Crying for the Moon Read online

  “With the two of us.”

  “What? What are you—” Maureen was stopped dead by a sudden realization. “Oh God.” The heat rose all the way to her hairline. “Oh Christ on a crutch.” She was beet-red, she was mortified, and the queer thing was she was even more mortified that she was caught being mortified. But really, she had never, never even suspected for one minute that actual real people would ever be at that kind of dirt. A ménage à trois, that’s what they called it; Maureen knew that because she’d read it in a Harold Robbins book. She stood up, outraged, and fell back on Fox’s lap, stood again and then . . . everything started to spin.

  She came to with a splitting headache, a mouth as dry as the Sahara, and the realization that she had no clothes on. She was afraid to find out where she was, but she made herself turn slowly and look, and she saw Fox lying next to her, grinning from ear to ear.

  “I’m your first time and you’re my first virgin.”

  “It wasn’t my first time,” she said angrily, “not by half.”

  He pulled back the covers to show her the bloodstained sheets and winked at her. Maureen felt herself turn crimson from the tip of her toes right to the top of her head, that same old shame. With the sheet pulled back and her whole body exposed, Maureen’s mind didn’t have time to feel sorry that her first time had turned out to be so nothing, so no big deal. Her mind was too busy noticing how white and flabby and repulsive and disgusting her actual body was—not just the each gross part, but the totally hideous all-together.

  “I was having my period,” Maureen mumbled.

  She grabbed the covers and pulled them over herself, but then it struck her: the convent. Oh Christ. She had to get back to the convent. Had she already been caught? The choir was singing today at the Place des Arts with choral groups from all across the country.

  She leapt up, wrapped in the sheet, and began the tortuous process of trying to get her clothes on without letting the sheet drop.

  “Where are you going, Maureen?” Fox said.

  “I’m singing. I gotta go. I’m late already.”

  “You’re a singer?”

  “No.”

  “But you said you were singing—”

  “Yea, yea, yea, yea, yea,” Maureen said, desperately trying to keep the sheet around her and get on her bra at the same time. “But I can’t sing really. I’m in a choir. They’re going to slaughter me. Our Lady of Mercy girls’ choir from home.” Maureen couldn’t believe she was stuck there answering his stupid questions when she should be back at the convent by now.

  At last, she started for the door. She half expected him to say, “When can I see you again?” but he didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything. That stopped Maureen. He didn’t want to see her again? Well, Maureen thought, she’d definitely better make plans to see him again, and so she had to say, “When can I see you again?”

  “I’ll be at The Rainbow Steps tonight,” he said.

  “Okay,” Maureen said. “I’ll be there.”

  She flew down the street without even knowing what street she was on, her mouth so dry it got in the way of her breathing. She asked the way to the convent and, mercifully, it was close—eight or ten blocks back the way she’d just come. Idiot, you idiot. Maureen’s mind started in with the same message it replayed all day, every day. Stupid idiot, how can you be so stunned, you idiot?

  She got back to the convent. The alarm had gone up at breakfast that she and Carleen were missing. So she lied and lied and lied and kept on lying. She said she’d gotten up early; she said she’d gone out to see the sights; she said she’d walked around Old Montreal.

  “It was just amazing, and those wonderful little streets, just like being over in Paris, France, or somewhere,” she said.

  She could tell that Sister Catherine didn’t believe a word she said, but Maureen could see her decide to let it go for now. Sister Catherine told her to hurry up and go get changed for the concert.

  Where was Carleen? God, where was Carleen? Anything could have happened to her. It was Montreal, Sin City. Maureen was frantic. Halfway up the stairs, Sister Imobilis, who was an alarming sight at the best of times with her flaming red wig that didn’t even try to pretend not to be a wig, and no eyelashes, no eyebrows, no facial hair of any kind—the girls in the choir had started calling her the Pig with the Wig—stood, wig askew, her anger burning with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, stopping Maureen and telling her that Carleen’s parents would have to be contacted and that the Montreal police had already been called.

