Meet Me in the Moon Room

by Ray Vukcevich

  Selena reaches over the table and traces her fingertips softly over my hand. My hair bursts into flames. I know she notices, but she chooses not to comment. Our waiter runs over and pours a pitcher of ice water over my head.

  My ears will be red. I’ll have to wear a big bandage, like a white turban, to work tomorrow. The women will arch their eyebrows at me. Most of the men will pretend not to notice. Ed Cory in the office next door will come over and give me a shot to the ribs with his elbow and say, “I can see you’ve been out with Selena again.” I’ll tell him I may be getting too old for this. After all, I’ll say, the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy could have been my older brother.

  I wave our waiter away, assuring him that I really am A-OK. Really. It’s nothing. Selena picks at her fish.

  “It was wonderful at the beach today,” I say.

  Our grandchildren played together. My little Amy sat in the sand not so much timid as awestruck, her mouth a little O, blue eyes wide, staring up at Selena’s Bradley who stood over her with his hands on his hips, his stomach pouching out over his diaper like he’d already discovered the joys and sorrows of beer. The waves came in, the waves went out, but the children only had eyes for one another. I watched Selena rise from the ocean like Aphrodite (but there is danger in that thought), shaking the water from her long, slender body, then running easily up the beach to us, seagulls marking her time with their cries. There was sand tangled in the hair at the back of my thighs. My chest felt warm. Selena dropped down beside us and dug into the big wicker picnic basket. Amy rolled over in the sand to watch, and I grabbed her and lifted her into the air then plunged her down to growl into her stomach. She giggled and slapped at my ears. Bradley put grape soda fingers on my shoulder and looked up at me with his deep brown eyes, so I grabbed him too, and growled into his stomach. When I put the children down, they scampered to Selena. She gave them each a sandwich. The sandwiches looked as big as hardbound books in their small hands. Children know it; they know where to go; men are not nurturing.

  “Wasn’t it, though?” she says. “I hope the children didn’t get too much sun.”

  We finish our fish.

  “Let’s dance,” Selena says. She knows I dance mechanically but will do almost anything to touch her. We go onto the floor. The music tries to chase me around like a garden hose after a dirty dog, but I won’t let it. I take a small shuffle step to the right and point with both hands to the left (little six-shooters), then I take a small shuffle step to the left and point to the right. This is the way I do these modern dances.

  Selena rocks; she rolls; she remembers Woodstock. Her hair flies around her face. Her skirt swirls, dipping between her thighs. She never takes her eyes off mine.

  I point. I shoot. It’s all in the thumbs.

  The music stops then starts again, slow saxophones, brushes on the drums this time, and Selena whirls into my arms. Her warmth staggers me. I feel dizzy.

  “You’re trembling,” she whispers in my ear, her breath shooting laser light through my head.

  “I know.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  She wants to know what I’m feeling, but she doesn’t want to be unpleasantly surprised. I don’t know what to tell her. Men are not open. We have ages of practice in not saying it; we’ve got it down pat. We are bull elephants, footloose and free in the forest and the grasslands, apart and aloof but endlessly irritating, sniping at the edges of the herd of females and calves, trunk slapping each other on the ass, saying, what a shot, man, and how’s the market this morning, and the best leaves are on the jujube trees, and way to go, Key Moe Sobby! We’re bears, sufficient unto ourselves, always chased away afterwards in case we are seized by an urge to eat the children. We’re snakes and, like her goldfish, we have no use for bicycles. Pigs. Oink, my man, you getting any lately, and what you got under that hood, and how about those Lakers?

  Selena nips at the lobe of my ear with her teeth. My left foot gives way, and I stumble forward out of her arms and fall to my knees.

  She pulls me up and helps me back to the table and kneels before me and removes my shoe and sock. I pull my foot into my lap and see that the bones of my toes are missing. My toes hang like limp pale pink balloons at the end of my foot. I touch my big toe with a first finger and thumb; it feels soft and silky, but empty, the nail a hard imperfection that I’m tempted to scratch off. I flip my dangling toes with my fingers and they swing back and forth. I put my sock and shoe back on.

  “You’ll have to let me lean on you when we leave,” I say.

  Her grin makes me want to howl at the moon.

  “Okay, you can lean on me,” she says.

  Our waiter comes round with the desert cart. Selena selects a chocolate mousse. I go with the cheesecake.

  “Tell me something astonishing,” she says. I notice there is a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her mouth. Her tongue flashes, licks it off, and I miss my cheesecake and clang my fork loudly against my plate.

  “Well?” she says.

  I open my mouth to speak, and my tongue shoots out, long and thin and stiff like a wooden tongue depressor, and the squatting figure of my father on the end of it opens his mouth to speak, and his tongue shoots out and on the end of it the hunched form of my grandfather opens his mouth to speak, and his tongue shoots out and on the end of it the knotty form of my great-grandfather opens his mouth to speak, and on and on, until from somewhere deep in my primordial past, a small, lonely voice says, “I love you, Selena.”

  “What?”

