Alchemy offered to buy us a home back east. We chose a two-story 1930s stone house on Cove Road on Shelter Island, a more pristine and isolated midpoint between the two forks at the end of the Sound. With his partners, Alchemy bought a three-story building on West 26th Street and Eleventh Avenue. They converted the basement and two floors into a women’s shelter and made the top floor an apartment for Nathaniel and me. Ruggles grudgingly agreed that I could forgo twenty-four-hour supervision for now. An aide came to check on me three times a week, and she and Nathaniel signed off on me taking my “normal” pills.
While he watched over me, an unforeseen bout of Gravity Disease infected Nathaniel, caused not by politics or my behavior but by the recognition of his dependence upon Alchemy’s generosity. Alchemy placed the deed to the Shelter Island house in Nathaniel’s name, and it highlighted his near pauperism. In thirty years of railing against the rampant selfishness of the wealthy, whenever Nathaniel had extra money he gave it away. He had donated the proceeds from the sale of the family home to a defense fund for death row inmates. Because they supplied a free house and other perks, Magnolia didn’t pay a grand sum, and he left before he could accumulate a pension. The advance he hoped to get for writing his memoir never materialized. He never made a dime when subletting his New York apartment, which we let go. Nathaniel supplemented our “Alchemy income” with adjunct teaching jobs at Stony Brook and Suffolk Community and occasional speaking gigs, but it was his self-esteem that needed supplementing.
He found invigoration in the rumblings of the antiglobalization movement, whose leaders idolized him. He spent weeks working the phones (and learning to use e-mail) preparing for the Seattle ’99 protests, which made him positively cheery.
Murray Gibbon and Marlene Passant opened the Gibbon-Passant gallery not five blocks from the apartment, and I scheduled a show. Inspired by the autumnal colors, I painted a series of Savant Red and Savant Blue abstracts on Plexiglas. I kept the edges sharp in honor of my past, and titled the exhibition The Beauty of My Weapons.
The Insatiables, at the peak of their popularity, were conquering Europe. When a radio station spread the rumor that Alchemy would fly in for the opening, Marlene and I decided to take advantage of my progeny’s fame. Not that there weren’t poseurs and frauds thirty years before, only now it seemed like New York openings were funless and filled with nonstop monkey chatter that gave me a case of external tinnitus. We sent out five thousand invites for the private Friday night opening, announcing a mystery guest. Hundreds arrived to find only blank walls and me, in my disguise as Dr. R. Mutter McGuffin, dean of the Dept. of the Theoretical Arts, behind a desk, selling MFA and BFA diplomas in the Myth of Fine Arts and Bachelor of False Advertising for $9.99. Some people got really upset. Most took it with good humor and enjoyed the free wine and beer. I sold them all. Gibbon snickered, “At least nobody died.”
The “real” opening happened the next Saturday. The show garnered my first review in New York’s self-anointed paper of record. A rave. The beginning of my art world redemption. You disappear for a while, live long enough, have a celebrity son, and a new generation of “critics” replaces the former slanderers. Every painting sold within a week.
Two days after the Bush coup of 2000, Nathaniel and I took the jitney to the city so he could help organize some protests. The country’s passivity enraged him. Mother Jones magazine asked him for a piece. He tried to write from the perspective of an aging Bohemian Scofflaw, in hopes that would spur him to write a follow-up to Tag—and perhaps make some money.
The afternoon he left for the post office to mail the piece, I took the subway to meet a displeased Gibbon and Passant at the Odeon. I’d sold a Savant Red painting for $100 to a broke young couple. In the middle of Gibbon’s tongue-lashing, my cell rang. Nathaniel had collapsed and an ambulance sped him to St. Vincent’s Hospital. I began to get hysterical — Marlene grabbed my arm and led me outside. Gibbon followed. We hopped in a taxi. I explained to Marlene that the ER doctor at St. Vincent’s had scarred my face with his ineptitude and I’d vowed never to set foot there again. This time the ER doctor, Neil Downs, who smelled like hot apple cider, competently assessed the problem, sent him for tests, and called in a neurologist; he’d suffered a stroke.
I sensated this was not Nathaniel’s time to leave me. I called Alchemy in Los Angeles. He was coming immediately. Xtine rushed over and stayed with me until midnight. I crawled into the empty bed in the semiprivate room and slept. After a few hours, the hospital’s spiritual Clorox odor awakened me. My brain feeling swollen, I left for a walk.
Winter, with its low smoky blue-gray clouds, like a silkscreen backlit by the city’s neon gleam, insinuated itself into my body and drew me to the seminary on 21st Street. The gardens were normally open to outsiders for only a few hours in the afternoon, but I’d made friends with the dormitory guards, who let me inside. I watched my breath as I meandered around the courtyard. I closed my eyes. I prayed to the sky for Nathaniel’s recovery. Suddenly, I felt blood dripping from my nose. I sat on a bench, tilted my head back, and patted it with the edges of my scarf. From my breath’s icy-hot vapors appeared an unfamiliar DNA ancestor.
— Shalom, my scion out of time. I am Margarita.
— Why have you never appeared before? Where is my Salome?
— I am Salome’s daughter. She sent me because I have a special message and mission for you.
— Have you come to take Nathaniel?
— No.
— Then why?
— When Salome and our family’s first father lay together, I became the child “untimely ripped” away to save his purity. My mother and I never found each other until it was too late. If she had found me, and he had known of me, he would never have allowed himself to be slain. You must stop it from happening again.
— What do you mean?
— Find your firstborn. Yes, he lives, and do what you must to assure our family’s destiny. Because one must live and one must die. And one has been chosen.
— Why? What? I don’t understand.
— Salome, murders do not happen suddenly. They gestate over years … and then they happen suddenly. You are their mother, you must be the one.
A guard found me on the ground beside the bench. He helped me inside, where I washed my face and warmed up. I caught a taxi back to the hospital. Soon Alchemy arrived, looking haggard, still anticipating I’d crumble or Nathaniel would leave us. My steadiness surprised him.
Dr. Downs explained the MRIs and MRAs indicated that, in all likelihood, Nathaniel would be facing a long recovery. Alchemy took charge, getting Nathaniel a private room and private nurses. After three days, they sent Nathaniel home to 26th Street.
Alchemy stayed in New York to help us out. But he also needed to work. He began producing an album by Cyrus P. Turntable. At home, he and Nathaniel spoke until Nathaniel became too frustrated and tired — the stroke had damaged his speech — about the short- and long-term ramifications of the Bush coup d’état and how this fracture in the democracy would help revolutionize the outdated system.