Loonglow

by Helen Eisenbach

  Louey stared at the glazed windows. There was no telling where she was, or if she should have gotten off the train hours ago. She could feel the rest of the car watching her, the obvious victim, forming their own conclusions. Grabbing on to a strap, she waited to see what the next stop would be, hanging on for life.

  When Louisa Mercer was six years old, her mother found her sitting among a jumble of torn papers with tears streaming from her eyes. When Meredith asked what was the matter, Louey looked up into her mother’s anxious face and announced that she was going to quit drawing forever. Meredith Mercer put a hand on her daughter’s heated cheek and soothed the hair off her damp forehead as she told the little girl, “You’re going to make us very proud when you grow up to become famous.”

  “I won’t!” exploded Louey. “I’ll never draw again! Karen Willoughby’s better than I am.” Meredith drew back with a suppressed laugh, but her daughter’s face was bitter as she explained why there was no point going on with something if she couldn’t be the best. No argument could change her mind.

  Louey’s birth in a quiet Washington suburb so many years after her two brothers had been an unexpected blessing. Several miscarriages had led Meredith and Edward Mercer to give up hope for the little girl they’d wanted, and when Meredith discovered she was pregnant, she was filled with terrible foreboding. Yet her dread changed to elation as the little girl emerged from her body perfectly formed: tiny, scowling, and with a fine trail of sandy hair.

  Within a week, Louey had stopped scowling, but she soon proved to be a cheerless baby, waking them at all hours with her cries. Her parents (who had been out of the habit of caring for an infant for quite some time) soon began to wonder if the blessing they’d awaited for so long was not in fact a curse. Edward Mercer caught himself on the verge of nodding off far too many afternoons at his laboratory; his wife began to long for the relative quiet of teaching algebra to adolescents.

  At eight months Louisa spoke her first sentence, at a Passover celebration at which the entire family was gathered, Louey at the head of the table in her high chair. The boys were conducting their usual search-and-destroy mission with the floating matzoh balls, and the conversation was so lively that a baby’s chirps went unnoticed. Finally, at the first pause in the conversation, Louey cried out in a loud, clear voice, “My turn!” Her family looked at her in amazement as her face dimpled in a grin and she added: “Please?”

  As soon as she started speaking, Louey became a buoyant, sunny child. By six, she also displayed a talent for drawing everything around her with remarkable precision. Her parents’ aspirations for the place she would have in history did not seem farfetched: such a clever, talented child could not fail to make her mark on the world. She would be the new Picasso, or perhaps merely the first Jewish President.

  By the time she was twelve, however, Louey had abandoned a number of fields at which someone else had shown even a trace of superiority. Her mother couldn’t understand why it was her child could not continue anything at which she’d been in any way bested; she worried that the serious little girl would lose her former delight at so many of life’s pleasures. As Louey grew older, Meredith was careful to avoid placing pressure on her to succeed, but by then it was already too late. If her sons were too cavalier about the paths that lay ahead of them, her daughter could think only of the future she was obliged to transform triumphantly.

  Then, the summer she turned fifteen, she made a new friend, and her mother once again saw a glimpse of her former little girl, glowing with rediscovered happiness.

  “Your friend is here.” Louey’s mother knocked on the bathroom door as Louey stepped out of the shower.

  “What?” Louey shook the water from her ears and toweled her hair dry.

  “Your friend Mia.”

  Louey stood by the closed door, momentarily confused. Who, she thought, was Mia? The bathroom mirror fogged with steam.

  “I thought you’d never get here.”

  The first hot night of summer, fifteen-year-old Louey had been lying, restless, on her bed, trying to keep from bolting like an untamed animal, until a carload of her friends had shown up, claiming that the best solution was a drive-in movie. Louey, coltish, with the savoir-faire of Styrofoam, had happily agreed. Yet for some reason she’d been unable to bear remaining cooped up in the car. Ignoring the derisive comments of her friends, she left the car to wander on her own, walking some distance past the final row to reach a grassy, uncongested area. She climbed a little hill to reach a spot as quiet as the car was rowdy (but not so still as to jangle her nerves), and lay down in the grass. Lighting a purloined cigarette to keep her hands busy, she stared at it, turning it around in her fingers.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” someone said, “you shameless vixen.”

