Girl in the Moonlight (9 page)

The days melted into one another as I began to have an understanding of myself, no longer as son or student or teammate, but as someone apart. This, I said silently, this is what I want. To watch as something beautiful emerges on a blank page, to get something right, to make a mistake and go back and try again. It was like the thrilling early days of love, when everything is possible.

A
S THE END OF SUMMER NEARED, I WAS INVITED TO A FAREWELL
dinner for Aurelio. He was returning to Barcelona in a few days. Cosmo was the cook. He was one of those people who seemed to be good at everything. Good student, star athlete. Once I had been leaving Aurelio’s studio, and I heard piano music. I followed it to the main house. There, through an open window, I could see and hear Cosmo playing, his head bowed in concentration, the fingers flying over the keyboard, the notes lingering in the air. For several moments, I stood there mesmerized. Finally, I had to remove myself, concerned he might suddenly stop and see me.

At the dinner were Izzy and Ruth Baum, looking older and frailer, Paolo and Esther, Roger, Dot, Kitty, and Randall. All the Bonet children, of course, and a few of their friends. I felt flattered to be asked.

Cesca was dating a tall, handsome Greek named Pavlos, who lived in Southampton. He wore a gold chain around his neck and a heavy mustache and drove a vintage Maserati. I had
never been so close to a car like that before. I couldn’t help admiring its sleek design, the polished wooden steering wheel and leather seats. “How are you, Wylie?” asked Cesca, her hand on my forearm. Her voice familiarly raspy. I had barely seen her. She appeared always to be in motion, elusive as music from another room.

She was wearing a white peasant-style blouse with embroidery in the front, showing off her deep tan. It hung off her shoulders, revealing her clavicle. “I like your hair longer,” she said. I had been letting it grow. She reached out and touched the back of my head. “So handsome.” She talked to me now the way an adult does to a child or a horse. I resented her trying to keep putting distance between us. Did she regret our time together so much? “Aurelio says you’ve been seeing a lot of Paolo. He’s a friend of Pare’s, you know.”

I nodded my head. We were standing out on the porch. She was smoking and held a wineglass in her other hand. I had drunk nothing so far. The police had started cracking down on drinking and driving.

“They all knew each other in Paris,” she continued. “Have you ever been to Paris, Wylie?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You should. I’d be happy to give you names of people there.”

“Thank you. I’d like to go.” What I really wanted to say was: I’d like to go with you. She would wear a kerchief around her head, shop in the little stores along cobblestoned side streets, in the evening we’d have aperitifs at a sidewalk café. I would paint. Every night we’d make love in our small bed. We’d be together again. Like before.

“Let me see your sketchbook,” she said, removing it from my back pocket. I didn’t try to stop her even if I could have. She put her glass down on the railing and flipped through the pages. “Not bad.”

“Thank you.”

“You should draw me sometime.” It was part invitation, part challenge.

“When?”

“Why not now? I’m an artist’s daughter. I know how to pose.” Taking me by the hand, she led me to a small white metal table with several chairs scattered around. “You sit there, and I’ll sit here.” She leaned back in her chair, took a final drag of her cigarette, stabbed it out in the ashtray, and, finishing her wine, winked at me. “Okay. Ready when you are.”

Portraits are very difficult. Paolo had told me: “To do a good portrait of someone, you must either draw them hundreds of times or know them for hundreds of years.” There is a difference between capturing a likeness on paper and capturing a person. The former requires skill, which is hard enough in itself, but the other requires knowledge, which is even harder. More challenging still is to draw someone you are in love with.

“Mind if I scratch my nose?” Cesca asked after ten minutes. I nodded my head and reviewed what I had so far. It was not terrible. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t ask to see it until you’re done.”

