“We got ourselves a balsamic moon,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Clarissa asked, the surf surging up her calves. “I don’t see any moon at all.”
“It’s the wishing moon. She shows up as a crescent predawn, just above the Pleiades and Venus.” He glanced at her. “You’re supposed to wish upon her.”
He scanned the sky’s zenith. She followed suit. “How come?”
“Because if you pay real close attention during the balsamic moon, you’ll know what to wish for instead of blasting away shotgun style. That way, when the new moon arrives, you’ve got a clean slate and a pocket full of fresh dreams.”
“You know a lot about the moon, Adams.”
“I had a girlfriend who was an astrologer.”
“I see.”
He looked at her. “Is this okay?”
“What?”
Adams reached over and moved a blowing strand of hair out of her eyes. “Standing here, with you, looking at the stars. I mean, you’re married and all.”
“I know,” Clarissa said, wondering if she would ever learn the names of all the constellations, the stars, the phases of the moon; wondering how warm and sweet his tongue was. “I sure do know.”
They stood there, alone at the edge of the world, no one suspecting their whereabouts, gazing into each other’s eyes, Clarissa fearful he would say something important and fearful that he would not. Just before they began to appear foolish, he stepped away and looked at the sea. “We could go for a dip.”
“No way!” Clarissa kicked an incoming wave. “Sharks love the night, and white girls who wear too much perfume.”
“Oh, come on,” he said, laughing, the Milky Way sparkling a kajillion miles above his head. He was gorgeous. Clarissa was certain that every inch of him was gorgeous.
“No!” She could not, would not, take off her clothes, even if he didn’t look. She wished she were that sort of woman—full of confidence, not caring what others thought of her body, comfortable in the opulent fact of her hips, breasts, and marital status. But that was not who she was. Not yet. She started laughing. “I am not skinny-dipping with you, Leo Adams.”
“Why not?”
“Because my number one goal in life is to remain clothed at all times.”
“Even in the shower?”
“Close. If God had wanted me to be naked, He would not have given me a passion for fashion.”
Adams walked farther out into the water; holding up his jeans by the waist to avoid getting wet. He looked really funny, she thought; Ichabod Crane goes swimming. “I’m going to quote you on that one day.”
“Be my guest. And when you do, not one centimeter of my body will be showing.”
“Iggy must be thrilled,” Adams said over his shoulder.
“Iggy doesn’t care,” Clarissa shot back.
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, well…” Clarissa trailed off, dug a hole in the sand with her toe, wished she had kept her trap shut.
Adams turned around and, not speaking, sloshed back to shore and headed in the direction of the car.
Clarissa hurried to keep up. “Where we going?” she asked, trying to put the lilt back in her voice, hating that she’d said anything truthful about her husband. What was wrong with her? Adams was the last person to whom she wanted to air her dirty and discontent laundry.
He paused, held out his palm. “Give me your hand.” She took it. Flesh on flesh: It felt real good, needed.
“Let’s get the blanket. Lie down. Stare at the stars.”
“Clothed?”
“Of course.”
“You sure?”
“Are you?”
She looked away. He squeezed her hand but did not let go.
They sat hip to hip. Adams sipped Jack Daniel’s. Clarissa stayed with wine. They talked about little things—her love for semicolons, his preference for dashes. He said he wanted to visit Florence one day and wear a cowboy hat to the Uffizi. Clarissa said she wanted to be queen of the Nile and wear thick black cat’s-eye liner that extended from her lids to her temples to her hairline. She told him about how she’d grown up with teeth so wicked that everyone made fun of her but that when she was still in college, bartending at a local pub, a man walked in, ordered a Scotch and soda, and said, “You know, I can do something about those teeth.”
“His name was King van den Berg.”
Adams spit JD out of his nose. “His name was what?”
“King van den Berg,” she said, giggling. “He was a maxillofacial surgeon, not long out of med school. I was good for his career.”
“What do you mean, sweet thing?”
“I mean my lousy bartender’s insurance wouldn’t pay for everything, so he waived his fee. I had to pay the hospital and the orthodontist, but not him. Five years in braces, seven hours under the knife, and voilà, he created a Clarissa I didn’t know, and he used my sad-assed case to build his practice.” Clarissa didn’t realize it, but she was smiling.
“Well, here’s to King van den Berg, the good doctor.”
“Here, here!”
Adams poured more drinks. He had very steady hands. “A Clarissa you didn’t know?”
She watched him recork the wine. If she tried really hard, she could hear the wind offshore and inshore. Beyond the breakers, it sounded very much in charge. Out there, a person could die. Pull a Virginia Woolf: Just step into the surf, your pockets full of rocks, and walk, walk, walk, until the water is deeper than you are tall; just let the current pull you under; no more creepy husband to make you feel like a piece of shit. “In my mind, Adams, I’m still her. I look in the mirror and don’t know the woman who stares back.”
“Clarissa?”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
“No.”
“Please.”
