New Moon (52 page)

We traded jibes with Paul and crew in the basement (Susan the clear victor), drank too many beers, and midway through the evening she took off on her own as I stumbled into the attic and went to sleep. I remembered her as a fierce, admirable girl I didn’t want to be paired with again. I saw her next, fully realized, blouse and stylish pin, nineteen years later in New York at a Doubleday book party for a baseball anthology I had helped compile. She was a top-echelon publishing executive by then and had made a point of coming by after work to say hello.

“I hope you don’t remember what happened that night,” I said, shaking her outstretched hand.

“Only that it wasn’t good, but I have followed your writing ever since and always rooted for you.”

Thirty years after our date in Massachusetts, she became my daughter’s publisher.

Out of the blue a writing teacher at Mount Holyoke invited me and two other Amherst authors to read from our work in a dorm lounge. I was the envy of Phi Psi, Fred above all. “What a golden opportunity!” he kept telling me. “What great odds! Share a few numbers with your old buddy, will you?”

In my fantasy I would read stirring prose, and some folksinger girl—blue eyes, long straight blonde hair—would come up and talk to me afterwards. Then we’d go to a café. She’d turn out to play guitar, compose her own songs, and perform plaintive renditions of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “If I Had a Hammer”—a wispy, wide-eyed variant of Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary. Full of high hopes, I accepted a ride to South Hadley from one of my fellow readers.

The event itself was a comeuppance. The other two authors, both seniors, were far more brilliant and risqué than me. Their turns of phrase and plot were nuanced and hilarious. When my turn came, I felt overmatched, defeated before I began. I was embarrassed to hear myself introduced as working with Saul Bellow’s editor at Viking. Neither of the more sophisticated novelists had a sponsor.

I took my place at the podium. As I began to read, my words mocked me. I sounded pious, pompous—back at the mole village. In the audience I glimpsed faces of girls—real girls, eager for the goods, an aesthetic they could admire. I knew that my whims and fancies had nothing to do with them. The whole writing conceit was bogus, a tale of hot air that I kept pumping up to keep from total despair. Even my notion of “pretty” was shallow, an unexamined artifact of the era’s doctrinal propaganda—pure kitsch.

I was a fraud—or worse, a con—proclaiming innocence and lofty ideals while seeking what everyone else wanted too—fame and romance. In any case, the girls flocked to the other two readers, so I ducked out quickly and stood on the highway, hoping to hitch a quick ride back. Of all people, Jeff Tripp pulled up in his Porsche. “Hop in, man,” he ordered, ignoring his own statute. I felt a bit androgynous as I took my seat.

He was drunk and barely made the curves. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I may be out of my head, but I drive better in that condition
than most people sober.” It was exciting, a quick nostrum for my still palpable lapse of un-Tripp-like bluster.

Instead of going back to Phi Psi he continued into town and parked outside a hamburger place. A sorority-plastered car from UMass pulled up next to us. Four charismatic gals in shorts got out, or maybe it was that such a vivid quartet is always entrancing.

“Well, lordy look here,” Jeff said, standing up. “I wish I had my hat on, so I could tip it to the ladies like a decent drunk.” Then to my astonishment he called out, “Hey, cunt!”

I slid behind the door into my seat and stared the other way.

When I looked back, I saw that they were giggling at this tall, scraggly figure approaching with a long beard—as though they had been about to be offended but noticed a sacred fool. “You, you’re the one I’m talking to. Baby, would you come home with me?” He half-sang the borrowed Dylan verse.

She was wearing a sassy T-shirt and instantly turned her back and walked away.

“Well, Grossinger, tell me if what my eyes see and my ears hear is true. The ladies will have nothing to do with me tonight. Is that so?”

“It’s so,” I told him.

“Well, I feel more like dining anyway. Shall we adjourn inside?”

Over a hamburger he took us back to his high-school days in Philly: debutante balls, blues and country his escape, then a totally out-of-context scene of accompanying a woman to Boston, having decided to marry her when, en route to the courthouse, his car broke down. “I stood there, weepin’ in the street over my goddamn buggy. And finally she said, ‘Who do you care more about, me or the car?’ I had no money, so I just sat there, bawlin’ behind the wheel, and she damn got up and walked out on me. I deserved it. That woman had every right.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No, man, you mistake my point. I’d get married anytime on a whim. If something should happen to take me out of the mood, sobeit. Hey, Grossinger, why didn’t you stop me there? It’s not a ‘mood.’ I don’t believe in mood. It’s that there’s a right time and a wrong time, always. Always! I certainly don’t want to be married.
It’s just at that moment it’s what I had to do.”

