Waking the Moon

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