Waking the Moon (61 page)

“What?” Dylan mumbled.

“About guys reaching their sexual peak at nineteen.”

“Yeah? Then you have something to look forward to.” He rolled over and hugged me. “My birthday’s not till August first.”

“You’re only
eighteen
?”

He sat up, grinning. “Yup. Wanna know something else?”

I fanned myself with yesterday’s
Post.
“I don’t know if my heart can stand any more.”

“This is the first time I did it.”

“Did what?”

“You know.” He looked at me sheepishly, and I suddenly noticed he was blushing.
“It.”

“It?”
I dropped the newspaper, shocked. “You mean, you’re a—”

“A lot of people are,” Dylan said defensively. “I mean, people
my
age. And—well, I never really
wanted
to before. Not much,” he ended lamely, and stared out the window.

“Holy cow,” I said, and collapsed onto a heap of pillows. “I think I need a drink.”

I got up, padded downstairs, and got a nearly full bottle of chardonnay from the refrigerator. I found two wineglasses and some fruit that I put into a basket—a bunch of black grapes, a rather wizened orange, a couple of figs that I’d bought impulsively and at an outrageous price at Eastern Market a few days before.

“Here,” I announced when I got back upstairs. I put the basket on the bed beside Dylan and poured some wine. “Nectar of the gods.”

We lay next to each other and drank and ate. The sunlight didn’t slant through the windows so much as flow, ripe with the carrion scents of wisteria and gingko fruit, burning charcoal and magnolia blossom and car exhaust: the sooty green smell that is summer in D.C.

“I love figs,” said Dylan. He bit into one, exposing the tender pink flesh beneath the dark husk. “We had fig trees at Keftiu—my father always said they were the real fruit in the Bible—you know, with Adam and Eve. But my mother said it was pomegranates.”

“Mmm,” I said, sipping my wine. “So. You never had a girlfriend, huh?”

He finished his fig and tossed the gnarled remnant out the window. “Not really. I went away to school a lot—prep schools, you didn’t really have a chance to meet girls. At least I never did, not in the States. Here I was like, Eurotrash, and over there I was the ugly American. And there was always my mother, you know?” He sighed and reached for his wineglass, stared into it for a long moment before going on. “My mother made me kind of paranoid about stuff.”

“Stuff? You mean—uh,
sex?”
I caught myself.
Angelica
preaching abstinence? Anger warmed me along with the wine, but I bit my tongue and nodded. “How interesting.”

“Yeah. I guess because I’m her only child. And AIDS, of course. And in Italy it’s a little different from here. All those Catholics—”

A pang shot through me. It had been so long, and what with
the tej,
and the night—I hadn’t even
thought
about AIDS. Or birth control. Or anything.

“Jesus, Dylan, you’re not, uh—”

He looked at me with those brilliantly guileless blue eyes. “No. I never got tested for AIDS. I didn’t need to.”

“Me neither.” I laughed, embarrassed, tried to cover for it by grabbing a handful of grapes. “I guess it’s different now, huh?”

Dylan yawned. “I guess. But my mother always made such a big deal about my being pure. About
saving
myself. For some crazy sacred marriage.” He stretched, his long lean body glistening with sweat, his hairless chest taut with muscle. I found my mouth getting dry, despite the grapes, and hastily drank some more wine.

“Saving yourself,” I repeated stupidly. The idea was ludicrous. A child of Angelica’s, saving himself for marriage?

“Not anymore.” He leaned over and kissed me, then buried his face against my breasts. “Oh god, you smell so good—”

We kissed, too happily exhausted to do more, and then Dylan adjusted the fan so that its scant breeze coursed over us.

“I’m sorry—I’m probably the only person in D.C. who doesn’t have air-conditioning.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t bother me. It reminds me of—”

I laughed. “I know—Keftiu.”

“I was going to say Venice. Crete is much hotter than this. Drier, too.” He frowned and, with a swooping motion, pushed the hair from his face—a gesture that suddenly, heartbreakingly, made me think of Oliver. “Does it bother you? Talking about my mother?”

“No.” The truth was, I’d somehow managed to forget about Angelica until he’d mentioned her—Oliver, too, until that moment. And it was strange, because being with Dylan suddenly made Oliver seem both more alive and more distant from me than he ever had. “No, it doesn’t. It just seems weird. I never would have thought Angelica would consider—well, that she’d think marriage was sacred.”

