Waking the Moon (6 page)

The feather.

I snatched my hand back, dug more deeply until I pulled out a heavy book. It fell open and I looked down at the curling pages, pretending to be engrossed. A much-worn copy of
Finnegan’s Wake
that I carried everywhere but never actually read. The room grew warmer, the other students whispered as I sweated and tried to focus my eyes.

O, O, her fairy setalite! Casting such shadows to Persia’s blind! The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon.

“Hel
loo
.”

I glanced aside. The apparition had moved. I saw streaming jet black hair above a field of white—white shirt, white pants, black wing tips with no socks—and large chapped hands swooping the hair from a sunburned face. When I lowered my gaze I saw the pants were not really white but baggy chinos, faded to the color of bone. The hands were large and nervous. After smoothing back all that hair they attacked a pair of spectacles with ugly black plastic frames, jamming them onto a hawkish face.

I started. Something—the hair, that delicately curved neck or perhaps just the suggestion of affected disarray—had made me think the figure was another girl.

But it wasn’t. It was a boy. He glanced warily behind him, then at the front of the room, then back at me, staring at me so intensely I started to feel a little uneasy. Then he stood, looking around nervously, and slid into the chair next to me. His chinos rode up to display glossy muscular calves, pale in front, sunburned in back, and completely hairless. Later he told me that he shaved his legs, something to do with the aerodynamics of cycling. But at that moment all I could think of was those eerie sexless angels gazing blindly from their ramparts at Rossetti Hall. He smelled of sweat and sun and 3-IN-ONE oil.

“Well then.”

He had a sweet voice, boyish, with that clipped prep school delivery that produces the faintest echo of an upper-crust British accent. Unexpectedly my heart was pounding. I closed my book and started to shove it back into my bag, when he leaned across his desk and peered up at me. His eyes were a piercing sea blue, startlingly bright against his sunburned cheeks. He had a sharp chin, a narrow, slightly upturned nose. The sort of handsome yet delicate face that you find in doomed matinee idols, James Dean or Rudolph Valentino. But his glasses were cheap and very dirty and seemed out of place. They might have been part of a bad disguise, Cary Grant as bumbling professor, or some ridiculous bit of stage business—
put these on and no one will know you’re Superman!
With a flourish he shoved them against his face again. Then he took the copy of
Finnegan’s Wake
from my hand, glanced at the title, and placed it back on my desk. His head cocked as he gazed at me and asked,
“Why
is a raven like a writing desk?”

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and looked away.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

It was the Mad Hatter’s question to Alice, of course. I knew it because I had directed a children’s production of the play at home that summer. And now this boy was sitting there like it was the secret password, waiting for me to come up with the right retort. I remembered the feather in my knapsack. I remembered the figures in my room the night before, the rows of angels flanking my window. I shivered.

Something truly weird was happening. Some kind of test, some bizarre initiation that I hadn’t been warned of. My fingers tightened on the edge of my desk as I raised my head.

He was still staring at me. And suddenly, inexplicably, more than anything I had ever wanted before, I wanted him to like me. Wanted him to keep on looking at me like this: eyebrows raised, almost smiling—not snidely but gently, encouragingly, as though to say
Come now, you know the next line.

And the crazy thing was, I did.

“‘Your hair wants cutting.’”

The almost-smile disappeared. He removed his glasses and peered at me more closely. He looked dismayed, but also confused. All the glory faded from his beautiful face, the way the blue drains from a cornflower after it’s been picked.

My heart sank. Something had gone wrong, his face showed it. He hadn’t expected me to know the answer—and why should he? Still …

“That’s right,” he said. He folded his hands on his desk, frowning. I felt idiotic and about fifteen years old, as if I were waiting to hear I hadn’t made the cut for the cheerleading squad. But I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was just my homesickness, the terror that I would never make another friend in my life. That I would never wear the right clothes or say the right thing again. But somehow, it seemed that everything hung on whether he liked me or not.

There was a long moment when I could hear the soft conversation of the others at the front of the room, the sound of a pen scratching on paper. Then, abruptly, he stretched a hand toward me and grinned.

“Oliver Wilde Crawford.”

