Waking the Moon (39 page)

On the screen, talk show hostess Opal Purlstein was curled at one end of her cozy
aubergine
couch, staring raptly at this afternoon’s guest.

“… when you think of it, it’s really just a return to the natural world order. In the grand scheme of things, the last few thousand years of history—well, let’s be overly generous, and say the
last
ten thousand years—why, in geologic time, that’s
nothing
! Just a blip—”

Opal nodded earnestly. At the other end of the couch, a stunning bronze-haired woman in an elegant crimson sheath extended her hand, delicately spreading her fingers as though they were the petals of some rare desert flower.

“—pfff! That’s all,” the woman said in a lilting voice. She looked as out of place on Opal’s show as Brooke Astor at McDonald’s. “That’s what our civilization is worth.”

Opal nodded, wide-eyed, and the audience burst into applause. On the couch the bronze-haired woman smiled demurely. Behind her stood two raven-haired Amazons, easily topping six feet, their arms crossed on their chests. They were lean and muscular and lethal as a pair of cheetahs, and stared with oblique black eyes into the camera. Both wore sleeveless black tank tops; silver armillas shaped like serpents coiled around their biceps. Their hair was cropped short as a boxer’s, but the effect wasn’t butch so much as purely androgynous: their faces were too serene, their eyes as carefully made up as Angelica’s own. The girl on the left looked very young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her face for all its grim expression surprisingly childlike. Her partner had a tattoo of a crescent moon on her cheek.

“It is
very important
to understand this,” the bronze-haired woman said in a low, urgent voice. From the audience came murmurs and scattered clapping. “We are only trying to reclaim what originally belonged to us. We are only trying to bring back the world that was ours, the world that is ours.”

The audience roared. Opal opened her mouth, closed it again, and nodded. The bronze-haired woman turned so that she directly faced the camera, her eyes huge, almost imploring. Then she smiled, lifting her hands slightly to acknowledge the applause. From her ears dangled two delicate silver crescents; on the breast of her ruby sheath lay another silver crescent, dazzlingly bright where the spotlights struck it. Her hair was still long and thick and curling, its ruddy highlights silvered here and there as though touched with ice. A faint web of lines radiated from the corners of her eyes, and there were laugh lines around her mouth, as delicate as though drawn with a
sumi
brush. She didn’t look as Hasel Bright had described her in his letter: still a girl, young as when we had last seen her at the Orphic Lodge. But her eyes were the same as ever, that unnaturally brilliant emerald, and her smile could melt enough ice caps to cause major coastal flooding along the entire Eastern seaboard.

Letters flashed across the bottom of the screen.

ANGELICA FURIANO, AUTHOR.

“But I know her!” I leaned forward to stab at the screen. For a moment my finger pinned her there, then the station cut to a commercial. “That’s Angelica!”

Jack took another bite of chicken vindaloo and nodded. “Yeah, I know her. She was at my birthday party—did I tell you Erica threw a surprise party for me at Morton’s last year? A bunch of people came, like big Hollywood types. Tom Hanks, that woman with the hair. I mean, Erica knew
everyone.
Did
you
know Erica?” He shook his head remorsefully. “Kind of a kook, but boy, she had great legs. We’re not together anymore.”

“No, I mean I
really
know Angelica—we were at the Divine together, she was my best friend!”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “No kidding?”

“Really! She was—well, if you met her, you know what she’s like. We were best friends, before—well, before I left. I lost touch with her, I haven’t heard from her in, jeez, it must be nineteen or twenty years now.”

“I thought she said she went to some school in Italy, Rome or Florence or something.”

“That was later—I met her here, at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. We were both anthropology majors.” I continued to stare at the TV, shaking my head. “I can’t
believe
it—”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, that would be her—she was talking about some place she was at, in Sardinia or Sicily or somewhere like that, she had a villa there that was built above some tomb that’s three thousand years old. She married an Italian duke, Rinaldo somebody, Rinaldo Furiano, I guess, Erica knew him because he used to help produce Fellini’s early stuff and Erica is a very big Fellini fan. But he died, he was a lot older than she is. She’s very big on the West Coast. Your friend, I mean.” He pointed at the television with his fork.

