Maybe the Moon (13 page)

“You think they feel it in Beverly Hills?” I wasn’t being bitter; I really wanted to know. It would be way too easy to blame this career slump on the crappy economy. If my battered little star is finally sinking in the west, I prefer to face the facts and be done with it.

Jeff replied that even rich pigs have to tighten their belts sometimes and that “cutesy birthday parties” would probably be the first thing to go.

“Cutesy?” I protested.

He chuckled. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I believe I do.”

“C’mon, Cadence. Don’t pull that shit. You know you’re better than that job.”

“It’s my
career
, Jeff. It’s what I do.”

He just scoffed at that. “It’s not your career.”

“Then what the fuck
is
?”

“Cadence…?”

“What is, Jeff? I’d really like to know. I’m not a real singer. I’m certainly not an actress. After a while you have to look at a few realities, don’t you?” I have no idea where this came from, but it
came with a holy vengeance, boiling out of me like toxic waste. “That cutesy little job of mine, as you call it, is what I do. It’s all they’ll
let
me do. I’d like to be flip about it, but I have to be proud of something, don’t I?”

Poor Jeff was struck dumb for a moment. Finally, he said: “Who is they?”

“What?”

“They. You said it’s all
they
will let you do.”

I saw what he was getting at immediately and wanted no part of it. “They, Jeff.
Them
. The fuckheads who run the universe.”

“Ah.”

“And don’t give me that shit about how there aren’t any thems, because that’s
all
there is in my life, and that’s all there ever will be. I’ve got thems out the asshole.”

“Nicely put.”

“Fuck you. You know what I mean.”

After a long silence, he stepped in gingerly: “Would this by any chance be…?”

“No, it wouldn’t. I had it a week ago. This is pure unadulterated me.”

In recent years Jeff has developed the nasty habit of attributing everything to my all-powerful menstrual cycle: mood swings, earthquakes, Amtrak derailments…

“Want me to come over?” he asked.

“What for?”

“I dunno. To slap you silly?”

I was glad he couldn’t see me smile. “Just be thankful you didn’t call last week.”

“I am,” he said, “believe me.”

“I could be cracking up, I guess.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’d like to be. I’d like
something
to happen.”

“Then something will.”

“No it won’t. Never again. I’m spinning my wheels, Jeff. Not even that; I’m
parked
. I’m parked in fucking Studio City and the lot
is closed and nobody even comes around to kick my wheels anymore.”

“Write that down,” he said.

“Write it down yourself.”

“What about Leonard?” Jeff suggested. “He might have some ideas. Callum talks to him all the time.”

“Yeah, well, Callum is cute and has a pretty dick.”

“Cadence…”

“I only go by what you tell me.”

He let it slide. “Do you need money? Is that it? Because I could…”

“No. Well, I always do, but…”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Jeff. Thanks.” He’d embarrassed me now, turning so unexpectedly sweet and sacrificial in response to my cattiness. There’s no way he could lend me money. As far as I know, he makes even less than I do. “I’m all right,” I told him. “It isn’t a loan I need, it’s a life.”

A
longer
life was what I should have said, but I was afraid of the feelings I’d unleash and Jeff’s proven inability to cope with them. Janet’s death, if nothing else, has made me more painfully aware of my own mortality, which is only natural for a little person—or so Mom used to tell me—even on a good day. When you’re a walking bag of organs like
moi
, you just can’t help wondering how much time you’ve got left.

Suddenly, in spite of myself, I wanted Ned there instead of his surviving partner—big old easy uncomplicated Ned—because Ned would have understood these emotions without having them explained to him. In the last months of his life we spent hours together, playing cards and putzing in his garden and enjoying the unspoken irony that fate had made us equals of a sort. Ned and I treasured each other’s company all the more, I think, because we both knew what it felt like to be living on a deadline.

S
O FAR
, I
HAVEN’T TOLD ANYONE WHAT HAPPENED ON
C
ATALINA
. It’s not that I’m embarrassed; I just don’t know
what
to think at the moment, and I’m wary about entrusting such fragile, half-formed impressions to other interpretations—especially Renee’s and Jeff’s—before committing them to paper. With any luck at all, there should be enough room in this journal (the one Neil gave me, appropriately enough) to tell the whole story. If not, I’ll switch to something different.

