New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  We reentered the metropolis, the World as cosmos—the last and twenty-second trump. The City brooked no sphinxes or tridents; it spun so fast its inhabitants were unaware of its motion. As the zodiac opened and closed at the speed of light, the cube melted, and the anagram of the Wheel of Fortune ran through its permutations (tarot, … tora … rota …), Bull and Lion faced each other no more. A new dimension arose trillions of years in the future when there would be a different universe—a different reality for consciousness, a different deck for the descendants of humanity.

  We hiked back along the avenue at the Western edge, down its lamp-lit thoroughfares. Creation shimmered inscrutably. Even streetlights and billboards had become illuminated papyri, sacred flames with meanings. Then Chuck proposed that gossamer threads of our very thoughts were manifestations of the forces of gravitational fields around stars—they were cosmic mind-stuff generated by the energy in the deck.

  The dancer had become the dance.

  On a midsummer eve Aunt Bunny and her compatriots packed wine and towels and hiked to the Lake. The men took their clothes off and dove into chilled water. Afterwards we lay in the sand philosophizing—Johnson versus Goldwater, the bomb, bad marriages. Sam the revolutionary wished he had died there in the hills with Castro on assignment for Time because everything since had been downhill for him—his marriage, his career: “Total bullshit, capitalist crapola. Is that what our lives are,” he mourned, struggling for articulation against the stars, “one flash of brilliance and then it’s over?”

  A renowned art-film director couldn’t believe Bunny would stay with Paul, so he proposed to her on the spot; she turned him down.

  “You’d tire of me,” she said.

  In late July I made friends with one of the few black guests at Grossinger’s—well, not a guest but a regular named Bitty Wood. He was in residence all summer, as his wife, Damita Jo, a nightclub singer, used the Hotel for her base. They hung out there with my grandmother’s consent—she still had the authority to sponsor long-term residents, or at least no one dared override her. A lanky middle-aged musician, Bitty sat in the lobby talking bop and poetry, rapping fingers in constant rhythm and laughing with easy good humor at the cluelessness and ostentation around him.

  “Dump that freeloader, will you!” my father barked one evening. His threats were not idle ones. Milty Stackel, Irv Jaffee, Jack the waiter … all had been fired. Each time I’d come back after months away someone else would be missing. Nat the hypnotist, Abe the athletic director, Kurt the ice-skater. “Crooks,” he would say.

  “All of them?” I would ask, disbelievingly.

  “They stole from me.” His eyes riveted in revenge.

  When I arrived at the beginning of the summer Jimmy McAndrews was gone too. He had made the mistake of phoning some friends in California from Traffic and then joking about it. “Big deal,” I said angrily, “a few West Coast calls. He was basically an honest kid.”

  PG couldn’t get over the fact I had known and hadn’t told him. “And I don’t want you hanging around with you-know-who,” he said, not willing to dignify Bitty with a name. “It doesn’t look good.”

  In my letters I brought Lindy up to date on Chuck, Schuy, Diana, my job, the Hotel, even Smokey. She was sorry to be so slow in answering. Her only mention of Steve was an embarrassed aside that he had dumped her. But now there was someone else:

  I date police reporters and get depressed by their views, and for the first time in my life went out with a married man the other night. I must have been totally out of my mind to think that all he wanted was intellectual companionship, but I didn’t know so found out. I don’t want to do reference work in sin; there always seem to be bigger and better sins just when you think you’ve exhausted the list. He was interesting, as people are….

  Smokey and I continued to spend evenings together, exploring our flirtation. But our making out was becoming more like a wrestling match. One night her kisses became bites; she gnawed my upper and lower lips as if she were perforating a line. It hurt more than seduced. I held her, half like a boxer trying to restrain an opponent, half like a lover. Then I let go and ran my hands lightly over her body under her dress. She sighed, returned my hug, then clawed my back, first sensually, then more like a panther—ow! Suddenly she sat up hard against the wall—thump! She put her hair back in place. I looked at her.

  She said nothing.