“My mother is very strange, Sweeney.” I started to laugh again, but Dylan’s expression was grim. “I’m not kidding. It’s not that she thinks marriage is sacred—she doesn’t. I still don’t know why she married my father. I’m pretty sure she didn’t love him. Not the way you’re supposed to love someone. Not the way—”

He leaned over and let his lips graze mine. His hair fell across my eyes for a moment, and I felt dizzy, breathing in his scent; but then he drew back.

“Not the way I feel about you,” he said in a soft voice, and any thought of laughing went right out of my head. He sat up again and sighed. “But she has this thing, about some sacred marriage—it’s got to do with her goddamn cult. All those women …”

“You mean like Sun Myoung Moon, marrying off his followers in Madison Square Garden or something?”

“I don’t know. It’s a secret, to me at least. Maybe they’re all going to marry each other. But I doubt it.” He picked up his wineglass and stared into it. “Hey, look—a bug.”

He tipped the glass toward the window, and I watched as a honeybee crawled out. Dylan blew on it; the bee somersaulted drunkenly across the windowsill, then disappeared outside.

“I know just how it feels,” I said, and poured him the rest of the wine. “Listen, you don’t have to talk about your mother if it—well, if it’s weird for you.”

“It’s not weird for me.” His voice took on an edgy, aloof tone, and for a moment I felt the same sharp panic that had seized me before.

Because crazy as it was—
and it was crazy!
I was twice this kid’s age, I’d gone to school with his parents, if things had gone differently I might have
been
one of his parents, on top of which I’d only known him for twenty-four hours, during which we’d fucked six times and I had
called in sick to work!
—crazy as all this was, I knew I was falling for him.
Had
fallen for him. Me, Katherine Sweeney Cassidy, who’d spent almost twenty years in an emotional coma—

I. Was. In. Love.

“… do you understand?”

I started. “Huh? I’m sorry, Dylan—”

He traced the line of my calf. “I was just saying that it’s not weird for me to talk about my mother. It’s that
she’s
weird—
really
weird. I love her, I really do; but I don’t really
know
her. I was always away at boarding schools, and she’d be off on all her digs, and even when she took me along there was always someone she paid to take care of me—tutors and stuff. She was always
nice
to me, it’s not like she was mean or something, it’s just—”

He stopped and sighed. I wanted to put my arms around him, I wanted to tell him I understood—that I knew what Angelica was like, that it was okay—but I was afraid to. I was afraid I’d seem too quick to comfort him, afraid I’d seem too
maternal.
So I just sat beside him on the bed and waited for him to go on.

“It’s just that she’s so fucking
intense
,” he said finally. Against his tan face his eyes burned like midnight blue flames. “She has all these bizarre ideas, these mad prophecies; but a lot of them come true.”

“Like—what?” I asked guardedly.

“Like earthquakes. Remember that big quake in L.A.? Well, two days before it hits, out of nowhere she calls me at school and tells me that she’s taking me with her to Minneapolis for a few days. Minneapolis! But I thought, okay, I’ll check out the music scene there, which I did.

“But meanwhile, everything back in L.A. goes
fwooom
—”

He slapped the bed with his open palms, with such vehemence that I jumped.

“All our neighbors’ houses slide into the canyon, but
our
house—
Mom’s
house—it doesn’t even
move.
Now you’d think my mother would be upset when she heard about this earthquake, right? That she’d be on the first plane back there to make sure everything’s okay. But no—she takes her time, which is a good thing, considering how violent all those aftershocks were. And when we finally get back to L.A., and get to the house—
nothing has moved.
I mean,
nothing.
All these rare statuettes and icons she brought from Crete and Italy, they haven’t even shifted on their shelves. The books haven’t moved. The dishes haven’t moved.
Nada.
I asked her, I thought maybe she’d paid someone to come in and clean it up before she got back, but no. An earthquake has leveled the entire West Coast, except for my mother’s house.”

He fell silent, and stared fiercely out to where the wisteria leaves hung limply from their woody vines. I waited before saying anything. My mouth was dry, I felt chilled in spite of the torrid heat; but if it killed me I wasn’t going to let Angelica and her weirdness into my carriage house.