  “You are the last person who saw her. She must have said something to you!” she spat at Maureen.

  “Promise soul to God, Sister, she never said anything to me.”

  Imobilis’s hand darted out and slapped Maureen hard, right across the face.

  “What?” Maureen stammered out.

  “Don’t you, you dirty, filthy little girl, call forth the holy name of God to back up your sinful lies. Holy God doesn’t want your soul, you good-for-nothing little streel. Now get out of my sight.”

  “Gladly,” Maureen muttered.

  “What?” Imobilis roared.

  “Nothing, Sister,” Maureen said as she backed away.

  AFTER THE CONCERT AT THE PLACE DES ARTS, MAUREEN went back to The Rainbow Steps. She was in such a rush to tell Carleen that her parents knew she was missing and the nuns had called the cops that she didn’t even bother to change out of her stupid navy blue serge uniform.

  The bouncer let her in and directed her upstairs. When she opened the door to what she imagined was Perry’s flat, she saw what looked like a cross between an office, a warehouse and an apartment, and there sat Carleen at a desk, typing away prettily, looking for all the world like the cat who’d just eaten the canary. She was wearing that big man-sized watch on her wrist. It was Carleen’s father’s watch, and he’d given it to her for luck before they left for Montreal. Maureen didn’t know why, but seeing that watch on Carleen’s wrist made her feel angry or uncomfortable or . . . something.

  Looking up at Maureen, Carleen said, “What you got your uniform on for, retard?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m Perry’s secretary now. I’m gonna help him run the business, and I’m gonna live right here, too, and—”

  “What? What? You’re nuts, Carleen! Your parents are gonna come up here and—”

  “I’m seventeen—”

  “Sixteen!”

  “—and I’m doin’ it.”

  Maureen distractedly picked up a tape dispenser from the desk and turned it around in her hands.

  “They are going to skin you alive, Carleen.” She looked at the dispenser. It was in the shape of a penis. She dropped it like a hot rock and then looked at the rest of the stuff on the desk. A lot of things were penises, or else they were breasts, or they were shaped like naughty monks with their robes held up by their erect cocks, or nuns with their tits out.

  “What kind of business is it that Perry is in?”

  “A catalogue business.”

  “What kind of catalogues?”

  “Mail order, sort of porny stuff.”

  “Porny stuff?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Jokes, you know, and balls you shove up your bum, and plugs and dildos and all that stuff.”

  Maureen didn’t know what to be more ashamed about: all that stuff or the fact that she didn’t even know what a lot of that stuff was. “They’ve called the cops on you,” she said after her face had stopped burning so hot.

  “I’m sixteen, the cops can’t do anything. I’m allowed. I’m starting my real life now, away from all that bullshit.”

  Maureen looked at Carleen helplessly.

  “Look, I know for a fact that no one is gonna let you get away with living your ‘real life,’ so you might as well come back to the convent with me now.”

  Carleen sat there like a rock, unmoving and unmoved. Nothing Maureen said shifted her. When Maureen picked Carleen up underneath her arms and dragged her physically toward the door, Carleen went limp and let herself collapse to the floor, but still Maureen kept dragging her. Then Carleen started to laugh and said Maureen was tickling her, and she was laughing so hard that Maureen got nervous.

  Her mind went back to when she and Carleen were sitting in the auditorium at Our Lady of Mercy Convent, watching the movie A Tale of Two Cities. At first, they were just sitting there, bored stiff, talking, saying the movie was a real dweeb-fest, but then they found themselves sucked into the emotion of it, and by the time Sydney Carton was taking other buddy’s place on the guillotine and saying, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done . . .,” they found themselves sobbing uncontrollably. They were so moved by his love and devotion to Lucie Manette that the both of them were inconsolable and crying and sobbing so hard that when they looked at each other, they laughed at how foolish they were being, and they laughed so hard, they started to cry again.

