The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  He noticed how the other people in the restaurant tried not to stare at her, and how in low voices they discussed her, wondering who she was.

  “I’ve had baloney,” he said, “but not abalone.”

  “Ha, ha!” she laughed. Other people smiled to hear her laugh. He was not just observing the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he was sitting at a table with her, looking for a moment at her teeth, pearly utilitarian incisors and crushers thrusting from pink gums, and thinking all at once how there was an idea of perfection even in such a randomly limbed, toed and fingered and leaking a creature as a human. Her perfect skin must indicate a perfect soul; there were others in the room who thought so.

  Her skin was translucent; he could see into it, where there was rose, ivory, even a trace of blue…

  “You’re not listening,” she said. “What were you thinking about?”

  “I was thinking about the color of your skin.”

  “Oh, John,” she said. In her blush came darkness before color, some of the shimmery green of her dress, too, and the unpowdery texture of a flower petal, say a white lily slashed with blood red.

  The abalone had the texture of scallops and the taste given it by the chef.

  She wouldn’t let him pay for anything—really wouldn’t—and when they left the restaurant she flattered him by asking him to drive, saying the wine had affected her. She would tell him where to go. In the car she sat close to him as if on a high school date, her hand lightly on his arm and her vivid knees high because of the drive-shaft hump. Whenever she pointed she first squeezed his proud muscled arm. How friendly and meaningless was the garden land of southern California; it was all vacation, the houses playful, the cars toys, the trees and flowers fakely pretty. Nothing seemed to matter very much. The slave-smooth purr of the engine was nice, and her hand on his arm was praise. With this kind of going he didn’t want a destination, but she asked him if he wouldn’t like to see Ozzie Rittheuber’s estate, Gladland, which wasn’t far from here.

  He thought it a defect in himself that he wasn’t purely curious about things like this. He didn’t want to meet a man who claimed he could be in three places at the same time. What could be said to such a person? Even to say hello would be a form of lie.

  “Ozzie probably won’t be there,” Bonnie said. “But we’ll have the run of the place anyway. You really ought to see it.”

  “Ozzie’s in three other places?” he said.

  She laughed, though she punched him lightly on the shoulder to show her disapproval.

  They were leaving, on a broad avenue, a neighborhood of kept-up lawns and small prideful houses. The boulevard strips became bleached and dusty, the vacant lots and acres sparsely covered with grass that looked tough as wire, and olive-drab bushes that were barely making it. Then, on the right, beyond a pale adobe wall, were the tops of lush trees. Bonnie said, “Here we are, if you want to.”

  They came to a wide wrought-iron gate in the adobe, the iron word GLADLAND forming part of its grille. He turned in, resigned to this visit, and Bonnie got out and opened the gates with a key she took from her purse. When he drove through she closed the gate and made sure it was latched and locked. They were on a black asphalt drive between columns of funereal arborvitae. Bonnie got back in the car and they drove another hundred yards and came to an adobe mansion with many low roofs of red tile, a cloisterlike columned porch among green shrubs and trees all foreign to him. She said jacaranda, African tulip, pride of India, hibiscus, bougainvillea, bird of paradise, poinciana—names that were familiar but without images. Even in their presence, her hand gracefully pointing, they were all one heady excess. He parked the car and they went into cool long rooms full of flowers and heavy wooden furniture, long tables and upright chairs that looked uncomfortable and out of place. He’d never seen television in a private house, only in bars, but here was the brown box with the gray porthole.

  A gray-haired woman in a white robe drifted past them, smiling benevolently but not quite in specific recognition.

  “Ozzie’s mother,” Bonnie said when the woman had drifted on. A young girl, maybe twelve, also in a white robe, followed Ozzie’s mother, carrying white bath towels. She smiled the same smile and seemed a smaller, earlier version of the woman. Over a metal door was a red glass sign, not illuminated but readable, saying, ON THE AIR. “Ozzie’s radio studio,” Bonnie said.

