Girl in the Moonlight (6 page)

I
RETURNED THE NEXT DAY AFTER WORK. AND EVERY DAY
after. We swam in the pool, played tennis, went to the beach. Cesca entering the ocean like a naiad. Hair up, neck bare. Diving cleanly into the waves, laughing in the spray. Wherever she went, men’s eyes followed her. At night we made love but never in her bed. We returned often to the changing room. There was also an old stable with a loft. Once in her car. She kept me apart from her family. Only Aurelio knew. Or at least I thought he did. “Pretend you are coming to see him,” she told me. When no one was looking she would kiss me.

And I did see Aurelio. We talked about painting. He showed me how to stretch and prime a canvas. Some of the basics. Composition. How to mix colors. He had books with color plates that he would bring out to the studio. “Look at that,” he’d say. “See how the line follows?”

If Cesca was busy, he and I would sit outside and take turns sketching each other. As we sat we talked. He was curious about everything. Had I ever been to North Africa? What was
boarding school like? Did I know anything about butterflies?

He had a way of questioning that was both childish and profound. Because of his dyslexia he got most of his information from people instead of books. Over the years I would be on the receiving end many times, when he would just look at me and ask, “Why?” And he meant it. He wanted to understand the deeper rhythms of life, the subtle undercurrents that pulled us all along. Why people did things, what our motivations were, our desires.

Wherever he went he would engage complete strangers in conversation, learning about their lives. His face open and handsome, his manner pleasant and trusting. It was almost impossible to say no to him. Drunks, passengers on trains, dinner partners, the homeless, girls on the beach. Whoever life placed in his path. Often he would even ask them to pose for him. Taking out his sketch pad and drawing them while they talked. Many times I would just leave him, knowing he could be there all night. And they couldn’t help talking to him. He just had this way about him. He could get them to tell him things they wouldn’t reveal to anyone else.

For several weeks I saw Cesca every day. The summer days and nights crackled with promise. Warm, silken evenings. Everything was new, splendid. Wrapped in the glow of youthful intimacy, we lay on our backs and shared our dreams and fears. She told me about her family, her childhood. How when she was a little girl she had a puppy, an Alsatian, she named Nadó, which means “baby” in Catalan, but it was hit by a car. She had cried for days, she told me. A tear appeared in her eye as she spoke. “I really loved that dog, you know?” Her favorite poet was Neruda, but she also loved Auden. She wished she could sing but said she had a terrible voice. I didn’t believe her and she said, “Oh yeah? I’ll prove it,” and began to sing “Me and Bobby McGee.” She hadn’t been wrong. I started laughing and had to agree with her. “Cosmo has an amazing voice,” she said. “I’m so jealous.”

I listened eagerly, intently, to everything she said, still unable to believe that it was she who was in my arms, gazing at the curve of her cheek, the luster of her skin. Occasionally she brought me a present. Once, a book of Picasso drawings. Another time a set of graphite pencils. I have the book still. It is inscribed,
“Amor, amor, hasta la noche abrupta,”
It is by Neruda, although I didn’t know it at the time. Translated it roughly means “Love, love, until the night collapses.”

One evening after dinner we walked the beach all the way to Louse Point. “I love this old beach,” she said. “My parents used to always bring me here when we were children. Sometimes I wish I never had to be anywhere else. I wish I didn’t have to go to college.”

“Don’t you want to go?”

For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then, “I don’t know. Not really, no. I don’t really see the point of it.”

“Why?”

“Because it kind of terrifies me. The thought of devoting myself to one thing, even to something I love, seems so final. I mean, what if it’s not what I end up doing? Why waste all that time? It’s so forced, so artificial. Making people decide about the direction of their lives so early. It doesn’t make any sense.”

I nodded. I was still two years away from having to face such a decision. But the thought of not going to college, of not going to Harvard, had never occurred to me. It would have been unnatural, like snow in summer.

“Don’t you worry about such things?” she asked. “What you want to do with your life and being wrong?”

“Aurelio seems to know what he wants.”

“Yes. He’s lucky in that way. It’s always been easy for him. The truth is that he’d be crap at anything else.” She laughed.

“And you?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t know if I wouldn’t just be crap at everything.”

Several nights later she couldn’t see me. There were other friends. She had been neglecting them, she told me. She’d call me tomorrow night, for sure. But then tomorrow came and again she was busy.

