Moon Says Hello (Prologue)

      At first light, Lou watched the girl with the bushy blonde hair sleeping next to him. A tiny thing, she snored lightly, her pink lips parted, and jerked as if caught in a bad dream. She opened her eyes and started; with her dark eye makeup smudged, she resembled a frightened raccoon. Lou realized she was holding her breath.

     “It’s okay. You’re all right,” he reassured her. He got up and walked two yards to the kitchen table and lit up a Marlboro. The cramped apartment reeked of stale tobacco, cooking grease and human sweat. He looked over and saw her eyes flick to his now flaccid penis and quickly back up to his face.

     “Want one?” he offered. She nodded and sat up holding the threadbare blanket to her chest covering her small breasts. He handed her a lit cigarette along with a giant clamshell he used as an ashtray.

     “It’s okay to look. I mean, it doesn’t bother me or anything.”

     The girl hitched the blanket an inch higher and kept her eyes on the filthy window beside the sofa bed.

     “You okay?” Lou asked.

     “Yeah.” They smoked in silence and she spoke again almost whispering. “Is there someplace I can wash?”

     “Uh, yeah. There’s a shower in the bathroom.” Lou got her a bath towel from a rickety dresser and took out a second one for himself. Good thing he had two. After half a minute he realized she was waiting for him to turn away. Initially surprised, he remembered that it was her first time. He turned away, listening to her make the floor under the worn linoleum creak. 

       The water heater clanged to life while Lou made up the sofa bed without closing it. Maybe they weren't done yet, and he had been paid. He smoked another cigarette awaiting his turn and cracked the window, knocking hardened snow off the ledge. The girl came out in a cloud of steam, wrapped in the towel. Lou slid past her hoping there was hot water left. She’d been in there a while.

       The water went cold seconds into his shower; he lathered and rinsed quickly. His ash-blond hair was plastered to his face and neck. He combed it back shaking the cold drops of water from his shoulders. Back in the main room, he dressed in a clean tee shirt and yesterday's jeans and lit up again. He motioned to the girl to take one. She had dressed in the black clothes she had come with: mid-calf leggings under a flounced skirt, a cropped top  showing her goose-fleshed midriff, fingerless driving gloves, Martens laced at the ankle.

     “I have a shirt you could wear over that.”

     “Okay,” she said. Her hair was no longer bushy, but a cap of yellow curls framing her delicate features. The stub between her lips looked out of place.

     “You look prettier without all that gunk on your face.”

     “It was just for…well, last night.”

     “Glad I got to see the real you. What’s your name?”

     The girl hesitated as if just realizing she’d washed off her disguise. She shrugged, as if to herself, and took a drag. “Laura.”

     “Well, hello, Laura, I’m Lou.”

     A forced laugh erupted from her mouth. “This is all very silly, isn’t it?”

     Lou laughed with her, more to accompany her mood than out of agreement. The situation wasn’t silly. It was fucking strange.

     “I don’t have much food in the house but I could take take you out for breakfast if you want. I mean, I have some cash,” Lou looked over at his jean jacket where the money Laura´s friends had given him made a bulge in the pocket.

     “Um, sure, okay.”

     He took her to Marny’s which never closed. At this early hour the dealers and hookers that frequented the greasy spoon were home, sleeping off Saturday night. A fat black waitress who looked like she could have been serving at Marny’s since the seventies shuffled over to their table in her sensible shoes and waited.

     “I’ll just have a bagel and some coffee,” Laura said, handing her the sticky laminated menu. She tried to wipe her hand on her paper napkin and succeeded in tearing it as it stuck to her hand.

     “I’ll have the same, and Jolee, could you make a couple more of those to go?” asked Lou.

     “Sure, sugar. What’ll ya have on ’em?” Jolee looked Laura over with bulging eyes.

     “Cream cheese?”

     “Same for me,” said Lou.

     After breakfast, they returned to the apartment. The morning was sunny but cold. They sat at the kitchen table with the ashtray between them. Lou lit up. Laura declined.

     “So tell me about yourself.”

     “What do you mean?” her tone was guarded.

     “No, hey, I don’t want to make you nervous. I promise you have nothing to worry about from me. But you have to admit, this situation’s a little out of the ordinary, right?”

     “I suppose.”

     “I’m curious about what brought you here. You don’t have to tell me but I’ll bet I can guess a lot of it.”

     “You think so?” she challenged; even her curls shook in defiance.

     “Well, you obviously have money. No, don’t make that face. It’s not just the money your girls gave me last night. I mean, you speak like someone who’s been well educated. You’re dressed to look street smart but your clothes aren’t cheap. Leather jacket and boots, and your friends were wearing similar stuff last night. Not too common around here to see girls trying to look cheap in expensive clothes unless they’re hooking, which you’re not.”

