Broken Sleep (17 page)

Socrates slumped over the podium, almost hidden in his oversize houndstooth jacket. Occasionally, he’d glare and take a puff from one of the three cigarettes he’d strategically placed—one in his right hand, one in an ashtray on the podium in front of him, and one hanging off the edge of a chair. The skin of his oblong face looked like mottled mercury and cooled lava. His thick-lensed glasses made his eyes look bulgy. His voice drizzled out with an Olympian sneer of superiority.

Socrates didn’t acknowledge the applause and whistles. Leaning heavily on his ivory-handled black cane, his body teetered like a rickety wooden-and-barbed-wire fence. He disappeared through a side door and out of sight.

Holencraft shot me a flinty glance from the opposite end of the hall and waved me toward him. I smiled and waited for him to come to me. From behind, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. I swiveled around and was about to give this Mr. Blanding’s guy my icy-eye brush-off when—Nathaniel! I wanted to jump up and wrap my arms and legs around him. I knew better. He’d changed his wardrobe. No more outfits designed by Che & Fidel, Inc. Here stood Mr. Suntanned Middle America in navy blue chinos, a lime-green Lacoste polo shirt, and brown loafers. He looked so out of place among all the pallid faces and their ordained black garb. (Is “garb” short for Garbo or garbage?) His hair was shading gray, cut short and neat, his face clean shaven below new, black-framed glasses. He caught me staring at his nose, which stuck out like a half-blind plastic surgeon had pinned a pink rubber eraser on the end of it. “Yeah, I look like Cyrano but without his poetic gifts.”

His soulsmell, even after all the hiding and unjust charges, was imbued with the pristine and hopeful odors of a newly gessoed canvas. As I was about to give him a polite hug and verbal pinch, Holencraft clawed the knotted end of my bandana and leaned over to kiss me. I backed away.

“Alexander, this is uh, um …” Nathaniel interrupted me—

“Philip Noland, an old friend of Salome’s.”

“I need to talk to Philip. Alone.”

Holencraft gritted his perfect teeth in displeasure. “I thought we had a rendezvous.”

“We agreed on a potential meeting to talk of my modeling for you. Nothing more. Nat … um … Philip is an old friend.”

Holencraft eyed Nathaniel as if he were mentally photographing him. He looked perplexed—how could I choose to go with this doughnut-bodied big-nosed guy over a stud as handsome as him? “Okay, but I will hold on to my ticket to Salome’s back room.”

I lightly grazed his arm with my fingernails. “Alexander, I know exactly what you want. Don’t piss me off by acting like a proprietary male beast, or you have no chance of cashing that ticket. Behave like a good boy and you never know …” I grinned voluptuously and turned away.

I tucked my arm around Nathaniel’s waist. “I’m so happy, really, truly happy to see you.”

He removed my arm and backed away from me. “You must be very careful. Meet me at the Odessa in half an hour. Please, do not tell anyone where you are going or who you are meeting.”

I waded through the crowd doing my kissy-kissy come-hither-to-my-show. Then I headed to the Odessa, a favorite of
Nathaniel’s but not of mine. The place oozed with the odor of foam rubber, or maybe fossilized blini, bulged from the torn, red plastic seats. In lieu of tablecloths, a thin film of syrup, sour cream, applesauce, french fry grease, and coffee covered each table. The waitresses, graduates of the Joseph Stalin Charm School, took pride in wiping the tables down so that any free crumbs landed on your lap. Flies performed kamikaze missions first on your meal, then on your face.

Nathaniel was seated at a back booth. “So, Mr. Philip Noland, what the hell have you been up to the last five years? Besides running from the outlaws who call themselves the ‘protectors of the people’ and having some defrocked doctor enhance your nose.”

“Mainly that. Being a nine-to-five blender. It’s been heavy times for me. I live in the Southwest. So-called enemy territory. It’s not. I’ve realized that Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ is ready for us, if we learn how to talk to them without sounding so snotty.”

“Being restrained must give you some major case of heartburn. Like this food.”

“Delectable.” He rolled a blini around his tongue. “Salome, for your own good, I can’t divulge too much. They are still running black bag ops on me. Even though we got rid of the Trickster, and the Congress is investigating the secret government, I don’t trust them to end it.”