The boat we took left from Long Beach, so we drove down late Saturday morning in the PortaParty van. The van was a sad sight, conspicuously unwashed and stripped of its usual jolly stock of props and streamers. It had all the poignancy of an empty stage. A cardboard box crammed with plastic beach toys rattled against the back door, but that was the extent of our cargo. I shuddered a little at this visual proof of the troupe’s decline, but didn’t remark on it to Neil, scared of what he might say.

“Are those Danny’s?” I asked, indicating the toys.

Neil smiled out at the white blur of the freeway. “We drove down to Zuma last week.”

I remarked that it was nice there.

He seemed a little surprised. “You like hanging out at the beach?”

“Sure.”

“Same here.” He grinned extravagantly, as if we’d just discovered something rare and wonderful in common.

“Where is he, by the way?”

“Who?”

“Danny.”

“Oh. Staying with the neighbors. Linda’s neighbors.”

I told him I’d hoped I might meet Danny today, that I’d wondered if either he, Neil, or Linda might bring the boy along for the day. It seemed like a great trip for a kid, after all, in spite of the circumstances.

“Yeah,” said Neil. “We talked about that.”

“But?”

He shrugged. “We just weren’t sure how heavy it might get. The funeral, I mean.”

Great
, I thought, and suddenly I was picturing Mrs. Glidden again, only this time she had me by the throat of my charcoal crepe de chine funeral frock and was shaking the bejeezus out of me.
Do you know what that video meant to my daughter? Do you? Do you have any idea
?

“Of course I’d like him to see the island, but…”

“What? Sorry.” I’d lost track completely of what he was saying.

“Danny likes it at the neighbor’s,” he explained. “They’ve got a pool with a water slide.”

“Oh…well…that’s good.”

“Yeah. Gets him outa my hair.”

You could tell he didn’t mean that at all. It was just a man thing, mostly, a false gruffness designed to underplay his obvious devotion to his son. This embarrassment surprised me a little, since I’ve seen him be so unembarrassed around hundreds of children. I guess it’s different when it’s your own kid. “Is Linda taking the same boat?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She flew into Avalon this morning. She thought the Gliddens might need some help.”

I pondered that one for a moment or two, discarding several possibilities, all of them ghoulish. “Help with
what
?”

Neil smiled at me languidly. “I think there’s a brunch after the service.”

“Oh.” A funeral brunch, I thought. Only in California. As we barreled on down the freeway, bound for God knows what, the event grew more and more surreal in my head.

The dock for the
Catalina Express
was immediately adjacent to the
Queen Mary
, the classic thirties ocean liner, now dawdling away her declining years as a stationary hotel and all-round tourist trap. We had two hours to kill before our boat left, so we did the obvious, foolish thing and paid to go on board. The tickets were hideously expensive (Neil put it on his Visa card), and the approach to the gangplank alone nearly did me in. It seemed to wind along for miles, a grueling serpentine, routing us first through Ye Olde Phony English Village, then past a huge circular hangar containing Howard Hughes’s preposterous wooden airplane, the “Spruce Goose.” By the time I finally set foot on board the
Queen Mary
I was panting like a sheep dog in a heat wave.

“Are you OK?” asked Neil.

I fell back against a wall—a bulkhead; whatever—and swatted my chest several times with my palm. Neil hunkered next to me and offered me a handkerchief. I took a few broad swipes at my dripping brow and handed it back to him.

A squadron of children, accompanied by a haggard middle-aged female, came to a dead halt next to us, enraptured by what they must have taken to be the first of the ship’s exotic attractions. The adult—a teacher, I guessed—gaped at us just long enough to embarrass herself thoroughly, then salvaged what remained of her composure and bustled the children away. I took a deep breath. Then another. Then counted to ten slowly. My heart felt like a small, desperate bird trying to escape from my rib cage.

“Better,” I said at last.

“You sure?”

I nodded.