I continued to draw her. It is an extraordinary freedom to be able to sit and stare without fear of being caught at someone who you love but who may not love you back. The eye can linger over every facet of their face, the planes of their shoulders, a nostril’s delicateness, the curve of an ear, traveling wherever it wants. To a bare knee, a slender calf, the rise of a breast. To hands joined together on a lap. Occasionally your eyes will travel to theirs and meet, and, for a few seconds, there is an exquisite, unspoken intimacy.

“You know, Wylie . . .” she began to say.

“There you are,” cried a voice behind us, shattering the moment. Cesca smiled as Pavlos walked up. “I’ve been looking
for you.” He had no accent. His father was Greek, his mother American, I learned later. He was raised in New York but worked for the family business. They owned an island in the Aegean.

“Wylie’s almost finished,” said Cesca.

Pavlos looked over my shoulder. “Hmm. Yeah. Not bad.”

He took the book from my hand without asking and showed it to Cesca. “See? It almost looks like you.”

The drawing was incomplete, I wanted to say. I needed more time. I was furious with Pavlos but said nothing.

“I love it,” said Cesca. She stood up and bent over to give me a kiss on the cheek. “May I keep it?”

“But it’s not finished.”

“I’m getting stiff from sitting. Can we finish another time?”

“Only if you let me come back and do it again. I can do a better job.”

Before she could answer, Pavlos came up and said, “Come on, babe. It’s dinnertime.” As he led her inside, she turned back to look at me, mouthing a silent “Thank you.”

The rest of the evening passed in a haze. Like an opium eater, I knew it was important not to overdose. I kept clear of Cesca, exchanging only occasional glances with her. Just being in the same room was exhilarating. But it was also painful watching her sit close to Pavlos, his hands on her. I tried to ignore it, to rise above it, and to show her that I was the better man. So I performed for her, chatting with everyone, making them laugh. Izzy and Ruth, whom I respectfully referred to as Mr. Baum and Mrs. Baum, even though the family referred to them as Gog and Bushka. Paolo and Esther.

At dinner I sat next to Carmen, who normally was so reserved, but I managed to entertain her with a few jokes. She was going to be a senior in high school next year and was trying to decide whether she should go to Harvard or Oxford. She
already knew she wanted to be a doctor. On my other side was Dot, who drank too much, and at one point put her hand on my thigh under the table.

After the dishes were cleared, Aurelio rose to make a toast. He thanked everyone. His mother first. Then his grandparents. To my surprise, he also thanked me. We all said “Salut” and took a sip of wine.

Roger found me. He was as jovial as always. Yvette and he had split up. His hair was turning gray. He asked after me. About school. As always, he expressed himself with his hands as much as his voice. He could not help touching the people he talked with. It was a trait the whole family shared. Constantly roaming over people’s shoulders, patting a knee. He was a little drunk, and his eyes were glassy. “Good, good,” he said in response to my answers to his questions. He also asked after my father. They were no longer as close as they had been.

“Tell Mitch I said hello. It’s been too long since I saw him. Tell him I miss him.” He had a pained look in his eye that focused in for a moment and then disappeared. “What about girls?” he asked, changing the subject. “Bet a handsome young man like you must have plenty of girls. You should have seen your old man. He was a real pussy hound.”

Aurelio came up. “Take a walk?” he asked.

I said good night to Roger and promised I’d tell my father to give him a call. I looked around for Cesca, but I didn’t see her. She must have left while I was talking with Roger. Disappointed, I followed Aurelio outside. He had a bottle of wine and offered it to me.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” he said, as we walked under the stars. “I will miss you.”

“I will miss you too.”

“You know, you are one of my only friends.”

This surprised me. He had the gift of friendship. People were drawn to him. Men, women, old, young. I had seen it. His charm and his soulful eyes. It was easy to like him.

“Why do you say that?”

“I know many people, but that doesn’t mean they are my friends. Or that I respect them. I respect very few people. Almost none my own age—except for my family, of course. That is why I suppose I prefer older people like Paolo and Esther. You are one of the only young people I have met whom I respect.”

