Girl in the Moonlight (5 page)

I saw my moment and took it. “We’re about the same size,” I said.

For the first time, Cesca turned and looked at me, her brow furrowing. She was already accustomed to ignoring men, taking their attention for granted. A rich man does not stoop to pick up a penny from the sidewalk.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“This is Wylie . . .”

“Wylie Rose,” I said, not wanting to be referred to as “Mitch’s son” or, worse, “the guy who fell out of the tree.”

“What I meant is that Aurelio could wear my blazer and tie,” I continued.

Cesca stared at me for a minute, then smiled and said, “That’s brilliant. Take off your shirt and give it to him.”

Aurelio began to protest, but she cut him off. “Do it. I’ll get Cosmo and Carmen in here as well. Mare wants us ready for seven.” She turned to me, put her hand on my forearm, and squeezed it gently. Even if I had never met her before, just that
faintest of pressure would have made me hers. “Thank you,” she said and gave me a little wink before walking out.

I stared after her, watching her cross the lawn to where Cosmo was sitting.

“Lucky for me you came,” laughed Aurelio.

I unbuttoned my shirt and handed it to him. It was a standard Brooks Brothers white button-down. My father had been taking me there every year since I was a child. The wooden, club-like walls, the stacks of shirts. It was always quick when we went there. In my father’s eyes shopping was effeminate. You went to the store with a purpose and then you left. Across the broad floor men inspected the ties.
Would Mr. Rose care to see anything else? No thanks, we’re just here for the boy
. Nick was his special salesman who always helped us. He was an old man with bad feet. Years before, my father would have smiled, happy to be recognized. Back when he had only three suits in his closet. Now he had dozens.

Aurelio slipped on the shirt. Despite his being a bit taller than me, the shirt fit him surprisingly well. I have long arms, and my neck had filled out because of rowing. “Perfect,” he said. I then handed him the tie and the blazer.

“Can I keep my pants?”

“Don’t worry about pants. I’ll stand in the back row,” he said with a wink.

We left the house and went out back to where the photographs were to be taken. Along with several dozen other guests, I watched as the family posed, Izzy and his wife, Ruth, seated in the middle surrounded by their children and grandchildren. Aurelio was grinning hugely in the back with his hair in a ponytail, my tie snug against his throat. From the waist up, he looked like a Spanish princeling. They were all there: Cesca, Aurelio, Cosmo, Carmen, Izzy, Ruth, Kitty, Dorothy, Roger and his
wife, Yvette, although it would be only a matter of time before there was another Mrs. Roger Baum.

The only one absent was Ugo, but he had been split from Kitty for years now, even though his presence was clear in the face of each of his children. There was also Randall, Kitty’s new beau and future second husband. A political science professor at NYU. I have seen the photograph many times since then, taking special pride in my own small role in it.

Later that night, I was standing around a bonfire wearing a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, I am not sure whose. The iconic lips and tongue. Aurelio had thrust it at me, saying, “Here. Wear this.” He was still wearing my clothes, enjoying the new persona. The light had faded. After the photographs and the speeches, the party within a party at the Playhouse continued as the adults sat down to dinner. I had already had several beers and was feeling pleasantly tipsy. Although I kept looking for Cesca—who was apparently mingling with the adults—Aurelio wouldn’t let me leave his side.

He was a great talker, appreciative of new audiences. And I was a great listener. He explained to me his theories of art. He spoke with the enthusiasm of youth, sure in the uniqueness of his discoveries, like someone thinking that no one else before them had ever fallen in love or theorized about the stars. The eternal and ageless mysteries. I didn’t mind. I was flattered by the attention. When he started talking about Japanese composition, ukiyo-e and Utamaro, I hung on every word. It was all new—and fascinating—to me.

I confessed to him that I was also interested in art. Since childhood I had loved to draw knights, Civil War soldiers, and, for the entertainment of my friends, fantastically naked women with improbably long legs and pneumatic bosoms. I knew I had a little talent, but it had never occurred to me that I could do
anything with it. Until that moment, I just thought of it as a trick, like being able to wiggle your ears. Certainly my family knew no one who was in the arts.

It had always been assumed that, like all my classmates, we would follow our fathers to Harvard—or possibly Yale or Princeton, depending on affiliation—and then to Wall Street or the law. In extreme cases, Washington, although public service was something one did after one’s fortune had already been made. There was no reason to think I would ever deviate from this path. After all, it promised security, respectability, and the comforts of wealth. In due time I would have children of my own and offer them the same advantages. There was no room for creative expression. It was about responsibility to family and society. To take a different route would have been heretical—somehow unmanly. Wanting to be an artist would be even worse. But what Aurelio was saying made perfect sense, and I had to know more.

