New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  My mother’s barrage of phone calls had woken my father. He guessed that I would show up there sooner or later; either that, or I had gone to my friend’s house (but his parents had no idea where we were). When we arrived he was hardly welcoming; he said we looked like three deserters from the Cuban army. He put me in the basement (since the house was full) and sent Paul and Chuck to staff quarters.

  As he pieced together the events of the night in his office the next morning he grew increasingly agitated at Paul’s parents. After reprimanding the three of us he dialed them on his speakerphone and berated them too: “I don’t believe in parents collaborating with children against other parents. That’s not how it works.” But they held firm, supporting our rights as Paul grinned with pride. PG ended the conversation as politely as he could, and then, to my delight, released us for the remainder of the weekend. Fittingly he saw an advantage to my presence—that, as a worker from the summer, I could cast a vote in the next day’s referendum: whether or not to unionize. “But for which side?” I puckishly asked Stern and Jenkins. The union had me disqualified anyway.

  All Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the three of us took a combined recreational and sociological tour of the Hotel, delighting in the scenery and food while assailing displays of decadence and bad taste. Everywhere we looked we saw blacks, Chinese, and Puerto Ricans sweeping rugs, polishing windows, wheeling carts of laundry. Overweight, overdressed New Yorkers, most of them Jewish, flaunted jewelry and performed unnecessary public dramas, barking at wives, husbands, kids. How had I missed this so completely!

  But it was a turning point. I had run away from home. I had told everyone that I didn’t live with my mother anymore. On the mail table at Phi Psi was her response—a carbon of her letter to my father, disowning me and turning over full responsibility to him. “That’s the way Richard has always wanted it, so now I will grant him his wish.”

  “No one is responsible for a nineteen-year-old,” he told me coolly on the phone. “I wrote her that if you can’t take care of yourself, then heaven help you.”

  The beginning of December was dominated by tests and papers, though we made time for a literary evening at Phi Psi featuring my freshman-year buddy Al Powers, Stephen Mitchell (the best poet in Humphries’ class), Jeff Tripp, and me. I invited Lindy to read too.

  “Sorry, I’m off to Penn this weekend.”

  In fact, she said, she was overwhelmed with schoolwork during the next month and getting behind on her assignments, so she asked me not to call for a while. She was obviously a Philly guy’s girl, so I left her in the past and all but forgot about her.

  My best pal then was a kid named Schuyler whom I met inauspiciously during intramural hockey. While attempting to pass, I ineptly whizzed a puck by his shins—lifting was not allowed. Shaking his stick over his head, he threatened to castrate me if I did that again.

  I knew him from afar as a rebel in Marx’s American Studies class, but his remark had the effect of thawing the barrier between us. Walking back to our lockers we shared Marxian foibles, then continued the discussion during lunch at Valentine. Schuy considered me the professor’s favorite, which he deemed a de facto betrayal (after all, he was Marx’s daily whipping boy). I assured him that King Leo was now down on me too. “He doesn’t like my reading material, he doesn’t like Phi Psi; he only wants me to imitate him and his buddies.”

  “He’s supposed to be one of the good-guy teachers,” Schuy complained, “but he’s just another authoritarian ‘my-word-goes’ bwana. He’s all for revolution and protest, but in his own class he can’t listen to someone else’s opinion without losing his cool. Just because he’s teaching Growing Up Absurd doesn’t mean he’s living it or on our side.”

  Schuy was a paradox. A virtual prep-school icon in style and appearance, he was as bright as anyone I knew, a natural athlete, and strikingly handsome—a mop of sandy hair and classic features. But he was fiercely independent, alienated from every peer group at Amherst, including Phi Psi. “Just another social club,” he snarled, “a lot of ignorant guys practicing reverse snobbism.” He was not trying to date girls, though he was very into them in his mind.

