Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1) (5 page)

Actually, I hadn’t just backed off. I had retreated to my room like a beaten dog. Next day I left home permanently.

I continue, and Liz listens as in a trance. “I’m ending my self-imposed exile. Going home. The congressman is never there. To him, I’m just another mouth to feed.” I pause, and then calmly add, “If I find out that bastard hurt her, if she felt compelled in any way to take all those pills because of him, I’ll ... do something ... I’ll ... tell the world about him ... ruin him.”

Liz plants several kisses on my shoulder. “Your mom was lucky, with you.”

I blush. “Can we change the subject?”

From our lofty refuge, The Hill, a weed-strewn parcel hidden by a stand of Eucalyptus trees, I can see the dark outline of Rattlesnake Mountain to the northeast. The congressman’s house, The Gables, lies at the foot of the mountain.

“I have a recital next Thursday,” Liz says, “in the gym. I’m dancing with Professor Rutledge. Will you come?”

I bite my tongue. “Okay.”

“Smoke a bowl? I copped some pot from J-man. He’s moved to the beach. Still goes to The Palace a lot.”

“You know I don’t smoke,” I say, smiling thinly. “I still have to get on with my life, remember?”

“It’s funny how you used to roll the most perfect doobies, even though you never smoked.”

I’m surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that Liz is still getting high. Yes, we had hung with friends who get stoned, like J-man, but we never indulged. I imagine that making love to her probably has to be awfully good before it’s better than on pot, but that’s something I’ll never know about. Anyway, stoned or not I possess the soul of a clown, a schlimazel, and inevitably my poor luck impels me to blow it at the most opportune moments.

“Let’s go, then,” she says, pulling a watch from her gaudy purse. “My dad locks me out at midnight.”

I engage the clutch, start the engine and put the floor shift into neutral. Liz grasps my hand firmly. “Daniel,” she says, “I know this might not be the right time, but before we go I have to tell you
my
secret. It’s going to hurt you, a lot. Please don’t hate me.”

“I could never hate you,” I say, thinking about how I still close my eyes at night and dream of marrying Liz. I’ve given my entire being to loving her, assured that our life together is pre-ordained. Fate led to my meeting her, at The Blues Studio one amazing night, when I played piano in the house band and Liz declared to the world that she was my sweetheart.

Now she closes her eyes, bites her lip and says, sort of prosaically, “My secret is ... that I slept with David.”

My first reaction is an incredulous inward repetition of my best friend’s name:
David
? As his name bounces around on the inside of my skull, I stare fixedly at the eucalyptus trees as they sway slowly back and forth in the moon’s cold blue light. I am wondering what my next life-changing strategy might be. If I have even a shadow of self-knowledge, I can use it now. But I’ll still be me, and that, it seems, is the basic problem.

“How the hell did it happen?” I ask Liz, after a long silence.

She casts down her eyes prettily and doesn’t speak for a minute or two. Finally, she says, “My parents were gone. David was waiting for Devon. We were stoned, and I know that’s not an excuse. It was a one-time thing. I’m so sorry.”

I try to gather my thoughts, and then I say, “Does Devon know?” I’m concerned about Liz’s sister, who is turning sixteen soon. She’s been my close friend and confidante since my relationship with Liz began almost two years ago. There’s something about Devon that comforts me. She and David have been a thing for some time.

“No,” says Liz. “Nobody else knows.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Her eyes meet mine. “Maybe I was afraid David would tell you, or tell Devon. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

“David is getting high? You’re responsible for that, too? What the hell, are you in love with him or something?”

She flashes a rueful smile. “Of course not.”

I can feel the wrath beginning to grow in my heart-hurt ego, and I ask myself, What would a man like Ernesto Che Guevara, whom I had lately begun to read (may peace be upon him), do in this situation? What would he say? Why can’t I be like Che, whose women never got in the way of his personal goals? Why can’t I just let Liz go and be done?

In some dark way I begin to envy David for having gotten Liz into bed without becoming her prisoner. I am bound to her like Prometheus to his rock.