  A short, swaggering cook at the Hotel had taken a liking to her and begun to date her on alternate nights. When she and I went out to dinner, he followed the JG on his motorcycle, buzzing us left and right. One time we lost him en route to a diner but, when we came out ninety minutes later, the car wouldn’t start. Then—in speechless mime—he appeared from behind a tree, threw open the hood, plugged the distributor head in, and zoomed off on his cycle. She shook her head admonishingly.

  The next morning at breakfast I blabbed a version of this event to the Head of Security who was nursing his last cup of coffee as I arrived. Some guy wanted to date the girl I was going out with and had messed with the JG, I said. No big deal, just an entertaining story. That night Jean shot over from her station to confront me, eyes like guns. “You shouldn’t have done that!”

  I looked at her blankly, imagining something sexual. “I would have handled it,” she fumed; then more quietly: “There wasn’t any damage done.”

  The house detective had approached her courting cook and threatened his job.

  “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” I protested.

  “Sure, you didn’t!” She turned and marched away. I saw myself now through her eyes, sitting at the head table among the bosses—the owner’s son, a model of false innocence.

  I went to apologize to the cook at his post in the kitchen. Before I could speak he spat out his challenge: “You can do anything you want, but it’s not going to stop me. Do you know that I’ve given her my mother’s ring? That ring is sacred to me!” He was almost hysterical. “I’m going to marry her. I just want you to know that.”

  “I’m not your rival,” I said. “Smokey’s just a friend.” But, even as I tried to appease him, summoning all the earnestness I could muster, I was blarneying us both. Jean and I were hardly just friends We may not have gone beyond the rudiments of making out, but that was daring for its time, and a luxury and novelty pour moi. I had never engaged in idle erotic play before, so I wanted it to continue. Yet my sexual dalliances couldn’t approach the gravity of this guy’s propositions. Even with the distributor-head caper, I was profane by comparison.

  I was beginning to see my heedlessness, my vain assumptions and spurious modesty. It had been a joke to try to pass myself off as an artist or Jean’s peer. I was the boss’s son, a ruling-class fink; I could never not be that.

  A muddle of agendas, I tried to explain myself to her in a letter. I knew we weren’t right for each other, but how to say that without risking the what was left of our tryst. I acknowledged that she had this other, more serious courter. But was she encouraging his pursuit—did she want to marry him—or was she merely angry at me?

  Likely if she had been a boy (or I a girl) Smokey and I would have been enemies. I was the wiry, innocent youth; she the bruising, worldwise trucker. We necked as much out of antipathy toward each other’s types as attraction. Unconsciously we were combatants from centuries of our ancestors’ wars.

  She wanted to pummel me as much as caress me; the more intimate the act, the less she could discriminate the two. My appeal was mainly as an object of curiosity, plus a sadomasochistic desire to touch the enemy, to seduce him and get him under her power. But I was just as curious about her.

  I closed my letter by apologizing for what that had happened. I wanted to sound noble and pure. I oozed false innocence. Her answer was indignant and revealing: “You think just because your father owns this place you can make all the rules and push everyone around.”

  We parted enemies. We had indulged in a brief erotic encounter before sinking back into our
ethnic stereotypes.

  Lunchtime at the Democrat, everyone was shooting the breeze around the presses. I sat at a lone desk in the copy room, laying down the tarot as Chuck had instructed me: three rows of seven, The Fool aloft. Before me sat the upside-down Hanged Man; the Magician with his platform of sigils; the High Priestess with her rippling robes and fruited veil; the Tower with its larval sparks and toppling king and knave; the lantern-bearing Hermit; the many-rayed Sun with its row of flowers and child-bearing horse; the angel of Temperance pouring her unidentified vibration between gold cups; the legatee of Justice, bearing an ethereal sword in one hand, the scales of quantum physics in the other—he, the Charioteer, the Devil, and the Lovers quadruple personae of the same emanation. Like Vance Packard’s “hidden persuaders,” these keys radiated a subliminal message; only it hadn’t been loaded cynically by executives at ad agencies but was disseminated by avatars in other realms. (The admen’s too of course, over the long haul.)

