Waking the Moon (15 page)

The bar was a long mahogany-and-brass affair that might have been imported from a 1920s cruise ship. Behind it a phalanx of harried undergraduates in ill-fitting white jackets poured drinks and opened bottles of champagne. I got a vodka tonic; Angelica took a fluted glass of mineral water. Then we walked to the end of the bar and staked out a spot by the wall. Angelica leaned back so that her dress rode up her legs, her stockings and high heels stark black against the creamy painted marble. I stood beside her and knocked back my vodka tonic.

“Nice bunch of folks,” I said, crunching ice cubes. “You think Oliver’s coming?”

Angelica shrugged, but I noticed how her gaze kept darting about the room. I was thinking of getting another drink when I spied a stocky figure off by himself, smoking a cigarette as he leaned against a medieval-looking tapestry.

“Hey! There’s that guy from Warnick’s class—what’s-his-name, you know—”

Angelica turned quickly, then nodded, disappointed. “Oh,
him.
José Malabar. He kept hitting up on me at orientation. He’s a commuter, lives here in D.C. with his parents.”

“And
he’s
a Molyneux scholar?”

“Yes—one of his brothers was, too. He’s an English major. Writes poetry. He showed me some of it.”

I rattled the last ice cube in my glass. “Any good?”

Angelica grimaced. “Not really my taste. Sort of raw. But it was okay.”

I looked back at the dark figure. He nodded and lifted his cigarette in greeting.

“Listen, I’m getting another drink,” I said. “You want something?”

“Maybe in a minute. But I’ll get it myself.”

At the bar I smiled gamely at the guys pouring drinks.

“You know her?” one asked, pointing his thumb at Angelica.

I took my vodka tonic and downed most of it in a gulp. “Yeah.”

“Huh.” He stared admiringly at Angelica, then flashed me a grin. “Well, you’re shitting in some high cotton, sister. Have another.” I traded my empty glass for a full one and stepped away. Angelica had floated toward the center of the room, deep in conversation with a white-haired man who could have been her grandfather. I turned and walked to the tapestried wall.

“Hi,” I said. José Malabar looked startled. “You’re José. You’re in Warnick’s class with me, right?”

He took a long drag of his cigarette and regarded me warily. He was my own age, heavyset and olive-skinned, with dark straight hair falling unevenly about his ears and small, almond-shaped eyes. He wore an ancient black suit over an open white shirt, flocked with burn holes and a dusting of ash.

“Joe,” he said at last, in a low voice. He had an accent that I couldn’t place. “Baby Joe.”

“Baby Joe.” I nodded and raised my drink to him. “I’m Sweeney Cassidy.”

He stared at me through a halo of grey smoke. “Yeah,” he said at last. “Sweeney. I know you. You’re the one got tagged by Beauty and the Beast this morning.” He began to laugh, a childlike wheezing giggle, and reached for my glass. I smiled uneasily and gave it to him. He took a sip, raising it in mock salute. “What’re you doing here?”

“I came with Angelica.”

“Huh.” Baby Joe frowned, then finished my drink. He handed me the empty glass and shook his head. “Yeah, I know her too. She’s okay. But you’re not one of
them
.”

“Who’s ‘them’?”

Baby Joe’s voice was derisive. “You know. The
Benandanti. Brujos.”

“No.” I looked around uncomfortably, then set my empty glass on the floor. “I mean, I guess not. I never even heard of them until today.”

“That’s good.” He dropped his cigarette. “Because I hate them.”

He stared at the floor, waiting till his cigarette had burned a tiny black hole in the wood; then ground it out with a filthy high-top sneaker bound with electrical tape. The sneakers matched his shapeless suit, which was baggy even on his ungainly form. On the lapel was a small red button. I squinted as I read the tiny letters.

IT’S NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS WHAT IT SAYS.

I laughed, but Baby Joe’s expression remained enigmatic. He tapped another cigarette from a pack of Pall Malls, then began to speak with exaggerated slowness.

“Let me tell you something, Sweeney Cassidy.” He spoke so loudly that several people turned to frown in our direction. “You shouldn’t be here. This scholar shit is dangerous,
di ba?”

I grew hot with embarrassment and stared at the tips of my boots, but Baby Joe seemed to enjoy the glares we were getting.

“You think you’re getting in for some nice schoolgirl fun, you and Barbie Doll over there, but you’re gonna get fucked.”

