Blame It on the Moon

I knew Anna Deveraux better than anyone else in the world did. Better than her parents, her lovers, maybe even herself. I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s true. And it worked both ways: she knew things about me that I had never fathomed until she brought them up. The people around us often thought we were a couple, but we never really were. Not in “that” sense. We never went to bed with each other but that one month—and it ruined everything.

It wasn’t even a whole month either. It ruined everything because we thought we’d fallen in love, but of course we hadn’t. We figured it out in a matter of weeks, or Anna did, but by then it was too late. We’d pissed off our real lovers and pissed away our friendship. It was utterly stupid, and I blame it on the moon. Anna, who is smarter than I am, says it was no one’s fault, that the time had come for a change. This is one of the few times I don’t believe her, but so what? It happened. We’re still what I call “internet friends,” but we never meet, never even speak to each other in real voices. Instead, we thumb-type in baby talk over phones, or punch the “like” button on social-media sites where invisible faces complain about the state of things while slouched in coffeehouses and rented rooms.

We no longer sit in the crazy marketplace we used to love, talking face to face in a haze of other people’s voices at a tin table surrounded by food stands. Never go out on rambling bus trips to lost corners of the city and take pictures of old buildings like we used to do. It breaks my heart, and probably it breaks hers too. But what can you do when you’ve ruined the one great love you had because you wanted too much of it? We held out for twelve years before getting horny over nothing, a rock in the sky. The foolishness of human beings respects no boundaries.

I don’t recall how we met, and it doesn’t matter. We had to be around each other for some reason—a project, mutual friends? Honestly, I don’t know. In any case we discovered a common interest in photography, learned we lived near each other, and we both liked to talk. The crazy marketplace was a second home to us both, and now that we had acknowledged each other’s existence, it seemed like we couldn’t wander into the place without finding ourselves together at a table. I’d be walking through the crowd carrying a tray, and hear my name called out; or I’d be sitting down stuffing my face and Anna would materialize in the seat across from me, smiling the beatific smile she reserved for chance encounters with friends. The smile glowed in a way that changed the light in a room, on a street, in your heart….

Anna was not pretty, but she was beautiful, if you know what I mean. Strong-featured with clear skin, sleek hair that changed color and length every few weeks, and that smile. And we’d start talking as if we’d been friends since birth. We were brother-and-sister close. Sometimes other friends would join us: friends of Anna’s, almost followers. Other times the two of us would talk alone for hours, till the market closed at ten; I’d walk her to her door, and then amble home to my own apartment under the big-city sky, the night tinted yellow by a million lamps. Naturally I thought, now and then, about how it might be to go to bed with her, but I never felt it was important. We had each other in a way that lovers rarely do; why ruin it? But of course we did.

All it took was a night where everything went just so, the way you dream it will but it never does. The Fates, those nasty sisters, tangled our threads into a Gordian knot, if I may mangle together a couple of classical allusions, and we had to slash our friendship to get free.

I couldn’t have imagined things would turn out as they did, it was such an ordinary day. Or as ordinary as a day can get when you know an extraordinary soul like hers. Anna called me: “Let’s drive up into the hills tonight, I wanna get a picture of the full moon over downtown. But not from the usual spots; everybody’s gonna be there, because of that article in the paper. Someplace different. And bring that big lens of yours, or it won’t work. I can borrow it maybe, huh?”

Of course I said Yes right away. But I always said Yes to Anna unless I had something specific scheduled. My girlfriend was used to it, and had finally gotten over feeling jealous. In fact, not feeling jealous about Anna was a key requirement of mine for a girlfriend. I always knew they would take some time, and I knew some could never deal with it. Laurie could, and the way Laurie and I got along made it worth the wait, the long period of small adjustments. Laurie was staying at her own apartment that night anyway; what better than to go on the road with Anna?

Anna’s voice over the wires: “You know a place? Where we can see downtown from the north of west? That’s what the paper said, but I have no sense of direction, as you well know.”

Sure, I knew a place, a line of low hills where some lots had been bulldozed a few months back but they hadn’t built anything yet. “I’ll pick you up,” I said. “When can you be ready?”

“I’m ready now, we don’t have much time. The paper says the moon rises at six-twenty tonight. Does anyone else know this place? What are you waiting for?”

“You’ll see me in ten minutes. Be outside.”

“I already am, talking to Carlo.” Carlo was an eccentric octogenarian who lived in her building and probably dreamed of her at night. I grabbed the camera bag and tripod and dumped them into the trunk of my car, which at that time was a little two-seater Mazda I’d picked up cheap from a friend. I didn’t change from my office clothes, so I was looking sharp. A sports car with the top down, a nice get-up: I guess that didn’t help. But without that damned September moon it wouldn’t have happened. I am pretty sure of that. A cloudy day, and the one great friendship of my life would have been saved.

