Man on the Moon

Christine Williams

__________

Camille saw it as a good omen. The most outspoken of all friends who doubted your intentions with me, she changed her tune when I told her about your team’s bachata social last week, when you’d reached for my hand during performances, and continued to hold it as we searched for a good room to dance in among three floors of kizomba, bachata, and salsa. To Camille, this display of affection, where so many people knew us, meant that you and I were either in a serious relationship or headed for one. Coming from someone who prided herself on skepticism, this seemed starry-eyed, but I kept my mouth shut; I wanted her to have faith in you. I told her how you’d held my hand practically all evening, and had escorted me to my car at midnight. What I didn’t tell Camille, or anyone else, was what you’d told me: the paperwork on your visa kept getting stalled. And you’d been unemployed for three weeks now because you were no longer eligible to work in the U.S. This must have been why you’d said you were on a budget before we went to Mua for dinner. My heart broke for you, knowing you must be worried about a visa denial, and I worried about the possibilities between us, which now, right when I felt we should be getting closer, seemed at risk. Immediately you assured me: once the visa was approved, everything would be fine! It was a momentary blip, you weren’t worried, you had some savings, and friends and family would cover you. By now I was used to you leading with optimism about your immigration status, but you wouldn’t look at me as you delivered the news. Your assurances felt false and forced. And even though I didn’t want to, I noticed.

Halloween was approaching and Sandy, a new friend I’d met through my favorite dance couple, Nick and Angelo, had invited the three of us to an upcoming costume party on the USS Hornet. Docked permanently in the old Alameda Naval Air Station, the Hornet had, in its glory days, been an aircraft carrier. Today it was a naval museum featuring exhibits from the NASA Apollo Moon exploration missions, and several planes from World War II. Though I’d lived in Alameda most of my life, I’d never done the popular Hornet tour. Sandy, a spunky law student with a twisted sense of humor and a soft heart, had recently met the man of her dreams, and she wanted Nick, Angelo, and me to meet him. And she wanted to meet you. I was relatively over my fear of initiating communication with you, so on an otherwise ordinary work day I texted to see if you wanted to join, presumably as my date. But almost immediately you responded—you had plans to ride your motorcycle to Los Angeles that weekend for a dance festival. My heart sank a little, I’d really hoped to see what costume you might wear (Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones?), but I decided to go anyway.

            The party was to be held the weekend before Halloween, and though Angelo would be out of town, Sandy, her boyfriend, and Nick and I made dinner reservations at Speisekammer, a German restaurant in Alameda. Over the next couple of days I converted my room into a Halloween workshop of blue and gold feathers, black tulle, and rhinestones, which I hot glued onto the back of a sheer lingerie skirt I’d found on Amazon—a peacock! The front of the lingerie piece (more apron than skirt) was made of lace-trimmed nylon, which barely covered essential parts. The back consisted of layers of black tulle that draped dramatically to mid-calf. The added feathers puffed up the bustle’s staggered tulle, bringing the costume to life. When worn with opaque turquoise tights and topped with a shapely corset, the peacock effect was unmistakable. And when worn into a restaurant, it was difficult to sit down. But wear it to Speisekammer I did, winning compliments and gawkers all evening. I wished you were there to see me.

            Nick had come as a naval officer—he had a great sense of irony—and Sandy and Dinesh had dressed in plainclothes (i.e., they didn’t dress up). After recovering from slight embarrassment (I was the only one who looked truly bizarre), I kept noticing how sweetly Sandy and Dinesh gelled. Solicitous and conspiratorial in a way that you and I were not. Dinesh was short, curly-haired, and friendly. He reminded me of an Indian Super Mario. Sometimes he would touch Sandy’s arm, just to check in, and she would look back up at him in a response only the two of them knew. As we ordered, I noted what dishes you might have liked, and checked myself. I didn’t want to spend the night pining for you, but unlike the now permanently moored Hornet, my heart went on without my consent, full steam ahead. Not even the crispy potato pancakes, homemade sauerkraut and applesauce, pickled herring, and other German delights stirred my appetite the way wondering how you might have liked them did.

