Girl in the Moonlight (28 page)

I took a deep breath and exhaled. Our eyes met, searching. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I’ve already hurt one girl because of you.”

“And I apologize for that too.”

“I’m not going to do it again. I can’t.”

“I understand.”

“I let myself believe you in the past. Trusted you, and each time you just pissed on it. On me.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“How the hell else am I supposed to feel?”

“How about thinking about things from my point of view, Wylie? It’s always you, you, you. That’s the one thing about you
that always bothered me. You were always so passive, playing the victim and blaming other people when things didn’t work out for you. You never thought about me as a real person, a person with flesh and blood and insecurities and a fucked-up childhood. I was always beautiful Cesca up on a pedestal to you. Don’t deny it. If I ran away from you, maybe there was a reason. If I ran away from you, maybe you should have tried a little harder to run after me. Haven’t you ever thought that it was always me coming to you? When did you ever come to me?”

She was angry now. Her chin thrust forward, her dark eyes flashing, defiant. I stared at her, stung by her accusation, pierced by my own vanity and ignorance.

“Oh God,” I said. “I’m such a fool.”

“Yes, you are, Wylie,” said Cesca, her voice gentler. “You are a fool. But you’re not alone. I’m a fool too. I just didn’t want you to think that I was just a bitch.”

“So what does this mean?”

“What do you want it to mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m too confused. What do you want from me? What can I do?”

“I don’t want you to do anything. You’re engaged. You should marry her. That’s what I want you to do. Have a family. Be happy.” She gave me her little half smile.

“But I still have feelings for you.”

“Good. I’m happy to hear that. If you loved me as you say you did, then you’d be a rotten sort of a person if you didn’t. You can love two people at the same time, but you can’t be in love with two people at the same time. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve made your choice. It’s a good one. You’ve got to grow up, Wylie. With me you’ll always be a boy. That beautiful boy I knew so long ago. But now it’s time for you to be a man.”

I nodded my head. Knowing that what she said was right. “Thank you,” I said.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk you back to your car. I have to help prepare dinner tonight. It’s part of our therapy. We all take turns in the kitchen. Can you imagine? Me? I’ve threatened to make paella. Pare sent me a recipe, but I can only imagine what a disaster it will be. At least, it’ll be one of the few nights here when the food isn’t some wretched vegetarian meal. That’s the one thing about depressives and addicts. They really suck at cooking.”

We both laughed, and once again she slipped her arm through mine. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it means. Sometimes you just feel completely cut off and forgotten up here. As though life outside has continued on without you, and you’ve just stopped.”

We retrieved the now-soaking bag with the mostly uneaten food in it. “Sorry you went to all that trouble,” she said, laughing. “What I had was delicious.”

I laughed too, holding up the soggy loaf. “Maybe you could use this to feed some of the ducks on the pond?”

“All right. We really aren’t supposed to, but everyone does.”

At the car, she said, “You know, there are a lot of good things I’ve learned up here. It’s been very helpful. Taking responsibility for my actions, learning to confront my fears. For a long time, I didn’t think anyone should love me. Or that I should love anyone. But I realize now you made me think otherwise. I can never thank you enough for that. What we had, no matter how fucked up it was in so many ways, was actually pretty special. I’ll never forget that.”

“Cesca . . .”

“Shhh,” she said, leaning forward and kissing me lightly on the lips. Not a passionate kiss. A loving one. An intimate one. A parting one. “Don’t say anything. Now just get out of here.”

I looked at her. The familiar face, the lovely brown eyes. I had always seen beauty, passion. Something more. Something
intangible, unattainable. Now I saw something wiser, kinder. She smiled faintly and nodded her head in farewell. “When will I see you again?” I asked. “Will you let me know when you’re back in the city?”

“We’ll see,” she said. “You know I was never very good at planning that far ahead. Good-bye, Tricky Wylie. Take care of yourself and have a happy life. Thanks again for coming. You have no idea how much it meant to me.”

