He kissed Jay, who sat crouched and crossed-legged on her chair. She looked bleary-eyed, hair tied back in a ponytail, coffee mug with a Salvador Dalí design cupped between her hands. She had been staring at the computer, reading her e-mail. “How is she? How’d she react?”
“She reacted by telling me my mother is Salome Savant.”
Jay, now wide awake, mouth agape, screamed, “Holy shit! What the fuck?! Oh, my God, Moses. What does this mean? Are you sure? When did she find out?”
“Just yesterday. My life gets wilder and stranger by the hour,” he said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head in total befuddlement. “Any moment, I’ll find out my true parents were crustaceans from Mars.” Still trying to gain perspective, he felt the truth of a historical maxim. “Remember what I’ve said about the Watergate break-in and other scandals, that the cover-up compounds the crime?” Jay nodded. “I won’t say her silence was a crime, but I sure wish she’d told me before.”
“I’m sure she does, too. It was a choice made out of love, not malice.” She smiled wanly and reached out for his hand, her even keel of calm restored. Moses felt grateful for her affectionate display.
“I want to get going. I’ll take the first nonstop. Drive me to the airport?”
“You don’t want me to come?” Jay’s unblinking eyes beseeched him to say yes. He shook his head. “I need you to stay with my mom. Please take care of her ’til I get back.”
“I’ll go meet her at the hotel and stay with her if she wants, or invite her here.”
“You can go over and use the pool. Maybe get her to swim some laps with you.” Moses half smiled. Hannah’s idea of exercise was sitting in a lounge by the pool and doing arm lifts with her cigarette. “She’ll appreciate you being there and so will I.”
Jay called the airlines, spoke to a supervisor, and managed to get a seat using their frequent flyer miles, while Moses gathered a few items and tossed them into a carry-on. He gobbled down a bagel, cream cheese, and lox, and they got in the car. Jay drove toward Lincoln Boulevard, then south to the airport.
“So, do — hey, watch out.” The car next to her had swerved too close to the other lane, but she continued, “Do you think Alchemy knows your father? That you two will meet?”
“Why would he know him and why would we meet?”
“Because Salome Savant is your mother, and your father has her artwork in the apartment.” She stated this factually and with slight incredulity.
Apparently, his mom had informed his behavior because he’d erected a mental block the size of the Great Wall of China. Only now did it fall away as he made the still unimaginable connection: Alchemy Savant, People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” was his younger brother.
Like any semisentient being of the past decade, Moses had absorbed plenty about Alchemy. There was no way not to have heard of him and his band, the Insatiables, in the 1990s. He’d even seen them perform in late ’95 at a rare club concert at the Whisky, in a benefit for the antiglobalization group Ruckus Society, when Jay, then his soon-to-be wife, scored them a pair of VIP passes through her connections at Kasbah Records. He had been entranced, along with everyone else in the club, from the moment the lights went up and Alchemy, like a ballet dancer pirouetting on a snowflake, spun slow motion in space and turned to face them, swilled a half bottle of scotch in a series of fast gulps, and with his eyes and body subtly signaling multiple allusions, he stage-whispered one of his catchphrases: “Ask not what your rock band can do for you, ask what you can do for your rock band …” On cue, the band launched into “E Pluribus Unum Wampum.”
Moses turned around and rifled through the CD case in the backseat of the car. He pulled out an Insatiables CD, imagining a thought balloon popping over his head and in exaggerated Lichtenstein canvas fashion exclaiming, “Alchemy is maybe the one person out of six billion on earth who can save your life!” The possibility dazzled. He shook his head as if he were drying his hair after a January dip in the Pacific.
“You mind if I play this?” he asked.
“Not at all.”
He played his favorite cut, the trancelike anthem, “Blues for the Common Man.”
Evil brothers, singing so saintly
Dreams in shatters, smiling faintly
Hoping high, laying low
It’s the blues
The blues for the common man
“His voice, I’ve never thought about it before, but your voices are remarkably similar.”
“Really?”
“Maybe it’s just the power of suggestion.” Jay paused. “He might be hard to find. You know that Absurda Nightingale OD’d earlier this year?”
“Right, it was horrible. Some of the female students at SCCAM played a midnight tribute concert for her.”
“Well, I saw on TV that Alchemy went into seclusion.”
“I get that.” He hesitated. “Jay, you understand why I want to go alone? I need you to take care of my mom.”
Jay’s “yes” was surrounded by silences exclaiming, yes and no. I want to go with you, but what can I do? She didn’t see the purpose in pushing him. If he changed his mind, he’d ask her. He read the hurt in her teary-eyed silence yet couldn’t muster a cogent answer beyond “Thanks.”
Standing on the curb at the airport, they hugged. Jay held him tightly, in a painful silence. Moses couldn’t explain his desire to be alone when he met his mother. There arose in him the vague terror that he’d be a far different Moses Teumer upon his return.
7 THE SONGS OF SALOME
The Sound of the Silents
I must digress. Please don’t be impatient. Impatience has the mixed aroma of a too-hot baby’s bottle and a freshly unwrapped rubber. Listen closely and you’ll see that others hurt me much more than I ever hurt myself. Others burned my brain and others promised new drugs and therapies and others always send me back here. No longer can I be rescued by Alchemy. Now my granddaughter Persephone is lost to me.
Now, my prebirth in Orient: a mix of fragrant colors humming of nature and the sinister odors of incessant prattle. Often splendorously unencumbered by trauma, more often than not marked by days of boredom, nights of tedium, except when the kids and their parents ostracized me with taunts of “retard.” The joyless cadavers impugned me for my raucous, intrepid, and immodest life. They were the first, but not the last, to despise me for telling untrue truths. Alchemy always claimed there is no Universal Truth, only shadows and permutations of truth. Yes, I teased him, that is true and false, because I have lived between the shadows of the truths and the lies.
It is my fact that I have suffered periods of despair and staggering pain when I wondered if I should have ever left our isolated two-story clapboard house about a quarter mile from the bay, across from the old slave cemetery. I’d sit for hours on the roof, painting watercolors or just inhaling nature.
Except for Hilda and Dad’s room, I painted murals on all the walls about every six months, perhaps more often. My own imagined treeflowers and natural hallucinations. My dad shook his head. He endearingly called me “Salo in Wonderland.” Hilda, the woman who called herself my mother, possessed not one iota of magical wonder. We spoke different languages. “Salome,” she would declare, “there is no such thing as a treeflower!” When I asked, “Why not?” she turned away from me as if I were a miscreant daughter from another planet, denying any culpability for my behavior. Dad was a man who loved order. He had the most compulsively groomed farm in Suffolk County. Too often my “shenanigans” sent him to his twelve-pack and smokes. But he loved me, my creative chaos, more than he loved order.