Luna Rising

by Selene Castrovilla

  He said, “You smell wonderful.”

  Trip was commanding, but gentle. He was masculine, not brutal.

  Wrapped in Trip’s bare arms, Luna said, “You’re so tender.”

  “You’re so soft,” he said.

  A little bit later Trip said quietly, “I can’t tell if it’s me you want, or just anyone.”

  She’d known it at the email, and now it was confirmed. Squeezing her fingers into his chest – it had just the right amount of hair and just the right amount of muscle – she said, “You’re the man I’ve been waiting for.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Luna was on top of Trip in his front seat, kissing him to the tune of Alice in Chains’ “Rooster” on the radio. Her jeans and underwear were off, and he was doing such beautiful things to her…

  Her eyes were closed, her thoughts all wrapped up in the feeling Trip supplied. His woolly chest was comforting and strong.

  A sharp light poked at her eyelids. She broke from the kiss and looked.

  There was a police car creeping through the lot toward them, headlights in their faces.

  “Oh my God,” she said to Trip, freaking. She slid off him, squeaking against vinyl into the passenger seat. She snatched up her jeans from the floor, then dropped them again.

  There was no way she’d ever shimmy back into them in time.

  “It’s okay,” Trip said, and his voice was so sweet she actually relaxed a notch. She was still way up there on her ladder of terror, of course, but it was nice to be one rung down from the top. He pushed his t-shirt over her. She folded her legs on the seat, so that the shirt covered her whole lower half pretty well.

  Trip said, “Just stay calm.” He hit the radio off, just as the opening notes of “Born To Run” were playing.

  It was the second time on this first date that they were being roused by a cop.

  On the beach, they’d only been kissing.

  This time they were doing something really wrong.

  Dear Jesus, under Trip’s shirt she was naked!

  Her butt was stuck to the seat like a suction cup. She shifted to release it.

  The cop pulled up to them sideways, his headlight beams bearing down on them like interrogation lamps in those old movies.

  Where were you on the night of the eighth?

  It wouldn’t take much to crack a confession from Luna – even if she were innocent.

  Leaving his engine idling, the cop got out, slammed his door and approached Trip’s window with a flashlight. His tall, thick body blocked the bulk of the headlights now, but rays still poked in around his frame, illuminating Trip’s dusty dashboard and the pile of parts and tools in his back seat.

  Luna wanted to fade away, to melt into the floorboards.

  Trip seemed stoic. He rolled down his window. “Evening, Officer.”

  The cop was young. His baby face probably looked fuller thanks to his crew cut. His eyes were big and round. Luna wanted to turn away – to look out at the dark ocean Trip’s car was parked head-on against – but she thought it best to face him.

  The cop said nothing back to Trip. He ran his light over Trip’s bare chest, then down to Trip’s jeans. Thank the lord Trip had his bottoms on!

  Luna sucked in a breath and waited for the light to shine on her.

  It didn’t.

  The cop said, “You folks need to be less obvious.”

  Trip said, “Yes, sir.”

  “You’d better be going,” said the cop. He turned away and headed back to his car.

  Luna and Trip sat still as the patrol car backed away, headlights growing dimmer until at last they were gone.

  Trip chuckled mischievously. “See? That wasn’t so bad.”

  Luna didn’t have it in her to laugh at that moment. She was just trying to get her heart to stop jittering so she could be sure it wasn’t going to burst through her chest.

  It had been pretty bad.

  But despite the heart-pounding interruption she felt happy.

  So happy to be with Trip.

  The next night they hung out in a vacant attic apartment Trip was working on, above a podiatrist’s office. They couldn’t go to Luna’s house – the babysitter was there with the kids. They couldn’t go to Trip’s house, either. After his last relationship fell apart, Trip moved back in with his parents.

  They sat cross-legged, comfortably mushed in a large sheet of egg-crate-style packing foam on the still-uncarpeted floor. They were surrounded by tools and fixtures yet to be installed. The room was tiny; its low ceiling was triangular. The faded wallpaper bore an ornate floral pattern. It felt like they were in a dollhouse, albeit one under construction.

  They watched the show “House” while dining on Chinese take-out. The scent of garlic sauce filled the small space. Luna had tofu and broccoli; Trip had chicken and mixed vegetables. She used a Styrofoam plate and plastic fork; he ate his right out of the paper carton with chopsticks.

  Finished, Trip stretched and moaned. He said, “My bones ache… I’m too old for all this hard labor. I’m falling apart.”

  Luna rubbed his neck and shoulders, and quoted a line from the opening credits of The Six Million Dollar Man: “We can rebuild him.”

  They talked a little, then they kissed a lot.

  They sank into that foam and kissed and kissed and kissed. When they took a breather, Luna told him, “You’re it for me, you know.” She stroked his bristles. Eyes closed, Trip had the majestic peace of a lion at rest in the grass.

  It was heaven in this attic, right in this clutter and foam.

  A little while later, Trip made love to Luna.

  It was exquisite, except Trip never opened his eyes.