She turned and walked away, back up the path to the main building. I watched her until she entered the house. At the door she stopped and gave a small wave. Then she was gone.

S
HORTLY AFTER KATE AND I RETURNED FROM OUR HONEYMOON
, I received a letter from Cesca. It was postmarked from Barcelona:

Dear Tricky Wylie,

Just a short note to congratulate you on your wedding and let you know I am fine. I am back in Barcelona but behaving myself (if you can believe it!!!). There is a hospice here for people dying of AIDS and I have started working there. It’s pretty gruesome in many ways—as you can imagine—but also surprisingly wonderful. I feel like everyone here I am helping is Lio. I miss him every day but now I can still feel connected to him. I miss you too. Don’t worry about me. I have never been happier
.

Molt amor,

C

And I was happy for her, of course, and relieved, but also a little skeptical. The notion of Cesca washing out bedpans or
bathing the dying was as out of character as if she had written to say she was taking holy orders. I imagined that before too long she would grow bored with this new project, and the next thing I would hear from her was that she had taken up with a South American playboy and moved to Marbella.

But I underestimated her. Or, more accurately, maybe I was only now seeing an aspect of her I never knew existed—an aspect even she had not known about. She was like an athlete who had spent years building up certain muscles, while ignoring others. Now she was developing those muscles as well. And she was doing so with the zeal of a convert. It seemed to consume her, as though she was trying to atone for her wild years with an excess of selflessness, desperate to correct her deficits and bring her account back to zero.

To my relief, she was not overly pious about it. She wasn’t like one of those reformed drinkers or meat eaters who become rabid teetotalers or vegans. She knew that not everyone would be able to, or even want to, do what she did. And, I think, that made her secretly proud, even if she never said as much. To take the hard road, to deny oneself ease or comfort or pleasure, was her penance.

Yet at the same time maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Cesca had always thrown herself into whatever she was doing, as determined as a dog with a bone. It was in her nature to be immoderate. It was a variation of Izzy’s theme. If she was going to do it, whether that meant making love, breaking hearts, living the high life, or helping the dying, she was going to be great at it. Like a fearless gambler, she went all in.

Where once I had sent her letters as though into the void, posting them like prayers I never expected would be answered, she now became a lively, frequent, and often unprompted correspondent. Once a month or so for several years, a letter or card would arrive, their contents without presumption or agenda.
Some of her notes were quite short, a line on the back of a postcard. Others could be quite chatty and amusing, often with little drawings in the margins, and they formed a sort of long-running serial about her life. I have kept them all, but here’s just one example:

Dear Tricky Wylie,

I hope this finds you and Kate well. It has been a good month here. I had a lovely visit from Carmen last week, who has grown into such a strong and wonderful woman. She was over here for a conference on AIDS—you know she has become quite an authority on the subject now, and I was very proud and impressed when I went to see her deliver a paper to the assembly. I kept thinking,
That’s my sister! That’s my sister!
I remember when she was young and was terrified of spiders, even the most harmless daddy longlegs, and how I would have to hold her hand tightly and lead her trembling past a cobweb or scoop the spider up in my hands and take it out of the room before she could enter. I would never kill them because Pare had once told me that it was bad luck to kill a spider and besides they were the artists of the insect world, each web a miracle of creation. But now she is all grown up. She got married last year—did I tell you? I can’t remember. It was a small affair. She emailed me afterwards apologizing for not inviting me. That it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. One day she and her husband—David is his name. I haven’t met him yet but he sounds lovely. He’s also a doctor—they just went to the city clerk’s office on their lunch break and got married. I probably wouldn’t have gone anyway, you know? Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it but my work here keeps me so busy and so many people need me that I don’t see how I could have taken the time. Anyway, she has the best news of all: She is pregnant! When she told me we just laughed and cried at the same time, jumping up and down
like a couple of lunatics. The baby is due in five months. How exciting! (When are you and Kate going to have a baby??? Quit wasting time!!!)