  Louey looked up into a pair of dazzling green eyes and the most beautiful face she’d ever seen smiling down at her. God, she swallowed, staring. The girl’s hair was so dark and wild she had an urge to plunge her fingers in the midst of it. Startled, she twined her hands together, looking down.

  “So what’s the meaning of this?” the girl went on. “You wear yourself out, honey?” Sighing: “God, the life you lead.”

  “Uh, hardly.” Louey frowned, bewildered.

  “Hardly?” Eyes twinkling, the girl moved close to Louey, making her feel nervous, suddenly, and warm. (Her skin was tingling slightly.) “You know of course the law prohibits leaving any underaged vehicle unattended at a drive-in movie. I can’t see what choice I have but to call in the authorities.”

  “I love those guys,” said Louey, “especially their hairdos …”

  The girl’s face was unreadable as she held her hand out for a drag, and Louey yielded, trying not to smile. The bones of the girl’s wrist were delicate, though Louey didn’t understand why she was so transfixed by someone simply drawing on a cigarette. Inhaling deeply, the girl flung herself down on the ground, tossing her head back as she exhaled smoke. Jesus, thought Louey, no one looked like that. Her legs reminded Louey of the flanks of a racehorse; the mixture of flesh, muscle and bone confused her. The girl held out the cylinder; Louey managed with some effort not to drop it.

  “So?” the girl went on. “Don’t you have a desperate but eloquent last plea for leniency?”

  “If you’re expecting a synopsis of the plot so far,” Louey said, sitting up, “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I wasn’t exactly concentrating on the movie.”

  “You weren’t?” Another grin swept the girl’s face and Louey felt her skin grow warm again. “Then how will I know which of the heroes escapes with his virginity intact?” The girl’s green cotton shirt clung to a slender waist; the faded jeans fit her long legs like skin.

  “You could always buy the book.”

  “Joyce Carol Oates, right? Or was that Getting Wasted?”

  “No, no, no,” Louey said. “Everyone knows Faulkner wrote Getting Wasted. We are watching Getting Trashed.”

  “No wonder I didn’t recognize any of the characters,” the girl exclaimed. Louey laughed, then flushed at her response. The girl held out her hand. “I’m Mia.”

  “Zadora?”

  “Damn”—softly—“and it’s taken me so long to establish my new identity.”

  “Why would you want to hide a thing like that?”

  “You are a deep and wise young person.” The girl spoke earnestly, leaning toward her. Louey smelled shampoo, as if she had just stepped from the shower, hair still damp. Reaching out, the girl shook Louey’s hand, holding on to it an extra moment, lingeringly; it took some effort for Louey to extract her own. What is the matter with me? she wondered, eyeing the blades of grass around her feet. “So,” Mia said. “Got one of your own?”

  “Pardon?”

  “A name. All your own.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I need to know.” Mia put a hand up as if to stop her from disclosure.

  Louey laughed. “Louey Mercer,” she gave in, “but my friends
call me Pops.”

  “Of whom you have many, I’m sure,” said Mia, echoing a line from one of Louey’s favorite Katharine Hepburn movies. “But that would get confusing for me—I already have a number of girlfriends with that name. Anyone ever call you Louise?”

  “Not and retain their teeth.”

  “Yeah, who can blame them?” Mia shrugged, casually brushing a curl of hair from Louey’s forehead. Then she startled Louey, reaching out to stroke her earlobe, rubbing forefinger and thumb together as if to test the softness of Louey’s skin. What? thought Louey, facing two unblinking eyes. Her cheeks were burning. She shook herself and rose, her legs unsteady.

  “Well …” she started; she was blushing, she discovered. Mia smiled and Louey felt light-headed, almost giddy. “Nice, uh, meeting you.” The sentence took more effort than she would have thought. So, it seemed, did making herself leave.

