Girl in the Moonlight

To the memory of loved ones I miss every day

To the Sirens first shalt thou come,
who beguile all men whosoever comes to
them. Whoso in ignorance draws near to
them and hears the Sirens’ voice, he
nevermore returns
. . .

—H
OMER
, T
HE
O
DYSSEY

T
HE DIRT ROAD TO THE HOUSE HAD BEEN PAVED AND SHORTENED
. What was once in my childhood dense woods had been over the years sold to developers. Large, modern houses now sprawled over the lots until there was only a thin barrier of trees separating one from the next. I had camped out in these woods. Built forts, startled deer. That was before the area became fashionable and the land alone worth millions.

Our house was one of the oldest on the pond, built when the area was a separate summer colony and a round-trip by horse or wagon to the village of East Hampton would consume a whole morning or afternoon. That was long before my parents bought, in the early 1960s, back when my father was just starting out. A weekend house was more than he could afford on his lawyer’s salary, but they had fallen in love with it, with its charm, its seclusion, and its views, and economized in other ways to make the mortgage. For the first few years there was almost no furniture. The house would echo with emptiness. It was a giant playground for me. I could ride my tricycle from room to room
without worrying about hitting anything. Fortunately, the previous owners had left behind a few things, including a butcher-block dining table and bright yellow straight-back chairs, so my parents could at least have the occasional dinner party.

It was a beautiful old house. A traditional saltbox built on a massive scale, its shingles brown with age. In the back was a wide, screened porch that faced west toward the sunset over the pond, the scene of many pleasant evenings. Old wicker furniture. My father, clutching a glassful of bourbon, at his mellowest.

Now my father is dead, and the house is being sold. There were taxes. Also, it needed a new roof, central heating, a proper foundation. The costs would have been prohibitive. In the end it was easier to sell. The buyer had promised he wouldn’t tear it down. The house had architectural significance, after all. This would be my last chance to see it.

I stopped the car by the brick path to the front door and stepped out. It was a cold November morning, and the drive out from Manhattan had taken only two hours. The grass was covered with damp leaves. No one was around to rake them up anymore. In the past we would have been getting ready for another Thanksgiving here. Fully extended, the dining room table could seat twenty, and most years it did. But that table was gone now, sold at auction, like so much of the other furniture.

This was not the first house that had vanished from my life. There had been an old family place in Maine, my parents’ apartment in New York that went after the divorce, my grandparents’ horse farm in Virginia—now all gone—but this house had been the one constant. It had been my home. I had spent every summer of my life here. Thanksgivings, Christmases. Had grown up within its walls, made the passage from boy to man. Had played touch football on the lawn, gotten drunk for the first time, made love, slammed doors in anger, slept uncountable nights.

A large, empty metal Dumpster sat ominously in the front yard. I walked past it down the slight decline to the rear of the house, crossing the wide back lawn and out to the large, brackish pond that stretched all the way to the ocean. At night, when everyone was in bed and the house was quiet, it was possible to hear the faint roar of the waves. I stepped carefully onto the old dock that extended over the bulrushes, the planks creaking beneath my feet. In certain spots the wood had already rotted away.

I always came here first. To the pond. The beauty of the view. The purity of it. The familiarity. Even now, years later, I can conjure it effortlessly. It would stay with me forever. The seamless melding of water to trees to sky.

In the distance a family of swans bobbed ornamentally on the slate gray water. The wind was raw. We sailed here from May to September, or even later, but the little boat, like so much else, had been sold.

I walked back up the hill around the other side of the house to where, under the rhododendron, I fished for the hidden key that was always hung on a nail. Unlocking the heavy oak front door, I pushed it open and stepped into the barren and dark front hall. The house was cold, the air slightly musty. There were a few last things left for me to sort through, to keep—or not. The rest would be thrown out. It was up to me. The kitchen counter had a cold cardboard coffee cup that must have been left by one of the contractors. It was next to an old, unplugged toaster and a final heating bill. The refrigerator stood open and dark, its shelves barren. The water had been turned off. There is nothing emptier than an empty house.