  The next evening Trip drove down to North Carolina to do a job. He worked all over the country –“Wherever they hire me.”

  Luna decided to go to the boardwalk. Nick had the kids.

  She parked near the beach entrance she and Trip had used, and headed up the wooden ramp. It was warm—summer was holding on even in September, and she didn’t need the sweatshirt she carried. The air smelled like salt and pizza.

  Luna reached the top. There was nobody in sight. She walked over to a bench overlooking the water and sat.

  “So what do you think, Jiminy?” Jiminy probably wouldn’t answer, but she figured she’d give it a shot. It’d been a while since he’d piped in, and honestly, she missed his input. “This is a good one, right? A keeper?”

  Her phone rang.

  It was Trip, calling from some bleak interstate highway.

  He was lonely on the road.

  They talked about mundane things, like traffic and television. Then he mentioned some show he’d liked as a kid. Luna told him how much TV had meant to her when she was by herself at night, waiting for Loreena to come home. “I needed the voices… the distraction,” she said.

  “That sucks,” said Trip. “I was never alone… but I do have one strange story about my childhood. Remember I told you we had a pet chicken?”

  “Fred,” said Luna.

  “Right. Fred,” Trip said. “One day I came home from school and Fred wasn’t there. My mom loved to cook, and there was this aroma of soup filling the apartment. It made me so hungry that I couldn’t wait for dinner. My mother gave me a bowl. So there I was slurping, and I asked her, ‘Where’s Fred?’ and that’s when Mom told me I was eating him.”

  “Oh my god!” said Luna. “That must’ve been devastating for you.”

  “It wasn’t really my chicken,” he said. “It was my brother’s. He was the one who kicked up a fuss about it, when he came home from baseball practice.”

  Luna had no idea what to say. She didn’t want to criticize Trip’s mom, but damn, that was a cold thing to do to her kids. Unless they couldn’t afford food. “Were you poor?”

  “No. But if something had a use, my mother used it.” He changed the subject. “Tell me about your ex-husband.” What a transition: From a dead chicken to a deadbeat husband.

  She told him a
condensed version of her marriage.

  Trip was disgusted by Nick’s behavior. He especially didn’t like him because “he had what I want, and he didn’t appreciate it.”

  “You could have a family, too,” Luna said. “I’ll give you one.”

  Trip paused for a moment.

  When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “I can see you’re in a period of transition.”

  After another pause he added, “Throughout my life women have come to me this way – on their way to somewhere else.”

  It wasn’t true for her.

  It wasn’t!

  Luna wanted to tell Trip this but somehow the words got stuck on their way out.

  He said, “You scare me.”

  The boardwalk wood hummed under Luna’s feet from passing bicyclists, and ahead, the ocean tumbled.

  Trip said, “When you leave me, and you’re with some other guy, at least I’ll have spoiled you a little.”

  Luna stared at the empty lifeguard chair on a huge hill of sand. She and Trip had shared their first kiss at the bottom of that pile.

  She said. “I’m not going to leave you. Why would I?”

  But Trip went on like he hadn’t heard her, and maybe he hadn’t.

  Over and over, the ocean rolled in and slid out under the moonlight.

  “I don’t know my purpose in life,” Trip said, “but I think maybe part of it is to help women find their way to the next phase of their lives.”

  She didn’t say anything then. She just looked at the waves.

  “Have you seen the movie City of Angels? Trip asked.

  “No,” she answered. “Someone told me the end, and it’s too sad. I can’t watch that.”

  “It’s not sad,” he said. “You need to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll like it.”

  Luna wrote Trip an email when she got home.

  She typed, “While I can’t guarantee anything – who can? – I don’t see this ending.”

  He wrote back, “Can’t respond now.”

  And that’s when everything changed.

  When Trip came back, he was different. Distant. A great lover when he was there, but he wasn’t there often. He always had to run to a job – always had to run somewhere far from her. He showed up late at night and crawled into her bed, but in the morning he was off like a starter’s pistol had been fired.

  “I gotta go to work,” was his mantra.

  His excuse.

  His shield.

  Just like that, the open, giving partner she’d thought she’d found had closed himself off.

  During her next visit, Dr. Gold asked, “Have you ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?”

  Luna had, in Oedipus Rex.

  Dr. Gold nodded. “But it’s slightly different. Oedipus collided with his destiny trying to deny it. Trip is engineering his perceived destiny. He’s doing everything he can to get you to do what he believes you’re going to do anyway.”

  Luna decided to love Trip as much as she could, and then he’d see he was safe with her.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Joe told her. “The guy’s a scumbag. Simple as that. Any more discussion is just a waste of energy.”

  So Luna stopped talking to Joe about Trip.

  It took a couple of weeks, but Luna located a copy of City of Angels.

  It was about an angel named Seth who fell in love with a woman. He became human to be with her. Then she got hit by a truck and died.

  She called Trip. “Why did you want me to watch that?”

  “It was just a good movie, that’s all.”

  There was more to it than that.

  But the guy who would’ve told her the truth was gone.

  FORTY

  “I don’t understand,” Luna said to Sunny a few days later. “The beginning was so good.”

