Pack Up the Moon

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Everyone gets sick. Or covered with some fungus.”

  “And yet here you are, alive.”

  “A girl I was with died in Afghanistan. A Dutch girl. We foolishly shared a mere sip from a glass of unboiled water.”

  Isolde said, “But you didn’t get sick?”

  “If you reach the age of five in Afghanistan, it is pretty hard to kill you. We have enough antibodies for ten people. I should have known better than to let her drink, that’s all.” He looked desolate with the memory.

  “I see.”

  “Filthy country,” Harry told Daisy.

  Tupelo said, “Blacky would make sure nothing happened to me, wouldn’t you, darlink?”

  “I would shoot you up with gamma globulin before we left.” He moved his lips at her with a push.

  “Anyway,” Reiner said, “no one wants to photograph a girl with fungus on her face, eh?”

  “I’m healthy as a horse,” I announced defiantly. “I just don’t have enough money.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Oh, you poor little thing!” Tupelo said dismissively. She would sum you up with her eyes and, finding you unable to advance her in any way, give you a swift write-off. She had a way of looking at you as though you were an invalid. It was a look full of false pity, demeaning and leaving you feeling superfluous.

  To ease my embarrassment, Blacky said, “There is nothing so refreshing as a healthy woman.” But then he turned bright red, as though regretting his words. He’d said it out of kindness, but there was truth in it, for him. Again he looked at me and I at him. Tupelo Honig might have captured him, but the look between us had fireworks in it. And I would have my fireworks.

  “But my dear,” Harry told me gently, “a model only has so much time when things are going well. Once you fall from fashion, the cash flow stops abruptly. You must make hay as the sun shines, my dear.”

  I was unimpressed with this argument. I would be young forever.

  “Still,” Blacky pointed out evenly, “a trip like that … difficulties would surely arise.”

  “Not if you have a translator with you,” Chartreuse assured him.

  “Well, do you speak Urdu?”

  “That I do not speak but we can easily hire some—”

  “I do,” Daisy spoke up. “I speak a lovely Urdu.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Harry said.

  “What ridiculous,” I interjected. “Daisy grew up all around the world, didn’t you, Daisy?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “My Punjabi’s a bit rusty, but it ought to suffice in a pinch.”

  “And I speak all the local dialects one needs overland,” Chartreuse put in.

  “I see,” Blacky said, “a real gadabout.” He said this almost arrogantly and he said it to Chartreuse. I hadn’t heard him use that tone before. Then he said, “Chartreuse … sounds French. Surely not an Afghani name …” His smile was sweet.

  Chartreuse returned his sweetness. “I said my mother was Afghani. My father was from Toulouse. But when I was born, I did not want to come out. I was almost a ten-month baby. Really. I was green. Covered in green slime. Merde alors! my father cried out upon seeing me. Il est chartreuse!”

  They all laughed. I was appalled and revolted. I wished he hadn’t told me that. “What did you mean,” I turned back to Wolfgang, changing the subject, “about the still photography? You mean I would get paid?”

  “Not a lot, assuredly,” he hiccupped. “You’ve not made a name for yourself as a photographer, have you?”

  “No.” I ducked my head. “We all know I’m the amateur.” I’d heard Isolde say Wolfgang was mean with money—for all his success. I could feel him watching me, which pleased me. The great filmmaker captivated by little me. Still, he looked so long and hard there were moments I felt intruded upon. His eyes were not just pleasured, but scrutinizing.

  Isolde put in, “It isn’t as though photography were brain surgery.”

  Reiner sat up at this and sputtered, “And it’s also not as though just anyone can pick up a camera and make a go of it.”

  “Oh, calm down,” Daisy sassed him. “Nobody’s challenging your profession.”

  “Surely you could muddle your way through it,” Harry said, “I mean with so many exciting subjects. Even if you botched the half of it, some of it would surely turn out right.” He turned to Wolfgang. “And that half might be frightfully exciting.”

  “Film is still expensive,” I pointed out.

  “Certainly that would be included in expenses,” Chartreuse negotiated.

