Moonglow by Michael Chabon
“You almost had me.” Uncle Ray grew calm, his tone measured. “You are coming in there with me,” he said, “and you are going to be glad that you did. And do you know how I know you’re coming in there with me?”
“How?”
“Because that is the Holy One’s plan for you.”
“Oh, really, God has a plan for me? About goddamn time.”
Home a month, my grandfather was out of work, depressed, and scuffling. His college degree had been gathering dust for six years. His experience in Europe qualified him for nothing that was legal in peacetime. His Philadelphia homecoming had seemed to disappoint all participants, in particular his parents, whose keenest disappointment lay in discovering that, despite the captain’s bars and the decorations for actions he could not discuss, they were still disappointed in him.
“Everything that has happened to you in your life before now,” Uncle Ray said, “was part of the plan. And tonight it’s all going to come together and make sense.”
“You know this.”
“I do.”
“God slips you the inside dope.”
Uncle Ray ran his hand along the tuck-and-roll upholstery under his thigh, his smooth chin adorned with the minute smirk of a man with a fix in.
“Christ, you are so full of it, Ray!”
“Yeah? So let’s make a bet,” Uncle Ray said. Only moments after his pious outburst, along the very lines my grandfather had employed to needle him, my great-uncle pointed unwittingly toward the exit door through which he and the custom Brunswick pool stick would afterward pass. “Five hundred dollars says you walk into that shul, in the first half hour—no, in the first ten minutes—the Holy One’s plan for you will be revealed. The reason you needed to show up tonight.”
“What horseshit,” my grandfather said. “Brother, you are on.”
His discharge pay had been snarled in red tape, and he didn’t have anything close to five hundred dollars, but he figured you had to like his odds.
* * *
My grandmother turned toward the doors of the reception room, curious to see the new-crowned princeling of Jewish Baltimore. She caught a glimpse of a slender young man in a navy blazer with buttons like gold coins. Under a velvet yarmulke, also navy blue, he wore his ginger hair half an inch too long. Entering the room, he was mobbed by a group of men (among them Judge Waxman) who teased and fussed over him like uncles ushering a virgin nephew into a brothel. The rabbi was soon lost from view. Mrs. Waxman coughed up a Yiddish imprecation or description of what lay in store for her husband when they got home.
“I don’t know,” my grandmother heard the rabbi say. He was making a show of reluctance, letting the men pull him by the wrists into the room. “Gentlemen, I have my doubts.”
As he was swept, redolent of gardenia, past my grandmother, she heard him apologizing for his tardiness. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Blame my date.”
“The brother,” Mrs. Zellner said. She sounded doubtful of the identification, as if the visible facts did not conform with what she had been told. “A decorated war hero.”
My grandmother saw my grandfather lingering in the hallway outside the reception room, looking as if he harbored doubts far graver than his brother’s. He kept his hands straightjacketed so fiercely in his pockets that they had begun to pull open the fly of his trousers. His knit necktie was ill-knotted, and his brown tweed blazer, worn over a chambray shirt that needed ironing, was too tight at the shoulders. Everything—the music, the lights, the rattle of wheels and dice, the outbursts of joy or disgust from the tables, his clothes, his skin—seemed to fit the man too tightly. Only his eyes had found a way to escape. They leaped to my grandmother from the hollows of his face as though from the windows of a burning house.
“He could stand a little more decoration,” said Mrs. Waxman.
* * *
For all the resistance he had put up to attending that evening’s event, my grandfather had given no thought to what it would be like when he got there. It was worse than he could have imagined. “Night in Monte Carlo”! A sequined half-moon, swags of ten-watt stars, paper carnations and potted palms, all carted in to cloak machinery that had been rigged to grind everyone down to zero sooner or later: To my grandfather, postwar, it seemed a ham-fisted synopsis of the world as he had come to understand it.
He sidled a little way into the room, hands stuffed into the pockets of his workman’s pants, feeling fit for nothing. He lowered his head to avert his eyes from the gaudiness and blare, the unseemliness of his unscathed homeland and countrymen, the unseemliness of Baltimore and its thirty thousand well-fed Jews.
The girl in the black dress walked right up to him. He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
“I was not ready for her,” he told me. “I was totally unprepared.”
She was wearing sunglasses indoors, at night. Around her shoulders the remains of what had been a fox sank its teeth into itself. She came confidently but hedging a little, head cocked to one side, as if only eighty-five percent certain they had met before and prepared to acknowledge her mistake. Between the fox stole and the bateau neck of the cocktail dress (on loan from the board president’s daughter) blazed an inch of bare white collarbone.
