Maybe the Moon

much as she could.”
    “Is that why you broke up?”
    “Not entirely.”
    “What else?”
    He seemed to resist for a moment, then said: “Are you scouting for Oprah or something?”
    “No, but pretend I am.”
    “She wasn’t much on romance,” he offered.
    “Didn’t bring you roses?”
    He shook his head. “Or expect them to be brought.”
    “Ooh,” I said. “That is a problem.”
    “It got to be.”
    My teasing had begun to unsettle him, so I veered away from the tender spot. “Was she in show business?”
    He shook his head. “Hospital administration.”
    Immediately I pictured this chilly bitch with a clipboard; make that chilly stupid bitch with a clipboard, since she’d let Neil get away. I asked him how he’d met her.
    “At Tahoe. When I played piano in a show lounge.”
    “And she was a tourist?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Were you in love with her?”
    “Yeah. I guess so.”
    “You guess so?”
    “For a while, yeah, I was.”
    “You don’t sound that much alike.”
    “We aren’t.”
    I would have felt much better if he’d said “We weren’t,” but I didn’t remark on it. It was getting clearer all the time that Linda still weighed heavily on Neil’s mind, for whatever reason. “What did you love about her?” I asked.
    He thought about that for a moment and then shrugged. “She made me feel talented.”
    “You are talented.”
    He smiled sleepily. “Not that talented.”
    “She liked the way you played piano?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Nothing wrong with that.”
    “No,” he said. “Unless it’s all there is.”
    “Well…yeah.”
    “There was more to it than that,” he said. “I’m making it simpler than it is. I was young then. I needed somebody to believe in me. My family wasn’t great at it.”
    I asked him how long he’d been divorced.
    “Almost two years.”
    “Why don’t you see other women, then?”
    Boy, did that rattle him. “Why are you so sure I don’t?”
    “Do you?”
    “Some. When I can. The job doesn’t make it very easy. And I spend a lot of time with my little boy.”
    “Oh, right.”
    “I will. I mean, I will more.”
    “Will more what?”
    “Date more.”
    I nodded.
    “Do you always pump people this way?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because people always answer me.”
    He laughed. “They do?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Wanna see where I live?”
    For a moment, I thought he was just being snide, underscoring my nosiness. “Look, I didn’t mean to…”
    “No,” he said, “I mean it. Come by for a while.”
    “Well…OK. Sometime.”
    “What’s wrong with now?”
    I couldn’t think of a thing.

    He lived on the second floor of a motel-style apartment house in North Hollywood. It was a clean, serviceable place built of rough white bricks and ornamental iron, with a plastic NOW RENTING banner flapping noisily in the breeze. The front doors were painted either orange or cobalt blue. On the patch of lawn out front, a small child with red braids sat perfectly still on a yellow plastic trike. As we approached, I noticed the eerie fish-scale sheen of the lawn and realized it was plastic too.
    There was an elevator, thank God, so I arrived at his apartment in a state of manageable breathlessness. He lifted me into an armchair in the living room, a pleasant, sunny space that had almost certainly been furnished on a single Saturday morning at Pier One Imports. There was lots of wicker stuff in plums and greens, matchstick shades, a preposterous trio of giant Italian wine jugs. The beige carpet smelled marvelously new. Beyond the sliding glass doors, the railed ledges overlooking the parking lot had been converted into twin ecosystems, rife with jungly potted things. Neil’s seven-year-old son, Danny, who was staying with his mom for the summer, was more than amply commemorated by a photo shrine on top of the TV set. Neil handed me one of the larger pictures to examine: the fruit of his loins seated at an upright piano, grinning infectiously.
    “In Daddy’s footsteps, eh?”
    He shrugged. “Maybe. If he wants to. I don’t push it.”
    “Right.”
    “I don’t. My old man did that to me.”
    I asked what his father had done for a living.
    “Does,” he corrected me. “He’s a pharmacist. In Indianapolis.”
    I nodded.
    “Puts you right to sleep, doesn’t it? We lived above the pharmacy. It was all he ever talked about. There was no way to get away from it.”
    I pictured this wide-eyed, twerpy-voiced little kid sitting glumly among the