     “We weren’t trying to look cheap, just…unrecognizable. In case someone we knew saw us.”

     “In this part of town?”

     “I know it’s unlikely, but it wasn’t like we came here to buy dope or something.”

     “No, you came to lose your virginity,” Maybe he shouldn’t have said that out loud. Laura looked at him squarely.

     “It was my choice.”

     “So why here? Why me? Not that I’m complaining, I can use the cash. But I’m not exactly, you know, in the profession. Besides, you have a lot going for you, Laura, if that’s your real name,” Lou ignored her accusing look. “My point is, you could get anybody to do what I did. Someone who could care about you. You're pretty enough.”

     “It was what I wanted, okay?”

     Laura’s defensiveness reminded him of his own rebellion in a past life. The argument he'd had with his father before he’d left. He said nothing.

     “Love is a stupid reason to wait for sex," she continued. "Nobody stays together anymore, and the last thing I want is for some pompous ass from the country club to be able to brag that he was the first and hold that over me for the rest of my life."

     So, Laura wasn't just well-off, Lou thought. She was a socialite. 

     "I’m the oldest virgin I know,” realization landed on her face like a veil. “I mean, I was. None of my friends are virgins, and not one of them is still with the first guy she was with. So I decided to stop being one as soon as I turned eighteen. It was my friends’ idea to give me this as a birthday present. But I was totally for it.”

     “So why me?” Lou considered himself a good judge of character and Laura had a streak of determination that belied her child-like face. It couldn’t have been easy to give herself to a complete stranger for her first time. Yet, though there had been some nervous moments, she had showed no fear during the night they had spent together. It had been quick, just like she'd asked for. And then she had rolled away from him lying quietly until sleep claimed her. Yet, for all her bravado, she was naïve about so much. It didn’t seem to occur to her that he could have raped or injured her, or that perhaps she shouldn’t trust someone who had taken her virtue for a sum. Still, she was here because her friends had bought her twelve hours of his time. Laura’s voice brought him back to the present moment. His nicotine stained fingers stubbed out the filter he held.

     “It was coincidence, really. We’d been to a few bars to find someone but I didn’t really see anyone I wanted to get close to. We were about to call the night a bust. We were all kind of drunk and one of my friends said, ‘Damn it, Laura, we’re stopping the next guy we see.’ We were cracking up about it when we saw you leave your building.”

     “I thought it was a hoax at first. Then I didn’t think you’d stay to see it through.”

     “Well, I’m glad it’s over and done with.”

     They sat quietly for a minute during which Lou felt an unexpected twinge of hurt at her words.

     “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t have to worry about me, Lou. You didn’t hurt me or anything. We just made love, that’s all.”

     “Is that what you think making love is?” Lou got up and started pacing. Laura leaned away from him in her chair. He knew he had no right to judge her but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “Your folks must be worried. Or maybe not. God knows what you told them about where you are. Maybe you want to delude yourself into thinking what we did was make love but we didn’t. What we did was fuck, Laura.”

    “You don’t need to make is sound so crass.” Her voice hitched.

    “It was crass. We screwed like two dogs in heat and you paid me for it.” He pulled a bottle and two tumblers out of a kitchen cabinet, one glass, one plastic. After pouring a couple of fingers of amber liquid into each, he put the glass one in front of Laura. He was putting away the bottle when he heard her sob.

     “Hey, hey, baby, don’t cry, now,” Lou led her to the bed with her glass in hand. “I didn’t mean any of that. Look, don’t listen to me.” He put his arm around her as she wiped her eyes and nose on the long sleeve of his shirt which she was still wearing. “Here, take a sip. You’ll feel better.”

     “Why do you even care? You’re just a washed out drunk.”

     “Whoa, there. I’m a lot of things, but I’m no drunk. Look, I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that if you were my sister, I’d want better for you than this.”

     “Do you have a sister?”

     “No, but I had a brother once.” Lou had put their glasses on the floor and pulled Laura next to him on the bed. Her crying had subsided and she put her head on his chest.

     “What happened to him?” she asked.

     “He died.”

     “I’m really sorry.”

     “It was a long time ago,” he said stroking her head. “You’re too young to be so cynical about life and about love. It’s about caring enough to risk putting the other person first, in every sense. Even if they don’t ultimately stay.”

     “You've been there. Did she leave?”

     “She died too.” 

     It had been a year since Gabe and Becca had died together in that car accident; Lou felt the ball of grief and betrayal begin to form in his stomach. Fortunately, Laura changed the subject.

     “Show me how to make love, Lou.” she whispered. And in the hours that followed, he taught her all he knew.