Maybe the Moon (12 page)

T
HIS STRANGELY OFF-KILTER DAY STARTED WITH A WEIRD PHONE
call from Neil. My first thought was that he’d finally drummed up a gig for us, but that bubble burst as soon as I noticed the peculiar note in his voice. He seemed cowed somehow, unnaturally subdued. After the briefest of preliminaries, he asked if he could come over. When I told him of course he could, he said he just wanted to make sure I was there.

“As opposed to what?” I said. “Skiing in Gstaad?”

He gave me the lamest little laugh, clearly in great discomfort.

“What’s up?”

“I think it should wait,” he said, “until I’m there.”

As soon as I hung up I began manufacturing calamities. Leading the list was the notion that I was no longer of use to PortaParty, that an old and valued customer, repelled by my presence, or maybe just my singing, had specifically requested that I not be in attendance at her little Ahmet’s, her little Blake’s, her little Zoe’s birthday party. Neil’s uncomfortable task, as I imagined it, was to break this news to me as gently as possible, hence the need to talk to me in person.

If the ax was to fall, I decided, I would handle it like Mary,
Queen of Scots—looking my best. I shucked off my stretched-out mauve-period T-shirt and climbed into a deep-green sailor suit that brings out my eyes. My hair was beyond redemption, but I slapped on a quick coat of powder and lipstick, then arranged myself artfully on the living room sofa, a back issue of
Premiere
next to me, opened to an article about Jodie Foster. When Neil arrived, he knocked quietly once or twice, then poked his head through the doorway.

“Cady?”

“I’m here. C’mon in.”

He slouched into the house wearing khaki trousers and a Hawaiian shirt, looking just as hangdog as he had sounded on the phone. Everything about him said supplicant. If he’d been wearing a hat, he’d have held it in both hands.

I gestured to the armchair. “Take a load off.”

He lowered his rangy frame onto the worn velveteen. His eyes made a brief, anxious flight around the room before settling on me again. “Nice dress,” he said.

“This ol’ thing?”

He smiled feebly and asked if Renee was here.

“At work,” I told him.

“Oh.”

“Some people keep regular hours, you know.” This remark was meant to be chummy, a breezy acknowledgment of our common gypsy bonds, but it was much too close to the subject of employment. I regretted it instantly.

Neil nodded distractedly and let it go. “Sorry I was so vague on the phone.”

“Hey.” I shrugged, unable to manage another word. Looking back on it, I think my breathing had stopped completely.

“It’s about Janet Glidden,” Neil said at last, fixing his eyes on the rug.

“What about her?”

He swallowed hard. “She’s dead. She shot herself last week.”

I can’t tell you what a surge of relief I felt. Well, I
am
telling you, but I certainly couldn’t tell Neil, or let it show on my face,
since he was looking as if he’d just brought word of something truly heartbreaking. What I ended up saying was “Oh, no,” or words to that effect, while I brought my hand to my cheek and left it there for a beat or two.

Neil nodded. “Linda called this morning.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“My ex-wife. Janet’s old friend.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“She didn’t know the details.” He scuffed the arm of the chair with the flat of his hand, filling dead air. “I wanted to tell you in person, to make sure you didn’t feel…you know, responsible.”

I nodded slowly, letting that sink in.

“Linda said she’d been depressed for weeks. Janet, I mean. So anything you might’ve said to her on the phone wouldn’t really have made that much…Well, you could tell how fucked up she was that day at the greenhouse.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.” I suppose I was rattled by then, but more than anything, I was touched by Neil’s instinct to protect me, to spare me the guilt. Was guilt warranted? I wondered. Had my little diatribe about Janet’s “incompetence” come at entirely the wrong time? What if she had told someone about the tantrum? Or left a note. Christ, a note.
Goodbye, cruel world. The dwarf made me do it
. “Does Linda know that Janet and I…had words?”

Neil shook his head. “She didn’t mention it, anyway.”

“Did she call you?”

“Linda?”

“No, Janet. After I cussed her out. I thought she might.”

Neil said she hadn’t called.

“I called her back, you know. I tried to be really nice about it.”

