Maybe the Moon (11 page)

“How’d you take it?”

“OK, actually. It was kind of a relief.”

“It must have been.”

“It was the way she did it, I guess—from one grownup to another. She made a rite of passage out of it.” I smiled at him while an old reel played in my head. “You know what else I remember about that night?”

“What?”

“Well, Mom went out to flag a cab and left me cash to pay the waitress—one more thing I’d never done before. There was still coffee in my cup, which was Styrofoam, so I took it with me and finished it on the sidewalk while I waited for Mom. I was standing there holding the empty cup and feeling like the coolest person in the world, when this guy in a suit walks by and sees me and stops and stuffs a five-dollar bill into the cup.”

“Oh, no.”

“I had
no
idea what had happened. Not the slightest. I tried to give it back to him, but he just waved me off. I told Mom about it when she got back, and she was furious. I think she would’ve hit the guy if he’d still been around.”

Neil shook his head slowly. “Did that really happen?”

“That really happened,” I said.

I hadn’t told that story for years.

We polished off a few beers, and then a few more. We got pretty jolly, in fact, escaping in tandem from the debacle of our day. When it started to get dark, Neil offered to make supper, and I accepted without protest. It was scrambled eggs and toast and peanut butter and apple sauce with cinnamon—all we could scrounge from the kitchen. Neil spread a tablecloth on the floor, so we could dine at the same level. Afterwards we just sat there, propped up by one end of the sofa, while cicadas played for us in the bushes below.

“I should call Renee,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just to tell her where I am. Sometimes she holds dinners for me.”

He smiled. “I could use a roommate like that.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

He laughed. “How long has she been with you?”

This made Renee sound like an attendant or something, but I let it pass. “Three years,” I told him.

“Seems to work well.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not much alike, though.”

I smirked at him. “Can’t get anything past you.”

He chuckled.

I told him that Renee and I had learned to “respect each other’s differences.” My way of letting him know that I knew she wasn’t the brightest gal around but that we still managed to communicate. It was an awful thing to say, but there you go. I do weird things around Neil sometimes.

“You want me to get it for you?” he asked.

I had no idea what he meant.

“The phone. So you can call her.”

“Oh…sure.”

Neil retrieved a cordless unit from the bedroom, or what I guessed to be the bedroom, and laid it in my lap. Renee answered right away, as if she’d been waiting by the phone. All I said was that things had taken longer than we’d expected, so not to worry about dinner. I knew she would’ve giggled or something if I’d said I was at Neil’s house. She asked if anybody interesting had shown up at the shoot. I told her nobody much, just Princess Di and Marky Mark. She believed me for about a nanosecond, then said: “Oh, you!”

I hung up, then excused myself to pee. To my relief, the toilet was modern and low-slung, easily navigable, a graceful dove-gray oval that bore me in imperial splendor as I studied Danny’s artwork on the bathroom door. The walls held postcards from Hawaii and
more snaps of the kid, plus an assortment of PortaParty shots, one of which featured yours truly onstage during the eclipse bat mitzvah. There was a sweet shot of Neil and Tread at the beach, and another one with a dignified older woman whom I guessed to be his mother.

I felt so cozy there in that small, personal space, so thoroughly embraced by my surroundings, by
his
surroundings, that I fell into a kind of reverie. My eyes slid from picture to picture, absorbing the march of his life, wanting to know it all. Outside, above the whir of cicadas, I could hear the comforting clatter of dishes as Neil cleaned up. I was a little drunk, I’ll admit, but something rather different was happening too. I felt such a part of him suddenly, such a perfectly natural adjunct to his life. I wouldn’t make a big deal out of that, I promised myself; it was enough just to know it was there.

When he drove me home, we talked about the scary new coup in Russia, about Pee-wee, about the white man’s black man Bush wants on the Supreme Court. Then, as if by some prearranged signal, we both fell silent. In the absence of our voices, the languorous night seemed to expand and spill into the van, a heady blend of diesel fumes and over-the-hill jasmine. From where I sat, there wasn’t much to see, of course, but I could hear sirens and boom boxes and Valley kids howling at the moon as if they owned the night. I knew just what they meant.

