New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  Between semesters my roommate Greg had left for the dorms, so I reclaimed the whole space. In his former corner I hung an ancient horse from Lascaux alongside Paul Klee’s knight in a rowboat. In the Klee a comic figure speared at three crooked fish dilating through a bent shaft of opalescence, its sourceless glow lighting a universe of more and less deeply-bathed cubes from white azure to blue-black. Alongside pranced the primordial steed of our species, fierce and cute, the spare charcoal of its mane and hooves seminal to everything. These were my insignias: vortices to the unknown.

  For second semester I signed up for three new classes—only Leo Marx’s American Studies section and Geology carried over. I enrolled in a seminar on D. H. Lawrence; an Abnormal Psychology course taught by Roy Heath, a visiting professor from Pittsburgh (where he was a colleague of my mother’s brother Lionel); and a survey of modern European drama. The latter was inspired by Tripp, who was directing a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that he was planning to take off-Broadway.

  The three magical-realist “Jeans”—Anouilh, Giradoux, and Cocteau—were a revelation, and I became an enthusiast for the theater of cosmic irony. Rehearsals of Godot were going on day and night in the Phi Psi living room—Jeff starring as Pozzo, with a whip, monocle, greatcoat, and breath freshener alongside my former room-mate Greg’s older brother Brett as Estragon. I loved the performance of paradox, the shift into the negative space.

  In these avant-garde playwrights the conventions of theater digressed into something between staged philosophy and science fiction. Men stumbled across minimal sets calling out to gods who were their own inventions, pulling characters out of parking lots in other eras. Antigone and Oedipus were reincarnated as Europeans performing Freudian myths that were themselves pre-Homeric apologues. As Anouilh put it, “I do not want to understand. I am here for something other than understanding. I am here to tell you no, and to die. To tell you no and to die.”

  “No” was something I had not rehearsed enough—no to my mother, no to Leo Marx, no to PG, no to the dungeon stairs, no to Betsy. I may have demurred and rebelled, fled or disobeyed, played pranks and gone amok, but I never said a confident no or defended the bastion of my existence.

  My theater teacher, Stephen Coy, was an admirer of Tripp, so, for once, I had authority on my side—free rein. For my term paper I wrote sixty pages of my own Anouilh-like imitation of Hamlet in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father cries out, “Stop in the name of Jean Cocteau!” Later, Hamlet reads a baseball magazine on his bed after delivering a key soliloquy, and America’s role in Vietnam is satirized in Denmark’s “Norwegian crisis.” The vendors selling food and souvenirs during intermissions are actors in the play and speak key lines—there was, in effect, no intermission, though the audience wouldn’t immediately know.

  Passing my old Shakespearean tyrant, Professor Baird, on one of the paths that crossed the campus that winter, I let drop a “Hello, sir.”

  “Watcha doing?” he snapped distractedly. This of course was the man famous for his canonization of the Bard and disdain for student work. I needed to get him into my script.

  “Most recently I rewrote Hamlet,” I deadpanned.

  It would be impossible to imitate the startled grunts and outraged syllables that followed. So I cast him as a second Pollonius, wandering in from the twentieth century to dismiss the play in person.

  Tripp told me that in America not being able to drive was “tantamount to not having a dick.” So, I immediately looked up “Driving Schools” in the Yellow Pages and enrolled in private lessons with a man who turned out to be the Northampton High football coach.

  “That’s who should teach you!” Jeff roared with delight, as he leaped into his own vehicle and bombed onto College Street.

  For six weekly sessions I hitched to Northampton. From there the coach took me out on back roads where I performed the rite of passage to his drumbeat of commands.

  At Horace Mann I had taken a month-long class, so I had already experienced the weirdness-thrill of sliding behind the torus onto the throne of Bob Towers (and numerous Grossinger’s chauffeurs), then commanding a vehicle’s mazy course. My first spin began as a broken line of lurches along a block of Riverdale. But once I got over my reticence, it was pure Penny Arcade. As I was propelling myself over the scenic drum, HM’s driving domo, Mr. Zachary, must have detected a dangerous shift because he asked me to pull over. I presumed a mechanical error.