I wandered through the wainscoted dining room, the sitting room, and the downstairs bedrooms, opening closets and finding nothing except scattered mouse droppings. The second and third floors were just as barren. The books from the shelves that
once lined the hallway had all been boxed up and dispersed. In my old room, a metal bed frame leaned against the wall. In the closet, there was a box of old tiles and several bare wire hangers on the rod. Nothing remained in my parents’ former room. I could see in the worn carpet the indentations of where my father’s chair had sat for decades. Disconnected phone jacks. A broken window shade.

My ultimate destination was the attic, where deeply recessed closets had been built under the roof for storage. I had been given one of these as a place to store my old belongings, things of sentimental value that could not fit in my New York apartment. Boxes from school and college. A few pieces of furniture. Suitcases of old clothes. A battered camp trunk full of letters and photographs. Bank statements from accounts long closed. An old paint box full of crumpled tubes of cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, and burnt sienna. A small bundle of brushes, held together by a rubber band, their handles smudged with long-dried color but their bristles still soft.

I carried the boxes and bags to the middle of the floor, creating two piles: what I would keep and what I would throw out. In one box, old comic books that would have been worth some money if I had taken care of them. In another, books of military history, which had been my prepubescent passion—along with painting model soldiers—and for which I saved up my allowance to buy in a tiny shop, long since closed, on Madison Avenue near the Seventy-Ninth Street bus stop. I flipped through one of them, recognizing the colorful plates of Napoleonic soldiers, the bearskins, the braids, that I once spent hours poring over. Still other boxes contained old cassettes, photographs, memories from schools and summer camps. Most of it would go in the Dumpster.

I had saved the rolls of canvases until last. At one time, I
had been fond of some of them, even proud. Now, as I unrolled them, they struck me as obvious and unoriginal. There were some embarrassing Rose Period imitations. A few with intimations of Corot and even Hopper. Others aimed for Velázquez but failed. These I quickly moved to the discard pile.

In another roll were several portraits. These were better, less pretentious and more straightforward. There was nothing wrong exactly with my work. I had always been able to draw well. I could deftly capture the shape of an eye, the curve of a lip. But there was something lacking too. The special animation that turns lines on a page or brushstrokes on canvas into something magical. I had the skill but not the talent. That distinction is everything.

On top there were a few self-portraits revealing my younger self. It was a face I was still surprised not to see in the mirror every morning. The thick hair, the lean cheeks. It is the other way around now. There was one of my father, looking impatient at having to sit still for so long. A few nudes from class. Then came the ones that I wanted most to see. The first, Aurelio, with his long poet’s face and dark eyes. I couldn’t stop myself from noticing the imperfections in my brushwork, the faults in perspective, wishing I had the chance to do it again, to make it better. Not only had it been too long since I had held a brush but that golden moment in time had passed, never to be recaptured or reclaimed.

I looked at the portrait for several minutes, remembering when I had painted it. How old would he have been? Nineteen? Twenty? I had been even younger. The years slipped by. Whole lifetimes had been lived since then. The hum of summer outside his studio. The strong sunshine and the salt smell of Long Island Sound. I had taken my time while he, the better painter, struggled to relax, unaccustomed to being on the other side of
the brush. “Let me draw you next,” he had said, laughing. His teeth white with health and youth. A cigarette burning on the table next to where he sat.

I placed Aurelio’s portrait to the other side, sure that I would keep it. There was only one painting left, the most important. I unrolled it, feeling the warmth of recognition. It was a full-length portrait of a recumbent woman, naked, beautiful, lit as if by moonlight.

Cesca.