But I can’t think like Che, or like David, and I don’t have a clear idea of what I really want, here and now. There is only Liz, and my mother’s honor, and vague notions about discovering life on other planets, solving the big bang theory and developing a unified theory of everything. These days I’m just the freak on the playground, a victim of uglification who’s fallen on his laughable face.

My sentiments ricochet back and forth between despair and rage. “What about the professor?” I ask bitingly. “Did you tell him, too?”

“Peter is open minded,” Liz answers quickly. “He’s independent, and he gave me my independence. We had a connection that allowed us to thrive, individually.”

“Why David?!” I shout in frustration. “Were you able to seduce him because Devon is a virgin?! Why my best friend?!”

“Please forgive me,” Liz answers uncertainly, and she begins to cry. “Maybe I—”

“Forgive you my ass! Get the hell out of my car!”

Liz freezes, and then slowly turns to look at me.

I glare fixedly at her, screwing up my face with as much contempt as I can muster.

She opens the car door and steps outside. When she closes the door, I gun the engine and, in one swift move, throw the gearshift into reverse and back the car in a semi-circle as the gears whine in protest. I jam the floor shift into first and speed away down the dirt lane in a cloud of dust.

For a moment I’m Steve McQueen in the classic film
Bullitt
, racing my souped-up Mustang over the hilly streets of San Francisco, as I press my Mazda up curvy Mt. Helix Drive. Several times I almost run my car off the road, or so I construe it as such. At the top of the mountain I stomp on the brake pedal and with tires screeching the car jerks to a stop. I jump out and run up the steps of the nature theater to the summit, to the stone retaining wall near the towering white cross.

I spring to the top of the wall, where one can look down on a vast pulsating blaze of lights, quivering like diamonds in the dark. After thinly considering a plunge to my death on the rocks below, I scream obscenities at the moon to ease the torment that gnaws at my heart like a large, furry rat.

But the wind seems to say to me: “What is the use of suffering, when there is no remedy, no cure for love?” Before long I feel foolish, and I walk slowly, dejectedly back to the car. I’ve fought with Liz before, I tell myself, although not over anything this serious. Perhaps, in time, I will find a way to forgive her. I need her.

I drive leadenly down Mt. Helix Drive and turn my Mazda onto the dirt lane. Liz is walking determinably down the road with hands on hips, a cartoon of the stern wife. I stop the car, and she marches by. I shift into reverse and drive slowly alongside her, bringing the car to a stop again. She opens the door and sits down lightly.

Neither of us utter a word for several minutes. The silence feels oppressive. Finally, we arrive at her parents’ wide-berthed trailer in the Valley.

Liz climbs out of the car. She turns and gives me a sweet look of disappointment. “In eight short months you’ll be eighteen, an adult, Daniel Isaac Rosen.” Then she adds disdainfully, “But you’re still just a baby. Growing up is a virtue, and it costs a lot. I can’t help. You’ll have to do it yourself.”

Before I can reply (I don’t know what I would say) Liz shuts the car door and comes around to the driver’s side. I roll down the window and listen.

“When you start to believe in yourself, to feel something other than self-pity, come see me.” She runs up the front steps of her trailer and disappears.

I sit still for a moment, like a forgotten Buddha statue. I suppose, I am thinking, that Liz and I have been subtly slashing at each other for some time. Now she’s decamped a second time, and the possibility I might never see her again seems real.

As I drive along Main Street, towards my motel, Haydn’s “Piano Sonata in E Flat” plays on the car radio. The music is like a warm summer downpour on my brain. I feel lost without my secret sharer, Liz Santini.

I tilt the rearview mirror downward so I can see myself. My eyes are wily, and for a moment I get the sense that I’m gazing at a stranger who mimics me, taunts me with the knowledge of a preposterous joke. My muscles tense until my breathing grows shallow and my sorrow transforms itself into a frozen, cursed smile. The image somehow informs me that for years, beginning with the onset of puberty, I’ve turned my eyes inward, watching and scrutinizing every aspect of my behavior. I’ve generated a tormenting self-consciousness that paralyzes me, gives me a feeling of unreality, an all-pervasive sense of not quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in.

