The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  George decided we had to have our own place.

  Chapter 13

  Beth couldn’t get used to the bathroom.

  Although it wasn’t really so much the bathroom as the getting there—they were all by themselves in the house so it seemed silly to wrap herself up in a towel every time she wanted to take a shower, but she couldn’t step out into that long hallway without feeling as if she were on stage at the Follies, stark naked and expected to dance. It was all those damn bedroom doors.

  She and Phil couldn’t have been more alone together, and yet she never seemed able to overcome the sense that they were not alone. Maybe a place like the Moonlight is never completely abandoned by the crowds of people who have moved through it over the years. Or maybe she had just listened a bit more attentively than she thought to Millie’s horror stories.

  The weekend had been both marvelous and strange. Phil with his new car was like a different person, more confident, almost cocky. The stranger she had seen through the windshield was really him.

  “How do you like the wheels, Doll?”

  For a second or two, she thought he was doing a Humphrey Bogart imitation. Except that he wasn’t imitating anyone. He was just himself. Except that he couldn’t seem to make up his mind which self to be.

  And then the long, slow drive to the Moonlight, as if they were on a parade float.

  “It’s great, isn’t it,” he said, and then, without even waiting for her confirmation, almost as if he were talking to himself. “I’ve always liked this color—burgundy, wine red, claret, what the hell. At night it just looks black, but in the daylight . . .”

  It wasn’t until the car was in the garage, and they were walking toward the house, that she noticed the shattered headlamp. She didn’t say anything.

  “In California all I ever drove were dinky little Japanese skateboards, but just once, I figured, I owed it to myself. . .”

  He was interrupted by the sound of music coming from the house.

  “I guess I must have left the radio on,” he said, opening the kitchen door for her. And there, on the table in the center of the room, was one of those old-fashioned wooden radios, the kind that are shaped like church windows, coming to a little point at the top. The volume was way up, and it was tuned to the Golden Oldies station in White Plains, the one that seemed to think the day the music died was when Glen Miller’s plane went down.

  Phil rushed past her and switched the thing off.

  “I didn’t know you liked that stuff,” Beth said, just for something to say. It was a little awkward for her, standing there in the kitchen of this strange house—like an unsanctified bride on her wedding night.

  “Yeah.” He smiled, all at once the old Phil again, as if surprised and a little frightened at being suddenly so alone with her. “I mean, I never used to. Only since I came out here—I found the radio in one of the storerooms day before yesterday, and when I turned it on that was what came out. It kind of fits in, I think.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Let me show you the house.”

  And that was what he did. She got the two-dollar tour, through all the big rooms downstairs and even out onto the patio, where the night air was still moist and hot and she thought she caught a whiff of tobacco smoke.

  “This used to be the outdoor dance floor,” he said, gesturing with his hand as if to convey some impression of its size. “It seems my uncle’s sense of timing was a little off, because all this went down the summer before Pearl Harbor, so I don’t suppose it ever saw much use. You can imagine what it must have been like, though—paper lanterns hung all the way around and some clown up on the bandstand in a white tux, pretending to lead a seven-piece orchestra. Couples hanging on each other, all soppy over My Blue Heaven. Jesus.”

  They went back inside and he led her up to the second floor. There was another stairway to a third story, but he ignored it.

  “This is my room here,” he said. “Our room.”

  He smiled again, and seemed to swallow hard. In that moment she was sure she loved him, more even than she had loved Pauley Koontz.

  And for a while it was beautiful. They made love with all the lights turned out, the big iron bed creaking beneath them, and he held and kissed her breasts almost with a kind of reverence, as if he adored her very flesh. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her nipples, the softness of his lips and tongue as he told her, over and over, and without uttering a word, that she was inexpressibly precious to him, as if the pleasure she gave him was something more than desire, even while his desire seemed to burn him to ashes.

  And then he entered her, and suddenly all she could feel was the perfect purity of his lust. It excited her—oh God, it excited her until she was almost wild—but he was that other person now, a hungry animal that devoured her, indifferent to her as if alone with his passion. When she reached her climax, it seemed to explode inside her with a sharp, white-hot burst of pleasure that was indistinguishable from pain.

  And she could hear, echoing somewhere, if only in her mind, a faint, sneering hint of laughter, cold and cruel.

  . . . . .

  “What’s upstairs?”

  “Oh, nothing much. A little apartment where I guess my uncle used to live.”

  “Then I’m surprised you don’t move in there.”

  Phil shook his head. “It’s a box. I never go near it. I’d rather be down here with you.”

  And then he smiled, his wonderful, fond smile that said you filled his life. They were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee. It was nearly noon, but she had just gotten out of bed. Phil had been outside all morning, painting the back of the house. He smelled deliciously of sunshine and sweat.

  Why did he make it sound as if to be up there was to be without her? It was as if the third floor lay beyond some barrier she could never cross.

  Beth wasn’t wearing anything except one of Phil’s pajama tops and only the bottom button was closed, so that every time she moved he could see her breasts. It was deliberate. She wanted him to make love to her—now, this morning, in broad daylight. She wanted to see if it would be any different.

