Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  It was all a little too weird for me. I went to a booth with a yellow-and-white awning and bought a lemonade. I crossed the Mall to the Freer, always an oasis of calm amidst the summer storm of tourists and children. I sat on a bench and sipped my lemonade and mused on what I had seen on TV.

  Angelica a cult figure.

  I shook my head and took another sip, getting a grainy mouthful of sour sugar. Although, really, it wasn’t totally unexpected. If I really thought about it, I would have been surprised if Angelica hadn’t turned out to be somehow extraordinary. If instead of an Italian count, she’d married a chemical engineer from Houston and settled there to raise their children. I wondered if she had children, dismissed the notion as ridiculous, maybe even a little grotesque. I could imagine Angelica hiring someone else to bear a daughter for her, and then engaging an army of nannies and tutors and linguists to raise her, a serenely beautiful child playing by herself in a Florentine garden.

  But Angelica pregnant, Angelica in labor; Angelica changing diapers and making Play-Doh and watching The Brave Little Toaster? Not in a thousand years.

  I finished my lemonade, dropped the empty cup atop a trash can already filled to overflowing. I walked slowly back across the Mall. A murky breeze carried the greasy smells of hot dogs and egg rolls from the lines of roach coaches parked in front of the museums. A bunch of marines in summer whites posed on the museum steps with a cardboard cutout of the president and his wife. Two museum guards watched, laughing, and saluted.

  Too weird. I let the heavy revolving doors bear me inside, breathing gratefully the cool recycled air, the heady scents of tourism and scholarship, and returned to my office.

  A little while later Baby Joe called. “What’s shaking, hija?”

  “Baby Joe!” I was unexpectedly relieved to hear his voice. “You okay?” Silence. It had been only a week since Hasel’s death. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “Well—I just saw the weirdest thing on TV. On Opal Purlstein—”

  “You watch Opal Purlstein?”

  “Angelica was on! I saw her, she was promoting some new book—”

  “Oh, yeah. Waking the Moon. It’s supposed to hit the best-seller list this Sunday.”

  I was flabbergasted. “I have a friend at the Times Book Review,” said Baby Joe tentatively, “he says—”

  “You knew?” I exploded. “You knew about Angelica and didn’t tell me?”

  “Hey, Sweeney, it’s not like it’s some kind of state secret—”

  “I know that! But all that stuff about Hasel, and you never even mentioned—”

  “I didn’t even know until a few months ago. I mean about her,” he said, aggrieved. “And—well, with Hasel and everything, I kind of forgot—”

  “How could you forget?”

  “Cut me some slack, Sweeney! My best friend fucking died!”

  “But Angelica—Hasel said he saw—”

  I could hear a soft intake of breath as he dragged on his cigarette. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about Hasel right now,” he said finally.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “Can we talk about Angelica?”

  Another long silence, followed by a sigh. “Yeah. But listen, Sweeney—there’s something weird going on. I mean with Angelica—”

  “So that’s news?”

  “Back off, huh? Okay, this is what I know: someone here interviewed Angelica for the Leisure section a little while ago. She’s got some kind of cult following out on the West Coast, feminist grad students, something like that…”

  “You could have told me, Baby Joe. Jeez, I almost had a heart attack when I saw her—”

  “How’d she look?”

  “Fantastic. I mean, she doesn’t look different at all, she looks just like—”

  I thought of how she had looked the last time I’d seen her: crouched over Oliver, as though she were a wolf and he her prey. I felt a clutching in my chest, the same awful disjointed feeling I’d had when Baby Joe told me Hasel died.

  “—she looked just like always,” I ended lamely.

  “Yeah.” Baby Joe sighed again. “Okay, I guess I should have told you when I first found out. But I kept thinking of Oliver, and—well, you and Angie had all that weird history—”

  “We did?”

  “Hey, hija, you tell me. But Oliver, you know, I thought it would just make you feel bad…”

  His voice drifted off. I imagined him sitting at his computer, hazed with blue smoke and a dusting of ash. My anger melted—because seeing Angelica did make me think of Oliver, and that did make me feel bad.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said at last.