Excitedly he led me to an old shed. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You’ll be honest, right?”

He switched on the light. It was a simple room, the walls unpainted, the joists exposed. There was an easel that held an unfinished canvas, and more canvases were lining the walls. A large table made from a door was covered with painter’s tools, including old coffee cans smeared with paint. The place reeked of turpentine. A tall roll of unprimed canvas was leaning in the corner. A stool stood in front of a wall draped with green material.

The canvases were bold, beautiful. That last word is one I might overuse, but nothing else substitutes. The browns, golds, and blues. Deep blacks. As rich as Rembrandt, but with a modern artist’s vibrancy and movement. Who am I thinking of? Picasso in one of his early periods. A wisp of Modigliani, the palette if not the execution. My painterly vocabulary was at that point virtually nonexistent.

Today I would suggest Corot, Velázquez, maybe even a little Goya, with a bit of Pontormo thrown in for good measure. I was struck by the confidence, the maturity of the works. They were almost all portraits. I recognized his family. Izzy, looking both tired and noble, like a Jewish Lear. His wife, Ruth. Roger. Kitty. A brooding Cosmo. Carmen, sultry and aloof. He’d done many self-portraits. Not surprisingly, I was immediately drawn to one of Cesca. It was only of her head and shoulders, but Aurelio had captured a quality to her smile and her eyes that was at once both familiar and unknown. I stared at it as I dared not stare at her.

“These are amazing,” I said, wanting to adequately convey my delight and admiration.

“You’re very kind. They are merely studies. I have a long way to go.”

That was my introduction to his famous modesty. He was like the perfect host, who wants to share everything with you but refuses to accept compliments on the quality of his linen or the excellence of his wine. It is an almost Oriental attitude, one brought by the Moors to Spain and then down through the generations. The king who welcomes a guest to his palace with the words “Please do me the honor of entering my humble abode.”

But Aurelio said it without irony. At the age of seventeen he knew that he had still a long way to go. To me, however, he seemed so far down the road as to be almost invisible, a mere wisp of smoke on the horizon indicating the degree of his progress from my own.

“No, I mean it,” I insisted. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so forward if not for the beer, but also there was a quality about him that seemed to require extra care, a natural reticence that needed, like an exotic plant, more water than others to truly thrive.

“Maybe,” he replied enigmatically.

“Where did you learn to paint?”

“My father taught me. He is a painter, you know.”

I remembered my father talking about him. The tone wasn’t very flattering. My father held artists in low esteem, especially those who abandoned their families.

“But you didn’t go to art school?”

“No. They don’t teach you how to paint in art school. At least not in New York. The art of painting is dying there. Today it’s all about minimalism and video and radical lesbianism. That’s why I am going to study in Barcelona. At the same school where my father studied.”

I was suddenly tremendously envious of him—of his talent and his opportunity. I wished I could have said those words, had people gape when they saw a painting of mine. I felt the flower of ambition opening within me. “When do you leave?” I asked.

“At the end of the summer. I’m dropping out of school.”

“Would you show me?” I asked. “How to paint, I mean.” Looking back, I am embarrassed by my presumption, but at the time I felt like a beggar asking a millionaire for a handout; he had so much and I had so little. He looked at me and pulled a face, sucking in his cheeks. “You don’t want me. I don’t know enough.”

“You know more than I do. I can draw, but I’ve never used oil paints before. I have no idea how to mix them. Or anything.”

Aurelio nodded his head and said, “Okay, why not? Why don’t you come back tomorrow, and I can at least show you how to build and prime a canvas. That’s how my father started with me.”

I happily agreed. It was like hearing a piece of music for the first time and feeling as though you already know it, that it resonates within a part of your soul that you didn’t know existed. I was excited, like a convert brimming with newfound faith. But this was not the only way in which my life was destined to change that night.

A
FTER DINNER, THERE WERE THE FIREWORKS. I HAD LOST
sight of Aurelio. Maybe having extracted a commitment from him, an obligation, I had scared him off. But for the moment it didn’t matter. Someone had passed me a joint. I can’t remember who. It was an evening of new beginnings. I took my first hit, trying to imitate the others, and, to their amusement, began coughing. When it was my next turn I tried again, this time successfully. I remember laughing and feeling a pleasant, unfamiliar lightness. We were all standing around in a circle. There was even an adult with us, wearing his jacket and tie. He inhaled greedily. “Good shit,” he said, holding his breath.

One of the girls giggled, and I followed helplessly while the starbursts and Roman candles whistled and exploded overhead. The crowd applauded. I saw my parents in the distance and avoided them. They would want to know where my shirt and jacket were. Smell the beer and dope reek on my breath.

