I’m feeling better today, though somewhat melancholic. I want to get on with my story before my corporeal disintegration renders me voiceless.
My first “vacation” years, from ’76 through ’79, were fraught with bouts of insulin therapy. I was drawn and quartered while the hotwire singed my synapses and rearranged my molecules. It caused the opposite effect of its intentions, made me heavier and deepened my Gravity Disease. My body was a blizzard of glassy windblown snowflakes scudding aimlessly. I feared I would melt to the ground and dissolve into the universe. The world inside me smelled like a decomposing cat picked clean by the buzzards of the art world and the witch doctors that first “treated” me here.
Good days were rare. Mostly, I was alone. When Anaïs Nin passed, Xtine brought me some copies of Nin’s diaries and I made three penis and three vagina papier-mâché sculptures from them. Then we burned one of each in her honor. I gave two to Xtine and two to Gibbon, who claimed that because of me, Lively had sicced the IRS on him.
Shockula was the bastard in chief before Ruggles arrived. With his batlike ears, simian head, corpulent ego, he celebrated like a sadistic vulgarian who got a rush every time he pushed the button on his zapper. I will forever be grateful to Bickley Sr. for halting the treatment. I’m sure Billy Jr. would’ve gladly ratcheted open my cortex like a coconut. He and Shockula won over Hilda with their Latinate shrink-speak. The first time she visited here, she broke down and pleaded, “Why, Salome, why?” I had no answer that would appease her.
It was many months before I was allowed to see Alchemy. I tried to convince myself he’d thrive living with Hilda, but I didn’t believe it. Hilda acted as if she’d received a dispensation and could raise him away from me and my wanton ways. Her voice had frowned at me because I’d serve him dinner at 11 P.M. and cursed in front of him. Now, she gave him “structure.” Just another name for control.
I lived for Alchemy’s drawings and letters at first written in crayon, then black pen. I started sending him drawings of Petra Sansluv, Pearl Diver by the Black Sea, which I’d started again when he was a baby. He would do his own drawings of her and send them back to me.
I waited eagerly for Nathaniel’s letters, with his bold script so much more macho than his persona but as sturdy and pure as his soulsmell. I’ve always distrusted e-mail, IMs, twits, p-mail. Any and all of the always-new cypherworld slango. These nanocommunications arrive without the demure or sexy dress code of an envelope, the personal saliva of a licked stamp, the revelations in words flowing from brain to hand to paper, with their swirls and curves of febrile emotions. They do not fulfill the beautiful agony of waiting … Waiting. I love getting letters, real letters. I don’t get many of them now. I wait for them from Persephone. I know this seems odd coming from me because I can be so impulsive. But these nanomessages—their words never get to simmer and boil through the winding routes of the night. No wonderment and pain in when they’ll be read. No imagining the delight or disappointment in shaking hands of the reader.
Even at his bleakest, Nathaniel searched for the possibility in new innovations. He exclaimed how e-mails got millions of people reading and writing again. He had a point. Only not enough of one to persuade me.
Alchemy understood. He always wrote me letters, even when we lived in the same house. Sometimes he slipped them under my door or mailed them.
They didn’t bring him to these grounds that first time. Instead we met at the B&B chocolate factory. His hair trim and tidy. His eyes, which had been so agog at the world’s sensations, were now dulling, bereft of their dreaminess. He was suffering the first dollops of Gravity Disease.
We both beamed with joy when we kissed. “Mom!” he yelled. “Alchemy!” I shouted back.
As I hugged him, Hilda said, “We call him Scott now.” Before he was born, to placate her, I told her I might name him Scott.
“Not in my presence, you don’t.” Drug-shocked and feeling impotent, I wanted to reassert my authority. “Alchemy, what do you prefer I call you?”
“Scott, you don’t have to answer that,” Hilda commanded.
He answered anyway. “Alchemy.”
Years later, just as he was being crowned the new Prince of Pop Culture, we were sitting on the deck of the first house he’d bought, in the hills of Los Feliz, sharing a midnight joint, listening to Dietrich peddle her “illusions.” I’d played that for him often when he was a child. “Mom, sometimes I wonder if all of this isn’t some form of illusion.” I heard a kernel of self-doubt, which he rarely expressed to anyone but me.
“Of course it is. We are all living under the spell of illusions. Even you. As artists, we are illusionists. This house, all of this, is transient. But your music is eternal and it is perfection. Alchemy, you are my purest creation.”
“You remember that day when I came to visit you outside the B&B factory?”
“Yes … Why?”
