“It’s a half-moon tonight.”
She nodded and turned to me with worry in her eyes, what I took to be the endearing worry that she was strange or damaged, or the even more endearing worry that I might be repulsed by her. But I wasn’t repulsed. I was thrilled that she’d confided in me and wanted me enough to worry about repulsing me. I thought I’d never heard of anything more amazing and singular: in perfect sync with the moon!
She must have felt relieved by how ardently I kissed her and reassured her, because her actual worry had to do with the rather obvious corollary to her confession: if I was committed to complete mutuality, to doing nothing with her that she couldn’t equally join in, I was going to be getting laid three days a month at best. She assumed that I could see this corollary. I didn’t see it. But even if I had, three days a month would have looked pretty great from where I was sitting that night. (Later, indeed, when we were married, it did come to look pretty great, in the rearview mirror.)
A week later, arriving early at Thirtieth Street for the SEPTA train, I had an impulse to buy something for Anabel in honor of our fourth date. I wandered down to the book-and-magazine store, hoping it might have a copy of Augie March, which Oswald had taught me to consider the finest novel by a living American, but it didn’t. My eye was caught instead by a stuffed animal, a miniature black plush-toy bull with stubby felt horns and sleepy eyes. I bought it and put it in my knapsack. On the train, crossing the Schuylkill, I saw the full moon gilding fair-weather clouds over Germantown. I was already so far gone that the moon seemed to me the personal property of Anabel. Like something I could touch and was about to.
Anabel, in her kitchen, wearing a stunning black dress, opened another bottle of Château Montrose. “This is the last bottle,” she said. “I gave the other eight to the winos behind the liquor store.”
Eights and fours, everywhere eights and fours.
“They must have thought you were their angel,” I said.
“No, in fact, they hassled me because I didn’t have a corkscrew.”
I’d expected the night to be magical through and through, but instead we had our first fight. I made a joking offhand allusion to her father’s wealth, and she became upset, because everywhere she went she was hated as the rich girl, and I was not to joke about it, she couldn’t be with me if that was how I thought of her, she hated the money enough without my reminding her of it, she was already knee-deep in the blood of it. After my tenth unavailing apology, I found some backbone and got angry. If she didn’t want to be the rich girl, maybe she should stop wearing a different dress from Bendel’s every time I saw her! She was shocked by my anger. Her deer’s eyes bulged at me. She poured her wine into the sink and then upended the bottle over it. For my information, she hadn’t bought a new dress since her senior year at Brown, but this clearly didn’t matter to me, I clearly had my own idea about her, and I’d dragged my wrong idea into what was supposed to have been a perfect night. Everything was ruined. Everything. And so on. She finally stormed out of the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom.
Sitting by myself, listening to the sound of her showering, I had the opportunity to replay our fight in my head, and it seemed to me that everything out of my mouth had been the words of a jerk. I was gripped by my old sense of ineluctable male wrongness. My only hope of cleansing was to dissolve my self in Anabel’s. It seemed that black and white to me. Only she could save me from male error. By the time she came out of the bathroom, wearing lovely white flannel pajamas with pale-blue piping, I was shivering and crying.
“Oh dear,” she said, kneeling at my feet.
“I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I just love you.”
I was in wretched earnest, but my dick was eavesdropping in my corduroys and sprang to life. She rested her cheek and damp hair on my knee. “Did I hurt you?”
“It was my fault.”
“No, you were right,” she said. “I’m weak. I love my clothes. I’m going to give up everything, but I can’t give up my clothes yet. Please don’t think badly of me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. We just needed to have a fight tonight, that’s all. It was a test we had to go through.”
“I love your clothes,” I said. “I love how you look in them. I’m so in love with you I’m sick to my stomach.”
“I can stop wearing them in public,” she said. “I’ll only wear them when I’m with you, and it won’t have to mean anything, because you’ll know it’s only me not being strong enough yet.”
“I don’t want to be the person who tells you what you can’t do.”
She kissed my knee gratefully. Then she saw the lump in my pants.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. Boys can’t help it. I only wish I could unlearn everything I know about it for you.”
She then suggested I take a shower, which seemed perfectly reasonable, since she’d taken one herself. After I’d dried myself with one of her luxurious towels, I put all my clothes back on, not wanting to appear presumptuous. When I stepped out of the bathroom, I found the apartment lit only by the moon. Her bedroom door, which had always been shut, was now open the width of one finger.
I went to it and stopped at the threshold, my ears full of the sound of my heart, which seemed to be pounding with the impossibility of what had happened to me. Nobody went in Anabel’s bedroom, but she’d left the door open for me. For me. My head was so full of significance I thought it might explode, the way the world would have to when it encountered an impossibility. It was as if no one existed, had ever existed, except Anabel and me. I pushed open the door.
The bedroom was a dream of purity in strong monochrome moonlight. The bed was a high four-poster with a calico quilt under which Anabel was lying on her side. There were sheer curtains on the dormer windows, one Amish rug on the floor, a spindly chair and desk (the latter bare except for the watch and earrings she’d been wearing), and a high antique dresser topped with a lace cloth. Sitting on the dresser were a threadbare teddy bear and an eyeless and equally threadbare toy donkey. On the wall were a pair of unframed paintings, one of a horse from an unsettling close-up perspective, the other of a cow from a similar perspective, both of them unfinished-looking, with bare patches of canvas, which was Anabel’s way as an artist. The spareness of the room felt rural-Kansan, nineteenth-century, especially in the moonlight. The animals reminded me that I hadn’t given Anabel her present.
“Where are you going?” she called out plaintively when I went to retrieve my knapsack.
I came back with the little plush bull and sat on the edge of the bed like a father with his girl. “Forgot I had a present for you.”
She sat up in her pajamas and took the bull. For a moment I thought she was going to hate it; was going to be scary Anabel. But she wasn’t that Anabel in her bedroom. She smiled at the bull and said, “Hello, little one.”