The next day I went to the compound after work. There was no point in calling. “We never answer the phone here. We just expect people to show up if they want to see us,” she had told me. It was true. There was a constant stream of people moving in and out of the various houses throughout the summer. German boys in small bathing suits helping themselves in the kitchen. Pretty girls sunning themselves by the pool. Musician friends of Cosmo’s. Old friends of Roger’s, sleek-looking men with sideburns and second wives. Mercedes convertibles parked on the grass. Delivery vans dropping food, wine, and flowers. Kitty presiding over lunch for a dozen. A Babel of languages. Usually when I arrived Cesca would hurry to meet me, saying, “Thank God you’re here. All these people are driving me crazy.”

Today, though, there was no sign of Cesca or her car. People I didn’t recognize were playing doubles on the tennis court. I skirted the Playhouse and found Aurelio in his studio painting a still life. I watched him work for a little.

“Have you seen Cesca?” I asked after a while.

“Not since she left.”

“Left?”

“Left. This morning.”

“What?”

“She left this morning,” he repeated.

“To go where? For how long?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“Last night at dinner she said she was leaving today for France for a few weeks. Some friends of hers have a château somewhere. They invited her and she went. She’s always doing
things like that. Here one moment”—he dabbed his brush in the paint on his palette and then applied it to the canvas—“and gone the next. Poof. Still, I would have thought she’d have told you, seeing as how you’ve been spending so much time together lately.”

I stared at him, incredulous.

“Wait. I almost forgot. She did leave something for you though,” he continued. “She dropped it off before leaving but I wasn’t really paying attention.” He put the brush and palette down, and wiped his hands with a turpentine-soaked rag. “Here it is.” He handed me a purple envelope, leaving behind a smudged thumbprint. “Sorry.” He grinned.

I took it, still confused. Mumbling my excuses, I stepped out of the studio and walked toward the beach, where I sat on the sand and tore open the envelope.

Dear Wylie,
it began.

Sorry to do it like this. I’m terrible at this sort of thing. Fear of commitment, I suppose. Of giving too much of myself. Sex is one thing but feelings are something else. Whenever I feel someone getting too close it’s time for me to move on. For what it’s worth, I really do like you, Wylie. Maybe a little too much. And then what happens when I break your heart? Because I would. Or make you feel weak or inadequate? I can’t help myself. It’s how I’m made. I’m not a bitch all the time I swear but I can be when it suits me. What you need is a nice, normal girl who will be sweet to you. Buy her crappy presents, take her to the movies. Break up with her. Do it a few more times with a few different girls. Learn how to love someone who wants to be loved. By that time you’ll have forgotten all about me
.

Con amor,
C
.

P.S.—Why do you have to be so handsome?

I stupidly read the letter several times, searching in vain for clues or answers that weren’t there. But it was all there. It took me years to really understand what she was saying. Like many people I preferred my own interpretation, choosing to decode her words in a way that caused me the least pain.

For several days I sulked, brooding over her betrayal, the abruptness of her departure. At first I hated her, called her names. If I was older I would probably have gotten drunk, but I didn’t drink much in those days. Instead I went for long runs, pushing myself, replacing psychic pain with physical pain. Playing over my revenge in my head. What I would do or say when I saw her next. With each footfall repeating the word
bitch bitch bitch
.

But my anger wasn’t real and it didn’t last. The fact of the matter was that I couldn’t just cease loving her. My love wasn’t like a stove that could be turned on and off. It was a seed that had been planted years before, a living thing that had taken root. At night as I lay in bed I relived every moment of our weeks together in my head. Sometimes I cried, other times I asked the darkness why, but mostly, on the verge of sleep, I thought about what it would be like to be with her again and gradually became determined that I would win her back. That all that was required was to prove to her that she was mistaken. That she could love me as I loved her. After all, hadn’t I seen it in her eyes as we made love, heard her whispered words of endearment, felt the caress of her fingers, the radiance in her smile? I was sure I had, and I knew I would see her again.

It was a week or so after she left that I returned to the compound. If I couldn’t see her, being in her home, surrounded by her family, was a poor but necessary substitute. There, at least, I could console myself with the memory of her, easing the sting of her absence even if it kept the wound fresh.

And Aurelio was glad to see me. Soon, I was going every
day. His companionship was palliative. We went on field trips. We painted the sea, the sky. Ripe fields. His canvases were effortless, mine clumsy.

