Meet Me in the Moon Room (8 page)

“I don’t think I could have missed the fact that a comet is about to hit the Earth, Tim,” Jane said.

“Do you read the newspapers?”

“No.”

“Do you watch TV?”

“You know I don’t.”

“How about the radio?”

“Well, no. Not today.”

“None of your goofy friends do either.” I nailed down my point. “So just how do you think you would have heard about it?”

“That tone is exactly why I say we need to live apart, Tim.”

“Boop boop boop be doop,” Sacha sang.

“Everyone just relax,” I said. “And keep your bags on.” Things were slipping away. I needed to circle our wagons. It was vital that none of us give the world outside even a fleeting glance.

My own breath aside, the smell inside my bag reminded me of all the things you can carry in a brown paper bag. Curiously, the first thing that came to mind was books. Surely I’d carried home more groceries in brown paper bags than books. In fact, the name of the grocery store was printed right on the bag in red letters. Nevertheless, I thought of books, and clothes, and moving. I thought of garbage in the bags before I thought of groceries. Maybe it was because groceries spend so little time in the bags. I knew that if I packed my stuff up in paper bags, the bags might just sit for months in some cold new place.

“This isn’t just my plan, Jane,” I said. “The president has been on TV urging people not to look. Forests have been lighted to smoke up the skies. Teams are everywhere in primitive areas making sure no one looks.”

“Even if there is a giant comet about to hit the Earth, just what good do you expect these bags to do?” Jane asked.

“Things that might happen can’t be separated from the devices you use to measure them,” I said. “You can’t look at something without changing it.”

“What?”

“The moon’s not there if no one is looking. Or in our case, the comet.”

“Like the tree in the forest?”

“Sort of,” I said. “But that was philosophy. This is science.”

“Oh, right. Sure.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Sacha said.

“Soon, honey,” I said. “Just hang on a little while longer.”

“Someone would peek,” Jane said.

“Maybe. But it won’t be us.”

“How can that matter?”

“This is the same argument you use for not voting, Jane.” I knew I should be soothing her instead of snapping at her, but I couldn’t help it. “It’s irresponsible. If everyone thought like you, no one would vote.”

“Who’s talking about voting? We’re sitting around the kitchen table with grocery sacks over our heads!”

Sacha giggled.

I decided to try silence on Jane. I could hear my own breathing against the sides of the bag, and with any little movement there was a rustle like dry autumn leaves in a green plastic trash sack. I could hear birds too. They would be in the feeder outside the window over the sink. They would fly away if they caught us looking at them.

I could pull the bag away from my face a little and look straight down and see my white shirt over the gut hanging into my lap. I could suck the gut in; I could sigh it out. I could see my tan slacks, my black loafers, and the black and white kitchen tiles.

Strange, but I couldn’t see the name of our grocery store through the bag. Had I put the bag on backwards? I twisted it around. I still couldn’t see the letters, and then I didn’t know which way the bag was. Were the red letters to the front or to the back? I felt unhooked, disoriented, lost.

Things suddenly got brighter. It is my opinion that that was when the comet touched the atmosphere, and because it didn’t hit just then, I think the last person on Earth quit looking at it at precisely that moment.

“Don’t you see the sudden light of the fire?”

“A cloud probably just moved away from the sun,” Jane said.

I thought I heard some uncertainty in her voice. “That’s what you’d like to think,” I said.

“How long are we going to play this game, Tim?”

How long? Why, just until the comet’s gone, I almost said. It hit me then that Jane’s question was a good one. If finally no one was looking at the comet, did that mean it went away, or did it mean the comet was hanging frozen just inside the atmosphere, filling the entire sky, ready to plunge down on us as soon as we looked? Didn’t that mean we could never look? Didn’t that mean we were doomed to sit there at the kitchen table with bags over our heads forever?

“It makes no sense,” Jane said. “What about intelligences on other planets? What if some alien shaman is looking at your comet through a telescope?”

“One of your saucer people?”

“At least there’s good evidence for them. Unlike your stupid comet.”

“Jane,” I said, “if you looked out the window right now you’d see the sky filled with fire, and just because you looked, the comet would crash down and blow us all up.”

“You’re scaring me, Daddy,” Sacha said.