  The crying and laughing went on right through the credits, but then Maureen started to slow down. She wiped the tears from her eyes, hiccuped, coughed and tried to catch her breath. But Carleen was still really crying in earnest, big air-gasping, heartbroken, gut-wrenching, chest-heaving sobs that just went on and on until she flipped and started laughing hysterically again, and then in a blink, she was sobbing, then laughing, then sobbing. She was switching faster and faster between crying and laughing and laughing and crying, and finally, Sister Mary Virginia had to deal with what was from then on referred to as “the incident.”

  Maureen stopped trying to drag Carleen out of the apartment, and Carleen just got up and went to sit behind her new porny desk again, looking at Maureen defiantly.

  “Well, I’m going then,” Maureen finally
said from the door.

  “Well, go on then,” Carleen said.

  “I mean it, Carleen. I’m really going—back to the convent.”

  “Yea, all right.”

  “I’m just going to leave you here, all by yourself.”

  “Yea, but I won’t be all by myself, will I? I’ll be with Perry.”

  “Okay, but they’re calling the Montreal cops.”

  “Let ’em,” Carleen said.

  Maureen opened the door.

  “This is your last chance, Carleen.”

  “Okey-dokey,” she said, not even looking up.

  “I mean it, come with me now or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or . . . don’t,” Maureen said, finally resigning herself to the fact that there was nothing she could do.

  After “the incident,” after Sister Virginia took Carleen out of the auditorium, Maureen didn’t see Carleen again until she hesitantly visited her on the seventh floor of the Grace Hospital, the psych ward, where they kept Carleen for a full month. Maureen only visited once and that was in the first week. She always meant to go back, she really did, but Carleen was in a ward with a whole bunch of crazy women—well, Maureen couldn’t say for sure that they were crazy, because she was so afraid to look at them, afraid she might see something that she’d never be able to un-see, and afraid that once she clapped eyes on crazy, really “locked-up crazy,” she’d just naturally go crazy herself. So that day at the psych ward, she kept her eyes firmly on Carleen, who looked different, altered, dozy, not like herself, not like the Carleen who played Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring over and over and over again until she almost wore the records through.

  It was Maureen who’d discovered the Gershwin and Aaron Copland albums. She’d read about them in America’s Teen-age Magazine, Seventeen, in a music column that had been squat in between a long “Facts about Your Bosom” article and “Posture Pointers to Make You Prettier.” She and Carleen had found the records and loved them and, even more, loved that they loved them. It made them feel so grown up, so above the fray, so sophisticated, to be listening to music that was almost classical; they were not just a couple of teenyboppers grooving mindlessly to VOCM’s top-ten hit parade.

  But now this person, the one lying so listlessly, so limply, in the psych ward, was not the same Carleen at all, not a bit like the Carleen who always “died” at that Lenny Bruce album, the one with a picture of him having a picnic in a graveyard. The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce it was called. This new Carleen was lying there unable or unwilling to be interested in much of anything. Maureen only stayed a few minutes, and she never managed to make it back there. She didn’t know why, and she always felt so bad about it. She knew that no true friend would ever do that. Something about Carleen had always made Maureen feel a little bit ashamed, like Carleen wasn’t good enough. Not that she wasn’t good enough for Maureen—she was more than good enough for Maureen—but what would they think of Carleen, especially now that she wasn’t just odd but certifiably nutty? Carleen’s weird, crazy, unpredictable self, Maureen knew, would not be good enough for them, the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful them who always sat in judgment and whom Maureen was always trying to live up to and please.

  AFTER LEAVING CARLEEN AT THE RAINBOW STEPS, MAUREEN went down to the Park of Islands all by herself because she hadn’t even been to Expo yet. She managed to see the big Imax thing, which was . . . well you know, it was big and all, but then again, so what? In the Czech pavilion, while Van Morrison was singing “Brown Eyed Girl” over the loudspeakers and big, fat, humiliating tears were pouring down Maureen’s face, she thought, Here I am, wandering around, standing in line at this stupid world’s fair, all by myself, and a guy caught her eye and sidled up to her.