I do have some sad news though. You remember my telling you about one of my patients, Alfonso? He died yesterday. It was a blessing really because he was in such discomfort. You could tell that once he would have been the most beautiful man—like Aurelio but blond—but now wasted and covered in lesions. He was good-humored about it until the end. I would joke with him that if he preferred I could get him a handsome male nurse to wash him but he would laugh and say, “No, I’m glad it’s you. I wouldn’t want the sight of my enormous cock to distract him from his duties.” We would laugh about that and he’d make bitchy comments about some of the staff, even some of the patients. He had been an actor (remember?) and had friends coming by all the time. At the end he declined fast. So many of them do. When some first arrive they seem as though they could be here for months, but inevitably the end comes quickly. At night I just sit up and pray and cry for them. I feel so helpless sometimes. It’s like trying to soak up the ocean with a sponge. When I wake up on those mornings it can be quite hard, but I go back and there’s always someone there who needs me urgently. Death is both inexhaustible and impatient
.

Everyone else is well. Mare is getting older, of course, but she is still as mad and charming as ever. She keeps promising to come. I see Pare all the time. He lives just outside of the city with his new family. My half sister Eulália is a perfect little angel. I am very fond of his new wife, Anna, too. He is mellowing now and hangs around his house like an old tomcat whose prowling days are over, happy with his memories of all the mice he has consumed over the years. In his old age he is even enjoying a modest kind of celebrity. There was an article about him in
El Punt
and a local gallery has been selling his work, which makes
him very pleased, as you can imagine. Cosmo just keeps doing better and better. Since he bought his house here up the coast I see a lot of him too. When he isn’t on tour we have dinner regularly. I wish he had a girl. Too bad he didn’t meet Kate first. No telling how things might have turned out, eh? Ha! Roger is just the same as always. He’s not much of a letter writer but that’s what Mare tells me
.

Well, that’s my news. Write to me and tell me about yourself. There are times I miss Amagansett so much
.

Més petons i abraçades,

C

I did write to her, but my own life was, while without drama, unfolding as lives often do, taking natural courses much as water from the spring runoff will flow down a dry streambed. We had our modest bourgeois adventures: Caribbean vacations, dinners with friends, small victories at work. The quotidian yet meaningful bricks that build up most lives. Kate did become pregnant. We moved out of her loft, which was fine for a couple but impractical for a family, and, returning to my roots, even if I had never truly strayed, bought a modest apartment on the Upper East Side.

While we gave up unfettered space and the daily glamour of living in Soho, our new apartment, in a fine old prewar building just east of Lexington, brought us a fireplace, a doorman, proximity to Central Park and good schools, and solid doors that we could close. I was now entering into the adult life, complete with its joys and sacrifices, my youth left behind me like a beacon for those coming after. Time, which I once seemed to have an abundance of, contracted, wearing down imperceptibly, like bone on bone.

I saw Cesca again. It was in Barcelona, several years after my marriage. I had been invited to speak at an architectural
conference there. Kate stayed in New York with our son, Mitchell. I had told her I would be seeing Cesca, and she’d voiced no objection. But I still hadn’t told her the whole truth about our relationship. Kate had her baby, after all. That is the purest bond. Everything else is secondary. My father, too, was smitten with his namesake. He and Patty invited themselves over frequently to our apartment, and if we were not regular weekend visitors to East Hampton, my father would call and ask, “When are you bringing my grandson out again?”

When I arrived in Barcelona, I was a more benign, staunch, and devoted man than I had been in my youth. I was moderately contented with my life, my growing family, my career. I was in my mid-thirties, going soft in the middle. I was beginning to notice resemblances to my father from when I was a child. He was about my age when I was born. My legs were his. Sometimes when I passed a shop window, it seemed as though I was seeing him in the glass.

The questions that had once dogged me had grown trivial as more serious matters took their place. When I thought of my youthful ambitions to be a painter, I shook my head in disbelief, barely able to recognize that person in the one I had become.