  In the sun in the window the cards were beautiful—not great art but beautiful: their esoteric colors, the faces, the glyphs, the white pillars of temples, the stream of celestial mind-stuff deliquescing unconscious waters….

  I followed the azure rivulet that materialized out of the Priestess’ robes, pouring across the downed oxbow moon at her feet, bubbling behind the granite cliffs of the Emperor, between edifices of the Chariot and the City, until it drained through galaxies and civilizations into pools of Star and Moon and became an ocean of many dimensions on which ordinary boxes floated.

  An actual blue seemed to trickle across the semblances as they came together—a three-dimensional deep image as alive and real as the world, only more radiant and essential for converting symbols into meanings. It was startling, hallucinogenic, not like a dream at all but an emanation from a different portal.

  Then I looked up and saw the water along the rocks of Callicoon Creek. It had transferred its subliminal after-image to the shiny inked cards and turned their cartoon into a four-dimensional hologram. Matter, phenomenon, and symbol were one. I had known that intellectually; now it was lucid.

  Leaves rustled against dusty windows, sunlight through them and dust breaking into thousands of coins on the table. Around me was the yellowing rag on rollers, the decay of history, of material reality. All this lived and would die, as Beckett had observed, but it wasn’t empty or, more accurately, its emptiness was precisely its fullness. Malone and Malloy had roused and inspired me, but their despair and nullity were not the foundation of the universe; they were a way to feel how profound and antithetical the forces of the universe actually are.

  Our lives posed no danger to the real Creation. Even the atomic bomb was the handiwork of the Magician; so was Fred’s fallout shelter—a mere Hierophantic outpost and shack. The Death Card stood near the center with his scythe. In my mind’s eye the hermetic archetype prevailed, commuting Waite’s horse-borne skeleton into its more fearsome unmounted form, mowing down every living form but obliterating nothing, transforming only so that new cells, new molecules, new electrons, new views of the cosmos were born from the paring of antiquated ones: a billion insects dancing in the fields beyond.

  I could hear the ripple of the Priestess’ robes, Callicoon Creek rushing toward Jeffersonsville. I stared at its twinkling rocks. I looked up through the trees at a disk in the sky. Even the so-called hydrogen of its formation was a mask concealing a Magician; Ahab knew as much. I turned down to the deck and, for an instant, saw white suns exploding everywhere, in alien skies against dreamlike arrases. I saw wheels turning and currents delivering signs deeper and deeper into substance. The figures of men and women wandering through the deck became the same man and woman, not at different moments but at once.

  This wasn’t a fantasy. I was staring into the actual cosmos with my third eye.

  The vision held for five seconds, maybe six, maybe seven; then the cards fell back into their temporal grid.

  I stood in a daze. Tears crinkled the corners of my eyes. I wiped them away and poked my head into the next room. Fred, his sister, and the others were back at work. I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t. They were standing in spirit fire and didn’t know it.

  And at night, filled to the brim, I had no doubt anymore, so I sent Lindy my joyfulness in a poem:

  Do you listen

  To the burning of the stars?

  I am the burning of the stars:

  Listen to me….

  Do you search

  For the silent sandy people?

  I lead them:

  Follow me.

  Do you hear

  Sometimes a distant lonely whisper?

  I hold one promise:

  It is there.

  Do you want

  The rainbow flock?

  I am one of its sheep:

  Want me!

  “Some long overdue letter here,” she wrote back a week later. “I thought your poem was beautiful and good. It sang, as they say here, and the song it sang was good. You are doing good things still, are amazingly productive and active politically and writing-wise.”

  We were more than halfway through the summer and still dancing, still possible—still on the brink.

  2

  HALLOWEEN

  In August, Fred assigned me my grandmother’s Senate testimony on the prospective construction of a Sullivan County Airport. “This way,” he teased, “I’m sure to get the inside dope.” I flew to Washington with her and Milton Blackstone. Milton had long believed that aviation was the only way to save the Catskills. Confident in his powers of persuasion, he viewed the hearing as an opportunity to address the real power brokers. We were checking into our hotel when Grandma was paged. Minutes later Milton whispered the news. While we were en route, Harry Grossinger, back in New York, had died of a heart attack.