“It makes sense,” I offered, not having a ready retort but not wanting to miss my cue again.

He consumed huge bites, then continued in a different vein. “I don’t really care about my own death. It’s boredom that terrifies me. I’m going to die like Malone anyway, my eyes shot, old fucks shoved up my prick, my mind indistinguishable from my ass, trying to write it all down with a pencil stub I keep losing in the sheets.”

We walked back to the Porsche. He shot onto the road in a dizzying lurch. “When I left Joanne,” he began to croon but quickly changed to prose, “she was standing on the corner. I floored my vehicle and left her standing at sixty. And Grossinger, if you ever use her name in front of me, I’ll never talk to you again. From this moment onward. Okay?”

“Sure thing.”

Among the kids with whom I occasionally went to dinner at Valentine was a fellow sophomore named Jon who lived across the hall from me in a single. A prestigious dude who could have joined any frat but preferred the exalted bohemian life among us, he was the only one in Phi Psi who had a private bed in his room, also a refrigerator and a bar. A certain style of statuesque blonde stayed over. He subscribed to
Playboy
and collected first-edition erotic classics—a ringer among us.

Jon was not an obvious stud—he was a large, somewhat plump Jewish guy from New York with an arrhythmic body—but he had savoir faire and a wealthy pedigree, plus a new Corvette and state-of-the-art stereo. He was smooth and well-groomed, with an insistent easy-listening personality. There was something seductive, almost foppish, about him, as though, male or female, he was always softening you for the kill.

Jon liked to debate literature with me. He considered himself an aficionado of the arts and insisted that I didn’t have enough experience to be writing novels. He would come by my room and initiate a conversation just before mealtime with the goal of continuing in Valentine. He took our intimacy as well as his authority for granted,
as he pulled manuscripts off my desk and perused several pages before delivering his analysis. “You think you’re being daring,” he declared one evening, “but this is nothing; it’s not even sexy.” Then he went back to his room, retrieved Henry Miller, and read me a few passages. “Now this is real fucking!” he exulted with an almost beatific smile.

The selections were carnal beyond anything I had imagined, like a man cutting a woman’s pubic hairs and pasting them on his lip as a mustache.

“That has nothing to do with me,” I protested. “It’s vulgar. And it’s sex for sex’s sake.”

“It be so!” Jon acclaimed, his innate amoeboid motion affirming while clashing with his sentiments.

Jon was the most obdurate version of a type I had encountered for years. In fact, I fashioned a hybrid character fusing him with Rodney (from Horace Mann) and Bud (from Chipinaw), a Miami Beach wolf pursuing the heroine Peggy in
The Moon.
During Jon’s and my rituals of affinity I had my antennae attuned, for he would provide the protagonist’s best lines: “We went to the movies. I took her hand and placed it on my cock, and it just so happened she didn’t take it away.” He chuckled. “Then we came back here and fucked.”

“Fucking is pretty good,” he pronounced another time, “but really only about—I’d say—a time and a half as good as masturbating.”

He loved to describe incidents of girls bathing with him, sucking his cock, and so on; he recited these in thoughtful monotones as though searching in himself for their true meaning, vaguely troubled that he couldn’t generate more titillation. But he was convinced he was on the right track; he had to be—after all, sex transcended any other deed or mortal meaning; the quest for it was the staple of our existence, the sole and sheer object of our desire. Oddly, Jon seemed to require another’s vicarious participation to savor and get the promised mileage from his own experiences.

Early in November, he mentioned a girl he thought I’d enjoy meeting. “I dated her freshman year, but we broke up. She’s a
writer.” His eyes met mine meaningfully. “I think she dropped me because she’s looking for someone creative. Now I hear she’s dating a guy from Penn, but she might like talking to you.” He leaned forward in conspiracy. “I’m sort of curious to learn what she’s up to. Maybe you could be my spy.”

Her name was Lindy, and she was a sophomore at Smith. When I called; she appeared at the phone quickly and had an immediate negative response: “I don’t know you.”