  “Don’t ever forget,” he pronounced sternly, “that every moment you are behind that wheel you hold life and death in your hands. Ever!”

  “I like that one,” said the Northampton coach. “I’m going to steal it for myself.”

  I made one bad move when I confused coach’s directive, turning against my own better judgment to the left, ending up in a tobacco field.

  “What the fuck!” he blurted in startled horror. “‘Right!’ Right right right. Right means right.”

  It was my only miscue. A month later I got my Massachusetts license in the mail.

  Jeff had nailed it: the document felt like enfranchisement, tribal permission, an irrefutable coming of age.

  In Psychology we began our semester by studying the etiology of neurosis, which brought back memories of my subway concierge Neil quizzing Dr. Fabian after my sessions. Our coursebook, Norman Cameron’s and Joseph Rychlak’s canonical Personality Development and Psychopathology, might have been Neil’s graduate text. Its opening pages christened the famous id, where torrents of primal libido got discharged until the nascent ego contained and bound them into a personal identity. Such was the emotional energy of our lives—cathected and transformed as “fantasies, daydreams, conflicts, object relations, the self, and social roles.” No more statistics to parse—this was “inner sanctum” stuff.

  Dr. Heath was a mild, reassuring professor, not unlike a psychotherapist himself. Because of my background with Fabian and Friend—a legacy I recounted at our first meeting—and his connection to my Uncle Lionel, Heath and I became out-of-class buddies, sharing meals in town, sometimes with my friend Paul joining us.

  Early in the term the professor took our class on a trip to Northampton State Mental Hospital. Patients flocked around us, vying for attention. One young man cornered Paul and me and showed us a sketchpad of his inventions, page after page, meticulously drawn: men with wings, elaborate pulleys and windmills. He told us that the police had incarcerated him there to steal his work, and he asked for our help in escaping so he could apply for patents before it was too late. We promised to try.

  Another guy confided to Dr. Heath that he was the psychiatrist and the doctors were his patients. I whispered to Paul that Anouilh would have agreed.

  Then a grotesque, over-dressed elderly woman took both my wrists in her hands and told me that she knew my grandmother. Surely that couldn’t be true, for she didn’t even know my name. But people had tossed that line at me since I became a Grossinger, and I loathed it to the point of being uncivil. Grandma Jennie appeared on TV so often selling rye bread in a commercial that began, “Hello, I’m Jennie Grossinger” that, at Horace Mann and Chipinaw, kids nicknamed me “Jennie.”

  Now I felt as though a madperson had read through my paranoia and was flouting it.

  “Don’t let them get to you,” Dr. Heath had warned, “because they will.”

  Back in class I questioned whether most of these inmates had real diseases—neuroses and psychoses by Cameron’s definition—or whether they were simply victims of a capitalist society. What I had observed were women deemed too grotesque or unattractive to find husbands, elderly folks without homes, prodigies who couldn’t adapt to cultural norms. I applied the sociological arguments of my American Studies reading to the terminology of my “Abnormal” textbook and wrote interlocking term papers.

  Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was my link between Freud’s theory of neurosis and the addictions of our rat-race civilization. Goodman had connected the anguish and exile of individuals to the vap
id materialism of our culture, almost gleefully assaulting the world in which my parents had spent their lives: “human beings working as clowns … thinking like idiots … Alternately, they are liars, confidence men, smooth talkers, obsequious, insolent…. ” No kidding! That covered the landscape, from Grossinger’s and the Nevele to midtown Manhattan and the conclaves of politicians. No wonder Godot never came. No wonder Quemoy, Matsu, and the Cuban Crisis. No wonder Betsy, Helene, and the rest … Barbie dolls, startlets in soap operas, dupes in vehicles for capitalism. Even our sexuality didn’t belong to us. Schuyler was right—“Growing Up Absurd” was the least of it: “If there is nothing worthwhile, it is hard to do anything at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question, is one nothing?”

  The source of these proclamations, Mr. Goodman himself, visited Marx’s class—he was a friend of the professor. A group of us went to lunch with our guest afterwards. I had expected a thoughtful social critic, even a compassionate elder, so I was unprepared for the gruff, belligerent curmudgeon who spat sermons at us and pushed aside our questions by saying that kids our age cared about fucking and nothing else. After he made that assertion the third time—seemingly oblivious to the fact he had already said it twice—Schuy and I stomped out.