I lost my genuine self in early adolescence. The realization evokes in me a terrible sadness. But Liz is right, I cannot cry. I can’t shed a tear over her betrayal, or the congressman’s iniquities, or this newfound awareness of myself.

As I re-position the rearview mirror I start violently, for my mother’s face flashes towards me out of the shadows, round and shiny, her green eyes quirked at the inner corners as if she’s worried about something. I’m either so stressed out that I’ve become delirious or my mother’s ghost is actually sitting in the back seat of my car. I notice the white scum of medication that encrusts her downturned mouth, the deep, persistent scowl in her forehead and the hard lines that run downward from her eyes. I hear her slurred words, spoken in a near whisper: “Remember your promise to me, Danny Boy.”

Then suddenly my mother’s face changes, or that’s when I think I see it change. Although still somewhat pale, her face has become younger and more vigorous, uplifted, like the face that had been hers in the photographs taken before I was born, the face of a young woman who knows that no evil can undo her. For me there has existed between the two faces a mystery I never tried to understand while my mother lived, but now seek to explore, and that sometimes has caused me to hate her.

Somehow I manage to pull the car to the side of the road and stop, barely able to take my eyes from my mother’s blanched reflection in the mirror. I’m afraid to turn around and look, for fear of what I might see, nothing perhaps, or ...

As I stare in disbelief, my mother smiles and then laughs softly, such as she had been unable to do in the last few years of her life.

I shiver, and she’s gone.

S
itting at the computer in my room I google Congressman Frank Rosen. I want to know more about the mystery man, the man in the old photograph. My mom is away, attending the Epstein auction with her closest friend, my godmother, Isadora Blair. Isadora is grande dame of the Island, “the only island there is.” She’s the undisputed leader of my mother’s social set. “The girls” also play tennis once or twice a week.

I emailed Ashley earlier today but I haven’t gotten a response. I told her that I’d met the mystery man and that my mother’s relationship with him is quite serious. I added that they’re probably getting married before long, and that we are to have dinner with Frank and his two sons this week.

I open a Wikipedia article about Frank Rosen that says he was born in the City of Boston forty-five years ago. That means he’s three years older than my mom. He’s the U.S. Representative for California’s thirty-seventh congressional district, a member of the Republican Party. Frank was raised in the Boston area and attended North Bennet Street Trade School.

As I’m reading the article, Manny hops about on my desk, next to the computer screen. “Pay attention to me,” he seems to say.

Frank’s paternal grandparents, Samuel and Esther Rosen, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz during World War Two. They had sent Isaac, their only child, to New York with a Jewish refugee organization because they couldn’t obtain entry visas for the whole family.

Isaac then lived with an Orthodox family in New York until he found his way to Boston. There he met Amy Murphy, a Catholic, and they married. Isaac went to work in the shipyards, and two years later Frank was born.

When Frank was thirteen, before he was to be bar mitzvahed, Frank’s father abandoned him and his mother. Frank worked at odd jobs to help support the family, and at sixteen he took a full-time job as a sheet metal worker in the shipyards. A year later, Frank’s mother died of a heart seizure aboard a metro bus.

The article goes on to tell how Frank married Mary Pettersen, a Catholic, of Norwegian descent. Frank then moved the family from Boston to San Diego, and he took a job with Tycon International Corp. as sheet metal supervisor. Mentored by Al Williams, President and CEO of Tycon International, Frank studied accounting and political science at SDSU in the evenings, and then law at USD. Al moved Frank along with Tycon, from Cost Accounting Manager to Controller, to Executive VP for Government Affairs after he’d earned his Juris Doctor degree. Al helped finance Frank’s successful campaigns for the California State Assembly, and then the state senate, and ultimately the U.S. Congress.