Meet Me in the Moon Room (9 page)

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

M
aggie 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.

Joe lost track of Maggie while she was doing time. He had written her often in the beginning, and she had always answered—funny letters. You’d think from reading her letters she was having a great time in jail. He wasn’t fooled.

She’d served about half her 18 months when her letters stopped. He called the jail. Was he family? Well, not exactly. They wouldn’t tell him anything. He kept writing for another month. Then he stopped. He was pretty sure he would have heard if she’d died in jail. It wasn’t like they lived in such a harsh place you could die in jail and not be mentioned in the daily papers.

He liked to think she was getting help. Maybe in jail they’d make her see a doctor who could figure out why she had to steal things. Maybe she would change. Maybe she already had. Maybe she’d gotten to a place in her life where a guy like Joe just didn’t make sense any more.

The month of her release came and went. He hadn’t been sure of the exact date anyway. He couldn’t just hang around the jail waiting for her to come out. He did hang around waiting for her to call. She didn’t call.

The next woman in Joe’s life was a freelance creator of computer games. Her name was Roberta. She was all the time shooting him with imaginary ray guns. She had a ten-year-old daughter named Tiffany and a sixteen-year-old son named Sam. One night Sam tried to strangle Joe with the cable that hooked his mother’s computer to the laser printer. Joe decided he wasn’t cut out to be a dad. He and Roberta weren’t together anymore.

There were posters all over town.

The Amazing Maggie! Come one, come all. See her pull a rabbit out of a hat. See her pull a hat out of a rabbit. Put her in a box and watch her get out of it! You won’t believe your eyes.

The big question for Joe was whether he wanted to be in the first row or not.

Opening night, Joe took a seat somewhere in the middle of the third row—not too near, not too far. When the lights went down, he decided he had agonized for nothing. She probably couldn’t see him anyway.

The curtain went up. The band jumped into a song, long and lazy in the beginning so the dancing men in black tie, tails, and top hats could tap along with their walking sticks, picking up the pace, putting on the Ritz, lining up along the stage, and then in the middle pulling back into a big V so Maggie could appear in a thundering explosion of pink smoke.

Ta da!

Nobody’s assistant now, she was the main event, a headliner. She did card tricks. She made things appear and disappear. She made things float in the air. She was really very good.

So, did she look either sadder or wiser? Joe couldn’t tell. Mostly she just looked good. She seemed totally at ease on stage. She loved the audience and the audience loved her back.

Could he take credit for any of it? Probably not. At best, he’d been practice for her, and there had been jail and therapy and whatever else she’d been up to since he’d lost track of her.

She lined up her dancing men and pulled produce from their ears. Cantaloupes! Watermelons! Fat zucchinis.

Hey, no fair, Joe thought, that’s our trick!

“For this next part,” she said, and from the shadows came a drum roll, “I need a volunteer from the audience.”

A spotlight swept across the crowd, and when it passed him, he thought he saw her eyes widen a little.

Okay. Now or never again. Joe jumped to his feet.

“Me,” he shouted, “pick me!”