  I put cheesecake in my mouth and smile around it. Men are not romantic; we don’t have much to say. Maybe we really have no deep feelings. We cannot wait to get out of our pants. We see only body parts, we think only of conquests, we never want to stay the whole night. We’ve got things to do.

  Our waiter puts a little black lacquered tray with the check on our table.

  We fence with our gold cards for a few minutes, finally agreeing that since she paid for the picnic this afternoon, I can pick up the check for dinner. I ask our waiter to pour us some coffee and call us a cab.

  Selena drinks her coffee and nods her head from side to side in time to the music. I drum my fingers on the table.

  Before I know it, our waiter is tapping me on the shoulder, whispering our cab is waiting. I push myself up from the table. Selena comes around and offers me her shoulder to lean on. I put my arm around her, and she looks up at me.

  “You okay?”

  I have to swallow hard; there is danger I could fall into those eyes, fall and fall forever. I nod, and she steps forward. I know I’m too heavy.

  The hostess in her bright white blouse and black skirt tells us to have a nice day as we make our way around the potted plants and into the street. The driver is holding the back door of his cab open for us.

  On the way to her place, Selena leans her head against the glass of the back window and gazes out at the bright city rushing by. I watch her hand resting palm up on her knee. I would probably fall on my face if I were to lean forward and touch my lips to her fingers.

  We don’t speak.

  The cab driver takes her money then helps me to her door and supports me, my left arm around his shoulder, while I lean in close to Selena. She’s got her back to the door, and her eyes shine in the moonlight. I ignore the driver’s stubbly face at my shoulder like a second head and kiss her.

  The rest of my bones disappear, and I slip down her body, slip out of the driver’s grip, like an eel socked between the eyes. The driver catches me by my belt in the back.

  I hang bent double, unable to see her face.

  “Well, I guess I’d better be going,” I say.

  The driver walks back toward the cab, carrying me like a suitcase. His boots crunch the gravel of her driveway. Crickets sing, and a warm honeysuckle breeze strokes my face
. Between my limp and dangling legs, I can see Selena standing on her stoop, a halo of moonlight in her hair. She raises a hand to wave.

  “I had a wonderful time,” she calls, filling me with delicious joy.

  “I’ll call you!” I shout.

  I’ll send her roses. I’ll write her a poem. My secret is not so much in knowing what women want; men can never know that. My secret is knowing what they’ll settle for. Even so, there is danger.

  Pink Smoke

  Maggie liked to steal things. Only a few days into their relationship, she stole a candy bar and slipped it into Joe’s shirt pocket as they left the mini-mart. He found it before they got to the car, and he wanted to give it back.

  “You better not,” she told him.

  He didn’t listen.

  The guy in the mini-mart looked mean and dangerous, and Joe was suddenly sure he had a gun under the counter.

  “You’re saying you want a refund?” the guy asked. “I can’t give you a refund. How do I know what you did with that candy bar?”

  “No, I don’t want a refund,” Joe said. “I just want to give it back to you.”

  “You want to give me your candy bar? How do I know you didn’t use a needle to inject poison into that candy bar? You go ahead and get out of here now.”

  “Look,” Joe said, “I didn’t pay for this candy bar, so I can’t take it.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t pay for it?” the guy said. “You mean you stole it?”

  “No.”

  “I think maybe you better freeze right there while I call the cops.”

  Joe ran out of the mini-mart. Maggie was behind the wheel of his car. He didn’t know how she had gotten it started. He jumped into the shotgun seat, and she threw the car into gear and they sped away.

  “Hey, nice going,” she said a little later. “You pulled it off.”

  “What are you talking about?” He was still having some trouble getting his breathing under control.

  She grinned at him and looked down at his hand. He followed her gaze and saw that he still clutched the candy bar. It was a crushed mess now, but stolen nonetheless. Loot.

  “How did you get the car started?” he asked.

  “I used the key,” she said.

  He looked, and yes, there was the key in the ignition. He leaned up on one hip and pushed his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, and no, his keys weren’t there.

  She had picked his pocket.

  Maggie had been a magician’s assistant in another life. She was never very definite as to when that other life had been, or where. A long time ago. Somewhere back east. She’d learned a lot of tricks. She could take the watch right off your wrist justlikethat and leave you none the wiser. She liked to pull things out of Joe’s ears in public—coins, cheeses, once a bunch of broccoli.

  He sometimes thought she might be more trouble than she was worth. Maybe he’d move on. Maybe next week. Maggie claimed to be 36. Joe was 41. There was still time for a nasty breakup, years of painful therapy, slow healing, and then someday someone else. The next woman in his life might be a fighter pilot or a taxidermist. He really wasn’t in over his head with Maggie. And there was that stealing business.

