Next morning I found Angelica at the dining hall. I sat beside her and she said nothing, absolutely nothing, about what had happened. I might have dreamed it all—everything except for sleeping with her. Angelica’s knowing smile told me that, at least, had been real. Her smile and the way she said good-bye, kissing me on the cheek and letting her hand surreptitiously brush against my breast for just a moment. Her fingers stroked my nipple until it hardened beneath my shirt, and then she drew away.
“Ciao, Sweeney. See you at dinner?”
I stammered some reply and nodded. As I watched her leave I noted that she still wore the moon-shaped necklace Magda Kurtz had given her, and like a talisman beneath her arm carried a copy of Magda Kurtz’s book.
And so began my new life. My real life, I thought then. Meeting Angelica and Oliver for breakfast at seven-thirty, Annie following her roommate like a grim conscience in cutoff fatigues and worn flannel shirts. Me drinking too much coffee in a feeble effort to kill what had become a near-constant hangover. Angelica picking fastidiously at slices of cantaloupe and grapefruit. Annie wolfing down petrified scrambled eggs with ketchup and ersatz home fries, while Oliver sat across from the three of us, kicking at the table legs, his hands never still as he swept back his hair and scribbled his odd ballpoint sketches on paper napkins.
“Very nice,” Annie would remark thoughtfully, peering at the pile of napkins fluttering in front of him. “That looks just like me. Except for the antennae, of course.”
Then she’d gather her books, give Angelica a soulful look, and leave. Annie never hung around after breakfast. She had an eight o’clock Music Composition class, and I sometimes thought the only reason she joined us was to keep an eye on Angelica.
Though Angelica seemed infinitely able to take care of herself. I knew she wore that crescent-shaped necklace everywhere, although she was careful to keep it hidden. A few days after the reception at Garvey House, I dropped by her room and found her reading by the light of a small banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. On one knee she balanced a steaming mug of tea. The air smelled warmly of vanilla and chamomile.
“Sweeney!” Angelica looked up, smiling. “We missed you at lunch today.”
At her throat nestled the lunula, its bright lines softened to grey in the dim light. Sans makeup, with her robe and glasses and white china mug, she looked solemn and a little silly, like a diva costumed to play the student in an operetta. Silly, but still beautiful enough to make my heart start raiding around my chest like a stone.
“Where’s Annie?”
“Library,” replied Angelica without glancing up again. She was painstakingly copying something into a notebook.
“What’re you doing?”
“Stuff.”
I made a face. As usual, she was poring over stacks of old books and anthropological journals from the Colum Library. She flashed me an earnest look. “This is fascinating, Sweeney. Really—you should check it out.”
I leaned over to pick up a volume slightly smaller than my hand, bound in calfskin faded to the color of old ivory.
Lucian Samosata: De Sea Syria
One of the texts listed in the handout that Balthazar Warnick had given us the first day of class, along with The Golden Ass and “The Bacchae” and “The Hymn to Demeter”—
DE SEA SYRIA/THE SYRIAN GODDESS: Evocative contemporaneous account of the ancient rites associated with the worship of Aphrodite/Astarte and the cult of Adonis in Phoenicia…
Gingerly I turned the pages. They seemed to be printed in Latin. When I reached the end of the book, a slip of loose-leaf fluttered out, covered front and back with Angelica’s fine cursive hand. I caught it and held it up to the light.
“There is another great sanctuary in Phoenicia, which the Sidonians possess,”
I read.
According to them it belongs to Astarte, but I think that Astarte is Selene. One of the priests, however, told me that it is a sanctuary of Europe… Zeus desired her since she was beautiful, he assumed the form of a bull, seized her, and carried the girl off with him to Crete…
I turned over the scrap of paper.
There is another form of sacrifice here. After putting a garland on the sacrificial animals, they hurl them down alive from the gateway and the animals die from the fall. Some even throw their children off the place, but not in the same manner as the animals…
“Gee, Angelica, that’s really nice.”
“Be careful!” Angelica picked up the volume, cradling it as though it had been a puppy. “It’s really old, and it doesn’t belong to me.”
“You can read Latin?” I asked sarcastically.
