Moon in the Morning
When Anders wakes up in the morning, the moon is still in the sky. Today, it’s in the right-hand corner of the window frame; in two or three days’ time it will be gone, on its way to continue its endless travels around the blue globe that holds it captive. Then it will be back, a slice at a time, until it shows up in his window again, round as a plate, bright and beaming. It’s just the luck of the draw that he has this view for a few days every month or so, but it never meant much to him until recently. Until, for the first time that he can remember, Anders doesn’t have a great pool of figures and shapes swimming around in his thoughts, with colors and tints and hues blending together to fill in the outlines of pictures he wants to create. Anders is seventy years old now, so this has been all he’s known for what feels like forever—certainly, since he was a young child, when he felt compelled to draw the pictures in his head with the pencils that were all that was available to him, or later, to paint, when he was finally able to buy the necessary supplies. But for the past few months, no pictures have come to him; there are no images in his head, no swirling colors. It feels like the essential machinery of his life has suddenly shut down, as if his heart has stopped and his thoughts are as blank as an empty slate.
Frightened and filled with anxiety, Anders came up with a way to at least keep working, hoping that if he kept to the disciplined daily schedule he’s followed for most of his adult life, which is to work at least a few hours at a time, he would jump start his imagination. So, for no real reason other than the subject was right there in his view, Anders has begun to paint what he saw in his window on that first day that he woke up with no idea what to do, and that was the moon, still visible in the pale morning sky.
Sometimes, even when Anders thinks that he should be able to see it, the weather obscures the moon. It hides behind clouds, behind the turbulence of a stormy yellow sky, the mist of a violet dawn. But that’s alright; he doesn’t really need to see the moon in the morning anymore because he’s fixed the image in his head. The part of him that he thinks of as his painter’s mind functions like a camera, storing images that resonate with him for reasons he may not understand for years and then, suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, appear as part of a composition he’s working on, sliding into place just when he’s worried that he might be stuck. The few times in his life that Anders has had a gallery show and his paintings have been reviewed, critics have applied the label of contemporary realism to his work, and he is fine with that, though as he’s gotten older his pictures have become more abstract. The moon paintings are some combination of both styles that he hasn’t yet tried to categorize for himself, perhaps out of some superstition that doing so will interfere with the continuation of whatever mysterious process is at work somewhere inside himself that has replaced the constant flow of pictures and images with the morning moon, as if it is a placeholder. A thing waiting for something else to appear.
For most of his life, Anders worked at night because during the day, he had to make a living. His art has never supported him. There was a time in his twenties that he was briefly famous—he had a show at a Soho gallery that the New York Times called “a revolution in contemporary realism, a depiction of daily urban life that challenges the viewer to reimagine cityscapes bathed in light and color.” But that was his one great success. From then on, he struggled to gain attention for his work though he has won some awards, received a few prestigious grants. To support himself, Anders has had a succession of different jobs, most of them involving some sort of craft. He’s worked for a company that made stained glass windows, operated a kiln that produced ceramics for the retail trade (vases, garden gnomes, crockery and mugs), even did a stint in a woodworking shop carving rosettes for guitars. His most recent job, and the one that lasted longest, was at a leather goods shop in Greenwich Village, where he sat at a bench and stitched sandals over and over again, year after year. The place closed down during the Covid pandemic and has not reopened, so Anders is now barely scraping by on Social Security. Besides his financial insecurity, he also has a lot of time to fill because he doesn’t have the stamina that he used to and can’t stand or even sit at his easel for more than an hour or two at a time. So, he’s tried to adjust his routine. He paints during the day now and tries to get a decent night’s sleep, but his sleep is poor. This change in the schedule he’s followed for many decades may be part of why he’s struggling with his work these days, though of course he has no real way of knowing if that is true.
This morning, he begins his new routine by getting up and feeding his cat. The cat, who curls up beside Anders when he goes to bed, is a much better sleeper than he is and often in the night when Anders is awake, he tries to listen to the cat’s soft, rhythmic breathing, hoping he can follow it to dreamland. Now, as soon as he sits up, the cat runs into the kitchen and sits by his dish, patiently waiting to be fed.
