New Moon (34 page)

Even as I invoked events I released their humiliation and tawdriness, my oafishnesses and betrayals—and I was inexplicably vindicated. Merely by proposing my history I had changed it. Now, as I reached page ten, I didn’t dread, I actually looked forward to the more provocative sections with delight. I soared. I was in the fire.

When I finished I gazed around the room at faces of people I had never seen. We had gone fifteen minutes past the period, past the end of school; still, no one said anything. Finally Mr. Ervin turned to the most accomplished writer, Mark Weiss, the one who had composed the Civil War story, and asked, “What do you think?”

“I think it’s the best thing that’s been done in the class all year.”

I couldn’t believe what I heard. My mind was tumbling. “So that’s it,” I thought. The path had always been there, and I had never seen.

I couldn’t have known, but I may have intuited (even then) that the magic was not the clue in the embers or a confession of secrets; it was the realization that I had been a witness to my own event,
that I had never completely identified with the things happening to me. The witness was there in the courtyard of 1220 when Nanny pointed to figures blown across the night. I couldn’t come close to perceiving it then, for I was a mere and mute embodiment of that dark. The witness observed someone else peeing on the floor and daydreamed in my body. The witness kept me out of trouble but also kept me out of life. Compared to this, Dr. Fabian’s symbols were cotton candy.

The years of dialogue with doctors had at last brought forth their antithesis—and their fruition—that my life need not be the raw material of dreamwork and therapy, need not be sustained only by symbols; it was something in and of itself.

“It seems so simple,” Mr. Ervin said weeks later, “but it’s not simple at all. I dare anyone else in this room to try it.”

For the remaining years of high school and beyond I wrote my story. I now go back to what is left of those first raw pages, the ones my mother overlooked when she discarded my scrapbooks and the other relics of my childhood. I recover episodes I no longer remember. Here, for example, is a minor scene from a meal that winter:

What strikes me now is how ordinary, even banal it was. At the time I imagined exquisite subtlety in my mother’s inquisitorial misdirection; in Bob’s hostility masked by flamboyant irony—that’s why I recorded it. But the real issue, the only issue, was how I was always on the outside of a sanctum, a family, they sought to protect against me—
my
family. Back then I assumed it was because they hated me; now I know they didn’t hate me at all—I was part of them, though not a part they wanted to admit. I lived out a terror they desperately—every instant in fact—struggled to conceal.

Too wide awake for her own sanity, my mother had woken us to the darkness of the universe with a kind of Dostoyevskian majesty. She crumbled under its epiphany, for the true cavernousness was mind-boggling. The others didn’t see it or want to see it. Now I understood the difference:
I did. And that’s what I was loyal to.

Only in flickers of déjà vu does the person writing this memoir come back to me now. I realize I was his only hope, his excuse for persisting. He was writing to me as much as to anyone. I alone could rescue him from his drab, forlorn world, and for that reason I reinvoke him and bring my imagination and healing back to him then, now—even as then, then, I called out to myself in some unimaginable future, to document the desolation and ensure that I survived.

One afternoon, not long after my maiden voyage in Ervin’s class, I was sitting in the Horace Mann cafeteria, doing my Latin translation, when a songful voice from the next table caught my attention. I looked up and saw a boy talking to his friends. He was acting out an episode for someone, waving his arms, stomping back and forth, making pictures in the air. He flashed a smile, then turned melodramatically grave. What happened next was mysterious. I knew it was “him.” The recognition was so concise and instantaneous, the feeling of adoration so utter and primal, I felt as though he had always been there and I had never seen him.

His face was deep and elfin, a glimmer of Gil McDougald’s rookie card. His voice flowed melodically over the scales.

His name was Keith, and I recognized him as a presence at Horace Mann from the class beneath mine, a regular in plays and the glee club. I had previously noticed something mercurial, almost fiendish, in him as he strode the hallways, delivering messages from offices to classrooms, a student volunteer. But I had never paid attention, he was just another kid. Now he exuded charisma and charm.

I began to obsess about him. He became the central focus and devotion of my life. Every time I saw him I was startled, as though I had encountered a famous person in the wild. What could have caused such a spontaneous metamorphosis?

Lying in bed at night I wove fantasies around Keith. I imagined him and me as roommates in a cottage by the ocean. We watched waves as they crashed in. I instructed him in playing Ocean Ball.
Then we rode surfboards together and rolled in the foam. We dried each other off with towels. Afterwards as we lay in the sun, and he teased me about my obsession with the Yankees. There was a grassy yard with wild blue flowers, a table on which a pitcher of lemonade sat. It was our home.

At my Friday concerts I crouched by the Magnavox, invoking Keith as gently and palpably as I could—his yellowness, his whimsy and irreverence, his farmboyishness along yon ancient Scottish burn, master of the lyre.

And the Platters sang “Twilight Time” and
“Oh yes, I’m the great pretender … / pretending that I’m doing well.”

Then Brook Benton:
“Go on … go on, / Until you reach … the end … of the li-ine…. ”

As music poured like honey I felt as though I could see a billion miles in my head. Through the stars, to something else … where nothing should be.

