Maybe the Moon

bought a big can just for me, as if he’d sensed somehow my impending need for comfort in large quantities. In the van on the way over, he’d listened to my tale of woe with sympathy but without comment. I knew that would come, but I thought it best not to push it, so I didn’t raise the subject again until we’d finished our cocoa and were under the covers, face-to-face, in bed.
    “You think I fucked up?”
    “How?”
    “Telling them no.”
    He smiled at me faintly. “Not if it feels better this way.”
    I told him I wasn’t sure how it felt.
    “Well,” he said, “if you were degraded by wearing that suit, then it was the right thing.”
    “I was degraded by the fact that they refused to see me as anything else.”
    “Like yourself.”
    “Like myself.” My eyes clung to him with a grip all their own, grateful for his placid understanding. “Tell me something.”
    “What?”
    “Why is Mr. Woods cute and I’m just disturbing?”
    “C’mon.”
    “That’s what they think, Neil. They won’t say it, but that’s exactly what they think.”
    “You’re just depressed.”
    “No. Don’t bullshit me. I count on you for the truth.”
    He blinked at me for a moment, assembling his thoughts.
    “Is it because I’m a woman?”
    He chuckled. “You sound like Streisand.”
    “Be serious. Would a little man be easier to take?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How do they see me, then?”
    “Who?”
    “People.”
    “I’m not sure,” he said after a pause. “Once they get to know you—you’re just Cady.”
    “Do they pity me?”
    “I don’t,” he said. “I admire you sometimes, for what you put up with, but I never pity you. I couldn’t be with you if I felt that way. You’re the strongest person I know, Cady, and the most forgiving. That’s what makes you so beautiful.”
    In spite of my best efforts, a tear rolled out of my eye. Neil smoothed it away with his thumb as rain splashed against the windows by the bucketful. I heard the squeal of tires on wet pavement,then a car alarm shrieking in the distance like a teenage banshee caught in the storm.
    After a while, I asked: “Do you think I’m talented?”
    “Cady…”
    “Just tell me again, OK?”
    “I think you’re very talented.”
    “Am I mainstream?”
    “I’m not sure what that means, but…I think everybody would love you.”
    “Leonard doesn’t think I’m mainstream.”
    “He said that?”
    “Not in so many words, but I know how he thinks. He thinks I’d frighten the horses, scare off the yahoos.”
    “What does he know?”
    “Everything, when it comes to that. That’s how he got rich. It’s his job to second-guess the public. He’s a pissy queen with his own Hockney and this fancy house in the hills, who is paid to think exactly like someone from Iowa.”
    “Who needs him?” said Neil.
    “I’m not sure he even knows I can act.”
    “Who cares? He’s just an agent.”
    “I can, you know. I’m a really good actress when they let me do it. I’m not just selling my size.”
    I must admit, I’m a little sensitive about this. In the early days, when Mom and I first hit town, we used my stature as a calling card to the haunts of the rich and famous. We’d go to The Comedy Store, say, when Robin Williams was performing, and slip the security guard a handwritten note to take backstage: “Hi, Robin, I’m the shortest woman in the world and I love your work. If you’d like to meet me, I’m outside.” It was shameless, but it worked almost every time—Diana Ross being the notable exception—and Mom chronicled our conquests on a monthly basis in long, heavily embroidered, eat-your-heart-out letters to Aunt Edie in Baker.
    The way I saw it, my height was a means to a worthy end, so Iworked it like a carny scam, always knowing, deep down, that I had the talent and the drive to back it up. Actually, Mom was more of a fanatic about this than I was. I’ll never forget the night she chastised me for wearing my hair up in a bun to a big premiere. “It’s spoiling the whole effect,” she told me. “It adds a good two inches. You’re almost as tall as that girl in North Dakota.” Mom kept track of these things.
    “I’ve been thinking,” said Neil.
    “Yeah?”
    “What if we talk to Arnie, get some glossies made of the two of us?”
    “And?”
    “Start our own act. Riccarton and Roth. I think it’s time, don’t you?”
    “Riccarton and Roth?”
    “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
    “If you like second