Then I stopped caring.

“Hi,” a voice said. “There you are.”

It was strangely rough and cracked, but had an underlying femininity, like someone who laughs and shouts more than most people. I recognized it immediately, even though I had only heard it for the first time that night. It was Cesca. She was still wearing her dress, but her feet were once again bare. She held a glass of red wine in her hands. “I’ve been wanting to thank you all night.”

“For what?”

“For giving Aurelio your clothes.” She smiled, her head nodding in encouragement. It was an amazing smile. Welcoming and suggestive. It is easy for me now to see that nothing about her was simple, but then I was too callow to know better. As I came to learn, it was impossible for her not to flirt, to seduce. It didn’t matter who it was. A waiter, her dentist, the man who sold newspapers in the kiosk on the corner. They just had to be male. To her flirting was as natural as breathing. But this being my first time experiencing it, I couldn’t help but think she was turning it on just for me.

“You were brilliant. And he looked so handsome in them too. My grandfather was very happy.”

I told her I was glad I could help, uncertain of what else to say.

“Wylie, right?”

“Right.”

“You want to get high?”

“For sure.” The words sounded unnatural coming out of my mouth. That was how I had heard the stoners at my school talk. Boys with long hair who played Frisbee and strolled through the woods when they thought no else was paying attention. Rash with impunity, even though they were all destined for expulsion. Still, I thought it made me sound cooler, more experienced. What did I know?

“Great,” she said. “Come with me.”

We walked away from the party, toward the dunes overlooking Gardiners Bay. The fireworks were done now, but the whiff of cordite hung in the air. The band had started playing again, and people were dancing on a wooden dance floor that had been installed on the lawn.

I took off my shoes and followed Cesca through the beach grass. A nearly full moon cast a silvery glow over the beach. When we sat down she was so close to me that I could feel the skin of her arm on mine.

Scarcely believing where I was and with whom, I was reluctant to speak, to say anything that would break the magic of the moment. For years I had imagined what I would do when I saw her. How I would tell her I loved her and take her in my arms. It would be easy. But such confidence is an illusion. It takes little to shatter it.

She sat there barely visible, producing a joint and a pack of matches. As she lit a match, for an instant her face was illuminated, her eyes shining at me conspiratorially, like those of a child with a secret. She took a deep drag and handed the joint to me. I remembered to inhale and hold it, trying not to cough. Desperate to impress her. Again.

“Where are you going to school?” she asked, leaning into me.

I told her.

She nodded. “I thought you were older. You look older.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to Barnard in the fall.” She told me that she wanted to major in theater, specifically set design. Her mother often took her to shows on Broadway, the
Nutcracker
at Lincoln Center during the holidays. More than the actors or the dancers it was the sets that appealed to her. “I love the idea of creating my own little world,” she said. “It’s art you can walk through, you know?”

I said nothing. Aurelio was a painter. His father also. Cesca
wanted to design sets. A family of artists. The freedom, the creativity, the beauty. I envied her the life I imagined she lived.

“I’d like to be a painter,” I declared impulsively, putting into words for the first time an ambition that had only that night occurred to me, thinking this would somehow impress her, make her look favorably on me.

“You?” She seemed to find this hysterical, and we both started laughing. “What do you know about painting?”

“Nothing,” I confessed. “But I’ve always liked to draw.”

“Are you any good?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. People have always said I was.”

“You’ll have to show me some of your work then. Do you have a studio?”

“No.”

“Where do you work?”

I shrugged. “Wherever I can.”

“It’s a hard life, being an artist,” she said, suddenly serious. “It’s not for everybody.”

I nodded my head. I knew nothing. “I’d like to try. When I saw Aurelio’s paintings tonight it made me think that maybe I could do it too. But I don’t know if I could ever be as good as him. He’s incredible.”

For a moment she was silent. I stared at her profile and listened to the rhythmic breaking of the waves below. Then she said, “You know what’s really incredible?”

“What?”

She snickered and leaned into me, her face inches from mine, and whispered in a low voice, “This pot is incredible. Shhh. Don’t tell anybody.” Then more laughter. “God, I am so stoned,” she said.

I laughed too. Everything was tremendously funny and terribly important at the same time. Emotions, sensations, barely imagined thoughts, one quickly replacing the other,
crackled through me like electricity. And there was Cesca, her knees touching mine, laughing with me. The moment was perfect.

I had to say something, had to express a little of what I was feeling. If I didn’t, I would implode. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life,” I blurted out.

“You’re sweet.” I knew instantly it was a compliment she had heard many times before, and it had lost its novelty.

But I was young, made brave by the combination of the pot and her proximity. “No, I mean it. You are. I thought you were the day we first met. Do you remember?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“I was a kid. I came over to your house. I fell out of the tree and broke my arm.”

