Broken Sleep Read Free Page A

and necessary conversation.
    “Moses,” Dr. Hank Fielding, a white-haired, square-headed oncologist in his early sixties, spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, “after the last round of chemo, you’re in what I like to call ‘qualified remission.’ The strong probability is that it won’t last. Your platelets are still too low.”
    “Which means?”
    “The bone marrow registry still has no match for you. You
need
a donor.” Jay, Moses’s wife of five years, clenched his wrist in panic. Afraid to look at Jay, trying to control his emotions, Moses stared at the wall behind Fielding while he continued in his avuncular tone, “I’m so sorry, Moses. You must find him.”
    In Moses’s presence, Jay obeyed her father Al Bernes’s (né Bernstein) credo, voiced in his art-dealer jargon: “equipoise and stoicism in the face of crisis.” Her twitching and bouncing legs, outbreaks of canker sores, and forced reassurances that “It’ll be all right” (along with a more frequent late night dipping into the alcohol cabinet) belied the truth. Beneath her varnished exterior brewed a cauldron of fear.
    After Fielding’s unspoken
or else
, Moses and Jay agreed, although a bit appalled at becoming a California cliché, to hire a private detective to track down his father. Moses told him, “The family name was Temesvar, taken from a city in Hungary where they lived before moving to Germany. I guess it was anassimilated name even then. I think it got rearranged when he came here. Maybe he went back to using it.” With so little to go on, the first and then a second detective came up empty.
    With her worry outweighing her hesitancy, Jay contacted Randy Sheik, least offensive of the Sheik brothers who owned the successful indie Kasbah Records. After leaving Miami in 1985, where her father owned a world-class art gallery, Jay had attended UCLA, and after graduation she and Geri Allen opened a chicly influential art consulting firm. The Sheiks and Kasbah became a major client. Randy, always happy to hear from Jay, suggested a woman with the Baskin-Robbins 31-Flavors name of Sidonna Cherry. “She’s unorthodox. She don’t ever let you meet her in person. But she watches you. And she sure the fuck gets results.”
    Unorthodox suited Moses. Unlike the other PIs, after he explained his situation, Cherry didn’t try to snow him about the benefits of a joyous, fairy tale father-son reunion.
    Cherry’s call delivered the first of many messages from the suddenly undead, which like a siren’s unholy song could not be silenced or ignored, unshrouding decades-old secrets and lies repeated so often that they had become truths.
    Sitting at the desk waiting for Cherry’s fax, he tried to conjure his father’s face from the one and only picture he’d ever seen, when he was five, his parents’ wedding picture. He remembered that afternoon clearly: His grandmother, who lived with them, had gone to the A&P grocery store so he sneaked into his mother’s bedroom closet, her haven against chaos with dresses, shoes, blouses, skirts, coats, umbrellas, and pocketbooks all in their assigned places. If he moved anyobject one inch, she’d
know
. He turned on the light and on an upper shelf he spotted stacks of papers and boxes, one labeled PHOTOS . With his little hands he tugged the black step-chair from the back left corner. He climbed up and reached as far as he could and pulled down a beat-up sky-blue metal safety box. A few days before, he’d spotted his mother crying while looking at the photos in the box. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the closet. He found pictures of himself as a baby and of his mother with her naturally auburn hair bleached blond. Then he found it—their picture. His father with a solemn demeanor and furnace-hot glare. Dark hair combed in a pompadour with a yarmulke atop his skull. The picture was black and white, but Moses also knew that his father had blue eyes; he, Moses, had small blue-gray eyes, unlike Hannah’s