Moonglow
My grandfather heard Mrs. Waxman and Mrs. Zellner disconsolately calling after my grandmother as she bridged the final twenty feet of linoleum mock-parquetry that separated him from her. He registered the tick-tock oscillation of her hips, the amplitude of the curves divulged by the cut of the taffeta dress. During the war he had come to depend on his pool hustler’s gift for taking rapid readings of other people’s eyes, and her sunglasses unnerved him. They struck him as unlikely. He wondered if she was in costume, starring later in a skit or pageant on the theme of “Night in Monte Carlo.” He surprised himself by smiling, which unnerved him further. The girl’s lips were painted red as Bicycle hearts and diamonds, and they parted to reveal an Ingrid Bergman smile to go with the sunglasses.* My grandfather heard a sound inside his head that he compared, years later, to the freight-train rumble of an earthquake. He felt he was standing in the path of something fast-moving and gigantic that, in its blindness, was bound to carry him away. Swept off his feet, he thought. This is that. At the last moment he managed to return his gaze to his shoe tops and shook his head.
“Unbelievable,” he said, aware that he was still smiling, and that he owed his brother five hundred bucks.
* * *
Where the carport roof overhung the patio my mother had set out a birdfeeder, a Lucite tube with an aluminum peg for a perch, packed with birdseed, dangling on a chain. My grandfather liked to keep an eye on the traffic through his window. He took particular interest in a squirrel he called “the momzer,” which came every day to raid the feeder. The momzer lacked grace, finesse, the power of flight. Once it had scattered the sparrows, it would approach the business end of the birdfeeder with a fierceness and a purpose whose futility amused my grandfather. The momzer was subject to gravity and the physics of a pendulum in ways a bird could not understand. It would begin with bold resolve, clambering down the chain from the overhang, hurling itself from a nearby trellis. But within seconds it would find itself clinging by its forepaws to the metal peg, or to the bottom of the tube, its tail madly switching, while the birdfeeder bucked and gyrated and worked to shake the momzer loose. As though he had yet to exorcise the demon that, decades ago, had urged him to drop a kitten out of a third-story window, my grandfather burst into laughter every time the squirrel fell, with a meaty thud, onto the flagstones of the patio. Sometimes he laughed so hard that I would have to take a Kleenex and wipe tears from his eyes.
“All those ladies in the Sisterhood, putting out their birdseed to catch a little chickadee,” my grandfather said. “But they caught a momzer instead.”
* * *
According to my grandfather, my grandmother’s first words to her future husband were: “Your head would look good on a fence.”
She had approached him with an unlit cigarette scissored between her index and middle fingers, one eyebrow, just visible over the rim of her sunglasses, arched in entreaty. My grandfather got the immediate sense, from the dumbshow and from something else—a lack of gaucherie in her girlishness—that she might be a foreigner. He lit her cigarette with Aughenbaugh’s lighter.
“Come again?” my grandfather said, the lighter’s flame stopped just short of the tip of his own cigarette. He replayed the remark in his mind. He decided he had heard her correctly, that she had indeed told him his head would look good on a fence. “How so?”
My grandfather had seen human heads discarded or reposed in unusual places, though never, it was true, on a fence. Nevertheless, he felt this was a conversational gambit he would not have thought to attempt. Because he could not see my grandmother’s eyes, he could not come to any solid conclusions about the spirit in which her observation had been offered. Only much later did he realize that in her weird way she had dispatched, with one stroke, the problem of making small talk with strangers.
“Oh, dear, I made a fault,” she said. “I see you take offense.”
“It’s my natural expression,” my grandfather said. “You’d look like this, too, if somebody stuck your head on a fence.”
“Wall.” The word burst forth from her, followed by a startling heehaw of laughter. She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry. I mean to say wall, not fence.”
“That changes everything,” my grandfather said. His approach to the art of flirtation with women was founded on an impeccable poker face.
“Wait,” she said, trying to hold back another of her braying laughs. “Have you ever seen a, how do you say, catheedral?”
