Maybe the Moon (7 page)

R
ENEE WAS A NAVY BRAT, BORN AND RAISED IN
S
AN
D
IEGO
. Brat status is something we share, in fact, since my dad was a drill sergeant at Fort Irwin, down the road from Barstow. This was half the reason I was named Cadence; the other half had to do with Mom teaching piano. Cadence, apparently, was the only thing my parents had in common. Plus the Cady Mountains were right there, flanking the bleakest stretch of the interstate, so my nickname came ready-made. Mom had a long, boring rap about this, which she rattled off at every audition, come hell or high water.

Renee’s mom was the military parent—a Wave, I guess you call it. Her dad had some sort of civilian job on the naval base. They were always entering her in beautiful-child contests; she had baby lipsticks and her own batons by the time she was five. When she was a teenager, she ran for Miss San Diego but didn’t get into the finals. Her parents divorced the same year, and Renee, who was a guilt-bearer even then, felt chiefly to blame. One more beauty crown, especially that one, would have saved their marriage, she claims. She moved to L.A. after high school with a guy she met while working at Arby’s. He walked out on her only days after they
found an apartment in Reseda. I have no idea what the problem was. Renee almost never talks about him.

Renee talks in her sleep, though she won’t admit it. You can hear her all the way through the door—a sort of ladylike drone, completely unintelligible, that seems somehow intended for an audience. There’s something so formal and melancholy about it, so redolent of loss, that I think of it privately as her Miss San Diego acceptance speech.

I can’t help wondering if the guys in her life hear the same monologue, and if they’re freaked out by it. Or does she have different dreams when she’s sleeping in other bedrooms?

I’m afraid I’m making her sound tragic, like Delta Dawn or something, and that’s not the way it is at all. She’s a great person, really. I’m lucky to have her.

T
ODAY, ACCORDING TO THE PAPERS
, L.A.
HAD ITS LAST TOTAL
solar eclipse of the millennium. About three thousand people mobbed the Griffith Observatory for the occasion, but I watched it from a house in Pasadena, where we were working a bat mitzvah. Just before it happened, while I still had the attention of my audience, I sang “Lucky Old Sun” and “Moon River.” Our clients, the Morrises, provided their guests with welders’ masks, cleverly upgraded with gold glitter, so they could watch that eerie ebony fingernail as it slid across the surface of the sun.

Since they weren’t watching us, Neil and I slipped off for a breather to a quiet corner of the garden. I sat on a patch of grass under the trees. Plopping down next to me, Neil dug a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his coveralls. “Did you get a good look at it?”

I told him I had, that one of the old ladies had lent me her welder’s mask and that, frankly, I wasn’t sure it had warranted all the fuss. The traffic was living hell this morning, and there were serious madmen everywhere.

Neil wanted to know which old lady.

“With red hair and wobbly teeth.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I told him that when I gave the mask back to her, she said: “Isn’t it amazing? It makes you feel so small.”

Neil chuckled, then shook a cigarette out of the pack, lighting it with his Bic. “What did you say?”

“I agreed.”

That made him laugh. “I thought it would get a lot darker. You know, this great shadow across the land.” He swept the air with the hand holding the cigarette.

“Oh, well. It was better than the Harmonic Convergence.”

“Shit. I forgot about that.”

“Well, there you go.”

“What was supposed to happen then?”

“Who knows? The harmonies converged. The harmonicas. Something.”

Another chuckle.

“At least there was something to look at this time.”

“True,” he said as he stretched out his legs. Then he leaned back on his elbows and tilted his head toward the sun, which you couldn’t really see for the branches. A lacy, dappled light fell across his face. He was like a beautiful mountain range, I thought. “How long is it supposed to last?”

I told him another fifteen minutes or so.

He was quiet for a moment, then said: “You were incredible out there.”

“Thanks.”

“Especially on ‘Moon River.’”

“Good.”

“I liked your patter too.”

I’d done a bit for the crowd about how the sun and moon were siblings, and how rare it was for Sister Moon to have any chance at all to upstage her loudmouthed big brother. I know it looks dumb on paper, but it worked swell for a bat mitzvah in Pasadena during an eclipse.

“You know what?” said Neil.

“What?”

“I think you should make a video.”

My heart leapt at the thought, even as I archly discounted it. “That ought not to cost much.”

“Well,” he said, “I know somebody.”

“With money?”

“No, but she wants to make a video.”