            I learned that Dinesh was originally from Mumbai, and since he sat across from me, I asked him about his journey to the States. He had undergone the same H1B visa process you were wading through now. Though he didn’t know you, he empathized with the uncertainty and stress of waiting for your fate: either acceptance or denial. When I intimated to him that your paperwork kept getting stalled, his face fell. “Oh. That’s rough.” Then he shook his head, looked at the tablecloth, and rubbed at a stain, perhaps remembering something dark. “He’s in a bad place in his life right now.” Throughout our meal, as I tried to sit comfortably with the feathered bustle grating against my back and my near-bare bottom searching for softness on the hardwood seat, I guessed at how uncomfortable you might be in that mask of optimism you’d probably felt pressured to wear since having lost your job.

            After dinner, we drove to the Air Station. Finding parking in the massive lot, already filled with party-goers, was challenging. As a fifteen-year-old, I had learned to drive in this at-the-time derelict lot. In the early 2000s, the road signs, lines, and streets that once served military families had bent and deteriorated after Alameda’s Naval Air Station had closed in the late 90s. By the time I was of age, the place was an ideal spot to learn to drive—an actual ghost town. And I had vivid memories of later riding in my best friend’s 1976 Pinto at top-speed all over the lot, ignoring the old road signs. But in 2004, when Hangar 1 Vodka opened a distillery, and Rock Wall Wine Company opened a wine bar, the old Air Station and its environs were transformed into a hotspot of activity. Now everyone flocked here on the weekends to sip small batch vodka in a historic airplane hangar with sweeping views of the Bay.

            Tonight, lit from within and angled heroically against the inky blue sky, the Hornet cut a haunting figure. Nick and I took turns posing for photos, and after climbing the long metal plank leading inside, I felt we’d been airlifted into the middle of a frantic movie set whose actors buzzed around, half-drunk, in aggressively ambitious costumes. The cavernous interior hummed with red lights, which cast an eerie glow over the bars at each end of the ship. Now I truly felt worlds away from you. A stage stacked with speakers blasted “Thriller” over a monster-filled dance floor. 1980s-horror-film–pizza-night vibes. Within half an hour I saw three different versions of Pennywise (the remake of It had come out that summer) and several famous cartoon characters—and I ran into a friend, also incidentally dressed as a peacock. If I turned a certain way, I could catch the smell of polyester, latex masks, and cheap Halloween makeup.

            Sandy, Nick, and I had just settled at a plastic circular table to enjoy our rail vodka in neon cups when a pair of gangly, cold talons crept over my shoulder. I turned, thrilled to see (a massive!) alien from Alien. Sigourney Weaver–movie version. The staggeringly large creature lifted its bulbous, gruesome head to reveal the face of a balding animatronics designer. He told us he had re-created the costume in near exactitude, including a seven-foot tail that slither-sailed high in the air behind him. Alien told me he wanted to take a picture with “the prettiest peacock he’d ever seen,” and I felt like one of the coolest weird kids on the ship. After the photo—a group of costumed lookers-on had gathered around us, bewitched by the 1979 horror celebrity—I asked the designer if he could dance in a seven-foot tail. He offered his talons, led me to the dance floor. And let the history books show: at midnight on the twenty-fourth of October, 2018, Alien and Peacock cut quite a rug on the USS Hornet. But, tall, dark, and mysterious as this alien was, neither the costume nor the man inside of it could hold a candle to you, and I longed to return to earth. I Instagrammed the night to death, posting snaps of myself bent over the front seat of my car looking for dance shoes—feathers and tulle billowing out over the driver’s side door, the Alien–Peacock dance-off, and drinks with Sandy, Nick, and Dinesh. Each time I posted a photo, you liked it, right up until two a.m. I wondered where you were. At a dance? But I didn’t hear from you. Despite my best attempts to capture each moment of my night, I couldn’t anchor myself to a single one.

           

Typical for the end of October in Northern California, the air crackled with midday heat. The week following the Halloween party, during an afternoon walk around Jack London Square Marina to cool down, I debriefed Martha about the Hornet festivities. When I began fixating on how you’d flooded my IG with photo “likes” that night but had not texted me since you’d gone to L.A., she encouraged me to reach out to you.

            “You’re not going to ruin any game by texting him now.”