“Can I get you some water or something?”

“No,” I said. “Just shade. And a place to sit.”

We retreated to one of the big lounges, a calmly elegant space, all curves and gilt and cool green frescoes. Neil hoisted me onto a sofa, then gave the ship’s brochure a hurried once-over. “This was a big mistake, I guess.”

I told him we had no way of knowing that without seeing for ourselves.

“Everything’s so far away,” he said. “Unless…” He looked down at the brochure again.

“What?”

“They have something called The Haunted Passageway. It’s kind of a ghost tour. Like a fun house.”

“Kids in the dark? I don’t think so.”

He smiled. “Good point.”

“What sort of ghosts?”

“Oh…some deckhand who got crushed by an iron door. Back in the sixties. According to this, they still hear him thumping sometimes.”

I rolled my eyes, though I couldn’t help admiring the cold-blooded genius of the marketing strategy. The owners of this enterprise had obviously learned from experience that a pretty ship alone wouldn’t cut it with the American public; true Family Entertainment demands at least a smattering of gore. But that “ghostly” deckhand had been a real person, after all, who was mangled during my lifetime, a guy who probably still has a family somewhere, people who loved him and miss him and remember the real horror. Does it give
them
the shivers, I wondered, to know that he’s been reduced to a thrilling special effect, a scenic attraction in a spook house? Do they get royalties?

“We could split,” said Neil, reading my mind.

“We could.”

Without further ado, we made our way back to the neighbor
ing dock. The afternoon had turned unseasonably hot, and a gritty industrial haze hung over the harbor. A long queue of tourists, laden with scuba gear and ice chests and plastic tote bags, had already gathered for the
Catalina Express
. A vein in my temple commenced to throb in smart syncopation with my dread. I was beginning to think I’d made a terrible mistake.

The voyage to the island took a little over an hour and a half. Mercifully, the smog lifted and the temperature dropped as soon as we were out of sight of land. The seats on the boat were airline style, really quite comfy, but the view they afforded was completely lost on me. Sensitive to this fact, Neil led me out to the slippery deck several times, where I clung for dear life to the bottom rung of the railing and made appreciative noises about the color of the water. A whey-faced lady in a sundress and Barbara Bush beads watched this awkward ritual with smug, philanthropic glee, as if I were some midwestern orphan with leukemia catching my first glimpse of the mighty Pacific. “She must enjoy that,” she said to Neil, apparently perceiving me to be deaf as well. For Neil’s sake, I restricted my response to a brief, murderous glare.

Our first glimpse of Avalon was amazing. The town was almost ramshackle, miraculously un
done
, The Land That Time Forgot. Simple wooden cottages as random as shipwrecks tumbled down the dry hills to a pristine crescent-shaped beach, at the end of which stood the great circular ballroom, as natural there as the dot on a question mark. There were dozens of sails on the harbor. And dipping gulls. And
chimes
, so help me, as if to welcome us, ringing from a distant hillside. Neil and I both wore expressions of wordless wonder. Blink once, I remember thinking, and the whole damned thing disappears.

Up close, of course, it was easier to detect the chinks in the fantasy. The eroding crag above the boat landing had been repaired with sprayed-on concrete, and there were far too many lard-assed tourists like me (well, almost like me) slouching along the prome
nade in search of diversion. Even worse, some of the more recent architecture (a sort of faux-Spanish postmodern) had lost touch with the charming artlessness of the rest of the town. Still, I liked the place a lot, and Neil did too. We felt unreasonably proud of ourselves, as if we were the first people ever to discover it.

We had an hour or so before the funeral, so we camped out on a waterfront bench and let the motley parade of humanity pass us by. The people who weren’t on foot were in goofy little white golf carts, since cars are
verboten
on major portions of the island. I couldn’t help grinning at the sight of these Toontown vehicles. Here was one place, at least, where life seemed a little closer to my own scale.

Neil pored over a street map he’d bought at the landing.

“How far are we from the church?” I asked.

“Not far.”

“Let’s see.”

He pointed to it on the map.

“That’s far,” I said.

“Is it?”