“Big?
Big for what?”

He shrugged. “Like this cult or something. Well, no, not a cult—she’s got this sort of self-help group, I guess it is. Only it’s religious, kind of crackpot stuff but women out there just go crazy for it.
Whoo-whoo
at the moon, raise your consciousness, all that kind of shit. Plus she’s written all these books. Like what’s-her-name with the legs, you know. Shirley MacLaine.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No—she’s really popular. I think it’s a boatload of crap, all this New Age stuff. But Erica was totally into it, that’s how come she invited her to my surprise party. Geena Davis was there. Did I tell you I met Geena Davis? That girl could eat apples off the top of my head.”

The screen cut back to Opal and her guest.

“Let’s see what the audience has to say,” Opal announced. She stood and marched into the rows of seats, waving her cordless mike like it was a censer. On the couch Angelica uncurled her legs and smiled beguilingly at the camera. Behind her the two tall black-haired women shifted. Their arms rippled with muscle, smooth and powerful as anacondas. The one with the moon tattoo smiled slightly, her thin mouth opening to flash very white teeth.

“Who are
they?”

“Oh, those are her bodyguards—”

“Bodyguards?”

Jack laughed. “Yeah, her Amazons, she calls ’em. Cloud and Kendra. They’re kickboxers. They were at the party too—”

“Angelica needs
bodyguards?”

“Oh, sure,” said Jack. “She gets death threats all the time. Guys are always trying to jump her bones or else trying to cut her up. I gather her views are a little extreme—well, here, listen—”

“My name is Amanda Jeffries, from Port Lavaca, Texas,” a round-faced, heavyset woman was saying. “I was married for seventeen years to a man—”

Her voice broke. Beside her Opal jockeyed with the mike so it would catch every breath.

“—My husband used to beat on me, so bad sometimes I couldn’t go to work. And our children, too. I threatened to leave him but he always said he’d change but he never did. Then I heard you talk at Victoria Community College—”

She inclined her head and the camera angle jumped to show Angelica listening intently, her brow furrowed and her green eyes glowing with concern.

“—I heard you talk about the Warrior Goddess inside of us and I went home, I signed up for a self-defense class at the Victoria YWCA and filed for divorce.”

Opal nodded. “And your husband let you go?”

“Oh, no.” Amanda Jeffries shook her head. “He came at me with a baseball bat—”

Gasps from the audience. “What did you do?” urged Opal.

“Well, I ran outside and threw the kids in the Pontiac and tried to drive off, but he smashed the windshield—”

Another cut to Angelica, her perfect eyebrows arched, the two women behind her silent and brooding.

“And?” said Opal.

“And so I ran him over. I—I—killed him. In reverse.” More gasps; scattered applause and one deep
boo.
Amanda Jeffries wiped her eyes. “I—I didn’t want to do it, I loved him but—the jury said it was self-defense and the Women’s Defense Fund helped me and my children while the trial was pending—”

“Let’s hear another point of view.” Opal walked deftly through the rows of seats until she reached a burly young man scowling near the back of the room. “What do
you
think of Angelica Furiano’s—”

“I think she oughta be
locked up
—”

The camera focused on the man’s face, his brown eyes darting from Opal back to the stage. “My wife and her friend went to one of her workshops in San Diego and this woman—”

His arm jabbed out as he pointed toward Angelica.

“This—”
bleeep!
“—is advocating overthrowing the government—”

Boos and catcalls, so loud the man looked startled and fell silent.

“I
think,”
Opal said gently, “I
think
that she’s calling for a change in the patriarchal system in this country, not overthrowing the government.” She whirled to face the stage. “Am I correct, Angelica?”