  “A long time ago, in a university far, far away,” Baby Joe giggled softly. “Hey, you didn’t videotape her or anything, did you?”

  “No. I guess I should have. But I was so—well, I was kind of shocked. It was like The Picture of Dorian Gray or something.”

  “Yeah. And somewhere there’s a very bad photo of Angelica, with her mascara running and no lipstick. Very scary.”

  I laughed. “So she’s a best-seller now, huh? I had no idea. I’ll have to get her book. You know anything about it?”

  “Not really. But I’ll fax you that interview.”

  We exchanged a few scurrilous remarks, and I told him about the Aditi.

  “Sounds pretty wild. I bet the food’s good—”

  “It’s great. You should come down and check it out.”

  “Do they have baluts?”

  “What’s baluts?”

  “Filipino specialty. You take these embryonic chickens and bury ’em in the dirt for a couple months, and then—”

  “That’s enough. No, I’m pretty sure there’s no baluts.”

  “Too bad. Don’t you ever do any work down there?”

  “Nah. This is the government. Mostly we just take turns answering the phone and going to lunch.”

  I heard someone calling to Baby Joe in the background. “Listen, hija, I gotta go. I may have something else for you later. You gonna be there?”

  “I guess—”

  “Okay”

  He hung up. I sat for several minutes staring at my desk.

  “Katherine?”

  I turned to see Dr. Dvorkin framed in the doorway. “Robert! Come on in.”

  “Thanks—I can’t stay, Jack left me some paperwork I’ve got to fill out for his fire-eaters.”

  He grimaced: a small round man, with white hair and a neatly trimmed white goatee, wrinkled and kindly and smartly dressed as an F.A.O. Schwarz Santa doing time in a fancy law firm. Even now, in D.C.’s broiling summer, he wore an immaculate grey three-piece suit, complete with testosterone yellow tie and matching pocket handkerchief.

  “Katherine, I have to attend a Regent’s Supper at the Castle tonight. Would you mind checking in on the cats for me?”

  In addition to being my boss at the museum, Dr. Dvorkin was my landlord. For the last eight years I’d rented the tiny brick carriage house in his back garden on the Hill. It was the most wonderful place I’d ever lived. The only place I could even imagine might be nicer was Dr. Dvorkin’s own town house.

  “Of course not. Should I be looking for white smoke rising from the tower?”

  Dr. Dvorkin sighed. For several months now the search had been on for a new Regent; three months earlier one had died at the age of ninety-seven and his replacement had yet to be named. “Not yet, I’m afraid. We’re meeting someone else this evening. I hope to god this thing doesn’t take all night. I think there’s some basil in my refrigerator, you should take it when you come over, it’s about to go bad.”

  “Thanks, Robert.”

  “Thank you.” He turned to go, then stopped. “I almost forgot—you got a fax.”

  I took the pages, tossed away the cover sheet, and settled back into my chair to read.

  ANGELICA FURIANO: WAKING THE GODDESS WITHIN US ALL

  It wasn’t what you’d call an in-depth piece—the New York Beacon wasn’t exactly noted for its coverage of Nobel Pr
ize winners—but it seemed like a pretty decent matching of journal and subject. While there wasn’t a photo of Angelica accompanying the interview (and that seemed a mistake), there was a loving description of one of her homes, in the canyons north of Hollywood, and a rather breathless listing of the original artwork hanging there: Frida Khalo, Mary Cassatt, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe’s polaroids of Patti Smith, an ancient vase fragment depicting Sappho’s lament for the virgin Gorgo.

  The (female) interviewer was obviously bewitched by Angelica. It was easy to see why—Angelica was so charming, her answers to even personal questions funny and self-deprecating. I could just imagine her, lounging on her white leather sofa with the picture windows overlooking the canyon. She wore expensively tasteful clothes: Italian sandals, pleated cream-colored skirt, jade green silk blouse. The interviewer noted that she wore simple jewelry, silver earrings shaped like crescent moons, and a moon-shaped silver pendant around her neck.

