It turned out disastrously. AIDS had denatured the city of so much vitality. Many friends had moved. Or died. The art market had crashed in ’87, Gibbon closed his gallery and now relaxed in style in the Hamptons. The Whitney Biennial curators, who I’d previously brushed aside, now rebuffed me. Leslie Tallent penned a piece on the younger artists I’d influenced, which made me feel like a has-been. I spent some nights with old friends like Xtine and some new ones. And too many alone. My nonstop movable feast of the ’60s and early ’70s seemed to have settled into an antiquated garden party with cocaine on a cracker as an hors d’oeuvre. Instead of burning down the castle, these kids lined up around the block to get inside.
My son’s busy life didn’t include me and my “antics.” Absurda, or Amanda, as we called her then, and I adopted each other as surrogate mother and daughter. When I received the invite to Blind Lemon Socrates’s imminent-death-from-colon-cancer requiem/extravaganza at Alexander Holencraft’s new apartment in the Dakota, I asked Absurda to be my date.
Mostly, I enjoyed the night. I dressed accordingly in ankle-high, rust-red boots, a short but not too short maroon dress, and a half-length silver faux-fur jacket with a pink boa around my neck. I did not enjoy the questions: “Where have you been?” and “How are you?” I asked instead, “How do I look?” The answer was fucking fantastic.
Socrates, with two teenage boys on either side of him, leaned on his cane. The poet Noma Moma Dada read a tribute, and the French filmmaker Matsa Brie announced the upcoming premiere of a documentary on Socrates’s life, before introducing the icon of honor. Socrates dropped his cigarette into his scotch glass and listened to it fizzle out. “I have spent my life attempting to halt the urbane decay that many of you represent,” he said, inching his long neck tauntingly toward a gaggle of young admirers. “I leave you with one thought: If you care more about riches or material goods than about virtue … then I have failed you. And you will fail yourselves.” He shook his head indignantly, as if he foresaw his fate as the forgotten.
Holencraft yelled, “Thank you, Socrates!” and everyone began drinking again. I felt a pinch on my ass. I turned, ready to slap the offender. His body shriveled and colorless, I wouldn’t have recognized Raphael Urso, except for his Willem de Kooning eyes bulging out in flinty disgust at the world. He laughingly said, “Whoa, there, Salome. Where’s Brockton?”
“Virginia.”
“Let’s do what we shoulda done years ago.”
“Raphael …” I snapped my middle finger against his forehead. “That’s all I ever wanted to do to or with you.” Ever good-humored, he laughed. Alchemy, with a female friend, unexpectedly showed up. “I’m going to talk to my son.”
Absurda had seen him, too, and we arrived by Alchemy’s side at the same moment. Absurda and Holencraft were exiting stage left for a night of indoor sports at the Stanhope. I witnessed a furtive exchange of glances and pursed lips between Alchemy and Absurda. He hummed, twinkle-eyed, “Do wah diddy diddy, dum diddy do …”
I’d never previously decoded the telegraphic signs of desire and denial tapping between them. I sensated the specter of Gravity Disease tainting her soulsmell of suede shoes and a champagne bottle’s cork. I wasn’t sure if the aura of Alchemy hindered or helped her. After a time, she left for California. No matter; she couldn’t truly escape her disease, or him.
New York and I seemed to be vibrating at different frequencies. I found it harder and harder to venture out alone. My immune system began to wilt from loneliness, and the psychic temblors of another bout of Gravity Disease sent me retreating to Harlottesville and Nathaniel’s (mostly) nonjudgmental empathy. I counted the days between Alchemy’s school breaks and waited for a stirring from my psychopomps.
During the Christmas break of Alchemy’s junior/senior year (he was graduating in three years rather than four), we traveled to New York and all decamped at the 3rd Street apartment. Nathaniel intended to talk to him about his postgraduation plans. I didn’t care what he did. Watching the evening news one night, Nathaniel flew off on a predictable tirade about the impending invasion of Iraq and the brainwashed public. Alchemy seized the opportunity he must’ve known would come.
“Nathaniel, you taught me that when Nixon abolished the draft he did more to undermine the antiwar movement than anything else because it removed the threat to the middle-class and rich kids and their parents.”
Nathaniel nodded.
“You used to quote some French guy, ‘To resist is to create. To create is to resist.’ I think it’s a good motto in art and in life.”
Again, Nathaniel nodded. I sensed something off, but he caught me completely by surprise with what he said next.
“I enlisted in the army. I’ll be going to boot camp in July. I will resist creatively and create with resistance. And it’ll look good in the future.”