Maybe the Moon (10 page)

When she excused herself and flapped out of the building in search of a missing lens, Neil ambled down to the stage and took a seat next to me on the wobbly plywood.

“Is this safe?” he asked.

It took me a while to realize he meant the stage. “Is anything?” I replied.

He laughed. “You got that right.”

I asked him how it had looked.

“Well…it’s hard to tell, of course, without the music behind it.”

I grunted. “Yeah, well…I’m not holding my breath for MTV.”

He smiled.

“Or public access, for that matter.”

“You wanna bail out?”

I told him I was OK about it. There was only one more day, I said, and Janet’s poignant little film, whatever its quality, would work as a résumé I could show to producers. I was a good sport about it for Neil’s sake, since he’d had such high hopes for the pro
ject and seemed even more let down by Janet than I was. I also wanted him to see me as a nice person, someone far too magnanimous to pull a prima donna number, however justified, on some ditzy film student. I cared what he thought about me, I guess. Care. Present tense.

“She’s not usually this way,” he said.

I asked him where he’d met her.

“She was a friend of my ex-wife’s.”

I nodded soberly. “And you got her in the divorce.”

He smiled. “Not exactly. I ran into her on the street, and she told me what she was doing at AFI. She sounded so together about it.”

“Oh, well,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we should fix her up with Tread.”

He laughed. “He could use some of her energy.”

I told him not to mistake panic for energy.

“Panic?” Hieroglyphics formed on his forehead. “About the shoot, you mean?”

“About me.”

This seemed to rattle him. “I dunno, Cady. She’s pretty cool.”

“She may be,” I told him pleasantly. “But she’s also in the throes of dwarf panic.”

“But she was fine when we saw her before.”

“Sure,” I said. “And then she had a week to think about it. I’ve seen the pattern, Neil. I’ve known too many women like her.”

“You really think so?”

“Yeah, I do.”

He asked if it was always women.

“Women empathize,” I said. “Some of them do it too much. ‘There, but for the grace of God…’ and all that. Janet looks at me and sees herself and can’t take it. She has to get away from it as fast as she can.” I smiled at him. “You must’ve noticed. She’s been running her little buns off all morning.”

Neil didn’t respond, just nodded blankly for a moment, then
smiled at something in the distance. Turning, I saw that Janet had returned.

“Find what you need?” Neil asked.

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry, people. I was sure I’d brought it.”

“No problem.” Neil and I actually said this together, like a couple of cats who’d just shared a canary. I hoped Janet hadn’t heard my quickie analysis of her behavior, since it would only heighten her guilt, and she had way too much already. I found her exasperating, of course, but I knew she was doing her best, so there was no point in getting mean about it.

When you’re my size and not being tormented by elevator buttons, water fountains, and ATMs, you spend your life accommodating the sensibilities of “normal” people. You learn to bury your own feelings and honor theirs in the hope that they’ll meet you halfway. It becomes your job, and yours alone, to explain, to ignore, to forgive—over and over again. There’s no way you can get around this. You do it if you want to have a life and not spend it being corroded by your own anger. You do it if you want to belong to the human race.

“How are you?” Janet’s voice was just a tad too loud to be natural. “You must be tired.”

I told her I was fine.

“I can run out for coffee or something…”

“I think we should just finish up,” I said.

“Oh…OK.”

Neil bounded to his feet, making the little stage wobble a bit. “I’ll get out of the way.”

“I like what you did there,” I said. “Those slanting beams.”

“Oh…me?” Janet was so cranked up that the compliment had flown right past her. She wheeled around like a confused crane and examined the delicate play of light and shadow on the wall behind us. “Really? You think so?”

I told her it reminded me of those long shadows on the buildings in
The Third Man
.

“Well…” She allowed herself a quick shutter-flash of a smile
and blushed violently. “That’s really nice, but I’m not sure it’s…Did you notice the latticework up at the top?”

I told her that I had, and that it must look wonderful in black and white.