When I went to Grossinger’s that Thanksgiving I brought Keith imaginarily beside me in the car, observing everything a second time through his eyes. “See,” I said as trees and homes near and far swept by in the gathering darkness. “This is the route we take. It’s the route we’ve always taken since I met my father and Aunt Bunny.”

I had brought along samples from my chemistry class, so Michael and I soaked pine cones in the elixirs, then looked for the faint reds of iron and greens of copper as they caught among logs in the fireplace.

That fall my brothers and cousins had become obsessed with speed skating. They all had new long blades and looked so cool as they crouched low to the ice, whipping around like Irving the Fox. When I told Grandma, she called the pro shop and arranged for me not only to get fitted for my own but receive lessons.

The rink had been a recent no man’s land for me. With its overwrought show music, stumbling galoots and prissy ballerinas cutting backward against the traffic, I felt no incentive to go there (except occasional lassitude). It was the site too of my debacles with Karen and Billy.

Now I saw the ice in an entirely new light: it was a racetrack.
“Look at these, Keith,” I mimed silently as I sat on a bench and laced the boots. Then I strode along the rubber mat, feeling the full fulcrum of my blades.

I had used figure skates for years, so I found it almost impossible to make headway on such elongated stilts. I was landlocked on the ice when my teacher, an Austrian named Kurt, arrived in a spray of ice shavings, grabbed my arms, and guided me around while I emulated his stride.

Perfecting this motion on my own became the focal point of my weekend. While my brothers whizzed about the empty rink, I worked up to a moderate pace near the side until Irv Jaffee intervened: “Wait till we close. Otherwise, you three are going to kill someone, a paying guest most likely! I know about this stuff. I won a few races in my day.” Yes, two gold medals in the 1932 Winter Olympics!

Speed skates weren’t allowed at the rink in Central Park, so I had to wait till Christmas to test mine again. My brothers had moved on, but I was determined to race. After breakfast, bearing my runners in mittens, I headed to the rink and immediately sought out Kurt. The morning was crisp and bitter, a deposit from the night’s near blizzard still crashing down from branches at irregular moments. A frigid Catskills wind bit my skin. “Yes, I’ll teach you but not today.” He grinned and pointed, “I got someone better.” He called over an older man in a Grossinger warm-up jacket. I didn’t know who this was, but I read the name over his pocket. Long ago I had watched him pass a pack of skaters in Madison Square Garden: Ray Blum was a hero from the dawn time.

I felt as though DiMaggio himself were coaching me as we stepped onto the ice at closing time. He got me to bend my ankles more, pull in my butt, lift my feet without dragging the blade tips on the ice, whip out my strides, crouch perilously near the ice at the corners to pick up speed, his own motion silken and seamless as he swallowed the rink in great strides. “There’s a trick to this,” he said. “You have to trust the blades, learn the meaning of the glide, of quiet speed. You have to go slow to go fast. Save your effort till
you need it.”

I joked that I was a sexagintesimal behind him (the minute behind the second hand), but I experienced the old spooky transference, a magician bestowing his power. I had learned baseball, swimming, and dream interpretation that way; now I was receiving a dollop of Ray’s grace.

After a few days of silent lessons, the Lone Ranger was gone without an adios. He never gave a head’s up or said “See ya” or “Hiyo, Silver and away.’” But I took that as a sign of transmission and trust.

Now that I could zoom, I practiced in between sessions after helping Kurt and Irv with the resurfacing. I was cultivating an inner rhythm and velocity I had long craved in sports: in baseball, in running, in tennis. I had never thought to find it on blades.

Dating actual girls seemed impossible, yet at times, the lure of “acquiesce” would envelop me. Back in 8C I’d lock myself in my teeny study bathroom and follow some fantasy, a story of a girl spontaneously investitured, glimpsed on the subway or recalled from camp or Hotel lobbies … barely breathing, my lips half open, my heart thumping, the inexplicable hint of a sneeze in my nose. I would go
into
it,
through
it, and out the other side, back into my familiar self eased and transformed. It was a trance of mutation I never would have thought possible had I not experienced it in the flesh. Its residue was a warm sap that in no way betrayed the blood and ecstasy behind it.

This was the same darkened privacy in which I transformed my Minolta images in a black plastic churn into strips of indelibly lucid windows—negative derivations of what I had imaged through the lens. After viewing them in the twinkle of alley light, always surprising, always exactly what they should be, I hung them on the shower pole to dry.

So, in that single small bathroom sitting on the same stall lid, I presided over two crystalline transformations, one photographic and chemical, the other made of pure ether.

Personal acts in private space were my solace then, my deliverance from household mediocrity. I invented a different series of games
for the larger bathroom, including a football one using a broken corner of soap as the ball, the squares on the floor as players, the lines that formed them as yard-markers, and the circle inside the ring-handle of the hamper for finger-kicking extra points and field goals. A well-worn chip of soap would spin along grids and land perfectly in a distant square between the field markers—a forty-yard completed pass (if it touched any part of a line, it fell incomplete). Then, clonk!, a flick of two fingers whacked the extra point against the hamper.