He paused and turned an insolent stare upon two elderly women who regarded us with tight frowns. “YOU—ARE
GOING
—TO
GET—FUCKED.”

The women moved off in disgust. Baby Joe smiled, then looked at me and added, “And your friend Oliver?
Talagang sirang ulo
—fucking crazy bitch! He’ll be pushing a shopping cart down Fourteenth Street one of these days. He’s crazy, that whole family is crazy. My brother was here with his brother, Walter—”

“Waldo.”

“Whatever. He was nuts, fucking nuts,
di ba
? Tried to poison some teacher that failed him. With
rat
poison. Once he shot at my brother with a bow and arrow.”

“He’s a Buddhist monk now.”

“Figures. These guys—” He gestured disdainfully at the well-dressed crowd surrounding us. “—these guys tapped my brother years ago,
di ba?
When we were in Manila my mother was a
bruja,
you know, a—a midwife and—well, some other shit—but then she had a run-in with President Marcos’s chauffeur and they made things tough for us. My father died of
bangungot
—you know what that is? Bad juju, Schoolgirl, very bad stuff—and we had to leave Manila, leave the whole fucking country. My uncle lives in D.C. so we came here, but then he’s got like some weird connection with
this
place and my mom gets plugged into all
that
shit. And my brother Nestor, they think he’s
brujo
like my mother, they give him some tests and finally he gets a scholarship.”

He shook his head and giggled softly. ‘“Religious Studies.’ But, like, this is the only way we get to go to college,
di ba,
so who’s going to say no?”

I nodded as though this was all perfectly normal. “What’s your brother doing now?”

“He’s got this band, Euthanasia. They play at the Atlantis sometimes.” He sighed. “Me, I’m only here ’cause they gave me a full scholarship.
Nobody
gives scholarships to poets.”

He raised his eyes thoughtfully. “But what are
you
doing here,
hija?
How’d you hook up with those two?”

I shrugged, stabbed at the floor with the metal toe of one boot. “I don’t know. They just started talking to me in Warnick’s class.”

“Huh.
Talking.”

Baby Joe looked disgusted, as though this was an obvious setup. But he said nothing more, only gazed through hooded eyes at the room in front of us.

I fell silent. I stared at my feet and wondered if I should cut my losses and just sneak out now. It seemed clear to everyone I met that I didn’t belong at this reception; didn’t belong with Angelica, and probably didn’t belong at the Divine. The three vodka tonics made me feel weepy and hopeless. I thought of my parents and how much it was costing them to send me here, how much they’d save if I returned home and commuted to SUNY Purchase. I thought of the classes I’d skipped, and the copy of
The Golden Ass
I wasn’t reading.

“Shit,” I said under my breath. I glanced up, hoping I might see Angelica, or maybe even Oliver. But there was only Baby Joe, smoking and brooding like an extra in a bad French movie. Angelica seemed to have disappeared, and Oliver, I was starting to suspect, wasn’t going to show at all.

So I turned back to the party going on without me; and who I saw was Professor Warnick. Amidst all that extravagant finery he looked absurdly small and demure in a pearl grey morning suit and striped ascot, his dark hair swept back from his face. He was watching the crowd with a bland expression, his blue eyes guarded but calm.

It was the figure standing behind him that made my neck prickle: the same extraordinarily tall figure I’d glimpsed outside of Reardon Hall that morning. Only now, instead of a simple cape, he wore robes that evoked some bizarre liturgy. Cloth of a purple so deep and rich it was almost black, but with a sheen that picked up the light and shot forth a phosphorescent glow. They swept about his emaciated form, cuffs and hem trimmed with golden ropes and cords and tassels. The effect should have been ludicrous,
Duchess of Malfi
meets
Star Trek;
but it wasn’t. It was terrifying.

“Hey, Baby Joe,” I said hoarsely.

My voice died in my throat as the figure turned. Its hooded face bobbed, like a blind hound trying to pick up a scent, and I shrank against the wall. I was ridiculously certain that he was looking for
me.
I recalled the figures in my room last night. This could have been one of them, only even more frightening, because no one else took any notice of him at all. He towered a good three heads above Professor Warnick—cadaverously thin, head weaving from side to side, the robes looped about his frame like winding sheets.

“Baby Joe,”
I hissed, but still Baby Joe didn’t hear. He was staring absently into space, nodding in time to some private music. Between his fingers the cigarette had burned out. I started to reach for him, then stopped.