“Oh, it does,” she said. “I mean, I hope. Would you like to see?” I’m sure she hadn’t considered the logistics of this exercise before making the offer, because she suddenly looked flustered again. “Unless…”

“Neil can give me a boost,” I assured her.

“Oh, well, then…if you’d really like…”

So Neil helped me down off the stage and held me in his arms long enough for me to look through the lens at Janet’s handiwork. Janet served as my stand-in, sitting cross-legged where I had stood, so I could see how the light would fall on my face. It was quite an effect, all right—starkly dramatic and spare—yet not nearly as memorable as the warm mahogany of Neil’s flesh through the nubby roughness of that white cotton sweater.

“Do they teach you that at AFI?” I asked Janet, after Neil had set me down.

“What?”

“Lighting. You seem to have a knack for it.”

“Oh…no. Well, yeah…some.”

“It’s amazing that you can do that with natural light.”

Janet looked at it again for a while, then back at me, a little calmer now that I had shifted the focus onto her work. In some ways, I think she was seeing me for the first time. “I’m so glad you like it,” she said.

Neil and I held a postmortem on the way back to the Valley.

“She might surprise us,” he said.

I agreed that she might and left it at that.

“I hope you aren’t pissed,” he said.

“About what?”

“That I roped you into this.”

I gave him a stern, half-lidded look and told him I was never roped into anything.

“Still,” he said.

I asked if his ex-wife was like Janet.

“No.” He turned and looked at me. “Why?”

“Well, you said they were friends, so I just wondered how much they have in common.”

“Not much,” he said. “Linda was organized. Is organized. That must be why Janet appealed to her. Another messy life to tidy up.”

“Did she tidy up yours?”

“As much as she could.”

“Is that why you broke up?”

“Not entirely.”

“What else?”

He seemed to resist for a moment, then said: “Are you scouting for Oprah or something?”

“No, but pretend I am.”

“She wasn’t much on romance,” he offered.

“Didn’t bring you roses?”

He shook his head. “Or expect them to be brought.”

“Ooh,” I said. “That
is
a problem.”

“It got to be.”

My teasing had begun to unsettle him, so I veered away from the tender spot. “Was she in show business?”

He shook his head. “Hospital administration.”

Immediately I pictured this chilly bitch with a clipboard; make that chilly
stupid
bitch with a clipboard, since she’d let Neil get away. I asked him how he’d met her.

“At Tahoe. When I played piano in a show lounge.”

“And she was a tourist?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

“For a while, yeah, I was.”

“You don’t sound that much alike.”

“We aren’t.”

I would have felt much better if he’d said “We weren’t,” but I didn’t remark on it. It was getting clearer all the time that Linda still weighed heavily on Neil’s mind, for whatever reason. “What did you love about her?” I asked.

He thought about that for a moment and then shrugged. “She made me feel talented.”

“You are talented.”

He smiled sleepily. “Not that talented.”

“She liked the way you played piano?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“No,” he said. “Unless it’s all there is.”

“Well…yeah.”

“There was more to it than that,” he said. “I’m making it simpler than it is. I was young then. I needed somebody to believe in me. My family wasn’t great at it.”

I asked him how long he’d been divorced.

“Almost two years.”

“Why don’t you see other women, then?”

Boy, did
that
rattle him. “Why are you so sure I don’t?”

“Do you?”

“Some. When I can. The job doesn’t make it very easy. And I spend a lot of time with my little boy.”

“Oh, right.”

“I will. I mean, I will more.”

“Will more what?”

“Date more.”

I nodded.

“Do you always pump people this way?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because people always answer me.”

He laughed. “They do?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Wanna see where I live?”

For a moment, I thought he was just being snide, underscoring my nosiness. “Look, I didn’t mean to…”

“No,” he said, “I mean it. Come by for a while.”

“Well…OK. Sometime.”

“What’s wrong with now?”

I couldn’t think of a thing.