Anders has almost always had a cat. This one, a dark marmalade—mostly black and brown, with tufts of orange here and there—is named Billy. Anders found the first cat many years ago, scrounging for food by the garbage cans outside his building. It lived to be sixteen, and when it finally died, he found another one just two days later, in almost the same spot. This has happened to him several times now, most recently with Billy, who was a scraggly kitten when Anders retrieved him from behind one of the building’s trash can on a snowy night. It’s fairly unusual to come across feral kittens in the middle of winter, but there he was, sitting silently in the snow, too weak to even cry. Anders picked him up and brought him upstairs because he assumed that was what he was supposed to do. By now, he has come to expect the appearance of one cat to replace another. This would no doubt be strange and unsettling occurrence if he was the kind of person who believed in signs and portents but he isn’t. Not really. This business with the cats is, he thinks, just something that happens to him. Something he accepts.
After he feeds Billy, Anders goes out to do some shopping, which is also part of the new routine he has fashioned for himself. Every day he goes to the supermarket to buy something for dinner but first, if the weather permits, he gets coffee from a food cart and carries it to a bench in a nearby park. Today, the weather is pleasant. It’s spring, and though the sky is gray and cloudy, it’s warm enough outside for him to sit for a while. Here, in the park by the 59th Street bridge, he has a view of the East River and the noise of the traffic on the highway that snakes along the edge of the river on the east side of Manhattan isn’t too bad. Luckily, though his apartment is close by, he doesn’t hear the traffic noise. Anders’ small apartment is in the back of a building on one of the few streets in the area that has not been visited by redevelopment and it looks the same way it did in the early part of the 20th century: a few brick tenement buildings sagging against each other, each with narrow vestibules, mailboxes with bent doors, and iron railings out front where those garbage cans are kept, the ones where he keeps finding cats.
Anders has lived in the same apartment since about a year after he came to New York from Canada. He was the youngest of seven boys, all with wheat-colored hair and gray eyes, who were born in a small town in the province of Alberta. His father owned the local hardware store and all the boys worked there with him at one time or another. All except Anders. He looked like his brothers, who looked like their father, but he was different. He was the artistic one. Maybe some long-repressed gene, passed down from people who left their handprints on cave walls suddenly emerged to dominate his life. He started drawing before he even started school and when it was his turn to spend his afternoon hours in the store he simply sat in the back and kept on drawing. His father was a well-meaning and tolerant man, so he let the boy be. When Anders had just turned seventeen, he got on a bus to travel to the nearest town that a library where he could look up information about youth hostels in New York City because he had formed a plan, which was to go to New York, get a job, and take classes at the Art Students League where many of the painters he admired had studied. Back in the late 1960s, that’s what you did when you needed to know something—you went to the library, you wrote letters, you waited for responses to be returned to you in the mailbox. Those things took time, so Anders started acting on his plan far in advance.
He left home when he was eighteen and hasn’t been back since. He missed his family at first, but not really; he liked them all well enough but never felt that he belonged with them. There were times when he had wished he did but he seemed to have no say in the matter. He was who he was, so he had to leave. The Art Students League didn’t work out though; what he found out after a few classes was that trying to study art was like trying to fit into his family—he had his own ideas about things and he had to follow his own instincts. He couldn’t learn from a teacher. Also, he felt a great deal of resentment towards the other students, many of them from families wealthy enough to pay their way through school and socially connected enough to open doors in the art world that Anders would have to break through himself. It was his intention to do just that, but he felt like an outsider in an insiders’ club and it bothered him. All the time.
The youth hostel, which was on the outskirts of the Village, was a better fit: he got a lot of useful information from the other young men and women staying there, such as how he could find an apartment by waiting at the news stand on Sheridan Square for the weekly edition of The Village Voice newspaper to be delivered so he could be among the first to find the new listings for cheap rentals. That was how he found his place. It has two rooms and a kitchenette. The smaller room is where he lives, where he has a sleeper sofa, a tv, a chair, all the basics. The larger room is his studio. It doesn’t get a lot of light but that doesn’t matter to him. He makes do.
