Maybe the Moon (22 page)

Sounds like a plan to me.

I
T WAS RAINING HARD WHEN
N
EIL BROUGHT ME TO HIS APARTMENT
. The white brick building had turned the color of dishwater in the downpour, grim as an old Kleenex, while the Astro Turf lawn shimmered brighter than ever, a glossy, nuclear green. I’d left home in a hurry, without a raincoat, so Neil made me walk under his as we headed to the elevator—a peculiar four-legged, two-armed, one-headed creature lumbering along under a leaden sky. From where I stood, about knee-high to Neil, it was a place of safety and peace: my own little terrarium, toasty warm, smelling deliciously of denim. I could have stayed under there for hours.

Upstairs, he made me cocoa. He had learned of my favorite comfort food a week or so earlier and had gone out and bought a big can just for me, as if he’d sensed somehow my impending need for comfort in large quantities. In the van on the way over, he’d listened to my tale of woe with sympathy but without comment. I knew that would come, but I thought it best not to push it, so I didn’t raise the subject again until we’d finished our cocoa and were under the covers, face-to-face, in bed.

“You think I fucked up?”

“How?”

“Telling them no.”

He smiled at me faintly. “Not if it feels better this way.”

I told him I wasn’t sure how it felt.

“Well,” he said, “if you were degraded by wearing that suit, then it was the right thing.”

“I was degraded by the fact that they refused to see me as anything else.”

“Like yourself.”

“Like myself.” My eyes clung to him with a grip all their own, grateful for his placid understanding. “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Why is Mr. Woods cute and I’m just disturbing?”

“C’mon.”

“That’s what they think, Neil. They won’t say it, but that’s exactly what they think.”

“You’re just depressed.”

“No. Don’t bullshit me. I count on you for the truth.”

He blinked at me for a moment, assembling his thoughts.

“Is it because I’m a woman?”

He chuckled. “You sound like Streisand.”

“Be serious. Would a little man be easier to take?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do they see me, then?”

“Who?”

“People.”

“I’m not sure,” he said after a pause. “Once they get to know you—you’re just Cady.”

“Do they pity me?”

“I don’t,” he said. “I admire you sometimes, for what you put up with, but I never pity you. I couldn’t be with you if I felt that way. You’re the strongest person I know, Cady, and the most forgiving. That’s what makes you so beautiful.”

In spite of my best efforts, a tear rolled out of my eye. Neil smoothed it away with his thumb as rain splashed against the windows by the bucketful. I heard the squeal of tires on wet pavement,
then a car alarm shrieking in the distance like a teenage banshee caught in the storm.

After a while, I asked: “Do you think I’m talented?”

“Cady…”

“Just tell me again, OK?”

“I think you’re very talented.”

“Am I mainstream?”

“I’m not sure what that means, but…I think everybody would love you.”

“Leonard doesn’t think I’m mainstream.”

“He said that?”

“Not in so many words, but I know how he thinks. He thinks I’d frighten the horses, scare off the yahoos.”

“What does he know?”

“Everything, when it comes to that. That’s how he got rich. It’s his job to second-guess the public. He’s a pissy queen with his own Hockney and this fancy house in the hills, who is paid to think exactly like someone from Iowa.”

“Who needs him?” said Neil.

“I’m not sure he even knows I can act.”

“Who cares? He’s just an agent.”

“I can, you know. I’m a really good actress when they let me do it. I’m not just selling my size.”

I must admit, I’m a little sensitive about this. In the early days, when Mom and I first hit town, we used my stature as a calling card to the haunts of the rich and famous. We’d go to The Comedy Store, say, when Robin Williams was performing, and slip the security guard a handwritten note to take backstage: “Hi, Robin, I’m the shortest woman in the world and I love your work. If you’d like to meet me, I’m outside.” It was shameless, but it worked almost every time—Diana Ross being the notable exception—and Mom chronicled our conquests on a monthly basis in long, heavily embroidered, eat-your-heart-out letters to Aunt Edie in Baker.