We left the Odessa and strolled around Tompkins Square Park. Nathaniel’s once nervous energy now seemed just nervous. His eyes were fidgety and his gait furtive and unassured. The park was still seedy with the homeless living in cardboard
boxes. The street kids blasted dump-truck-size boom boxes. Everyone seemed high on something, be it junk, glue, or spray paint fumes.

“Don’t worry, Nathaniel, this is a cop-free zone.”

“Yes, these are our Untouchables. No one gives a shit about them. Maybe I should move here and they’d get off my case.”

“Why’d you risk coming back? Because you needed to see me?”

“If you knew how often …” His eyes watered ever so slightly. “My mother has incurable liver cancer. My sister is taking care of her alone. I need to be with them.” He sighed. “My lawyers are close to swinging a deal with the Feds.”

“Oh, Nathaniel. I am so sorry.”

“Me, too. Only, after decades of imbibing any fluid containing alcohol, it’s not a surprise.”

At the corner of 9th and B we stopped in front of the Christodora. A miniskyscraper built in the ’20s, it had fallen into a shambled shell of itself—like me, now. After a fire, the city had it condemned. It got a makeover later, in the ’90s, with the “whitey-fication”—that’s what Nathaniel called gentrification. I often snuck around the boards and yellow tape and foraged inside, peeling off the blue-and-white wallpaper with its images of St. Christine and collecting ornaments for ready-mades and collages.

“Let’s go in.” I stuck a finger through the belt loop of Nathaniel’s pants and tugged at him. We stepped over two grizzled fellows with their bottles of Thunderbird couched between their legs, sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway. The ground-floor rooms were shooting galleries lit
by candles. The higher you climbed, the emptier it got. A few rooms were lit by the sudden flash of hash pipes. Light from streetlamps flickered through the cracked windows. We climbed the staircase to the ninth floor and found an empty room with a view of the East River and Brooklyn to one side and the World Trade Center to the other. We made love, which, this time, was dreamy. He understood the pleasure of my pleasure in being multiorgasmic. After, I climbed onto the sill facing south toward the river and the Statue of Liberty. The sky, a mix of Wolf Man–movie blue-blackness and low, foamy white clouds with a peekaboo moon imbued the city with an eerie tranquility. Nathaniel squeezed me against his chest.

“I want to go with you. I don’t want you to disappear on me for another five years. I’ll even skip my show.” He smiled almost sardonically. “What? Are you living with someone? I don’t care.”

“No, no one else. It’s been impossible for me to keep up a relationship. I’ve had to move and I can’t tell the truth to anyone”

“I already know the truth, and I’m my own movable fiesta.”

“Salome.” He bowed his head. “If the Feds make a deal, I hope to get some time with my mom and then it’s off to prison. If not, it’s back into hiding. It’s the opposite of your razzmatazz New York life. No readings or openings. If you dress like this,” he teased, “
you
might get arrested.”

“I can do it. I can. It’d be good for Alchemy, too. You have to meet him. You’ll love him.” I could tell he was thinking,
You can’t and why would you … for me?

“You’ll see. I can do it!” Suddenly, I began to tear up. He thought I believed he didn’t want me to come with him, but no, I was overtaken by a moment of clairvoyance. Over the next few days I needed to spend whatever time I could with him.

He wouldn’t divulge where he was staying, but we rendezvoused the next day and went to the Met with Alchemy. As we strolled into the Impressionist room, these two teenage girls ran up to Alchemy. One of them ran her fingers over the smooth skin of his perfect face and practically undressed him with her gaze. Nathaniel whispered, “Is it always like this?”

“Yes.” I didn’t think much of it. Little girls, women, old queens—they all wanted to fuck him. No one ever said it aloud, but I could always smell lust in all its pleasant and nefarious variations. Incidentally, or maybe not so incidentally, the Collier Layne psychvoyeurs have often gone shrink-style ballistic (no yelling allowed) at my blasé attitude toward sex. Though they’ve tried to conceal it, a few of them almost popped their penis out of their pants when I elaborated on some of my salacious anecdotes.