A
NEW JOURNAL, PLEASE NOTE—SMALLER THIS TIME BUT MUCH
fancier, with maroon leatherette and pretty marbled endpapers. Neil bought it for me in a mall in Westwood after we finished a particularly obnoxious gig there. I’d fully intended to pay for it myself, but Neil was insistent, saying I could buy him a beer one night. The journal cost a lot more than that, of course, so it was a nice thing for him to do. I almost never write in Neil’s presence, but he’s heard me talk about the diary from time to time, and I think he senses how much it’s become central to my life.

The video went surprisingly well on our second day of shooting. Janet seemed looser and less fidgety, much surer of her objectives. I’ve even begun to get excited about it. Janet knows somebody with a chain of arty-type repertory movie theaters (if three is a chain), who might be interested in showing the film as a short subject between trailers. That’s such a quirky idea that it might just attract attention, generate a little press, at least. And the audiences would certainly be more savvy and receptive than your typical MTV viewer. This could be just the right venue for me, the more I think about it.

I’m on the balcony of Callum’s suite at the Chateau Marmont,
six stories above Sunset. I’m in terry cloth after a noontime swim, cool-skinned and wet-haired, my nipples still pleasantly taut. A lovely, warm breeze is blowing. Callum and Jeff are down at Greenblatt’s, buying sandwiches, since there’s never been room service here. They’ve promised to bring me back a turkey on rye. Our view is toward the south: an unbroken sweep across the palmy, saffron-hazed plains of West Hollywood, with a four-story Marlboro Man looming preposterously in the foreground. The hotel itself is a funky jumble of towers and terraces, with a sixty-something-year history that’s almost inseparable from legend.

Most people think of the Chateau as the place where Belushi bit the big one, but it’s got a lot more going for it than that. There’s all sorts of gossip in a book Callum bought at the front desk. For starters, an extremely young and horny Grace Kelly used to cruise the halls here, looking for guys who’d left their doors open. Howard Hughes and Bea Lillie and James Dean all hid out at the Chateau at one time or another, in varying states of emotional disrepair.

What’s more, when Garbo was in residence, she always floated facedown in the pool, they claim, to keep from being recognized. (“Look, there’s a corpse in the pool!” “That’s no corpse, silly, that’s You-know-who!”) The very canvas awning above my head was the one that broke Pearl Bailey’s fall—well, caught her, actually—when she toppled from the ledge of her balcony after a festive lunch. She was feeling no pain, according to the book, and was in no particular hurry to leave when a hook-and-ladder came to her rescue.

As you must’ve guessed, Jeff and Callum are an item now. Having spent the better part of last week shacked up in this suite, they finally surfaced and invited me over for a morning of sun by the pool. Jeff is trying his damnedest not to look dramatically altered, but any fool can see he’s dorky with happiness. Callum, on the other hand, appears pretty much the way he did at our first meeting: just as sunny and steady and obliging, just as unreadable. Even in the midst of laughter he seems to be holding something back, as if observing himself—and everyone else—from a safe distance.

Callum did lose Jeff’s phone number. Or says he did, anyway. I guess it’s possible he never intended to call Jeff back and was merely shamed into a second date by the fact that they had me in common, but I seriously doubt it. Not the way they’re acting now. Earlier, down by the pool, I caught them swapping a look of such pie-eyed lovey-doveyness that I find it hard to believe anyone was pressured into anything.

Not that we’ve discussed such matters—
or
the question of those girlfriends back home. I’m assuming that was Callum’s way of getting me off his case. We’ve mostly just talked about
Mr. Woods
and my video and Callum’s new movie, which is a big-budget thriller that has no connection whatsoever with Philip Blenheim. Callum plays a rookie cop whose little brother is kidnapped by a psychopath. I hinted around coyly about any “small roles” that might be available, envisioning myself as a crime lab researcher, say, or an observant street person who provides the missing clue, but Callum just smiled sweetly and said the script was already set. They’ll be shooting in two weeks at Icon. Marcia Yorke is the other lead, playing Callum’s girlfriend. He told me the name of the director, but I can’t remember it.