  Goodman’s book remained seminal to me, but in my mind I had appropriated it from its author. The man was right, of course: we were stuck in adolescent fantasies and probably useless for more nuanced discourse. But that didn’t make us libidinal beasts without discernment. It wasn’t sex that drew me; it was the texture of seductive feelings. It was the way things changed and were changed into each other in the tinder and alchemy of masturbation, a vast, cryptic river flowing into “Oh, Shenando’h, I love your daughter…. ”

  I was roused at one level by the lure of girls but at another by the fathomless labyrinths of feeling in myself where guises radiated deeper guises and were entangled mysteriously, one veil over another, closer to Keats’ nightingale than Playboy magazine.

  We were all bound away somewhere, across some “wide Missouri,” coming from, going to, an insoluble riddle. That’s what I sought in my own erotic depth, the sense of how deep I went—and my desire went.

  For Goodman and Beckett the magic of desire had been lost in the sludge of the world—discarded in the garbage cans of Tripp’s stagesets. At finale, the prophets warned, we will find our hearts and souls empty; we will be unable to go on. But I was still brimming with hope. I honored Beckett because he was spare and pure, but I didn’t want my birthright stolen by cynics and lesser muck-a-mucks.

  Catherine Carver spent many months with the finished draft of Salty and Sandy and the polished sections of The Moon, and she finally wrote back that, although I was very talented, I had not yet written a book publishable by Viking. She trusted that by continuing to work with her I would get to that point. She presumed that we would talk the next time I was in New York.

  I was crestfallen, though I knew all along that something wasn’t right. My writing felt too childlike and iconoclastic for the world of Saul Bellow. Yet my fantasies of the future were tied to being a novelist, and this woman was my Tom Greenwade—he was the scout who found Mickey Mantle when sent to look at another Oklahoma player. She had discovered me and was my champion in the bigtime.

  With no fallback life on tap I skipped a Friday of classes and took the bus into Manhattan to meet Miss Carver for lunch. She picked a distinguished literary restaurant where she told me right off that The Moon was going in a dangerous direction, away from reliable narrative into occultism, and she warned me again about reading Olson. “You are no longer making believable stories or creating characters who are real. Some of the writing in The Moon is truly inspired, but I think it belongs in essays, not novels. Even so, you are elevating the tarot to an unwarranted, almost absurd level.” She wanted more Grossinger’s, more irony, more satire, more sex—in general, more action and less philosophy.

  She was asking me to abandon the writing that was most meaningful to me. I needed the view from Luna to transcend the banality of my own plots. I needed the scope of Olson and Beckett to yank me out of beach parties and teen gossip and get me into the greater cosmos.

  My father was in the City that afternoon, so we had dinner in his hotel room. He too was interested in the career implications of my lunch with Catherine Carver and, when he heard my disheartening account, without forewarning he picked up the phone and dialed without explanation. After a few seconds I realized that he had called the popular novelist Harold Robbins.

  “Harold, Paul Grossinger here … yes, you can do something for me this time.” In the course of the conversation he wrote down an address. “You meet him at his place; he’ll read your work and tell you what it’s worth; then you’ll know whether this woman is just pulling on your chain.”

  It had the crudity of all his offers, but I too wanted to know what Harold Robbins would make of Salty and Sandy. It was such a preposterous, tantalizing notion I didn’t think of passing it up. The next morning I took the bus downtown and rode an elevator to a penthouse where a middle-aged man in a silk bathrobe led me into his living room and offered me Danishes while he sat on a sofa flipping through my manuscript. After fifteen minutes he let me know he was finished by taking a deep breath. Then he said:

  “You’re a writer. You’ve got a ways to go, and this stuff isn’t ready to publish, but these editors, they’re frustrated college teachers; they want to latch on to some young kid and school-marm him. I don’t know what kind of writing you’re going to do, but keep going and it will work itself out. Don’t change for her, for the promise of publication.” As I left he thought to add, “When you’re ready, come see me. I may have my own publishing company by then.”