            True, I’d grown braver, but it had been nearly three weeks since I’d last seen you. Was there a statute of limitations on initiating contact? Merely thinking about opening the text app flipped my stomach. “Yeah. I don’t know. I guess we’ve been dating awhile, but it still feels like it’s early days with him . . .” I let my thought trail off, mentally chasing other reasons why texting you now would be a bad idea.

            “This is the Bay Area, where you’re lucky if a relationship lasts a week and a half, and you’ve been dating for months. It’s really not still early days.”

            “. . . Plus, as he said, he ‘just enjoys the company of others, no matter who they are, without getting attached.’ ”

            “What’s your point?”

            “Basically I could be anyone with a pulse and he would enjoy my company. But he hasn’t contacted me in weeks. For all I know, he hates me.”

            Martha shook her head slowly. “Look, I’m willing to bet he’s not thinking very much about you one way or the other. He definitely doesn’t hate you.” Martha lifted her arms and mounted a soapbox. “He’s just a dude. And he’s probably used to women rolling over for him regularly because he has a lot of options, and for that kind of guy, our generation of cis-gen women has been forced into the role of the chill girl.”

            The chill girl was someone who was self-sufficient, low-maintenance, and crafty. Able to hide every genuine emotion behind a fake one. Part magician and part coy assistant, she could read the room and distract it from reality, turning her underlying fury or sadness into a carefree giggle—a cuddly white rabbit—which she’d pull from her sleeve in a flourish as she allowed herself to be sliced in two. Projecting just the right image of self-control and total submission to her intended audience. Whether such a woman could really sustain this act, and to what extent any man really wanted the show to go on, was debatable. And yet, it was a stereotype that many young women our age—unsure of where we stood and afraid of turning love interests off with emotional overload—felt compelled to embody.

            I sighed. “Yeah, but I’m not a chill girl.”

            “No one is! It’s a myth. He has been inside of you Christine . . . If you’re a thinking, feeling female who sleeps with someone you care about, chances are, you’re not feeling chill!” A seagull ambling around the bike path we walked along took flight as Martha picked up her pace. “I have no idea how you’ve been able to withstand weeks of non-communication with him when that would drive most women to voodoo and power ballads.”

            I could feel Martha’s nervous system overheating, and now mine threatened to short circuit. My mind snapped from one extreme—a romantic-ish partner who doesn’t communicate—to another—a needy boyfriend who love bombs me with cutesy nicknames and stuffed animals. Like Joni Mitchell, I’d seen both sides now, and each was suboptimal. “Well I don’t want constant communication, that’s just another flavor of dysfunction. But I don’t like having all these feelings when I have no idea if they’re reciprocated. At all. Like am I just another notch on his belt? And I don’t know how much I can or cannot tell him since I don’t want to add any more stress to his increasing pile of it.” I scanned the sky. “I don’t think he thinks that way, but I hope I’m not just an option for a casual booty call every couple of weeks.” 

            We stopped to admire the boats docked in the Jack London harbor, the hazy skyline of Alameda shimmering above the water. “Ah the old booty call.” Martha leaned on a piling. She had calmed down now. “I really don’t understand how our generation of women has accepted and even exalted this idea of basically a highly-structured casual sexual encounter, when sex is way up there on the list of the most intimate of human acts. The whole concept is even more neurotic than just losing your mind.”

            We waved to a rowing team whose coxswain whooped in encouragement.

            Martha continued, “I’ve had a lot of arguments with my bro friends about how casual sex does not exist, but no matter what I say, they don’t get it. They talk about girls like we’re some kind of sports goal. They talk about ‘setting it up.’ They don’t realize how insane we go from start to finish while we’re so busy trying to look like we don’t give a fuck.”

            Applying this revelation to you now felt like swilling cod liver oil—painful, awful, but perhaps for my own good? Turning on my heel, I put us in motion toward Blue Bottle to get lattes.

            “Oh God. Sports goals? Is that the norm for men our age, or are these guys special? Your bro friends sound awful!”

            Martha carried on, “Actually, a few weeks ago I felt like I got through to them. I had them listen to the first two and a half minutes of ‘O Fortuna.’ You’ve heard it?”

            I shook my head no.

            “Trust me, you’ve heard it.”