  They passed into a room of deep carpeting, deep couches and easy chairs where all the colors were warm tints of rose. “The Life Room,”

  Bonnie said. “Ozzie has classes here. Everyone glows.”

  “You’re glowing,” he said.

  “And so are you, John. Isn’t that clever? Ozzie teaches that we absorb color, sort of like chameleons, so it’s important to have life-colors, what he calls the bio-colors, when we open ourselves to the Life-Mind. Sometimes he uses the mauve room, which is calmer. It depends on the class. It’s just fascinating, really. For the children he sometimes uses the green room, to calm them and make them understand the oneness of life forms. The Life Room is for the deplenished in spirit.”

  They traversed these rooms, then left the coolness of the mansion and crossed a lawn, avoiding the swaths of a sprinkler, to the pool, which seemed jagged until be recognized it as a huge cross in pink ceramic tile which made the water a warm gray, as if the pool were full of smoke instead of water.

  “I wonder if you could take a dip with your knee,” Bonnie said. “We could take a short dip, I bet. I can’t stay in the sun because I’m not supposed to have a tan on the assignment I’m on. I’m supposed to look pale and sophisticated. La-di-da.”

  Ozzie’s mother swam a slow sidestroke along one segment of the cross, the young girl walking along above her, carrying towels. “Ozzie’s mother and her granddaughter—Ozzie’s sister’s child,” Bonnie said.

  “They’re wearing white, so they can’t talk. White is silence.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “White is the color of infinity, purity and restfulness. You’re real calm and silent, then, and everybody’s the same.”

  “The same?”

  “Old and young, male and female—all the exact same. All differences are filtered out by white, which is all colors reflected at once, you see. The whole spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (you know how to remember that? Think of a man’s name: Roy G. Biv)—all received and translated back to the Universal, so in white we are one with the Vast Loving Silence.”

  Bonnie led him to the bathhouse, a small version of the main house. In its dim interior were shelves of one-piece bathing suits, all white, all the same except for size. “Can we talk if we wear these?” he said. “Can we splash and giggle and do cannonballs?”

  “Oh, John,” she said, and went behind a partition to change.

  Her white suit did not change or conceal, at least to his infidel eyes, anything, and while their suits didn’t cause silence in Bonnie, she did speak thereafter in a lower voice. She rose from the water gleaming, and twirled, shedding diamonds; the cotton suit when wet was so transparent he looked away from her unselfconscious nipples and shadowy triangle. The suits were thin and institutional, as if out of the thirties when much skin was covered but everything beneath the cloth was clearly defined. But it was Bonnie herself who was transparent, guileless and sweet. Exposed to her in the sun while she arranged an umbrella to keep her skin ivory, he felt that his cupidity was stealing something valuable from him. He preened, thinking what a figure he cut, soaked bandages and all, yet how dishonest he was in his friendliness toward her. She had paid him back ten times for the accident on Los Robles. Her transparency was the truth, his salacious thoughts evil, his cynical thoughts in error. How nice to believe that. How nice to believe anything. There was evil in the world, evil everywhere beyond thinking about, murderous child-killing evil. He believed in that, so why not believe in its opposite? Why not believe in the goodness of her screwy beliefs? Men had used Bonnie and hurt her, who was good
. He was not of that evil, so he entered the delicious slide of his own seduction. Farewell logic, farewell intelligence. He shivered with loss.

  They lay on the grass at the periphery of a sprinkler’s reach, fine droplets sometimes touching them as the swath came around. She lay in the shade, he in the sun, and she looked at him, her eyes luminous and meaningful. He looked back steadily and they didn’t speak, a weighty moment. She reached for his hand and put it on her breast. “We are one,” she said softly, “one and indivisible in God’s infinite love.”

  It was lovely, but he could only play at it. He tried. He could almost make it into the invulnerable sincerity of her world. At least he saw, for an instant, what it would be like. Imagine the benevolent answers, the impervious optimism, Our Father who aren’t in heaven. He leaned over her and kissed her on the lips, chastely, he thought, but Satan rose in him at once and he moved too far over her. She pushed him away, not ungently, and said, “It wouldn’t be love.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re not right for each other that way.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t get the ways separated,” he said.

