New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  “That’s okay,” Lindy said. “So, we hate each other. It will all come out in the wash.”

  Like Schuyler I was trying to scale the abyss of my failed adolescence in a single leap. Lindy was as helpful as another person, with her own destiny at stake, could be. She didn’t abandon me or get scared off when I panicked, but she also didn’t let my dramas take over or stampede her into compliance with desperate claims. She required that I make an ongoing, sincere attempt at normalization, to stop indulging and inflating my knee-jerk apostasies and paranoias. If I hadn’t, she would have been gone in a flash.

  Yet she counted on my originality and prowess for dead-reckoning, my willingness to improvise and make unconventional choices, as I pushed her to break her obedience to spurious authority and decorum and to be her quirkiest, most free-associative self.

  I had to learn how to my discriminate contradictory passions on the fly: the generosity of creative imagination (good) versus tantrums of mere contrariness (bad). My pranks, fears, and epiphanies ran in overlapping synapses, so it was a challenge to sort them out and retain my dignity as well as any ease or flair. I didn’t always stay on the beam of that one because I hadn’t experienced, at a baseline level, that the tracks, though parallel, weren’t the same. To my family it was all perverse and insane, every insight and audacity. As far as they were concerned, I had no visionary or aesthetic gifts. At best I was meant to become a lawyer or hotel executive. The trouble was, I had allowed myself to be minimalized and depreciated in my own mind too.

  By what presumption was I purporting to court this woman? At times I would wake with a start like a man on a tightrope who had never been trained in the art; it seemed sheer overreach and bluff. I hadn’t even dated yet. It was a wonder that Lindy even liked me, let alone perhaps loved me, that she saw a diamond in the rough.

  When she was feeling good about our relationship, she might at random moments, even in public, let her entire weight suddenly collapse against mine like a modern dancer in an informally choreographed pas de deux. As I shifted with varying degrees of success to absorb her impact without losing balance, often stumbling a bit, she would pronounce with self-deprecating satire: “A man you can lean on!”

  She was invoking a current fashion ad that ran regularly in the New York Times Magazine and New Yorker. A woman in a worksuit of blended polyester inclined like the Tower of Pisa against nothing but the words “A man you can lean on—that’s Klopman!” The issue of whether I was solid enough to hold up her weight too (if necessary) was crucial because Klopman had been her long-time standard. Before me, there were Steve and Jim and others like them—super-confident males. When she was dubious or incensed by my failings—the absurdity of even considering me boyfriend material—she treated the clothing ad as gospel and made comments like, “I need a different kind of man, and you need someone you can lean on too. If we keep forcing the issue, we are both going to end up on the floor.”

  I tended to judge how we were doing by how seriously she took Klopman.

  She decided to go to a friend’s house outside Boston for Thanksgiving (“Remember, familiarity breeds contempt,” she warned, amused that I had thought the word was “content.”). I went to the Hotel and used it as a base to revisit Bard. It turned out that Kelly had guests on that day, so Harvey led me to the home of Jonathan Greene, a married student and poet. Beside the fireplace after dinner I participated in an evening of scuttlebutt during which I fielded questions about myself. Harvey sat there smoking his pipe, nodding and smirking, tossing an occasional jibe like “Don’t forget, he’s not only got Amherst but Grossinger’s to live down.”

  I visited Kelly the next afternoon. He expressed concern about my “travelling without Lindy.” I acknowledged his warning and promised to return together, but he was already on to the next topic.

  “Why did you tell Harvey and Jonathan your story and yet never a word to me, even about Grossinger’s?” I was dumbfounded that he already knew, then abashed as I pictured myself chattering away while the disciples prepared their report for the master. But was he saying that I should have told him my life tales too, or that I made an ass out of myself by telling them at all?

  “It didn’t seem appropriate.”

  “You’re right. It wasn’t. I caught the attention of the part of you that is awake, and you didn’t think to waste my time on such nonsense. Having Lindy with you helped; you were in too serious a situation to dawdle. With those others it was just nervous energy, nothing that counts in play. That’s okay. You defined them too. Nothing lost.”