  He was mainly on guard—resentful at being hustled all his life, determined not to be taken in again if he could help it. One Saturday night he and I hitched together to a mixer at Smith, talking up our excitement all the way. Yet in meager follow-through we hung in the crowds along the wall. Whereas I was a deer in headlights, frozen by systemic paralysis, Schuy was noble and defiant. I thought he was far and away the most attractive guy in the room, yet he never left our vicinity along the wall, offering only a volley of churlish remarks, one of them quite memorable: “They’re so damn good-looking, but that’s what they’re playing at. I’m just not gonna go for it. Let one of them act like a normal human being and come over and ask me to dance.” No one did.

  Helene had invited me to stay with her at Christmastime and, after a round of family diplomacy, my father agreed to take me to Miami with him and Aunt Bunny because they were going there anyway.

  I rode the Trailways bus out of Amherst to Idlewild … and stepped off a jet in Betsy’s city. She was my dream lover until then, more so in her absence because she had been quoined by daydreams into a full-time cohort and idol. Her alias had stayed loyal to me through the ordeals of freshman year, the betrayals of both my families, through assorted reproaches, failed dates, and other ignominies and debacles. She was the luminous Miami girl, watching over me from her other Earth, nullifying the forces opposing me. She alone could reach across the cosmos to the voice behind the dungeon stairs and charm and amuse it on my behalf; she had been its antidote. Now I had to face that she was a real person too, with her own agendas and trajectory.

  Sun throbbed through listless Southern air. I kicked a broken coconut shell along the ground. Bodings were everywhere, but I had little hope.

  The first two days were an unexpected throwback to Uncle Paul, hero and guardian of my childhood. He showed me his haunts: the Grossinger Pancoast he once owned (now the Algiers—“but it’s on lease,” he joked, “we get it back in ninety-nine years”), the restaurant in which he and Grandpa Harry were partners, even the house where he conducted the original Easter egg hunt.

  I enjoyed being under court protection, as I ate dinner at a pricey French restaurant with him and Aunt Bunny, then joined them on a yacht with business associates. The next day I sat on the beach with my stepmother—jabbering magpies again, drinking rum cokes. The proximity of Betsy was a constant prod, but I put a screen around it and walked in my father’s ancient shadow. On the third day, I moved to Helene’s.

  I expected a normal Jewish family, but I found a cartoon-like parody of my New York household: a sardonic, abusive father; a sluggish, oppressed mother; neither trying to hide long-practiced acrimonies or barbs of contempt. I wondered why Helene even stayed there; after all, she had cut her own record, “You Better Leave Him Alone,” a minor hit on the Roulette label, promoted as the debut of a “hot new teenage rocker” between Lou Christie’s “Shy Boy” and Dinah Washington’s “A Stranger on Earth.” A local star, she was performing regularly in clubs.

  She had broken up with Spike and recently rejected a marriage proposal from a much older, carrot-topped lawyer (she showed me his photo) who wasn’t wanting to hear no for an answer. Relieved to have me at hand, she asked point-blank if I’d be her boyfriend now. “Don’t you see,” she pleaded. “We’re both going to make it. We should make it together.”

  I deflected the topic, for the anticipation of Betsy obsessed me.

  It wasn’t until my fourth day in Florida that she returned from college. I called. We arranged to meet at her house on Pine Tree Drive the next morning.

  I got off the bus and walked for blocks under the tropical sky, manuscript under my arm, this book in its embryonic form. Coconut palms rippled eerily. It was my life in cameo. Movie cameras tracked me from across the street.

  Internally I knew better. I could
barely separate Betsy herself from her character in Salty and Sandy or Peggy in The Moon; she had become an illuminated being. Helene had told me she was back with Bob, and there was nothing in Betsy’s and my infrequent newsy correspondence over the year to suggest that she in any way considered me a possible boyfriend. But I needed to see her, for this was the conclusion to my novel. Catherine Carver and my readers-to-be were waiting.

  I was led into the mansion by a black butler. Betsy met me at the edge of the living room and reached with quaint refinement for my hand. She was the same plain but charismatic being whose pastel portrait had hung on my wall all year. Her voice was familiar and strange, it had been in my head so long. I was in the temple of the goddess whose simulacra adorned my innermost chapel.