  “I hope I didn’t tease you, John. I didn’t mean to. I do love you, John, for what you are, but…”

  How flat the world went. She was right, of course. Friendship and the kind of love she meant were not enough to banish sudden boredom, loss, borderline anxiety. He wanted to own her altogether, inside and out. If he couldn’t have all of her he didn’t want any of her. A little boy in him pouted despicably.

  “I mean I hope I didn’t make you think we could be lovers,” she said, worried for him. “I guess I shouldn’t have got us into these baptismal suits. I can see that now. I always thought they were too thin, but Ozzie says the early Christians went naked into the waters—a symbol of death and then rebirth in Christ. But I guess you don’t believe in that so much, so we just look sort of naked and it must have seemed that I was trying to arouse you.” She reached for his hand but changed her mind and quickly took hers back.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything to arouse me. I just think of you and I’m aroused.”

  “But is that all you feel?”

  “Is it a sin?” he asked evasively.

  “We don’t have sins. I mean we might use the word, but a sin isn’t something positive, it’s just a negative, something without love.”

  He’d been hearing that word so much it began to veer toward a nonsense sound—a children’s game with a word. “So what is love, then?” he said. “Wouldn’t I love you if I made love to you?”

  “I’ve been made love to without love. I’ve been loved without being made love to. I’ve been made love to with love, too,” she said seriously.

  “I’d love to make love to you with love, too,” he said.

  “Oh, John!” She laughed, but she said, “You can’t ‘make’ love. You either love or you don’t love. Only God made love, as He made us all, as He made the lamb. He is our Shepherd. We are enjoined in His Spirit and in Christ to love.”

  “Bonnie, you know what shepherds do to lambs?”

  “Love and protect them.”

  “So they can eat them later.”

  “Oh, John, the meaning doesn’t mean that. It doesn’t go that far. They protect them from getting lost and from wolves.”

  “The wolves are trying to make a living too.”

  “Where did you ever get so bitter and cynical? Was it in the Army? Or because of your lost father? I was bitter once, too, but Oval and CSW saved me.”

  He almost asked her if Oval was her lover, who made love to her with love, but at that moment Ozzie’s mother and granddaughter appeared, the granddaughter with a tray holding four tall glasses of orange juice. They sat down, Indian fashion, and offered the orange juice, their silence and loving smiles.

  He and Bonnie sat up, so the four of them faced each other, all wearing the identical translucent bathing suits, sipping orange juice. He tried to smile, and perhaps did, but he couldn’t close his eyes or look away. What the old woman and the young girl proffered to his captured vision were the details he mercilessly catalogued. The grandmother’s skin hung from her bones in the bunched, mottled, soiled-looking patterns of age, her pubic hair a snarled gray patch, her long dugs flat against the sides of her belly. The granddaughter’s skin was pearl smooth, her breasts barely beginning to swell, her plain young face simple and unfinished. Her expression, like her grandmother’s, was doctrinal, unnatural, too sweetly uncaused. In her child-slim crotch he saw the simple fold of her and looked away toward Bonnie, where he had to note the rose surrounding her thimblelike nipples. He asked himself what he should be seeing, anyway. The young girl seemed to be joyously examining his forehead. The old woman seemed fond of her life and condition, proud of all of them, in love with her orange juice. His own eyes were openings to his consciousness, unfiltered. What was he supposed to notice or not notice?

  Bonnie’s toenails were enameled blood red and her little toe was homely and bent, with a small sallow coin of bunion. Sunlight, diffused by haze, pressed upon his head and shoulders. The random droplets from the sprinkler were pinpricks. Bonnie seemed as pleased and satisfied as the two other females, and he had a boy-shame of being here in their moist, indulgent aura. It was not a man’s life to be so surrounded by them. The immodest way they presented their near-nakedness to him was in itself female. Surely they must be aware of his criminal eyes and ignoble thoughts.

  When the orange juice was finished the old woman and the young girl, still in silence, went back to the mansion and he could stretch and yawn like a dog.