“Yes, Sweeney, I can read Latin. And Italian, and French.” She settled back on the bed. “Why haven’t you been to Warnick’s class all week?”
I felt like shouting, You know damn well why I haven’t been to class! Instead I just shrugged. “Listen, me and Oliver and Baby Joe are going down to the Cellar Door to see Patti Smith. You want to come?”
“I can’t. Professor Warnick lent me his own copy of that—”
She inclined her head toward the small leather-bound book. “—and I promised I’d give it back after class tomorrow.”
“Angelica! What are you—”
“Sweeney. Please.”
“Fine. Forget it.” I waited to see if she’d say anything else, if she’d bother looking up; but I had been dismissed. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”
She flipped through the pages of a monograph and nodded absently. “Tell Oliver to drop by after the show.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
I stalked outside, angry and embarrassed. To be commanded to carry a message to Oliver, as though I was nothing but her go-between! Still, I gave him the message. I’d do anything for Oliver, and almost anything for Angelica.
Each morning at a few minutes before nine, Oliver and I would escort her to Magic, Witchcraft and Religion. We’d walk to the foot of the Mound and watch Angelica stride up its path alone, her long legs flashing between the gauzy folds of a flowered skirt. Then we would turn away, and the real business of the day would begin.
We would go to the Shrine to drink more coffee and then wander around the gaudy chapels, occasionally pilfering the collection boxes for bus change. Sometime before noon we’d catch an 80 bus downtown. We’d get off at Dupont Circle, find a bench, and watch the boy hustlers at work. Oliver knew a lot of them from the bars; they’d wander over to bum cigarettes and tell us where to find the party that night, before sauntering off to lean on the hoods of big cars with diplomatic license tags and dark windows. As the afternoon wore on we’d head over to Meridian Hill Park. There Oliver would score marijuana or some very dubious acid from one of the starved-looking rastas—blottah barrels hemp two bucks too bucks—and then it would be time to head back to the Divine and figure out our evening agenda.
I would never have dared to do any of this on my own. But with Oliver I felt invulnerable. His beauty, his air of noblesse décharge, even his very obvious lack of judgment, seemed to protect us from the stunningly real dangers of the city. He’d lope through the city’s worst—and best—neighborhoods, his long hair streaming behind him, wearing his standard uniform of white button-down shirt and faded chinos and black wing tips with no socks, mad blue eyes agleam, arms waving as he told me some hair-raising story. And somehow we never got mugged, or arrested, or even lost. This despite the fact that much of the time Oliver was flying high and loose and pretty as a grinning dragon kite, tripping on acid or mushrooms or god knows what.
Though the truth was, I could never really tell if he was stoned or sober. With Oliver everything seemed strange. I think that in some bizarre way he could make strange things appear. A bald eagle landing in Lafayette Park to prey on feeding pigeons; a red fox skulking outside the entrance to a K Street law firm. Blind nuns, transsexual punks. An armless legless man on a skateboard who sang the Irish national anthem in a bone-freezing tenor, and then rolled a cigarette with his to
ngue and greeted us by name. It got so that if something peculiar didn’t happen on one of our outings, I’d feel disappointed and a little wary.
Nights we would take a Yellow Cab to Southeast and go dancing inside a warehouse where I was the only girl among hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys and men. When everyone spilled back outside at dawn, the same Yellow Cab would be waiting for us on the narrow dark street beneath the dusty trees of heaven. Cab Number 393, with its driver Handsome Brown, a former prizefighter who by that hour was as drunk as we were.
“Where to, children?” he’d rumble, his face filling the rearview mirror. Usually we’d go back to the Divine, to stagger off to bed. But some mornings Oliver would have him drive us to the Tidal Basin to watch the sun rise, or to some all-night place where we could sober up over bad coffee and greasy sausage sandwiches.
Some of these places weren’t safe, according to Handsome Brown; but “I’ll take care of things, my man.” And leaning over with one hand on the wheel, he’d pop open his glove compartment, to show us the gun in there—to show me, actually, Oliver usually choosing these cab rides to nap—and occasionally remove it and brandish it as he drove.