  Standing there transfixed, Grandma barely noticed us, her gaze on a remote horizon. “At last!” she whispered. “He lived too long, the bastard.”

  It was a woman I had never seen.

  We rushed back to the airport where Milton hired a private plane. He would stay and testify; I would accompany my grandmother home.

  We squeezed into a cabin with two young pilots. They taxied, took off, and headed north. We flew inland from the coast, then over the New York line, the co-pilot consulting a map (neither had been that far north) … finally to the vicinity of Grossinger’s.

  Enormous thunderheads loomed over the Hotel. I saw them up ahead, floating in 3-D Ektachrome, violet, amethyst, and black, laden with moisture and ions, the G.’s familiar grid of buildings below at Monopoly-board scale. As the pilot descended to land, we floated into sudden darkness. Hail slapped against the windows. The plane rocked and jerked. My grandmother staring into empty space murmured bitterly, “It’s him. I can see him. He’s trying to keep me out.”

  The pilots ignored her as an addled old woman. They rode the bumps and howled in glee.

  I trusted her vision implicitly, but I was also unafraid. If it was Grandpa indeed, I presumed he would spare me. First, though, he would make his point.

  Each time we approached the Grossinger’s runway, we were buffeted so hard we were forced to pull away.

  “It ain’t gonna work, buddy,” conceded the pilot.

  The storm was brief and concentrated—by newspaper accounts the worst flooding ever recorded in the county. It washed out both of Harry’s current skeletal constructions and blew down trees that had stood for centuries.

  The pilot searched in nearby sunshine for an alternate site, finally picking a meadow outside Monticello and radioing its position. By the time we came bouncing along the pasture the JG was waiting at the edge of the weeds.

  My father retreated to his sister’s house on the grounds to sit shiva, the required Orthodox mourning. Aunt Bunny stopped seeing her friends out of solidarity and respect. She did not realize how much she required their support to keep her sane, how long she had been out of touch with the G.’s ethnic provincialism and shtetl roots.
In her mind she was a fledgling intellectual apprenticing with mentors, a young woman entertaining potential suitors. She had been transacting this dual identity so gracefully and incontrovertibly that she had forgotten it was on loan, dependent on her husband’s willingness to live a double life too. Now the disparity of the two worlds—one inescapably intimate, the other almost, but not quite, possible—tore her apart. I watched her become more and more morose. One evening I found her sitting on her bed, arms tucked in close to herself, fists clenched.

  “Jeez,” she said, “this is the big one, the blue devil itself. I don’t know if I can make it.” She braced, back against the headboard. Earlier that month she and I had gone to see Night of the Iguana, the movie of Tennessee Williams’ play about panic; now she was invoking Williams’ figure of speech. She had the same instinct as I had had a few months earlier, wanting a name for the unnameable, an escort in the uncompassed void. I pulled up a tremulous chair. For all our discussion of panic I had never seen one of hers.

  After cuffing her clenched fists into each other, head hung, eyes shut, she slowly regained composure and paraphrased Richard Burton’s lines: “This is like a crucifixion without nails. I see twilight through the branches, the coming dark. Like the iguana I am one of God’s creatures at the end of its rope.”

  “At least you are eloquent in your pain.”

  She laughed. “A lot of good it does me.”

  When my own words ran out, I combined Beckett and Keats as if a playwright were penning my lines too: “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping yet? This is the court’s eternal session, the courtiers crushed by the golden weight of their robes. Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”

  “Thank you, Richard. You bring me the best company, the kind that recognizes who I am, what’s happening to me.” That was a given—I had just been there. “Your father hasn’t a clue.”

  On the stereo I played Jimmie Rodgers—plaintive, accordionlike notes: “…someday some old familiar rain / will come along and know my name…. ” We both knew that rain; our lives were joined by it.