I said nothing. “That’s just it,” he continued. “You know when to be quiet. When to say nothing. You are content to just accept things as they come and learn from them. That is very difficult. It takes people lifetimes to do that, but to you it comes naturally.”

I had never looked at it that way. To me, it was simply shyness or good manners. My mother always told me that people don’t like someone who talks too much. I was, however, pleased that Aurelio thought so highly of me. He was certainly the only person around my age whom I respected greatly. I had other friends—classmates and former classmates. Fellow oarsmen. I was even moderately popular. At least no one seemed to actively object to my presence. But none of them knew of my interest in art or understood it so perfectly. Even the girls I had dated knew nothing of my ambitions, thinking instead that I was destined for a nice, safe, normal career like the rest of my peers.

I thanked Aurelio and took another drink of the wine. We were sitting now on the same stretch of beach where I had gone swimming with Cesca the year before. The moon shone above the water.

The memory was bittersweet, and I probably drank more of the wine than I should have. We talked about Barcelona, art school, the insidious effect that money had on the art world—one of his recurrent themes—the importance of creating something
beautiful not for fame or reward but for the thing itself. Aurelio did most of the talking. I mainly sat there thinking about Cesca and getting drunk. I desperately wanted to talk about Cesca, in the annoying way that young men feel compelled to share their romantic aspirations, but every time the subject was on my lips I said nothing. He was her brother after all. His first loyalties lay there.

At one point I lay down on the sand, listening to the waves gently lap the shore, staring up at the stars, feeling at peace. It was good to have a friend like this, I reflected. I was so grateful to him, for his companionship, his encouragement. And for introducing me to Paolo and Esther. The future seemed a little clearer. Maybe Cesca would also be there in some way. I couldn’t see it yet, but it was a nice thought. Aurelio talked on.

“I love you,” he said, disturbing my reverie.

These were not words I was accustomed to hearing, especially from a man. My mother had said them to me when I was a child, tucking me into bed with a kiss on the forehead. Or as a form of apology or to soften the blow of a punishment. “You know I love you, but . . .” That was how my father spoke to me, throwing the phrase out in passing, as though it would be embarrassing not to adumbrate it with a qualification, avoiding any whiff of sentimentality. I took it for granted that my parents loved me, as I loved them, but we were not a family given to regularly professing our affection for one another.

Certainly I had never heard these words uttered to me by a girl of my own age, even if I did yearn to use them myself and hear them reciprocated. Most of all from Cesca. When we were together I had told her that I loved her and had felt in her touch what I believed to be love, but the words never came. Sometimes she would pretend not to hear me, other times she would stroke my head and say, “Thank you, Wylie.”

I was unsure how to respond to Aurelio. Maybe in Europe
it was more conventional, like topless sunbathing. Didn’t French men kiss each other on the cheek? I didn’t want to insult him.

“I—I love you too,” I said, meaning that I felt deep affection for him, which was the truth.

He put his hand on mine. It was dark, and I could barely see him, but I heard him shift closer to me. Felt his breath on my face.

I stood up, and he pulled away.

“I have to go,” I said, stumbling back over the dunes, wanting to get as far away as possible.

“Wylie, come back,” he called.

I didn’t listen. I had heard about guys like that. We made fun of them. They compromised us. But I was young then and didn’t know that love could take more than one form.

I
AVOIDED THE BONETS AFTER WHAT HAPPENED THAT
night with Aurelio. That meant I never finished my drawing of Cesca, though it remained in my sketchbook. That whole year I would go back and stare at the unfinished drawing of Cesca I had made that night. While I had soon filled up my first sketchbook and had worked my way through several more, like a postulant with a favorite psalm I would return almost nightly to the portrait of Cesca. I had sketched the broad outline of her face and hair but only finished one of the eyes. It stared at me, beautiful and restless. The rest of her features were ghostly, lightly penciled in, the mischievous smile just barely perceptible, the dark hair only a vague mass. It was far from a perfect likeness but it was all I had.