The next day Nathaniel took us to the baseball game at Shea Stadium. Alchemy’s first. He was so excited. I drew pictures of the field and drank beer that tasted like vinegar. On the subway ride home, Nathaniel gave us—mainly me—his fulmination on why standing up for the national anthem was some form of collective brainwashing. It irked him that he had stood up, against his principles, because he couldn’t afford to be singled out. The born explainer needed to explain to someone. He smelled like my dad’s old leather-bound
encyclopedia when he got on one of his unending explain-the-world ragas.

We got off the subway at 23rd Street. Alchemy and I were going back to the Chelsea and Nathaniel to wherever he was holing up for the night. Alchemy reached up and hugged Nathaniel, and I thought,
Hilda is always telling me Alchemy needs a man around. Maybe she’s right
.

We arranged to meet the next day at Fanelli’s in SoHo before going to see my new work. The opening was the following Saturday.

Alchemy and I walked blissfully cross-town to the Chelsea. The desk clerk handed me a note in an envelope from the firm of Bickley & Schuster. “Be at my home at 11 A.M. Urgent.”

This was a first for Billy Jr. All of my previous interactions, and those of Dad and Hilda, had been with Bicks Sr. I wasn’t one bit anxious. It’d been a few years since I’d seen Greta at the bistro, and I thought maybe she’d discovered a dose of grandmotherly devotion and desired to see Alchemy. So I took him with me.

Billy Jr., his wife, Lorraine, and their ten-year-old son, William Bickley III (sweet kid, Billy the Third) all lived in the same building as Bicks Sr., on 64th Street off Central Park West. Right around the corner from the West Side Y, a notorious gay pickup spot, and probably where Bickley Sr. did his queenly business. Billy Jr.’s apartment was, like so many Upper East and West Side digs,
Town & Country
austere, immaculate. Beneath the tasteful furniture and accoutrements, I sensated the encrusted scum of immorality.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice.” The lilt in Billy Jr.’s voice betrayed his real sentiment, which was, “Take a cyanide pill, why don’t you?” He led me down the hall and we stopped outside two closed doors.

“Lorraine,” he called out to his wife, “come fetch the boy and have Marcella prepare some milk and cookies for him.” Lorraine was a thin woman ten, fifteen years younger than Jr. She reached for Alchemy’s hand. “He’s adorable.” Alchemy eyed her with some suspicion. I bent over and whispered in his ear, “It’s fine. Don’t let them take you out of the apartment without me.”

Billy Jr. opened the doors. We entered a study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls and, on the fourth, a bank of windows and a brick fireplace. He pointed to two peppermint-green-and-white striped divans. I kneeled on the left divan, leaned my arms on the seatback, and took in the expansive view of Central Park. This Philistine, I’m sure, never appreciated its beauty.

He lit a cigarette and asked if I wanted one. I declined. He remained standing.

“
Junior
, where is your father?” He was about fifty then and moved with the audacity of a once healthy frat boy gone soft and paunchy. He was a homicider. His putridity contaminated anyone close to him.

“My father is turning seventy-five soon. He’s semiretired to the family compound in Palm Beach. It is out of deference to his wishes that I am speaking to you.”

Despite or maybe because of the visceral indecency of his work, I never felt like Bickley Sr. judged me beyond the
difficulties my existence caused him and his “client.” But Billy Jr. considered himself superior to me.

“Junior, you smell like you have a question.” His question had the offensive odor of rotten eggs. “So what is it?”

“Why did you bring the boy?”

“I thought
you
were the boy.”

“Don’t be snide, Salome. I know all about you.”

“You think you know me. All you know is what’s in some crackpot file that I’m not even allowed to read.” We glared at each other. “And if you mean my son, Alchemy, Greta’s grandson, I thought perhaps she wanted to see him.”

“She has no desire to see him or you. None.”

“That was not your intended question, was it?”

He asked, almost giddily, “Why are you seeing Nathaniel Brockton? Don’t try to deny it.”

“You little prick. What you really mean is: Will I help you send him to jail? Junior, see this?” I stuck out my fuck finger. “You suck it until it squeezes out of the pinhole in your skinny dick.”

“Your insults will not help him. He is being arrested at this very moment.” My fury at his arrogance overwhelmed the sword thrust to my heart. I leapt up and moved closer to him. “You know what Diogenes said about a rich man’s house?”

“No, no. I don’t.”

“He said that the only place to spit—is in his face!” I launched a gob that nailed him in his right eye.