The one important role that the Art Students League played in his life was that it was there, in one of his classes, that he met his first girlfriend. It was a long and serious relationship. She quit art school soon after he did but for a different reason: she told him that she realized that she would never be an important painter. She was good, she could probably sell paintings here and there, but she was never going to be the sensation that she had always expected to become so instead, she enrolled in the City College of New York—which was as close to free as you could get in those days—to study art history. If she couldn’t be an artist, at least she could immerse herself in art, just in a different way. This was an important decision for her, but also for Anders, who realized that while she was doing the right thing for herself, it was not a path that he could ever follow. There was no second best for him, there was only the work he wanted to do.
That girlfriend was followed by another and then another. For someone who did not consider himself particularly attractive and who had thought it likely that he would spend his life alone, he was surprised to find that when one relationship ended, another one soon began. It was something like the thing with the cats—inexplicable. And yet, it was the way it was.
The last relationship Anders had, which had lasted for almost two decades, ended about a year ago. The woman was considerably younger than him and it was her choice to leave. Perhaps Anders was not in love with her but he had been comfortable in her company, comfortable to have entwined his life with hers but clearly, she needed more from him than that. The breakup was a shock to him. At first, he thought he would be fine—after all, he had based his life on two things: his need to paint and his ability to take care of himself—but more shocks were coming because, though it seems unimaginable to him, he found that he was lonely. Worse than that: he was actually becoming fearful about being alone.
How could that possibly be? When he tried to review how he had incorporated this principle into his life—the I can take care of myself, I am fine alone thing—he came to the surprising conclusion that he had been fooling himself. From his Art Students League days, he had gone from one relationship to another with little alone time in-between, so there was ample evidence that he had been deluding himself. Or maybe it was just something about being the age he was, owning the knowledge that at seventy, he was likely to be living by himself from here on out. From here to the end. This has begun to cause him a great deal of anxiety, real anxiety that comes upon him suddenly and leaves him shaking. Sometimes it wakes him from sleep in the dark and empty hours of the night when he finds the bed drenched in sweat and his heart pounding like a wild machine. These are terrible feelings—terrible. He doesn’t like to think about it, but deep down he suspects that this fear, this anxiety, also has something to do with the lack of ideas for new paintings. For the placeholder pictures of the morning moon.
Still, before the breakup, he had paid for a spot in the spring Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, which was coming up soon. The cost was steep and he didn’t want to waste the money, so he plans to exhibit a selection of his older work along with some of the morning moon paintings which, lately, have taken an unexpected turn. When he began this series of paintings, Anders was simply painting different phases of the moon in the morning sky but almost without realizing what he was doing, he began adding other elements to the paintings. First there were rooftops, a line of rooftops leaning against each other at the bottom of his canvas. These were the rooftops of old tenement buildings, like his own. Then the rooftops vanished and people appeared, blurry men and women seen from the back. They all seemed to be emerging from the bottom of the canvas so that an observer looking at the picture could not tell what they were standing on. Perhaps it was the horizon. Perhaps the edge of the earth. And then the people vanished too. What replaced them—what Anders began to paint below the morning moon felt to him like a series of received images that had flown into his mind from who knows where, took hold of his hand, his paintbrush, and directed him to include in his pictures—were the prairies of Alberta.
Anders had not been back for more than half a century and yet, there on his canvas, was the scene that he looked at every morning when he woke in his bedroom in the house where he lived with his family in a small, rural township. From the window of the room he shared with two of his older brothers he saw the wide, empty prairie; miles of yellow grass, green grass or brown, depending on the season. Sometimes what he saw were unbroken fields of snow. The wind was like the prairie’s breath, blowing clouds across the blue bowl of the sky. Sometimes wildflowers bloomed on the prairie, sometimes golden eagles floated on the spring breezes. When he was a child, Anders was indifferent to this view but it seems to have embedded itself in his memory and has now reappeared, demanding his attention. Demanding that he paint it, over and over again, beneath the morning moon.