“So she had a premonition,” I said at last. “Well, thank god she did, or you might have been hurt, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Dylan said bitterly. He shook his head, his long hair spilling across his shoulders. “A premonition! My mother has nothing
but
premonitions! Hurricane Andrew, Mount Pinatubo, some mudslide in Bangladesh—she’s
always
got an inside track on natural disasters. This woman told me once that my mother had told some scientists—women scientists—to leave Finland, because there was going to be some kind of disaster, and it turned out she was right: it turned out she was talking about Chernobyl. Her and her followers, they’re always on the first train out of town, a good twenty-four hours before the storm hits.”

I took a deep breath. “So—what are you telling me, Dylan? Do you really think Angelica knew about all those things before they happened?”

Dylan turned those burning blue eyes on me. I saw a sort of desperation in him: that I didn’t believe him, that I thought he was crazy. For the first time I could see how it might have been hard for him—despite his beauty, despite the gold earrings and Doc Martens and all the other trappings of flaming youth—to find a girlfriend. Hard maybe to make any friends at all.

“Yes,” he said, daring me to argue. “She did.”

I waited. Then, “I believe you, Dylan,” I said softly. I reached to touch him on the shoulder, half-expecting him to flinch or turn away. But he didn’t. He turned and took me in his arms. I could feel him trembling as he whispered, “She scares me sometimes, Sweeney. I know she’s my mother, but she scares me …”

“Me too,” I murmured, and stroked his tangled hair, the two of us holding each other so tightly that not even the golden air could slide between us.

“The way she talks,” he went on in a low voice, like a child comforting himself. “All this crazy goddess stuff, but the way she goes on about it in her books and all, it almost makes sense. You can really see how these women fall for it. It’s not just that she
knows
about these things. I can believe that. I mean, animals know when there’s going to be an earthquake, right? But some of the people who’re into all her New Age stuff,
they
think she
makes it happen
! Like in Hawaii they think there’s this goddess Pele who makes the volcanoes blow up—these people think my mother can actually
do
that!”

He rubbed his forehead as though it pained him. “Sometimes, I think my mother believes it herself.”

“Oh, she does, Dylan,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me.

“You know what she’s like?” he said at last. “This picture I saw when I was at Lawrenceville. An X ray of the inside of a nuclear blast, taken out at White Sands. Have you ever see that? Outside you can see all this smoke, this huge mushroom cloud and flames everywhere. But inside it’s just all this fire, and then in the very middle, there’s a black hollow core. Like there’s all this destruction around it, but in the middle there’s nothing there at all.”

I shuddered and reached for my glass. “Maybe we should think about going out to get something to eat,” I suggested, finishing my wine. “You hungry?”

Unexpectedly, Dylan laughed, as though we’d been talking of nothing more serious than the weather, then rolled over to slide his arms around my waist. “I could be,” he said, nuzzling my throat. “Maybe. If I had the chance to work up an appetite—”

Later, we went out to eat.

When we returned that night, Dylan tried calling Dr. Dvorkin, to see about picking up his things from the main house. But Robert was out, no doubt caught up in selecting the new regent, or else with the Aditi or the Mall’s Independence Day celebrations or any of the million other things that consumed his life. I finally gave Dylan my key, so he could get into the house and retrieve his things. He returned to the carriage house with a knapsack, a gym bag stuffed with clothes, a personal CD player, and a couple of paperbacks,
Shampoo Planet
and
Pylon
and a book about the Neanderthals.

“That’s it?” I stared at the overflowing gym bag. “That’s all you brought for the entire summer?”

Dylan shrugged. “My mom’s coming out for my birthday. She’ll get me some more clothes then.”

We called in sick the next day, and the day after that. We stayed in my bedroom in the carriage house, with the wisteria trailing through the open window and the old fan in the belfry humming like a hornet’s nest. At night we’d venture out onto the Hill, walking as in a trance through the blue-veined air, drunk on sex and heat and wine, both of us not a little stunned to find the city still around us, the sound of firecrackers and police cruisers crackling somewhere just out of sight. At twilight government workers filled the outdoor cafés, crowding the little round marble-topped tables. Street kids vied with each other along the southeast strip of Pennsylvania Avenue, kicking through spent blossoms and McDonald’s wrappers and the frayed blackened tails of firecracker strings. At 3:00
A.M.
the streets filled with revelers leaving the bars, and their laughter became part of our sleep and our lovemaking, laughter and the crash of bottles breaking against the curb, like surf pounding a far-off shore.