I devised a coin game for sitting on the toilet, using the different-sized squares and rectangles of the floor as targets and bouncing a dime high off the walls. It played like a Skee-ball alley with flat boxes instead of raised rings. The smallest square counted for six; the rectangle, three; and the large square, one. I had twelve shots to get twelve points (or lose) in a series of best four-out-of-seven matches—Gil McDougald’s number still the duodecimal basis of all contests in my mythology. Very little skill was involved. Despite some amazing streaks—the dime bouncing off the tub and walls and spinning or rolling crazily—the game was pure lottery and spectatorship.

Though I could reverse the outcome of the 1960 World Series a thousand times on the bathroom floor, none of them counted, none of them were recorded or remembered; but one day that would be the fate of the 1960 World Series too. No one alive anywhere in the universe would know that it happened.

Days at school were interminable. In a new obligatory body-building program I was assigned to alternate periods of weight-lifting and swimming. I felt puny and defective as though my bones might break instead of the barbells go up.

My face became so covered with acne my mother took me to her dermatologist. From then on, every other week, I’d visit him myself to have my pimples popped. There was no gentility to his process. He wrapped a hot medicated towel over me and went pimple by pimple with a pin, scrubbing with gauze to get out the goo. As he worked he lectured me on diet, skin care, and the lotion Phisohex.
Not only did the treatments hurt like hell, they scraped against my ennui and irritation, abrading them into something more hostile and morose. He was touching my very mask.

At home I’d work his white liquid (with its paradoxical aroma of bubblegum) into my skin. Constant soreness around my cheeks and eyes and a mottled appearance became part of me. My acne was not just an ailment; it was how I felt about the world.

When Uncle Moe showed up as a rare dinner guest that December he presented me with an electric razor—a ritual conferred on him as an honorary kinsman. I had hoped to avoid that deed forever, but as I checked the mirror I knew it was time. A faint fuzz of black bristles marked the same unknown boy as the sores.

Afterwards the three adults took me downtown for a preview of the movie
On the Beach.
We were among a small number of people in a skyscraper office, my mother having scored comp tickets through the Fontainebleau.

After human life on Earth was annihilated by bombs and ensuing radiation, the lights in the room went on, startling us back to reality. I blinked and stretched. I had just seen the end of time. Now we had a deferment, but for how long?

The elevator got stuck on the twenty-seventh floor, and my mother became hysterical. She was always emotionally right if off-target in just about every other way. Two of the men in our group pried open the door and gate and gave us each a hoist. After we climbed out, we took an adjacent elevator down, Martha giddy and trembling.

In my review for the
Horace Mann Record
I proposed that the chance event of a Coke bottle dangling in a window shade (sending out a signal drawing the post-holocaust submarine crew to Australia) replicated the “accident” that might have set off the war in the first place—and might still.

I considered nuclear war my topic. The “bomb” was conceived when I was and cast its shadow over my life. It would lie dormant for months and then renew its grim reality with a start. God, it could happen, the end of everything,
this very minute!

The previous summer at Chipinaw I had walked around in a daze for two whole weeks after a red-haired counselor known as “The
Mad Hatter” swore in one of his wild soliloquies we would never get to be adults, any of us. Though the guy was by consensus nuts, his words couldn’t be shaken off as quotidian Chipinaw blarney: “They’re going to blow it all up one of these days, and all of our fat asses with it! Just by accident! There isn’t a chance in hell they won’t!”

How had I lost sight of that cardinal fact? This whole unhappy parade was leading to oblivion. It would be like
On the Beach,
the last straggling survivors singing “Waltzing Matilda” to revive their flagging spirits. Would I get to be even seventeen, let alone twenty?

When I argued against the bomb, my parents defended it vociferously, claiming that the attack on Hiroshima ended a horrific war and saved lives. “You didn’t have brothers in the Pacific!” my mother snapped. “You don’t know what war is.”

So I quoted her lines from
Night of the Auk,
a blank-verse play that I had watched on TV (I had just gotten the script at Womrath’s):
“We broke their back with one quick crunch / And cheered a reddened flag of sudden victory. / But on their streets, and in their houses, / In the churches, schools, and hospitals, / In the dentist office, in the playground, / The flame of our treachery to humanity / Seared the flesh, the blood, the very genes / Of four ferocious students armed with all the terrible retribution / Of their abacus, textbooks, and lead pencils. / … What have we done in all the intervening years, / We, high moralists, hope of Earth, / With that great treachery crouched upon our conscience? / What mass confessional has absolved us?”

As I concluded my oratory, Bob applauded, calling out, “Bravo, bravo.” Yep, Arch Oboler was on a Faulkner-like roll when he pulled those stanzas out of his measured rage. His metrical beats of remorse never failed to send tingles down my spine. My stepfather got it, or at least wasn’t blind to the issue; in fact, he carried around a copy of the
Record
with my review and shared it with assorted colleagues, including a professor from Grinnell he met on the plane.

But my mother sat there that night as I read from Oboler, stewing and looking pained. Then, rising promptly from her chair in a demonstration of relief that I was done, she declared, “He always has to be superior, but he can’t get more than a B+ in English!” And she bumped angrily against me as she vacated the room.