With three sweeps of her white arms, she drew the walls, towers, and spires of a cathedral. She sketched with an efficiency of gesture that came as close as anything he remembered having seen to what poets and sportswriters liked to call grace. As her hands soared and dived, the coal of her cigarette shed glowing threads of tobacco. The orange sparks were reflected in the lenses of her cheaters. She finished by miming a rose window, encircling her fingers over her chest, a zone to which my grandfather’s attention had already been drawn. Brassieres of the era were architectural affairs; in her bust, with its loft and scale and defiance of gravity, there was something cathedral-like that moved him. Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He read its brief account and felt ashamed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen some cathedrals.”
“On the walls,” she said. “The ancient walls.” She pronounced it hancient. “You see faces in the stone. That is the kind of the face you have.”
“Got it,” he said. “I look like a gargoyle.”
“Yes! No! Not a . . .” and she came out with the French word for gargoyle, which my grandfather after forty-two years could no longer retrieve. “Those are to catch the rain, and they are animals, monsters, they are ugly. That is not the kind of the face you have.”
That was at least partly a lie. To one of her psychiatrists, she later confessed that she did think he was ugly, albeit in a way she found appealing, even arousing. When she first saw him, standing at the threshold of the reception room, contemplating departure before he had even arrived, she thought he had an American face, an American body. Buick shoulders, bulldozer jaw. Only if you considered his eyes would you be forced to conclude, and she did conclude, that he was beautiful.
“I am the one who look like the gargoyle,” she said.
“Hardly.”
“Yes,” she said. “On the inside.”
He let that one pass without comment, taking it for prattle, compliment-fishing; his first misjudgment, his first encounter with the voice of the Skinless Horse, speaking through her.
“Can I ask you to do something?” he said. “Would you by any chance be willing to take off those glasses?”
She stood very still, red lips pressed together. He wondered if he had made some kind of gaffe, if asking a Frenchwoman to remove her sunglasses violated a well-known Gallic taboo.
“The eye doctor said I am not supposed to,” she said. Her voice faltered. “But I will.” This came out barely louder than a whisper.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Never mind. You can just tell me what color your eyes are. That’s all I really wanted to know.”
“No,” she said. “I will take them off for you. But also you have to do something for me. Let me to do something, I mean to say.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
I don’t know how many people could have seen my grandparents, standing there in the hallway outside the doors of the reception room, whether anyone was paying any attention. But even if they had been standing in an empty room, I imagine that neither my grandfather nor the mores of 1947 can have expected my grandmother to do what she did next. Looking back at that night from inside the soft gray nimbus of Dilaudid, my grandfather could only close his eyes, the way he closed them that night, as she reached out to the fly of his trousers and, tooth by tooth, zipped him up.
“C’est fait,” she said.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself lost for the first time in hers. They were the color of twilight in Monte Carlo, when the stars come out to twinkle like ten-watt bulbs, and the quarter-moon fans her hem of sequins against the sky.
“Blue,” my grandfather said, falling back against the pillow of the rented hospital bed in my mother’s guest room. After that it was a long time, hours, before he opened his eyes again.
7
Just before midnight of September 29, 1989, my grandfather completed the model of LAV One. It represented the latest thinking on lunar settlement design (the reason it had needed so many revisions), fourteen years’ work, and about twenty-two thousand individual polystyrene pieces cannibalized from commercial model kits.* At the center of the model, amid the half-buried tunnels, bays, domes, huts, landing strips, and radar arrays, there was a hole about four inches in diameter. Looking down into this hole, you could see through to the plywood substructure of the model’s molded lunar surface. If you asked my grandfather the purpose of the hole, he would always give you some variation on You’ll just have to wait and find out; to be honest, there was not a lot of variation. After a while—no doubt according to his plan—I stopped asking.
