Meet Me in the Moon Room (12 page)

Real bug stuff, industrial strength. No more Mr. Grocery Store wimpy bug spray. Big Bob the Bug Man had dosed him good. Put his head in a greasy cloud. Knocked him down flat on his ass.

Perry pulled his arms in under his chin in an attitude of prayer. When the light goes on, everyone scrambles for cover, but this is what we all really want, this sweet cloud of sleep. His body shook with a sudden convulsion, and he kicked his heels against the floor. Big Bob put a big black boot on Perry’s middle and pushed, and Perry did a bone crunching sit-up.

Gutter ball.

So, tell us again about the Lesson you’ve learned, about how Life Is Like Bowling.

Okay, okay. Forget it.

The Lesson is Life Is Nothing Like Bowling, Perry decides.

“I’ll pack a bag,” Carmela said.

A Breath Holding Contest

I
’ll breathe through my ears and win, or I’ll die. I won’t give in. I fully expect my ears to save me. It’s a faith inherited from my father who, in endless attempts to verify his theory of teleportation, used to lurk in shadows, inside closets, behind bushes and trees, under my bed to pop out screaming like a crack-crazed axe murderer, hoping I’d just go somewhere else. If you’re scared enough, he’d say, your mind will move your body, Sonny. I used to think that’s the way he got rid of Mom—teleported her and her hardware-selling boyfriend to Florida.

I’ve round-robined my way into the finals, and now I sit lotus fashion on the beach in front of the local champion, a tiny whisper of a woman like a famine victim in a yellow swim suit. She looks familiar, but after all these years, opponents tend to blur in my mind. Her name is Marcia, and, like me, she wears an orange scuba mask, her mouth sealed shut with adhesive tape. She’s beaming evil thoughts at me, her beady blues narrowed but steady. She’s got that “I win, you lose” look. People tell me I wear that look, too, meaning it as an insult, but I always take it as a compliment. Contests, any and all kinds of contests, are my meat. Marcia doesn’t realize who she’s dealing with.

She makes me nervous, though, and I get offensive. I put together a thought and shoot it across the space that separates us.

I can eat more jalapeno peppers than you can!

She doesn’t seem impressed. This could be trouble.

I can stand on my head longer than you can, she fires back.

The spectators crouch like scavenging sea gulls on the slick, black rocks that circle Marcia and me where we sit locked in our combat, noisy as corpses with our weakly bottled up gases. The Pacific washes the rocks, but it doesn’t move the onlookers, the fans, in their tennis outfits, their bikinis, their cut-off jeans and dopey hats. They shake away the salt spray and laugh. They won’t admit it, but they hope one of us dies today. That’s what spectators are for—to look upon the twisted, purple face of defeat and shiver deliciously.

Drops of seawater dot the glass of my mask. I smell wet rubber. I taste hospitals in the tape over my mouth. Huge hands crush my chest. I want to breathe! God, how I want it. Just to gulp in big bites of cool ocean air, smell again the pine forest lining this Oregon beach, taste the fishy sea soup in the breeze. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at even the waves of sunscreen and sweat wafting from the spectators. I ache. I ache. I mustn’t let it show.

I can do more one-armed pushups than you can, I tell Marcia.

I can do more tap-dance steps, she rallies.

She’s got a point. If I get out of this alive, I’m going to have to bone up on my tap dancing. She knows she’s scored a hit. I must work fast. I can feel the membranes that close my ears move back and forth, back and forth, holding fast. Surely they will break soon. I must be ready. When the air streams through my ears and into the back of my throat, I must play it cool, take little breaths, no great chest heaves.

I hit her with another thought. I can chug more beer than you can!

That makes her pause. I can tell a little person such as herself couldn’t chug much beer.

I could run circles around your beer belly.

She’s good. I decide to try another angle. I can name more vice presidents than you can!

She thinks about it. She doesn’t seem worried. I have a wild moment of panic, but I fight it down. I won’t give in. I’d die of shame if I lost to this woman. My vision is blurring, and muscles all over my body twitch and jerk. I make fists of my hands and put them under my thighs to hold them down. I can see that Marcia won’t quit either. This is like being married again. Women just won’t quit, no matter what you do to show them who can do more, who knows more, who should say what’s what and when. No, they always have one more last word waiting.