  I learned that her husband the duke had been eighteen years her senior, and had died during a sailing trip in the Aegean five years ago. Following his death, Angelica returned to the States and began writing in earnest. Her first two books, The Nysean Fields and Amazons in America, had been published as trade paperbacks by a small New Age press. The books had become surprise best-sellers, and a cause célèbre in both New Age and small press circles. After Amazons in America turned up on the New York Times best-seller list, Angelica started giving workshops stressing the same things she invoked in her books: how women should avoid becoming victims, how they should take responsibility for their own failures as well as successes; how they should learn to recognize the Goddess within themselves. There was a strong occult slant to all of this, with the Goddess (whom Angelica called Othiym) standing in for that ubiquitous Greater Power favored by adherents of AA and its ilk.

  And, unlike any Twelve-Step program or women’s self-help group that I’d ever heard of, there were some genuinely disturbing elements in Angelica’s Goddess-worship. The emphasis on the division between the sexes, rather than their union; a certain disregard for the importance of family or any other ties except for those between the Goddess and her followers. In the little I’d read of other, similar, female gurus—Shirley MacLaine, Lynn Andrews, Marianne Williamson—there was always an emphasis on the powers of love and forgiveness, of the importance of loving yourself so you could better love someone else.

  Angelica didn’t buy it.

  “That’s condescending to women.” Furiano’s brilliant green eyes narrowed as she reached for her Limoges teacup. “For thousands of years, women have wasted their lives taking care of men—tending their homes and their children and their castles and their farms, tending their offices and corporations and schools, making sure they look young enough and beautiful enough to keep a man—and why? Because we have been brainwashed into thinking that men are necessary for our happiness and self-esteem—”

  The reporter gently suggested that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that. Dr. Furiano bristled.

  [Dr. Furiano: I was impressed.]

  “Come now—you’re a woman, you know what it’s like! I say, “Enough.” We’ve all put in our time being Aphrodite and Hera”—the goddesses of Love and the Hearth respectively—“we’ve all been the dutiful daughters and good mothers and noble prostitutes and loyal secretaries. It’s time to acknowledge that there are other roles for us to play. That we can be warriors, not just in the skies and in the armed services, but on the home front, where most of the battles are fought anyway. That we can be lovers but also leaders; that we are not victims! Everybody knows that women really are the stronger sex—you read accounts of shipwrecks and accidents, the journals from the Donner Party… it’s the men who go down whimpering, and the women who walk out of the jungle alive. If men had menstrual periods, they’d have ten paid sick days a month! And can you imagine a man having a baby? Why, we would have discovered a cure for childbirth a hundred years ago!

  I laughed. This sounded like the old Angelica.

  Dr. Furiano offered me more tea; a young man (a graduate student in cultural anthropology, Dr. Furiano told me later, working for her as a summer intern) came out bearing a silver tray of tiny butter cookies shaped like horns. I asked her if her next book was going to be an extension of her earlier work, or if she had done away with men altogether.

  “Not yet! You see, I still find uses for them—” She laughed, and her grad student grinned. “No, truly, I have many men in my life, I always have. My father raised me after my mother died when I was an infant, and he was probably the greatest single influence on me. I absolutely do not have a vendetta against men.

  “My new book—my new book is called Waking the Moon and will be published this summer. I always try to have my publication dates coincide with one of the Goddess’s ancient holidays—though this one will be out before Lammas, which is a celebration of the harvest that used to end with the sacrifice of beautiful young men to the great Goddess. When people think of human sacrifices, they think of the Carthaginians tossing children into the flames, or beautiful virgin women tied to the stake. But actually the first and greatest sacrifices in human history were nearly always of men, in an effort to appease the Goddess. So it is easy to understand how men might have gotten a little concerned, and ended up seizing control of things out of desperation—”

  And, this reporter thought, you can see why Dr. Furiano’s own work is met with controversy wherever she goes.