He went to his workbench and took down a gaudy Romeo y Julieta cigar box. He removed a bundle of tissue paper from the box and unwrapped a circular structure fashioned from a take-out coffee-cup lid. He had initially completed the moon garden in May 1975, pillaging tiny n- and British OO-scale model train kits to fill it with flowering shrubs, rosebushes, and vegetables grown in hydroponic racks. With a careful thumbnail he lifted the lid’s sipping flap, which he had reconfigured as an access hatch. He peered in to check on the family who had replaced the original lovers as occupants of the moon garden. On a sling bench and two sling chairs of his own design, enjoying moist and oxygenated air, sat figures representing my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, and my brother and me. The figures were posed stiffly (even for polystyrene people), as if for a formal photograph. Everyone safe and sound.
My grandfather lowered the flap. He carried the moon garden to the model of LAV One and fitted it into the hole that awaited it. He was not aware of any great sense of accomplishment. It was a job he had left undone for too long, a promise too long unkept, and what he felt most was relief.
Six months later he would be dead.
The next morning, well before dawn, my grandfather went out into the dense Florida darkness to load the trunk of his Buick LeSabre for a trip to Cape Canaveral. There had been no launches since the Challenger disaster nearly four years earlier. Now another shuttle, Discovery, was scheduled to lift off that morning at ten. He had filled a bait cooler with a freezer pack, a bottle of Michelob, a plastic food container of cut-up pineapple, and two meat salad sandwiches. Meat salad was a specialty of my grandfather’s. You passed a piece of leftover roast through a meat grinder with some dill pickles, a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Like many of my grandfather’s specialties, meat salad tasted better than it looked or sounded, served on a nice challah roll. He put the cooler into the trunk with a pair of binoculars, a secondhand Leica with a brand-new telephoto lens, the latest issue of Commentary, a transistor radio, a gallon of tap water, and a reclining folding chair, complete with a footrest and a sun umbrella you could attach to the chair’s frame. He had made the sun umbrella himself, surgically replacing the handle of a rain umbrella with a C-clamp.
Like any habitation of the elderly, Fontana Village was rich in insomniacs and early birds, but for the moment my grandfather had the morning to himself. Before closing the trunk of his car, he leaned against the rear bumper and listened to the silence. It was not perfect. It was never perfect. But he had come to appreciate how small or distant sounds could intensify it, the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness. The tick-tick of an insect or possibly a frog. A big rig downshifting out on I-95. Mist effervescing in the beams of the security lighting. Underlying everything, the low-pitched tinnitus that was the sound of Fontana Village itself, a compound hum of air conditioners, vending machines, circuit breakers, swimming-pool filtration systems, poorly insulated wire. A woman’s voice, far away, calling out, “Ramon!”
My grandfather straightened up. He angled his head, his ear a dish attuned to the cosmic background radiation. He shuffled the short deck of Ramons he had encountered in his life. None of them lived in Fontana Village. There were some Cubans living at Fontana Village, and they sometimes had first names like Adolfo and Raquel, but they were Jews like everybody else, Goldmans and Levys come to the promised land of South Florida along a different branch of the river of exile. He did not know any of the Cuban Jews well. One of them might well be Ramon. Ramon Lifschitz. Ramon Weinblatt. From time to time some poor bastard with dementia went walkabout, and you would see his wife or the home care nurse running after him, shouting his name.
“Ramon! Hee-er, kittykittykitty.”
The voice seemed to be coming from the direction of the Jungle, as the residents of Fontana Village called the wasteland that bordered the retirement village to the north and east. In the Jungle, nuisance plants and Bermuda grass gone feral had been at war with native stranglers since the late seventies, contending for ownership over five hundred acres that was briefly a golf course and country club. Somewhere in that tangle a devourer of pets, widely believed to be an alligator, plied its leisurely trade.
“Ramo-ohn!”
On the second syllable the woman’s voice broke like a bar mitzvah boy’s. There had been amusement in her frustration before, but that was gone now.
My grandfather looked at his watch, which he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist. It was already past five-thirty, and the trip north would take about three and a half hours, four if he stopped for gas and a toilet break. The return to service of the shuttle fleet had attracted considerable interest in the media, and traffic might be heavy. He really could not afford delay.