There were other concerns that year. After I had returned to boarding school in the fall for my senior year, my mother went to my father and told him she wanted a divorce. The news had come as a surprise to both him and me. I had never thought of my parents as particularly unhappy. But I had never really
thought of them as particularly happy either. In the selfish way of children, I had just assumed that nothing would come along to disturb my world. Other children’s parents might get divorced but not mine.

But my mother was unhappy. Unlike my father, who was naturally gregarious, she didn’t have many friends, and during the summers her days, especially the ones when my father was working in the city, were lonely ones. She was southern and missed her home, her friends and family, and did not like many of my father’s associates. She found them ill-mannered and their humor crude. Their women were loud and overdressed. She was like a cat living in a nation of dogs.

When I was a child she was my best friend. We would raid vegetable stands together, hunt for frogs in the mud, dig holes in the backyard, attack the local beach on our bikes. She, not my father, was the one who taught me how to bait a hook and catch crabs with a chicken leg. How to bodysurf. During summer weeks she would sit out on the back porch with her vodka and cigarettes, my absent father’s chair unoccupied until the weekend, while I played on the floor with my impressive collection of toy tanks. She would tell me stories about her family, about her own childhood. Memories of faded plantations and foxhunting, large Christmas parties and sledding in Richmond during rare but ecstatic snows. About her father, who was a hero in the war and had been killed at Saint-Lô. On her desk was a black-and-white photograph of him, handsome in his captain’s uniform. She kept the Silver Star that had been posthumously awarded him in its box in the top drawer of her little writing desk.

My father was crushed by her demand. He had felt that the marriage was a success. That they were as happy as ever. “That’s the point, Mitch,” she had sighed. She was not vindictive, though, letting him hold on to the East Hampton house while she kept the New York apartment. This she would soon
sell in order to return to Virginia. My father, meanwhile, was living in a small rental apartment near Beekman, but I never saw it. The rest of the details, the process of cutting away the dead tissue from the live, were spared me.

I did have a single visit from my father late that fall. He appeared unannounced at my school on a Saturday and took me out to lunch at the local inn, where instead of eating he just alternated between saying how much he still loved my mother and telling me how she was a bitch who had ruined his life. Naturally, I couldn’t agree with him but sat there nodding, letting his anger wash over me, sensing the pain of his wounded pride, the wreckage of his life. It was only years later that I learned of his affairs.

I was spending my first Christmas break after the divorce at our soon-to-be-sold apartment with my mother when I ran into Cesca at a New Year’s Eve party. She was on her way out with a group of people as I was coming in. “Wylie,” she exclaimed. “How wonderful to see you. We’re late for another party. Give me a call. Happy New Year!”

I took her at her word and called the number late in the afternoon on the first. The phone rang four or five times before an unfamiliar voice answered “Bonet residence.”

“Good afternoon. Is Cesca there?”

“Miss Cesca no here.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“She be back later.”

I debated leaving a message but decided against it.

“Thank you. I’ll call back later.”

When I did call back, the same voice answered. It was around seven o’clock. The time after naps and before dinner, at least in Manhattan.

The voice on the other end said, “You wait. I see if she here.”

“Please tell her it’s Wylie.”

I waited several minutes before Cesca came on the line. “Hello? Wylie?”

“Hi. Yes, it’s me. Sorry to bother you. You did say that I should give you a call.”

“Look, I have to run out.”

“I was hoping I could see you.”

“I don’t know. I’m very busy.”

“Please? I have to go back to school soon.”

She sighed. “Okay. Tell you what, can you come downtown tomorrow around four? I know a little café.”

“Great. Where?” She gave me an address on Waverly Place.