Through it all Oliver walked with me like my demon familiar. I got a weird buzz from going with him to the discos, where no one seemed to know I was a girl. Oliver usually seemed happy enough to forget. He knew I was in love with him. I told him, many times, when I was sloppy drunk, but he only grinned that crooked canine grin and threw his arm around me.
“Oh Sweeney. Why ask for the moon when we have the bars?” And he’d drag me to another club.
Angelica was in love with him too, of course. I knew that from the beginning. It seemed that there could be no way they wouldn’t end up together. Sometimes after dinner the two of them would rise from the dining hall table and go off alone. Or else Oliver and I might return from our evening’s debauch and he would walk me to my door, then continue, singing softly to himself, up the stairs to Angelica’s room. I would throw myself on my bed, feverish with jealousy and yearning and something else, something worse: the fear of having been befriended by mistake, of being found out as an impostor. I tried to console myself by thinking that, even if Angelica slept with Oliver, I understood him.
But now I know better. No one understood Oliver although Annie, perhaps, came closest.
“Forget him. He’s a nutjob,” she pronounced one night in a vain effort to comfort me. “Really, Sweeney. Haven’t you ever read Brideshead Revisited?”
I sniffed. “No.”
“Well, it turns out very badly for boys like Oliver.”
I didn’t care. Hanging out with Oliver was like being attached to some dense yet glittering, rapidly spinning object. By virtue of his speed and beauty he attracted all sorts of things—middle-aged professors, exotic cigarettes, postcards from Tunisia, psychotropic drugs—and now by association many of those things were becoming attached to me, chief among them Angelica di Rienzi and Oliver’s habit of increasingly sporadic class attendance and casual narcotics use.
So the semester passed. October’s acid glory burned into November ash; and one day the Xeroxed flyers appeared across the campus.
AUTUMN RETREAT
AT
AGASTRONGA RIVER ORPHIC LODGE
Friday, Saturday, return Sunday night
For Details See Balthazar Warnick, Provost, Thaddeus College
At dawn I woke to someone calling my name from outside my window. No angels, no creatures from the other side of the Door; only Oliver. His long hair was dirty and when I let him in the front door I could tell he hadn’t showered since we’d last met: he had a not-unpleasant musty smell of Tide-scented clothes, cigarette smoke, and boyish sweat.
“Oliver,” I croaked as I let him in.
Outside dew sparkled on the grass. The Divine’s domed and turreted buildings and dusty oaks seemed to float untethered above us, like the city’s dream of itself.
“Oliver,” I repeated, rubbing my eyes. “You’re up so early.”
“Didn’t go to sleep.” He bounced past me into the dorm, squeezing my shoulder and grinning. “Went back and had a little taste from Wild Bill’s terrarium.” I shuddered and pulled the door closed after him.
In the hall he paused to read one of Balthazar Warnick’s flyers. “Well!” he said cheerfully, “It’s the day after tomorrow, so I guess we still have time to pack.”
I yawned. “Pack?”
Oliver nodded. Carefully he detached the flyer, rolling it into a little cylinder and sticking it in a pocket. “There’s only a limited amount of space for these things, we should sign up now.” He turned and began walking back to the front door.
“Oliver, it’s 5:00 A.M.! And the retreat’s not till Friday—”
He stopped and regarded me thoughtfully. I had on another pair of ripped jeans, but I hadn’t washed off my makeup, and I was wearing the same T-shirt I’d had on for three days now. “Then perhaps you’ll have time to do your laundry,” he said mildly, and grabbed my arm. “Come on—”
The nightmarish thought of a weekend under Professor Warnick’s tutelage was eased by the notion that I might finally have some time alone, really alone, with Oliver. We found a sign-up sheet in the empty foyer of Thaddeus College, and he was right—only a few spaces were left, and my heart jumped to see that Angelica’s name was not there. But after fastidiously writing his name and mine in spidery letters, Oliver added Angelica de Rienzi to one of the remaining lines.
