New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  As we walked silently back to the College Street hitching corner, she said, “I could feel it that first time I saw you. I knew this would happen.”

  During February and March we went out each Saturday night, sometimes to dinner, sometimes to a movie, but always to my room where we took up kissing and caressing. Loving was not some elusive thing in my future; it was as intrinsic as the desire that led to it, in fact more so, for not being fantasy. I was in a waking dream.

  I was astonished to hear Ginny had a boyfriend in law school in Virginia whom she was thinking of marrying. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing with me, but she was open about her feelings. “You’re very wonderful,” she said, “but I don’t know who you are. You don’t even know. You’re the original ‘ugly duckling,’ and I have no idea what you’ll become. I’m the first person to reach you, so I can touch only so much. But I love the part of you you let me touch. Anything else going on in my life is immaterial to that.”

  I wasn’t nearly that articulate. I couldn’t communicate or even understand my absorption in her, but I clung to it like a life raft. I wasn’t infatuated the way I had been with Betsy or even Harriet at Wakonda. I didn’t idolize Ginny, but I was addicted to her. She seemed dainty and fragile, opaque and ulterior, so that my passion seemed to dissipate right through her, but it didn’t matter because the weekends had become their own intoxication.

  My Lawrence course had built slowly, and now, in this spring of the birth of eros, The Rainbow and Women in Love imbued me with the lives of men I might yet be. Paul Goodman may have seen only adolescent lust, but Lawrence detected a spirit drawing souls together beyond discourse. It was a force lodged in our hungering cores, transforming not sublimating, giving rise to the miracles of domesticity and children: the generations of creature life on Earth. Mutual attraction was as natural and unconscious as fields of flowers and wild rabbits, and it was not discardable as mere instinct or id; it was the basis of civilization, of church, of art, of the starry heavens too. It was the mystery of existence, even as I had suspected.

  Lawrence meant regular rough and scarred men and women, not just playboys and dandies; in fact, he mocked the big talkers and had his women prevail over them, their eros actual and boundless rather than an adjunct of male fantasy:

  … her limbs vibrated with anguish towards him wherever she was, the radiating force of her soul seemed to travel to him, endlessly, endlessly, and in her soul’s own creation, find him….

  Desiring was the mystery. I felt that profoundly with Ginny. It wasn’t a wish that came to an end in fulfillment; it went on forever. And then Lawrence …

  There is only one clue to the universe … the individual soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and moons and atoms is a secondary affair … the death-result of living individuals.

  A secondary affair? How incredible to think and believe that and then be able to say it! Certainly my physics and geology teachers wouldn’t agree. Even my Lawrence professor considered it mere rhetoric.

  Ginny said one night that she wanted to smother my pain. She hugged me and stroked my back, but I still felt untouched and wanted her hand to go to my penis. She resisted the cue. “It’s too soon,” she said and instead began a long kiss. I felt the magnetic flow of my attention onto her and wanted to find its resolution. I drew her thread deeper and deeper into my own being She was so luminous and evanescent I couldn’t feel where I met her ostensible seduction—or joined the ragged edge of my own desire. My attraction toward this girl was sinuous and indirect, like an old, old cloth bearing some of her lace and elegance, a gap across which I could feel nothing but waves of curiosity and wonder. The thing between us was a faint, unexamined amber, a glow fluttering alive at the slightest friction.

  Down the hall in another universe the Phi Psi jug band was closing out the evening, Paul on base and kazoo, Jenkins on slide guitar, Toby rapping thimbles on a washboard, Paul’s new girlfriend blowing into a jug. Half of my attention wended toward them as I observed Ginny moving, eyes cast upward, in her own quiet, a rhapsodic trance beyond me, the face of a white moon.

  I couldn’t go there; I wouldn’t find her if I went. Her essence was a mystery to me: who she was, who she thought she was, what sort of woman she would one day become. For all her animal propinquity, her casually lewd presence, she might as well have been a literary figure, Ursula in The Rainbow, a girl in the dazzling glare of her own fantasies and apotheosis.