My grandfather heard Mrs. Waxman and Mrs. Zellner disconsolately calling after my grandmother as she bridged the final twenty feet of linoleum mock-parquetry that separated him from her. He registered the tick-tock oscillation of her hips, the amplitude of the curves divulged by the cut of the taffeta dress. During the war he had come to depend on his pool hustler’s gift for taking rapid readings of other people’s eyes, and her sunglasses unnerved him. They struck him as unlikely. He wondered if she was in costume, starring later in a skit or pageant on the theme of “Night in Monte Carlo.” He surprised himself by smiling, which unnerved him further. The girl’s lips were painted red as Bicycle hearts and diamonds, and they parted to reveal an Ingrid Bergman smile to go with the sunglasses.* My grandfather heard a sound inside his head that he compared, years later, to the freight-train rumble of an earthquake. He felt he was standing in the path of something fast-moving and gigantic that, in its blindness, was bound to carry him away. Swept off his feet, he thought. This is that. At the last moment he managed to return his gaze to his shoe tops and shook his head.
“Unbelievable,” he said, aware that he was still smiling, and that he owed his brother five hundred bucks.
* * *
Where the carport roof overhung the patio my mother had set out a birdfeeder, a Lucite tube with an aluminum peg for a perch, packed with birdseed, dangling on a chain. My grandfather liked to keep an eye on the traffic through his window. He took particular interest in a squirrel he called “the momzer,” which came every day to raid the feeder. The momzer lacked grace, finesse, the power of flight. Once it had scattered the sparrows, it would approach the business end of the birdfeeder with a fierceness and a purpose whose futility amused my grandfather. The momzer was subject to gravity and the physics of a pendulum in ways a bird could not understand. It would begin with bold resolve, clambering down the chain from the overhang, hurling itself from a nearby trellis. But within seconds it would find itself clinging by its forepaws to the metal peg, or to the bottom of the tube, its tail madly switching, while the birdfeeder bucked and gyrated and worked to shake the momzer loose. As though he had yet to exorcise the demon that, decades ago, had urged him to drop a kitten out of a third-story window, my grandfather burst into laughter every time the squirrel fell, with a meaty thud, onto the flagstones of the patio. Sometimes he laughed so hard that I would have to take a Kleenex and wipe tears from his eyes.
“All those ladies in the Sisterhood, putting out their birdseed to catch a little chickadee,” my grandfather said. “But they caught a momzer instead.”
* * *
According to my grandfather, my grandmother’s first words to her future husband were: “Your head would look go
She had approached him with an unlit cigarette scissored between her index and middle fingers, one eyebrow, just visible over the rim of her sunglasses, arched in entreaty. My grandfather got the immediate sense, from the dumbshow and from something else—a lack of gaucherie in her girlishness—that she might be a foreigner. He lit her cigarette with Aughenbaugh’s lighter.
“Come again?” my grandfather said, the lighter’s flame stopped just short of the tip of his own cigarette. He replayed the remark in his mind. He decided he had heard her correctly, that she had indeed told him his head would look good on a fence. “How so?”
My grandfather had seen human heads discarded or reposed in unusual places, though never, it was true, on a fence. Nevertheless, he felt this was a conversational gambit he would not have thought to attempt. Because he could not see my grandmother’s eyes, he could not come to any solid conclusions about the spirit in which her observation had been offered. Only much later did he realize that in her weird way she had dispatched, with one stroke, the problem of making small talk with strangers.
“Oh, dear, I made a fault,” she said. “I see you take offense.”
“It’s my natural expression,” my grandfather said. “You’d look like this, too, if somebody stuck your head on a fence.”
“Wall.” The word burst forth from her, followed by a startling heehaw of laughter. She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry. I mean to say wall, not fence.”
“That changes everything,” my grandfather said. His approach to the art of flirtation with women was founded on an impeccable poker face.
“Wait,” she said, trying to hold back another of her braying laughs. “Have you ever seen a, how do you say, catheedral?”
With three sweeps of her white arms, she drew the walls, towers, and spires of a cathedral. She sketched with an efficiency of gesture that came as close as anything he remembered having seen to what poets and sportswriters liked to call grace. As her hands soared and dived, the coal of her cigarette shed glowing threads of tobacco. The orange sparks were reflected in the lenses of her cheaters. She finished by miming a rose window, encircling her fingers over her chest, a zone to which my grandfather’s attention had already been drawn. Brassieres of the era were architectural affairs; in her bust, with its loft and scale and defiance of gravity, there was something cathedral-like that moved him. Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He read its brief account and felt ashamed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen some cathedrals.”
“On the walls,” she said. “The ancient walls.” She pronounced it hancient. “You see faces in the stone. That is the kind of the face you have.”
“Got it,” he said. “I look like a gargoyle.”
“Yes! No! Not a . . .” and she came out with the French word for gargoyle, which my grandfather after forty-two years could no longer retrieve. “Those are to catch the rain, and they are animals, monsters, they are ugly. That is not the kind of the face you have.”
That was at least partly a lie. To one of her psychiatrists, she later confessed that she did think he was ugly, albeit in a way she found appealing, even arousing. When she first saw him, standing at the threshold of the reception room, contemplating departure before he had even arrived, she thought he had an American face, an American body. Buick shoulders, bulldozer jaw. Only if you considered his eyes would you be forced to conclude, and she did conclude, that he was beautiful.
“I am the one who look like the gargoyle,” she said.