“I think Grandma Hilda never forgave you for asking me about my name and never forgave me for answering ‘Alchemy.’ And you’ve never forgiven me for using Scott when we lived in Virginia.”
“Yes, I did. As soon as you reverted to Alchemy. And Hilda never forgave me for anything, from the moment I got pregnant and lost the baby.” I’d started telling Alchemy about the babydeath when he was in my womb. “You’re wrong about one thing, Hilda forgave you for everything. She doted on you unconditionally.”
He finished the joint, lit a cigarette, blew the smoke into the air, and watched it dissipate. “Where did you come up with my name? And none of that bull about how you were sure I’d be a rock star.”
“Why not? You certainly have used that story to your benefit.” We laughed.
“True, but your stories do change.”
“As do yours.”
“Stop stalling.”
“Years before, someone had given me some books. I found them again in the house in Orient when I was pregnant with you.”
“Who gave them to you?”
“Cigarette, please.” I didn’t smoke much, but I wanted one then. He handed the pack to me. I didn’t light up just yet. “I don’t remember. It was long time ago. Before the hotwire therapy.”
He asked skeptically, “But you remember what those books had to do with my name?”
I lit the cigarette and was frozen in my memories for a minute. “They were a gift from the father of your dead brother.”
“Mom, I didn’t mean … Sorry.”
“No need.” I took a puff before continuing. “In the midst of a Savant Blue period, I was terrified of losing you. One late afternoon, a beautiful Orient twilight, I climbed to the roof and I began meditating in tandem with the cicadas, whose vibrations entranced like the entreaties of a thousand mantraing monks, and I was deliriously reading Rimbaud’s ‘Alchemy of the Word.’ ” I stopped. I had occasionally intimated our family’s ability with DNA travel, but he, having not experienced it, never responded and only listened. “I had scraped my leg climbing up to the roof, and from my blood there appeared Kyle”—he’d heard about her—“who introduced me to Mary the Jewess, the first female alchemist. We communicated. As it darkened, I inhaled the odors of the full moon when it appears translucent and yellow-white-pink-and-blue like shimmering linen, both gorgeous and foreboding, and at that moment you gave a kick in my belly. The cicadas hymned like angels whispering your destiny as ‘Alchemy Savant, mystic of music and moon.’ From that moment on, I knew you’d live to be born.”
He nodded. My son did not need to question my truths. I asked him, “Would you have preferred I named you Scott?”
“No. Well, sometimes, when I was a kid and the jerkoffs in Greenport called me Alcrummy and the bullies in Charlottesville kicked my ass. And your solution was to sing Bowie’s ‘Kooks.’ But you prepared me for life with you and life as I am living it. Would Scott Savant have become leader of the Insatiables?”
He was, like me, an acoustic morphologist. And he understood that his name was filled with music. And we morphologists know that in every language a “rose” is a fragrant mixture of sounds and odors, and that an asp sounds like an asp … even when his name is Lively.
Ever the conniver, Lively paid me a visit maybe eighteen months after Nathaniel had struck a deal to serve two years in Allenwood and two years on probation. They dropped the drug charge and he pled guilty to obstruction of justice. Which is perfect Lewis Carroll logic, because if he wasn’t guilty of selling drugs (which they knew he wasn’t), he was on the lam, so to speak, for a crime he didn’t commit. Nothing was obstructed but the truth.
When Shockula informed me of Lively’s impending arrival, I expected some form of retribution. I warned him, “Count Shockula, if Lively’s expecting me to apologize for our incident, he’s going to be waiting ’til Godot finishes brunch.”
On a sweltering late July afternoon, I swooshed outside wearing a salmon-colored sundress and big-brimmed white cotton hat with peacock feathers hung from its back brim. I sat on a white marble seat at a round table. Shockula came over with Lively and then walked off to the side and spoke with another Collier Layne vacationer. Lively coiled himself in the seat across from me. He seemed rather nervous, his body less domineering, hidden under a loose-fitting pin-striped blue suit that looked like he picked it off the spy rack at the CIA mall. His eyes covered by his unintentionally fashionable FBI ’60s-style drugstore sunglasses.
“Is Nathaniel okay?” I feared something had happened to him, and that was the reason Lively came to visit.
“I have not seen him.”
“Is he still getting out in September?”
“I have no news contradicting that.” Lively dabbed at the sweat forming on his temples and forehead with a white handkerchief.
“Are you checking up on me for Hilda?”
“I have neither seen nor spoken to her.” He rat-a-tatted the table with his gnarly knuckles and gaudy ring. “What do you know about your biological father?”