I shouldn’t have thought that. She jumps right on it.

I can maintain a relationship longer than you can, she tells me sweetly.

Oh, yeah!

My longest was three months.

Ah ha! Got her. My longest was six months!

I lied. My longest was a year.

I’m stunned. A year!

Marcia’s turning an ugly shade of blue, and there are red blotches around her mask and tape, but I don’t think I can outlast her. I must look worse. The shame sits heavy in my stomach, like too many tacos. It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to breathe through my ears after all.

You didn’t last long with me, Sonny. Her thought is all ice.

That’s it. She’s been playing an unfair advantage. She knows me. I dig in my memory, and find her there, in Maine, that winter of the lobster-eating contest, the night we had after I beat the bib off her and everyone else.

I’m better in bed. I must make up lost ground.

I love better.

Even she must know how weak that is. She hesitates, but before I can fire another round, she gets in her best slash so far.

I know where my mother is.

That unhinges me. My brain is starving for oxygen. I shoot wild. I own the railroads. I’ve got Park Place!

Somehow the spectators know I’ve missed. They know the end is near. Her fan club chants, “Marcia! Marcia!”

Her cheeks are puffed up big, and she looks like a frog or a trumpet player, but I see the cold fire in her eyes as she delivers her coup de grâce. My father’s not squatting in some doorway drinking shaving lotion and puking on his shoes!

Darts, balls, hoops, scoops, pucks! I cry. No air is ever going to come through my ears. I’m bouncing on my butt in the sand and making little whimpering sounds behind my tape. It can’t end like this.

Even when you win, Sonny, you lose.

I’m snatched away like a tablecloth, leaving Marcia, the black rocks, and the spectators trembling in their places on the beach. I appear some two hundred yards up the beach on the deck of the SeaView Restaurant. I rip the mask from my face, the tape from my mouth. The air I gulp is god-I-died-and-went-to-heaven good. Thank you, Dad. Oh, thank you. Lots of eyes on me—old people in their Sunday best, young couples with wine. I see I’m about as welcome as a little accident Muffy the pooch might have left behind. A waiter is moving swiftly my way. He’ll tell me to get lost, keep moving. I open my arms to the sky.

“It isn’t fear that moves me, Dad,” I tell him, wherever he is. “It’s chagrin.”

Fancy Pants

H
e pulled into the repair lane and stopped. She twisted around in the passenger seat to look back, ready to give him the signal, and he stared down the exit ramp watching the bridge. They didn’t worry about the complicated cloverleaf above them. The trick was to wait for a gap in traffic and then make a dash for it. At this time of morning, it wouldn’t take long.

“Now,” she said.

“No good,” he said, meaning either there were too many cars coming the other way on the freeway or too much activity down on the bridge. Someone might see them enter the secret place. There would never be a time with no traffic at all, but it was only the close traffic they worried about. Anyone seeing them leave the road from a distance might not believe their eyes or more likely would pretend they hadn’t seen it at all.

A few moments later she said, “Go.”

This time it was okay. He stepped on the gas and speeded onto the exit ramp, but instead of continuing to the bridge below, he suddenly pulled off the road and down the steep embankment. This was the tricky part. If he didn’t hit the exact spot, they would probably crack up, damage the car, maybe hurt themselves. Certainly they’d have to call someone and make explanations.

But he’d gotten it right again. They bounced over the uneven ground, down the green slope of wild grasses and dandelions, down into a space that was surrounded on all sides by highways but was lower than them all, a hidden valley in the city. At the bottom, the freeway itself was some fifty yards above, the exit ramp twenty yards up, and the cross street running along the bridge maybe thirty yards above them. There was a tight line of trees on the freeway side.

In the valley itself, more trees and shrubs grew. He tucked the car into a place he knew could not be seen even if someone stopped and walked around the perimeter of the secret place as he had done once after parking and climbing back up the embankment.