“Don’t worry, honey.” I would have liked to touch her hand, but I couldn’t reach her. “Nothing can hurt you if you keep your head in the bag.”

“You’re teaching her to be an ostrich!”

“What’s an ostrich?” Sacha asked.

“Is that why you won’t let me have the weekends?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I really, really have to go, Daddy,” Sacha said.

I heard them shifting in their chairs, moving around, trying to be quiet, but not succeeding. I heard them whispering. Fear turned me to stone. The game was up. I pictured Jane quietly slipping off her bag and setting it aside, pictured her carefully removing Sacha’s bag, saw Jane grin and roll her eyes in my direction and put her finger to her lips so Sacha would be quiet, saw them both looking at me stiff in my bag, the two of them, the little alien, the Russian girl, our surprising blond Sacha, and the big one, looking so sweetly sad suddenly, Jane. It wasn’t that she hated me, I realized. She’d moved on when I wasn’t looking. She was bored, restless; we had so little in common these days. She wandered like a wounded bird, one leg missing maybe, circling east, and I plodded ever westward. What in the world did we have to talk about?

I saw Sacha make an O of her mouth when she looked at the window and saw the comet peeking in at us like an angry red eye filling the sky. I saw the comet leap to Earth and fire the trees, the city, our house. Burning hurricane winds knocked down our walls and crisped our skin and peeled our bones.

I cried out.

Jane snatched the bag from my head.

Sunshine turned the refrigerator into a gleaming white block, an alien monolith that had popped into existence among our chrome pots and wooden bowls. From somewhere far away came the tiny tinkle tinkle of an ice-cream truck. I looked at the window over the sink, and in a flutter of squawks and black wings, birds fled the feeder.

“It’s easy to see what happened,” I said. “You were right, Jane. Someone peeked. But we didn’t. And because we didn’t, by the time we looked, we’d split off into a reality in which the comet never existed in the first place. We’re saved!”

“Oh, Daddy.” Sacha hugged me quickly, then ran off to the bathroom.

“Okay,” Jane said, “you can have every other weekend. But we take the cat.”

“What cat?” I asked.

There Is Danger

T
here is danger in regarding her as a goddess, danger in speculating about the lazy smile she directs at me over the Dover sole, the lemony finger bowls, the steaming rice, and bright green spears of asparagus, her gray eyes dancing with golden candlelight, danger in the provocative tilt of her head, her long chestnut hair flowing over her bare shoulder.

Selena reaches over the table and traces her fingertips softly over my hand. My hair bursts into flames. I know she notices, but she chooses not to comment. Our waiter runs over and pours a pitcher of ice water over my head.

My ears will be red. I’ll have to wear a big bandage, like a white turban, to work tomorrow. The women will arch their eyebrows at me. Most of the men will pretend not to notice. Ed Cory in the office next door will come over and give me a shot to the ribs with his elbow and say, “I can see you’ve been out with Selena again.” I’ll tell him I may be getting too old for this. After all, I’ll say, the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy could have been my older brother.

I wave our waiter away, assuring him that I really am A-OK. Really. It’s nothing. Selena picks at her fish.

“It was wonderful at the beach today,” I say.

Our grandchildren played together. My little Amy sat in the sand not so much timid as awestruck, her mouth a little O, blue eyes wide, staring up at Selena’s Bradley who stood over her with his hands on his hips, his stomach pouching out over his diaper like he’d already discovered the joys and sorrows of beer. The waves came in, the waves went out, but the children only had eyes for one another. I watched Selena rise from the ocean like Aphrodite (but there is danger in that thought), shaking the water from her long, slender body, then running easily up the beach to us, seagulls marking her time with their cries. There was sand tangled in the hair at the back of my thighs. My chest felt warm. Selena dropped down beside us and dug into the big wicker picnic basket. Amy rolled over in the sand to watch, and I grabbed her and lifted her into the air then plunged her down to growl into her stomach. She giggled and slapped at my ears. Bradley put grape soda fingers on my shoulder and looked up at me with his deep brown eyes, so I grabbed him too, and growled into his stomach. When I put the children down, they scampered to Selena. She gave them each a sandwich. The sandwiches looked as big as hardbound books in their small hands. Children know it; they know where to go; men are not nurturing.