  “I don’t think I’ve heard you mention this girl Mia, have I?” Louey’s mother asked.

  “Uh, no.” Louey toweled a patch of steam off the bathroom mirror and peered at her reflection. “I met her at the movies with the gang,” she added carefully. Surely she was jumping to conclusions; this couldn’t be the same person with whom she’d talked for less than fifteen minutes.

  “She says you were supposed to go to a party tonight,” came her mother’s voice. “Shall I tell her you’ll be down in a minute?”

  “I was going to do homework tonight.” Louey was uncertain as to what the proper response should be under the circumstances. “She never told me she was coming to pick me up.”

  “Should I tell her you didn’t remember the party and that you can’t make it tonight, dear?”

  Louey wrapped herself in a towel and opened the door. “No,” she said; it came out louder than she had intended, and she winced. “I’ll come down and tell her so myself in a minute.”

  Louey’s mother went downstairs, leaving Louey to dress hastily. Was this really true? Had the girl she’d met looked up where she lived and decided suddenly to show up on her doorstep? What a bizarre thing, she thought, appearing at some stranger’s house and whisking her away. She shook her damp curls and made her way downstairs.

  “Hey, Louey.” The girl from the drive-in sat in a reclining chair, talking with Louey’s mother as easily as if she’d done so hundreds of times before.

  “Hello,” Louey said, a slight edge to her voice. “You’ll have to excuse the wet hair, but I wasn’t planning on going out this evening.”

  “You’ll never live it down if you don’t at least put in an appearance.” Mia shook her head solemnly. “Everyone at the party will be asking about you all night.”

  “Mustn’t be the subject of undue talk,” she answered dryly. Mia grinned (which made it hard to stay annoyed with any real conviction). Before she could ask what Mia was doing in her house, one of her brothers came into the room, glancing at Mia’s chair, then doing a double-take.

  Louey sighed. “Danny, this is Mia. Mia, my brother Danny.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Danny spoke in a voice several octaves deeper than his normal one.

  “Louey’s told me a lot about you.” Mia shook his hand.

  Danny flushed with pleasure. “She has?”

  “Tell him that story you liked so much the other day,” Louey prompted, raising an eyebrow.

  “It’ll have to wait until next time,” Mia said, rising, “or we’re going to be late. You ready, Louey?”

  There was no choice, evidently, but surrender. “As I’ll ever be,” Louey said, and rose to go.

  Wednesday morning when Louey got to work there were twenty-six messages on her desk: ten from agents, twelve from authors, and the rest from friends who hadn’t reached her the day before at home. She shuffled the pile twice, pulling off her running shoes and sliding the Rolodex toward her. It was 8:58. Perfect. None of the agents would be in until ten at the earliest. She dialed the first agent gleefully, leaving her name after his taped message and crumpling the paper with his name on it. Soon she had a pile of crumpled messages in balls adorning the bottom of her trash can and the knot that had already formed in her stomach upon walking into her office was half the size it had been. Not a single argument, cajoling request for money or hard-sell job: and it wasn’t even 9:30.

  “Don’t ever abandon me like that again,” her assistant Kevin warned, poking his head into her office. He wore a short-sleeved shirt with wild green aliens on an orange background, plus an orange tie; his hair was still damp from the shower.

  “Great tie,” Louey said. “Did you miss me terribly?”

  “Terribly, and without a moment’s relief. Queen Daisy was on the warpath the whole day. You couldn’t have picked a better day to play Camille.”

  “Who was playing?”

  She smiled at Kevin fondly; he was twenty-one, fresh out of college and smarter than she had any right to expect—smarter than most of the editors, right up to their fearless leader, Daisy. (Not that this was saying much; there wasn’t anyone at Regent Books who wasn’t smarter than its publisher, messengers included.) Louey knew she was lucky to have an assistant like Kevin: hardworking, brilliant, humble. Most of the male assistants resented the subservient tasks the females generally seemed to take as their due, but Kevin served her as if she were his royal liege. “What was Daisy on the warpath about?” she asked.

