THIRTEEN. NUDE MOON
Pouring rain. Emily held a newspaper over her head. It sagged at the edges like a nun's habit and gray ran off in lines down her fingers. As she walked barefoot back from the beach through deep puddles, sand stuck to her ankles in delicate, lace-like patterns. In the drier inner landscape of her mind, Emily thought about lies. Rain shook the leaves. She had always lied easily, switched fact for fiction, embroidered stories with her own thread. It wasn't really lying though, just her physical knowledge of cycles; a vague familiarity with events that had yet to happen. She believed in omens and often waited before doing things for signs of weather. It was important to recognize an indigo sky, the few clouds at noon collecting into definable shapes, or the late afternoon mist, which reminded her of time, lapse film of seeds sprouting and most specifically that moment when seedlings threw off the dust on their new leaves and grew toward the sky.
Emily let the paper fall to the porch. Through the rain she saw the beach towels and bathing suits soaked on the line outside and water pounding down from the gutters. In the kitchen she turned the spigot on, bent down, and drank. Water blown through the screen door had gathered in puddles around the floor.
He had been here. She looked into the bedroom. Below the windows, rain dripped into drawers dumped out and scattered.
“Eddie,” she called, then ran to his empty room. She walked quickly back to her bed. A car lumbered past. She pressed her spine against the wooden headboard, drew her knees to her chest.
Evening was coming on fast. The rain beat a hectic rhythm on the roof. Shadows of water melted and moved like a lava lamp over the walls. She ran her tongue over a childhood scar on her knee. It tasted oddly tinny and the tissue was pinker, the color of cooked salmon and slightly raised like braille.
She lifted her head and looked around the room. In her closet, a triangle was torn from the crotch of a pair of pants. Emily carefully walked over and turned on the overhead light. It made each scattered object impossibly real. Flipping the light off, she stood in the doorway and watched the shifting shadows.
“Mom,” Eddie yelled from the kitchen.
Emily moved toward him. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing,” Eddie said. He placed a hand on Emily's back. He hummed from deep in his stomach to try to calm her.
“Tell me what he said.”
“I don't want to talk about it,” Eddie said, moving his hand up and into her hair. Emily pulled away. “Tell me.”
He shook his head. Emily saw the deep circles under his eyes and that he hadn't changed clothes since yesterday.
“I don't know. Crazy stuff.”
“What was that?” Emily thought she heard a hand on the door and a breath against the screen.
“Wind,” Eddie said.
She covered her eyes with a hand.
“You know, with my friends it's their mothers that worry about them,” he said.
“I worry about you,” Emily said.
“Then why do you do shit like this?”
“You know I didn't do this.” She motioned to the tattered room.
Eddie stared at her. She saw that he was shaking, and she reached for him, but he slipped away and walked to his room. She heard the door shut, then lock behind him.
Emily went to the door and cupped a hand to listen. “Come out,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
“No, I won't,” he said.
Emily went into her bedroom and lay in the dark. She heard muted sounds through the wall. Quiet, she said, quiet. And then carefully she began to plan. No matter how boyish their lips looked in the hot sun at the beach, or how bad the feeling got of wanting a stranger, from now on she would choose only one. Every day she'd pick a Bible verse. Start now, her mind stomped out. From near the bed she picked up the Bible and flipped through, trying to find her fate in the rice-paper pages. He turneth the rivers into a wilderness, and the water springs into dry ground.
Eddie opened the door and walked to the bed, brushed hair away from her face, took the Bible from her hands and set it on the side table. “You pushed him too far,” he said, his voice as clear and deep in the dark as a lover's.
Emily turned from the image of herself in the bar mirror. “You alone?” the tourist said, his hairy hand resting on the bar, on one of his fingers a square ring with a too-big-to-be-a-diamond stone in the center.
“I'm waiting for someone,” she said and walked to the bath, room. She'd stopped at Paolo's for a drink on her way to Birdflower's. The light and chatter from the bar had drawn her over. In the stall she leaned forward, not letting her thighs touch the seat. She rinsed her hands in the sink and ran her wet fingers through her hair.
She came out, sat down, and watched a few couples dance drunken and awkward. There was a man with white blond hair sitting alone. She posed her hips forward so he could see better and slowed her eyes, let them take in all but him, looked at him as though he was any other detail, then gazed back to the dancers. Quickly, he was up and coming to her. Lanky build, narrow hips, awkward swagger. He smiled in an offhand way and asked her name. She told him and then he asked if she was married.
“I was,” she said. “But it turned out bad.”
The man's arm brushed her shoulder. She backed from him, nearly dropping her beer, and walked barefoot out of the bar.
The rain was light but steady. She walked along the road on the broken yellow line. It was as if some giant needle had seamed up the soundside and the beach, and carefully, heel to toe, she followed the stitches toward the murky signpost.
Usually she tried not to think about that night she left Daniel. But it was impossible now. Slowly, as the seasons change, as snow gathers on the highest Tennessee mountains, a restlessness had come over her. A hurried feeling in talking to Daniel and even sometimes a carelessness in handling Eddie. It seemed as if the floor of the house began to tilt backwards. Now it was obvious that she should have told him, that maybe together they could have figured it out. But instead she started to go to Nashville on Saturdays. She made up excuses about shopping, about doctor appointments, about lunches with old friends from high school. She found bars: the Blue Note, the 100 °Club, one called Dover's. It never took more than an hour for her to pull some man over. She'd start a careless conversation with them, let her knee slant toward theirs, and listen to their stories. She fell into them gradually. The first few Saturdays she'd left the bar early, insisting that she had to get out to her parents’ house in the country. Then after a month of teasing, of trying to figure out what was happening and if it could be remedied by simple attention, a shy man had come along. He was like the blond children in Christmas pictures. Drunkenly they undressed each other as slates of sunset fell through the hotel blinds.
This became her way then. There were moments of remorse: while bathing Eddie, she caught her eyes in the medicine chest and thought, How can I do this? Once, sorting through old photographs of her wedding, her stomach had clenched and she'd felt dizzy. Often on Mondays she'd swear to herself that this weekend she would not go. But on Saturdays she would drive to Nashville.
It was unclear who had finally told Daniel. He accused her and immediately she admitted — not to all, but to one man. She created him by combining all her favorite qualities from each. One's fragile scent of mint and wool, another's chest, one's lovely pale body hair, the fingerlet curls from another, one's pondish-green eyes, and another's cowboy thinness. It did seem, even to her then, like a single man.