MOON IN LEO

1 2 3 R M O O N I N L E O T. M. M c N A L L Y I am haunted by the story of a great king. The king, having grown weary – terrorists in the field, the bringing of water to the desert, etc. – called to his astrologers, and he said, being king, My time is coming. Then he ordered his astrologers to find a time, the given moment, through which his passing would cause the least disturbance to the universe. To the universe, that’s the detail that haunts. He wasn’t worried about the queen, sobbing in the basement; or the prince, out crossing swords with the neighbor on the lawn; or the princess, that fey and willful creature, combing out her hair in the pretty turret. Do not disturb, the king instructed his astrologers. Do not disturb the universe. Love, my father once wrote, operates always from a position of strength. Which is also to say, the astrologers they all gathered, and presented cases, and debated the circumstances each to each. He wanted to go, this king, like a pebble into the sea. Like a pretty little seashell you’d find along the beach: smaller than an almond, bigger than a pea. Riches, we grow to understand, brought from the great and mysterious depths of the sea. 1 2 4 M c N A L L Y Y My father once fell in love with a woman he was not supposed to. I found the seashell in a shoebox full of letters he had written to the woman I never met. Autumn. She lived in Lake Geneva, which is Midwest for Wisconsin, in a pale clapboard house with a pretty red gate that latched. The first time he struck the latch, that click, he knew even then he was going through a passage that would change the course of his life. My father didn’t simply have an a√air; he fell in love, stupidly, as if it were a trapdoor. It was the click, that moment at the gate, that he paid attention to; he could have turned around. He could have said, Hey, Autumn. I have to go. That was her name, Autumn. She had presented him with the seashell, a token of her esteem, with a purpose to remind – approximation , shading, and hue. Size, apparently, of her clit. Even in 1972, or especially, it was possible for a love a√air to change a man’s life. She drove a sporty Datsun, this woman; she was the mother of a spicy little girl and a slightly troubled older boy; she knew the tangle of kids, I’m saying, and thus she understood a driving premise of my father’s nature, that same premise he had brought to bear to rescue her from the streets of Chicago – a summer storm; she, standing near the lake, drenched in her pale, now translucent, summer dress. It’s the people who believe most in freedom, the ones who wash up in front of you on Lake Shore Drive, who never seem to have any cash. What good was a little current, my father thought, without being able to light a lamp? So he was showing o√, a little. Probably he didn’t need to scold the cop. She also needed to catch the train. He bought her a ticket for the train. And then he gave her his card. ‘‘Oh,’’ Autumn said, brazen as Aphrodite. ‘‘Will I get your secretary ? Or will I get you?’’ He was smitten: like that. And she was pretty, book-smart and reckless: free, to use the language of the day. Cast loose from a well-feathered nest, it showed in her bearing and her confidence. Also she was practiced in the arts. She wrote ardent letters with an ambisexual hand in dark blue ink. Chameleonic, my father thought once, later that week in a restaurant, watching himself in her eyes. She knows just what I want to see. He saw: a woman with training in the theater, which he took to mean that she could persuade herself of any- M O O N I N L...