  I let go of the Delphic Oracle till another day. We hitched back to Smith.

  A Saturday night later, I picked a handful of flowers in the Glen behind Phi Psi and brought them to Smith. Ginny strolled downstairs, short sleeves and a skirt for the warmer weather, a quixotic smile. Delighted with the gift, she insisted on finding a jar and taking them to her room. Then we hitched a ride to Phi Psi.

  We spent an hour downstairs, talking with Paul, Phil, and Ellen … drinking tap beer. Ginny was a saint in pale sequins, as we danced to Patti Page, the “Tennessee Waltz,” so that I felt like the hero of Hamilton Basso’s View from Pompey’s Head at the crossroads of his life, dancing with his sweetheart even as the song, matching its words, stole her away (“Now I know just how much I have lost ….”). We went upstairs. The blossoms-on-peach fabric that made up her dress swooped in and under to follow her shape, framing the line of her breasts. Without a word we fell into our tryst, our only interest each other’s bodies.

  I strained against prior boundaries to contact her, to come to a verdict, to know what followed. She was telling me stories of her brothers in Baltimore, her summer in France where the family she was living with broke apart before her eyes.

  I reached under her blouse for the first time and felt the band of her bra in back. She continued to clench and kiss, and I moved to the front and explored the frilliness covering her breasts. Deeper waves rolled through me, and I rubbed against her with my groin and pulled her onto me. She responded effortlessly, as if she was already there. Our bodies wound in frictioned counterpoint, rhythms and chords I never knew. Something darker and older than desire was drawing me now. At odd junctures I felt flat, as though its current had stopped and nothing was happening, but the spark kept reigniting.

  Her face in semi-darkness was a vague almost inhuman mask, floating in its own space, its arc of contemplative romanticism. I kept reaching out through a feeling in my penis that was spreading throughout my body, trying to hold her on it, hold me in her ambiance. I put her hand against my hardness, but she took it away. I sat upright and looked at her with questioning eyes.

  “We’re still not there yet,” she said. “We can’t force it.”

  “Why aren’t we there?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something missing. It’s not you. There just hasn’t been enough time.”

  I trusted her, but I was suspicious. “Is it because of your friend in Virginia?”

  “I’m going to see him next weekend, and I want to be clear. Yes, I sleep with him. But he’s not the problem I have with you. I’m overwhelmed by you. I care terribly for you. But you’re more than I can deal with.”

  I turned on the light, and we sat in silence. She put a hand gently on my face. In my unslaked craving, the mercy of her gesture was too much.

  I left the room. I ran up the stairs to the third floor, through the attic onto the roof. I stood in the night air. At a distance I could appreciate her again. As a fantasy, she filled me with desire. I climbed back through the hatch and lay on my bed fully dressed. I wanted to cry, but my throat and eyes were hardened against it. Instead I reached for my genitals and rubbed them. I spat on my hand, then rubbed harder. There were no tears there either, only the dull side of disappointed lust. I strained to summon the scene in my room back into my mind so that this time she took hold of my hardness. Staring blankly into her face in my mind I pulled the current up through my surging breath and shot out a bitterness into the sheets, my fingers instantly on top of its warm film, rubbing it into the surface i
n some meager extension of pleasure.

  I returned to the room where she was reading, and we talked idly for half an hour—my evasion now a barrier between us because I couldn’t tell her the truth. We left in time to hitch back before her curfew—a thoughtful goodnight kiss at the doorstep. She said she’d see me soon. There was no evident cloud on the horizon, just a deepening of the puzzle. I assumed things would go on as they had and culminate somehow. I didn’t think beyond that; I barely even thought that. Hitching back from Smith in the rear of a car full of kids, I stared numbly at the night. In my mind, indelibly stuck, refusing to let my thoughts go blank, were the words of “Wild About my Lovin’” as plunked by Tripp on his guitar:

  I ain’t no iceman, no iceman’s son,

  But I can keep you cool till that iceman come.