She focused on the silly images of the Jetsons flying through space. She wondered what it would feel like to be fire instead of stone. She tuned in a distant gale, the old catechism of family sin and regret bearing down: Some children had loving mothers; some children had fathers; some women had tender husbands; most women her age had their own families so that they could re-create the world into a kinder and better place, remap it all so that old cruelties were banished.
“Clarissa.” She felt his hands cup her face, felt him tilt her head toward him. “Listen to me, Clarissa.”
The wind blew harder, driven by the force of the offshore storm. The surf pounded. In the deep distance, night birds cried. The world at the edge of the sea was a noisy, busy place. But still, despite the cacophony inside and outside her mind, she heard him.
“She’s beautiful, Clarissa. You’re beautiful.”
She searched his eyes, looking for a lie. She’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.
“Did you hear me? Do you believe me?”
Clarissa placed her hands on his. She tried to say yes but could not speak. She remembered what he’d said about a balsamic moon and managed a silent wish: Please, make it true.
He pulled her to him and whispered, “Clarissa. Clarissa. She’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”
They held each other for a long time under that changing sky—Mercury disappeared; Mars and Venus tangoed farther apart—until finally Clarissa said, her head on his shoulder, “What keeps them up there?”
“Keeps what where, sweetheart?”
“The stars. Why don’t they fall down, fill up our shoes, get tangled in our hair?”
She felt him move against her. He placed his lips against her cheek. “Einstein, baby.”
Clarissa laughed. Never in all her days had she heard those two words spoken jointly. Einstein, baby. “What do you mean?”
He held her by her shoulders. “Newton had it all wrong. None of us are going in a straight line. It’s okay.”
In her mind’s eye, she saw herself tumbling through that starry sky, following a curving path, colliding with nebulae and novas and planets as yet unknown.
“Claris
sa, I mean it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what’s going on with you and Iggy. All I know is that all of you—the old and the new and the one who doesn’t even fucking exist yet—is beautiful. Whoever led you to believe otherwise is a goddamn asshole.”
She had fought against it all day: when she was in the trash truck and lost in the swamp, when she nearly drowned in quick mud, when the kids ice-picked her tires, when her husband had laughed at her derisively, in essence dismissing her. But she couldn’t hold back anymore. The whole of her life—its sadness and its promise—seemed suddenly necessary, and she began to cry.
Adams pulled her back into his arms. He stroked her hair, chanted, “Clarissa, Clarissa, Clarissa,” over and over, the same three syllables, as if he were determined to weave her name into the wind. Clarissa, Clarissa. He wrapped his fingers around the charm necklace, lifted it over her head, set it in a gleaming swirl beside their feet… Clarissa, Clarissa… and then, one by one, he removed her silver bangles. He slipped them down her arms, over the thin ovals of her wrists, the gentle rise of her palms, her hard knuckles, her waiting fingertips… Clarissa, Clarissa… first her left arm, then her right, never two at a time; always with the sweet, slow ache a lover is supposed to take with his beloved, even though they were without shadow, until her skin was bare. He set each sterling circle on the comforter, beside the swirled necklace. Twenty bangles total, they formed their own constellation that shimmered gently in the star shine. When he was done, he again took her in his arms and cradled her the long distance to the earth. Clarissa, Clarissa.
On a small stretch of sand, in repose, they watched the heavens, and still he stroked her hair and whispered her name, and still she wept.
With the shedding of each tear, Clarissa felt the weight of her life shift. Her mother’s madness, her husband’s meanness, her battered past; small kindnesses abandoned behind slamming doors; benign passions left to fester in the hollow sound of an unfinished sentence; minor intimacies—a caress here, a glance there—circumvented daily; the babies she never birthed, even though in her waking moments they seemed so real that she had named them—Pearl Rose and William Isaac, little Rosie and Ike; the terrifying minutes, hours, years, she felt spurned by both her husband and God; all those broken moments as she stared out her kitchen window, watching Iggy worship yet another woman: Little wounds all, but she could no longer carry them. Their weight was too great. There was a continent of light lying before her called the future. As her stubborn bog of old grievances lifted, the entire little planet with her name on it began to spin more confidently, its orbit a rosette: circles upon circles of life hidden and revealed. Oh, how she loved being touched.
Clarissa. Clarissa.
They did not make love. They did not take off their clothes. They did not touch in places off-limits to friends and strangers. He interrupted the whispering of her name only twice: once to kiss her cheek, once to kiss her forehead. The innocent and long-craved intimacy was, for Clarissa, cataclysmic. No one would believe her: A man touched my hair and whispered my name, and when he was finished, I knew I was going to leave my husband.
They left the Gulf before the golden crescent of the balsamic moon had risen in the eastern sky.
“I have to get home,” she whispered.
Adams touched her shoulder and the silk strap of the chemise and said, “I know you do, baby. But wouldn’t it be great to stay out here all night?”
She sat up, feeling as if she were a ribbon unfurling from a good man’s arms. “It sure would be,” she said, “but look, the tide is coming in. It’s going to get us.” She gathered her jewelry and her blue shoes. She thought how wonderful it was that the cerulean boots came in all sorts of disguises.
