The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,5

perfectly well how airplanes worked. And anyway, he wasn’t driving the plane. (The manager was still standing there, and you know he suddenly seemed like the silly one, just standing there with his winter-white arms crossed, his cheap watch ticking on his wrist, while Lawrence and I talked about … well, I don’t know, the philosophy of technology or something.)

Anyway, the point is, I think this is sort of wondrous, this event. I do. And there is no one to check it out with, no one to pass or fail me for my observation and this is a vast relief I feel such a lifting inside. Hope, I think. I’ll bet Lawrence has angels everywhere in his house, moons hanging from his ceiling. I intend to see. Suddenly time is time. I’m leaving a twenty-dollar tip for the maid. I have always wanted to do that. It makes sense to me. And anyway, Martin and I have too much money. We have for some time. At first it was just that we didn’t have to worry about whether we could go out to dinner at some fancy place. Then we got way ahead on tuition, on the mortgage, on everything. We made bigger donations to more organizations. Then he started investing. I never wanted to know about it, I found it sort of frightening.

We buy things over and over again. New cars, before the new-car smell has gone from the old one. New furniture, new silverware, the latest fashions that are sometimes out of style before we’ve taken the price tags off, more, more, always more, full boxes coming in, empty boxes going out, for what? So that we can sit out on our (new) deck in the summer and drink vodka and tonics out of our vodka-and-tonic glasses with limes that have been cut with the (new) lime cutter? It’s always bothered me, what we lost when we stopped being able to fit our things into the trunk of our car. Martin doesn’t believe me. He says it’s a luxury of being rich to wish you were poor. I don’t want to be poor. I just want to be appreciative.

Twenty-five years ago, when I met Martin, he was a hippie. He had a ponytail, tied neatly in the back with a piece of rawhide that smelled like incense. We did drugs once in a while, we used to hurry to clean the kitchen before we came on to the acid, we didn’t like coming down to dirty dishes. In those days, Martin talked about angels too. About parallel universes. About the industry of ants, the wisdom in the dance of the honeybee. I would sit on his lap, my long hair streaming down my back, my long dress on and my long earrings, too. I was braless and barefoot, and Martin and I were filled with wonder at the way the dust motes were colored, we’d never noticed.

I do have to go now. It’s almost checkout time. I wonder where I’ll eat lunch.

Dear Martin,

I hope you’ve gotten a little bit used to this, to my being away. I have, suddenly.

I am here in a room in someone’s house, in a very small town called Midgeville. When I asked at the gas station this evening where the nearest motel was, the man said there was no motel in town, but that the Lewis family had a kind of bed-and-breakfast, real nice place. You didn’t get your own bathroom or anything, but you got a bedroom. Twelve dollars. So I came here and it’s the most wonderful place. An older couple I’d put in their mid-seventies lives here, and the house is full of the old-fashioned things I love—doilies, a grandfather clock, maple end tables crowded with photos and flowered porcelain dishes, overstuffed sofas and chairs with soft pillows tossed here and there. The bed I have is a beautiful brass one, a blue-and-white quilt on it. The front window looks out onto the garden—I can’t really see much now, but Mrs. Lewis told me it’s her husband’s hobby, his pride and joy, he’s got sixty different kinds of rosebushes out there. One variety produces silver blossoms! She said she puts them in a vase with the purple roses, that they’re lovely together.

I feel a little like a child again, up in my room, the door closed, listening to the sound of voices below me. I’m looking forward to the morning—Mrs. Lewis is making applesauce muffins and I know they’ll be