            She excavated her iPhone from the canvas messenger bag slung over her shoulder. “I told them, ‘Look. Every time you meet a girl that seems down for casual sex, I guarantee you she’s playing this song in her head.’ ” She began skipping through the music. It was an orchestral piece. I recognized it instantly (it had been featured in countless movies, commercials, and other popular media to add drama and doom) and I nodded along as Martha narrated. “The beginning is when she first sees you.” A choir chants Latin lyrics in unison, their words punctuated by kettle drums reminiscent of thunder. “The middle . . .” An oscillating accompaniment represents Fortune’s wheel chugging, repetitive, the relentless kettle drums building toward a crescendo as the voices get higher, quicker, and the drum beats faster. “. . . is the plotting and the planning and the worrying and the poetry writing.” The music builds to an anxiety-inducing crescendo anxiety in whoever listens to it. “And the end is when she sleeps with you and loses it.” She lingered on the grand finale—a chaotic long last note of three highly strung and strung-out choirs, kettle drum clanging, cymbals crashing, and horns pounding like a heart making a break for it!—and then pocketed the device. “My bro friends listened to the whole thing and looked a little frightened. It fucked them up.”

            “Brilliant connection, I definitely play that song in my head! That ending is so perfect and dramatic, but yeah . . . Obviously I can’t show that I’m losing my mind after sleeping with a guy if I want to keep him around. It would scare him away. Look how your bro friends reacted. If we emote that ending, then we have no sex and no song. And no sanity either way I guess.”

            “We need to re-educate an entire generation of men.”

            Though we’d reached the blissfully air-conditioned, glass-paneled sanctuary of Blue Bottle, I couldn’t get comfortable. The coffee shop’s palette of blond wood, fog gray, and cyan was meant to appeal to Bay Area techies and sophisticates. Maple, linden, ash, and alder—the light tones of their interior—contrasted beautifully against the rich color of coffee. A sleek aesthetic that contrasted with my own more base interior tones of carmine worry and mud. I rapped my fingers nervously on a maple-linden-alder counter as we waited for the caffeine neither of us needed. “Do you think he’s thinking like your bro friends?”

            Martha shifted her weight, evaluating. “Eh, I doubt it. Not based on how he’s treated you so far. He doesn’t seem totally lame. Plus he wasn’t raised here, so that’s an added element of confusion, but potentially to your benefit.” She examined the otherworldly orchid arrangement separating us from the baristas. Purple petals and curled green tendrils appeared suspended in the middle of a slim glass vase. “His citizenship is in limbo right now, kind of like this crazy flower show. And as you said, he’s taking life as it comes . . . you should probably just do us all a favor and text him.”

            I decided to take the plunge. Feeling my hormones ride the tide of “O Fortuna,” I took my phone from my back pocket and sent: Hey, how are you?

            Immediately I panicked, praying you didn’t think I was insane, desperate, or needy. As we waited for our names to be called, I kept my eyes on my messaging app, the finale of “O Fortuna” coursing through my veins.

            Once our coffees were ready, Martha grabbed them from the counter, where I stood mutely glued to my phone, and ushered me out. “Christine, he has no clue how hard that was for you to send.” She handed me my coffee, which I sipped greedily, wanting to internalize her reassurance along with the seven dollar cappuccino. Martha continued, “He’s in his own head, on another planet.” She chuckled, gesturing with her iced latte. “He’s roaming around in outer space on a motorcycle about to crash into a crater, and we need to save him.” She cupped a hand around her mouth. “‘This is Ground Control to Major Tom, we have a man on the moon!’”

            I imagined you on a motorcycle on the moon, your man bun bobbing buoyantly in the lunar wind, and burst into laughter, relieved to think of you as comedy rather than in the context of “O Fortuna.”

            As though you’d listened to our entire exchange, when we arrived back at the office, you texted: Heyyyyy not bad, how was your Halloween?

            At my desk next to Martha’s, I spent ten minutes deliberating about how to answer, and waited another ten minutes to send what I thought was an appropriately chill response: The party was pretty good. A few people thought I was dressed as a pigeon, but oh well. What did you do?

            Silence.

__________

Christine Williams writes to try and understand the world. Her work has been published in Glint Literary Journal, Concho River Review, and The Tomahawk Creek Review. She lives in Alameda, CA.

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