“I know. I remember. I really don’t think it had anything to do with…”

“What was she depressed about? Did Linda say?”

“No. Just…general stuff.”

“General stuff.” I echoed him flatly, beginning to be annoyed by his vagueness.

“Janet had a few wheels in the sand, Cady. She always did.”

I asked him if he’d known this when he’d fixed me up with her.

“Well…” He picked his words carefully. “I knew she was neurotic. Lots of creative people are. It comes with the territory.”

“Yeah,” I said numbly. “I suppose.”

“I’m really sorry, Cady. If it hadn’t been for me…”

“Oh, c’mon now.” I wanted to be magnanimous, to brush it off as nothing, but my mind kept lurching back to the scene of the carnage, sifting through the wreckage for clues, the black box of Janet’s personality. “She didn’t leave a note?”

“Apparently not.”

“What day did she do it?”

Neil chewed on that for a moment. “Tuesday, I think.”

The day after
, I thought. “Where?”

“At home. Her place in Brentwood.”

I had already pictured her at the greenhouse, the setting of her final failure, that pale, angular body sprawled across the stage like a broken marionette, the lighting next to perfect. What if she
hadn’t
been in dwarf panic that day? What if she had just been in panic, pursued by some entirely personal demon?…And what if she had managed to keep that monster at bay until yours truly stepped in to destroy her defenses with a few lethal words?

You’re a total incompetent, Janet. You don’t deserve to work with real professionals
.

Neil must have noticed the stricken look on my face, because he left the chair and sat on the floor next to the sofa, taking my hand in his. “Look, Cady. There are lots of people thinking the same thing right now. There’s no way you can take the blame for this. You hardly even knew her.”

“I suppose.”

A moment of weighty silence passed, broken only by the piglet squeals of the Stoate kids, running amuck in their backyard. Neil gazed up at me with a sleepy, ironic smile. “There’s more.”

“Oh, shit.
What
?”

“It’s not bad. It’s sort of nice, actually. They’ve invited us to the funeral.”

I couldn’t have been more stunned. “
Who
?”

“Janet’s parents.”

“They didn’t.”

He nodded. “They specifically requested you.”

“They don’t even know me.”

“They knew about the video, I guess.”

“Did they know I
walked out
on the video?”

“Doesn’t sound like it. Linda just said they were trying to reach some of Janet’s film friends. They want the funeral to, you know, reflect her life.”

Yeah, I thought, but what if Janet had told her mother about the Incident? And what if her mother had invited me to the service just to lure me into an ugly confrontation? I could already see her weeping hysterically, flinging her pale, gawky, Janet-like body across her daughter’s coffin as she thrust an accusing finger (long and white, like Janet’s) at the wicked actress in the front row.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think it would mean something if you were there,” Neil countered. “They think of you as Somebody.”

“Who does?”

“Janet’s parents.”

“C’mon.”

Neil shrugged. “They know about
Mr. Woods
, at least. Linda said they did.”

“Oh, swell. Do they expect me to wear the suit?”

Neil smiled benignly, refusing to buy into my cynicism. “It’s next Saturday,” he said. “I thought we could make a day of it. I’ve never seen Catalina myself.” He was almost coy about the way he dropped the locale, a frisky light dancing in his eyes while he waited for it to register on me.

“Catalina? The island?”

He nodded.

“They’re having the
funeral
there?”

“That’s where they live,” he explained, enjoying himself immensely. “In Avalon. Janet grew up there.”

“Nobody grows up there.”

“Janet did.” He widened his eyes at me teasingly. “Ever been there?”

I had to admit I hadn’t. I know the place mostly from a couple of old songs and that line of swimsuits. The island is largely wilderness, I’ve heard, and Avalon is a toy town, a tourist mecca that enjoyed a boom in the twenties and thirties and hasn’t been the same since. They still have glass-bottom boats and salt-water taffy and that huge circular ballroom, the one so often depicted on sheet music, presiding over the harbor. As one of the songs goes, it’s just “twenty-six miles across the sea,” but no one I know has ever set foot there.

Neil was waiting for my answer. “So what do you say?”

“God, Neil. I just don’t know.”

“It would help me a lot if you came.”

“Why?”