I gave him a jaded look. “A girlfriend or something?”

“Hell, no.” He smiled at some private vision of this woman. “Just this person I know. She’s a student at the American Film Institute. She has to make a short film for one of her classes.”

“Oh.”

“If you’re not interested…”

“No…I could be.”

He sat up energetically and crossed his legs, Indian style. “She’d give it style, Cady, I know that. She’s got good taste. Some of her ideas about it are pretty interesting.”

“You’ve already talked to her about it?”

He looked a little sheepish. “Some.”

I assured him I wasn’t offended.

“She wants to do it in black and white, with long shadows and a simple set, a sort of Lotte Lenya thing. Haunting and beautiful. She’s got access to a studio, and I could play the synthesizer. We could do it for almost nothing.”

I thought about it for a moment, gazing up at the trees. “What would I sing?”

“I was thinking of ‘If.’”

“The old Bread song?”

“Yeah. I think it would work with your voice.”

“Really?” I couldn’t quite take in the idea that he’d spent time thinking about me and my potential. No one’s really done that since Mom died. I could feel an awful weight lifting that I didn’t even know had been there.

“It’s a poignant song,” Neil said, “and nobody’s heard it for ages.”

“Except in elevators.”

“But you’d give it a new dignity.”

“I suppose.”

“It would work, Cady, I know. And with you singing it…it would rip their hearts out.”

I felt a tiny alarm go off. “Is that what we wanna do?”

He shrugged.

“I’m not a poster child, Neil.”

“I know that.”

“If your friend wants that…”

“She doesn’t. I told her all about you—what a great person you were, what a strong and beautiful spirit. She gets it, Cady, she really does.”

Neil had never said anything like this to me directly, so I felt myself reddening on the spot.

“Maybe I’m out of line,” he added.

“No. I see what you’re after.”

“You do?”

I nodded.

“You could sing something more upbeat, I guess.”

“Fuck that. I want hearts ripped out.”

He laughed; we both laughed.

“We’d have a good time doing it,” he said. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

“I hear you.”

“You’ll do it, then?”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Great.”

“OK.”

His gorgeous brown eyes settled on me for a moment, then seemed to turn nervous, darting away distractedly. “Think we’ve played hooky too long?”

I smiled at him. “You’re the boss. Who’s gonna rap your knuckles?”

“Yeah, but…”

“What’s the matter? You leave Tread in charge?”

“You got it.”

“He can handle it,” I said.

“Yeah, but we don’t know what happens to him during an eclipse.”

We both thought this was hilarious. We were laughing our asses off, in fact, when the object of our amusement came loping around the corner, big red whiskers akimbo. “Oh, hi, guys. Been lookin’ for you.”

We greeted him in unison, looking guilty as hell.

“Mrs. Morris wants you. There’s a big toast or somethin’ coming up.”

“Oh…well.” Neil gave me a wry, conspiratorial look, then hopped to his feet and brushed dead grass off his butt. A round of muted applause—more solar worship, no doubt—rolled toward us from the house. I rose and shook the wrinkles out of my Pierrette outfit, feeling somehow that an idyll had passed.

Tread was predictably stoked about the eclipse—what a mystical, primal, humanizing thing it was—and proceeded to tell us about how he’d taken special care to align his crystals for this morning of mornings. Neil was sweet and kept a straight face throughout, though his smile seemed just on the verge of bolting for freedom like a herd of white horses. I didn’t dare catch his eye. Tread’s a real bran flake sometimes, but there’s no point in hurting his feelings. The fact that Neil understands this—and knows that I know he does—makes me like him even more.

“Look at the ground,” Tread said, as the three of us headed back to the festivities. “The best show is down there.”

I looked and saw nothing.

“What do you mean?” asked Neil.

“I think you have to smoke something,” I said.

“Now wait a minute,” said Tread. “Just look.”

“I’m looking.”

“See all the little crescents?”

I did see them. What I’d accepted as the usual variegation of light and shadow was, in fact, thousands of tiny half-moons—half-
suns, if you prefer—scattered across the ground like the hairpins of an untidy goddess.

“They’re photographs,” Tread explained. “Under the trees here the leaves filter the light, so it actually takes a picture of the eclipse.”

“Amazing,” murmured Neil.

“Yeah,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Good one.”