The way I saw it, my height was a means to a worthy end, so I
worked it like a carny scam, always knowing, deep down, that I had the talent and the drive to back it up. Actually, Mom was more of a fanatic about this than I was. I’ll never forget the night she chastised me for wearing my hair up in a bun to a big premiere. “It’s spoiling the whole effect,” she told me. “It adds a good two inches. You’re almost as tall as that girl in North Dakota.” Mom kept track of these things.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Neil.

“Yeah?”

“What if we talk to Arnie, get some glossies made of the two of us?”

“And?”

“Start our own act. Riccarton and Roth. I think it’s time, don’t you?”

“Riccarton and Roth?”

“Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“If you like second billing.”

He laughed. “OK. Roth and Riccarton.”

I rolled it around for a while, testing the rhythm of the words. “No, you’re right. Works better the other way.”

He stroked my hair. “I know a guy with a club just around the corner. He might not book us right away, but we’d steal the show on Open Mike Night. After that, who knows?”

“Well…it’s a start.”

He frowned. “Hate it, huh?”

“No. Sounds good.” Not as good as an evening with Meryl and Bette and Barbra and Madonna, but I was trying like hell to lower my sights for once. I have to do that, I realize, if I’m to survive in this town at all. All things considered, an Open Mike Night in North Hollywood sounded preferable to, say, phone solicitations in Reseda or another idiotic infomercial where you can’t see my face. I’d sunk lower than this, after all, and still managed to hold up my head about it.

Neil got out of bed, lit a cigarette, returned to stretch out and stare at the ceiling. “We need a classy look,” he said, warming to
his subject. “I’ll get a tuxedo, maybe, with a bow tie the same color as your dress.”

“That’d be nice.”

“You can sit in one of those tall stools with a back. With a pin spot.”

I told him I sounded better standing up.

“OK, then, we build a little box, like a pedestal. I can roll it out with me before you make your entrance. It would announce you, sort of—like a trademark.”

“Can we put steps on it?”

“Sure.”

“It’s better if you don’t have to lift me. People aren’t as nervous.”

“No kidding?” He acted as if he’d never thought of that before.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“OK.”

“The pedestal’s nice, though. I like that.”

“I thought you might.”

I smiled, but warily. “Are you sure about this?”

“Completely. Never surer.” He touched my cheek. “Can you spend the night?”

I told him I’d planned on it.

“Good.”

“We can do this, Neil, but I don’t want a Svengali.”

“I know that.”

“I’m my own Svengali.”

“Hey,” he said, “I’m just the piano player.”

“We aren’t gonna sing duets?”

“If you want,” he said, laughing.

“Duets would be nice, I think.”

“Then we’ll do them. As many as you want.”

I told him not to be so easy, that I’d take advantage of it.

“I’m just glad you’re staying,” he said.

He made a nice dinner for us—beef stew and garlic bread and salad—while the rain kept pounding away. I watched TV from the
bed, comforted by the circling smells of the stew, the muffled clatter and clink of his movement in the kitchen. The tube, meanwhile, was full of the Thomas hearings, recap after recap of the weirdest day of testimony yet.

“I am
not
believing this!”

Neil arrived from the kitchen wearing a white butcher’s apron and holding a soup spoon like a scepter. “What now?”

“He told her he has a dick like Long Dong Silver!”

“Who’s that?”

“This porn dude.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“I’ve seen him. My friend Jeff showed me a photo once years ago in a magazine. He’s got this long, skinny shlong that hangs down to his knees. It looks like a piece of garden hose or some-thing—a really useless piece of garden hose. It was tied in a knot when I saw it.”

Neil grinned. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“No, sir. And if
we’re
having this conversation, they must be having it at the networks.”

Neil chuckled.

“They’ve got that photo as we speak, and they’re racking their conscience, wondering if this is something America
really
needs to know. I say show it. Show the world exactly what a pig Clarence Thomas is.”

“How can you be so sure she’s not lying?”

“Why should she, Neil? Why should she sit there and say the words Long Dong Silver?”

“Because he jilted her.”

“
Jilted
her?”

“Well, rebuffed her. She was obviously hot for him once.”

“Oh, please.” I threw up my hands.

“Plus he married a white woman.”

“Oh, now, there’s a good reason to get him.”

“It is to some black women. It’s the worst crime you can commit.”