“Wasn’t it, though?” she says. “I hope the children didn’t get too much sun.”

We finish our fish.

“Let’s dance,” Selena says. She knows I dance mechanically but will do almost anything to touch her. We go onto the floor. The music tries to chase me around like a garden hose after a dirty dog, but I won’t let it. I take a small shuffle step to the right and point with both hands to the left (little six-shooters), then I take a small shuffle step to the left and point to the right. This is the way I do these modern dances.

Selena rocks; she rolls; she remembers Woodstock. Her hair flies around her face. Her skirt swirls, dipping between her thighs. She never takes her eyes off mine.

I point. I shoot. It’s all in the thumbs.

The music stops then starts again, slow saxophones, brushes on the drums this time, and Selena whirls into my arms. Her warmth staggers me. I feel dizzy.

“You’re trembling,” she whispers in my ear, her breath shooting laser light through my head.

“I know.”

“What are you thinking?”

She wants to know what I’m feeling, but she doesn’t want to be unpleasantly surprised. I don’t know what to tell her. Men are not open. We have ages of practice in not saying it; we’ve got it down pat. We are bull elephants, footloose and free in the forest and the grasslands, apart and aloof but endlessly irritating, sniping at the edges of the herd of females and calves, trunk slapping each other on the ass, saying, what a shot, man, and how’s the market this morning, and the best leaves are on the jujube trees, and way to go, Key Moe Sobby! We’re bears, sufficient unto ourselves, always chased away afterwards in case we are seized by an urge to eat the children. We’re snakes and, like her goldfish, we have no use for bicycles. Pigs. Oink, my man, you getting any lately, and what you got under that hood, and how about those Lakers?

Selena nips at the lobe of my ear with her teeth. My left foot gives way, and I stumble forward out of her arms and fall to my knees.

She pulls me up and helps me back to the table and kneels before me and removes my shoe and sock. I pull my foot into my lap and see that the bones of my toes are missing. My toes hang like limp pale pink balloons at the end of my foot. I touch my big toe with a first finger and thumb; it feels soft and silky, but empty, the nail a hard imperfection that I’m tempted to scratch off. I flip my dangling toes with my fingers and they swing back and forth. I put my sock and shoe back on.

“You’ll have to let me lean on you when we leave,” I say.

Her grin makes me want to howl at the moon.

“Okay, you can lean on me,” she says.

Our waiter comes round with the desert cart. Selena selects a chocolate mousse. I go with the cheesecake.

“Tell me something astonishing,” she says. I notice there is a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her mouth. Her tongue flashes, licks it off, and I miss my cheesecake and clang my fork loudly against my plate.

“Well?” she says.

I open my mouth to speak, and my tongue shoots out, long and thin and stiff like a wooden tongue depressor, and the squatting figure of my father on the end of it opens his mouth to speak, and his tongue shoots out and on the end of it the hunched form of my grandfather opens his mouth to speak, and his tongue shoots out and on the end of it the knotty form of my great-grandfather opens his mouth to speak, and on and on, until from somewhere deep in my primordial past, a small, lonely voice says, “I love you, Selena.”

“What?”

I put cheesecake in my mouth and smile around it. Men are not romantic; we don’t have much to say. Maybe we really have no deep feelings. We cannot wait to get out of our pants. We see only body parts, we think only of conquests, we never want to stay the whole night. We’ve got things to do.

Our waiter puts a little black lacquered tray with the check on our table.

We fence with our gold cards for a few minutes, finally agreeing that since she paid for the picnic this afternoon, I can pick up the check for dinner. I ask our waiter to pour us some coffee and call us a cab.

Selena drinks her coffee and nods her head from side to side in time to the music. I drum my fingers on the table.

Before I know it, our waiter is tapping me on the shoulder, whispering our cab is waiting. I push myself up from the table. Selena comes around and offers me her shoulder to lean on. I put my arm around her, and she looks up at me.

“You okay?”

I have to swallow hard; there is danger I could fall into those eyes, fall and fall forever. I nod, and she steps forward. I know I’m too heavy.

The hostess in her bright white blouse and black skirt tells us to have a nice day as we make our way around the potted plants and into the street. The driver is holding the back door of his cab open for us.