Tread gave me a big, crooked, metaphysical grin—about as close as he ever comes to saying I told you so. “You should look down more often.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Sure. There’s good stuff everywhere.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

It’s dark now and I’m in my bedroom, looking out at the same moon that caused all that commotion this morning. Renee is in the living room, painting snowy peaks with her secret television lover. The world is back to normal again, they tell us, but I can’t help feeling expectant, on the brink of something truly significant. Neil says his video friend, whose name is Janet Glidden, will want to get started right away. That’s fine with me, though I’m not nearly as thin as I’d like to be. Oh, well. I’ll wrap myself in something dark and get the makeup right and do it all under a three-watt blue bulb. The voice is what counts, anyway.

Jeff called earlier this evening to say he’d recognized my legs in that cellulite infomercial. We had a good laugh about it. I asked him, proceeding carefully, if he’d heard from his friend in the park. He said no, without elaborating, so I let the subject drop. I think his pride’s a little hurt. As near as I can make out, guys usually call Jeff back.

A moment ago Aunt Edie called from Baker to inquire about my well-being and express her belated dismay over Merv Griffin. She had just seen an old
Globe
at the beauty parlor. “Did you know he was that way?” she asked.

I told her pretty much everybody did.

“Poor Eva Gabor,” she said.

T
HERE’S SOME BIG STUFF TO TELL YOU, BUT
I’
LL START WITH THE
morning and how I got my butt sniffed on Rodeo Drive.

Since Renee is off work for a week, we dolled ourselves up and drove into Beverly Hills for what Renee is fond of calling “an elegant day.” We were standing outside Bijan, window-shopping and looking as tastefully blasé as we knew how, when this big, ugly dog appeared out of nowhere and, without so much as a howdy-ma’am, stuck his big, wet nose up my dress. Renee shooed him off several times, to no avail. He’d caught his first whiff of condensed woman and could not be contained.

“Oh, gah,” groaned Renee. “I hate it when this happens.”

“
You
do?”

She giggled, then shooed him some more and told me: “Don’t. We can’t laugh.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll think you’re friendly.”

“Maybe I am,” I said.

“I mean it, Cady. Look mean.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Back up against the wall, then.”

“He’ll just go for the front.” I reached up with both hands and pushed the dog’s muzzle away. “How ’bout it, Renee? This elegant enough for you?”

“Shut up.”

“He doesn’t have a boner, does he?”

We were both crippled with laughter when a snippy-looking woman in red leather came out of the store and gave us the evil eye. “Is there something I can help you with?”

I don’t know why that was funny, but it was. I lost it so completely that Renee had to explain things for me. “This dog has been…harassing her.”

“Is it your dog?”

“No.” Renee sounded terribly accused. “We’ve never seen it before.”

I was holding my waist now, gasping for breath. The dog had backed off a little, observing my madness, his head tilted in genuine puzzlement.

“Are you all right?” asked the woman.

I nodded.

The woman studied us a moment longer, then went back into the store. I leaned against the building, trying to compose myself, while Renee proffered a sickly, mortified smile to a pair of matrons who’d stopped to gawk. Almost as if he’d realized the fun was over, the dog lost interest and sauntered off down the street.

“Thanks a lot,” Renee said sullenly.

“Who? Me or him?”

“You.”

I wiped my eyes, then waved at the gawkers, who eyed each other nervously, then skulked away. “It was funny,” I said, trying to explain myself.

“You could’ve said
something
.”

“No way.” I held up my palm to show her how much I meant this. “I could barely breathe.”

“She thought you were having a fit.”

“I know.” I tried to look contrite. “I’m sorry.”

“And you messed up your mascara.” Renee knelt in front of me, pulled a Kleenex from her purse, and began repairing my face. “I always forget about dogs.”

“It’s OK,” I said.

She just kept on dabbing away. “Where do you think he came from?”

I thought for a moment, then said: “Got me licked.”

She laughed really hard at this, so much so that her face began to squinch up and her big, friendly knees squared off in a disquietingly familiar way.

“Renee…?”

She squealed incoherently, like some old-time movie damsel trying to shake off a gag.

“You’re peeing your pants, aren’t you?”

All she could manage was a nod and another squeal. She was doing a full jackknife now, impressively enough, yet somehow remained standing.

“They’re gone,” I said. “Go for it.”

The morning was not a total washout, I am happy to report, because Renee keeps an extra pair of panties in her purse for just such emergencies. She picked up this helpful hint, she explained, during her kiddie pageant days, when unnasty undies were apparently a point of real pride in the dressing rooms. After skulking off to a rest room in a nearby coffee shop, she joined me for pie in one of the booths.