I looked into those sea blue eyes and nodded slowly. As suddenly as it had appeared, his doubt was gone. We might have grown up together, played Ringolevio in the summer twilight, been betrothed as children. For a moment I could only stare, until he nudged me.

“Sweeney,” I said. I took his outstretched hand. On his shirt cuff a watch had been drawn in blue ballpoint ink, the hands pointing to four o’clock. Always time for tea. “Sweeney Cassidy.”

“Ah hah.” Oliver slumped back into his chair. His eyes narrowed. “Sweeney. You’re from someplace very cold. Maine?”

I shook my head. “New York. Why?”

He drew an imaginary line from my velvet-clad knees down to my boots. “It was cold in my room,” I said defensively.

“Of course it was.” He nodded, tugging at the collar of his oxford cloth shirt. “I rode my bike down from Newport,” he went on. He spoke so quickly that I had to lean forward to make sure I didn’t miss a word. “A 103 Vega, I traded my twelve-string for it—1964 Gibson, with that kind of marbled bakelite detailing around the frets? That guy from the Thirteenth Floor Elevators had one just like it. Everything else’s coming in a trunk. Greyhound. I didn’t get here till yesterday night, took me three days, no change of clothes, I washed these this morning.”

He held out his arm and I touched the cuff above the ballpoint wristwatch. It was damp, but I barely had time to register that before his hand shot back, swooping the hair from his eyes, and he continued.

“So New York. Manhattan? Detour from the High School for Performing Arts? Or no, NYU film school but then you saw that Truffaut movie and—”

He cuffed my boot. “—here you are, Iphigenia in Northeast, our own Voila! And you’re taking Warnick’s class,” he added approvingly, adjusting his glasses. “Have you seen the pre-Columbians yet?”

I blinked. I was sweating so heavily I was surprised there wasn’t a pool at my feet. “Pre-Columbians?”

“At Dumbarton Oaks. We can go this afternoon. They open at two.” He glanced down at his wrist. “Can you borrow a bike? Or the 63 bus goes there.”

I felt a faint buzz at my temples, a thrumming sound that spread across my skull and down my spine. I felt stoned; at least, I couldn’t make any sense out of what Oliver was saying, although he seemed to think he was carrying on a normal conversation.

“The bus,” I said.

Oliver nodded. “Okay,” he said, pleased. “Sweeney, huh? Mockingbirds outside your window last night, near the Convent of the Sacred Heart? O sacred head surrounded?” He tilted his head sideways, gazing at me with glittering eyes.

I stared back, nodding like I had some idea what he was talking about. If he wasn’t so unabashedly beautiful, you’d think he was nuts. But this was Oliver’s peculiar gift—one of them, at least—that if you didn’t understand him, or were confused (and I usually was), or even just bored, you always felt like it was
your
fault.

“Tom O’Bedlam,” he said, and gave my chair a little kick by way of urging me to join the fun.
“You
remember. Gloomy Orion and the Dog outside your window while your parents were arguing downstairs. Spread your knees and fly away. ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales.’”

I swallowed and riffled the pages of
Finnegan’s Wake.
This was worse than an oral exam. But then from outside came a faint burst of song: right on cue, a mockingbird in unwonted daytime concert. And suddenly I knew what he was talking about.

“Dumbarton Oaks,” I said. “‘Let us go and make our visit.’” It was the only line of Eliot I could remember.

Oliver nodded excitedly. “Right!” He removed his glasses, spun them by an earpiece. “Now, we’ll have to eat first—”

He rattled on, more unfamiliar names. Blue mirrors and Georgetown and numbers, 330 and six-oh-five, but was that a time or a bus or an address? It was my first exposure to one of Oliver’s odd monologues, composed equally of literary and private allusions and delivered at breakneck speed in his prep school voice, punctuated by dramatic tugs at his long hair and glasses. I nervously twirled a lock of my own hair and just kept nodding.
I
have a gift for looking and talking as though I know more than I really do.

But Oliver didn’t care. Oliver just kept on talking, smiling that loopy grin that let you know he’d spent a lifetime being loved by everyone he’d ever met.

“… so we’ll hit the Blue Mirror, hardly worth the transfer anyway, save your quarters for the Rockola at Gunchers and some Pall Malls, excellent sort of sub-Deco architecture and—”

Behind us footsteps echoed down the hall and then stopped. I glanced away from Oliver to see a figure standing in the doorway. A somewhat hesitant figure, the carnival light from our classroom’s windows broidering it with gold and red and green.

