The Almost Moon (21 page)

I had to eat something, and Natalie or no Natalie, the student union was the only place within walking distance to get food at this hour. I stood, regretfully, and bid good-bye to the Sunday painters I had been taught to condemn.

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I walked through the gathering crowd of students outside the student union. Westmore was not known for its intellects or even its sportsmen. It was known for being an affordable commuter school, good for a four-year degree in subjects such as marketing or health-care consulting. The Art Department, like the English Department, was a condescended-to anomaly staked out by a variety of types whom Natalie and I alternately thought of as losers or geniuses. The school's founder, Nathaniel Westmore, had been an artist and writer before his Thoreau-like disappearance into the woods of Maine. As a result, both departments had remained comparatively independent from the rest of the campus.

Westmore students wore the off-price version of the clothes that were worn in New York a decade ago. On the few occasions I'd brought Sarah with me to the campus, her presence had caused a stir. I had always been proud that my daughters lived in other states and chose to make their lives away from home even if, very often, I wished I could drive down the street and sit in Alice S e bo Id

their houses. But I would never do that to either one of them.

One saving grace in my own life was that my mother was never capable of a pop-in.

I walked up the wheelchair-accessible ramp and passed through the heated momentary hush of the double doors, and there was Natalie, among the sea of students thirty years' our junior.

She was sitting at a round booth by herself, over near a wall of windows that looked out on the swampy undeveloped land.

From the student union, the old oak tree wasn't visible, only the reedy grass that soon, after the next frost, would turn color and, as winter came on, make an ushering sound as the dried-out stalks beat against one another in the wind.

She was looking out into the distance, perhaps out over the highway, where the large traffic signs were nothing but small green flecks and the cars were impossible to see.

I would not tell her, I realized. How would I phrase it? I had said the words so far only once. "I killed my mother." I wondered at this new lexicon I had entered. I killed my mother. I fucked your son.

I walked over to her, barely aware of the students bearing food on trays as I passed.

"Natalie."

And there were her eyes, Natalie's light-brown eyes, which I had looked into since childhood.

She was dressed in one of her faux Diane von Furstenberg dresses that Diane von Furstenberg would never have put her name on. The material consisted of an inscrutable pattern that seemed to adorn many women's bodies at middle age—a sort of dazzle camouflage designed to keep the eye from being able to focus on the actual shape inside. The wraparound dress was in a style we'd agreed was perfect for disrobing but that I had abandoned.

At some point, seeing those dresses hanging in my closet

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had begun to depress me—their light cloth and indistinguishable patterns made me think of endless suits of wasted flesh.

"Hi," she said. "You can finish this. I'm stuffed."

I sat down opposite her, and she pushed the pale orangeflecked cafeteria tray over to me. On it was half a cheese danish and a yogurt left untouched. We had always been like this. She ordered too much, and I ate what was left.

"Where were you yesterday?" she asked. "I called your number half a dozen times. I even called the Bat Phone twice."

"At my mother's," I said.

"I had a feeling. How is she?"

"Can we not talk about it?"

"Coffee?"

I smiled at her.

Natalie stood with her cup. The cafeteria cops never stopped us when we walked backward through the line and got a refill.

We were tacitly granted the same privileges as the teachers.

I wolfed down the half-eaten danish and peeled back the foil on the top of the yogurt. By the time Natalie returned, I was halfway done with my secondhand meal. The coffee—hot, watery, weak—obliterated what was left of my appetite.

"What's with you?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You seem sort of nerved-out somehow. Is it Clair?"

I thought of deflecting mechanisms. I could have commented that not everyone ends the night with half a bottle of wine and a sleeping pill or that not everyone was secretly fucking a construction worker from Downingtown... but I didn't. I would tell as much of the truth as I could.

"Jake showed up," I said.

It was as if she'd heard a gun go off. She slapped both her hands down on the table and leaned in toward me.

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"What?"

"You know how I told you he used to wake me when the girls were sleeping? With pebbles from the neighbor's geranium pots?"

"Yes, yes."

"He woke me up this morning at about five a.m. He was standing inside the fence of my backyard, tossing rocks. We spent the morning together."

"Helen," she said, "it is now my opinion that you are not acting nerved-out enough! What's going on?"

"I don't know," I said. "How's Hamish?"

"Since when do you care? How's Jake?"

And so I told Natalie that he currently lived in Santa Barbara on the estate of a software mogul whom he had never met. That he was doing some sort of installation there. That he had a female dog-sitter for his dogs, Milo and Grace, and that he planned to travel to Portland soon to see Emily and the children. I realized, as I said the few things I knew, that I didn't know very much.

"But why did he come to see you?"

It rang in my head: I never wanted the divorce.

"I'm not sure yet," I said. I held the cup of hot coffee in my hands and pretended I was warming them up. When Natalie looked at me, a certain lifelong look that said "You're not telling me the whole story," I could feel the shakes start where my elbows met the table. A second later, I had spilled the full and scalding cup.

Natalie stood up from the booth. The coffee had gotten on the sleeve of her dress, but most lay pooling on the table or seeping into my jeans. I did not move. I felt the hot water burning my thighs. It felt right to me. I saw the clock across the room. It was 9:55.

"Time to go to class," I said. I heard it in my voice. It was suddenly flat. I had always told Natalie everything, and now, within

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twenty-four hours, I had done more, I saw, than it might be possible to repair between even the oldest of friends.

Briefly I thought about what it would be like if I asked Natalie to come with me somewhere, to go away together, move to another city, maybe open the clothing store she had always dreamed of. She was adjusting her dress and daubing off the coffee from where it had splashed onto the outside of her purse. "Remember riding bikes together?" I wanted to ask. "Remember that nerdy guy who lived on your corner and had a bell on his handlebars?