“Why do you suppose they do that?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Dogs.”

I shrugged. “Because they can.”

“It must be so weird for you.”

I told her it was like living in a world with dragons.

She frowned for a moment, then gave me a wan smile and
gazed out at the street. “I hate Beverly Hills, anyway. People are so stuck up.”

“Mmm.” I didn’t care where I was, really. I was mostly just glad to be off my feet, to be back in air-conditioning again and buzzing merrily along on caffeine and sugar.

“Let’s go home and change.”

“You just did.”

“Into something casual, I mean.”

“I thought this was our elegant day.”

“Well…” She looked down at her pale-peach blouse and white linen skirt. “I guess we could wear this there.”

“Where?”

Her eyes were avoiding me.

“Where, Renee?”

“Icon?”

“Why would we go there?”

“You know…”

It took me a while to get it, maybe because I’d blocked it out: the brand-new Mr. Woods ride was being launched to great fanfare and heavy press at Icon Studios this week. Renee and I had seen a big story about it on
Entertainment Tonight
—with Charlton Heston and Nancy Reagan climbing out of the fucking thing. The mythology that required yours truly to remain invisible at all costs has found a lucrative new life in the Valley as a high-class midway attraction. Try to imagine my excitement.

“I know you think it’s dumb,” said Renee.

“It’ll be hideously crowded.”

“Maybe not.”

“What does the ride do, anyway?”

“I dunno,” she said. “I think they fly you over the woods.”

“I hate theme parks, Renee. I really do. I loathe and despise them. Couldn’t you go with Lorrie or somebody?” (That’s her friend from work.)

“Please, Cady. It wouldn’t be any fun without you.”

I knew I was doomed to lose, so I told her I would go, with two provisions: that we go straight to the ride and leave as soon as the ride was over and that she not reveal my identity to a living soul while we were there. The last thing I needed was for her to trot out my tired elfin credentials for some flat-butted Lutheran family on vacation.

Icon Studios, I should tell you, is within spitting distance of my house in Studio City. It’s built on the side of the mountain, on two levels, with a connecting escalator that looks like a giant Lucite rodent run. The lower level is really two operations, a working studio and a theme park, with almost no connection to each other. The hordes of tourists who troop through the park each year to cluck over the family photos in “Fleet Parker’s Dressing Room” have no more chance of meeting the star himself than they do of meeting the real Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. The place is plastic on plastic, an illusion about an illusion.

I hadn’t been to the park in almost seven years. Mom and I took Aunt Edie there, at her request, on her first visit to L.A.—it’s that sort of place. It was much as I’d remembered it, just as soul-deadening, certainly. The plodding, Necco-colored people on the rodent run were what I tend to think of when I hear the term New World Order. Renee ran interference when the crowd got too thick, but it was slow going most of the time. The air was stale and muggy under the blurred white sky, and there were way too many children off leashes for my taste. We headed straight for a soda stand as soon as we reached the lower level. I’d already had quite enough.

Renee stooped to hand me my Diet Coke float. “Are you doin’ OK?”

“I preferred the dog,” I said.

“Cady.”

“I’m kidding.” I licked the foam on the edge of the float.

“I want you to like this,” she said.

“I love this.”

“I mean the Mr. Woods Adventure.”

I grinned into the foam. “How long is the line?”

“Not long.”

“I bet there’s a lot more you can’t see.”

I was right, but I didn’t rub it in. For almost half an hour all I saw was poles and legs, poles and legs, as several hundred of the faithful were led through an elaborate cattle chute for humans. To keep us docile there were a dozen video monitors suspended from the ceiling, offering not only clips from
Mr. Woods
but a gooey tribute to “the little guy himself” by Philip Blenheim himself. Renee adored this, of course, swooning and giggling at all her favorite moments. Me, I was grateful for the air-conditioning.

There was a sign, just before we boarded the ride, that said:
CHILDREN UNDER
35
INCHES MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT
.

“Uh oh,” I said ominously, teasing Renee. “Look at that.”

“So?”

“They’ll never take me. I’m four inches under.”

“Well, I’m an adult.”

I told her they might want proof.

“I have an ID,” she said, missing the joke.

“Why do you think they say that?” I said, beginning to worry for real.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” said Renee.

“It won’t be nothing if my ass is flung into Kingdom Come.”