  Two days later I got a letter:

  Dear Richard,

  Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for the flowers. They’ve made me so happy. My room has been warm and cheerful because every time I’ve looked at them I’ve thought of you and that wonderful part of you that I can’t understand but is so important & must survive even if transplanted in Washington. I know what you mean, Rich, about losing the words & the experience—the derivatives. I suddenly realized that everything you say means something. It is all so important and I wanted to cry out to you & ask how you understand & what you understand. I wanted you to pull me out but you can’t & I can’t and now that my panic is passed I wonder if I want it.

  The flowers are dead now. There was no fuss or anything. They just died without a whimper. I couldn’t stand it—that they should die & be gone and everything would go on as usual so I write you as nearest of kin to inform you of their passing. They lived well and died bravely—not losing their dignity when their beauty faded, leaving behind a vase and a brown paper bag. More than most.

  I express my—I’m overdoing this. Well Rich, thank you again. Have a good weekend. I have an exam tomorrow, then am leaving for U.Va.

  ’By

  Ginny

  I didn’t realize it then, but that note was farewell. Mine, not hers. Ginny was the enchantress I had been seeking for years, so she wasn’t easy to give up, but she was inscrutable and had a fiancé. Though wild horses wouldn’t have kept me from her—on a conscious level anyway—I had reshuffled the tarot and was ready to deal new cards.

  I came upon her letter ten years later while cleaning out files and was moved to tears. How thoughtful and eloquent she had been, how heartfelt her statement, and generous! I was a stubborn child, twisted up inside. In all my bravado of complexity and themes within themes, I couldn’t hear her simple rightness and respond to her as she deserved.

  So I tried to answer ten years late and say “I’m sorry.” I wrote to Smith for her address and found out she had left after sophomore year; they had an address for her under a married name in Cochabamba, Bolivia, care of the Peace Corps. My letter came back “addressee unknown.”

  The last time I saw Ginny was a summery April Saturday a few weekends after her trip to Virginia. I hitched to Smith in high spirits and went to her house and asked for her.

  “Hi, hi,” she said excitedly, poking her head out of the kitchen. “I can’t see you today. I’ve got lunch duty and then a big paper to write. But call me—we’ll set another time.”

  I’m sure I would have, but before I could, the fortune teller laid down a different hand.

  As a twelve-year-old I read lots of adult science fiction so, when asked to write a term paper in Second Form English at Horace Mann, I had a ready topic: “Themes and Symbols in the Work of Robert Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon.” That was when I incorporated the notion of alternate probabilities into my life.

  Sheckley’s premise was that the present is made up of infinitesimal minutiae. The movement of a single object by a careless time-traveller could alter the whole course of history. What if a rock had been seized as a weapon in a moment of battle by the chief who was to unite the American Indian tribes into a nation that discovered Europe? What if that rock were kicked out of his reach a thousand years earlier by a time-traveller from a 22nd-Century Indian Empire? If the chief were then prematurely killed for the cudgel being beyond his reach, the traveller might find not only that he had no country to return to but that he himself was impacted in time and space, unable to be born.

  “Worlds without end,” wrote Sheckley, “emanating from events large and small; every Alexander and every amoeba creating worlds, just as ripples will spread in a pond no matter how big or how small the stone you throw. Doesn’t every object cast a shadow?”

  My life was made of such shadows, a raffle of undrawn lots. Ever since reading Sheckley’s story I had played a game with probabilities, tinkering with paths to alternate universes. Periodically I would take an unplanned route to check if it made a calculable difference in my life. While I could not (of course) know what I missed by my detours, I never succeeded in altering fate in any obvious way. On this morning, as promising as its blue sky, yellow buttercups, and dandelion riots, I was disappointed in not having Ginny go out into the spring with me, and I did not want to return to Amherst.

  What I failed to see was that she was receding anyway at light speed, already a residue of something ineffable. Upon reaching the turnoff to the hitching post, I decided to cast my lot with the ripples … and pivoted in the opposite direction. Then I walked three-quarters of the way around a block rather than corner to corner.