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Wolfgang placed his knife and fork down on the plate in a final gesture. “But why not come?” He rubbed the palms of his hands together. “It would cut costs to have an unknown.”

  Reiner said, “Of course, if I decided to come that would solve all your problems. Then Claire wouldn’t even have to come.”

  “But,” I was outraged, “I might want to come.”

  “Claire could still do some of the photography,” Isolde said. “She could be a backup. For insurance.”

  “You wouldn’t need insurance with me as photographer,” Reiner pointed out.

  “But you know,” Wolfgang said, “that just might work …”

  “Look,” I protested, “I’m just a model. Maybe I’m in over my head here.”

  Blacky turned in his chair. “No, but being a model has its own cachet. Fashion and film mix very well, I think. The newspapers love that sort of thing, don’t they? You could send back intermittent stories, Claire. They could print them. Quick would love a travel story like that. Didn’t they use you on a cover?”

  He’d said my name so gently. And he was sticking up for me. He might be dazzled by Tupelo Honig but he was on my side. I felt it. And what an idea! Artists weren’t worth their salt until they’d traveled off the beaten path. I’d be gaining experience. And an eye. I would become a real artist. Just a different sort. And one could make a living at photography.

  “You’ll have to write the stories.” I smiled gratefully at him. “But it’s a wonderful dream. One day I think I might manage the pictures.” I frowned, remembering the reality. “If only you could wait a couple more months.”

  Blacky said, “I’m disappointed. In a couple more months, you will have met a handsome young man.”

  Isolde joined his mocking tone. “Who will help you spend your money.”

  “And,” Blacky reached toward me with his eyes, “he will have filled your head with dreams …” He bit the rim of his wineglass, his white teeth on the edge. The wine swirled in a tantalizing circle. Was he flirting with me?

  I shook my head, denying such a future. But I raised my glass to him and finished it. To add to my confusion, Blacky now turned back to Tupelo. Right away, she was basking in his refound admiration. I caught the glint of satisfaction in her eye. Gaggle on, she must have been thinking to herself as she shimmied in place, I’ve got the goods.

  That’s all right, I told myself with all my newly learned bitter, sophisticated reasoning. Let her have him. He’d be back. And how did he know I’d done a cover for Quick if he hadn’t seen it? So he did like me. I didn’t have him, but there was something in his eyes that told me one day, if I was lucky …

  Wolfgang put his plushy hand on top of mine. “Where is it you said you were from?”

  “I’m from New York,” I said.

  “But not New York City, surely?” Reiner said, already knowing the answer. His hair had come loose from its rubber band and I couldn’t help thinking he looked like an old transvestite done up like a nun at the end of a long, happy night.

  “No,” I said. “Queens. Just outside.”

  “Oh.” He caught the eyes of all of them. “Queens! That stretch of curb that lines the Van Wyck Expressway from the airport all the way to the city. I know. I’ve been to New York so many times.” He slipped a spoonful of peas into his mouth and chewed them thoughtfully. “Where str
ay dogs roam. Isn’t it true?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Not a shred of culture. And graffiti everywhere. Dreadful!” He turned to Tupelo. “All the houses have bars on the windows.”

  “Uch,” she said.

  My throat closed and I could barely speak. I wanted to defend my home. But where would I start and what would I do, describe the trees, the beauty of the old Victorians, the rain-washed light? Whatever I would say, he’d turn it around and make me look foolish. He had the knack. “What’s the matter, Reiner?” I said. “Do you hate Americans?”

  Isolde raised a hand. “Oh, please, Claire, don’t go getting defensive and patriotic. It’s so gauche.”

  “Especially from a country involved in an illegal war,” Wolfgang put in.

  “Where in India,” Harry kindly changed the subject, “would you be going?”

  Wolfgang looked to Chartreuse, who said blithely, “To Goa, of course.”

  “Goa?” Harry said. “Portuguese Goa? That’s where all the hippies and drug addicts go. Beach after beach of naked Europeans, isn’t it?”

  Chartreuse said, “Goa’s wonderful.”

  “You’d get sick of that quickly enough,” Harry said. “There is one place, though, in the Indian Himalayas … a Tibetan Buddhist refuge.”