  And he was watching her, but he hadn’t touched her yet. Maybe he was shy about it. She would like to think that.

  “Would you like to go back to bed for a little bit?” she asked him. “Maybe I could be nice to you. Maybe you’d enjoy it that way.”

  And this time she made love to him. She kissed and licked him all over and when he was ready she climbed on top, guiding his hands up to her breasts. She took her time, keeping him deep inside her as much as she could, and she was the one who came first, although not by more than a few seconds. And the whole time, even while he was straining into his climax, he held her breasts so gently. That was the best part, the tenderness of his restraint.

  It was better than it had been last night—not as much heat, but more love. It was what it should always be and hardly ever was, a shared thing, more about feelings than passion.

  Why did he seem so different during the day? He was her old Phil again now, the person he had stopped being—for a while—last night.

  About one thirty, while Beth was already in the bathroom, someone came. A man parked his car in the driveway—she could hear him slam the door shut—and went around to the back to talk to Phil. She could hear the murmur of their voices when she opened a window to let the steam out, but it wasn’t any of her business so she turned on the water for her shower.

  Forty minutes later she looked out the kitchen window and saw his car was gone. She went outside. Phil had that radio on a chair, and it was blasting out swing music like the wrath of heaven.

  When he saw her, he came down from his ladder and turned the radio off.

  “That was the realtor who was here,” he said flatly, as if he had received bad news. “He thinks I’m fixing the place up to sell it.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer. He just climbed back up on his ladder and retu
rned to his painting.

  “I like owning this place. I just wish there was some way to make it pay so that I could go on living here.”

  “And there isn’t?”

  If he heard her, he gave no sign. He might have forgotten her. His whole attention was on the gutter pipe he was painting with careful, rounded strokes.

  “How do you like the color?” he asked finally.

  “Fine,” Beth lied. In her private heart, she thought all wooden buildings should be painted white, but Phil could paint his house any color he liked. “How did you choose it?”

  “I don’t know—it just kind of sprung out at me from the sample book.”

  “You get it at Feenie’s.”

  “Yeah. He had to mix it special. The son-of-a-bitch tried to talk me out of it.”

  Good for Feenie, she thought. There was just something about that color that gave her the creeps.

  “I’m sorry you have to sell your house,” she said, just to change the subject.

  He shot her a glance that, for a moment, seemed to class her with the realtor and all the other forces of darkness. Then it softened.

  “Thanks, but maybe I won’t. Who knows? Maybe something will come up.”

  “Maybe.”

  She went back into the house because she could sense he wanted to be alone—alone with his house and his creepy paint. He was that other person again, so she wasn’t sorry to leave him there.

  When she was back inside she heard the swing music start up again.

  It was only then, for some reason, that she felt the peculiar desolate quality of the house, as if it had been emptied of everything, even memory. The space within its walls was dead—not merely empty, but dead, in the sense of having been deserted by life. And she understood, again for the first time, that this is what she sensed in Phil, that somehow the house had found its way into him. The house had created its own level of reality and its real existence was there, and it was drawing Phil to it, as its possession, its prize, perhaps even its instrument.

  But no one can contemplate such an idea for long and stay sane, so Beth dismissed her intuition as nothing more than a morbid fancy, a case of injured feelings that this man sometimes slipped away from her. She told herself it was only that.

  She hardly knew what to do with herself, so she went into the kitchen and began to look around with an eye to dinner. She found a couple of TV dinners and the makings of spaghetti, along with about a pound and a half of hamburger, and decided on spaghetti and meatballs as the lesser of two evils.

  It was too early to start cooking, however, so she went back upstairs. At the foot of the stairway leading up to the third floor she paused for a moment and looked at the closed door at the top.

  What the hell, she decided, she would have a look. She wouldn’t be violating anybody’s privacy.

  She had half expected that the door would be locked, but the knob turned easily in her hand. The rooms beyond were as tiny and drab as Phil had described—a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom, all heavy with abandonment and the smell of stale cigarette smoke. Beth noticed that the bedroom closet door was standing open and saw a calendar with an illustration of a girl fighting her skirt down in the wind. The date was June, 1941, so the wind had been blowing for nearly fifty years.

  “It’s a box. I never go near it.”

  Then who had been smoking up here? The room had been unoccupied for—how long? Not since June, 1941, but certainly for many years. Cigarette smoke lingers, but not forever.

  Suddenly she had to get out of there. She was in such a panic to escape that she slammed the door behind her—the noise brought her to her senses and she stood on the stairway for a moment, listening.

  Was Phil in the house? Had he heard? She waited for a long moment, but there was no sound.

  And then, at last, the music from the radio, leaking in somewhere from the patio. He was still outside painting.

  And the smell meant nothing. Phil smoked, and he must have been up there sometime or other. One cigarette, maybe two, a couple of weeks ago—would that be enough? Would it still register, or would it simply have blended in with the dust?