He got out of the car. The air was cool, and he could smell a farm somewhere, or at least cows, or at least things that crapped wherever they were standing, whenever they felt like it. Or maybe he was smelling a memory. He leaned back down to give her a smile where she still sat looking straight ahead in the shotgun seat.

“I need to use the bathroom,” she said.

“So, use the bushes,” he said. “ You could have gone before we left the house.” He walked around the car and opened the trunk.

She got out and slammed her door, and the sound was loud enough to silence the birds and bugs for a moment. She came to him and looked down into the trunk and hugged herself as the wind blew her skirt around her legs.

“Where did the chairs come from?” she asked.

“Wherever chairs come from.” He grabbed one of the wooden chairs and pulled it from the trunk. He set it on its feet and then reached in for the other one.

There was a big brown wicker picnic basket.

“Here I’ll take that,” she said.

“I thought you had to use the bathroom?”

“I can wait a few minutes.” She took the basket from him and moved into the trees. He picked up the chairs and followed her.

They walked through waist-high grass and then thorny undergrowth for a small distance and came to a meadow. The bridge was directly overhead. There was a brook with tiny silver and blue fish darting about. He put the chairs down beside the water.

“No, over here,” she said.

She shook out a big red, green, and white checked blanket and let it settle to the grass like a magic carpet. He carried the chairs over and put them on the blanket. She slipped off into the forest, and a moment later he could see a bush quivering like there were many frightened quail in there, instead of just her, peeing.

He sat down on one of the chairs. A moment later, she returned and knelt on the blanket. She opened the picnic basket and took out a black case longer than his forearm. You had to wonder how it fit in there. She handed it to him. He put it on his lap and opened it. Inside were the three silver pieces of a flute. The sight of the gleaming instrument sent a little shiver of anticipation down his spine, and he looked up at her and smiled.

She had taken her place on the other chair, the bow of her cello poised to play over the instrument itself.

“Where did the cello come from?” he asked.

“Wherever cellos come from,” she said.

“What about the wine and cheese and baguettes?”

“Later,” she said.

He lifted the flute to his mouth and ran through several scales to loosen up. “Okay?” he said.

She answered by drawing the bow across the strings of her cello. He listened for a moment, then stepped in just where he was expected. Vivaldi. Late in a concerto in G minor. Allegro.

“You flute guys are the best when it comes to oral sex,” she said.

He blew a low, middle, and high F justlikethat, and she laughed, but you had to wonder how he was hearing her over the music.

“My Russian grandmother used to say look for a fellow who plays the flute.”

You had to wonder if her Russian grandmother had had oral sex in mind when she used to say that.

She said, “It has everything to do with lip control. All your little flourishes.”

Yes, her lips were moving so he probably wasn’t reading her mind. He might have made a snappy comeback, but his mouth was busy with the flute.

“It’s that fine control of air,” she said. “Like a thin thread tickling from the lips, moving here and there, just there. They say you guys develop muscles you don’t use for anything else but flute playing. Little do they know. And I haven’t said a word about tonguing.”

She laughed again, a high soprano laugh that blended perfectly with the music, and he felt absolutely wonderful. Bluebirds hopped out onto their branches to whistle along with the music. Squirrels came out to swing and sway. Grinning raccoons gathered at the edge of the blanket.

“Aren’t we happy?” she asked, and then she answered herself, “Yes, we’re so very very happy.”

Danger. Danger.

Hadn’t he warned her that if you do so much smiling your face might freeze like that, and then where would you be? She wouldn’t listen.

“So very happy.”

She sounded a little desperate.

He could see that her hands were already bleeding. With every stroke of the bow across the strings, she left a smear of aggressive red blood across the smooth wooden face of the cello.

He was in no better shape. He could see now in blurry close-up the contrast of his own blood on the silver flute keys. That contrast reminded him of the difference between the meat and the machine, the knife and the muscle, a sudden silver slice across the vein.

Her nose fell off.

She looked startled for a moment, but she didn’t stop playing. He could feel his face slipping. He smiled. A mistake. He knew all that smiling would get him in trouble. He saw her eyes widen a little, and he figured he must look pretty frightful.