“Nothing. Hilda and Gus claimed they were never told who he is. The one time I met Greta, she was more than elliptical. My personal research says that he must have been an artist.” I quickly covered myself. Lively would never accept my genetic travels as anything but the hallucinations of a madwoman. “It’s fact that Greta was friends with many artists when she arrived in New York.”
Lively scratched at his cheek but said nothing.
“You have more than an idea, don’t you?”
“Unhmm.”
“Lively, I’m listening.”
“First, in regard to Hilda, I have my qualms about your abilities to keep a secret.”
“I don’t ever purposefully hurt her.”
“That is exactly my fear. Your lack of purpose.” He tilted his head toward the sky, then leaned forward over the marble table and gave a smidge of a nod toward Shockula. “Your father was Gus Savant.”
“Oh, please!” I sputtered. “It took you almost two years to come up with that twinkle-twinkle-nursery-rhyme explanation?”
“Accept it or not. It’s a fact.” He paused, letting the needle he’d slipped into my consciousness evacuate its message. “I’m sorry he was not an artist. From what little contact we had—my meetings with Gus were fleeting—he impressed me as a most decent man.”
“He was better than decent. I loved him. I’d be proud to be his offspring.” I sat pensively for a moment. Never had I connected Gus’s chromosomes to me. “He would never have done that to Hilda.”
“Salome, even good men falter. Gus was adamantly, and rightly, opposed to an abortion. No one wanted to risk a public explosion. It would have guaranteed ruining Miss Garbo’s image, and your father’s marriage. Gus and Hilda got their child.”
“Lively, what do you want from me?”
“Nothing. I’m trying to do right.” He took off his sunglasses, placed them on the table, and without wiping the sweaty curlicues forming on his cheeks, aimed his Shiva the Obliterator eyes onto me. “I have no reason to lie. I’d have more reason to lie if it weren’t true. Hilda was never told of Gus’s paternity and he never wanted her to hear about his lapse. That is why you best have the sense not to tell her.”
“Who told you? And why should I trust you? Why didn’t you tell me that day in Billy Jr.’s apartment?”
“As I said then, William Bickley felt honor bound to keep his word to Gus. At the time, I felt honor bound not to act against his wishes. Still, I am not under his jurisdiction or hogtied by any legal agreements.”
“When did they meet? How?”
“That is not relevant.”
“To me it is. Give me proof. Were they in love?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. As far as proof, my proof is my word.”
The man was so taken with his own benevolent hubris he brought out the violence in me. I wanted to dig my nails into his gorillalike sideburns and scream, “You’re fucking with my life!” but I stayed seated and sipped my water before asking my next unanswerable question. “Was Greta a spy?”
Lively’s incisors ground into each other to maintain his posture of gentlemanly formality. We sat silently. I had sensated correctly. “Of course she was. She worked for you and Bicks Sr.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Not exactly.”
“What would you say?”
“Let me propose that she was sympathetic to us.”
“And Gus, he was a spy, too?”
“No, he was not.” Lively stood up, towering over me. “Despite your previous attempt to injure me, I bear you no ill will.” As always, he made me feel as if his blandest statements were a lethal threat.
“Since you are in a giving mood, think you have the resources to dig up whether my mother and Marcel Duchamp ever had an affair?”
He tugged at the perspiring chicken skin around his massive Adam’s apple, suddenly perplexed. “You mean the French fella who is the mime?”
I started giggling. “Forget it.”
He shrugged. He bent over and put on his sunglasses. I should have thanked him. But I couldn’t be that phony.
I called Hilda a few nights later. “I was looking at an old picture of Dad from when he was in the navy that I have here in my room. What did he do during the war?”
“You heard these stories when you were a child. Have you forgotten?”
“The doctors told you. Some of my memories are scrambled from the treatment.”
She tried to answer jokingly, “Some of them were scrambled before.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“Let’s not fight.”
“I’m not fighting, I’m asking a question.”
“Gus had done two years in the navy when he was nineteen, before we started dating. He reenlisted right after Pearl Harbor. We were married by then. After serving about a year at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he was reassigned back to Greenport, where he became the liaison between the navy and the Picket Patrol, the group of civilians from the North Fork who sailed out to scout for Nazi submarines. Why do to want to know?”
“Because I miss him.”
“I do, too.” And she did. She never suspected that Gus betrayed her, if indeed he did. Never did I find Dad within me. I could only commune with Greta’s mitochondria and they, like she, never revealed the secret of my father.