Maybe the Moon

Barbara Bush beads watched this awkward ritual with smug, philanthropic glee, as if I were some midwestern orphan with leukemia catching my first glimpse of the mighty Pacific. “She must enjoy that,” she said to Neil, apparently perceiving me to be deaf as well. For Neil’s sake, I restricted my response to a brief, murderous glare.
    Our first glimpse of Avalon was amazing. The town was almost ramshackle, miraculously un done , The Land That Time Forgot. Simple wooden cottages as random as shipwrecks tumbled down the dry hills to a pristine crescent-shaped beach, at the end of which stood the great circular ballroom, as natural there as the dot on a question mark. There were dozens of sails on the harbor. And dipping gulls. And chimes , so help me, as if to welcome us, ringing from a distant hillside. Neil and I both wore expressions of wordless wonder. Blink once, I remember thinking, and the whole damned thing disappears.
    Up close, of course, it was easier to detect the chinks in the fantasy. The eroding crag above the boat landing had been repaired with sprayed-on concrete, and there were far too many lard-assed tourists like me (well, almost like me) slouching along the promenade in search of diversion. Even worse, some of the more recent architecture (a sort of faux-Spanish postmodern) had lost touch with the charming artlessness of the rest of the town. Still, I liked the place a lot, and Neil did too. We felt unreasonably proud of ourselves, as if we were the first people ever to discover it.
    We had an hour or so before the funeral, so we camped out on a waterfront bench and let the motley parade of humanity pass us by. The people who weren’t on foot were in goofy little white golf carts, since cars are verboten on major portions of the island. I couldn’t help grinning at the sight of these Toontown vehicles. Here was one place, at least, where life seemed a little closer to my own scale.
    Neil pored over a street map he’d bought at the landing.
    “How far are we from the church?” I asked.
    “Not far.”
    “Let’s see.”
    He pointed to it on the map.
    “That’s far,” I said.
    “Is it?”
    I nodded. “Unless you’ve got time for two funerals.”
    He chuckled. “We’ll rent a golf cart, then.”
    I made a face at him. “You can’t go to a funeral in a golf cart.”
    “Who can’t? That’s what they do here.”
    So that’s what we did. We procured a racy little number with a striped canopy at a rental agency right there on the main drag and tooled up a leafy street called Metropole in search of the church. The suspension on the cart wasn’t for shit, but Neil had strapped me in snugly, so my squeals whenever we hit a bump were more of exhilaration than of terror. Neil would glance at me each time with a look of real concern until I succeeded in reassuring him with a smile. It was the strangest sensation, riding along like that. I felt utterly ridiculous and utterly contented, all at the same time.
    The church was a plain white frame structure hung with scarlet bougainvillea. An assortment of golf carts was parked in front, most of them fancier than ours and missing the telltale rental numberpainted on the side. These were locals, obviously, friends of the family. As we made our way to the door, I wondered if Neil and I were the only mourners from the mainland. Besides the dreaded Linda, that is.
    Our progress was observed by a tall, gray-haired man in a navy suit standing guard just inside the door. When we finally reached him, he gave us a dubious once-over and uttered Janet’s name softly, as a question. Neil nodded, following the man into the church. I came after them at my own pace, trying to look devout—or at least concerned—and acutely aware of all the eyes on me. Neil lifted me onto a pew and handed me a printed program bearing Janet’s name, the minister’s name, and the high points of the service. That piece of paper and the less-than-fascinating grain of the pew in front of us was all that occupied me for the next half hour; I couldn’t see for shit.
    The service was your basic Protestant understatement, so devoid of specifics that the honoree might just as easily have died from natural causes at eighty. We sang a few tired hymns and received a few tired words of comfort from the reverend. At one point, about halfway through, Neil glanced at someone across the room, acknowledging her presence (I was sure it was Linda) with a thin smile. I couldn’t help