She was waiting on the sidewalk, with Carlo slouched beside her, smiling that chimpanzee-like grin of the hopelessly horny. She gave him a peck on the cheek, hoisted her own camera bag onto her shoulder. The bag had a tripod strapped to the bottom and swung clumsily as she trotted to the car. I opened the trunk, she threw it in beside my kit, then she flounced into the car, opening the door for herself as she always did. It was a warm evening, and she wore a light, swirly dress and ballet slippers, a cardigan on top buttoned tight. I started the car and pulled out into the velvet dusk, cruising through streets lined with cozy apartment buildings and their glowing windows. Anna’s head swiveled side to side as she took it all in: “Look at the all the people in their living rooms, sitting in front of the TV when they could be out here with us! Oh it’s a beautiful night, isn’t?” And it was, the sky crouched lovingly over us, winking an odd star now and then through the glare of streetlamps, streetlamps that tried to warn us of the dangers of darkness…. A brief run on the freeway, with the wind whipping her hair around and making talk difficult, then I pulled off onto a wide empty road that ran between some brand-new warehouses towards the hills.

The road dead-ended into a flat dirt field with a driveway leading to a tubular gate that seemed to have been put up half-heartedly, since there was no fence and you could just drive around it, which we did. The unpaved road was well-graded, and I’d taken the low-slung Mazda up there before. We bumped slowly along in second gear, Anna chortling with quiet glee as the car wound up into the hills, dragging a veil of dust. Soon we came to the lots, which had not changed since I had explored them a few weeks before: flat concrete foundations, murky-looking in the darkness, with pipes sticking up out of them in forlorn little clusters. One lot had a chain-link fence in front, through which plastic slats had been woven; I drove around it and parked the car. The city spread out in front of us, a glimmering swarm of yellow lamps bedded in darkness, and in the distance, the high towers of downtown, tall narrow shadows with the arrayed squares of office windows shining up and down their dark bulk. It was a bar graph charting the money power that had built the pulsing streets below us; they all seemed to lead to it from where we sat. Anna’s hand grabbed my own, which had been holding the shift knob. “Our city!” she said.

“Like a giant glowing spider in its web,” I said.

“Like a galaxy,” she said, and sighed. The night thickened overhead; the lights seemed to brighten; a bird wailed briefly in the dark slopes below us. The odor of desert plants drifted up to us, along with the rumble of traffic from far below. Something white glowed impossibly brilliant between two buildings: “The moon!” she cried. “Get the cameras, quick!”

We hurried out of the car, I opened the trunk, and we busied ourselves with technique. The night grew brighter behind the towers; we had found the right spot. We were ready on time.

I handed Anna my prize telephoto lens; I had different ideas for my shot, something more panoramic, showing a burning sweep of lights below the skyline. We set the tripods up side by side and waited, while the moon edged coyly up into the eastern sky, visible only as an intense whiteness between skyscrapers. Finally it revealed itself above the highest towers, looming huge the way it does when it’s still near the horizon. I clicked the shutter when a quarter of it still hid behind the tallest roof, and then again after it lifted itself higher to sneer at the frantic human clutter on the plain below us…I heard the shutter click in Anna’s camera by my side, smelled a faint odor of talcum that could only have come from her, mixing with the desert scents of the night. The moon rose steadily, shrank as if bored with our attention, and inched into the night sky, dimming the stars, shaming the furious pride of lamplight swarming below the towers and their burning windows. At last it was too high to make a good photo, and Anna’s hand found mine, or mine found hers, we turned and fell into a hug. She murmured into my shoulder, “We did it! Oh, what a moonrise! What a night!” Creatures rustled in the dark mass of chaparral below us, the breeze brought us perfumes of sage, the lights glimmered, the slow moon rose, and I made the biggest mistake of my life: I looked down to see Anna’s face turned up to mine, her skin silvered by moonlight, the white orb caught in her eyes, her wide-open eyes, and without even thinking about it we began to kiss.

So much of life consists of matters that we refuse to accept but that happen anyway. We forgot about our unspoken agreement, the night became warmer or it was just us, we moved towards the car still wrapped together, I saw her fling something white onto the seat, and she turned to me again, pulled me down to her as she lay herself back over the smooth cool hood of the little sports car, raised her legs to my shoulders, I entered her, we became at last, at long last, we became lovers, without word or thought.

…The night; the scent of sage and talcum; the silver moonlight plating her face, her hair, the curve of her throat; the electricity that seemed to fill us both so that we too became like small vain lamps that challenged the moon. The moon won, smirking in the sky above us; we came together, she let out a high clear wail like the call of a night bird, held me close to her with her legs, and said, “Oh, stay; oh, stay a while, oh, stay forever; oh, what have we done….” And as she caught her breath and opened her eyes, she smiled. “It was like making love to the sky, the whole universe.” Then: “Help me up, Mr. Sky….” I took her outstretched arms and helped her sit up, then hop to the ground. She fell against me again, nuzzled her head on my chest. “Let’s go back to my house, do this some more. And then breakfast, yes?”