  “It’s a box. I never go near it.” She just didn’t know.

  She went outside again because out in the sunshine it didn’t seem to matter as much.

  “How would you feel about spaghetti and meatballs?” she asked him.

  . . . . .

  Instead, they drove into Greenley and got Chinese to take out. They sat at the kitchen table and ate out of cartons, and everything was just as it should be.

  “You want to go to a movie or something?” Phil asked, digging around in what was supposed to be shrimp and pea pods—the shrimp had been marvelously successful at camouflaging themselves.

  But she shook her head and smiled. “No. I just want to be with you.”

  It was perhaps the most sincere declaration of love she had ever made in her life, and it seemed to make him very happy.

  “Okay.”

  For a long time they ate in silence, content simply to be together. She helped him to rice, separating out the clotted grains with her fork. They drank Chinese tea of a pale, sickly green out of mugs so ancient they were white by default, their patterns having long since worn off. They shared the fortune cookies.

  “I was thinking, maybe you could move a few things over,” he said over Neapolitan ice cream, for what kind of lunatic would trust a Chinese restaurant with dessert? “I mean, you wouldn’t have to go off the deep end or anything—just take it a step at a time. But we could see how it works out.”

  “You want me to move in? Is that it?”

  “Yeah. I want you to move in.”

  She let the invitation rest in her mind for a moment, thinking that twenty-four hours ago it was all she hoped for. But now . . .

  “Okay. If you want me to.”

  “Then it’s settled.”

  He leaned across the table and kissed her, and his lips tasted of strawberry ice cream. It seemed a good beginning.

  After dinner they sat out on the patio and listened to the radio—regular music this time: Billy Joel, Gloria Estefan, Hall and Oates. They sat on lawn chairs and held hands, watching the daylight disappear.

  After dark the music dropped away into silence. It just faded into nothing.

  “I thought reception was supposed to get better at night,” she said. “What happened to the Ionosphere?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  He got up to fiddle with the dial, and almost at once the radio was blasting the squeal of Bennie Goodman’s clarinet.

  For maybe five seconds Phil just stood there, as if he couldn’t believe it. And then he switched the radio off with a vicious snap.

  “Jesus. The sucker really has its own opinions.”

  He turned to her and smiled—it was a joke, you see. But he looked almost frightened.

  “We could leave it off,” she said.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  They saw the joke at the same time, and they both laughed.

  That night she awoke once, very late. It seemed as if, from one instant to the next, she was just awake, listening. Except there was nothing to hear. The loudest sound was the soft stir of Phil’s breathing.

  Moonlight poured through the window, pale and cold, like the hand of Death pointing an accusation. Beth sat up in bed, obedient to its summons, and saw that the light had fallen across a stain on the floor. She hadn’t even noticed it before, or, if she had, she didn’t remember.

  Now the stain was a dark, garish black, smeared with the moonlight as if it were still fresh—as if it were . . .

  She lay down again, her heart pounding with an unfocused, senseless dread. And then her mind seemed to go numb, and she went back to sleep.

  In the morning it was like something recalled from childhood. She noticed the stain, pale brown and ancient, almost worn away by time, as she got ready for her bath, and she smiled a little ruefully at the memory of her own fear.r />
  Chapter 14

  “Sure, I can pound it out for you. Five fifty, with the headlamp. The paint’s in stock. Bring it back tomorrow morning and I can have it for you by Tuesday.”

  Phil stood in front of his car, beside a man in dark green coveralls who wore his beard cut straight across at the nipple line and probably weighed three hundred pounds. They were contemplating the dented fender like generals over a field map.

  Why had he bought this car? What had possessed him? What was so wonderful about it that he was shelling out that kind of money for a dimple? He didn’t even know how he was going to make the payments.

  He hoped Jack Matheny understood more about real estate than he did about car repairs.

  “That’s what the insurance adjustor said: five fifty, right on the button.”

  The body shop owner nodded. He knew all about insurance adjustors.

  “Yeah, well, we all read the same price books,” he answered, with the air of revealing a professional secret. “It’ll be five fifty anywhere you go—the difference is workmanship. Look around my yard and see if you can find any bad paint jobs. How much is your deductible?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “And you don’t know who did it?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “Jesus, that’s tough. But it always seems to work that way.”

  The man never took his eyes from the fender, so Phil was left to wonder what he meant. Was it an observation of the general injustice of life, or was it just his opinion that most hit-and-runs were some clown chewing up his paintwork on the garage door when he came home pie-eyed from a lodge meeting?

  If that was it, Phil couldn’t argue. He remembered making the call to the insurance company Friday afternoon—all he got was a chance to leave a message on their answering machine—but he couldn’t even remember discovering the accident.

  In fact, there was precious little he could remember of that afternoon and evening, right up to the time he picked up Beth. He had a vague recollection of taking a drive, just for the pleasure of being in his new car, but his memory of it was like a photograph that was too out of focus even to be recognizable. Where had he gone? What had he seen? He had no idea.