Like her younger brother, she was dark, but where he was angular, almost ascetic, she was soft, sensual. Her eyes simultaneously playful and carnal. Both siblings possessed an otherworldly beauty, as though they were composed of a rare element, one not found on earth, something that usually burned up as it hit the atmosphere, and that, because of its rarity, made it even more precious.

The painting stirred many emotions in me, not the least envy. Because, unlike the other portraits, I hadn’t painted this one. Aurelio had, a long time ago. But now it was mine. It was my most treasured, and dangerous, possession. Cesca had given it to me.

It had been years since I had last seen it. And now I was no less struck than when I had first beheld it. The perfect brushstrokes, the play of color and light. The quizzical smile that was both an invitation and a warning. It should have been hanging in a museum instead of hidden away in an attic.

Some women might have been embarrassed to see themselves depicted so lushly naked, but not Cesca. Her gaze was bold, unashamed. She was an artist’s daughter, after all; had been posing since she was a baby. There had been depictions of her in her father’s hand at various stages of life all over their house. Cesca as an infant in her mother’s arms. Cesca as a skinny child. An oil of her on the verge of womanhood. Charcoals of
her laughing, serious. The penumbra of her hair framing her face. Always her beauty staggering. For an artist to have such a daughter would have been a miracle of fortune.

“These are only the ones that Mare chooses to display,” she told me once, referring to her mother. She pronounced it “MAH-ruh.” It was the Catalan word for “mother.” Her father was Pare. “There are hundreds more somewhere.”

But I didn’t have hundreds more. These canvases in the attic, like the last coins of a once-rich man, were all that remained. After them, there would be nothing. Nothing that tied me to a time and a place when I was a different person—younger, more idealistic, hungrier for love.

Life is filled with what-ifs, the roads not taken, the doors left unopened, the lovers left behind. Like Borges’s forking paths, the choices are infinite. There is no map, no instruction manual. When we are very young the choices are made for us. This school, those friends. The world then is small, limited, and comparatively safe. That is how it should be. As we age, the opportunities multiply, but so do the dangers. Early stars burn out. Fortunes reverse. Many young men and women I had known, full of promise, fell by the wayside, victim to drugs, but also to indulgence, idleness, lack of direction, greed, arrogance. Not all though. Some went on to great success. Became CEOs, heads of foundations, Oscar winners, professors, even painters. Some merely rich. An old college friend of mine is now foreign minister of his country.

The tragedies are what stay with me. Did I have a knack for attracting the melancholy, the unfulfilled? The suicides, the defectives, the weak of will? One of the smartest, most talented youths I ever knew was a particular idol of mine when I was a teenager. I remember his speed on the football field, laughing as his powerful legs increased the distance between himself and his pursuers. Also, his brilliance. His eloquence. His blond good
looks. He could have been anything. Unknown to me at the time his parents were undergoing a bitter divorce, the reverberations of which were shattering. He was kicked out of one school and then another. All his promise crashing to earth. There were drugs too. Cocaine. We lost touch. Today he is a yoga instructor on an ashram in Oregon.

I had made many choices, some good, most not, that had led me to this attic, weighing my past and bidding farewell to a house I loved but could not save. The years peeled away, and in my mind I was once again a teenager. Tall and slender. But even then nothing was simple. What if I had chosen differently? Would I be here at this moment? There are the dreams our parents have for us, and then there is the life we create for ourselves. It is impossible to know. The secret, they say, is not to regret—but that, I have found, is impossible. The most one can hope for is to forget. Memory, though, is a poor servant; it bursts in on you when you least expect it.

I didn’t need anything physical to remind me of Cesca though. I find myself thinking about her every day, passing by a certain street corner where we once walked, hearing a song on the radio, imagining her face in the crowd, the figure that had just turned the corner. At night she is often in my dreams, always just out of reach, across a table, laughing, climbing a stair, disappearing into the next room, or on the verge of love, until something causes me to wake up unconsummated, aware of her continued absence in my life even if her memory was still with me every day.

I remember when I first met her. It changed my life.