  “Pick a number. Basically it was because she found some mistakes in the Berkman copy and hit the ceiling, threatening to fire the whole copywriting department.”

  “Naturally she’d initialed the copy herself, mistakes and all.”

  “An irrelevant detail, Louey, you just can’t get good help these days. So she simply had to throw a few tantrums or it wouldn’t seem as if she really had the company’s interests at heart.”

  “Millicent get screamed at?”

  Kevin nodded. “It was gruesome. Everyone came out of the cover-art meeting looking like slaughtered sheep, and Millicent was beet-red. Then Daisy followed her into her office.”

  “No exit.”

  “And continued where she’d obviously left off. Millicent just sat there and took it.”

  “She always does. Did all these people really call me yesterday?”

  “Damon called four times.” Kevin raised his eyebrows at her meaningfully. “The man has difficulty understanding the phrase ‘sick in bed.’ I should have told him you were dead.”

  “He got his proofs?”

  “I messengered them to him yesterday afternoon, as soon as they came in. He said he doesn’t like the typeface.”

  “He specifically asked for that typeface.”

  “He also mentioned that he hadn’t seen the cover proofs yet—”

  “They don’t exist yet.”

  “—and that he hadn’t seen the back-cover copy set in type yet—”

  “He just called them in Monday.”

  “—and that he doesn’t want the cover to be quote typical soft-core idealized faggot shit unquote.”

  “He said that? Into your virgin ears?”

  “No, wait. Maybe it was ‘faggot slime.’”

  “I’m the only one allowed to talk to you that way.” Louey ripped the paper with Damon’s name on it into tiny shreds. “I can see I’m going to have to kill him.” Louey sighed. “And what did Rifkin want?”

  “She was livid. Said her book’s in the stores and why hasn’t she seen a copy yet?”

  “It’s out? Shit. I haven’t even seen it. Can you get some copies from sub rights and messenger her a few? And we should express-mail the Stud calendars to Bambi this afternoon.”

  “Already done. She called yesterday in a snit demanding to speak to you. I told her she’d have them in her twisted little hands by noon today.”

  “Angel.”

  “Don’t start with me. I had a whole army of people yesterday who took your uncharacteristic absence very badly. Took it all out on me, in fact.”

  “I’ll never get a brain tumor again, I promise.
”

  “Are you feeling better?” He hovered near her with genuine concern.

  An ashen taste filled Louey’s mouth as she recalled the feeling of waking up the previous day without Mia. Her stomach lurched; they might as well have broken up two days and not two years ago.

  “Must be feeling better,” she said. “How could I face another day with Daisy if I weren’t?”

  “Or a day without me?”

  “Or a day without you,” she agreed, patting him on the shoulder. “Well,” she sighed, “I suppose it’s time I made some actual phone calls.”

  “Be brave,” Kevin said, leaving her office. “Wake me when it’s over.”

  Tuesday Louey had spent the entire morning in bed, staring at the cracks in her ceiling and replaying the moment when Mia had turned around to face her, that easy, guiltless smile lighting her beautiful features and destroying whatever tenuous hold Louey had on sanity. The past two years she’d obviously been deluding herself; she was never going to get over Mia. Mia had been put on the planet specifically to pluck her from the world of the merely mortal and then let go to watch Louey plummet to the depths of hell. All in a day’s work, she supposed; no reason to let a small thing like permanent emotional paralysis get in the way of leading a rich, productive life.

  A hot shower would make her feel better, she knew, but she didn’t want to feel better. She wanted to stay in bed until someone had to send a squad car to make sure she hadn’t been brutally murdered. She wanted Mia to call now that she’d seen her and find her number out of service, for Mia to open the paper and see her picture under a grisly headline. Was that asking so much?

  Given the nature of the city, she realized, it was amazing that their paths hadn’t crossed before now. (Normally, brushes with her past were limited to those with whom she’d shared 3 a.m. cocktails or a junior high school softball association, it was true.) Still, it was sadly appropriate that the first time she’d seen Mia since being deposited on her nose in the rubble would be on the subway. Just her luck to have such an opportunity for a long, soulful reconciliation.