New Moon (54 page)

She was loud enough to bestir Dr. Gordon, the psychiatrist who lived across the hall. We had spent years muffling our fracases so as not to arouse his attention. That taboo was now out the window too.

“Maybe I can be of assistance here,” he offered.

“You no-good crook,” she hollered as he proceeded into the hall and tried to calm her. She wrenched herself loose, pushing his hand off her shoulder. “Go away. And don’t try to tell me I’m crazy. Just go back to your rich patients.”

All our prior dealings with him had been cordial and neighborly, though no doubt he had overheard the pogroms. He held his ground and told her that she didn’t have to suffer this much; she slammed the door. He shrugged majestically, seemed to wink at the rest of us, and slipped back into his nook.

Out on Central Park West we split into groups. Jonny and Debby joined Bridey and Bob, while Paul and I continued to walk downtown in the falling snow as we hatched a plan. Our Phi Psi mate Chuck Jenkins, whose home was St. Louis, was exploring New York for the first time in his VW Bug; Paul had his hotel number. “If we can reach him he might be able to rescue us.”

By now, epiphany had replaced the gloom that had been ragging me all day. I had flipped energy fields and was flying. Sensing a mythic theme, even an epic crossroads, I raised the ante. “If we get him, let’s drive straight up to Grossinger’s. After all,” I added with a sly smile, “dinner with Aunt Bunny
was
the original plan.” Gleefully Paul concurred.

My true compass was setting in—my mother couldn’t stop me from going to Grossinger’s
whenever I wanted.

Jenkins was holed up at his fleabag, watching the storm, bored.
Glad to be enlisted in something more lively, he agreed to get himself uptown pronto. After nursing him through directions, Paul called his own parents, told them where we were headed, and asked them to pretend they hadn’t heard from us. One hurdle remained—for me to fetch my belongings upstairs.

We took the service elevator in order to use the apartment’s rear entrance and negate telltale noises. I slipped my key into the lock, made a quick, soft rotation followed by an equally deliberate push. As I tiptoed through the kitchen to my former study, I felt like an American spy in East Berlin, behind enemy lines, my ass at stake. Luckily my mother was occupied. I could hear her on the phone in the bedroom, still hysterical, Grandma Sally her audience now.

She was denouncing the whole Grossinger family, saying how they had cheated her out of her rightful desserts and ruined her life. Over and over she mentioned Bunny as some wanton home-wrecker. She had plenty to say about Richard: an ungrateful lunatic who was flunking out of college because he cared for no one but himself. A thoroughly intimidated Paul hid behind the garbage can next to the elevator. Only after I made my escape did I realize that I was light-headed and shaking.

Twenty minutes later Jenkins’ green Bug swung around the corner and, as Paul and I cheered, Phi Psi’s jug-band leader parked by a hydrant and got out. Paul patted him on the back; then we somehow fit my suitcase, slid in, whipped down 96th Street, and headed through driving snow toward the Hudson River Drive and George Washington Bridge. I was jubilant, streams of white flakes adding to my adrenalin rush. I was finally fleeing the Gorgon.

Crowded into the Bug, its wipers barely keeping the road visible, we coasted up the New York State Thruway—the pavement a carpet of snow matted with tire tracks. We arrived at PG’s house after midnight.

My mother’s barrage of phone calls had woken my father. He guessed that I would show up there sooner or later; either that, or I had gone to my friend’s house (but his parents had no idea where we were). When we arrived he was hardly welcoming; he said we looked like three deserters from the Cuban army. He put me in
the basement (since the house was full) and sent Paul and Chuck to staff quarters.

As he pieced together the events of the night in his office the next morning he grew increasingly agitated at Paul’s parents. After reprimanding the three of us he dialed them on his speakerphone and berated them too: “I don’t believe in parents collaborating with children against other parents. That’s not how it works.” But they held firm, supporting our rights as Paul grinned with pride. PG ended the conversation as politely as he could, and then, to my delight, released us for the remainder of the weekend. Fittingly he saw an advantage to my presence—that, as a worker from the summer, I could cast a vote in the next day’s referendum: whether or not to unionize. “But for which side?” I puckishly asked Stern and Jenkins. The union had me disqualified anyway.

All Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the three of us took a combined recreational and sociological tour of the Hotel, delighting in the scenery and food while assailing displays of decadence and bad taste. Everywhere we looked we saw blacks, Chinese, and Puerto Ricans sweeping rugs, polishing windows, wheeling carts of laundry. Overweight, overdressed New Yorkers, most of them Jewish, flaunted jewelry and performed unnecessary public dramas, barking at wives, husbands, kids. How had I missed this so completely!

But it was a turning point. I had run away from home. I had told everyone that I didn’t live with my mother anymore. On the mail table at Phi Psi was her response—a carbon of her letter to my father, disowning me and turning over full responsibility to him. “That’s the way Richard has always wanted it, so now I will grant him his wish.”

“No one is responsible for a nineteen-year-old,” he told me coolly on the phone. “I wrote her that if you can’t take care of yourself, then heaven help you.”

The beginning of December was dominated by tests and papers, though we made time for a literary evening at Phi Psi featuring my freshman-year buddy Al Powers, Stephen Mitchell (the best poet in Humphries’ class), Jeff Tripp, and me. I invited Lindy to read too.

“Sorry, I’m off to Penn this weekend.”

In fact, she said, she was overwhelmed with schoolwork during the next month and getting behind on her assignments, so she asked me not to call for a while. She was obviously a Philly guy’s girl, so I left her in the past and all but forgot about her.