“Let me help you with that.” Adams slipped the necklace over her head, held up her hair so that it wouldn’t get caught in the chain. And then he slid twenty bangles, one by one, reversing their journey, over her fingertips, palms, knuckles, wrists.
She watched him, how he held each one as if it were precious, how he moved them gently up the slope of her arms, how attentive he was. “Adams?”
“Yes, baby?”
“You’re a magnificent man.”
“Ah, girly”—he draped his arm over her shoulder—“you’re the one with glitter on your toes.” He kissed her forehead. “You just don’t know it yet.”
The late hour and the three shots of JD took a toll on Adams; he slept most of the way to the Old Florida Magnolia Inn, his feet resting on the folded comforter, and that was okay with Clarissa. She needed the silence. Maybe it was simply because she hadn’t been touched in a good long while, but she felt cleaved in two, as if her life had already changed but she wasn’t yet sure of the details.
Traffic was light; forty-five minutes after leaving the coast, she arrived at the bed-and-breakfast. It was lit up with spotlights—even the trees—and she wondered how the guests slept with all that blaring light.
After having read the dossier, she got the creeps just from looking at the place. She was fully convinced that the murdering Butlers had built it and had based its layout and flourishes on the house whose owners they had butchered, the house she owned, the house where her husband was holed up doing only God knew what.
She shook Adams awake. He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “Whew! I’m beat.”
“You look tired, like you need a solid eight.”
“I have to get on the road early. I’ve got a class to teach tomorrow night. Did I tell you I’m teaching?”
“I did not know that.”
He looked at her, sleepy-eyed, and sighed. “You okay?”
“I am,” she said. “Very, very okay.”
He touched her face with two fingers and traced her jawline.
“I have to go home, Adams.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want you to either.”
He looked away, into the night, and she wished for a different life.
“You’re going to start knocking out that novel. You’ll see.”
“I hope so.”
He kissed her cheek. Clarissa’s body ached and tingled in places she forgot she had. This made her happy.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Clarissa. Tell Iggy I said hello, but don’t take any shit off him. I don’t want to get between you two, but I’m on your side. You know that, right?”
She nodded yes.
“I’m serious. You need me, I’m there.” He kissed her once more, again on the cheek, opened the door, and said, “I’m really glad I got to see you.”
“Me too, Adams.” He eased out of the car and shut the door, but before he could walk away, she said, “Adams?”
The streetlight illuminated his face; he looked content, as if zigzagging through life—holding someone when she needed to be held, whispering her name so many times it became an incantation, not asking for a single thing other than that she find her joy—were a good way to live.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime, baby.”
“No, I mean it.”
“I do, too. And by the way, I’m going to go steal that fucking sign now.”
She laughed. “Don’t burn it without me.”
“It’s a date.”
She put the El Camino in gear, and being a girl with a lead foot, as always, she pressed the gas with too much purpose, spinning the tires. Adams laughed and waved good-bye. She steered Yellow Bird out of downtown and toward home and understood something that heretofore had been a foreign concept: Everything else that would happen that night depended on her, and solely her.
She had just crossed the county line when the monsoon began. The thunderstorms—built on the energy of the day’s heat—illuminated and nourished the swamp, prompting foxes, deer, possums, and various other animals along Clarissa’s path to hunker down. The wipers ticked out of time to the Tejano beat, creating a dissonance that Clarissa found oddly comforting. The r
ain came down so hard, she could barely see out of Yellow Bird’s wide windshield. She took a curve too fast, considering the wet road, and eased off the gas pedal. Clarissa. Clarissa. She could smell him on her. She had no desire to shower his scent away. It was as if Adams had, through a kind and innocent intimacy, changed the combinations on all her locks. Click, click, click. What would she do now, with an open heart?
She turned off of Tremble and Shout—the rain eased—and slowed to nearly a crawl as she passed the village green, which had been transformed into a small town of not just dwarfs, but (according to the signage) full-body-tattooed dwarfs and sword-swallowing, fire-breathing dwarfs and three-hundred-pound dwarfs (which even Clarissa found over the top) and bearded-lady dwarfs and, if the art on the side of one of the trailers was to be believed, Siamese-twin dwarfs. There was even the World’s Smallest Dwarf dwarf, which made Clarissa laugh as she imagined a twelve-inch man running around, biting the ankles of all the other dwarfs. She felt ashamed for finding a dwarf village amusing, but weren’t they, after all, making a living based on their size, and did that not leave them open to some level of bemusement? She stopped Yellow Bird and gazed at the trailers and the big white tent and the gigantic fire tower that loomed over the village. Random lights burned brightly—trailer to trailer—and red and white bulbs were strung like happy barbed wire along the green’s perimeter. She noticed that the Rocket Dog trailer was lit brightly from within and saw a shadow pass by its curtained window. Perhaps the dwarf whose talent was being shot out of a cannon was an insomniac. Who could blame him? If she knew that come tomorrow she was going to be a human cannonball, she’d probably have a sleepless night, too.
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 23