  Whether by accident or subliminal design, I came to Laura Scales House and remembered Lindy. I went in and asked for her at the desk. I was in luck. Minutes later she appeared in the stairwell.

  “What a surprise! I was sitting in the smoker feeling depressed and sorry for myself, not able to do a stitch of work, wishing I had some wonderful visitor … and then you just arrive.” I asked if she would like to go for a walk into town, maybe a glass of lemonade; and she nodded. “Wait, though,” she added. “I want to go upstairs and change.”

  She came back wearing a blue and white striped polo shirt, a light sweater, and tan slacks. After a hiatus of almost six months we took our second walk into Northampton. After ordering sweet rolls and lemonades at a café, we picked up our narratives at an outdoor table.

  It hadn’t been working out for her in Philly; she felt used on the weekends and then cast aside—no real conversation, no emotional contact. So, she wasn’t going there for a while, and Saturdays were particularly lonely. Her classes were also discouraging, her teachers uninspired, even vindictive, mainly concerned with a narrow line of critical thinking.

  I could object similarly about Amherst, but at least I had a few good courses now and was surrounded by lively people at Phi Psi. I told her about Paul Goodman’s visit, Schuyler, D. H. Lawrence’s Rainbow, and a bit about Ginny. I even recounted how the ripples had led me to her doorstep. She found that remarkable and foolhardy, but she was the perfect audience, for she heard and gave back every nuance and resonance.

  We returned to the campus, a charge of ideas and rhythm between us. Everywhere sun, birds, flowers filled the air, and my mind and heart. I told her a sudden inkling—that Freud had discovered only the method of symbols, but nature itself from the beginning of time had been creating clones, replicas, cues. I identified them wheeling about: the screech of blue jays, patterns of clouds and leaves, signals not needing interpretation or criticism. “The trouble with our teachers is they think they can explain things. But there’s nothing to explain. There’s only the breeze, the Wheel of Fortune, clover, a horse in a cave at Lascaux, billions of stars.”

  She shifted the conversation to Moby Dick, the subject of the paper she was trying to write when I arrived, and I pointed at the sun that Ahab said he would strike if it insulted him. “That is the White Whale,” I said as we glanced briefly at the blinding disk. “The same primal force is there. Ahab wanted to strike at the heart of nature itself. Moby Dick was just his passing snare.”

  “I can see that,” Lindy said.
“So much more powerful than a symbol to be a real breathing creature, a real sun.” She was lucid and sparkling, tall and strong, challenging me with a forcefulness that met my own. She spoke not of magic and literary allusions, as I was wont, but of emotions and feelings and how hard it was to reach people. “For me they always seem to skitter over my surface like bugs. Their shallowness even betrays this lovely day. Maybe only the trees and fields can be touched, and they don’t speak. Certainly I couldn’t touch Steve, or Jon before that, and it doesn’t appear as though you could touch Ginny.”

  I adored her directness. Her face conveyed an Athena-like intelligence, and her eyes were filled with both sensuality and knowledge. I felt that afternoon like the Magician presiding over the First Trump, spinning out worlds without diminution. She was the Priestess of the Second Trump, deepening them, weaving them together, making the universe calm and lovely. After our snacks we found a place on the grass and held court there till late afternoon. Then we hiked back to Wiggins Tavern for dinner.

  This was the beginning—we both must have known.

  The following Saturday I met her again, downstairs in Laura Scales. She was more dressed up, in a blouse and dark skirt, light perfume, and we hitched to Amherst together. I felt uncertain who we were as boy and girl. To me she was as perfect as anyone could be, present and contacting, sexy by force of her intelligence but also stunning with a Circê look I could never resist. She was tall and statuesque, regal but lithe, her body a dancer’s, elegantly poised, strong and nimble, large hips, full but delicate breasts. Every movement was comely and aesthetic, her own, no wasted motion. She honored a vaguely crablike scuttle as she walked, a sideways predilection, breaking up lines, casting spirals about me, her swoops and gestures as fresh and entertaining as her talk. Her mouth was large and sensuous, her pale eyes intense and focusing under heavy brows. Was this a date?