It was a wonder I hadn’t gotten that before.

“Jon is not the best reference you could have, you know. One of the things I worried about when I broke up with him was that his friends would start calling me.” Her voice was sharp and clear, full of personality; years later I learned that my classmates regarded her as the prettiest girl in the Class of ’66 freshman book, but I had stuck to’67, so hadn’t bothered to look.

I explained I was no friend of Jon, just a writer who happened to live down the hall from him. I told her that I was working on a couple of novels and had a New York editor.

“I’d like to meet you; that’s fine. But I’m not sure I want to troop over to Amherst. Why don’t we have dinner in Northampton?”

I agreed, and we set a time on Saturday night.

I hitched to Smith on the premise of two writers getting together to talk shop. I precast Lindy as gentrified and world-wise like her one-time boyfriend, and I was mainly concerned to come off as a legitimate author.

I stood among the other males in the reception room at Laura Scales house, waiting for my date to appear. After a few minutes she came bounding down the stairs, tall and lithe with an open face, certainly attractive—dark eyeliner, long light brown hair. “Where are we going?” she said perkily. I had no idea. “How about Wiggins Tavern? I’m not against using this occasion to dine some place fancy.” It was the classiest restaurant in town, old-fashioned and expensive.

We set out on the road that hugged the campus. It was just past nightfall, and street lights in Northampton were coming on. As we crossed into the town’s action she dealt away our single point of connection. “Jon is an egotistical ass,” she declared, “a brief freshman
flirtation. He was exciting, with his wealth and social poise. He’d score theater tickets, and it was one fine restaurant after another—a real gas for a girl from Denver—though I didn’t play tennis, a big demerit for that.” She flashed a “poor naïve me” smile. “When he flew out to visit me at Christmastime I saw right through him. Even worse, so did my parents.” I laughed at the image of animalcule Jon trying to appear like anything other than an urbane hustler. “I learned my lesson. I’m dating an architect in Philadelphia now.”

We came to a curb with a puddle. “Jump,” I said automatically.

“How chivalrous!” But she cleared it by a good margin. I jumped behind her.

There was a new playfulness now as we strode past darkened buildings through the lobby of the tavern into its lantern-lit restaurant. The ornate setting evoked Towers family dinners in New York, but
we
were now the adults: me and this unknown young woman being seated at a table of fine linens and sparkling goblets. We shared quick grins. After reading menus and ordering, we took turns spinning our autobiographical tales.

I told her about my childhood, Drs. Fabian and Friend, Aunt Bunny, Betsy, Mr. Ervin’s writing class, Chuck’s poems, Charles Olson, Leo Marx, Katey Carver, and Phi Psi. She described growing up in Colorado, her family’s summer cabin in a mining town, her two older married sisters, years of ballet, her high-school romances (one on a trip with a group from her parish, St. Barnabas, to help build a church in Cuernavaca), her difficulty in her biology course (“not well prepared by my dippy prep school”), her poetry, her godfather the poet John Ciardi, her parents’ troubled marriage, and her weekends with her lover Steve in Philadelphia.

We had an instant rapport that allowed us to go anywhere and confess anything without the customary awkwardness of ungauged intimacy. It was as though we were two very articulate members of an advanced species discussing the foibles of a lesser species, namely ourselves. We parleyed back and forth almost effortlessly through drinks, the meal, dessert, her coffee, and then afterwards in the bar, a beer … and another. It seemed as though we had been talking for weeks when we had to race back in time for her
Smith curfew, stopping here and there to stare at shop windows while catching our breaths. She was a great discovery, even if not a possible girlfriend.

In the weeks that followed we spoke every few days on the phone. I gave her ideas for English papers, and she tried to think of girls I might go out with, though none of them seemed quite right—too academic or too stereotypically New York and Jewish. We sent writing back and forth in the mail and commented on each other’s work (her poetry had a great deal of wit plus a bent for the surreal). When she got back from an unexpectedly discouraging weekend with her boyfriend, she called Sunday night, and I commiserated at length. Then, as Thanksgiving approached, it was evident she didn’t want to see him again so soon and couldn’t go home to Denver for just four days. I offered her a trip to Grossinger’s, adding, “You could meet Aunt Bunny.”