On the first day of the art show in Washington Square, Anders carries his paintings downstairs and stacks them carefully in the back of a van he’s rented. Each canvas is wrapped in plastic and foam board to protect it on the trip downtown. Once he arrives, it’s impossible to find a parking spot so he has to leave the truck in a nearby garage. Next, he has to wheel the paintings into the park on a flatbed dolly and set up each picture for display on standing gridwall panels that he keeps in a storage locker along with the dolly, the foam boards, and other items he needs for the various art shows where he exhibits his work over the course of a year. He also sells his paintings on a web site that his girlfriend had set up for him but hasn’t updated it recently because he hasn’t yet figured out how to maintain it by himself.
Just getting the paintings out of the truck and hung up for display is hard work. Tiring. So when he’s finally done, he settles himself down in a beach chair he’s brought along and tries to look approachable. He has a stern face—various girlfriends have told him that—so he does what he can to adjust his expression to make it seem like he would be an easy person to talk to about his work, which people tend to want to do at these kind of art shows. Generally, the questions are not intrusive. People want to know what the title of a particular painting is, what kind of paint he’s used (oil, mostly, though sometimes acrylics), how long he worked on a particular piece. In just the first few hours, Anders sells two paintings—one of the morning moon alone in a lavender sky and one older piece, a moody seascape of a windswept beach with a lone cat, modeled on Billy, walking along the shore. The cat is an unexpected element in a seascape, which is what the woman who buys the painting says to Anders. I don’t think I will ever stop being surprised when I see this picture hanging in my hallway. A cat, of all things. A cat walking by the sea.
The day is warm and breezy, with the fresh scent of blossoms in the air. Late in the afternoon, in the hour when the feel of the park is beginning to change from a pleasant urban oasis of art and greenery to something edgier, something a little more fluid as parents and children leave the playgrounds to head home for dinner and art patrons are slowly replaced by weed dealers and buyers looking to score, a man stops by Anders’ paintings and examines them, one by one. The man, who looks to be about the same age as Anders, is tall and rangy, with gray hair long enough to be flattened against the back of his neck by the blue baseball cap he’s wearing.
Finally, the man raises an arm and points to one of the pictures hung on the top of the middle panel of Anders’ display. It’s his most recent work. “Is that Alberta?” the man asks.
Anders is startled. How can this person possibly recognize that the painting he’s fixed on—rows of yellow wheat stretching out towards the horizon with a crescent moon, looking as thin and pale as an old sheet of airmail paper hanging overhead in a cloudless blue sky—was painted from Anders’ memory of the fields outside the town where he grew up?
“Yes,” Anders says. “How did you know?
The man shrugs. “I couldn’t tell you that. The thought just came to me.”
There’s a way the man speaks, a flat, drawn-out sound to his voice that Anders is pretty sure he recognizes. If he’s right, this man, like himself, is far from home. “Are you from Alberta?” he asks.
“Near Milo,” the man says. “Do I maybe know you? Did you grow up around there?”
“I did,” Anders said. “My father owned a hardware store in town.”
“Stuttgart’s?”
“Yes.”
“I guess maybe that explains it then. My dad used to take me to that place from time to time, when he needed a hammer and nails or something like that. Maybe I saw you there, once. I remember my father telling me that Mr. Stuttgart had a whole bunch of boys and they used to work in the store.”
“That was us,” Anders agrees. “Me.”
The man nods, then holds out his hand. “My name is Terry Benoit.”
“Anders Stuttgart.”
The two men shake hands, then Terry Benoit steps back as if some ritual has been carried out and concluded. “Well then,” he says. “Strange to run into someone from Milo after all these years. Who’d have thought?”
“Not me,” Anders says.
The man lets his gaze linger on Anders face for a long moment and then gestures towards the painting. “I like the painting but don’t think I could afford whatever you’re charging.”
“Fifty bucks.” Anders says. He has priced his paintings a lot higher than that but there’s something going on here, some feeling he’s having that he can’t quite name that makes him almost want to hand over the painting for free. Saying “fifty bucks” was as close as he could come to not doing that.