  “Hey, look,” she said when he opened the door. “I brought the wine.” She held up a couple of bottles of wine—one red, one white, both too big to be plausibly hidden on her person. Maybe she’d swiped them one at a time? No, she would have done them both at once. She could be so distracting. Tonight she wore an incredibly colorful T-shirt with target swirls of red and green and blue that pulled the eye in toward her breasts and then away up and over her shoulders and back again just in time to be blinded by a smile. Cut-off jeans, which meant she could put one leg out and snatch your attention (was this when she planted the produce in his ears?). Sandals. And every toenail a different color. If you looked very closely, and you wanted to look very closely, you might notice there were messages in tiny letters written on her toenails like bumper stickers—if you can read this you’re too close!

  She held the wine out away from her body with both hands and stepped up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. When he opened his eyes, he had to take a step forward so he wouldn’t stumble into the hallway. She had slipped by him.

  After dinner, he lighted a fire and they settled on the couch with coffee. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, and she sighed and snuggled in. She idly moved one hand up and down the front of his shirt, expertly unfastening and fastening the buttons. He thought she was not even aware that she was doing it, until he felt her cool hand on his chest. He kissed her. He could feel her muscles moving under his hands, as if he were holding a cat when it doesn’t want to be held, but Maggie wanted to be held. He was lost in the kiss and the feel of her, the smell of her. There was something else happening just under the surface. He imagined opening his eyes and seeing that the scene had changed, that they were no longer on his couch in front of the fire, but had been moved magically to a South Seas beach. He could almost feel the wind moving across the bare skin of his back.

  Then with a cheerful “Ta da!” Maggie leaped away from him, and as she went, she took his shirt, his pants, his shorts, his shoes and socks, his watch. He flopped back onto the cushions stunned and completely naked.

  “I think it’s just so incredibly sexy, me being fully dressed with a naked man,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  He did.

  The night she stood him up, he figured it had finally ended. He’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. And this was it. He knew that he made most of his own problems with such thinking, but he couldn’t help it with Maggie. Maybe it was because he never had understood why she would have been interested in him in the first place.

  He drank a little too much that evening and went to bed early. When the phone rang at three in the morning, it took him a long time to rub the stupidity out of his eyes and ears.

  Maggie was in jail.

  So, she hadn’t stood him up after all.

  “That’s a heck of an excuse,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “Come on, Joe, wake up. Can you help me out here? I know it’s asking a lot.”

  “I’ll be there.” He didn’t know where the jail was. She gave him precise directions.

  She’d been busted for shoplifting—captured on video, a stupid lapse on her part, she told him. That was bad enough. But she’d also drawn a cop she couldn’t charm. He wasn’t the least bit amused when she returned his handcuffs with a smile after he’d locked her hands behind her back. Joe wondered if she’d said “Ta da!” He bet she had. The cop had called for backup and, before she knew it, there were so many grim-faced men and women in uniform, you might have thought she’d knocked over a bank, and taken a dozen hostages.

  Joe took her back to his place. He wanted to yell at her. He didn’t. He wanted to ask her how she could be so stupid. She didn’t have to steal things. It wasn’t like she was starving. He didn’t say that either. He made her tea while she used his shower. She came out of the bathroom dressed in his red robe, her hair wrapped up in a towel, and they sat at the kitchen table and drank tea and didn’t talk much. Later he tucked her into his bed and sat for a while watching her sleep.

  Maggie was so angry, she was vibrating and humming like a robot about to explode and splatter machine parts all over the landscape. The two of them were stomping down the street and people were getting out of their way.

  “You’ve got to go back to your shrink,” Joe said.

  “I won’t.”

  “They’ll send you back to jail.”

  “Let them. I’ll bust out.”

  “Then they’ll just shoot you, Maggie.”

  “Good!”

  She snatched the hat off a passing woman and pushed
it into Joe’s hands. The woman didn’t notice.

  “Hey!” Joe said. He stopped, but Maggie kept moving. He hurried to catch up with her.

  She took a watch from a passing man and gave it to him. She bumped another man, said oh excuse me, and then gave Joe the man’s wallet. They hadn’t stopped moving. Maggie grabbed a purse and pushed it into his arms. He was carrying a lot of stuff now. All they needed was for someone to notice and start yelling for the cops and he’d be standing there with his arms full of stolen goods.

  “Maggie, for Christ sakes stop this.”

  She shot a hand into a man’s coat, did a little dance with him that left him looking dazed, and then handed Joe the man’s tie and shirt and kept walking.

  They passed a hot dog cart and she gave Joe a jumbo frank with sauerkraut and they kept walking. She snatched the glasses off a bald man and the pearls from a woman with a cane.

  “Stop it, Maggie!” Joe yelled.

  “What do you want from me?” Maggie said, still so angry there should have been smoke billowing from her ears. “I didn’t take her cane. And you know I could have.”

  They rushed by a man on a bench reading a newspaper. Maggie snatched out the sports section and slapped it onto the pile of stuff Joe carried.

  In the distance, sirens screamed and he was sure they screamed for him. He stopped dead in his tracks. “I can’t go on like this, Maggie,” he called after her.

  She looked over her shoulder and said, “So stay where you are!”

  After she’d turned the corner, but before the patrol car flashed onto the scene, Joe deposited the things she had stolen from the pedestrians into a trash barrel. He turned the other way and tried to blend in with the crowd.