Try, Try Again
A few months after the birth of Persephone, Alchemy and Laluna’s daughter, Moses took a day off from the foundation and motored up the 405 to the Skirball Center to attend a daylong symposium expounding upon the works of concentration camp survivor Levi Furstenblum on the twentieth anniversary of his suicide. In spite of, or perhaps because of the past years’ revelations, Moses’s fascination with the Third Reich’s craven depredations continued. How different his questions for Furstenblum would be now than if they’d met fifteen years before.
He sat in a middle-row aisle seat as the panel began debating the meaning of Furstenblum’s views on forgiveness and redemption. The moderator began with a quote from Jacques Derrida’s essay on “unforgiveness” followed by a passage from Furstenblum:
Forgiveness is not earned, achieved, or bought. It is like love and ascends of its own volition. One can strive to comprehend unspeakable acts, but one cannot will forgiveness. There are those who live by the maxim “Forgive but don’t forget.” I find that phrase disingenuous. When I say that we are all capable of evil, I do not mean to imply any belief in the concept of original sin — to be human is to receive and inflict misery. Despite impulses of vengeance toward my torturers, and here the difference in our humanity is critical — I did not demand their death. I am not a murderer. Accepting that too is necessary for forgiveness. When released from the camps, I experienced the misery of perplexity and callousness in the actions of friends and family. Forgiveness came to me for them. For the murderers, who never asked for it, I wait.
As Moses listened, he thought about how the burden of his anger and frustration had dissipated, and he had come to forgive the failures and mistakes of Hannah and Jay — those he loved most. Even for the unstable Salome, whose responsibility for her actions was suspect. His father hadn’t sought it, yet somehow he felt he had achieved forgiveness for him. His own search for self-forgiveness remained ongoing. And then, just as she was drifting away on the lightness of forgiveness, the moderator loudly announced, “Time to break for lunch,” returning Moses to reality. He made his way to the back of the room. Then he stopped, heart aflutter, mouth agape. Had Furstenblum’s words conjured the image?
“Hi,” Jay greeted him, almost too jauntily, and moved closer to gently embrace him as she whispered, “I hoped you’d be here.” His arms fell limply to his sides. Disarmed, Moses asked, “Eat something?”
“Sure.”
Even after four years of divorce, they still e-mailed, if only sporadically. Jay would inquire at least once a month about his health. Jay’s mom had finally passed away ten days before, after years of not really being present, and Moses had sent flowers and a card to which he received a thank-you e-mail.
They filed out of the room, and he followed her toward the cafeteria. Her once midback-length hair was now cut to the nape of the neck. “Let’s sit and talk first.” They veered off to cement benches and sat under the shadows of the Santa Monica Mountains.
“Jay, why didn’t you just call or e-mail that you were coming?”
“I was afraid. I don’t know your situation.”
“I’m not situated.” Moses noticed Jay’s slightest exhalation of relief. He refrained from asking the reciprocal question.
“With my mom passing …” Her voice trailed off and she sighed. “I just wanted to see you.”
“I am so sorry about your mom.”
“She’s better off. I’d been missing you and thinking about you. And whenever my father complained about the ‘burden’ of my mom, I thought about what we went through together. And I wished you were in Miami by my side.” Moses didn’t offer that if she had asked, he would’ve been on the next plane. “Moses, we shared something so rare, and we blew it.”
“Yes, we did,” Moses said hesitantly.
“Moses, what are you thinking?”
He didn’t say what he was thinking. Death and mourning leave one so vulnerable, and although it is not uncommon, it is a treacherous time to seek to rekindle the embers of love lost. His desire to hold her, swear his enduring love, stalled at the barrier of the unknowable. Can this past be recaptured, a present restored, a future remade?
Instead, constrained by the memory of his outburst that signaled the death knell of his marriage, he offered blandly, “I need to grab a bite and then I’m going back in. You staying?”
“Is it too late for forgiveness?”
“Neither of us can answer that now.”
“Will you call me so we can answer it together?”
Moses recalled a graduate school history professor of his who scoffed, “The idea that most people claim to be brutal realists proves the opposite. Most of you fall into one of three categories of gullibles: those I classify as the less gifted, the willfully ignorant, and the perpetually delusional.”
For much of his life, Moses considered himself to be among the brutal realists. Later, he conditionally reclassified himself as willfully ignorant. Finally, he descended to the perpetually delusional. He researched and discovered that almost 10 percent of all divorcees remarried or lived again with their former spouse. He found no information detailing for how long or whether they stayed together.
He invited Jay to the premiere of a play written by Nightingale Grant recipient Hilaria Diaz. The ICEman Cometh was not O’Neill’s classic play but one portraying the plight of illegal immigrants. Moses thought that if he and Jay were to make a go of it, both of their Livability Quotients needed reformulating, and that formula now included his relationship with Laluna and Alchemy and his nonrelationship with Salome, all of whom would be there.
Alchemy and Jay greeted each other with amiable if jittery hellos. Laluna, who disguised her awkwardness in public appearances by feigning boredom, flashed a rare radiant smile of welcome. Jay took a bathroom break during the intermission, and Laluna, after edging her way to Moses, shifted her eyes in an exaggerated side-to-side toward a loitering Salome, who suddenly darted up the aisle. After they watched her disappear into the lobby, Laluna leaned over and whispered, “Mose, it makes me really, like really happy, to see you with someone.”
Throughout the evening, his emotions roiled — desire, resentment, distrust of Jay’s motives and his own, and the facile hope that love really could conquer all. Jay wanted to go out after the show. Moses claimed fatigue and asked if they could meet later in the week. They did, at an Indian restaurant on Pico. Over appetizers, they made small talk about the difficulties of her work after the economic crash, his contentment working at the foundation, and his mixed excitement and angst over establishing the Nightingale Party. Moses, blinders off, saw Jay at forty-five years old with tiny crevices arching out from the corners of her eyes, the crinkling of her lips, hair dyed to hide the creeping gray, glasses necessary to read the menu. To him, she sparkled as attractively as ever.
Between the appetizer and main course, small talk over, Moses took the plunge. “Jay”—he took a gulp of his water—“I don’t believe in more than incremental changes in our essence. Whatever you loved about me before still exists, and what you didn’t, that does, too. I am still the guy you no longer wanted to be with that day in the Cedars parking lot.”
Jay took a sip of her white wine.
Moses consciously chose not to push the Alchemy button by spitting out what he was thinking: I am never going to be a big enough guy to say, “So glad you screwed my brother.” He understood all partners lie, deny, omit, rearrange, and censor to avoid hidden relationship land mines. Only now, he couldn’t locate the danger line separating honesty and mean-spiritedness, so he continued cautiously. “The monstrous thoughts that stream into my head, well, I have to believe that everyone has them, only my filter is thinner than most.”