“Sold,” Terry Benoit says. “But I live out in Queens and it’s too big for me to carry on the train. Maybe I could come back later with my car.”
The two men make the necessary arrangements. Benoit gives Anders two twenties and a ten and says he can get his car and be back by six o’clock. That’s an hour past the time when the exhibitors are supposed to pack up and leave so they agree to meet at a nearby bar.
Good as his word, Benoit shows up at the bar right on time. Anders is already seated at a table, drinking a beer. “Listen,” Benoit says, “Can I buy you another? Maybe sit and talk a while?”
“Sure,” Anders says, gesturing at the chair across from where he’s sitting.
At the bar, a place called the Quiet Lamb on West Fourth Street, not far from the park, music is banging through the rafters. Songs about whiskey and women and traveling on lonely roads. A waitress brings two tall glasses of Guinness and the men clink them together.
“How long have you been living in New York?” Benoit asks.
“Forever,” Anders says. “At least, it feels that way.”
“Yeah, me too. It wasn’t my plan, really, but when I was twenty, I met this girl. I guess that’s always part of the story, right? You meet a girl and whammo, everything changes. She was a cousin of a friend of mine and she’d come to visit. Anyway, she was from Hoboken, over in Jersey, and I ended up moving there. We got married, I went to welding school, and that’s pretty much my story. My wife died a few years ago but I’m still working. I’m the oldest guy in the shop where I work but it keeps me busy.” Benoit has already finished his Guinness and impatiently signals the waitress to bring another. “I thought women were supposed to live longer than men,” he says. “I couldn’t stay in my place after she died, so that’s how I ended up in Queens. I take the ferry across the river every morning to go back to Jersey, to work.”
It's a sad story and Anders is saddened by it, but also disturbed. Is there some meaning to the fact that out of all the people wandering around New York City on a pleasant spring afternoon, this one man out of millions happened to randomly walk up to him in Washington Square Park and turn out to be connected to him through their boyhood in a shared province of Canada? Canada, far to the north, far away. Anders can’t shake the feeling that he’s supposed to understand something here that he’s not understanding. Are he and Terry Benoit like refugees from the same small town who happen to meet in a refugee camp after long years of struggle and travail? That happens in movies, but does it happen in real life? Or is the universe twisting and turning around him in some way, suggesting how he might ease his loneliness by offering him a friend—a man who is clearly lonely enough to want a friend—since both he and the universe understand that Anders is too old to meet another woman who would want to take him on? Or is the opposite thing happening—something bad instead of good, meaning, is he supposed to understand Terry Benoit as an example of what happens to boys who leave their families, who risk their future for love—or for art—and then are left to live alone, sad and drunk, riding ferries, walking to the supermarket, feeding their cat? Actually, Anders can’t understand why he is even having thoughts like this. The universe twisting and turning around him. Where did that idea even come from? Maybe it has something to do with how anxious he’s been feeling lately, because he feels the anxiety coming on now. Coming on hard and fast, rising like heat inside his body, like a fire igniting in his skull.
“I have to get going,” Anders says to Terry Benoit. “It was nice meeting you.” He leaves some money on the table and gets to his feet. He feels like he’s fleeing, like he’s running away. “I hope you enjoy the painting,” he says to Terry Benoit and then gets out of the Quiet Lamb as quickly as he can.
To try and calm himself, Anders walks back through the park. The night sky looks like dark foil pierced by tiny diamond stars. The smell of marijuana drifts through the trees, wafts along the paths that radiate out from a splashing fountain at the center of the park. Before Anders headed off to the bar, he locked up his paintings in the back of the rented van so he can set up in the park again tomorrow, which means he’s going to have to take the subway home. On his way to the train station at Astor Place, he passes an art supply store on West 8th Street that he’s familiar with and decides to stop in. He’s still working on the prairie pictures and needs a particular color to pair with the pale morning moon that appears in this painting. He thinks what he needs is cerulean blue, a cool hue that will cool the color of the prairie grasses so that they look like water. The moon might be an oyster carrying a pearl.