“Look at her,” I said, gesturing toward that strong, cool, dignified face on the screen. “Does she look like a racist to you? She taught civil rights law, for God’s sake!”

“At Oral Roberts University.”

“Well…”

“That’s not a credential
I’d
brag about. That’s like…teaching ecology at Exxon.”

I absorbed that for a moment, then gave him a grumpy look. “Go back to your stew.”

We ate dinner on the bed. The media in all their tongue-lolling sleaziness made poor Anita Hill say the words Long Dong Silver no less than four hundred times in the course of the evening. You couldn’t hit the clicker without landing squarely on that moment in time and the attendant shabby spectacle of all those middle-aged white men—Teddy Kennedy especially—trying their damnedest to keep a straight face.

After another hour or so, we tired of the spectacle and turned off the set. I felt lulled by the rain and my pleasantly full stomach. Seeing me begin to drift off, Neil doused the light and slid into bed next to me, pulling the covers over us. I snuggled against him and fell into a solid sleep.

I woke up alone to sunlight streaming through his matchstick shades. Hearing activity in the kitchen, I slid out of bed in the T-shirt I’d slept in, gave my hair a quick fluff, and went out to join him. He was tidying up with a vengeance: scraping plates over the disposal, sponging the countertop, bagging garbage.

“I hope you’re not doing that for me.”

“I must be brain dead,” he said. “I completely forgot something.”

“You’ve got another date, and she’ll be here in five minutes.”

His laughter was short and sour. “Linda’s bringing Danny by.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not his usual day, but she called a few days ago and asked. I just forgot about it.”

“That’s cool.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“You want me to call a cab or something?”

“No. Not at all.”

“I don’t mind.”

He shrugged and gave me a sheepish look. “There’s not much point. They get here in ten minutes.”

In other words, we had to deal with it now, and that was that. No wonder Neil was panicked. I was suddenly annoyed that his negligence had turned this fairly significant confrontation into a rush job.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

“No…well, maybe a wet washcloth.”

“You got it.”

“Do you still have my green T-shirt? The one I left here last time?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll take that too, then.”

He left me alone in the bedroom with my requirements. I shucked my grungy T-shirt and gave myself a quick sponge bath in front of the closet-door mirror. Then I put on the green shirt—which was freshly laundered, at least, and a fairly becoming color—slapped on lipstick and powder, and spritzed myself with Charlie. After a futile effort to repair my sleep-dented hair, I flung down the brush in exasperation. It was Linda I was doing this for, but don’t ask me why.

I returned to the living room, where Neil was snatching scattered newspapers from the floor.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

“No. It’s fine. You look nice.”

I grunted.

“Sorry about this.”

“What the hell.”

“She won’t stay. She’s just dropping him off.”

“You need some time alone with him. Let’s just call a cab now and—”

“I’ll drive you home, OK? In a little bit.”

I shrugged.

“He’s a nice kid. He doesn’t bite.”

“Maybe
I
do,” I said.

He laughed and dropped the newspapers on the dining table—just as the doorbell rang.

I jumped a little in spite of myself. “Is she always on time?”

“Always,” he replied, and headed for the door.

I smoothed out my T-shirt and waited from a distance to give him as much opportunity as possible for explanations and introductions. He swung open the door to reveal an informally garbed Linda—pink slacks, gingham blouse, sunglasses—and, hard by her right leg, the handsome, stormy-eyed seven-year-old who made these meetings compulsory. Danny was dressed in vinyl cowboy boots and Levi’s, with a bright aqua corduroy shirt. While his mother greeted his father, the boy gazed across the room at yours truly, having sensed on some primal level, as I had, another living creature in the room at his eye level. I guessed him to be about a foot taller than I am.

“We aren’t late, are we?” asked Linda.

“No, no,” said Neil. “Just on time. Hi, Skeeter.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Look who’s here.” Neil beamed. “We were just rehearsing.”

“Oh, hi,” said Linda. “How are you, Cady?”

“Great.”

“Danny, this is Ms. Roth…” Linda began.

“…the lady I sing with,” Neil finished.

The kid hadn’t stopped staring at me, so I walked toward him, looking friendly, letting him see how this apparatus works. “Hi, Danny.” I gazed up at Neil. “What’s this Skeeter business, anyway?”