He lived on the second floor of a motel-style apartment house in North Hollywood. It was a clean, serviceable place built of rough white bricks and ornamental iron, with a plastic
NOW RENTING
banner flapping noisily in the breeze. The front doors were painted either orange or cobalt blue. On the patch of lawn out front, a small child with red braids sat perfectly still on a yellow plastic trike. As we approached, I noticed the eerie fish-scale sheen of the lawn and realized it was plastic too.

There was an elevator, thank God, so I arrived at his apartment in a state of manageable breathlessness. He lifted me into an armchair in the living room, a pleasant, sunny space that had almost certainly been furnished on a single Saturday morning at Pier One Imports. There was lots of wicker stuff in plums and greens, matchstick shades, a preposterous trio of giant Italian wine jugs. The beige carpet smelled marvelously new. Beyond the sliding glass doors, the railed ledges overlooking the parking lot had been converted into twin ecosystems, rife with jungly potted things. Neil’s seven-year-old son, Danny, who was staying with his mom for the summer, was more than amply commemorated by a photo shrine on top of the TV set. Neil handed me one of the larger pictures to examine: the fruit of his loins seated at an upright piano, grinning infectiously.

“In Daddy’s footsteps, eh?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. If he wants to. I don’t push it.”

“Right.”

“I don’t. My old man did that to me.”

I asked what his father had done for a living.

“Does,” he corrected me. “He’s a pharmacist. In Indianapolis.”

I nodded.

“Puts you right to sleep, doesn’t it? We lived above the pharmacy. It was all he ever talked about. There was no way to get away from it.”

I pictured this wide-eyed, twerpy-voiced little kid sitting glumly among the towering shelves of pills, while a gray-templed patriarch a la James Earl Jones drones on endlessly about the glories of filling prescriptions. “What did he think of you and the piano?” I asked.

“Not much. He got better about it later.” He shrugged. “He came to Tahoe, anyway. Heard me play.”

“Well, that was something.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Something.”

“At least you know what your father looks like,” I said.

He hesitated for a moment, apparently confused, then said: “You don’t remember anything?”

“Well, I remember he existed, but the rest is a blur.”

“You never even saw a picture of him?”

“Nope. Mom just erased him after he left.”

“I see.”

“And believe me, I looked. I used to dig through Mom’s stuff when she was out of the house. She had this special drawer in her dresser—way up high where I couldn’t reach—with all her letters and snapshots and shit. When she went out shopping, I’d drag the step stool out of the kitchen and play detective.”

“But no pictures, huh?”

I shook my head. “The most I ever found was a gift card that said ‘To my darling Teddy.’”

“That was his name?”

I smiled. “Her name. Short for Theodora.”

“Oh.”

“I used to imagine it was from him. I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Oh, sure. Chapman. Sergeant Howard Chapman. At the time, anyway. He left the service just before he left us.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“No. But I used to think Mom did and just wasn’t telling me. One summer when I was about ten, we drove to New York and visited cousins. It was my first trip out of Baker, so Mom made a big fuss about it. Somehow, along the way, I convinced myself that she’d finally found my father and was bringing me to New York for a reunion. There was no evidence for that whatsoever, but that didn’t stop me. When we got to my cousins’ house in Queens, I even checked the phone books and found an H. Chapman in Manhattan. I was sure it was him.”

Neil smiled. “Did you call?”

“Oh, God, no. I wouldn’t have dared. I just thought of it as evidence. In case I worked up the nerve to ask Mom about it.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, but not for a long time. I kept thinking she might spring it on me one night, as a special surprise, when we went out for ice cream or something. We’d get off a bus somewhere and ride an elevator, and there would be the Sergeant. He’d be tall and redheaded and smell like pipe tobacco and be much nicer than we thought he’d be.”

“What made you think he’d be in New York?”

“Go figure. It just seemed like the place fathers would hide. Mom was great about it when I finally asked her. She took me to a deli and bought us big gooey desserts and let me drink coffee for the first time. She said she’d brought me there—to New York, I mean—because she wanted me to see where her family came from. She said she had no idea where my father was and that she wouldn’t take him back even if he did turn up. She said he was a bastard and a coward and she was deeply, truly sorry she hadn’t made that perfectly clear to me earlier.”