Anders goes into the art supply store and begins wandering down the aisle where the tubes of oil paint are displayed. There’s a particular brand he usually buys but he’s thinking that he might try experimenting with another, so he stops to examine a book with samples of how the color looks on different types of paper and canvas. He’s deep into thinking about how the slight variations in tint may affect his picture when he suddenly hears three loud cracking sounds. He thinks he’s hearing a backfire from a car outside or maybe fireworks, though he can’t imagine why anyone would be setting off fireworks at this time of year. He’s still holding the book of paint samples when he looks down and sees that there is blood on the page in front of him. One drop of blood and then another and another.
“Oh my God!” someone cries out and then, as Anders later tries recollect what happened, things get a little blurry. He remembers a store clerk rushing up to him and herding him towards the back of the store and into an office, where he’s told to sit down in a chair. Someone else wraps some kind of scarf or bandage around his head as the room fills up with policemen and emergency medical personnel. Anders is still holding the sample book, but someone takes it from him. A gurney is brought in the office and Anders is told to lie down on it. “I’m fine,” he keeps saying because he thinks he is until he realizes that the side of his face hurts; it feels like its burning. And there is blood all over his clothes.
He is wheeled through the art supply store and out into the street, which is filled with police cars. Then the gurney is lifted into an ambulance, which goes screaming past all the traffic lights, heading towards a nearby hospital. Finally, trying to make sense of what’s happening—Anders feels like he’s in a fog, like some kind of filmy curtain has been pulled down in front of him, separating him from the world outside—he looks up at the EMT in the ambulance who’s sticking a needle in his arm and asks, “What happened?”
“You’re okay,” the EMT says. “The bullet just grazed your cheek. I’m giving you some pain medication right now and hanging a bag of fluids. Just relax.”
“What bullet?” Anders asks. “What are you talking about?”
The EMT sighs. “Some crazy kid,” he says. “This is the second time in a week that we’ve been on one of these calls. All of a sudden, kids are back into graffiti and they’ve been trying to steal spray paint anywhere they can get it because in New York, you can’t buy it legally until you’re eighteen.”
“What?” Anders says. “Graffiti?”
“Yeah,” the EMT replies. “Remember the seventies? Kids tagging subway cars, dangling from rooftops to wildstyle the sides of buildings? Well, it’s all back. Fun times all around,” he concludes, with a sour expression on his face.
Anders is taken to Bellevue. It’s Saturday night and the emergency room is a crazy place. He’s transferred to a bed in a corner cubicle and hooked up to an intravenous drip. Still feeling numb with shock and light-headed from the pain medication he’s been given, Anders has to make a real effort to pay attention when a doctor shows up and walks to the side of his bed.
“Well, I think you’re a very lucky fellow,” the doctor says as he examines the side of Anders’ face. “It’s just a graze wound. A quarter of an inch one way or another and we’d have a very different story here. Looks like God decided to spare you tonight. He must feel that you deserve a blessing.”
God? A blessing? Anders isn’t sure that’s what he actually heard, but then decides that yes, he did. To Anders, this young doctor—Stephen Maxwell is the name on the plastic ID card pinned to the pocket of his white coat—looks like a millennial club kid, slick and handsome, with an expensive haircut and sparkling white teeth. God is about the last thing he’d expect Dr. Stephen Maxwell to be spouting off about. Anders can’t think of anything to say in reply other than, I don’t actually believe in God, which would likely lead to a conversation he doesn’t think he could sustain right now, so he just keeps quiet as Maxwell goes about cleaning Anders’ cheek and applying a bandage.
“Okay,” Maxwell says. “You’re good to go. We’ve given you an antibiotic and I’m going to write you a prescription for more that you should fill tomorrow and take for about a week. Leave the bandage on for a few days and take a bath if you can instead of a shower so you don’t get it wet. Come right back here if there’s any sign of infection, but there shouldn’t be. I think you’re going to do just fine.”
