Maybe the Moon

her.”
    “You really think so?”
    “Yeah, I do.”
    He asked if it was always women.
    “Women empathize,” I said. “Some of them do it too much. ‘There, but for the grace of God…’ and all that. Janet looks at me and sees herself and can’t take it. She has to get away from it as fast as she can.” I smiled at him. “You must’ve noticed. She’s been running her little buns off all morning.”
    Neil didn’t respond, just nodded blankly for a moment, thensmiled at something in the distance. Turning, I saw that Janet had returned.
    “Find what you need?” Neil asked.
    “Oh, yes. I’m sorry, people. I was sure I’d brought it.”
    “No problem.” Neil and I actually said this together, like a couple of cats who’d just shared a canary. I hoped Janet hadn’t heard my quickie analysis of her behavior, since it would only heighten her guilt, and she had way too much already. I found her exasperating, of course, but I knew she was doing her best, so there was no point in getting mean about it.
    When you’re my size and not being tormented by elevator buttons, water fountains, and ATMs, you spend your life accommodating the sensibilities of “normal” people. You learn to bury your own feelings and honor theirs in the hope that they’ll meet you halfway. It becomes your job, and yours alone, to explain, to ignore, to forgive—over and over again. There’s no way you can get around this. You do it if you want to have a life and not spend it being corroded by your own anger. You do it if you want to belong to the human race.
    “How are you?” Janet’s voice was just a tad too loud to be natural. “You must be tired.”
    I told her I was fine.
    “I can run out for coffee or something…”
    “I think we should just finish up,” I said.
    “Oh…OK.”
    Neil bounded to his feet, making the little stage wobble a bit. “I’ll get out of the way.”
    “I like what you did there,” I said. “Those slanting beams.”
    “Oh…me?” Janet was so cranked up that the compliment had flown right past her. She wheeled around like a confused crane and examined the delicate play of light and shadow on the wall behind us. “Really? You think so?”
    I told her it reminded me of those long shadows on the buildings in The Third Man .
    “Well…” She allowed herself a quick shutter-flash of a smileand blushed violently. “That’s really nice, but I’m not sure it’s…Did you notice the latticework up at the top?”
    I told her that I had, and that it must look wonderful in black and white.
    “Oh, it does,” she said. “I mean, I hope. Would you like to see?” I’m sure she hadn’t considered the logistics of this exercise before making the offer, because she suddenly looked flustered again. “Unless…”
    “Neil can give me a boost,” I assured her.
    “Oh, well, then…if you’d really like…”
    So Neil helped me down off the stage and held me in his arms long enough for me to look through the lens at Janet’s handiwork. Janet served as my stand-in, sitting cross-legged where I had stood, so I could see how the light would fall on my face. It was quite an effect, all right—starkly dramatic and spare—yet not nearly as memorable as the warm mahogany of Neil’s flesh through the nubby roughness of that white cotton sweater.
    “Do they teach you that at AFI?” I asked Janet, after Neil had set me down.
    “What?”
    “Lighting. You seem to have a knack for it.”
    “Oh…no. Well, yeah…some.”
    “It’s amazing that you can do that with natural light.”
    Janet looked at it again for a while, then back at me, a little calmer now that I had shifted the focus onto her work. In some ways, I think she was seeing me for the first time. “I’m so glad you like it,” she said.

    Neil and I held a postmortem on the way back to the Valley.
    “She might surprise us,” he said.
    I agreed that she might and left it at that.
    “I hope you aren’t pissed,” he said.
    “About what?”
    “That I roped you into this.”
    I gave him a stern, half-lidded look and told him I was never roped into anything.
    “Still,” he said.
    I asked if his ex-wife was like Janet.
    “No.” He turned and looked at me. “Why?”
    “Well, you said they were friends, so I just wondered how much they have in common.”
    “Not much,” he said. “Linda was organized. Is organized. That must be why Janet appealed to her. Another messy life to tidy up.”
    “Did she tidy up yours?”
    “As