  The next time Catherine Carver wrote me I replied candidly, telling her the gist of my exchange with the author of The Carpetbaggers. She had a markedly unhappy response—carbon copy to Leo Marx.

  “How could you even listen to such a hack!” he berated me after our next class. “First Charles Olson, then Schuyler Pardee, now Harold Robbins. I put myself out for you. Look what I get. You taught me an important lesson: never get too close to students.”

  But Tripp enjoyed the Harold Robbins affair. “Serves Marx right,” he chuckled. “The fatuous dictator!”

  I called a girl out of the Mount Holyoke picture book. Jane was a tall pixie who discovered a scratchy, old Alice in Wonderland platter among my records and insisted we dance to it at once. Giggling compatibly and stomping like puppets, we acted out the “Lobster Quadrille”: “‘Will you walk a little faster,’ / said the lobster to the snail. / ‘There’s a porpoise right behind us, / and he’s treading on my tail.’”

  Despite our merriment and shared admiration for the mock turtle, she turned down subsequent invitations to revisit him or me.

  Then one night in February I made a “picture book” date with a girl at Smith and, on the chosen Saturday, hitched over to Northampton to meet her. She was late coming downstairs and, while I stood in the foyer, a striking-looking blonde on desk duty asked where I was from and what I was studying. She was curious too about my choice of a date. When I told her how it had originated, she smiled and offered, without hesitation, that I was in for an unpleasant surprise. A silence followed. Then she confided, as if sharing another secret, that she herself was a writer.

  She was a compelling being with a sad, demure face, the aura of an old-fashioned fairy-tale maiden.

  This was who I should have been going out with, but then my date appeared.

  Nancy was a small energy packet of girl who was already practicing the twist on the way to the highway. She was looking forward to an evening of partying and announced right off that Phi Psi was the pits and we should go elsewhere. I seemed incidental to the matter, a pinball that had put her into independent motion. She talked so incessantly about a new British rock group that it was years before I could listen to The Beatles without bias. All evening I looked forward only to g
etting back early enough to see if the girl was still there. She wasn’t … and I hadn’t even gotten her name.

  But I was friends with a senior who dated a girl from that house, so I asked him to inquire discreetly. Her name was Ginny, and I called her the next night. “Of course I remember you,” she said.

  I started to explain how she had been right about—

  “Do you want to go out this weekend?” she interrupted. It was like Tripp saying, “Stop chattering.” As simple as that.

  What I saw the second time was a lean, medium-height girl with a complicated, mature face and an inexplicably heavy heart. Amid campus weekend hoopla, her melancholy was reassuring, even beguiling. Her dress had lots of lace, and she wore a pearl necklace. We caught a ride to Amherst and, after a visit to the basement (where she was much awaited by a curious Paul and crew), we went upstairs where I sat on my desk and she settled on the couch. I read to her from The Moon and Olson’s Distances. She followed from a small sheath of her own poems, concise landscapes and startlingly graphic love psalms; then she read a few favorites from my collection of D. H. Lawrence’s poems.

  Ginny was from Wisconsin, though she had spent lots of time in the South; she was a sophomore like me and was also thinking of transferring. She bore many of the same sorts of grievances toward Smith that I did toward Amherst, bemoaning the ritualized dating, materialistic values, and downbeat teachers. She was a kindred being, though her depth was ungaugable.

  After she had finished the last Lawrence poem, there was a silence, and I asked if she wanted to dance. It was so obviously a request for contact I at once regretted it. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I added with a bashful grin.

  She said she didn’t like to dance but gestured for me to come by her on the couch. I did. We looked at each other, and I saw in her a mirror of my wanting, a mouth opening, and I met it. We kissed long, repeatedly. I reached out from my heart and held her against me. This was what I had waited for, so many tangled years from the dream of Annie Welch. It wasn’t just a single kiss, or a feint in a game I didn’t understand. It was a time and place to do nothing else but feel someone and be kissed, and kiss. And there was so much to it—hair, a neck, a back, a backbone, a face, lips, a tongue, pausing for a breath and looking at each other, beginning again simultaneously.