“God damn you, lady,” my grandfather said.
He opened the well that held his tire-repair kit and took out the socket wrench without thinking about it or knowing why. He slammed shut the lid of the trunk. It thudded like a kettledrum in the humid air.
He crossed the parking lot, nervously gripping and renewing his grip on the shaft of the tire wrench, to a walkway lit at intervals. If you went right, the walkway led past the swimming pool that served this end of the complex. To the left, it wandered around the back of the cluster that included his own two-bedroom unit to a service area with a charging station for the carts that village residents used to get around. Past the service area, you came to a fairly wide strip of lawn backed by a running wooden rail about a foot high. After that, things became primeval.
My grandfather’s leather sandals, imitation Birkenstocks of Israeli manufacture, slapped against the pavement. It was an angry sound. He was annoyed with Ramon, whom he pictured lean and cross-eyed, skulking into the Jungle to meet his death, just for a taste of rat or nutria. He was annoyed with Ramon’s owner for coming out to look for Ramon when it was still pitch-dark and there was, at any rate, nothing to be done. There was nothing to be done, and yet off he went to try and do it; my grandfather was annoyed, most of all, with himself. The louder his sandals slapped against the pavement, the angrier he became. He found himself hoping that when he reached the edge of the Jungle, he really did encounter the alligator so that he could beat it to death with the socket wrench. That was the purpose, he now understood, for which he had taken the tool out of his trunk.
He crossed the northernmost of the lawns serviced by the groundskeepers of Fontana Village. The soles of his sandals kicked up pinpricks of dew that stung his shins. He was wearing khaki shorts, one of seven identical pairs he had purchased at Kmart, to go with the seven polo shirts and seven pairs of white tube socks, which he always wore with sandals, that constituted his daily uniform after my grandmother died. If it was somebody’s birthday or some function he could not avoid, he would put on a Hawaiian shirt, decorated with bare-breasted hula girls, that I had given him as a joke. The shirt had scandalized some of his fellow villagers, but my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.
Out here past the service area, it was too dark to see. My grandfather took out Aughenbaugh’s Zippo and struck a light. Tiny beads of moisture in the air trapped the light before it could travel very far. Light enveloped his hand like a ball of St. Elmo’s fire.
“Hello?” said the woman. “Who’s that?”
“Your neighbor,” my grandfather said.
The lighter grew hot against his skin and he snapped it shut. Retinal fire swam across the darkness. Then his eyes adjusted, and he found that he could see. Dawn was an abrupt business in Florida; in another ten minutes or so it would be morning.
“Mrs. Winocur claims to have seen it. She calls it Alastair,” said the woman. My grandfather heard her introduce herself as Sally Seashell; later the last name turned out to be Sichel. “But do you think it’s really out there?”
“Something’s there,” my grandfather said, never one to give false comfort. He thought Phyllis Winocur was full of shit, but he doubted that the cats and lapdogs of Fontana Village were vanishing voluntarily into the swamp in a bid for freedom, banding together out there like four-legged Seminoles. “How’d he get out?”
“My fault,” she said, “I was dumb. I took pity on him. Back home he used to range so freely. He and I haven’t been here long.”
“Where’s home?”
“Philly.”
It crossed my grandfather’s mind to observe that Philly could be tough on cats, too, but then he would have to explain. It had been a long time since he had attempted to explain himself to a woman. It felt like an insurmountable task.
“What part?” he said.
“Bryn Mawr.”
“Bryn Mawr ain’t Philly.”
“Aha,” she said. “Yes, I can hear it in your voice.”
As it grew lighter, my grandfather came to see that Sally Sichel was a good-looking woman, tall, slender, but full-breasted. Dark complexion, long nose with a bump, a touch of Katharine Hepburn in the cheekbones. Maybe a couple of years younger than he was, maybe not. She wore a pair of men’s pajamas, the kind that buttoned up the front, and duck boots coated in rubber the color of a New York taxi. She had not troubled to lace them up very well.