  “Ah,” Chartreuse remembered. “McLeod Ganj. Just above Dharamsala.”

  “Isn’t that where the Dalai Lama lives?” Blacky put in. Wolfgang said, “Now that would be interesting!”

  “Me, too!” I heard myself lament. “I want to meet him, too!”

  Harry fondled his earlobe. “There was some talk within the trade a while ago about a missing tabernacle, a gift from Tibetans to Papist Catholics, as it happened, who’d been sent to China as missionaries then lost their way. Lavish with rare gems, that sort of thing. Was supposed to have turned up there and then didn’t. Raised quite a fuss. I must have that article somewhere. Would be lovely to stumble across that, eh?”

  “There it would be,” Daisy said, “just waiting for you.”

  It was very late. Still no one seemed to wish to be the first to leave. Suddenly I felt so warm I became dizzy. I excused myself and went down the hallway to the bathroom. I was just consoling myself in the mirror, washing my hands under a stream of delicious icy water, when Tupelo slipped in and shut the door behind her.

  “Oops,” I smiled, feeling slightly better, “just going.”

  But she hadn’t come to use the ladies’. “Let me see your bosom,” she said, peeking over my shoulder.

  I thought I must have got something on Isolde’s pretty blouse. Interested, we both looked down. She took the elastic top of my blouse and, with two hands, slipped both sides over my shoulders and to my waist. I stood before the mirror, exposed, my arms imprisoned in the sleeves. From behind, she weighed me with her eyes.

  “What a curvy little thing you are,” she said. Then she threw back her head and laughed, one up on me.

  “Keep your hands to yourself,” I said, regaining my composure, pulling my blouse back in place. It had all happened so fast. But it was too late. She’d seen the pupils of my eyes dilated with pleasure in the mirror.

  “Sei vorsichtig, Kleine,” she warned me pleasantly, looking keenly at herself now, for she’d accomplished her task. I knew enough German to understand. Be careful, little one.

  “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” she hissed in her heavy English. “Europe is not like America, you know. You’d just better keep out of my way.”

  “Hey, don’t be so shy.” I returned her intimidating tone with an exaggerated swagger of the head, reenacting washing my hands, the soap slithering in and out of my fingers. “Just spit out the way you feel,” I said, not feeling as brave as I sounded.

  She ignored the irony. “Things happen here to young girls.” The way she’d said it, it frightened me. I became aware of her size and strength. We stood there for a moment, at an impasse.

  Then she said, “You’re not the first little flootzie to step in my path, you know. They come and go like, like popcorn.”

  “Flootzie?” How dare she! She was the flootzie. I mean, floozy. I returned her scoffing tone.

  “Like popcorn, eh. Really? How unusual. That’s quite a threat.”

  But she wasn’t wounded by the absence of subtleties in one of her many languages. She smiled, a nasty smile that reached one eye and left a twitch.

  “It’s your boyfriend you should be worrying about, not me,” I came up with, scrambling for any defense.

  Isolde and Vladimir were coming down the hallway to go check on the children. Vladimir was grumbling, “I’ve got to find a flat nearby, that’s all. I can’t be wasting time driving back and forth.”

  Isolde was laughing and hopeful. “I’ll help you look,” she murmured in the voice she saved for him.

  Tupelo put a reassuring palm on my shoulder, as though we’d been in there confiding secrets. “Go home. Things will be safer for you in the States.” She let me pass. “I promise.”

  I wiped my hands hastily on a towel and got away.

  She made light conversation with Isolde and Vladimir.

  Trembling, I went in and regained my seat.

  “You must try these peppers.” Chartreuse leaned over me with the frying pan when I sat down. “These are magnifique!” He swaggered the top of his head. “Hold your plate up. Careful! This oil is hot.”

  Tupelo was just returning to her seat, her face a radiant mask of changing smiles. Harry leaned back at that moment and Tupelo seemed to trip and bang into Chartreuse. The oil splashed down, splattering onto my lap.

  “Ow!” I cried out. It was furiously hot. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. Everyone made confused and sympathetic noises and I wanted to make light of it, but the oil blazed into the inside of my thigh and it was all I could do to keep from crying.