I arrived early. The café was dark and smoky inside. The walls held faded photographs of long-dead opera singers. I sat at a small empty table in a corner. A waiter approached. I didn’t know what a cappuccino or latté was, so I just ordered a cup of coffee. “American or French?” the waiter asked. “American,” I answered, unsure of the difference.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. There was no sign of Cesca. I wondered if I should call her from the pay phone on the wall. Even if I could remember her number, I debated whether it would do any good. If she were coming, she would have already left. The thought that she might not come depressed me. I felt foolish and then slightly angry, at myself for thinking she would be interested in seeing me and at her for letting me think it.

I had finished my second cup of coffee and was about to leave when Cesca walked in. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, giving me a quick kiss before sitting down.

She was wearing a long oatmeal-colored sheepskin coat, blue jeans, and Frye boots. Her head was covered by a light wool cap. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold.

“It’s been a crazy day,” she said, taking off her cap and shaking her hair out, an act that cut me like a knife. There was a simplicity and naturalness about her that made her even more
beautiful. The waiter hurried over. She stood to give him a kiss. “Ciao, Danny,” she said. She asked him to bring her a cappuccino and took a pack of Marlboros from her purse.

“So how are you?” she asked.

She was like that and knew it was easy to forgive her. Her presence exonerated her.

I told her about school, painting, applying to college, my parents’ divorce. She was empathetic, recalling her own parents’ divorce. “It was hard at first,” she told me, then shrugged. “My father was never around much anyway, so it didn’t really seem all that different at first. You’ll learn.”

I asked her about herself. She was taking time off from Barnard. Maybe she would not go back to college after all. She was thinking about transferring to an art school. Somewhere that offered a degree. Possibly Parsons or SVA. Maybe London. She had heard good things about Saint Martins. Or maybe the Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was a big decision.

I was envious of her opportunity, wishing I was in a position to alter my life the same way. I would be going to college in the fall. If I told my parents I wanted to go to art school, they would oppose it. My father because he would think it was a stupid, airy-fairy idea—and he’d be damned if he was going to pay for it. My mother because it wasn’t what one did, dear.

I told Cesca this, and she laughed. “We don’t have that problem in our family,” she said. “My grandfather would love it if we became artists. Or actors. Or anything. Aurelio will become a great painter,” she said. “Cosmo a great composer.”

What about her? I asked.

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe a set designer. Maybe a painter. Whatever it is, I’ll be great at it.” She laughed and looked at her watch. “I have to go.”

She put down her cup and opened her purse. “No, please,” I said, fishing around in the pockets of my khakis for my money.
“Let me.” We’d barely been talking for half an hour. I didn’t want it to end. “Please don’t go just yet,” I pleaded.

She gave me a sympathetic but resigned smile. “I have to go, Wylie. Another time.”

“Wait, one second. Can I ask you something? It’s important. It’s about Aurelio.”

She resumed her seat. “What is it?”

“Um, I don’t know quite how to say this.”

“Say what?”

“Aurelio. Is he, I mean, does he like girls?”

She laughed. “Of course he likes girls. Why do you ask?”

I blushed. “I just wondered. He, um . . .” But I couldn’t finish.

She looked at me evenly and leaned in, smiling. “He also likes boys,” she whispered. “I think he’d do it with a turnip if he was attracted to it.”

I sat back and took this in. It was not information I wanted to hear, but I supposed it was better, if only slightly, than the alternative.

“You look confused,” she said.

I nodded my head. “I am confused.”

“Why?”

I proceeded to tell her about what had happened on the beach. How surprised and angry I had been.

“I can understand that,” she said. “I hope you forgave him.”

“That’s just it. I don’t know if I can.”

“Of course, you should. He’s still Lio.”

“Yeah, but he’s a guy. He shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing at all. I freaked out, you know? I haven’t seen him since, and I don’t know if I want to.”

She looked at me, her dark eyes amused, bold. “So what if he made a little pass at you? You’re lovely. I don’t remember you complaining when I did it.”

