Girls in the Moon

by Janet McNally

  “Thanks a lot, Dad.” Something goes brittle in Archer’s voice. He turns away from his father just a little, but I notice. “As always, your support is overwhelming.”

  “I am supporting you.” Dr. Hughes slips his phone into his pocket and picks up a briefcase from the counter. “Not in the way in the way you hoped, I suppose.”

  Archer doesn’t say anything, just exhales softly and fidgets in place. Sunlight streams into a golden square on the tiled floor next to his feet, and the room stays quiet.

  “My mom teaches at a university too,” I say, just to fill the space. I’m not about to tell him that she used to be in a band as well, and she gave it up.

  “Really?” he says. “Which one?”

  “University at Buffalo. She’s in the art department.”

  “Art history?” His eyebrows rise as he says this.

  “Studio art,” I say. Then “Sculpture.” I hope he doesn’t ask me what medium, because I don’t imagine he’s much into metal. What would my mother think? He doesn’t look like he has the constitution for it. This guy, she’d say, would never be able to stand the heat.

  He nods as if he’s considering my answer. I can almost see him make the decision: art history would have been better.

  Archer moves in something like a shudder, his limbs going loose. “Okay, well, we’re just here to pick up my tuning pedal,” he says.

  Dr. Hughes nods. “Right,” he says, “and I have a meeting. I’m leaving now.”

  Archer is already walking away toward the back of the apartment, and I stand there only a second before I follow him.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say before I go.

  “Likewise.” He smiles, and in that moment, it seems sincere.

  Archer goes through a doorway down the hall. His room is large, I suppose, by New York standards, and painted a deep gray blue, a vintage roll-down map of North America on the opposite wall. He has a poster of the Beatles’ Let It Be: John, Paul, George, and Ringo, each in his own square. There’s a wide window that looks out on the black-edged windows of the sandstone building across the street. I can see an Irish flag in the window opposite, and some kind of palm tree in the one next to it. Archer turns on his stereo and puts the needle on the record he’s left on there. It’s the Kinks.

  “Nice,” I say.

  “You’re a Kinks fan?” he asks.

  “Of course,” I say. “People think the question is ‘Beatles versus Stones,’ but it should be ‘Beatles versus Kinks.’” This is my mother’s riff and I’m just paraphrasing, but Archer doesn’t have to know that. Besides, she’s trained me, and Luna, too, given us a full musical education. Sure, she left out the Shelter lesson in Nineties Music 101, but I’m catching up on that.

  Archer is smiling at me, and I feel my cheeks flush. “So who would win?” he asks.

  I smile too. “Oh, the Beatles, of course, but at least it would be a real contest.”

  Archer kneels down on the floor in front of his bed and pulls out a box. I stand in the center of his room, not sure what I should do. There is a cluster of photographs on his desk and I try to look at them without him noticing. There’s at least one of Archer and a pretty dark-haired girl.

  “I like the color,” I say.

  “What color?” He’s rummaging through pedals and cables, pulling some out and lining them up on the rug.

  “Of your room. It’s like a whale.”

  I’m positive that I’m making no sense. Any power I’ve had over words is failing me. You get me in a cute boy’s bedroom and I fall apart, apparently. But Archer smiles again.

  “Definitely the look I was going for,” he says.

  “Really?” I almost feel relieved.

  He laughs. “Well, no, not really. But I like whales.”

  Archer starts digging through the boxes under his bed and I don’t really know where to sit, so instead I go over to stand by the window. Down on the sidewalk I see Rafael helping a deliveryman with a huge box of groceries. An orange falls out and rolls to the curb without either of them noticing.

  In my normal life, I’m never this high up. People are never this small, enacting whole scenes in miniature down on the street. The cars slide by, the yellow taxis switching lanes. Suddenly I notice the silence of the space between songs, the record crackling like radio static. Then “Strangers” starts, Dave Davies singing with a voice like gravel at the bottom of a clear cold stream. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I feel like I’m in a movie, but I’m not sure what the plot is. I’m not sure what happens next.