“Aside from the pleasure of your company?”

“Yeah. Aside from that.”

“Well…Linda’s gonna be there.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t wanna get stuck with her all day. On an island.”

“What a thing to say about somebody you married.”

“Yeah…well…what can I tell you?”

“How fierce is she, anyway?”

“Not too.”

I gave him a dubious look.

He laughed. “Not at all. It would just help to have someone there.”

“A buffer.”

“No, a friend.”

“A friendly buffer. Is it a day trip?”

“It can be.”

“A boat or something?”

“Or a plane,” he said, “if you want.”

I told him I preferred the boat.

I’m writing this in bed. Renee is out at the movies (
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
) with her friend Lorrie from The Fabric Barn. I feel truly shitty, but it’s nice to have the house to myself, to be able to play my Nino Rota albums without provoking one of Renee’s oh-poo-not-again expressions. There’s a nondescript little breeze stirring my curtains, and the moon has just popped into view, red as a pumpkin. A scoop or two of rum raisin ice cream would lift my spirits considerably, but I’m just too tired—or too drained, maybe—to make the trek into the kitchen and haul out the ladder to the freezer.

Jeff called about an hour ago. We had the longest talk we’ve had in ages. They’ve started shooting Callum’s film, and it’s a closed set, so I think Jeff is on his own these days, except for a few stolen late-nighters at the Chateau Marmont. He seems as smitten as ever with Callum, but he’s surprisingly ungenerous with the particulars. I guess he’s superstitious about blowing a good thing. So to speak.

When he asked about my own schedule, I told him that so far I’d only been booked for a funeral.

“Oh, yeah?” he said blandly. “Anybody I know?”

I explained to him briefly about Janet, identifying her simply as “the woman who was doing my video.” He said almost nothing in response, and I wondered if her death came across as self-indulgent (if such a thing can be said about suicide) in the harsh light of his own experience. Most of the people Jeff knows are just trying to stay alive.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

“About what?”

“The video.”

“Oh, it was pretty much of a disaster already.”

No, I didn’t tell him about my tantrum. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I
am
feeling guilty.

“Too bad,” he said. “Sounded like a good idea.”

“Well…ya lose some, ya lose some.”

Jeff laughed ruefully. “That’s the fucking truth.”

“Are you writing?”

“Some.”

“That means none, right?” That settled it: he had to be in love. He only writes when he’s in pain.

“Cadence…”

“
I’m
writing.”

“Good for you.”

“I’ve got a snazzy new journal and everything.”

“So what are you writing about?” He made a real effort to sound pleasant about it, but I could tell he found it impertinent that a rank amateur was frolicking so carelessly in his chosen field.

I did my best to reassure him. “Just…stuff that happens. Nothing really important.”

“Mmm. Well, it’s always good therapy.”

“It is,” I said.

“And how’s your love life?”

“Well…the batteries are running low, but…”

He snorted. “C’mon. You know what I mean. The guy you work with. The African-American.”

I tried not to let him get to me. “He’s not my love life, Jeff. He never has been.”

“Well…”

“He’s not an African-American, either.”

“I thought you said…”

“I did, and he is. But he would never use that term. He’d sound too much like a white liberal.”

That zapped him nicely. He retaliated with a long, aggrieved silence.

I didn’t want to start a fight, so I added playfully: “You don’t even use it yourself. What were you doing? Trying it out? Seeing how it tripped off your tongue?”

He informed me, icily, that he’d used the term for weeks.

Yeah, I thought. Ever since you read that interview with Spike Lee in which “Afro-American” was declared unacceptable. I kept my mouth shut, though. Even in jest, I know not to dick with him when it comes to matters PC.

“I didn’t know he was a sore subject,” Jeff said.

“He’s not. He’s just not what you think.”

“OK, then.”

“He’s a good friend.”

“Glad to hear it.”

I had half intended to tell him about Janet’s funeral being in Catalina—and the trip with Neil and all—but I knew Jeff would just turn it into something it wasn’t. I gave myself a break and avoided the subject completely, rattling on about work and the lousy business we’ve been doing lately.

“Well,” Jeff remarked darkly, “we are in a recession.”