I must admit it’s a novel sensation to see Jeff paired off with someone younger than himself. Ned Lockwood, after all, had a couple of decades on Jeff, so I guess I’ve come to think of the younger man’s role as Jeff’s natural, perennial state. Ned was a nurseryman, for the record, a big, hulking sweetheart of a guy whose bald head stayed nut brown throughout the year. He was a lot less serious than Jeff, a real joker sometimes, and I was just crazy about him. He was somewhat of a legend in his youth, Jeff tells me: a generous soul generously endowed. Ned was Rock Hudson’s lover for a brief period during the
Pillow Talk
era, when Hudson, in his mid-thirties, was clearly the older man.

Ned was no fading twinkie, though, when I knew him; he wore his age with an easy, shambling grace that was completely out of sync with the desperate pretenses of most people in this town. He and Jeff never lived together—Ned had a tiny cubbyhole next
to his nursery in Los Feliz—but they borrowed each other’s lives with the offhanded efficiency of brothers who could wear the same clothes.

Maybe there’s a pattern here, after all, some unwritten law of gay genealogy that compelled Jeff to pass the torch to a younger man, just as his lover had done, and his lover’s lover before that. Whatever the reason, I’m glad he finally got laid. Jeff suffered for a long time after Ned died and deserves to be happy again. I’m not at all sure this is true love, but it’s a start, at least. I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible, that Jeff would bury himself so completely in the navel-gazing of his writing that he’d lose the knack for intimacy with another person.

After lunch. The guys have come and gone again. They invited me to join them on a drive, but I decided to stay here with my journal, basking in my solitude and the delicious oddness of this place. Just before they took off, Callum realized he’d left his sunglasses by the pool and raced down to retrieve them, giving me and Jeff the moment I’d been waiting for.

“I’m so fucking proud of myself,” I said.

“Yeah…well…” He gave me an embarrassed smirk.

“You look good together. I knew you would.”

He stood at the mirror and ran a comb through his remaining strands of hair. There was something so tentative and teenagery about this gesture that I couldn’t help but be moved.

“So what’s the deal?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“With Callum. He knows I know, doesn’t he?”

“Know what?”

“That he’s a homo, Jeff.”

He looked vaguely annoyed. “Of course.”

“He doesn’t act like it.”

“Well…”

“He knows I’m cool, doesn’t he?”

“Sure.”

“Well, tell him to lighten up. Tell him I’m the biggest fag hag this side of Susan Sarandon.”

“Tell him yourself.”

“Well, I would, but…he seems like he’d take that as an invasion or something.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“I hadn’t really noticed it.”

“You hadn’t?”

“He’s just young,” he said, laying down the comb.

If I’m not mistaken, it was I who first suggested this to Jeff, and not that long ago, either. That he’d loosened his moral requirements for a bed partner so drastically in such a short time could only mean one thing: Jeff’s poor little overworked politics had been no match at all for a great piece of ass. I gave him a long, hard look with a Mona Lisa smile.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I just figured something out.”

“What?”

“Why you weren’t wearing your nipple ring at the pool.”

“What?” He frowned and looked away, picking up the comb again.

“He asked you to take it off, didn’t he? It was too gay for him.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

“This is getting serious.”

“Cadence…”

“Is this a permanent arrangement, or did you put it back on?”

“In the first place, nipple rings aren’t just a gay thing anymore.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Axl Rose has one, and he’s a homophobic pig.”

“Oh, well, in that case…”

“In the second place…”

He didn’t get to finish the thought, because Callum came bursting through the door, looking sleek and cryptic behind his
shades. Seeing Jeff turn scarlet on the spot, I showed mercy and shooed them both out the door without further ado. I knew too much about what was driving Jeff to rag him any further.

Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.

I
HAVEN’T WRITTEN FOR WEEKS
. I’
VE BEEN STRICKEN WITH WHAT
Mom used to call “the mauves”—something vaguer than the blues but just as debilitating. If I knew what the problem was, I could fix it, or at least bitch about it, but I can’t nail down my emotions long enough to give them names. I feel empty and adrift, I guess, devoid of purpose. The simplest rituals of existence, like shaving my legs or replacing the trash can liner, leave me racked with the futility of it all. I long for serendipity, but there is simply none to be had. And that hateful, familiar voice in the back of my head reminds me that I’ve probably already done all I was meant to do—and ten years ago, at that. I am a husk of a person, nothing more, a burned-out organism tumbling toward oblivion.