  “Is there a better song than this in the world?” I say. I turn back toward Archer.

  He smiles. “Maybe not.”

  “Right now, it sounds like the best thing I could possibly hear.”

  I hear Dr. Hughes say something from the other room, maybe good-bye, and the door shuts hard behind him. Some kind of spell is broken, like a radio dial going off station when you drive too far to get the signal.

  Archer turns and sits down, leaning against his bed. I notice that it’s made carefully, the gray coverlet tucked under his pillow and creased in a straight line. I wonder if Archer did it or if they have someone whose job it is to do that. I’m not sure, yet, if he’s the kind of guy who makes his bed.

  “My father drives me crazy,” Archer says. He’s looking up at me, so I drop down and sit on his rug too.

  “Maybe he’s just jealous,” I say. “Economics is not very sexy.”

  Is this what I’m supposed to say? I wonder. Am I doing this right? I have no idea.

  Archer laughs. “I’ve thought about that.” He picks up a green bass pedal and moves the knobs absentmindedly. “You know, we used to talk about music. He was the one who first introduced me to sixties soul. He had all these records when I was a kid: Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles. But then we moved, and my older sister started having problems.”

  “Does she live here?” I ask. I had peeked inside the first room down the hall, which had long purple curtains and a bunch of satin toe shoes hung in a clump from the door. If Tessa were here, she would have stuck her whole head in the room, gathering intel like a spy.

  “No,” he says. “Only Calista does. I don’t know where Natalie is. Boston, as of a couple of months ago.” He pushes the box back underneath his bed, where it fits neatly under the bed skirt. “She was a dancer, but she got hurt. And then she couldn’t stop taking the pain meds.”

  He takes out his wallet then, and I expect him to hand me a picture. Instead, it’s a driver’s license. Natalie Hughes, it says. I study her picture: she’s the girl from the photo on Archer’s desk. She’s pretty, with a narrow face and high cheekbones, sky-blue eyes and wavy dark brown hair like his.

  “She left that in her room. Right in the middle, like a message.” He shakes his head. “I mean, what is she doing without her ID?”

  “Maybe she has a fake.” Eyes: blue, the license says. Hair: brown. Height: 5 feet, 7 inches.

  “Maybe. But why? She’s twenty-two. It’s like she just wanted to leave her whole life behind.” He rubs his fingers across his forehead. “And she wanted us to know.” He squints a little, as if the light behind us is too bright. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  I don’t know how to answer, but it’s okay because I don’t think he’s really looking for one.

  “When I dropped out of school, my dad just lost it,” he says. “He doesn’t even know how to talk to me anymore.” He rubs his forehead. “It’s not like I can’t go back. He’ll still be there. He’ll be there forever. They’re going to have to drag him out of that endowed chair. No matter when I go back, he won’t have to pay my tuition.”

  Archer is still sitting on the woven rug, leaning back against the side of his mattress. I reach out to touch a striped wool camping blanket folded at the end of his bed, but I want to touch him. His knee or his shoulder. I want to feel the warmth of his skin through his clothes.

  “Do you want to go back?” I ask.


  “What?”

  “To school, I mean. Someday. Do you think you will?”

  He pulls up a corner of the rug and lets it drop. “Maybe. I like the idea of being in school; I’m just not sure I need a degree at the end of it. It depends what happens with the Moons.” He shrugs. “I should move out, I know. We’re just gone so much lately it hasn’t seemed worth it. We won’t be back for a month this time. And Calista likes that I still officially live here.”

  “What do you think will happen?” I ask. He looks at me. “With the Moons, I mean.”

  He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know. I know Venus Moth is really into us, and that would change things. For the next tour, I mean. We’d probably get to leave the States, even. Play Europe.”

  “Be famous,” I say.

  “Eh,” he says, “I don’t really care about that. I just want to get out of this house. Get my dad off my back.”

  “My mom wants me to talk to Luna,” I say. “Try to convince her to go back to school in the fall.”

  Archer looks at me, waiting, so I keep going.