My hotel in Barcelona was old, elegant, the furniture in need of re-covering. It was the first time I had been back to the city since that August years before when I had slept on Aurelio’s floor. Then it had been summer, now it was winter, the streets outside my room overlooking the Gran Via de las Corts Catalanes were wet with rain, the trees on the wide boulevard barren of leaves. The chairs outside the cafés empty. On the pavement Barcelonans hurried by, wrapped in scarves and heavy coats against what would be back in New York mild weather. I pressed my forehead against the glass, feeling its coolness.

It was my second day after arriving. Until then my time had been taken up with conference matters: meetings, panel discussions,
breakfasts, lunches, breakout sessions, an official dinner. I had come with the founder of my firm, an elegant, white-haired man in his late seventies. He was staying in a palatial suite several floors above me. His shirts were handmade in Milan, his shoes in London. Each spring he taught a course at MIT. He served on important committees and boards. The firm was his whole life. It had cost him two marriages. His children barely knew him. Despite his age, he still traveled constantly. Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin, San Francisco. He was one of those men to whom work was a tonic. It kept him young. If he stopped, he would die. I knew I would never be him, even though part of me wished I could.

There was a client dinner that night, and I was expected to attend but had carved out a hole in my schedule in the late afternoon. I had called Cesca shortly after I landed. A woman answered in Spanish, and I asked to speak to Cesca Bonet. “Ah, okay,
sí, un momento
.” I heard the receiver being placed on its side and the faint tapping of heels on a floor. A few minutes later, I heard a voice say,
“Si? Això és Cesca.”
Yes? This is Cesca.

The sound of her slightly raspy, amused voice on the phone after so long came as a shock. Real time had passed, but suddenly everything seemed familiar again, as though it had only been a day or so since we had spoken. “Cesca, it’s Wylie.”

“Wylie!
Hombre!
You’re here! I’m so glad. When did you get in?”

“This morning. Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have as much time as I had hoped. I’m with my boss, and he has me pretty solidly booked. I do have a window on Thursday in the late afternoon, around five, but I need to be at a dinner at seven. Does that work?” Most Barcelonans didn’t eat until much later, but the hotel was used to accommodating foreign visitors.

“That’d be fine. Five, then. Shall I come to you?”

“Do you know where my hotel is?”

“Of course.”

I was waiting in the lobby bar. Until this moment, I hadn’t been nervous, but now I could feel my heart racing. With my foot tapping, I sipped my scotch and eagerly watched the door. I had been careful in choosing what I wore, my most elegant suit, a new silk tie. In my cuffs, the onyx links she had given me for Christmas years before.

In the past, Cesca would have swept in with a flourish, late, impossible to resist, and somehow managed to upend my world. This time I was prepared for her. My armor was thick. My resolve unbroken. This time the wax was in my ears.

So why see Cesca at all? Why not simply sail around the rocks and stay on the open ocean? I could have easily come to Barcelona without seeing her. In a city of this size, it is entirely possible that I could have spent my three days here without running into her. But it wasn’t a sense of good manners or obligation that induced me to tell her I was coming, the way you might with an elderly female relative. No, when I wrote to Cesca, I convinced myself that my reason for suggesting we meet was entirely innocent. What, after all, could be the harm?

If pressed, I would probably say my reason for seeing her was to declare my manumission from her. To see in her face the realization of what she had lost in me and what I had become. To say: I have become a man, a husband, a father. This is what you could have had. To pay her back in a small way for all the agony she had caused me over the years.

But getting beyond my arrogance and petty pride, there was a deeper reason still. It was the most simple of all: I wanted to see her. With my own eyes. To again put a face I had once so cherished to her letters. To hear the sound of her voice again, the throaty laughter. In truth, I missed her. The way an exile misses his homeland or an old man misses his youth.

The deepest reason of all, as old as the race itself, was desire.
Though I did not admit it to myself, there was the secret hope that we were only a short elevator ride to my room, the quick shedding of clothes, the exquisite plunge into what was both known and forbidden, the urgent slap of flesh on flesh. It was a distinct possibility, a rekindling of long-lowered flames. It was the outcome I yearned for, and dreaded, most.