  We sat there, she on the couch, me on the adjacent chair. We had nothing in common except a vestigial rapport, and even that an eroding memento. She was already a sorority girl, while I was quoting the Socialist Worker and Samuel Beckett. But I had to speak for myself: “I really looked forward to seeing you. You look great.” I had broken the seal with stilted lines I couldn’t rescind. I could see Tripp shaking his head, laughing, “Cowed, were you, by your two-bit cheerleader?”

  She knew what I was carrying, so she said simply, “May I see it?”

  For the next hour or so I sat there skimming magazines while she turned through the pages. My mind raced through an inventory of what she was reading—my descriptions of her, my transcriptions of her words, my fantasies of her coming to Amherst and us going off together. It didn’t matter any longer. It was a 100-percent total confession.

  I stared at every last thing in that room many times, each piece of kitsch art, each item of museum-vintage furniture, the queue of Reader’s Digest books on the shelves, the view through the sliding glass to the pool. I had come too, like a troubadour, to the castle.

  She straightened the pages neatly into a pile and returned them to their box. In her eyes I could see the answer, or perhaps it was the question, searching my own piercing look in order to understand—but, in any case, it was final, and I knew it. “You should go,” she said.

  I got up and walked to the door, Betsy a step behind me. “I had hoped—” I started to say.

  “You’ll find someone right for you,” she interrupted. “Thank you for letting me read it. You didn’t have to.”

  I strode down the long driveway, out the iron gate, past the coconut palms, into my life, which was waiting in the Miami afternoon. I encountered something almost prehistoric, that had no name or meaning. I felt drained and feverish, an atavism of Bill-Dave Saturdays. I tasted a toasted almond popsicle in my mind. I walked for miles, past houses, fallen coconuts and oranges, lamp posts, stores, trying to harbor every breath of tropical flowers, to record each feeling and its echo, singing the old songs in my heart, and telling myself, with feigned drama, that it was over.

  I did not see Betsy again, nor did I have any further communication with her; yet periodically I dreamed of that mansion with its iron gates and palms.

  I come long distances through the South or find myself in Florida to my astonishment and decide to look her up—why not? I go to the front door and am told she doesn’t live there anymore … or that she has died. Or she appears, hopeful and shining, as she was, in some version of that living room. Or she is an old woman, sad and defeated…. And I long to recover the purity of the feeling I had for her once.

  The dream has a vague background synesthesia woven from strands of Betsy’s song for Bob that Arista summer, Bryan Hyland’s American ghost ballad “Sealed With a Kiss.” A more profound and mournful hymn than its dippy title, its resolution of minor into major chords holds a devotional tension all the way from Bach’s organ music and old English lute songs to the Beatles’ “And I Love Her”:

  I’ll see you in the sunlight,

  I’ll hear your voice everywhere;

  I’ll run to tenderly hold you

  But baby, you won’t be there.

  Such was the landscape of astral Betsyland, as the dream grew and changed with my own aging. In one version she was divorced and caring for dozens of young children in a slum; in another, she was on her way to the beach with no appreciation for how far I had come to find her. She nodded a quick hello and hurried on.

  For years we never spoke in dream, but then we did and, though I don’t remember what she said, it scalded new light and sensation along the perimeters of an unlived life. I experienced a Pacific wilderness, fragments of an Australian Aboriginal ceremony, a beach far older than Miami where she showed me patches of glacial ice, gullies exiting from the planet’s core among ordinary sunbathers and palm trees; then she vanished into a crowd. Or she came from a room in an old Hardy Boys book and provided the resolution to a different mystery.

  When I awakened I felt a tremendous loss, but also a wonder and freshness for having been there. I was never not regenerated by that dream.

  I know that Betsy wasn’t an appropriate girlfriend and that she was kept alive in me in the form she first manifested: as the anima, the mirror of my lost female self but also the presence of the Other, a naiad from a time before language. At a moment of life change—of leaving my mother’s gloomy household—she appeared in the guise of a Dade County cheerleader to lead me into the care and spaciousness of the world, to insist that I fulfill her potential in me … to open my heart ahead of time to women who would love me. Without her I would have been stumbling across the threshold from darkness into darkness.