Sometimes I stayed for dinner. Kitty welcomed me as the son of an old family friend. Carmen and Cosmo both largely ignored me. He had a band. He spent hours in his own studio. Every week there seemed to be a new girlfriend, each more gorgeous than the last. When he came to the table he made everyone laugh. He was the family clown, could tell jokes, mimic voices. If he hadn’t been a musician he would have been a terrific comedian.

Carmen sunned herself by the pool, attended by a constant stream of young men and equally pretty girls. Then they would all drive off somewhere. Parties that I was never invited to in houses where parents were away.

After Labor Day I returned to school. Even though I had promised myself that I wouldn’t, in a moment of weakness I wrote a letter to Cesca at her address in the city. In it I wrote that I would be back in New York over Christmas and maybe I could see her then if she was around.

I knew enough to realize there was no point in remonstrating with her, asking why she had done what she did or the way she did it. People are the way they are. You have to take them or leave them, and I wasn’t ready to leave her yet. Like a traveler to Shangri-la, I had discovered a new world, and, having lost it, all I could think of was how to return. I wished her good luck at Barnard and signed it “with love.”

Of course, I never heard back.

T
HERE IS AN OIL PAINTING ON MY WALL NOW OF SAMPANS
on a pearlescent river. They could be Chinese but just as easily Thai. There are nine sampans in all, very small. I don’t know who painted it, but I have spent many hours staring at it, wondering about the lives of the people on the boats, where they are going, where they’ve been. Do they know each other? Are they in competition?

Two seem to be chatting in a friendly manner. Maybe they’re related. I have made up a story that a man in one of the boats is in love with a woman in another. She is young, bareheaded, alone, possibly a widow. Her face would be weathered but there would be traces of an early loveliness. She is also obviously quite tough or else she couldn’t operate that sampan by herself and survive. It is easy to see why someone would fall in love with her. But she is torn between having her independence and subjugating herself to a man. If she were to marry again, he would have to be strong but also understanding. Someone who loved her for herself, not for her strong back or child-birthing potential. She has noticed
the man in the other sampan stare at her. He seems like a decent man, but she cannot tell. A hard worker like her, but what would he really be like? Her first husband had been a brute, and she was not sorry when he drowned. Maybe she is better off on her own, the master of her own fate even if it means a life of loneliness. It is impossible to know. Theirs is a story without consummation. Fixed in time like Keats’s Grecian lovers.

We can never really know another person. A couple can be married for decades and still keep their secrets. The long years before they met. Childhood. Other lovers. Then there are the small things, things not quite remembered, the banal. Rainy days. A childhood room. Fourth of July celebrations. Trips to the dentist. The death of a dog. All the myriad events and encounters that shape our lives, like water flowing over stone.

These are what make us. I have tried to capture Cesca as I knew her. What I experienced firsthand and what I learned, either from her or from those who knew her. Others may not approve of her, may find her too selfish or irresponsible. I have a friend who married a girl that I never liked. She was dull and plump but he adored her. They were very happy together. It doesn’t matter what I thought of her, after all. It is impossible to tell the heart what it should want.

CESCA NEARLY GOT MARRIED HER FIRST YEAR AT
Barnard. There had been a boy, a few years older than she, soon to graduate from business school. He had given her an enormous yellow diamond that had belonged to his grandmother, who was an Astor. Cesca had accepted, amused by the novelty. She liked the idea of being engaged. It was a portal to adulthood. She was always in a hurry. To be first. To define oneself by sweeping gestures and contradictions. She was still young enough then to believe that life was only a series of grand chords.

Kitty told her she was too young for marriage but knew there was nothing she could say to dissuade her daughter. But Izzy also disapproved and promised to intervene. You’re too young, he argued. They were having lunch at his regular table at La Côte Basque. He had invited her to discuss the matter. The waiter discreetly serving the
délices de sole Véronique
. Pouring the Montrachet. Izzy loved his eldest granddaughter but knew she lacked discipline. There was a wild streak in her. It was what made her noble, he thought, but also reckless. This fatal flaw had ruined all his children, although he had enough discipline for them all even if did them no good.

