Meet Me in the Moon Room (14 page)

I sigh again, knowing she’ll know I’m sighing at her.

I get no response. It’s as if she is in another room instead of sitting right beside me on the couch with a paper bag over her head.

“So have you been sitting here with that bag over your head all afternoon?” I say.

She says, “I heard you coming up the stairs.”

I say, “You heard me coming and you hurried over to the couch and put a grocery bag over your head?”

“Yes,” she says.

I suppose what she’s doing makes some sense. In fact, nothing she does makes absolutely no sense. We live in a single room. We cook here, we sleep here, we do everything here. Well, we do go down the hall to use the bathroom we share with another couple. But there aren’t many chances to be alone.

“Let me see your face,” I say.

“Go away,” she says.

“I think we should hash this out,” I say.

She doesn’t answer, and her silence infuriates me. I lean in close to snatch the bag from her head, but stop myself just in time.

“Come out of there!” I say.

“I won’t,” she says.

I take a deep breath. I count to ten. I do some deep knee bends. I root around under the sink and find a paper bag of my own. I wait to unfold it until I’m standing right in front of her again. I want her to hear the sound.

It doesn’t make enough noise when I unfold it. So I shake it. I can see it is having an effect on her by the way she squeezes her hands into fists in her lap.

I sit back down beside her.

“Okay,” I say, “you want to be alone, I’ll just go off by myself.” I shake the bag again and then put it over my head. I am startled by all the room inside. “Hey, there’s really a lot of room in here!” I say, and as I speak I can hear my voice is different, and I realize that she can probably hear that my voice sounds different now, too. I picture her sitting there beside me with the bag over her head, wondering just what I’m up to. Has she figured it out yet? Is she sitting there picturing me sitting here with a bag over my own head? Or has she taken her bag off?

I worry that maybe she is looking at me now.

As if to confirm my fears, I hear her get to her feet and open the refrigerator.

Then I hear nothing at all.

I don’t even hear the refrigerator close.

I listen carefully. But I cannot tell what is going on. Is there anyone out there? I’m afraid to look. I’m afraid to know.

The Perect Gift

T
he children had stuffed their ragged clothes with newspaper against the snow that Christmas eve. Tim still had on his dirty Dodgers cap, and you could see Amy’s mousy hair through the holes in her summer scarf. They huddled together on the curb in the moonlight, waiting for Santa, blowing into their hands, rubbing one another’s shoulders, listening to their chattering teeth, listening to their rumbling bellies.

“Me, I want cake,” Amy said.

“I want a burger,” Tim said. “I want some fries and a Coke and maybe one of those one-man pies.”

“Cake,” Amy said. “Chocolate cake.”

Soon headlights appeared moving slowly down the dark street. The children could hear the tires in the oily slush of melted snow.

“Get ready to run,” Tim said. “In case it’s not him.” He took her hand and they got their feet.

The big white limo with the two red you-better-watch-out eyes on the door pulled up beside them, and Santa climbed out of the back seat.

“Merry Christmas!” His voice boomed and echoed in the carcasses of the burnt-out buildings lining the street. He dragged his big sack out on the sidewalk. “I’ll bet you two have been good this year,” he said. “Is that true?”

“Yes!” the children cried.

Santa gave them a stern look, but they knew he didn’t mean it. “Maybe I should check my book.”

“No!”

“You’re right. No need to look. I remember you two.” The jolly old gentleman dug into his big red sack of Christmas goodies. “Let me see. Let me see.” He finally found what he wanted and straightened up again. “Here you go, young man.” He handed Tim a big card, maybe four or five inches high and eight or so long. “And one for you, Missy.”

Tim looked down at his card. It was smooth and slippery. Glossy. There was a picture of several cooked birds surrounded by greenery on a white plate. There was a border of little blue flowers all around the card. Along the top were the words GREAT RECIPES OF THE WORLD. There were instructions. The ingredients were in bold letters. A snowflake fell onto the card and melted, but the card was so slick, the snowflake couldn’t wet it. What Tim liked best about the card was that it was new; it had no sad history. Tim looked at Amy, then they both looked back up at Santa.

“I can see you’re wondering,” Santa said. “It’s like this.” He put his hand on Tim’s shoulder. “If you give a man food, he can eat for a day, but if you teach him to cook, well, dot dot dot!”

“Dot dot dot?” Tim asked.

“Yes,” Santa said with a bit of an edge to his voice. “Dot dot dot!”

Tim and Amy knew just how to talk to grownups. “Thank you, Santa,” they said together.

Santa treated them to a few ho ho hos, and his bowl full of jelly routine, then climbed back into his car. The limo sloshed on down the street.

When the car disappeared, Tim and Amy settled back down onto the cold curb.

“What’d you get?” Tim asked.

“Casserole of Octopus,” Amy said. “Looks squishy. What about you?”

“Braised Squabs.”

“What’s a squab?”

“I don’t know. Looks like little chickens in the picture.”

“Timmy?”

“Yeah?”

“Wanna trade?”

Tim pretended to think about it for a moment, and it wasn’t all pretend, then he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close. “Anything for you, kiddo,” he said.

Message in a Fish

T
he phone rang three more times before Josh decided it wasn’t part of the elaborate dream he was dreaming of Valerie and got up to answer it. As he stumbled into the living room, he thought the phone would almost certainly stop ringing just as he picked it up, so there was no need to hurry. He had time to run through a short list of people who might be calling him at a time like this: someone else had died, probably Aunt Eppie, or maybe it was a collections guy—Josh hadn’t made payments on anything in months, or a wrong number, or a crank call—some serious heavy breathing or Prince Albert in a can (or maybe it would be Valerie calling from the Starship. See? I’m not so dead after all!). He picked up the phone, and said hello.

