Waking the Moon

Against her ruddy palm the lunula gleamed, the sun igniting its etched surface so that she could see all the moons there at once, new moon, full moon, dark, and within its curving bands of light the contours of a face, shuttered eyes and mouth half-open to the dawn, a sheen of blood staining her cheeks and lip and chin: Artemis, Durga, Cybele, Hecate, Inachus, Kali, Hel…

The Great Mother, lover and slayer of Her faithful son.

Othiym Lunarsa. The Woman in the Moon.

CHAPTER 5 The Sound of Bones and Flutes

WE NEVER MADE IT to Dumbarton Oaks. “Actually,” Oliver said, steam from his coffee clouding his glasses, “I think they’re closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.”

I tilted my cup until I could see my face reflected in it. “That’s okay. I don’t know where I would’ve gotten a bike.”

Medieval History had come and gone, then Introduction to Archaeology, followed by Oliver’s Early Greek Drama and my Philosophy 101. We hadn’t moved from our booth in the Shrine cafeteria, except to help ourselves to unlimited refills from a pair of battered plastic thermoses on a side table along the wall. Oliver took great interest in the endless stream of tour groups that filed through.

“Now watch them,” Oliver announced, tilting his nose toward a claque of grey-haired women. “Fill their plates because it’s an all-you-can-eat thing, but they won’t eat any of it, except the salad. Just watch.”

Ten minutes later, the women left. Oliver leapt from his seat and sidled up to their empty booth. He returned a moment later with two laden plates.

“See?” he said triumphantly, setting one of them before me. “You like shrimp creole? She didn’t even touch it.”

I stared at my plate. The shrimp creole did indeed look untouched. Only a fastidious bite taken from a biscuit, and a smear of lipstick on the water glass showed that he hadn’t just filled the plate himself. Looking at it made me feel ill.

“Uh—no thanks,” I said, standing. “More coffee?”

Oliver shook his head. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small object roughly the shape and length of his forefinger. When he held it up I saw that it was a little silver pocketknife tarnished almost black. On one side an elegant monogram spelled OFOW in extravagant arabesques. Oliver flicked it open and a glittering blade appeared, like a minnow leaping from dark water. He speared a triangle of overdone meat. “Would you like some liver?”

He polished off three plates. I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything, and I was so nervous I drank coffee till my ears rang. But I didn’t care. I felt the way you do when you wake up in the morning and, before you even get out of bed, remember it’s the first day of summer vacation. Here I was, on my own for the first time, with all the Gothic mysteries of the Divine to be explored and an entire city to discover. The sickening loneliness that had haunted my first days was abating, but that wasn’t what made me feel light-headed, so giddy I laughed at everything.

What it was, was Oliver.

He was so beautiful, and so odd, and so utterly unself-conscious. If I’d been older, I might have found him insufferable, with his fey affectations and prep school jargon; but I’d never met anyone like him. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes made of dried flowers from England that smelled sweet as rain. He claimed secret knowledge of IRA gun-running operations and military experiments using LSD. He showed me a tiny scar on his right hand, beside his pinkie, where he said a useless sixth finger had been amuptated hours after his birth. And there was his beauty, and the way he made me feel that I was in on a secret. Most of all, I guess, it was how he seemed to take for granted that I was his confidante, that I would always understand what he was talking about.

“Here,” he said, after finishing his last plate of liver. He took my hand, placed a neatly folded paper triangle in the palm, and closed my fingers around it. I opened it: the page that Angelica had given him during class, now covered with spidery drawings.

“Hey!” I smoothed the paper on the table. “These are really good.”

They were funny, rather wistful caricatures of Oliver and Angelica and myself, with Professor Warnick a Nijinsky faun dancing in the foreground, sistrum upheld, sparks shooting from his little horns.

Oliver grinned. “You’ll like The Golden Ass,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“Actually, I’ve read it.” I hadn’t, of course, but figured by tomorrow I would have.

“We-ell.” Oliver’s chair thumped forward. “I thought so,” he said softly, and began telling me his history.

He was from Newport, from an old, old money family that had its roots in County Meath in Ireland. Oliver claimed some character in a Fitzgerald story was based on his grandfather, and that Booth Tarkington had written The Magnificent Ambersons after the tragic death of Oliver’s great-great-aunt. His parents were famous (and famously wealthy) anthropologists, now estranged.

“Sort of,” Oliver explained. “Mom lives in the carriage house and does her pottery. Dad’s still in the main house, because of all his America’s Cup stuff.”

Oliver himself was the youngest of six brothers. The two oldest had enlisted to fight in Vietnam. Osgood died there. Vance returned a junkie and now lived in San Francisco. Another brother, Leopold, was a well-known female impersonator in London. Cooper played piano in Newport jazz clubs; Waldo had become a Buddhist monk.

That left Oliver.

“So what are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “I’m a legacy. We Crawfords all attend the Divine. I didn’t really have a choice. They tapped me a long time ago. I went to Fairchild Abbey—”

A preparatory school in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, run by an obscure order of brothers. Not Jesuits, Oliver was quick to explain; not Benedictines either.

I laughed. “So what’s left? Capuchins? Franciscans? Cathars?”

“No.” He frowned so fiercely that I looked into my coffee cup, abashed.

“There’ll probably be some there tonight,” he said a minute later, and sighed. “At that damn reception, I mean.”

I waited for him to go on. When he said nothing, I took a deep breath and asked, “So what are they? The Molyneux scholars, I mean?”

Oliver only gazed at the ceiling again. When I glanced up I saw squares of petrified Jell-O arrayed across the acoustical tile, like Mah-Jongg pieces. I decided to save face by getting more coffee. But then—

“Magicians,” he pronounced as I slid my chair back.

“What?”

“They’re magicians.”

For a moment I caught the full force of his eyes: so improbably brilliant and defiant he looked slightly deranged. Before I could say anything he glanced at his wrist.

“Uh-oh! Four o’clock, time for tea!” He stumbled to his feet.

“But it’s—I mean, it can’t be more than three—”

Oliver gulped the last of his coffee, held up his wrist so I could see the faded timepiece drawn there. “Wild Bill—harvesting the psylocibin—paid him last night—got to get back to the dorm. See you at seven—”

I watched him lope down the aisle, waving distractedly at a table of guys in fraternity sweatshirts. On the wall above them a dusty-faced clock showed it was nearly four.

“Damn!” I grabbed my knapsack. If I hurried, I might make my last class of the day.