Girl in the Moonlight Read Online Free Page A

out to the curb the next morning by the maid. A critic for the Voice once fell down a flight of stairs, and to everyone’s amazement got right up and staggered away into the night. It was obvious to most people that Kitty was not a great painter, but everyone agreed on her charm. She was sexy, long-legged, and busty. Her laugh was irresistible. As was her hospitality. She took lovers. Some of them Ugo’s friends. Her children helped pour the drinks and clean the ashtrays. It was a better education than anything they could learn in school.
    To the children their father was a wizard, a djinn who could fly over mountains. He would send them letters, lavishly illustrated, from his journeys. Poems in many languages. Packages wrapped in brown paper and clustered with exotic stamps wouldarrive from time to time, filled with strange candy, costumes, enormous seashells, or, once, the complete skeleton of a fruit bat. He could perform magic tricks, pulling cards or coins out of ears. He tore dollar bills into pieces and made them whole again. Read the children’s futures in coffee stains, promising them all long, happy lives and prophesying fame and fortune. When he was home, they knew to leave him alone while he worked. The door to his studio was closed. But when he emerged, he took them for long, rambling walks down to the docks, where he would converse with sailors and stevedores in one of the languages he spoke. They were never sure how many. Was it four or five? Did dialects count?
    They would sit quietly by his side while he drank with friends in bars or visited other painters’ ateliers. The afternoon sunlight slanting through the window. The children doodling on napkins, talking quietly among themselves. Their bond unbreakable. Everywhere they went it was obvious that people were happy to see him. And because they were his children, people were happy to see them too.
    Occasionally, he would take Kitty’s car and drive them out of the city even though he didn’t possess a license. To the beach, to the markets along Arthur Avenue, to find baby goat to roast in the backyard, to fish for striped bass along the Hudson. Some days it would get too late, and they wound up spending the night, sleeping in the car if they didn’t have enough money for a hotel. He was a terrible driver. The kind who gesticulated with his hands and looked at his passengers to make a point or tell a story. Everyone agreed it was a miracle he never killed himself or anyone else. Once he forgot to put gas in the car, and they all had to return to the city in the back of a milk truck.
    Ugo was also a cook. Kitty, like many rich girls, was not good in the kitchen, nor did she care about food. An old black woman named Mamie came in every day to clean and cookfor the children. Fried chicken, stew, spaghetti, lamb chops. When Mamie wasn’t there, Kitty would burn TV dinners for the children. But their father created marvelous meals. Traditional fish stew, of course, but also whole cod with raisins and pine nuts, fricandó, a kind of pizza called coques, loin of pork that melted in the mouth, tuna escabèche . Telling them the names for the food first in English, then in Spanish, and last in Catalan, so it would stay with them. “This is esqueixada de bacallà, this is escudella .” While drinking wine, he would sing and tell jokes. He taught the children how to chop garlic, how to tell when snails were cooked, how to look at a fish’s eye to know if it was fresh. He had deals with the butcher, the fishmonger, the grocer, the liquor store owner. He would trade drawings for food and drink, flirt with the waitresses and the shopkeepers’ wives. Kitty would press money on him, but he would only pocket it, preferring to barter. So many fish for a drawing of such a size, so many bottles of wine for a painting. It was an inexact but virtuous math.
    Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last. Kitty and Ugo were divorced in the early 1970s, although life carried