“Yes,” Angelica’s clear voice rang out. “And—”

“Can I finish?” The man broke in angrily. “These women, they get together and they all bitch about how their husbands abuse them and they can’t get decent jobs and I’m a rapist and everything comes down to Men Suck, but I work fifty-hour weeks to support my family, I never lifted a finger against my wife or children, I supported the Equal Rights Amendment and what do I get? My wife left me, she says I was
condescending
to her, she says I—”

“Well, perhaps she did not correctly perceive your concern,” Angelica suggested smoothly. “Very often men are not aware that they treat their wives in a childlike fashion. You see, we’re still trained to see women in only certain ways—and other countries are worse than the United States in this, when I was in Italy it was
very
pronounced—the whole Madonna-Whore syndrome. Or you have this whole way of looking at women as either nurturers or as children who need constant protection. Many of the world’s ancient Goddess religions represent the Goddess as having three faces: those of the Mother, Daughter, and Crone or Destroyer. And a number of recent books help women focus on two of those aspects: Gaea, the nurturing Mother, and her daughter Kore. And that’s wonderful. I truly think these books are wonderful and I think that they’ve helped women a great deal; but it’s not enough.”

The camera moved in slowly for a close-up on Angelica’s face. Shafts of light from the silver crescent on her breast flickered across her cheeks and jaw; she looked as though she were rising up from deep clear water. Her voice grew softer, more intense. Beside me Jack leaned closer to the television set, and I could imagine everyone in that audience shifting in their seats, everyone straining to get closer to Angelica.

“—Because we can’t just ignore that other face of the Goddess. For thousands of years we’ve pretended that She doesn’t exist, that human history begins and ends with the Old Testament. But now, for the first time in millennia, women are starting to embrace Her again. And that’s marvelous, but we can’t just pick and choose which of Her aspects to honor. We have to deal with
all
of them. With the Full Moon and the New Moon but also with the Dark of the Moon, Hecate’s realm. We have to acknowledge the Mother
and
the Avenger. We must embrace She Who Mourns and She Who Creates, but we must also honor She Who Destroys.

“Because otherwise we will never be whole. In traditional patriarchal societies, men have always acknowledged their own aggressive tendencies—that’s why they’ve always been the warriors and the football players, the generals and bank presidents and—”

“The serial killers!”
a shrill voice shouted. Uneasy laughter from the audience; but Angelica only nodded seriously.

“—and yes, the serial killers—but also the great artists and writers and composers. But until we as women acknowledge our own personal need for power and our own capabilities for aggression and independence, we will never be whole. We’ll continue to be good mothers and daughters, we’ll continue to be muses, we’ll continue to be
victims
—but we won’t be whole and strong. We won’t be the Supreme Goddess that we can be. We need to acknowledge all the aspects of the Goddess within us; we need to
embrace
the chthonic darkness, to welcome and awaken the Moon; and then we will be whole again. Then we will be strong, unconquerable, sovereigns of the Sacred Earth.

“Then we will be One with Her.”

Riotous applause and a few enraged shouts from the audience. A quick cut to the burly young man shaking his head and mouthing something obscene. But Opal had already abandoned him and was walking briskly back to the stage.

“Well, thank you, Angelica! I know
I’ve
read your books and found them incredibly empowering, and I took your Dark of the Moon workshop up in Vancouver last summer and—well, it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful! Thank you
so much
—

“Angelica Furiano, on a cross-country tour promoting her new best-selling book
Waking the Moon: Toward a Supreme Spirituality of Women.”

Opal held up a book: I could just glimpse its title, in bright gold letters against a black background, and the glinting foil crescent that surmounted Angelica’s name. Cheers and excited yelps. Angelica stood. The studio lights made a golden aureole of her hair, and while she should have looked like a thousand other talk show guests, sheepish or giddy or simply inane, she did not. She looked as she always had, beautiful and poised and utterly regal. Very slowly, as though performing in a Noh drama, she rested one hand upon her breast, her fingers spreading to cover the lunula, and then raised the other hand to the audience as though in benediction. Once again glittering letters flashed across the screen.

ANGELICA FURIANO: WAKING THE MOON.

I stared at her and shivered.

“Boy, she is a looker, huh? And she looks just like that in real life, I mean in L.A., some of these girls you see on TV or in the movies, you see ’em in real life and pffft—” Jack made a disgusted sound, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “But she’s the real thing, I tell you.”

“Her eyes aren’t real,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Her eyes—those are green contacts; her eyes aren’t really that color.”