Renee must have suspected a last-minute change of heart, because she frowned and poked out her lower lip. “It’s not that fast, Cady. Nancy Reagan’s hair wasn’t even messed up.”

The woman in front of us, a plump, white-haired lady in pink sweats, turned around and smiled down at me. “It’s really mild,” she said. I wondered how long she’d been waiting to leap into the conversation. “I was the same as you, but it’s a piece o’ cake.”

“Thank God.”

The woman nodded. “I was exactly the same as you.”

“You’ve done this before, then?”

“Brought my sister’s kids last week.”

Renee jumped in: “Is it fun?”

“Well…if you love Mr. Woods as much as I do.”

“Oh, I do!”

The woman laughed.

“I mean, I probably do.” Renee tittered, then cast a guilty glance in my direction. I could tell how much she was dying to blab, so I admonished her with a stony look. The pink-sweats lady seemed nice enough, but I was tired and cranky, and too preoccupied with ideas for the new video. I just didn’t have the stamina, or the time, for the draining little ritual of explaining myself.

The ride turned out to be a sort of glorified fun house: a chilly, dark space the size of an airplane hangar, through which we lurched and glided in “bark”-covered trains. The scene of our Adventure, according to Philip in the preride video, was not the suburban forest we knew from the movie but the “faraway, mystical realm of Mr. Woods’ origin.” Translation: I may be cheesy enough to exploit this character, but I’m not going to fuck around with a classic.

What this change of locale afforded, of course, was the perfect setup for cloning Mr. Woods, for creating a whole race of lovable robots in his image. That familiar wizened face, once so charmingly singular, popped up behind every bush and tree stump as we sailed along, as a teenage girl, say, or a romping baby, or a campful of lumberjacks marching home from work. There were Mr. Woods farmers and their wives, Mr. Woods soldiers going off to war. There was even a wedding ceremony in which everyone in church looked like Him. In the pyrotechnical finale, at least a hundred of the little fuckers (evil ones, I presume; the plot was too much for me) were hurled through the forest by a giant catapult.

I was profoundly unmoved. When we lurched out into the day-light again, Renee and the pink-sweats lady swapped notes. Renee was pleased, but thought Mr. Woods looked weird as a bride. I bit
my tongue and said something vague about the old-fashioned thrill of being led by the hand through a darkened room. Renee looked at me funny, unconvinced, then resumed gabbing with the lady.

When we were alone again, Renee announced stiffly that she had to pee.

“Then pee.”

“Look,” she said. “I didn’t tell her.”

I told her I knew that.

“Why are you mad, then?”

I told her I wasn’t, that I was just tired, that I thought
she
was mad.

“You wanna go with me?” She meant to the ladies’ room.

I shook my head, gave her a weak smile, and asked her to help me find a place away from the traffic.

This turned out to be a small but highly groomed patch of grass around the corner from Fleet Parker’s Dressing Room. I was sprawled there amid the birds of paradise, like some live-action garden gnome, when I heard a youthful male voice call my name.

“Cady?”

The guy knelt on the lawn to address me, completely natural about it. He was cute and in his early twenties, snub-nosed and sandy-haired. He wore a blue checked shirt with chinos and bore a marked resemblance to half the cutie-pies in West Hollywood, but I honestly couldn’t place the face.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Callum.”

All I can tell you is that the name just stayed there in the air for a while, everywhere at once, like the hum after a bell has been tolled.

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

Without showing teeth, he gave me the prettiest smile. “No.”

I hit the ground with my hand. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“Same thing you’re doing, I guess.”

My thoughts were galloping way ahead of me, of course, so it
was a real chore just to function in the moment. “Have you done the Adventure yet?” I asked Callum.

“A few hours ago.”

“Pretty tacky, huh?”

He just shrugged and smiled, remaining sweetly noncommittal. I wondered how much loyalty he still felt for Philip, whether he still kept up with him, whether he had come here as Philip’s guest, maybe, as an official part of the tenth-anniversary hoo-ha.

“It’s not
terrible
,” I said, backing down a little, “but it’s not an improvement on Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“Can I join you?” he asked.

“Of course. Sit.”

He eased onto the lawn next to me.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” I explained, taking in this new grown-up version of him. “She’s in the john.”

He nodded.

“What are the fucking chances of this?” I asked.

“Got me.”

“Can I say that around you now?”

He laughed. “You always did.”

I laid a hand on my chest to convey my horror.

“I survived,” he said, grinning.

“Are you here on vacation or something?”