Maybe the Moon

it down for me!
    Already computing the time it would take to get back to the dressing room and find Jeff, I spun on my heels and ran smack into…Jeff’s legs.
    “Jesus,” I whispered.
    “I’m here,” he whispered back.
    “I completely forgot.”
    “When does it go black?”
    “After Bette finishes.”
    “Shit, that’s her, isn’t it?”
    “That’s her,” I said.
    “Which mike do you want?”
    “The one in the middle.”
    “The one she’s using?”
    “Right.” I gave him a faint, ironic smile as if to say I deserved it.
    “It’s yours,” he said.

    When I was little, Mom used to read to me from a novel called Memoirs of a Midget , by Walter de la Mare. It was written in the twenties, I think, though its flowery, slow-going style was strictly Victorian. The narrator, known only as Miss M, was an over-wrought little prig whose chief object in life was to disappear completely from the public eye. Given all that, you’d think I’d have detested her, but I didn’t. I related completely to the endless abuse she received at the hands of cruel bourgeois patrons and under the wheels of speeding carriages. She was such a deity around our house, such a defining force, that I actually thought she’d cut an album the first time I saw her nickname applied to Bette Midler.
    I tell you this because it’s what I was thinking as I stood there in the wings, waiting for my turn in the spotlight, just behind that other Miss M, feeling a curious, wet heaviness begin to spread in my chest. My first thought, silly as it seems, was that I was somehow in that suit again, enduring its weight and heat and confinement. My second thought was the right one, the one that has circled my consciousness, buzzardlike, ever since Mom bit the big one in the parking lot at Pack ’n Save. I put my hand against Jeff’s leg to steady myself.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    I remember trying not to scare him, trying to say something flip about my fabulous timing as usual, but there wasn’t breath for words, or the strength to form them. I was a block of hardening concrete—or a fly caught in the center of that block. The pain, however, was something polished and metallic, something completely new. Before Bette had finished her song, I was on my back and Jeff was on his knees next to me, blowing into my mouth and yelling into the blackness for Renee.
    The last thing I remember was the sound of Velcro being torn.

26
    O BVIOUSLY I’ M NOT DEAD . I WROTE THAT LAST ENTRY YESTERDAY morning—my first morning here—in secret defiance of my doctor, who gave me strict orders to vegetate. According to my nearest neighbor, a grumpy old Greek in the next bed, they always say that to people in the cardiac unit, and almost never enforce it, so I’m having another shot at it, knowing they can’t do shit to me if I get caught. I’m writing sheet by sheet on pink three-hole paper Renee found in the hospital gift shop. She didn’t want to get it for me at first, putting up a big fight, until I reminded her sweetly that the movie of our lives will never be made if nobody knows how the fuck it turns out.
    I’ve had a “mild heart attack.” Nothing to be terribly concerned about, they say, unless I have another one in the next few days or so. Swell. I feel pretty good, except for a sort of shadowy ache in my chest—more like a lingering body memory, I think, than anything else. I was wheezing like a calliope when they brought me in, but I’ve since had regular hits of oxygen and seem to be pretty much back to normal.
    In case you’re interested, my untimely collapse never made so much as a ripple at the tribute. Before Fleet Parker had finished hisspeech, the stage manager delivered a note to him explaining my indisposition, and Fleet ended up presenting the award himself; the audience never even heard that line about “someone as old as all the rest of us put together.” Since Philip sent a mammoth pot of hydrangeas to the hospital, along with an unusually sweet note, I harbored the hope that he might have told the press about me, but there was nothing in the paper this morning and zilch on Entertainment Tonight last night. The event itself was covered in scrupulous detail, right down to the gowns in the audience, but there was no mention of the minor medical crisis in the wings.
    Jeff and Renee rode with me in the ambulance to the hospital, so we’ve since lost track of the world back there, knowing only what we learn from the