“Hardly.”
“Yes,” she said. “On the inside.”
He let that one pass without comment, taking it for prattle, compliment-fishing; his first misjudgment, his first encounter with the voice of the Skinless Horse, speaking through her.
“Can I ask you to do something?” he said. “Would you by any chance be willing to take off those glasses?”
She stood very still, red lips pressed together. He wondered if he had made some kind of gaffe, if asking a Frenchwoman to remove her sunglasses violated a well-known Gallic taboo.
“The eye doctor said I am not supposed to,” she said. Her voice faltered. “But I will.” This came out barely louder than a whisper.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Never mind. You can just tell me what color your eyes are. That’s all I really wanted to know.”
“No,” she said. “I will take them off for you. But also you have to do something for me. Let me to do something, I mean to say.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
I don’t know how many people could have seen my grandparents, standing there in the hallway outside the doors of the reception room, whether anyone was paying any attention. But even if they had been standing in an empty room, I imagine that neither my grandfather nor the mores of 1947 can have expected my grandmother to do what she did next. Looking back at that night from inside the soft gray nimbus of Dilaudid, my grandfather could only close his eyes, the way he closed them that night, as she reached out to the fly of his trousers and, tooth by tooth, zipped him up.
“C’est fait,” she said.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself lost for the first time in hers. They were the color of twilight in Monte Carlo, when the stars come out to twinkle like ten-watt bulbs, and the quarter-moon fans her hem of sequins against the sky.
“Blue,” my grandfather said, falling back against the pillow of the rented hospital bed in my mother’s guest room. After that it was a long time, hours, before he opened his eyes again.
7
Just before midnight of September 29, 1989, my grandfather completed the model of LAV One. It represented the latest thinking on lunar settlement design (the reason it had needed so many revisions), fourteen years’ work, and about twenty-two thousand individual polystyrene pieces cannibalized from commercial model kits.* At the center of the model, amid the half-buried tunnels, bays, domes, huts, landing strips, and radar arrays, there was a hole about four inches in diameter. Looking down into this hole, you could see through to the plywood substructure of the model’s molded lunar surface. If you asked my grandfather the purpose of the hole, he would always give you some variation on You’ll just have to wait and find out; to be honest, there was not a lot of variation. After a while—no doubt according to his plan—I stopped asking.
He went to his workbench and took down a gaudy Romeo y Julieta cigar box. He removed a bundle of tissue paper from the box and unwrapped a circular structure fashioned from a take-out coffee-cup lid. He had initially completed the moon garden in May 1975, pillaging tiny n- and British OO-scale model train kits to fill it with flowering shrubs, rosebushes, and vegetables grown in hydroponic racks. With a careful thumbnail he lifted the lid’s sipping flap, which he had reconfigured as an access hatch. He peered in to check on the family who had replaced the original lovers as occupants of the moon garden. On a sling bench and two sling chairs of his own design, enjoying moist and oxygenated air, sat figures representing my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, and my brother and me. The figures were posed stiffly (even for polystyrene people), as if for a formal photograph. Everyone safe and sound.
My grandfather lowered the flap. He carried the moon garden to the model of LAV One and fitted it into the hole that awaited it. He was not aware of any great sense of accomplishment. It was a job he had left undone for too long, a promise too long unkept, and what he felt most was relief.
Six months later he would be dead.
The next morning, well before dawn, my grandfather went out into the dense Florida darkness to load the trunk of his Buick LeSabre for a trip to Cape Canaveral. There had been no launches since the Challenger disaster nearly four years earlier. Now another shuttle, Discovery, was scheduled to lift off that morning at ten. He had filled a bait cooler with a freezer pack, a bottle of Michelob, a plastic food container of cut-up pineap
Like any habitation of the elderly, Fontana Village was rich in insomniacs and early birds, but for the moment my grandfather had the morning to himself. Before closing the trunk of his car, he leaned against the rear bumper and listened to the silence. It was not perfect. It was never perfect. But he had come to appreciate how small or distant sounds could intensify it, the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness. The tick-tick of an insect or possibly a frog. A big rig downshifting out on I-95. Mist effervescing in the beams of the security lighting. Underlying everything, the low-pitched tinnitus that was the sound of Fontana Village itself, a compound hum of air conditioners, vending machines, circuit breakers, swimming-pool filtration systems, poorly insulated wire. A woman’s voice, far away, calling out, “Ramon!”
My grandfather straightened up. He angled his head, his ear a dish attuned to the cosmic background radiation. He shuffled the short deck of Ramons he had encountered in his life. None of them lived in Fontana Village. There were some Cubans living at Fontana Village, and they sometimes had first names like Adolfo and Raquel, but they were Jews like everybody else, Goldmans and Levys come to the promised land of South Florida along a different branch of the river of exile. He did not know any of the Cuban Jews well. One of them might well be Ramon. Ramon Lifschitz. Ramon Weinblatt. From time to time some poor bastard with dementia went walkabout, and you would see his wife or the home care nurse running after him, shouting his name.