How he used to ring it all the time?" I thought of having seen Mr. Forrest that morning. And suddenly saw Mrs. Castle talking to the police, her arms arching in the air as she spoke. Had I seen that? Or had she been calmly talking to them? Were they taking notes? Or just listening to her talk? I tried to remember the number of police cars that had been there. Two on my mother's side of the street and one around the corner. The coroner's van and the ambulance that had pulled up to Mrs. Leverton's. I could call the hospital to find out what was wrong with her, but Jake wouldn't approve of that. It would tip my hand.

"He's really gotten to you," I heard Natalie say.

I looked up at her. My vision was fuzzy around the edges, and her voice suddenly seemed a long way off.

"Well, it's time to go get nude," she said. She was reaching for my hand. We had said this phrase to each other for fifteen years.

"Yes," I said.

"I'm leading you, woman," she said, "and we are going to sit down after this and talk men. I've got some news of my own."

This helped. It made me feel good that Natalie planned to tell me about the contractor. It was what I used—that still-to-come confidence of my friend—to make my legs work and stand up.

We walked from the student union, down the sloping asphalt pathway that led from it to what was commonly called the Art Hut. I had never understood this nickname because, more than

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anything else, the building itself looked like a failed attempt at an industrial office complex. One that had never gotten past the first two floors and then had been cruelly sheared off and roofed with a patchwork of composite and tar. Inside, however, were the huts. Dark, warm corners in the large studios, where many of the art adjuncts would spend the night, as the conditions in the art building were often better than the places they rented in the surrounding neighborhoods—especially as winter came on.

In the Art Hut, you could crank up the heat, and the bill went to the university. As we were walking through the doors and up the three stairs to the first-floor hallway, I thought that maybe I would come and live in the art building. Surely there had to be a blanketed warren to spare. What I hadn't quite put together yet was that I was already churning. Half of my mind had now begun to plan an escape.

I saw Natalie retreat with a wave into Room 230—the Warm Room. I thought it was unfair that Natalie so often lucked out and got assigned to it, and had wondered if there was a silent favoritism shown toward my friend on the part of the room assigners at the start of every semester. I could see why. Neither Gerald, the other model, nor I brought muffins or wine over to the administrative offices. We never put Halloween pencils, with erasers shaped like counts or pumpkins or ghosts, in the secretary's mailbox.

Gerald, I suddenly thought, was someone I did not want to see. He had lost his mother in a fire the previous year. She had gone to bed and left a cigarette lit, and the next thing Gerald knew he was falling to the floor and gasping for air. He barely got out alive, and his mother, they said, was dead from the smoke before she burned. Since then, when I ran into him, he would say,

"My mother died," in the middle of talking about the weather

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or about what poses we were doing for various classes. Natalie had always thought he was a little dim-witted, and this new habit seemed finally to have confirmed it, but as I walked down the hall to my own classroom, all I could think of was his genius.

How did the firemen know it was her cigarette left burning on the bedside table?

"Hi, Helen. You look great!" one of the students greeted me.

She was a girl named Dorothy, the best student in the class even if also an insufferable suck-up.

I could feel one or two other students take note of me then.

They were adjusting their easels, which were battered and stained from years of undergraduate use.

I made my way to the three-panel screen, behind which I dressed or undressed. I noted only vaguely what was set out on the platform or pinned to the curtain that lay to its rear. There was a basin. There was a washcloth and comb. And on the curtain there was a large picture of an old-fashioned bathtub. It barely made an impact. I thought, Bathtub, and then I stepped behind the screen and sat down on the painted black wooden chair to take off my shoes and find my bamboo flip-flops to place on the floor.

Just as I had clung to the idea that Natalie was planning to tell me about the contractor, I now was helped along by the sharp scent of bleach coming off the former hospital gown hanging from a metal hanger on the back of the screen. The woman who did the laundry for the art building was afraid, Natalie and I both thought, of live-model disease. As a result, she used so much bleach that it quickly ate through the gowns we used and left them as thin as tissue paper after a very short time. But the scent of her fear, made palpable in the bleach, served to startle me to my task. I heard Tanner Haku, a Japanese printmaker who had ended up in Pennsylvania after twenty years of teaching around the globe, enter the room and greet his students. He

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began talking to them about individual style in the depiction of the nude.

I took my sweater off over my head and shoved it in the small hutch beneath the window beside me. I placed my shoes in the hutch below. I sat in the chair in my mother's slip and my black jeans. On the other side of the screen, I heard Tanner Haku quoting Degas: "Drawing is not form; it is the way we see form."

But he did not credit Degas. If he credited Degas, he would have to explain who Degas was and what Degas meant to him personally. It would be that much more of his soul he would have to sacrifice to the classroom.

I unbuttoned my jeans and stood to take them off.

"That doesn't make sense," I heard the reed-thin voice of a boy say.

I could feel the thud to Haku's chest. After this many years, even though I was only the model, I could usually feel the thud to mine. But this boy's confident assertion in the face of a hundred years of history made no impact on me now. In a way it made me see that no matter what happened, things would go on just as they had been, with or without me. Gerald would come, and he would say, "My mother died," and the students would nod uncomfortably, but he would stand on the platform, and they would do slightly altered assignments—Man on a Pedestal instead of Woman at the Bath—and then they would turn them in and Tanner would listlessly grade them as he blasted opera and drank gin.

"And Helen will do a series of poses of women at their toilet,"

he said.

I heard a few titters as I put my rolled-up jeans beside my sweater in the hutch. Ah, he is baiting them, I thought, and this gave me another jolt to stay on my feet.

As he explained what this meant, I knew he would be pointing to the basin and washcloth on the platform and to the picture of

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