“That was you?” She laughed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to laugh. I remember that. You were such a sweet boy. We had no right to make you do that. I felt terribly about what happened. Hearing you cry. It made me sad.”

“I was trying to impress you.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I fell in love with you.”

She said nothing.

Feeling foolish, I said, “Look, forget it. I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .”

“Shhh,” she said. “Don’t be.” Then she got to her feet and took my hand in hers. Astonished, I said nothing.

“Do you want to go for a swim?”

“Sure. What—”

“Good,” she said, interrupting me. “Come on.”

Still holding my hand, she led me down to the shoreline. The water of the bay is always calm. It is popular with parents and children too young or scared of the ocean waves. At night
it is even more placid. “Can you help me with my zipper?” she asked, turning around.

Wordlessly, I reached out. I had never unzipped a woman’s dress before. Not even my mother’s. I fumbled unfamiliarly and found the zipper, lowering it carefully. She stepped away from me and shrugged out of her dress. I watched as she placed a hand on my shoulder for balance and removed her underwear. She stood before me, naked, but I could barely see a thing. Two vague dark points on her breasts and another darker patch between her legs. She laughed and wiggled her hips. “Come on, slowpoke. It’s your turn.”

Quickly I removed my clothes and dumped them in a pile on the beach, but she was already in the water. The last thing I removed was my eyeglasses. For a moment I debated leaving them on but feared losing them in the water. Without them her body would be a blur.

I entered the water, the tiny waves cold and gently lapping at my feet, feeling the hard edges of shells. “Where are you?” I called.

“Over here.”

I swam toward the sound of her voice, her head just visible. The water was shallow. When I stood it was barely to my waist. The air cool on my skin.

“Don’t you just love swimming at night?” she asked. “Isn’t it heaven?”

She was floating on her back, her body laid out like a table. I had never been this close to a naked woman before. I approached like an initiate. My ignorance shaming me.

She waded over to me. “Hey you,” she said, and to my surprise she reached her hand below the surface. Instantly I became excited. She giggled, holding me with her hand. Without letting go, she reached up and kissed me, slipping her tongue into my mouth. “Do you like that?” she asked. “Do you want to touch me?”

“Yes,” I croaked.

She took my hand and placed it on her breast. The softness indescribable. She kissed me again. This time I pulled her toward me, confident in my physical strength, in the belief that she wanted me, that there could be only one outcome. But she ducked away with a splash.

“You’re going to have to catch me.”

She dove under the water and I couldn’t see her. “Over here,” she called, nearer the beach.

“Where are you?” I called.

“Here,” she said, now right behind me. She embraced me and again we started to kiss. Her tongue darting in and out, sinuous, alive. I was erect now. She let out a low moan, and I reached between her legs.

“Come with me,” she whispered. She took my hand and led me back to the beach. On the sand, she stopped and kissed me. I reached for her. “Not here,” she said.

We gathered our clothes and walked naked across the sand. Even though I could still hear the music and noise from the party, I felt entirely alone with her, as though we had slipped through a crack in the wall. “This way. Come on.”

We ran up the beach to a low structure that was apparently changing rooms. There was a short flight of stairs and then a deck that felt rough underfoot. She giggled, saying, “Here we are.” She pushed open a door and I followed her inside.

Moonlight illuminated the room through a skylight in the ceiling. I saw a massage table. A basket of towels. She lay down, her legs apart. My moment of truth. My watershed, the dividing line of my life. Everything that came before and everything that would come after.

“Now,” she whispered, pulling me toward her, encircling me. The pressure of her thighs. The tautness of her belly. Her body still cool from the water. She grabbed my shoulders. Her
hips rocked back and forth and I along with her. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said, in a voice halfway between a command and a mantra. I was trying to not lose my balance. Trying to not disappoint her. Trying, unsuccessfully, to not finish too soon.

“That’s all right,” she said. “We can go again.”

And we did. This time I was better. Less nervous, more at ease. She demanding, knowing what she wanted. By the time we were done I could feel beads of perspiration from my exertions running down the small of my back.

We sat there side by side on the bench. “Your first time?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes. That obvious?”

“No. I think it’s sweet,” she said, leaning over and kissing me on the cheek. Her breast rubbed against my chest, arousing me again. We made love a third time. Slowly. Pleasurably. When it was over we were speechless, our chests heaving, unable for several minutes to even move.

We dressed and walked slowly back to the party, her arm around my waist, my arm about her shoulder.

The party was coming to an end. I had to find my parents. “Can I see you again?” I asked.

She kissed me. “Of course. Come for a swim tomorrow.”