I nodded. “Breakfast, yes.” But we stayed there a long time, and I didn’t even feel ridiculous standing over the glimmering city with my pants down at my ankles and the wild world rustling in the slopes below us. At last she reached up for a kiss, and stepped back, looking up at me with the moon in her eyes. We put away the gear; I walked her to the passenger side of the car and opened the door for her, something I’d never done before. When I got in I found her white panties draped over the headrest where they’d fallen, and reached for them. “Oh, leave them,” she said, smiling. “I won’t be needing them where we’re going anyway, will I?” And we drove back down into the populated night, the wind whipping her bright hair around as we sped onto the freeway, with the complacent moon looming cold and satisfied overhead.

We spent the next two weeks alternating nights between her apartment and mine; though we were in our middle thirties we acted like a pair of horny kids, parting only for work. Without the moon in play, she was more a playful than a passionate lover, but we felt something serious building up behind the physical frenzies, and we were fools, we didn’t know what it really meant. We barricaded our hearts away from the rest of our worlds…. I don’t know what happened to her sort-of boyfriend, but he was never mentioned again, not in speech nor text, and my Laurie figured things out within a week of my ever-more-awkward evasions; she left me after a stern lecture that was gentler by far than I deserved though it wasn’t gentle at all. And so there we were, face to face, Anna Deveraux and me, in the dark, night after night, putting all the weight of our lost days on each other’s shoulders. Of course it could not last, and it didn’t.

It lasted, in fact, till the night of the new moon. We began to taper off without noticing it: forgetting to call each other from work, that sort of thing. Nights spent alone, and not feeling bad about it. Two days when we both were busy. A night together becoming awkward now and then, as if we hadn’t learned our parts even after all that passion. Then, two weeks on, the breakdown. Not a break-up, but a breakdown: Anna suddenly sitting on the floor crying freely. Slouched, lost, dejected, I don’t know what. I moved towards her to ask, to comfort, and she put her hand up like a cop stopping traffic and said, “No! No, darlin’, no. I just…I, I, I…oh god we’ve got to stop. It’s too much, I can’t be dependent on anyone, I’ve taken care of myself since I ran away from home when I was fifteen, don’t you see?” She looked up at me, tears running down her cheeks, smiling weakly: “I’m falling in love. I can’t have that. You know me, you know me so well. You know I can’t have that. What if you die? What if I die?”

I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t die but of course that was nonsense; anything can happen, and some day it will. I edged towards her again to offer a hug, a hand, anything, but she made the traffic cop gesture again and stood up. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. We should never have…I’ll never forget but I’ll try. Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.” And she gathered her bag and jacket and ran, ran out the door, still crying. I have not seen her face since then, nor heard her voice.

The night of the new moon is always dark. I’d never felt so alone in my life. I am still in that darkness.

I did not call Laurie, nor otherwise try to turn back the clock. It’s impossible anyway, pretensions aside. I have not dated anyone else since then, though I’m sure I eventually will. But I can’t yet get myself to start a relationship with someone who will always be second-best in my mind. I know folks do that all the time, that life requires compromises, that you gotta be realistic, vote for the good-enough candidate, choose the restaurant you can afford, rent the room that’s open and not the one across the hall with the better view. These are things that I do, because Anna was not part of them. When you are with Anna, nothing is second-best anymore, because she changes the world. But she herself couldn’t change, couldn’t compromise. And would I have loved her so if she had? Maybe not, and maybe she knew that.

I keep no mementos from Anna Deveraux in my rooms, not that I ever had any. She was a maker of moments, not objects, except for her stunning photographs, which I see posted on Facebook now and then. I did try to write a list of Anna attributes, which I taped to my desk lamp and look at when I am feeling pessimistic about the universe, which is more often lately. It’s not definitive, it’s not even necessarily all true, but here it is, a partial list of things that Anna does well:

1) Live free

2) See things as they are

3) Deflate pretensions

4) Call at the right time

5) Make you feel alive

Of course number #4 mocks me, since she will not call. There is no right time for us any more. We can’t comfort each other as we used to do—and yes, I did comfort her now and then, even Anna had her times of doubt. But that’s all over with.

As for my picture of the moon, I entered it in a contest and won two hundred and fifty dollars and spot in a glossy magazine. My fifteen minutes of fame, I guess. I mentioned it on Facebook, and Anna posted a thumbs-up in the comments. Just an emoji, not even real words. That’s all that’s left me of the great love of my life. At least I could be happy that for twelve bright years I didn’t even think that it might end. I blame it on the moon, but who knows? We all die, and love dies too. You still gotta live. I wish it hadn’t happened, but I’m glad it did.