  “My brown-eyed girl?”

  “I got green eyes, actually.”

  He smiled at Maureen.

  “Well,” she explained, “hazel . . . so there is brown in there, technically speaking.” She continued, though she didn’t really want to: “Kind of a shitty brown, not that warm, velvety brown that people go cracked for, you know, the whole swim-in-the-pool-of-your-eyes kind of brown, I was just . . .” She couldn’t seem to stop talking.

  “The song,” he said, “I really like Van Morrison.”

  “. . . I would love to have brown eyes and brown skin as well,” Maureen went on, as she wiped the tears from her eyes. “And for all my freckles to just magically melt together and become a deep tan, or . . . I’m probably talking too much, am I?”

  “Yea.”

  “I like Van Morrison too,” Maureen lied. She’d never heard of Van Morrison, but now she was going to buy all his records.

  “Wow, are you wrecked?” the guy said to Maureen. “Do you think it’s time to have another draw?”

  “Yea, okay. Let’s have another one.”

  And with that, Maureen had her first-ever toke of hash.

  Laughing, laughing, uproariously laughing at everything. The world was a funny old place. Then they were walking, and then they were at his place. And buddy was all over her. Well, I already did it last night, thought Maureen. Who am I to deny someone something they so obviously, so alarmingly and so desperately want? Maureen didn’t feel she had the right to deny anyone that. She didn’t feel it was her place. So, she thought, the best thing at this point would probably be to just keep giving it away now that she was ruined anyway and they seemed to want it so much, to want her . . . so much—well, the use of her body anyway. I mean, it would be mean just to keep it, wouldn’t it? And so she and the Van Morrison buddy just did it, but of course Maureen didn’t let him touch her or anything in any of “those places.” Maureen thought that because “it” was a definite mortal sin and doing “it” was so dangerous because you could get knocked up and your life could be totally over forever, so in a way just by doing “it” you were already being punished, or potentially being punished anyway. And since almost everything that went along with doing “it”—French kissing, intimate touching, even dry humping, someone had told Maureen—was, according to the Church, a mortal sin, Maureen figured why pussyfoot around? It was definitely more valiant, more courageous, to just let buddy stick it in, get the deed done, commit the big, dangerous sin and move on. From what she could tell so far, doing “it” involved no pleasure whatsoever, so it stood to reason, if there was no pleasure and there was great danger and, on top of that, it was kind of disgusting and grunty, she was probably already paying for the sin right here on earth, so why would she have to burn in hell for eternity for doing something that was so grody anyway? I would love to know, though, what all the big fuss is about, Maureen thought. Just more bullshit, she guessed. She’d never actually, to that point, heard the term “foreplay,” but she knew she was against it—against it ever since Mr. Kearsey . . . Maureen didn’t let her mind go there. It was all bad enough.

  The guy from Expo fell asleep. She lay there for what seemed like hours, bored out of her gourd and a bit sore. This wasn’t what Maureen had had in mind at all when she dreamt of the worldly delights she’d enjoy in Montreal. This can’t be it, just lying here in the cold on a dirty old mattress on the floor, next to someone I don’t even know. She crept out of bed and dressed and made her way on foot through Old Montreal to The Rainbow Steps on Crescent Street. She wasn’t giving up on bringing Carleen back to the convent with her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ONLY PERSON SHE RECOGNIZED AT THE RAINBOW Steps was that Fox guy from last night. Oh shit! thought Maureen. Now what am I supposed to do? What about if he wants to do “it” again? Am I obliged because I did “it” last night with him? But then I’d be doing “it” with two different guys on the same night—the absolute height of slutdom. Though Maureen felt ashamed, she also felt kind of elated, because, after all, if she was going to leave virginity, holiness and goodness behind her, she might as well do it with a bang—two bangs in one night, actually, Maureen’s mind interjected.

  She asked Fox to go upstairs and get Carleen for her.

  “Can’t. She’s not there.”

  “She’s gotta be there,” Maureen said.