I nodded. “Unless you’ve got time for two funerals.”

He chuckled. “We’ll rent a golf cart, then.”

I made a face at him. “You can’t go to a funeral in a golf cart.”

“Who can’t? That’s what they do here.”

So that’s what we did. We procured a racy little number with a striped canopy at a rental agency right there on the main drag and tooled up a leafy street called Metropole in search of the church. The suspension on the cart wasn’t for shit, but Neil had strapped me in snugly, so my squeals whenever we hit a bump were more of exhilaration than of terror. Neil would glance at me each time with a look of real concern until I succeeded in reassuring him with a smile. It was the strangest sensation, riding along like that. I felt utterly ridiculous and utterly contented, all at the same time.

The church was a plain white frame structure hung with scarlet bougainvillea. An assortment of golf carts was parked in front, most of them fancier than ours and missing the telltale rental number
painted on the side. These were locals, obviously, friends of the family. As we made our way to the door, I wondered if Neil and I were the only mourners from the mainland. Besides the dreaded Linda, that is.

Our progress was observed by a tall, gray-haired man in a navy suit standing guard just inside the door. When we finally reached him, he gave us a dubious once-over and uttered Janet’s name softly, as a question. Neil nodded, following the man into the church. I came after them at my own pace, trying to look devout—or at least concerned—and acutely aware of all the eyes on me. Neil lifted me onto a pew and handed me a printed program bearing Janet’s name, the minister’s name, and the high points of the service. That piece of paper and the less-than-fascinating grain of the pew in front of us was all that occupied me for the next half hour; I couldn’t see for shit.

The service was your basic Protestant understatement, so devoid of specifics that the honoree might just as easily have died from natural causes at eighty. We sang a few tired hymns and received a few tired words of comfort from the reverend. At one point, about halfway through, Neil glanced at someone across the room, acknowledging her presence (I was sure it was Linda) with a thin smile. I couldn’t help wondering if the deceased was there, too, but decided not to put the question to Neil. My voice has a way of carrying sometimes.

To avoid the rush, we left before the last hymn was finished, then waited outside on the lawn for Linda. When she emerged from the crowd she gave Neil a chaste peck on the cheek and, without waiting for an introduction, extended a long, dry hand down to me. “Hello, Cady. It was sweet of you to come.”

“Hey,” I said stupidly. “No problem.”

The ex-Mrs. Riccarton was tall, lean, and oval-faced, several shades lighter than Neil. Not exactly pretty, but elegant, and enormously self-possessed. She wore a chic-looking gray silk suit, and her hair was pulled back in a modified Wilma Flintstone. Neil had never painted her as a monster, and she certainly didn’t seem to
be one. What was it he had said? Unsentimental? Too organized?

“Have you met the Gliddens yet?” she asked.

I told her I hadn’t.

“I think they’re…” She craned her graceful neck. “Yes…over there.”

The Gliddens stood together on the sidewalk, receiving the consolation of friends, so identically pear-shaped and shaggy-headed that they might have been salt and pepper shakers. Both of their plain, open faces wore the same expression of wistful stoicism, and you could tell at a glance they were one of those couples who do everything together. I just knew they owned matching nylon wind-breakers.

“Maybe we should wait,” I said. “There’s sort of a crowd.”

Linda nodded, then looked at Neil. “I know a shortcut to the house, if you feel like a little walk.”

Neil looked confused. “Isn’t there going to be…?”

His ex finished the thought for him and shook her head. “The ashes are at the house.”

Neil glanced to me for guidance. “How do you feel about a walk?”

“Fine,” I said, sounding as casual about it as possible. I was determined not to look like a pussy in front of Linda.

So we followed those long, efficient legs through the dusty shrubbery to the Gliddens’ house, about three backyards away. It was part of a row of houses, cottages really, each the same, yet each in some way different, facing another such row across a palm-lined walkway. They reminded me of the company houses that mill owners once built for their workers, only nicer, with tile-studded bird- baths and rose trellises and perfect little postage-stamp lawns. To my surprise, there was already a small group of people assembled in the Gliddens’ backyard.