  “But, of course, we really can’t really do that anymore, I mean at least not legally, and so…”

  There was more of this sort of talk; then,

  Dr. Furiano leaned closer to me. Through the window behind her, I could just glimpse the crescent moon gleaming above the Hollywood Hills.

  “You know,” she said, “all I’ve really done is follow in the footsteps of those who went before me. The great female archaeologists of our time, June Harrington and Magda Kurtz and Marijta Gimbutas, women who discovered so much about the Goddess cultures of ancient Europe, and who inspired people like me to go searching for more answers.

  “I found my answers in the ruins of ancient temples in Estavia and Crete and Turkey. I found them in what I discovered there about the goddess Othiym, and now I want to share my knowledge with women everywhere.”

  She pointed to the window behind her. “Waking the Moon isn’t just about personal empowerment. It’s really about something much, much bigger, about all of us—women and men—reaching outside of ourselves and using that chthonic aspect of our own natures to change the world. To take a world and a race on the brink of self-destruction and shake it back to life again. I truly believe that very drastic measures will be needed to change things, if we are to survive. There is a quote from Robert Graves which I find quite interesting, considering he wrote it nearly fifty years ago, in The White Goddess—

  The longer Her hour is postponed, and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will Her five-fold mask be, and the narrower the scope of action that She grants to whichever demigod She chooses to take as Her temporary consort in godhead. Let us placate Her in advance by assuming the cannibalistic worst…

  Dr. Furiano’s hand remained poised in the air. Beyond it the moon rose slowly above the hillsides.

  “But I think change is coming,” she said softly. “I think it is coming very, very soon. And I very much want to be a part of it.”

  I put the fax paper down on my desk, smoothed it with my hand.

  Othiym. Waking the Moon.

  It was all crazy, of course, but exactly what I would have expected from Angelica. The part about saving the world made it sound like maybe she’d tripped off the line somewhere, but the rest seemed pretty much in character with the girl I’d known nineteen years before. And at least she’d given credit to June Harrington and Marija Gimbutas and…

  At the thought of Magda Kurtz I shivered, reached in
stinctively for the cardigan I kept hanging on the back of my chair all winter. But it was July now. The sweater was stuffed in a drawer at home, and I doubt if it would have offered much comfort anyhow.

  “Katherine?”

  I started, turned, and saw Laurie Driscoll, our department secretary “Another fax for you.” She handed me a piece of paper. “And Alice said to tell you that your intern will be here tomorrow morning—I guess a whole batch of them arrived this morning, they’ve got orientation and then some kind of lunch at the Castle. So finally we’ll have some help getting that new stuff organized.”

  “About time.” I took the fax, glanced down, and recognized Baby Joe’s signature. After she left, I read Baby Joe’s addendum.

  Sweeney—

  This just in, I thought you should see it. Also, I talked to Annie Harmon and she said she’d call you.

  I’ll be in touch.

  B. Joe

  It was a copy of a brief article from that morning’s New York Times.

  FLAGSTAFF, AZ July 2 Police stated that yesterday morning the skeletal remains of Cloud Benson, professional bodyguard to noted feminist archaeologist and author Angelica Furiano, were discovered on the grounds of Furiano’s home in Sedona.

  In what appears to have been a grisly freak accident, Benson’s corpse was completely devoured by wild animals—probably some type of fire ant, says County Medical Examiner Warren Schaner—so that only her skeleton and remnants of clothing remained. Benson, 19, had been a member of Dr. Furiano’s entourage since the fall of 1993. She was last seen alive the previous evening, when her colleagues Kendra Wilson and Martin Eisling left her in the cottage they shared on Furiano’s 200-acre ranch. Furiano speculates that Benson, who liked to run every evening along the ridge that marks her property line, may have tripped and injured herself, and so fallen prey to some kind of predator. Sunday Jimenez, Furiano’s housekeeper, reported seeing a puma on the property some months earlier.