Maybe the Moon

Florida they can.”
    I waved goodbye from the front door, watching until his rusty Civic had rounded the corner, out of sight. Back in the kitchen, as I searched for a vase for his carnations, I wondered if he really had a lunch date with an editor or was on his way to the Chateau Marmont for an all-day stakeout of the lobby. He wasn’t above that sort of thing, and I had noticed a certain gleam in his eye.

    The following day, in an empty greenhouse on La Brea, we began shooting the video. It was the second time Neil and I had met with Janet Glidden, his American Film Institute friend. She was a tall, skinny white girl with enormous teeth and a slab of straight black hair, shimmering like spun acrylic, that she continually swatted from her eyes. Her manic, fidgety manner, which hindered her work at every turn, might easily have been mistaken by some for cocaine abuse or plain old tenderfoot jitters, but I knew better.
    The greenhouse belonged to a friend of Janet’s, who had lent us the place for two days only. That would be pushing it, to say the least, even for a simple lip-syncing job, so I did my best to keep things moving along. This meant standing still, for the most part, resplendent in pink sequins on a tiny, thrown-together stage, while Janet from Another Planet skittered around the room in a terminaltizzy, endlessly apologizing. Her fingers were long and ivory-colored and trembled visibly as she adjusted and readjusted the various sources of light.
    The lighting was all natural, she said, and she was very proud of it. She had a drop cloth on one slope of the roof, arranged in such a way as to send melodramatic little God-rays streaming down across the stage. From time to time, she would scurry up a ladder outside the greenhouse and poke at the cloth with a bamboo pole. She was building a set with light, she told me, just as Orson Welles had done in Citizen Kane ; it was the only way to achieve “grandeur” on a limited budget.
    Neil watched the grandeur from a distance, leaning against a potting table at the far end of the greenhouse. He was in slacks that day, dark-brown gabardine, and a white cotton sweater that hugged him like skin. While he didn’t talk much, he would catch my eye and wink from time to time, as if in acknowledgment of Janet’s loopy, befuddled nature. I think he’d realized, as early as I had, that she just didn’t have it in her to deliver the goods.
    When she excused herself and flapped out of the building in search of a missing lens, Neil ambled down to the stage and took a seat next to me on the wobbly plywood.
    “Is this safe?” he asked.
    It took me a while to realize he meant the stage. “Is anything?” I replied.
    He laughed. “You got that right.”
    I asked him how it had looked.
    “Well…it’s hard to tell, of course, without the music behind it.”
    I grunted. “Yeah, well…I’m not holding my breath for MTV.”
    He smiled.
    “Or public access, for that matter.”
    “You wanna bail out?”
    I told him I was OK about it. There was only one more day, I said, and Janet’s poignant little film, whatever its quality, would work as a résumé I could show to producers. I was a good sport about it for Neil’s sake, since he’d had such high hopes for the project and seemed even more let down by Janet than I was. I also wanted him to see me as a nice person, someone far too magnanimous to pull a prima donna number, however justified, on some ditzy film student. I cared what he thought about me, I guess. Care. Present tense.
    “She’s not usually this way,” he said.
    I asked him where he’d met her.
    “She was a friend of my ex-wife’s.”
    I nodded soberly. “And you got her in the divorce.”
    He smiled. “Not exactly. I ran into her on the street, and she told me what she was doing at AFI. She sounded so together about it.”
    “Oh, well,” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Maybe we should fix her up with Tread.”
    He laughed. “He could use some of her energy.”
    I told him not to mistake panic for energy.
    “Panic?” Hieroglyphics formed on his forehead. “About the shoot, you mean?”
    “About me.”
    This seemed to rattle him. “I dunno, Cady. She’s pretty cool.”
    “She may be,” I told him pleasantly. “But she’s also in the throes of dwarf panic.”
    “But she was fine when we saw her before.”
    “Sure,” I said. “And then she had a week to think about it. I’ve seen the pattern, Neil. I’ve known too many women like