  “How clumsy of me!” Tupelo clapped her hands together.

  Everyone rushed to assure her that of course it hadn’t been her fault at all.

  “Oh, the poor thing! Oh, the poor thing!” she kept saying. But she didn’t say a word to me. Blacky came over to me. He pushed the folds of the green skirt up and inspected the angry map of red on my thigh. I took no joy in this. At the moment I was in so much pain I could only rock back and forth.

  With a concerned look, Blacky lifted me by the hand and I followed him into the living room. He led me to the couch and Harry went to Isolde’s medicine cabinet for gauze and salve. For a few minutes, I saw nothing but white pain. But after a while, the intensity subsided and I could almost see the humor in the situation. Tupelo watched with a feverishly craned neck from her spot at the table, hardly noticing Wolfgang, who had seen his chance and was gesticulating at her in vivid conversation. I imagined Tupelo was intensely frustrated at that moment. Then I heard her say, “Can you imagine? She exposed her breasts to me in the toilet!” I don’t know what they all thought.

  Blacky’s gentleness was something I wasn’t prepared for. I certainly understood why he’d become a doctor. There was something so empathetic and thoughtful about his touch. There seemed to be nothing else he could have been.

  “I know it hurts,” he said in a caring, intimate tone. “The pain will subside shortly.” He seemed totally taken up with me and I relaxed.

  I imagined him in the hospital in Vietnam, saying the same words over and over to American boys with gravely serious injuries. For that reason alone, my heart would have flown to him. When he finished applying the salve and, with a feather-light touch, wrapped the wound, with me lifting my leg at the appropriate moments so he could slip the gauze strands under and through, he looked into my eyes with concern.

  “Thank you.” I smiled. “I’ll be fine. Really.”

  He, too, relaxed. “Do you always get into trouble like this?” He smiled, too. There was a hint of mischief in his sparkling eyes. Well, we were both over the limit.

  Suddenly embarrassed, I drew my legs toget
her.

  He gave me a patronizing little pat on the knee and stood up, the cool, professional doctor once again, and I his little charge. He offered me his hand with deliberate politeness, steadied himself, and escorted me back to the table.

  Tupelo held up one arm and rattled her noisy bracelets, as if she were calling a cat. Blacky seemed to float toward her.

  Everyone made a fuss for a moment or two.

  “Has anyone seen that piano player Emmanuel at the Kleine Rondelle? “Isolde changed the subject and they were all off on a different foot.

  “Ach, that reminds me!” Vladimir jumped up with an uncharacteristic burst of energy and went to the stereo to gather his records.

  Wolfgang was talking to me; my face was toward him but my full attention was with Blacky and Tupelo. My ears strained to hear everything they said. After our short encounter, I felt proprietary rights toward Blacky.

  “You know,” I overheard him tell Tupelo, “my mother telephoned this evening. She loves the theater. You can’t imagine how excited she was when I told her I’d taken you out. Really. She’s a fan.”

  “Drop me back at my hotel after this.” She smiled at him. “I’ll give you a photograph with a really special message for her.”

  “I’ll bet she will,” Reiner, listening, too, said to me.

  I felt sick. All at once, it became obvious to me that they would sleep together. It was hopeless. I knew I’d had too much to drink. Everyone was laughing.

  As I left the room I looked in the mirror. Above Tupelo’s shoulder I saw Blacky’s face. He watched me go. He could have had me, but he watched me go.

  I went to my bed. I didn’t cry. I lay there looking out the window at the navy darkness and the drowning fall of stars. I pulled myself up to the sill. I looked to the east.

  chapter seven

  That probably would have been the end of it. That sort of people makes all kinds of plans at parties and nothing ever comes of them. But then something happened that changed everything.

  It was some days later. I was sitting on the window seat thinking what a wonderful apartment for Vladimir for his sculpting, so filled with light. I wasn’t surprised Isolde felt assured he’d be back. The flat alone was compelling enough to draw him. And it was odd here, with the bronze women statues in positions this way and that. They looked longing and desolate, not sexy and brazen as I’d first thought. It was as though they missed him, too.