Virgin Heat(83)

The moon slouched toward the horizon, its orange color dimmed and warped toward powdery pink, a gentle, used-up shade. They walked, their footsteps crunched. Their legs were weary as the moon but they kept on walking, they were on their way to some end or some beginning and it seemed they couldn't stop until they'd reached it. Ziggy said, "What we've been through, you and me, it's been pretty crazy."

Angelina crossed her arms against her midriff, squeezed herself a little. She remembered kissing Sal Martucci in the shadows in her father's hallways, his fingers putting goose bumps on her neck. She thought about the fallow years, years she'd mostly believed were exalted by their dedication to a secret passion. "Yeah," she said, "it has been pretty crazy."

"I was thinking," Ziggy said, "that maybe the crazy part is over."

Angelina feared to answer that, just walked and watched the pocked face of the slipping moon. Ziggy reached out, took her hand, tried to stop her walking. She left her hand in his but pulled him onward, something was preventing her from standing still.

Ziggy tagged along, a little flustered. He was ready to propose, and it seemed odd to be proposing on the march, and it did not occur to him that Angelina knew that too, and maybe she was walking to fend off the long-awaited question. He kicked a rock. He cleared his throat. He said, "Angelina, I was wondering if you'd marry me."

For all the preparation, the ten years' biding time, the question seemed abrupt, the moment clipped. It had to, being one of those divides that neatly severs history into before and after. Angelina didn't answer right away. She plodded on, looking at the moon. It was a hand's breadth above the water, it stained the ocean underneath it. At last she said, "Why?"

"Why?"

"Yeah, why? Ziggy, more and more I see we hardly know each other."

"We've known each other all our lives."

"No," she said, "we haven't. What do you know about me, Ziggy?"

He struggled not to lose heart in the unaccustomed effort to explain himself. "I know you're beautiful," he said. "I know you waited for me."

"You could be the last man in America to marry a virgin."

"Angelina, please, I'm tryin' to be romantic . . . Besides, I waited for you too."

She said, "That's a good one."

"In my way I did. I didn't fall for any—"

"It doesn't matter," Angelina interrupted. "But Ziggy, doesn't it feel, I don't know, like kid stuff, like something from a life that's finished now?"

He looked off at the ocean. Everybody wrestled with the same few questions in life, but people asked them at different times in different ways; kept asking them even after they'd been answered; and Ziggy vaguely realized that he and Angelina had gradually swapped positions on almost everything. He asked her. "How many lives you think you got?"

"More than I've lived so far," she said.

They walked. The moon sank toward the water, in its final moments it changed from something that was falling to something that was melting, its contours going soft and edgeless as its red reflection climbed up off the sea to join it.

Ziggy said, "Those other lives, maybe we could live them together."

Angelina stopped at last. Without the steady crunch and squeak of footsteps the world seemed very quiet. She looked at him, at the black eyes she remembered, in the changed face that by now challenged memory as the true face.

She said, "I don't think so, Ziggy. It's what I've wanted for the longest time, but I don't think so."

The last red rays fell across her cheek, her neck. Ziggy said, "So now I have to wait for you?"

"You said you were waiting before. In your way."

"But then I didn't know it."

She managed half a smile, said, "Waiting isn't that much fun."

The moon touched the horizon, seemed to balance there a moment, then began to slide into the ocean, serene and stately as a queen entering her bath.

Angelina watched it being slowly swallowed up, said, "One fantasy, Ziggy? One fantasy at least? Hold me till the moon is gone."

He reached across the tiny swath of beach between them and took her in his arms, they stood like lovers until the moon was covered up in ocean, and the stars got bluer as the red gleam was extinguished and the russet arrow on the water disappeared. Then she walked away from him, her footsteps crunching on the coral underneath the sand.