Cesca resisted. She told him that her fiancé had been offered a job at Morgan bank. Marriage was an attractive notion. Like many children of divorced parents, she was torn between her desire for a secure home life and the disbelief that such security was ever possible. She might have moved on from wanting to be the wife of a Catalan pharmacist, but she hadn’t lost the craving for consistency, for a settled life where circumstances could impose a kind of order on her. It was the dream of a child, like wishing for snow at Christmas or a happy ending.

Izzy urged her to wait until after she’d graduated from Barnard. “Then if you want to get married, you’ll have my blessing,” he said. “But maybe by then you’ll change your mind. Think about it. You are destined for bigger things, my dear. Marriage is not yet part of the equation. One day but not yet.”

He pointed out that she still had much to accomplish before she should consider such things. Husbands, after all, were demanding. Children even more so. Would she be able to pursue her dreams? Did she still want to study theater design? He knew the Nederlanders, the theater owners. He could make introductions. If necessary, he would even invest in a show. She would be a triumph. Broadway would beat a path to her door. But only if she remained single.

Izzy’s nature was to expect the exceptional from his offspring, but that also meant he was destined to be disappointed. Like many self-made men, he believed that anything was achievable through the power of hard work and determination. But when his children inevitably failed to fulfill his ambitions for them, he kept urging them on.

Roger had been the first. From a young age, Izzy had set him such a high bar that it would have been nearly impossible to succeed. Not for any son of Izzy Baum was it good enough to simply do well or lead a productive life. No, from Izzy there was always the constant pressure to be great. “You can be great!” he would tell Roger, and later his grandchildren, even my father. “You can be great!” And he meant it too. With his scrapper’s will, he truly believed that greatness was attainable with enough effort and encouragement.

In his own way, he had become great, but he never thought so. He knew he had become a success, had money and houses and the trappings of wealth, but those were not great things to him. They were simply the benefits of a lifetime of toil, combined with a certain pecuniary cunning. By the time his children had come along, he no longer aspired to greatness for himself, but he believed he could give Roger the tools to become great. More than power and influence, that would be Izzy’s ultimate reward. To be pointed at and hear said, “You see that man, Izzy Baum? He’s the father of Roger Baum.” Nothing would have been sweeter to him. This had been his dearest wish since the moment he had first held his son, amazed by the pink-skinned perfection of the boy.

So he gave Roger all the advantages he had never had. Private schools. Lessons in French, riding, and sailing. Extra tutoring in geometry. He would invite different men—corporation presidents, politicians, college professors, architects, artists, doctors—for dinner at the palatial house on East Sixty-Eighth Street and
have his son sit with them to absorb their knowledge. And at the end of every evening, Izzy would stop by Roger’s room and, as the boy was drifting off to sleep, would ask, “Did you learn anything tonight?”

“Yes, Papa,” was the answer.

“You will be great!” repeated his father, stroking the boy’s hair. “I know it.”

And as the boy grew, Izzy kept an eye on him, wondering what shape the spark of genius would take. Would he become a scientist, a doctor, a poet, a political leader? The first Jewish president even? Anything was possible. Unlike his own father, Izzy was irreligious. He had no ambitions for his son to grow up to become a rabbi or Talmudic scholar. His years in the business world had taught him that the only thing to believe in was oneself. But he wouldn’t have minded if Roger became a university professor or even a critic. It did not matter if his profession of choice was lucrative or merely consequential. After all, he did not have to worry about sullying his hands with labor. Money would never be an issue for Roger. Izzy had already drawn up with his lawyers extremely generous trusts for each of his children, but his real hope was with Roger.

And for years that hope appeared to be well founded. During Roger’s prep school years, he was a star, winning prizes in a wide range of academic and athletic pursuits. He was captain of his football team and president of his student body. Boys liked him, and girls found him exciting. Even his teachers, normally so jaded by the constant change of faces every year, envisioned great things for him. When Roger graduated from private school in New York, Izzy threw a huge party at the Stork Club to celebrate. Eddie Fisher sang, and among the luminaries in attendance were the mayor of New York, Ernest Hemingway, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Rocky Marciano, and Jackie Gleason. It
was covered in the
Times
. Roger’s graduation present from Izzy was a Jaguar roadster.