This was crazy. Whether it was the vodka or nerves or just bad vibes, I was acting like I’d lost my mind, or at least the part of it that should tell me how to behave at a party I’d crashed. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look up.

Professor Warnick and his companion were gone. In their place stood a group of boisterous undergraduates who seemed to have all just come from the same boozy pregame show. I glanced around, certain that I’d be able to find that towering emaciated figure; but it was gone. It might never have been there at all.

My fear faded into drunken ennui. I watched the laughing students and tried not to feel envious and stupid and headachy. Finally I turned to Baby Joe and asked, “So. You live in D.C?”

“Huh?” Baby Joe started, gazing in surprise at his dead cigarette and then looking suspiciously at the crowd. “Hey,
hija
—isn’t that Barbie Doll? Over there with that famous lady professor—?”

I turned. For a moment I glimpsed Angelica between waves of black tie and silk, her auburn hair shimmering. She was talking excitedly to a woman who kept glancing over her shoulder and motioning Angelica closer to her.

“Her?”

Baby Joe nodded. “Yeah—you know, that archaeologist. I forget her name.”

I tried to get a better look at the famous lady professor archaeologist. She was maybe in her forties, brown-haired and sexy in a scholarly kind of way. Not exactly pretty but
interesting
-looking, with intense dark eyes and a Mary Quant haircut and probably the same frosted lipstick she’d been wearing since grad school. The same minidress too: a sleeveless black-and-white sheath with big eyes on it. A little weird, but the sort of thing I could imagine an archaeologist might think was appropriate formal wear. Whoever she was, Angelica looked more excited than I’d seen her all day I thought of joining them, but another wave of partiers swept through and I lost sight of them.

“You want a drink,
hija
?” Baby Joe pulled at his shirt collar to expose where it had been repaired with black thread. “Sweeney? You look like you need one.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. Thanks.”

He started for the bar, pausing to stare at my T-shirt and boots. “Blue Cheer. Well, fuck me.
Di ba,
okay, maybe you’ll be okay …”

I walked with him, this time accepting the Pall Mall he offered me, and for good measure ordered two vodka tonics.

Magda Kurtz, the famous lady professor of European Archaeology, had come tonight against her better judgment. It meant canceling her flight back to the West Coast, which was an expensive indulgence, and now she wouldn’t get enough sleep, which was always annoying.

But mostly, it was dangerous. All summer she’d been playing fox and hounds with the
Benandanti,
tiptoeing around the Divine like the renegade student she still felt like. While her own students here treated her like the prophet of a new age, the other teachers were more circumspect. Distant, at best, like Balthazar Warnick—and
why
were so many of them at the Divine still
men!
You’d think they’d at least make some recruitment effort!—at worst, cavalier or disdainful or even suspicious of her work. So different from Berkeley, where her theories were already part of the core curriculum.

But then the Divine had always been like that—so far ahead of its time in many ways, positively medieval in others. The Anthropology Department especially seemed hardly to have changed at all since she’d left. Sometimes, she thought wryly, it seemed like it hadn’t changed since Malinowski’s day.

A lot of that was Balthazar’s doing, of course. He’d been the one to approve her summer term here—it had been his suggestion, in fact, and Magda still wasn’t sure why the invitation had come. But once offered the chance to return, she’d been surprised at how strong her feelings were for the place, how very much she wanted to be here again, even in the middle of the summer.

So Magda had come. She hadn’t been back since the disastrous Çaril Kytur expedition. That was how they all still referred to it, even Magda herself. As in the words of the
Washington Post
article that had heralded her return this summer—

“… that disastrous Çaril Kytur expedition from which, like a phoenix from the ashes, Magda Kurtz arose with her landmark theories of the matristic cultures of ancient Europe.”

Here at the Divine the students loved her. Professor Kurtz, with her wry, rather droll teaching style. And, of course, her theories, and her books—the trade paperback edition of
Daughters of the Setting Sun
had recently become a campus best-seller. And the legendary parties she held in her tower room on campus, where a few of the chosen would pass around Magda’s ancient ivory opium pipe with its embellishment of tiny grinning evil-eyed lions, and smoke opium—
Real opium! from Nepal! She was
Too Much
!—and where, as the night burned to dawn, one (and sometimes two) of the more comely undergraduate boys might be discreetly steered toward the little back room, while the rest of her admirers were directed to the door. Oh yes: Professor Kurtz was famous.