When I get like this, Renee turns hideously chirpy, trying to snap me out of it. It never works, but I usually end up faking at least a partial recovery, just to get her off my case. Last night, in an effort to cheer, she made my favorite meal (pot roast) and regaled me with half a dozen Jeffrey Dahmer jokes she’d heard at work. I groaned and laughed as much as I could, pretended to be my old self again, and went to bed early, crying myself to sleep. I had another long, vivid dream about Mom.

In this one we were attending a sort of premiere party for my new video. Renee was there too, and Neil and Jeff and Tread and Philip Blenheim and even Aunt Edie, fresh off the bus from Baker. Mom had her hair in the sort of beehive she stopped wearing about the time I was born. She looked really modern like that—so out she was in—and I told her so, which thrilled her no end. The video was on an endless loop projected onto a huge cube above the buffet table. Philip Blenheim was impressed by my voice and how thin I looked. When I introduced him to Aunt Edie, she got way too gushy about
Mr. Woods
, but Philip took it all in stride and winked at me secretly, one professional to another. He offered me a role in his next film, but I played hard to get and said something vague about an obligation to Marty Scorsese.

Then the scene shifted abruptly, and Mom and I were on a bluff above the Pacific. It was sunset, and Mom’s skin was all golden and smooth, like a nymph in a Maxfield Parrish painting. She sat next to me, brushing my hair and singing softly. When I told her I thought she was dead, she laughed and said she’d just been in Palm Springs, developing a miniseries about Lya Graf—a real person I’ll tell you about later. Mom said an executive at Fox, somebody just under Barry Diller and extremely excited about the project, thought I’d be perfect for the role. I squealed and hugged her and felt a warming rush of relief. I thought she’d left me for good, and here she was, lovelier than ever and so real I could smell her Jean Naté, making big plans for our future as if she’d never been away.

On with the shitty news: Janet Glidden called this morning to say she’d been having “problems in the lab” and that we might have to reshoot the video. I hit the ceiling and called her a “total incompetent” who didn’t deserve to be working with “real professionals.” Even as I said it, this sounded pompous, so I called her back a few minutes later and apologized. She was so shaken that my raging disappointment was instantly replaced by raging guilt. The project is a goner, obviously; I might as well face that now and be done with
it. To spend another day lip-syncing in that stuffy greenhouse would only prolong the agony. I bowed out as nicely as I could, but Janet didn’t take it very well. Too bad. The way I see it, if she has to start over again, she might as well start with somebody else.

I called Neil to fill him in, figuring Janet would probably call to cry on his shoulder. He was more than sympathetic and even tried to take responsibility for the whole mess. I can’t believe how nice he is.

We’ve had no gigs for a week and won’t for another two or three. Neil says not to worry about it, that things usually slow down in the fall. He seemed to be enjoying the break, actually. His kid was there for the weekend, and I could hear him romping and giggling in the background.

Aunt Edie called a little while ago, but I didn’t pick up. How the woman does it I’ll never know. The moment my life begins to fall apart, she homes in on me like a buzzard circling dead meat. She left a message on the machine about running into Lanny March at a gas station in Baker. Lanny March was a boy I hung out with in high school and haven’t seen since. We played Clue together after school and went to the occasional movie, so Aunt Edie regards him as a vaguely romantic figure in my life, which he wasn’t at all. He was probably a big homo, come to think of it, given his sweetly bemused demeanor and his enduring passion for Bernadette Peters. Aunt Edie only mentioned him to remind me that everyone who
really
cares about me still lives in Baker.

Aunt Edie is Mom’s slightly younger sister, though you’d never believe those two came from the same womb. Aunt Edie is so uptight she makes Marilyn Quayle look like the Whore of Babylon. Mom could be prissy, sure, but she had a streak of real wildness too, a latent individualism that redeemed her at the most unexpected moments. She grew up in the desert, after all, in the only Jewish family for miles around. Circumstances alone must have forced her to make up some of the rules as she went along.