  He had a very definite opinion about my relationship to Grossinger’s. “You must have accumulated good karma in a previous lifetime. Grossinger’s is the universe’s way of rewarding you. Don’t reject it. That would be ungracious. Try to put it to good use. Since it is a blessing to you, try to be a blessing to it. Not in a culturally ritualistic way, as everyone will insist at the waste of both your time and theirs, but in the true sense of magi bearing gifts. Respect the karma of your family members too. Don’t deprive them of your knowledge or compassion out of second-rate political claptrap.”

  Then he handed my manuscript back to me.

  “The speech you gave at Halloween was, in a sense, your first piece of writing. What comes before it is more gossip, social chatter of the sort you did last night.” His eyes were solemn and piercing. “Confession is a trick we play on ourselves. We pretend it is personal, but it is actually the least personal act of all.” I nodded, as he went on. “We were all mistreated in childhood; do we want to make that the talisman of our lives? We all have the same fantasies and daydreams; they’re not of essence. It’s the energy they generate that matters. Remember Crowley, turn it into the nourishment you need, make a different energy, do not let the Moon swallow you. Anyone can dance like a marionette. It is far more difficult to face our uniqueness, to speak of what is truly in our hearts.”

  I had waited a lifetime for Fabian and Friend—even Leo Marx—to speak with such clarity and precision.

  “Your Halloween speech was personal because no one could have spoken it but you; it expressed your destiny. These Betsies and Peggies are everyone’s fantasies, which means no one’s.” He corroborated the point by reading from a poem by Olson:

  This, is no bare incoming

  of novel abstract form, this

  is no welter or the forms

  of those events, this,

  Greeks, is the stopping

  of the battle.

  On the afternoon of Christmas vacation I drove Lindy to the airport by Hartford. I already had my own ticket out of New York and would meet her in Denver in a four days’ time. I passed through Grossinger’s like a mirage. Aunt Bunny was back in the hospital by then, getting a new round of shock treatment. “How can you allow such a thing?” I demanded of my father.

  “Richard, I haven’t paid for your medical school yet. Leave this to the doctors.”

  I visited my New York family the day before my flight. I was an outsider there too, no longer privy to battles and tensions that had once been second nature. They were conducting them now without me, my mother and brother at each other’s throats, my sister catatonic.

  Head against an airplane window, I looked down at snowy checkerboard farms and sang on and off in my mind a silly New Christy Minstrels song that began “I was drivin’ a rig out o’ Texas, / all loaded an’ bound for Cheyenne…. ” Then, on the other side of sky, mid-afternoon, she was standing there in a crowd in her blue puffy winter jacket with an open face that melted my heart.

  “Hello, kiddo.”

  As I said the password back, the song’s patter concluded in my brain: “ … got me a woman in Denver, Lord,/ That’s where I’m settlin’ down…. ”

  She drove us to her house in Capitol Hill near center city, though to a New Yorker it looked like countryside. Christmas lights in the windows, snow on the front lawn; this was my daydream past, my undisclosed future. Her parents, her married sisters, and their
husbands were on hand. I was introduced in a flurry and offered this and that to eat and drink.

  While treating me gingerly, everyone expressed enthusiasm about my visit and curiosity about my people back east. Her mother and father were older than mine, silver-haired denizens of the Old West. Since I had been briefed in advance on her father Hank’s eclectic interests I sought him out for an exchange about UFOs and then Pueblo Indians.

  Her oldest sister Susie was friendly if cool. Her husband was a business executive. He spoke that night with authority about profit margins.

  Her next oldest sister, Polly, had Lindy’s eyes and wise look, but was more slapdash and quippy, outwardly super-friendly. Her clarion of a voice dominated the clatter. After a few minutes she led me aside and whispered, “Boy, am I glad you’re here. I’ve been hearing about some of Lindy’s flings, married men and all. I always knew my good-looking kid sis was going to attract the wrong types.” Then she patted me on the arm and gave me a hug. Her husband was a smooth, stocky psychiatrist who had been a flight surgeon on aircraft carriers in the South China Sea.