Now
what?
I thought.

It was a girl. Another of Dr. Warnick’s students, of course—if you could conceive of a Piero de’Franceschi madonna showing up for class in a Bloomingdale’s peasant dress and high-heeled Fiorucci sandals and Coach bag, trailing a cloud of perfume that smelled of sandalwood and oranges. She peered into the classroom doubtfully, turning until her gaze fell upon Oliver and me. Her eyebrows arched in a delicate show of disbelief.

“Is this Professor Warnick’s class?”

She had a beautiful throaty voice, with a slight vibrato. Oliver fell silent. I could hear the students in the front of the room whispering.

“Balthazar S. Warnick. That is correct.” Oliver found his voice and gestured at an empty seat next to him. The girl smiled, a rapturous smile that made you feel lucky just to have glimpsed it. I glanced at Oliver and could see that he was actually blushing, twiddling his glasses and staring at her, transfixed.

And suddenly all the cold misery that had overwhelmed me before rushed back. Because, of course,
this
was who was supposed to know the answer to Oliver’s ridiculous opening question.
This
was who he was supposed to meet—not me.
Never
me. Though from his expression he seemed quite unnerved. He looked away, shoving his glasses back onto his nose. “Ummm—a seat?” he asked, and tentatively patted the empty chair.

The girl stared at Oliver. Her eyes narrowed, and a curious expression crept over her face. Mingled apprehension and longing, but also a sort of restrained
hauteur,
as though she waited for a servant to come show her to her chair. As though she, too, had been expecting someone different. It was an unsettling expression to see in someone my own age. I wished I had taken a seat in the front of the room, wished that I’d never come here at all.

Her gaze flicked from Oliver to the chair beside him, and then to me. I found myself staring right back at her—a cat may look at a queen, right? For a long moment her eyes held mine. Luminous eyes, bottle green and almond-shaped, with long curled lashes tinted a dusky green as improbable as her irises. At the front of the room the muted conversation had stopped.

“We-ell,” the girl said softly. She shifted her bag to her other shoulder and stepped into the room. Then, to my surprise, she spun on her heel and sank into an empty chair.

The chair next to
me.

“I am Angelica di Rienzi,” she said, and smiled.

“Wow.”
An explosive breath from someone in the front of the room. “Daddy, buy me one of
those.”

She was like a pre-Raphaelite Venus. Those enormous slanted eyes, cheekbones so high and sharp you’d cut your lip if you tried to kiss them. A wide curved mouth carefully shaped and colored with pale violet lip-gloss, hiding perfectly white teeth and just the slightest hint of an overbite. Her hair was a gorgon’s tangle of bronze curls, pulled back loosely with a thick purple velvet ribbon and hanging halfway down her back. Between soft tendrils glinted a pair of gold hoop earrings set with amethyst beads, and around her long neck hung a fine gold chain set with another, single tear-shaped amethyst. She wore a flowing cotton peasant dress, with short gathered sleeves and a scoop neck and little violet ribbons trailing from the bodice. Your basic trust fund hippie look, and just about anyone who affected it—me, for instance—would look infantile or perhaps, if they were fortunate, engagingly girlish.

But not Angelica di Rienzi. Angelica looked
regal.
How can I describe what it was like, seeing her in a university classroom? A classroom at the Divine, to be sure, but still just a classroom, smelling of chalk and cigarettes, floor wax and earnest fear. It was like glimpsing a peacock on a lawn in New Rochelle; like hearing someone sing the
Magnificat
in Grand Central Station. No one could look at her and not believe that the world would give her whatever she wanted. Not even Oliver. Not even me.

She tilted her head. “And you must be—?”

“Sweeney,” I said, my voice cracking. “Sweeney Cassidy.”

“Angelica.” Oliver repeated her name slowly, unconsciously aping Angelica’s theatrical diction. He moved his desk and chair closer to hers and extended his hand. “Oliver Wilde Crawford.”

Angelica nodded graciously. She pulled a notebook from her bag and let the purse slide to the floor, then, with another dazzling smile, took his hand.