Given the same baggage, Aunt Edie went totally bourgeois, joining forces with Betty Crocker and Barry Goldwater to build a
life her neighbors could understand. She married a restaurant manager and had three large-economy-sized children, who grew up torturing cats and puking at the Burger King and regarding Baker as the center of the civilized world. When I came into the picture—and my father, in turn, went out—Aunt Edie made such a prolonged display of sympathy that Mom broke with her completely, resolving to cope with the future on her own. She rented a new duplex on the other side of town, dyed her hair honey blond, and worked overtime at the power company to buy me my own set of encyclopedias. (I was reading voraciously by the time I was four.) To hear Mom tell it, Aunt Edie actually envied her sister’s newfound freedom, but she never copped to it, ever. Not even when Mom and I moved to Hollywood and began sending home pictures of the celebrities we’d met.

Mom used to insist that Aunt Edie wasn’t a wicked person, just a frightened one. So frightened, apparently, that whenever she visited her gynecologist, she took a special bag with her to wear on her head during cervical examinations. The theory, according to Mom, was that Aunt Edie’s dignity wouldn’t be compromised if she didn’t actually
see
the doctor while he was looking up her pussy. Mom swore to the absolute truth of this and permitted herself a brief disloyal giggle before swearing me to secrecy. “I mean it now, Cady. Edie would be mortified if she knew that you knew.”

Ever since then I haven’t been able to look at Aunt Edie without thinking of that damn bag. I don’t know whether it was paper or what, so I make up my own versions. Sometimes I see it as a pointy quilted thing with nose holes—a head cozy, if you will—or made of creamy linen and elaborately monogrammed, like her favorite handbag. Even at Mom’s funeral, when Aunt Edie came decked out in the world’s soberest navy-blue suit, I flashed on her in the stirrups again, her head shrouded in a matching navy bag, those skinny Nancy Reagan legs propped open like pruning shears. The image simply refuses to die. It was Mom’s final revenge on her sibling.

Actually,
I’m
the final revenge. When Mom phoned Aunt Edie
to report that I’d landed the lead—sort of—in Philip Blenheim’s new fantasy film, it was the sweetest of victories, the ultimate payback for twenty years of simpering, uninvited pity. Mom never actually voiced her resentment, but her real message to her sister was there in the subtext of my success:
See what you can do when you refuse to be frightened
.

I hope I’m not making Mom sound like some sort of pushy stage mother, because she wasn’t. The dreams of stardom were all mine; Mom simply adapted to them. She was baffled and often repelled by much of what I love about show business, but she knew what I wanted more than anyone on earth, and she did more than anyone to see that I got it.

I read a book once that said that the bond between a little person and her (or his) mother is one of the most inviolable in nature. Since the child remains child-sized for life, the weaning process is sometimes postponed and dependencies can develop that persist until death. When Mom was still alive, I worried about this a lot, terrified of becoming her permanent baby.

Now that she’s gone, I just miss her.

Before I forget: Lya Graf.

Mom learned about her years ago, when she first started reading up on little people. Lya Graf was a Ringling Brothers performer in the late twenties and early thirties—a figure of great charm, from all reports, and only twenty-one inches tall. (“Almost a foot shorter than you,” Mom would remind me tartly, just to keep me from getting too swell-headed.) One day on a promotional tour, Lya visited the floor of the Senate in Washington. As luck would have it, J. P. Morgan was there at the same time, about to testify before the Senate Banking Committee. A canny photographer, recognizing a great photo op, deposited the dainty Lya on the not-so-dainty lap of the famous financier, and the resulting shot made front pages around the world.

Because of that, Lya became a bigger star than ever. She contin
ued to tour with the circus, finally earning enough money to fulfill her dream of returning home with her parents to their native Germany. Alas, Hitler was in power by then, and the unique imperfection that had won Lya the hearts of children everywhere didn’t play as well in the Third Reich. Both she and her parents were consigned to the death camp at Auschwitz—and eventually to the gas chambers—in the interest of a more perfect race.

Mom fixated on this story as if it were personal lore, rattling it off with gusto to anyone who’d listen. For years I wondered if it contained an object lesson for me, a subliminal warning that might somehow spare me from Lya’s fate. What was the moral, anyway? Don’t sit on a rich man’s lap? Never try to live with your parents? I was almost a teenager before I realized that the story was merely Mom’s way of linking littleness and Jewishness, of relating her own early experience of outsiderdom to the one I had suffered. Lya Graf was
us
, rolled into a neat little fable about the supreme unfairness of the world.