  If the Houghs were self-conscious about my being Jewish at Christmas time, they needn’t have been. We were all Americans, and I was far more committed to the teachings of Thomas Merton than to anything I had learned at Hebrew School. Angels and alchemists were Christian; the tarot was Gnostic and Qabalistic both. Christ was a rabbi who took an old prophecy to another level.

  On Christmas morning I read to them from Merton’s sermon on Prometheus. Its gist is that we are foolish in to try to steal things God is only too willing to give us for free. In making ourselves into heroes or thieves we deny his pure bounty and generosity. We barter away spirit for matter and goods.

  The anti-materialism came across, so it was not their favorite message, but they thanked me for sharing it with them. In the days that followed, though we didn’t acknowledge it, they were becoming my family too.

  Denver felt a bit like my runaway in Winnipeg, only this time for real. I gradually lost myself in the adventure, touring my girlfriend’s city with her—coffee shops, former schools and neighborhoods, meals and beers in Larimer Square. One afternoon I went around the house photographing vignettes of her life, collections of objects on her desk, clothes thrown over the chair.

  I was in flight over the abyss, and there was no turning back. My only hope was to land on the other side.

  When I called Stan Brakhage in Rollinsville I omitted mention of Phi Psi because I did not want to be implicated in Tripp’s hyperboles. Happy to have unexpected visitors courtesy of Kelly, he gave us directions on finding his cabin, a couple of unmarked dirt roads in the mix. Lindy and I set out in her father’s Chevvy the next afternoon: a pilgrimage into the foothills of the Rockies recalling our recent sally from the Catskills to the Hudson.

  The highway to Boulder was the easy part. On subsequent mountain roads we got lost multiple times and had to turn around in perilous spots and wind back. Finally we found a hopeful lane, enough like the one Brakhage described to risk plunging into wilderness.

  I stood in the snow, staring at a relic, clearing my head: a log cabin amidst drifts, piles of wood and splitting blocks, a very old car, an axe in one log…. the stageset of Dog Star Man.

  When we came in the door I had the same giddy sensation as upon entering Kelly’s—I was crossing an unmarked cosmological perimeter. “Greetings,” said Brakhage, extending his hand. If the Kellys’ home was a chamber of the Druid occult, this was the Orphic West out of Denver.

  We followed Stan in and immediately met the real-life Jane. She was dressed in jeans and boots and had been blending batter for bread. The hearth of the cabin was spacious and sunny, filled with books, canisters, reels, and other paraphernalia of Stan’s art. Small kids scampered in and out, mostly without pants.

  Stan began talking, just as at Amherst, partly from the generous impulse of his thoughts and partly in resentment for the way he had been treated at the kinds of Eastern colleges we came from. As he railed about being poor and unappreciated and not having enough money even to buy film stock, our Amherst and Smith affiliations escalated, without any participation from us, into red flags of moneyed elitism.

  Sitting there cluelessly representing them, we became targets for longstanding peeves and resentments we barely understood. There were moments I thought we were about to get tossed out, as when Stan thundered once he figured out my connection to Tripp, infuriated that I tried to keep it from him. Luckily he settled into a scathing commentary on my former housemate: Jeff was deluded, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, indulged for too long by negligent parents and professors, a fatuous bombast as well. He concluded finally that he should sell his beloved Porsche, “that is, if he cares about art. And if he doesn’t need the money, which he clearly doesn’t, there’s a film-maker in Colorado who can always use it to buy another year’s groceries.”

  Then he asked if we were hungry. Jane disappeared for a spell and returned with a platter of a bark tea, tan goat’s milk cheese, and some fresh-baked bread.

  We ate as Stan took us on tour with a cast of rowdy characters: Sartre, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound. When he realized that Lindy hadn’t seen his films he brought out a projector and showed a section of Dog Star Man. Then he told us about the death of its dog, Sirius: “Other dogs found his corpse in the snow and rubbed themselves in it. The origin of perfumes is the body’s decay—you know, John Donne: the nearness of death and sex.”

  Day became night. Exhausted, I felt myself sliding into a quicksand of déjà vu as well as an apathy at my core. Wind blew snow against the cabin. The meaning of everything, myself included, was evaporating. The Six of Cups had been drawn from the Greater Deck. I felt far from anyplace and wanted to go home, if only I knew where that was.