Izzy would continually send letters to Roger, citing recent remarkable actions he considered of the same caliber as the ones that would one day redound to him. Of particular interest at one point was Dr. Salk, and during this time Izzy actively encouraged Roger to identify other diseases that might be cured as well.
Just think of it,
he would write,
one day to be mentioned in the same breath as Jonas Salk. You can do it! With your brains and my money, there’s no reason you can’t find a cure to any of the terrible diseases currently afflicting the globe. Have you thought about changing your studies to science or even medicine? If so, I will have a word with the president immediately. Should you decide to pursue this course of action, I might even see my way clear to donating a new laboratory
.

If Izzy had actually left Roger alone, it is entirely possible that his own intelligence and inborn abilities would have assured him of a good, if not a great life. But Izzy couldn’t help meddling. It was in his nature to control.

It was different with Kitty. Izzy had tried to control her too, but, unlike Roger, she rejected him. Even as a child, she fought him. When he said he admired her blue dress, she’d wear the green one. She would come home from school and, instead of doing her homework, would read Nancy Drew stories or listen to programs like
The Romance of Helen Trent
. As she grew older her rebellion manifested itself in her choice of men. She went to Vassar and was nearly kicked out after her freshman year for having a man in her room. By the end of her junior year, she quit school entirely and moved to Paris, where she rented an apartment overlooking the Tuileries and studied painting. She went to nightclubs on the Left Bank and became the mistress of a married politician.

Her father was furious, but he never stopped sending her money every week to the American Express office on Rue
Scribe. In spite of it all, he still doted on his eldest, and nothing could put him in a better mood than a word or a smile from his daughter.

She and my father had even been lovers for a period, although I did not find that out for many years. My father was Roger’s bosom friend, his regular crony. In college they would travel down to New York from Cambridge on Fridays and go to “21” with girls Roger knew, and Roger picked up the tab every time. For many summers, while my father worked first as an intern and then as a young attorney at various Manhattan law firms, he would come out most weekends to stay with the Baums, his first introduction to the East End of Long Island. He thought it was paradise. Izzy liked to live well and enjoyed sharing his pleasures with the people he loved.

Some nights, if she was alone, Kitty would knock on my father’s door. The first time it had happened my father was startled. She was his friend’s sister, and Izzy’s daughter. “Don’t be silly,” she said, unhooking her bra. “Look, do you want to or not?” Afterward, she said, “I’m not interested in dating you, Mitch. You’re cute, but you’re not really my type. If there was another man here, it just might as well have been him.” Over the course of that summer, whenever they both happened to be in the house, she would knock again if she felt like it, and she usually did. Occasionally, at dinner, when no one was watching, she’d slip her hand onto his thigh. For my father, it was like living in a French novel.

If Roger had too much of his father’s attention and Kitty scorned it, the youngest, Dorothy, was virtually ignored. Prettier than her sister and more delicate, Dot was treated like a doll by her father. He never made demands of her, never expected much of anything from her. She, in turn, tried everything she could to please him, to not have him treat her like a baby. In
the end the only thing she could do was shock him. She took lovers. Drugs. Dabbled in left-wing politics. Became a hippie. Lived on an ashram. Protested the war. She wasn’t married. Didn’t have children. Apparently my father also slept with her.

Like an old jockey training for a last race, Izzy was not yet ready to give up. He was determined that one of his descendants would be great. Nothing was more important to him. He would spend whatever it took. It was a pact he had made with a god he didn’t believe in. You make me rich, Lord, and I’ll make someone great, someone who can give back, who can make the world a better place. Who can be a better person than I. Even if his own children would never be great, there were still Kitty’s children. If he couldn’t succeed with his own, he would make one of them great. But now he was an old man. He might not live long enough to know what his grandchildren could, or could not, achieve.

Sitting at lunch, Cesca knew her grandfather would give her the old speech about how she could be great. She had heard it all before. But unlike some, she actually believed she could be great. She already knew that Aurelio would become a great painter. That Cosmo would become a great musician. Carmen was brilliant as well as beautiful. She could be anything.

Cesca just didn’t know what direction her own life would take. There was so much that impassioned her but not any one thing more than another. From a young age she had learned how to draw, but she never felt the same love for it that Aurelio did.

Yes, she could do theater design, as Izzy suggested, but there were other things that interested her too. Fashion, for example. She had always been told what a good eye she had. And what if there was something out there that she hadn’t come across that was to be her destiny? To commit to one thing now would be a mistake. She couldn’t afford not to be ready when it announced
itself. If only she could be sure. What she needed was a sign. In the meantime, why not marry? If she was destined to be great, what did it matter whether she was married or single?