  Sunny said, “Beginnings are always good.”

  Then she amended, “Well, they’re not always sooo good, but even when they’re not, we pretend they are… You know how that ‘hope for the best’ shit goes.”

  Luna did know.

  She could write a book about it.

  Jiminy had said the same thing to Luna about beginnings, back when he was speaking to her. It seemed like forever since he’d chimed in. But what Luna had felt about Trip transcended beginnings.

  It felt universal.

  Grounded.

  Right.

  And yet, it had gone so wrong.

  She was tired of thinking about Trip. Her brain hurt. So she changed the subject. “So what’s new with you?”

  “I met someone at IHOP,” said Sunny.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I was out to lunch with the work crew. It was the waiter. He served me his number pierced on a toothpick in the middle of my Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity.”

  “That’s… cute…”

  “And he took my food off the check! Kachow!”

  Free food was a sure way to Sunny’s heart. Well, maybe not her heart. But it was good for at least a one-time visit to her vagina. “What’s he like?”

  Sunny paused. “He’s twenty.”

  “Too young.”

  “He’s got stamina. He says he’s gonna rock my world.”

  Luna laughed. “A bit clichéd, but I admire his enthusiasm.”

  “I’d settle for a six pack of Bud and a foot massage,” said Sunny. “But he’s not old enough to buy beer.”

  “Well, have fun getting rocked.”

  “Unfortunately, I have to let him come to my place because he lives with his parents, and he doesn’t make enough in tips to pay for a motel. But maybe he’ll bring me one of those giant IHOP omelets with hash browns.”

  “A woman can dream…”

  “I’ll call you with an update,” Sunny promised.

  Luna hung in with Trip, accepting his late night visits, infrequent phone calls, general insensitivity…

  And his sex.

  God it was demeaning.

  But it felt so good…

  He called himself Thor in his erotic text messages, and in bed he was Thor.

  Thundering into her.

  Pure ecstasy, but joyless, too. Aunt Zelda said life was both heaven and hell, and here they were in one tough nutshell.

  Luna and Trip were so spectacular together it was like fireworks bursting through their bodies. Yet when he looked at her, he was a terrified lamb caught in a trap.

  She screamed in pleasure and cried in agony, and he never made a sound.

  And she kept waiting for that guy from the beach to come back.

  “You’re gonna be waiting a long time,” Sunny told her during their next conversation. It had been over a week since they’d spoken, due to Sunny’s crazed work schedule (and hopefully also due to some world-rocking.) “Try: forever.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Trip’s an asshole like me. He doesn’t want to be bothered with anything except what he wants.”

  “You’re an asshole?”

  “I am. But it bothers me to see him being an asshole to you.”

  “Thanks… I guess.” But Luna wouldn’t concede that Sunny was right about Trip.

  She couldn’t.

  “So, did that young guy rock your world?”

  “Oh, please. He couldn’t rock a squirrel. And of course he wanted to stick around afterwards and watch Shameless.”

  “Did you let him?”

  “Hell no! If I wanted to watch dysfunction in action I’d go visit Sal’s family.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I threw him his pants and told him to get pedaling.”

  “Pedaling?”

  “He rode his bike over. He claims he owns a car, but he wanted to drink when he got here.”

  “You could’ve picked him up.”

  “Goddamn good thing I didn’t. Because after his shoddy performance¸ he’d have been walking home. And that fucker didn’t even bring the omelet. He said he couldn’t manage it on h
is handlebars. Loser!”

  “Does he know you didn’t like it?”

  “No. He thinks he’s stud of the year. He keeps calling and calling… wonder when he’ll get sick of my voicemail.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him you’re not interested?”

  “Because I’d rather stab myself in the eye than ever speak with him again.”

  “How about a text?”

  “My way requires less effort,” said Sunny. “The biggest problem is that I have to avoid IHOP now.” She sighed. “Sayonara, Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity.”

  On Halloween, Trip called Luna at eleven p.m. She’d been under the impression he was working in Connecticut. Turned out he’d come home early that morning and constructed an elaborate haunted maze in his yard for the neighborhood trick-or-treaters.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “I would’ve brought my kids.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think of it.”

  There was silence on her end. On his, there was banging and scraping. He was taking down the maze, cell phone undoubtedly perched in the crook of his neck. He’d hang up soon, she knew, in a rush to finish his task. He never had time to talk to her.

  “Okay, let me go finish. Bye.” He was gone.

  Luna held the phone against her chest and tried not to cry. This didn’t seem right, no matter what kind of spin her mind tried to put on it to avoid a confrontation.

  She called him back.

  “Yeees?” he asked.

  “I wish you’d called me earlier,” she stammered out. “You’re never around… it would’ve been nice to see you…”

  He cut her off. “You know what’s worse than calling late?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Not calling at all, that’s what,” he told her.

  Then she said what was really brewing inside—not because she was brave, but because she just couldn’t hold it back. “I feel like I’m losing my self respect.”

  “Oh, calm down,” said Trip. “There’s always next year. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”