“Does he usually come when you call him?”
“Always.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“All night.”
“Hmm.”
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Sally Sichel said. “We just met. But that piece-of-shit cat is more or less my only reason for living.”
My grandfather fought against an overwhelming impulse to say something along the lines of In that case, maybe you ought not to have let him out of your house to be eaten by a half-ton reptile or For Christ’s sake, lady, it’s just a motherfucking cat. He revised downward the favorable impression he had begun to form of her, an impression shot through with a surprising vein of lust; it had been a very long time. Anyway, you had to have reservations about somebody who walked around with her shoes untied.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “He was only a cat.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s just, I lost my husband very recently. And Ramon was really his cat.”
“I see.”
“They were very close.”
“I understand,” my grandfather said. “I lost my wife.”
“Recently?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry.”
Sally Sichel started to cry. Standing there in her pajamas, arms crossed under her commendable breasts. Looking out at the Jungle that had taken her husband’s cat, the architecture of her cheeks glazed with tears. Her nose began to run. My grandfather took a chamois, which he used to wipe his camera lenses, out of the back pocket of his shorts and passed it to her.
“Oh,” she said, blowing her nose into the chamois. He remembered—as much in his loins as in his head or heart—the circus girl who had spread her legs for him in the cottage at Greenwich Yard, Creasey’s bloody chamois clutched in her hand. “What a gentleman. Thank you.”
He knew that it would also be gentlemanly to put a consolatory arm around Sally Sichel’s shoulder. Not just gentlemanly; it would be humane. But he was afraid of what might happen down the line. A widow and a widower, easing each other’s passage from grief to passion in the autumn of their lives: The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
From the time he’d moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot. While he turned out the beautiful and high-priced scale models that NASA and private collectors had commissioned, and explored the labyrinth of LAV One as it grew in intricacy and size on the dining room table, the available women of Fontana Village came to make their case. They sent scouts and embassies, plates of cookies and brownies and blondies, pots of soup, potato latkes at Hanukkah, cards, knit goods, pies, poems, oil paintings, cuts of meat, bottles of wine, and a dish of macaroni and cheese. I happened to be visiting when the macaroni and cheese showed up, and I thought it made a pretty strong case for its author, who had followed a recipe adapted from Horn & Hardart’s.
As he’d been licking his fork, awash in memories of the Broad Street Automat, I’d thought my grandfather had looked more contented than I’d seen him in a long time. When the dish was empty, however, he had washed it out and dried it, dropped in a thank-you note scrawled on a scrap of legal paper, and left it on the woman’s back patio at a moment when he knew she would be out. On a few occasions he had been cornered by some available and exceptionally persistent woman of Fontana Village, and just to get a little peace he had accepted her dinner invitation. More intimate invitations, some tempting, some issued with a frankness he could not help but admire, he had declined.
It was not that he wanted to be celibate. He got ideas. He missed the contact, the skin-on-skin warmth of it. The property manager of Fontana Village, Karen Radwin, had a way of touching your arm or your shoulder when she spoke to you, sometimes he would feel a jolt of current. And yet apart from one night in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in April 1975, my grandfather had kept his hands to himself since my grandmother’s death.
You could say this or you could say that about the why or why not of it, but in the end it came down to this: He didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like explaining himself. My grandmother used to complain sometimes about his silences, but only when there were other people around, when people started in with the banter and the repartee and the opinions on Agnew or Sondheim, as if she were embarrassed for his sake because his silence might be taken for disapproval or thickheadedness. Don’t worry about him, she would say, that’s how he is—every time we start an argument I end up with a monologue. Or Some husbands take lovers, mine he take the Fifth. Then she might put a hand on his knee and insist, reassuring herself maybe as much as whomever they were with at the time, But he is listening. After they had been married fifteen years—around the time I came into the picture—there was nothing he could tell her that she didn’t already know. That was all he wanted: to be known.