  “Look out,” Bonnie said. “You’ll break something.”

  They went to the bathhouse and got dressed. When Bonnie came out of her cubicle, shimmering in green again but with straight wet hair, she said, “I’m so sorry if I did anything to lead you on. I really didn’t mean to. I just wanted to be friends and we can love each other, can’t we? Without the other thing?”

  “Sure, Bonnie.”

  “You have your little girl in New Hampshire and I’m much too old for you.”

  “And you’ve got Oval.”

  “It’s true I love him, but Oval won’t touch me.”

  “He must be out of his mind.”

  “He says he’s my teacher and he won’t take advantage of that.”

  “He must be a saint.”

  When they got back to the parsonage in Tulaveda a tall man came out on the porch. He was lanky and his clothes seemed to be held up by odd ridges of bone and muscle. The clothes themselves were cheap, gaudy and wrinkled—yellow pants and a green sports shirt, tan-and yellow shoes. His face was pale and lean, his lips full, with a sweetly worried look.

  “Oval!” Bonnie said. “You’re back!”

  John remembered what he had forgotten to remember, the pure, handsome innocence of the face. It would substitute candor for all cleverness, even for intelligence. It proclaimed that it would, that everything would be seen, always, that nothing was worth concealment or indirection, ever.

  “Hadasha told me your name and that you were from New Hampshire,” the man said in a tenor voice that was suddenly more familiar than his looks. “Are you from Leah? Is your mother’s name Martha?”

  “Yes,” John said. He was at least three persons at this moment. He had time to think this, with a lurch of disembodiment. He was his own self, with all his grown history; a half-person in another’s white shirt; a small child bound in memory and the choked paralysis of wonder that had in it some resentment—an emotion he was not all that familiar with and which made him think of his own victims, as if he were one of them—some hurt, unhappy child he might have snubbed or been mean to, or a girl he had abandoned, like Virginia Hadar, who wondered why he never wrote to her.

  “Come in,” the man said. “Bonnie, you come too.”

  If this awkward-looking man was his father there were certain immediate judgments he had to make. For one, the fellow’s clothe
s were tacky, from another class than his. This was of no great importance but it was a fact. The five-year-old wouldn’t have known or cared; the tenyear-old would have noticed. Who would ever buy brown-and-yellow shoes, the brown all gingerbreading?

  They went into 601-B and through to what was probably 601-A, the other half of the parsonage where Oval Forester’s office was, and what seemed to be classrooms, folding wooden chairs glimpsed in passing. In the office was another portrait of Christ, heroic and kind in thorns, gazing out of mist. Bonnie sat on a leather couch, next to him, while Oval, or whoever he was, his posture and expression indicating worry and concern, walked back and forth before a large wooden desk. He looked too young, an aging youth, his face simplified by its lack of reserve. His hair was an almost dyed-looking black above bis high pale forehead. Maybe he was a more imposing man when he didn’t have an explanation or a confession to make.

  “Do you know John’s father?” Bonnie asked.

  “You’ve recognized me, haven’t you?” Oval, or Sylvan, said to John.

  “I think so,” John said.

  “I was told you’d been adopted by Amos Sylvester and taken his name and it would be best if I bowed out of your life altogether. That was ten years, thirteen years ago.”

  “Amos?” John said, a half-uttered bubble of strange laughter.

  “But you call yourself John Hearne.”

  “It’s my name,” John said. “Did my mother tell you all that?”

  “Yes, Martha wrote that to me.”

  “It figures,” John said.

  “She said he was a marvelous father to you.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. It seemed perfectly logical that his mother would have said that Amos was a marvelous father.

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” Oval, or Sylvan, said. “She must have wanted it so much she decided it had to happen, so she just said it. She tends to do that. She really means well. She’s a fine woman.”

  “I always had the impression she was a fucking liar.”

  “Hey, Johnny. Johnny.”

  “Oval?” Bonnie said. “You’re all upset and you’re making me upset! What is it? What is it? Are you John’s father?”