“Thank you,” Anders says, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He still feels a little dizzy but doesn’t want to let Stephen Maxwell see that in case he starts saying something like how God might want him to stay in the emergency room and rest for a while. That’s not what Anders wants. He wants to get out of here as soon as possible.
A nurse comes in to unhook him from the intravenous drip and then he has to sign a sheaf of papers before he’s released, which takes a while. Still, he’s surprised to see how late it is—nearly eleven—when he looks up at the clock above the exit door as he’s leaving the hospital. Maybe all the events of the night didn’t really go by as quickly as they seemed to him. Or maybe, in his head, it felt like time had stopped when in reality, it is still slipping on by.
Outside, on the busy street bathed in the fluorescent glare of the light pouring out from the enormous hospital complex, Anders hails a cab and carefully climbs into the back seat. His apartment is not far from here but he doesn’t trust himself to walk just yet. He doesn’t feel entirely steady on his feet.
“Sir? We’re here.”
Anders hears someone talking to him and opens his eyes. Apparently, he’s fallen asleep during the short ride because he has no memory of the movement of the taxi, no memory of being transported through the streets of Manhattan from the hospital to his building, but here he is. And there is the iron railing, the garbage cans, the front door that leads to the narrow vestibule where the mailboxes are, the ones with the bent doors.
“Sorry,” Anders says as he hands over the money for the ride. Then he gets out of the cab, walks across the sidewalk and enters his building, where he climbs the stairs to his apartment. The cat, Billy, is waiting for him right inside the door, but as soon as Anders crosses the threshold, the cat lets out a yowl and runs away. Anders follows after him and soon finds the cat sitting in the dark, pressed against the back of the sofa that folds out into a bed. His eyes, round as coins, look full of fear.
“Hey,” Anders says, holding out his hand, “it’s me.” Hearing his voice, the cat seems to relax a little, but not much, so Anders goes into the bathroom and scrubs his hands and face, trying to wash away the smell of the hospital, which he guesses must be what has the cat so spooked. As he does, he glances at his face in the mirror and what he sees looks pretty awful. Ravaged. Tomorrow, at the art show, he’s going to have a harder time than usual trying to look like a regular nice guy. Time and circumstances are not being kind to him, he thinks. Time and circumstances, both coming at him like raised fists.
“Better?” he says to the cat when he goes back into the room. He and sits down on the sofa and holds out his hand so the cat can sniff his fingers. But Billy stays where he is, making soft noises in his throat. The sounds may be a growl or they maybe be something else.
The next thing Anders knows is that he’s blinking as he opens his eyes, which feel moist and sticky. He must have fallen asleep again, because he’s still sitting on the sofa but the cat is gone. Anders has been dozing in the dark because he didn’t even turn on a light when he first walked into the room but he does now, leaning over to reach a lamp on table beside the sofa. It’s something he found at a flea market long ago, a lamp with a tan shade decorated with the silhouette of black bears. The lamp casts a warm light, and in its glow, Anders sees the cat sitting in the doorway between this room, where he lives his life when he’s not painting, and the studio, where the rest of his life—the most important part—takes place.