  “I haven’t said much yet, and she’s not going to listen anyway.” I turn toward his desk, touch the milk crate full of records on the top. “The two of them drive me nuts. First of all, my mother is mad at Luna for doing the same thing she did. And Luna’s, like, following our mother’s every move and doesn’t seem to realize it at all.”

  Archer smiles, but his eyes look serious. “I think it’s hard for her to see that,” he says. “She wants to believe she’s making her own choices.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “Luna always makes her own choices.”

  I start to flip through the records in the crate. There are three more crates like it on the floor by my feet. I see Otis Redding, the Eels, Talking Heads.

  “That one is signed by David Byrne,” Archer says. I can see the signature in the left-hand corner. “My father bought it for me.” He sighs. “A long time ago.” He stands up to open a tall cabinet by the window. “This is all records too,” he says.

  “I think you have a vinyl problem.”

  He slips an album from the middle shelf. “I know I do.”

  I keep flipping, the album sleeves smooth and papery under my fingers. I’m almost through the second crate when I find it: the record that stops me midflip. I didn’t even know I was looking for it, but when I see it, it’s as if some kind of search is over.

  twenty-seven

  MY FATHER HAS COME OUT with one album in the three years since I’ve seen him, and I bought it myself on vinyl six months ago. Rolling Stone did a piece about it, even put a small headline on the cover. I saw my mother looking at it at the grocery store, squinting, and when she walked away to put orange juice in our cart I pulled a copy off the stand and crouched down on the floor to read it. Gimme Shelter, it said. Kieran Goes Back to the Studio with Promise. Considering that my father owns a studio, I’m not sure how he went “back” to it, but I figured it wasn’t really worth writing a letter to the editorial department.

  I picked it up at Spiral Scratch, an indie record store in our neighborhood. When I brought it up to the counter I expected there to be some fanfare involved in the checkout, but of course the clerk didn’t know who I was.

  “We’ve been listening to this one in the store,” he said. He pushed his dark-framed glasses up on his nose. “Finally this dude did something right.”

  I smiled and might have shrugged, then walked home clutching the record in its paper shopping bag. I didn’t listen to it while my mother was home, and I didn’t put it in the cabinet with the rest of the albums in the dining room. I guess I had given up on trying to get her to talk to me about my father. I kept it in the narrow strip of space between my dresser and my bookcase, resting on the hardwood floor, and sometimes at night I’d slide it out and disassemble it as if I were diffusing a bomb. The cardboard sleeve, the envelope, the lyrics, which came printed on a paper thin and transparent as onion skin. The black vinyl record itself, its concentric rings like the inside of an old tree. The album came with a digital download, of course, and I had it on my iPod. I’d listen before I went to bed, trying to figure him out from his lyrics, his voice. What was this “promise,” and who was he making it to? There was a song about a breakup and one about a girl named Laura. I didn’t know anyone named Laura. There was a lyric about a girl with blue-green eyes, and I wondered if it was about my mother. But my father had been touring without her for fifteen years, and he might have picked up a hundred blue-green-eyed girls since.

  There was only one picture of him on the album, a small one on the back where the recording information was, and the credits for the other musicians. He stood in profile, shadowed, black-and-white. He was smiling widely, his mouth open. This was my father in gray scale, compacted. And even in photographic form, I couldn’t get him to look at me.

  Now, in Archer’s room, I find myself looking at the photograph of my father again. It’s so small I can’t see the dimple that matches mine.

  “Is it weird that I have that?” Archer asks. He’s standing behind me, so close that I can feel his breath on my shoulder.

  I turn to look at him. “Why would it be weird?”

  “Because you guys don’t talk to him. And Luna’s so angry.”

  I shake my head. “It’s not weird.”

  Archer’s brow furrows. “Are you?”

  It seems like his sentence is missing an adjective. “Am I what?”

  “Angry.”

  I think about it. “I’m confused. I just don’t know where he went. I mean, he was never around all that much, but now he’s just totally gone.” I lift the album sleeve up. “Except for this.” It’s paper, it’s pictures, but I feel like it carries the music inside of it somehow.