“So, you the guy with the fish?”

“What?” Josh stood on one foot so he could pick the other one up off the cold wooden floor. In the dark, the hum and splash of his fish tanks sounded like a creek cascading over smooth rocks. It might be a chilly night in the rain forest along the Rio Negro—were there ever any chilly nights in South America? And what was this about a fish?

Oh yeah, the fish. His classified would have appeared in today’s paper. Good god, why was he still in bed? He pushed the little button on the side of his watch and saw that it was four-thirty in the morning. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Have you mistaken me for the Time Lady?” The caller sounded like a man Josh wouldn’t want to get to know. “Did you advertise the fish or not?”

“I did,” Josh said. “I just didn’t expect people to be calling up in the middle of the night. And who’s the Time Lady?”

“Just how many people do you think will be calling at all for an item like this?”

“Lots!” Josh said. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by Cosmo? He was a beautiful and very rare fish. To see him was to love him. If things had not been so very desperate, Josh would not have placed the classified at all, but now that he had, he was sure people would be lining up around the block just to get a look. Josh would have to sell tickets, maybe hold an auction. It was not like such fish were falling out of the sky.

“In your dreams,” the caller said.

“Are you sure you know what we’re talking about here? If you’re just looking for something to swim around and look pretty, maybe you should try your local pet shop.”

“What I want to know is does it have lips yet?” the caller asked.

Okay, clearly the man knew which way the wind was blowing. Only people familiar with the Top Hat Fish would ask about the lips, and not only the lips themselves, but the timing of their appearance. An amateur would have asked about the hat.

“He’s just getting lips,” Josh said.

There were so many things to know about Cosmo. Probably the most common blunder was to confuse him with a common arowana (Osteoglossum bicirrhosum). Not that the arowana wasn’t an interesting fish in its own right. Often described as “prehistoric,” arowanas were imported into the pet shop trade from South America. They grew to a length of about 20 inches in captivity and preferred large live foods like goldfish, but they could also be trained to take chunks of raw fish or beef. They were sleek and graceful and were often displayed in big tanks in Chinese restaurants. In the wild they leaped out of the water to snatch bugs and small birds from overhanging branches. In captivity they often leaped out of their tanks and flopped around on the floor and died.

Your garden variety arowana was no Top Hat Fish (Osteoglossum sombreroium) like Cosmo. Cosmo was two feet long and pearly white with rose highlights and blue eyes. And the hat, of course. The reason the Top Hat Fish was called the Top Hat Fish was the black growth on the top of its head. The growth developed slowly (like the lips) but in adult specimens looked just like a black satin evening hat.

“So you’re saying the fish has no lips,” the caller said. “Okay, so how about the hat? Are you sure you’ve got a true Top Hat? It’s an easy mistake to make when you’re new at this.”

“I’m not new at this,” Josh said. “The hat is around two inches high and maybe an inch in diameter. It is jet black and perfectly formed.”

“In that case I’ll give you a hundred dollars for the fish.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Josh said.

“Look, you know and I know no one else is going to call on this.”

“You’re not even in the ball park,” Josh said. “This isn’t bargaining. I don’t even hear you yet.”

“I think my offer is pretty reasonable,” the caller said, “considering the fact that you’ve probably taken an ordinary arowana and superglued Ken’s black plastic ballroom-dancing hat to its head.”

“What!”

“I’ve always wondered how you guys get the fish to hold still while the glue dries.”

“What are you talking about?” Josh wished he were dressed. If he weren’t standing in the dark in his underwear he might be able to handle this.

“And how do you get the fish’s head dry enough for the glue to take in the first place? A blow dryer?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Okay,” the caller said, “make it a hundred and fifty.”

Josh banged the phone down. Banging it down felt so good that he picked it up and banged it down again. It didn’t feel quite as good the second time. He was trembling. The very idea!

He walked back to his bedroom and got his robe. It had been a crank call after all. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. Valerie would have told him not to brood, and she would have kept after him until he smiled. His reaction to the unusual had always cracked her up. But she had followed an idiot into oblivion (or joined the Others on the Starship, depending on how you looked at it) and he would have to deal with this alone. He went back into the living room and switched on the lights in all of the fish tanks.

Cosmo came out to take a look.

The fish was a vision of grace, Josh thought, a rosy pearl water snake with fins. At unpredictable times Cosmo rolled in the water like a kayak. That roll might lead someone who didn’t know any better to think that the black hat on his head was in fact artificial, that it had been added by some crazy person, that it was knocking the fish’s sense of balance out of kilter. Such things were not unheard of. Just look at the way people colored fish and called them “painted perch.”

Josh had a moment of doubt. What if Cosmo were not a sombreroium after all? In fact, what if every Top Hat Fish he’d ever seen had been a fake? All that talk about a new species that seemed not to be altogether of this Earth might just be a lot of hot air. What if Cosmo were a bicirrhosum that someone had altered? How could that have happened? Well, for starters, the collector he’d bought the fish from would have had to be in on it. Wilkins was a man Josh had long trusted as a reliable source, but even a reliable source could be corrupted. Suppose someone comes to Wilkins and says hey we’ll give you this suitcase stuffed with money or maybe we won’t kill your kidnapped family if you convince Josh Torbert this common arowana is a rare and wonderful Top Hat Fish. Next someone would have had to break into his house and glue the plastic top hat to the fish’s head at just the time when a real sombreroium would have developed the characteristic satiny black growth. Was that why he couldn’t get in touch with Wilkins? Could it be that Wilkins was not really off on a collecting trip in Southeast Asia as his wife claimed? Or might this whole thing have something to do with Valerie and her circle of dead space cadets?