Once the lamp is turned on, the cat walks toward Anders and then jumps up on the sofa. He’s holding a leaf in his mouth and drops it Anders’ lap. It still looks like a living thing, this leaf, green and vibrant, newly plucked from a tree blooming in the new season, this new spring. Anders can’t imagine where the cat found it, because all the windows are closed so it can’t have blown in that way and if it had been stuck to his shoe it wouldn’t look so perfect, so clean, without even a single tear. It’s a real mystery, another strange experience in a night of unexpected twists and turns. But wherever the leaf has come from, Anders understands that Billy means it as a gift. It’s something the cat does from time to time, bring him odd bits and pieces that he finds—well, who knows where? Anders wonders if the cat does this because he thinks it’s a means of paying his way. Or maybe the small items Billy brings to him are gifts of love. But maybe, right now, the cat is still a little worried that Anders, who has come home unaccountably late and smells of strange and unknown places, may not be who he appears to be. Maybe the cat is still afraid of him and the leaf is a test, given by one creature to another, to see if the one who came through the door is still the same as he has always been. Who is the one presence he trusts in the whole world—which, for the cat, exists in the space of these two small rooms. So, Anders picks up the leaf and puts it in his shirt pocket, which is what he always does with the trinkets that the cat brings him. Perhaps this familiar gesture will reassure Billy that all is well, which seems to work because when Anders next reaches out to pet the cat, he finally begins to relax. Anders can feel that: he feels the tension leave the animal’s body as it accepts that everything is still the way it should be, and that he is safe. “Good boy,” Anders says to the cat. “See? I’m still me. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Which, of course, is not really true. It’s not true at all, and Anders knows it. In this world, there is a lot to be afraid of. Real things, but also things you make up in your mind, and things that are just part of your nature. For example, Anders used to think that the bravest thing he ever did was to leave home, but becoming an old man, an old person who probably going to be alone for the rest of his life, is much worse. Much more frightening. But here he is. This is his life, and this life is the sum of his choices, plus all the random things that happened to him along the way and the things he did. The work he did—the work that will continue until the end of his life, through the life of the last of the cats, which may be Billy, though maybe not.
In the morning, though he feels stiff and sore, Anders gets himself out of bed, gets dressed, and takes the subway downtown, where he retrieves his paintings from the van and sets up his display in the park. It’s a warm and lovely Sunday and many people come to visit the art exhibition. Some stop by Anders’ paintings to admire them, some ask about the bandage on his face and when he tells them what happened, they offer sympathy, they say yes, they saw the story on the news and it’s awful that Anders got caught up in this new wave of urban crime. They talk about graffiti, ask whether Anders thinks it’s a legitimate form of art and Anders say yes, he believes it is, though he finds a way to make a joke out of the idea that there are better ways for an artist to obtain materials than to rob an art store. This is city talk, New York talk, gab and chatter that passes the time, that connects people to one another as they stroll through a landscape of trees and playgrounds budding with the welcoming signs of spring. Anders sells several paintings, most of them from the series depicting the morning moon. A woman who buys one of these paintings tells Anders the story of how she first saw the moon in the morning sky when she was a child living in the mountains of West Virginia and was astonished by it; she says that it was the first time she ever understood that the division between night and day was not absolute, that one thing can blend into another, that not everything she thought she understood about the world, or was told by others, was always going to be true and she was going to have to figure things out for herself. A lot more things than she expected.
That night, after Anders has returned the rented truck and brought home the paintings that remain unsold, he spends some time in his studio, making sure that he has everything he needs to start work again tomorrow. As he sorts through his paints and brushes, he realizes that he never did get to buy the cerulean blue he wanted, so thinks about trying to make do with what he already has. It also occurs to him that he actually hasn’t looked for the morning moon in some time; except for the past two days that he spent at the exhibition, he’s been painting steadily, working from memory without even catching a glimpse of the subject of his recent pictures. There’s no real reason for that: he just hasn’t bothered to look out the window in the morning, hasn’t checked to see if it’s one of those days when the moon lingers in the sky long after dawn.
Anders finds that he has a tube of Phthalo Blue and thinks he can try that for the picture he has in mind of the watercolor prairie under a pearl-pale morning moon. He takes the tube out of the drawer where he found it and places it by his easel, so he won’t forget. He doesn’t think he will but just in case, it’s better to have it waiting for him than to try to remember, in the morning, what he had planned to do the night before. As he leaves the room and turns off the light, he has another thought: that there is a way he could find out whether or not he’ll be able to see the moon tomorrow morning. He knows that the moon is in different phases and different places in the sky throughout the month and he could easily look up the information online—so much more easily than, say, riding a bus to a library or waiting for a letter with a list of youth hostels in New York City to arrive in the mail—but he doesn’t think that he will do that. Instead, maybe he’ll take the bath that was suggested to him. Maybe he’ll watch some TV and let his cat—who seems to have accepted him back by now—curl up beside him and dream about whatever it is that cats dream. The moon will simply appear in the morning or it won’t. Right now, though certainly all this may change at any moment, Anders feels that he can just wait and see.