  They fed us from an iron pot of soup they were making for dinner. Afterwards, Stan posed a riddle: One night he and a friend, happy and peaceful, sitting under the moon with beers, asked each other, “Why can’t it be like this all the time?”

  It was a wonderful question, but we couldn’t guess the answer: “Why can’t it be like this all the time?”

  “It is like this all the time,” Stan said. “It’s just that we don’t know it.”

  They walked us back to the car and we chugged into the wintry black. As Lindy worked her way down the mountain I got dizzier and dizzier. It wasn’t just carsickness; it was the whole day, the life. Though I was thrilled by our ongoing adventure, my body rejected its baptisms. I felt chilled, nauseated by unfamiliar aliments: goat’s milk and Gertrude Stein and elf tea, Stan and Jane’s marriage and children, now the twisting road, the intimacy of Lindy herself. I was afraid I didn’t have the strength or guts to pull this off. I wanted to rest. Enough bravado. Enough radical art and transformation. Finally I was too sick to continue and had to get out.

  It was the biggest display of stars I had ever seen, the Dipper and Orion outblazed. Breathing Rocky Mountain air, I shivered and improved, the bitter cold restoring a counterweight of reality. I came back into the car and put my head in her lap as she drove, her icy paw now and then on my forehead as she steered the curves. I hadn’t the strength even to focus—let alone identify—constellations I saw upside-down.

  I refunded my return plane fare so we could take the train east together. We tried to arrange it so that we would go to New York, reclaim the Mustang, and drive it back to school, but Lindy’s mother caught on at the last minute and changed her ticket at the station.

  “It’s totally inappropriate to travel together,” she grumbled. “Let Rich go fetch his own car.”

  At dawn we lay against each other half-asleep on a bench in the Chicago station … bookends, spoons. We fit, auras and energy patterns as much as bodies. My train came first. I kissed her and boarded. I shot through the Midwest, across New York State, down Harlem, into the tunnel at Park Avenue and 96th. I took the subway up to Central Park West. It was a weekday—everyone in my family was at work or school. There i
n the basement garage I found my car where I had left it, all shiny yellow—Bob had had the caked mud and brine of winter washed off. In the grace of that gesture of his I drove the turnpikes back to Amherst.

  Second semester I signed up for Watercolor and the History of Art. I also took History of Film, Cognitive Psychology, Hindu Philosophy, and Seventeenth-Century Literature. It was a busy schedule, for I was still gathering credits to make up courses flunked freshman year. I was also beginning to view my studies with perspective. I had arrived at Amherst dazed and confused, unprepared to use resources that made it a fabled academic destination. While most of my classmates jumped at the chance to have complex experiences and start adult life, I was deep in my own maelstrom—at war with myself and embattled with the world.

  Now I felt remorse for what I had lost—more than half my college tenure. It was too late to retrieve those opportunities, so I approached the ones that remained with childlike enthusiasm. Lindy had exposed my lack of a cultural background too. Her world was infused with Monet, Klee, Satie, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Merce Cunningham. Mine had nothing at all. Both my clans had ignored the fine arts so thoroughly that I viewed them as immaterial, on the level of tightrope walking or falconry. Except for photography, my seventh-grade fling with Danse Macabre, and a few other token dispensations, the worlds of painting, sculpture, dance, and symphonic music were demoted subconsciously to either decorations or affectations. Since I barely even sampled them, I overlooked their unique enchantments, their range of aesthetics and knowledge—the clues they held to the nature of reality.

  I continued to ignore them in college, as I marched straight into the avant-garde, admitting a few abstract expressionist painters like Klee and Miró and the atonal, cosmic-ray-like sounds of Elliott Carter and Arnold Schoenberg—but little else.

  Lindy startled me into recognition of both my hubris and deficiency. Apprised by her in a way I hadn’t been by high-school and college cohorts, I was anxious to address the deficit and make myself whole. In fact, I signed up for History of Music too but failed a tone test in the first class—I didn’t know the difference between one note and another—so I switched those units to a psych class that met in the same period: optical illusions and pattern formation.