“Wait,” I said, and wrote Anne Harmon. “There—”
Two days later, Annie and Angelica and I were in the parking lot of Thaddeus College. I was wearing one of Oliver’s shirts, too big for me and infused with the musty marijuana scent of his room. Annie had on a red flannel shirt and beat-up tweed jacket that Baby Joe had given her. She was so small and compact that her guitar case looked incongruously large, like a cello carried by an earnest mouse. Angelica wore yet another gauzy flowered dress under a light woolen cape, her hair tied back with a green velvet ribbon.
“A weekend in the country…” she sang. Annie rolled her eyes.
A small crowd milled outside Thaddeus College. Beside a battered Volvo wagon Balthazar Warnick stood and read aloud from a list of names. I slunk behind Angelica and Annie and did my best to avoid catching his eye. Angelica checked us in and we waited for instructions. I dropped my knapsack and peered into the Volvo. Mounds of boxes and coolers rose from its back compartment, and I was relieved to see a number of gallon jugs of red wine. Several other vehicles arrived and were poised for flight, motors running, drivers cranking up tape players and radios. I saw Baby Joe and his friend Hasel Bright leaning on Hasel’s ancient Volkswagen bug. When they saw us, Hasel saluted Angelica with a Jack Daniels bottle.
“Avanti, Angelica! I want you to have my love child—”
Angelica smiled indulgently and blew him a kiss. People began tossing last bits of luggage into trunks and clambering into cars. The caravan was ready to go, but there was still no sign of Oliver. Angelica walked over to Balthazar Warnick, Annie and I trailing reluctantly behind her.
“Professor Warnick, someone else is coming,” said Angelica. “Oliver Crawford—”
Balthazar Warnick lifted his head to regard her coolly.
“Mr. Crawford seems to be carrying on a family tradition of holding everyone up,” he began, when Oliver came loping across the parking lot.
“Oliver!” cried Angelica. “We almost left without you!”
Oliver shoved his hands into his pockets. “Oh surely not.” He bowed, then draped his arm over Angelica’s shoulder. “Here I am.”
“All right. That’s everyone, then—” Professor Warnick folded his list and stuck it into his jacket. “Mr. Crawford, perhaps you would give me the great honor of riding with me—I want to hear how your brothers are doing, and how you have been spending your time away from my class—”
Oliver smoothed his hair back and tugged at his shirt collar.
“Yes, Prof
essor,” he said, bowing. He was so loose-limbed, his pupils so dilated, that he looked like an Oliver rag doll with black-button eyes. “I’ll give a—uh—full report.”
“Come on, then.” Professor Warnick opened the front door of the Volvo and shooed Oliver inside. “You too, my dear—” He gestured for Angelica to follow.
“Don’t forget our bags!” Angelica called to Annie. I watched in chagrined disbelief as Oliver kissed her cheek.
Annie nodded in disgust. “Yes, Mistress! Igor obeys—” She turned to me and cocked a thumb at Angelica’s bags. “Mind giving me a hand?”
I sighed. “Yeah, sure.” With a sick feeling I watched Balthazar Warnick climb into the car with Oliver and Angelica. Then I hefted one of Angelica’s leather suitcases, grunting.
“Jeez, what’s in here? The True Cross?”
“Books on witchcraft,” said Annie, “and the entire fall line of Mary Quant makeup.”
I stared at the bag despairingly, “Why are we doing this, Annie? I mean, there’s Warnick, and—”
Annie actually went white. “Why are we doing this? We are doing this because for some insane reason you and Oliver signed us up—”
“I signed me up! I wanted to be alone with him for once, without—”
“Last train for Debarksville, girls,” someone shouted.
“Forget it,” fumed Annie. “Let’s go.”
We found two empty seats in the back of a Dodge Dart piloted by a dour young seminarian. I slumped in my seat and stared disconsolately out to where Oliver and Angelica sat laughing in the front of the lead car. Behind them Hasel’s VW rocked dangerously back and forth. Then there was a break in the traffic, and the two cars careened out of sight in a cloud of exhaust and dust.
“Hey, get over it, Sweeney, okay?” Annie looked at me and shook her head. “I’ve been wanting to ask you—did something really special happen the first time you put on that shirt? Or are you just waiting for Oliver to notice you’ve been wearing his clothes for three days?”
Waking the Moon Page 18