I looked away, embarrassed and annoyed. I didn’t want to discuss what had happened between us quite so casually.

She laughed. “Don’t be too hard on Lio. He’s a sweetheart. He didn’t mean anything by it. I know how fond he is of you.” She stood up. “Look, I really have to go. How long are you in New York for?”

I told her. Only three more days and then back to school.

“I’m going skiing in Utah tomorrow so I probably won’t see you before you leave. But you’ll be back out next summer, right? And if Lio’s around, I hope he won’t freak you out too much.”

She bent over and gave me a kiss, not on the cheek, but this time, to my surprise, on the lips, lingering just a second longer than necessary. The softness of her lips, their warmth; I remember them still. Standing up, she ran her fingers through my hair. “So handsome,” she said. “I’ll see you in the summer, okay?
Adéu
.”

BUT I DIDN
’
T SEE HER THAT SUMMER. I DID, HOWEVER, SEE
Aurelio.

It was at Paolo and Esther’s. I was living with my father, once again working as a carpenter and painting in the evenings, but I still went to see them every Saturday. Paolo would critique my work while Esther fed us. Most days I would help in the garden, planting or weeding. Sometimes Paolo and I would walk to the beach, where he would make fantastic sand sculptures and flirt with the pretty girls. Once, a beautiful blond woman in a bikini rode by on a horse. I had never seen him so excited. He walked up to her.
“Ciao, bella donna,”
he cooed in his heavy accent. “You are a goddess, no? Come and sit with us miserable mortals and tell us what it is like up in heaven.”

To my astonishment, she dismounted and sat with us, and
for an hour she helped Paolo with one of his sculptures while the horse wandered about in the background, nibbling on beach grass. Paolo kept her laughing with a running string of stories and compliments. It was a delicious moment. He was at that age when a man can charm a woman without being a threat. Certainly if he had been younger, he would have charmed her right into bed. With his short legs and handsome face, he never failed to remind me of a satyr.

I always felt honored when Esther asked me to stay with them for dinner. There would often be other guests coming. Other artists, a magazine writer and his wife. A famous photographer. Novelists. Everyone gathered outside, where the slanting sunlight glinted against the leaves of the trees. People of all ages. White-haired lions of the Abstract Expressionist movement with scarves around their necks, pretty girls in strapless dresses. Paolo and Esther’s son, Gianni, and daughter, Ginevra, were there with their families; a three-year-old grandchild running naked through the garden squealing with laughter. There is nothing like a party at the home of an artist. Esther was cooking a seafood stew in the outdoor oven in a large copper pot: squid, fluke, cod, striped bass, and monkfish. “Mon-key fish,” as Paolo called it.

Tables had been laid under the arbor, and lanterns had been lit in the branches. We were all about to sit down when a lone figure appeared at my side. It was Aurelio. I had not seen him since that night.

“Hello, Wylie,” he said.

“Hello.”

“How are you?”

“Good. And you? When did you get back?”

“A week ago. It’s good to see you.”

I said nothing.

“Look, about what happened,” he continued.

“Forget it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He broke into a huge smile. “I am glad. I’ve thought about you often. You must come over tomorrow. I have many things to show you.”

It was impossible for me to remain angry with him. I remembered what Cesca had told me about him. He was still my friend. We talked about Barcelona. Art School. How beautiful it was. How fine the people were. I asked after his family. After Cesca.

“She hasn’t been here this summer,” he told me. “She’s somewhere in Europe right now but she’s threatening to go to art school in London. I hope she does. She’s much more talented than she gives herself credit for.”

“What do you mean?”

“She draws quite beautifully but she’s very secretive about it. When she was a little girl she’d always be drawing in a corner and when Pare asked to see it she’d try to hide whatever it was she was working on. He could be critical, you see. He’d say things like ‘That leg is too long,’ and he’d be right, but she’d start crying anyway. She hates criticism. Always has.”