Maybe the Moon

crumpled on the sofa, sobbing.
    “Did he rape you?” I asked.
    She shook her head.
    “I’ll run a tub,” I said.

    I stood by the tub and scrubbed her back with a sea sponge. She had finally stopped crying, but she was still a mess.
    “I think you should call Lorrie,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “Because that prick tried to knock your head off.”
    “It’s not her fault,” she said.
    “I’ll call the cops, then. What’s his name?”
    “Skip.”
    “Skip what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Renee…”
    “Well, I don’t.”
    “Lorrie will know.”
    “No she won’t,” she said. “She only knows Barry.”
    “Her date?”
    “Yeah.”
    “We’ll call Barry, then.”
    “No.” Renee shook her head dolefully. “Just leave it, OK?”
    “He hit you, goddammit.”
    “I know.” She started to sniffle again. “What’s the matter with me, Cady?”
    “Nothing. Jesus, Renee, it’s not your fault.”
    “I should’ve never went on a stupid blind date. They never work out.”
    “Well…yeah. Maybe that’s true.”
    “And the regular ones don’t, either.”
    “Oh, c’mon. Some of them do. You’ve met some nice guys.” I couldn’t name any right offhand, but it seemed like the thing to say. Fortunately, Renee didn’t challenge me.
    “But they never last,” she said.
    “Well…”
    “I have to find somebody.”
    “Why?”
    “Because…never mind.”
    When Renee resorts to “never mind,” you know the truth isabout to surface in some convoluted form or other. “C’mon,” I said, biding my time as I swiped the sponge across her spacious pink back. “You’re twenty-three years old. You’ve got all the time in the world.”
    “Not if…” Again she cut herself off.
    “Not if what?”
    “If you move out.”
    “Why should I move out? This is my house.” I saw it now, of course, ever so clearly.
    “Yeah, but you’ve got a boyfriend now.”
    “ Not ,” I said emphatically, appropriating one of her more asinine pop phrases.
    “But I thought…”
    “We’re seeing each other, Renee. That doesn’t mean we own each other.”
    “You sleep with him.”
    “So?”
    “Well, I thought…”
    “He has a kid, honey. It’s his whole life. He’s not gonna ask me to come live with him.”
    “Maybe he will.”
    “Yeah, and maybe the moon is cheese.”
    “But if he came to live here…”
    “With the kid?” I rolled my eyes for her. “I don’t think so.”
    She giggled, mostly out of relief, I think. I wondered how long she’d been dwelling on this desertion/eviction fantasy and if it had actually driven her to go shopping for shitheads. I began to feel guilty about the lump rising on her face. “We’re a team,” I told her. “I thought you knew that.”
    “Well…”
    “Nobody else would put up with me, honey.”
    “Oh, Cady!” In a rush of pure emotion, Renee pivoted toward me like an overaffectionate baby elephant, making me drop the sponge.
    “Don’t hug me,” I said, stepping away. “You’re wet.”

    So we’ve been bonding today, us girls. Renee’s spirits have lifted considerably since I started writing, but she still hasn’t left the sofa. Now that she sees Neil as less of a threat to us, she’s begun to extol his virtues, how nice he is and how talented and how cute.
    “You should get Denzel Washington,” she said at one point. “He’d be so perfect.”
    I looked up from this notebook. “For what?”
    “For the movie.”
    “Huh?”
    She sighed as if I were the thickest person in the world. “You’re writing about him, aren’t you?”
    “Some,” I said, feeling slightly invaded.
    “Well…”
    “I don’t think there’ll be a movie, Renee.”
    “Why not?”
    “Trust me on this, OK?” I had tried to picture me and Denzel playing the big love scene on Catalina, under the directorial eye of, say, Penny Marshall or Ron Howard or any of those seventies kids currently making sensitive movies, and I just couldn’t do it. Times had changed, true, but not that much. Besides, the real thing had been too perfect, too exquisitely internal, to imagine its cinematic counterpart. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re having a life: the real thing is the movie.
    The phone just rang, and Renee says it’s for me.

16
    I ’ VE BEEN AT I CON ALL DAY—THE ACTUAL STUDIO, NOT THE theme park—where weirdness followed weirdness until I’m no longer sure of anything. It started yesterday with a phone call. Not the one that interrupted my last entry—that