Introduction

Envious Moon is a harrowing tale of the sometimes dark obsession, and often sensual beauty, that accompanies young love. With a nod to Romeo and Juliet and reminiscent of Endless Love, Thomas Christopher Greene tells the story of two young lovers and their journey to find perfection in each other's arms.

When young Anthony Lopes and his best friend set out from the small fishing community of Galilee, Rhode Island, to commit what they believe will be a victimless crime, they never imagined that it would change their lives forever.

They expected the mansion on the island bluffs to be empty. But inside they find a man and his daughter, Hannah. Haunted by her fleeting image and convinced he can atone for what happens to her father, Anthony is determined to find her.

Filled with the dazzling narrative drive, lyric prose, and compelling characterizations that have earned Thomas Christopher Greene the admiration of Nelson DeMille, Bret Lott, and Susan Cheever, Envious Moon is a luminous, highly original, and riveting novel about what it means to love, and be loved.

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Excerpt

The summer I turned ten my father got a new job on the Mavis, a sword boat. Sword fishing was the most lucrative of the commercial fishing jobs and that was a good summer and he made good money. We ate steak on nights he returned and listened to Red Sox games on the radio. The happiest nights of my life were the nights when he came home. We never knew when to expect him because a fishing boat only returns when it is full of fish or out of fuel. But somehow I could sense when he was on land. I don’t know how to describe it and maybe it was just luck. But he was never able to surprise me. I’d stand in the front yard and watch the street and think, he’s going to turn the corner now. It was like I was willing him to be there. And on those moments when I was right, I’d see him in the distance in the summer heat, at first only a figure outlined against the hot day. But there was no mistaking him, his walk. I’d run out to the street to him, yelling his name and when I got close, he’d stop and wait for me. He’d hold his arms out wide and smile. I’d jump into his arms and smell his cigarettes and all the fish he had caught. His sweat. He’d hold me up and kiss my cheeks and then put me down and tell me to get my mother. And it didn’t matter how tired he was, we’d still spend hours kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the road. He’d tell me stories about life at sea. I wanted nothing more than to be on a boat with him. To learn to fish as he did and sometimes when I told him this, his mood changed. You won’t be a fisherman, Anthony, he said.

My father always took the time to tell me how proud he was of me. Especially with how I did in school. I was a straight A student from elementary school through junior high. They put me in a college-track program. I was the only son of a fisherman in those classes. That made my father prouder than anything. He taped my report cards to the refrigerator and he told all the men he worked with how smart his Anthony was. He used to tell me how I was going to go to a big college and then leave Galilee. I didn’t like when he said this because I could not imagine leaving Galilee. He always said I was going to go to New York, and live in a big house and drive a nice car and marry a pretty woman and have kids who had a better life than I had. It should be easier for each generation, he said. That’s our job as parents. I wanted to ask him: but what if I don’t want to leave Galilee? What’s wrong with my life? What if I want nothing more than to be like you? To fish with other men and when on land to kick a soccer ball with my son and eat steaks and listen to baseball?

But I never said these things to him. I knew how happy my report cards made him. I knew how pleased he was when my eighth grade teacher, Mr. Loomis, called my parents to tell them that I was reading on a college level already. He told them that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and that college was within my sights if I kept working at it.

In 1984, I turned fourteen. This was in July and my father was on the Mavis and they were fishing a seam in a roiling sea at night. It was their fourth night in a row and they pulled sword after sword and even with the high seas, to a man they did not wish to be anywhere else. At the rate they were going, each crewman might walk away with five grand. My father and another fisherman were at the bait table. They stood across from each other and as the line unfurled from the spool they took squid off the table and baited them on the big hooks. It was repetitive and hard work as there was no slowing down the line. But my father was a good fisherman and he was especially good at slapping the bait up there and catching it solid. Later other fisherman would tell me he almost never wasted a single hook.

At one point the men on the other side of the deck doing the butchering called for help and the man across from my father left. My father was all alone and normally this would not have mattered since he was certainly fast enough to keep up on his own. But in the roiling sea the boat lurched suddenly to port and my father was thrown forward with the squid in his hand. The hook meant for the squid drove through the part of his palm where the thumb met the forefinger. In the whip of the wind whatever cries he might have made were drowned out. He was swept into the black sea.

If he had not been hooked so solidly, they may never have found him. They pulled him out of the icy Atlantic like a fish.

That night men from the co-op came to the house and I woke when I heard my mother’s grief. It was a sound like no other. In the days that followed, everything slowed down. The house was always full of visitors and our small dining room table was covered with more food than we could ever eat. They held a wake at O’Brien’s funeral home, in the small upstairs room they used for the poor people. The fishermen and their wives all came to pay their respects and the fishermen looked like men who had no business being inside. I stood in the corner and no one paid any attention to me, which was good because I refused to take my eyes off my father’s body. My mother told me his soul would rise to heaven and I didn’t want to miss it. I thought it would look like candle-smoke, floating toward the ceiling. Though I didn’t see anything. Later I figured it must have risen while he was still in the ocean.

After everyone had left, my mother kneeled in front of my father and said her goodbyes. She wore black from head-to-toe and I remember that she had a run up one leg of her stockings. My mother spoke in Portuguese and she spoke in English and the words were meant for my father and not for me. But I knew, even at that young age I knew, that the words she spoke were words of love.

She spoke for a long while. And while she whispered to him she reached up and pushed her hands through his thick hair. She cupped his lifeless face in her hands. And that night, for the first time, I saw my parents as separate people. As Berta and as Rodrigo, a man and a woman who had loved one another. And I knew that the sea had taken my father. That the sea took many things. But that it could not take their love. Even after he was gone, the love remained. It was in the upstairs room of the funeral home that night. And for as long as I stayed in the small bungalow, it was in that house. I saw it in my mother’s eyes.

After the funeral, I told my mother I was a man now and she didn’t laugh at me. I said I would go to sea and she said, “There will be plenty of time for that.”

We went on. In the years that followed I grew tall and strong like my father. I had his curly hair and his big brown eyes. I hung around the docks and got to know the boats and the men. In the summers, I took what work I could to prove myself. I learned how to tie leaders and how to make lobster traps. And when I turned sixteen, against my mother’s objections and the objections of my teachers, I left school. Two of my teachers even came to the house to try to talk to my mother and me. They said I was making a huge mistake. That in two years if I kept studying that lots of colleges would be interested in me. My mother agreed with them but I said, we don’t have any money. Keep your grades up, Anthony, they said, and the money will be there. They said it like the money would just appear out of nowhere. I told them I needed to fish. But that I would work on my G.E.D. when I was home and we would see what happened. Berta didn’t talk to me for a few days and I took a job on a boat that jigged for cod. She acted as if by leaving school a part of me had died, which I suppose now it had.

Six months later I would join a sword boat. It was as close to my father as I would ever come. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the Author:

1. How reliable is the narrator? What does Anthony’s story say about the nature of truth? About memory?

2. The novel draws it’s title from Romeo and Juliet. What does the book say about class in America? How do the different backgrounds of Anthony and Hannah affect their interaction?

3. The novel is a story of love and obsession, and, in particular, the blinding love of adolescence? Where in the novel does the love they have for one another cross the line into obsession?

4. What does the book say about fate? About chance? About the inevitability of events?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author's web site
»	Essay from the author on ENVIOUS MOON

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