  I fit the record back in its spot in the milk crate and sit down at the edge of Archer’s bed.

  “What is weird,” I say, “is being the only one in my family who doesn’t, you know, do music.” I’ve always felt this way, but I don’t know if I’ve ever said it out loud. And then I do say it, and nothing happens except Archer sits down next to me.

  “You never tried?” he says.

  “A little. My mom didn’t push me, but she was open to it. Surprising, seeing as how she acts about Luna now. I mean, what was she expecting would happen?” I pull one leg up on the bed and hold my ankle. “Anyway, I didn’t have any talent. My voice is fine, but it’s nothing special. I couldn’t really pick up an instrument. I even tried the flute. I figured that would be totally different, and I could have something that was just my own. But I hated it. And I wasn’t any good. Or maybe I was afraid to be really bad at something they’re so good at.” I stop, feeling my cheeks flush. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  Archer smiles, a slow, wide smile that takes its time moving across his face. “I asked.”

  A pigeon flies past the window, a fluttery blur of gray wings. “I always thought I’d find something else,” I say. “I have the smart thing, the grades thing, but that’s pretty much it.”

  “Are you kidding me?” he asks. “Phoebe, you are an incredible writer. Poet, lyricist, whatever.” He reaches toward me and takes my wrist between his fingers. His thumb presses right on my pulse and I feel as if I might melt straight onto the floor.

  “Thanks,” I say, and suddenly I feel very aware of the space between us. You could measure it in inches, not feet, not yards, not miles. I can see the amber flecks in his blue eyes, and I’m wondering what he can see in mine.

  The record ends, and I hear the needle return to its stand. That’s how quiet it seems. Archer lets go of my wrist and goes to put a new one on.

  There’s an Elvis Costello concert poster on the wall next to me. It’s from his Brutal Youth album, and Elvis looks serious and maybe a little disapproving. Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing here, Elvis, I think. But maybe it’s not too late to turn back.

  My heart starts to beat harder against my rib cage. The idea blooms i
nside me like one of my mother’s daylilies: beautiful, star-shaped, for a limited time only. I lean toward Archer a little bit.

  “I need to go someplace,” I say, “and I don’t want Luna to know.” I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I put my palms flat on my thighs. I take a deep breath. “It has to be today. Will you come with me?”

  twenty-eight

  I KNOW WHERE MY FATHER’S studio is. I know because Luna took me there once last year, when I visited her at her dorm during her first semester in New York. It was early November, chilly, and when we got off the train, the wind smelled like blue sky and dry leaves. The trees in Brooklyn burned red and gold. We stopped first at a tiny café for hot chocolate in cardboard cups, and then we walked three blocks with the warm cups in our hands.

  When we got there, we stood across the street and looked at the building for a while, then crossed in the middle of the block and climbed up on the stoop: one, two, three stairs up. There was a small white doorbell and above it, printed in tiny letters on the green tape of a label maker, it read KIERAN FERRIS STUDIOS. I wondered if my father had made the little sign or if he had some kind of secretary. I leaned against the railing and Luna stood crookedly and stared at the sign, rubbing one of her tall brown boots against the other. I took a sip of cocoa. Standing there, I thought we might as well ring the bell and see if he was there, but that was never part of Luna’s plan. When I reached out toward the button she stopped me, grabbing my hand and pulling it back. She shook her head.

  She turned and stepped onto the sidewalk, then started walking toward the train.

  “We’re leaving?” I asked. I was still up on the stoop looking down on her. Her red scarf blew across her shoulders.

  “I just wanted to see it,” she said.

  I didn’t try to convince her. I just walked down the stairs and followed her past the café, onto the subway, back uptown to her dorm. We didn’t talk about it later, and what I wondered most was why she’d taken me along. She was in the city all the time; she could have come alone and no one would have known. Instead, she’d brought me on her strange pilgrimage, just to stand on a stoop and then turn around and walk away. Maybe he hadn’t even been there.