  Yet “anima” is a name for a symbolic transformation of many masks. Her form of appearance changes as we change, bringing latent parts of ourselves to consciousness as they are needed, discarding familiar reference points so that we become estranged to ourselves. We think we are dying, or in love. That’s where the rest of our life always emerges, from the muse who leads us where we weren’t able to go on our own.

  But just because Betsy was the projection of a force inside me, a stand-in for a mother I didn’t have (and that Aunt Bunny couldn’t be) does not mean she was not an eligible girl. In truth, eros failed, and our lives twained without either of us understanding who the other was or might be. Perhaps such broken romances are absolved by the universality of the feminine and masculine (yes, we are all the same woman, the same man, acting out the same metadrama). Perhaps our losses are healed recurrently in later love. But there remain holes in the dreamtime, things ever needing mending, alternate realities floating through space-time, seeking planets and possibilities for their rendering. Through their eternal return we experience we will never be made whole. Not in this body, on this world anyway—nor in this swift-moving slick of relativity.

  That night Helene and I went to a drive-in. In the car she leaned against me as I put my arm around her. She giggled at the atrocious comedy on the screen: “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” starring Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, and a host of other comedians and vaudeville refugees. I felt apart and disinterested. A dying man kicked a bucket away—ha, ha, ha. Helene roared and grabbed and shook me as if to squeeze some humor out of a stuffed ape.

  On the way home I slid back across the front seat, but she told me it was proper in Miami Beach for a date to sit flush against the driver: “Don’t embarrass me!” I felt that that was silly and also made me an obstruction, so I angled myself against the door. We didn’t talk. She pulled into the driveway, and stared at me. I longed to be on that jet plane going home.

  “It’s over for you with Betsy,” she said. “Why don’t you take me seriously?”

  “I guess it was something special with her. It’s nothing against you; it either happens or it doesn’t.”

  “How would you know?” she said. She leaned over, put her mouth on mine, and kissed me long and hard. At first I felt like pulling away, as though from a gushy relative. But she put her tongue inside and rolled it up and down. I felt a wave of excitement begin at my roots and flower through my whole body. I held her and kissed back. I was trembli
ng, as she sucked me further into the kiss. But instead of continuing, she pulled away and looked back at me probingly. She said, “Let’s go inside. There’s time for us.”

  Not really. Her parents were sitting up, so she went straight to her room. The next morning she rushed out early for rehearsal and she had a date with Bozo the lawyer that night. I left the following noon and didn’t see her again until five years later in Detroit when she had three children by him and was no longer singing professionally.

  3

  THE RAINBOW

  I returned to college after Christmas with a new strategy for transferring. A dissident English professor named Roger Sale had departed Amherst with a rousing farewell speech two years earlier. Decrying his students’ blind obedience to authority and substitution of cults of personality around faculty for real scholarship, he admitted that he had been disruptively eccentric himself and said and done outrageous things in class, but that was only in order to wake “smug robots” from habits of “abstract servility:” their unspoken “contempt for knowledge” and “huddled scholasticism.” Accusing the college of “a rather dogmatic sense of its own superiority,” he proposed that its aim of excellence from its students was cultivated primarily “in order to maintain this superiority” or, more properly, its illusion. The school was “snotty, elitist, avowedly Protestant, and provincial … a box filled with agile white men like a squash court.”

  His concluding elegy was a quick, wry jab at Amherst’s collective hubris: “So, I say goodbye. You are off, I hope, in spite of all I have said, to lead. I am off to where the dream is not of a whole man but of a whole society. Go to hell—and thank you.”

  Sale was memorialized as an underground hero, and people compared my chapel oration to his. He was now teaching at the University of Washington. I wrote to Professor Sale before Christmas and, when I got back from Florida, I found a letter from him on the Phi Psi table, encouraging me to apply to Seattle and offering to help if I came there. I sent at once for an application.