My best pal then was a kid named Schuyler whom I met inauspiciously during intramural hockey. While attempting to pass, I ineptly whizzed a puck by his shins—lifting was not allowed. Shaking his stick over his head, he threatened to castrate me if I did that again.

I knew him from afar as a rebel in Marx’s American Studies class, but his remark had the effect of thawing the barrier between us. Walking back to our lockers we shared Marxian foibles, then continued the discussion during lunch at Valentine. Schuy considered me the professor’s favorite, which he deemed a
de facto
betrayal (after all,
he
was Marx’s daily whipping boy). I assured him that King Leo was now down on me too. “He doesn’t like my reading material, he doesn’t like Phi Psi; he only wants me to imitate him and his buddies.”

“He’s supposed to be one of the good-guy teachers,” Schuy complained, “but he’s just another authoritarian ‘my-word-goes’ bwana. He’s all for revolution and protest, but in his own class he can’t listen to someone else’s opinion without losing his cool. Just because he’s teaching
Growing Up Absurd
doesn’t mean he’s living it or on our side.”

Schuy was a paradox. A virtual prep-school icon in style and appearance, he was as bright as anyone I knew, a natural athlete, and strikingly handsome—a mop of sandy hair and classic features. But he was fiercely independent, alienated from every peer group at Amherst, including Phi Psi. “Just another social club,” he snarled, “a lot of ignorant guys practicing reverse snobbism.” He was not trying to date girls, though he was very into them in his mind.

He was mainly on guard—resentful at being hustled all his life, determined not to be taken in again if he could help it. One Saturday night he and I hitched together to a mixer at Smith, talking up our excitement all the way. Yet in meager follow-through we hung in the crowds along the wall. Whereas I was a deer in headlights,
frozen by systemic paralysis, Schuy was noble and defiant. I thought he was far and away the most attractive guy in the room, yet he never left our vicinity along the wall, offering only a volley of churlish remarks, one of them quite memorable: “They’re so damn good-looking, but that’s what they’re playing at. I’m just not gonna go for it. Let one of them act like a normal human being and come over and ask me to dance.” No one did.

Helene had invited me to stay with her at Christmastime and, after a round of family diplomacy, my father agreed to take me to Miami with him and Aunt Bunny because they were going there anyway.

I rode the Trailways bus out of Amherst to Idlewild … and stepped off a jet in Betsy’s city. She was my
dream lover until then,
more so in her absence because she had been quoined by daydreams into a full-time cohort and idol. Her alias had stayed loyal to me through the ordeals of freshman year, the betrayals of both my families, through assorted reproaches, failed dates, and other ignominies and debacles. She was the luminous Miami girl, watching over me from her other Earth, nullifying the forces opposing me. She alone could reach across the cosmos to the voice behind the dungeon stairs and charm and amuse it on my behalf; she had been its antidote. Now I had to face that she was a real person too, with her own agendas and trajectory.

Sun throbbed through listless Southern air. I kicked a broken coconut shell along the ground. Bodings were everywhere, but I had little hope.

The first two days were an unexpected throwback to Uncle Paul, hero and guardian of my childhood. He showed me his haunts: the Grossinger Pancoast he once owned (now the Algiers—“but it’s on lease,” he joked, “we get it back in ninety-nine years”), the restaurant in which he and Grandpa Harry were partners, even the house where he conducted the original Easter egg hunt.

I enjoyed being under court protection, as I ate dinner at a pricey French restaurant with him and Aunt Bunny, then joined them on a yacht with business associates. The next day I sat on the beach with my stepmother—jabbering magpies again, drinking rum cokes. The
proximity of Betsy was a constant prod, but I put a screen around it and walked in my father’s ancient shadow. On the third day, I moved to Helene’s.

I expected a normal Jewish family, but I found a cartoon-like parody of my New York household: a sardonic, abusive father; a sluggish, oppressed mother; neither trying to hide long-practiced acrimonies or barbs of contempt. I wondered why Helene even stayed there; after all, she had cut her own record, “You Better Leave Him Alone,” a minor hit on the Roulette label, promoted as the debut of a “hot new teenage rocker” between Lou Christie’s “Shy Boy” and Dinah Washington’s “A Stranger on Earth.” A local star, she was performing regularly in clubs.

She had broken up with Spike and recently rejected a marriage proposal from a much older, carrot-topped lawyer (she showed me his photo) who wasn’t wanting to hear no for an answer. Relieved to have me at hand, she asked point-blank if I’d be her boyfriend now. “Don’t you see,” she pleaded. “We’re both going to make it. We should make it together.”

I deflected the topic, for the anticipation of Betsy obsessed me.

It wasn’t until my fourth day in Florida that she returned from college. I called. We arranged to meet at her house on Pine Tree Drive the next morning.

I got off the bus and walked for blocks under the tropical sky, manuscript under my arm, this book in its embryonic form. Coconut palms rippled eerily. It was my life in cameo. Movie cameras tracked me from across the street.

Internally I knew better. I could barely separate Betsy herself from her character in
Salty and Sandy
or Peggy in
The Moon;
she had become an illuminated being. Helene had told me she was back with Bob, and there was nothing in Betsy’s and my infrequent newsy correspondence over the year to suggest that she in any way considered me a possible boyfriend. But I needed to see her, for this was the conclusion to my novel. Catherine Carver and my readers-to-be were waiting.

I was led into the mansion by a black butler. Betsy met me at the edge of the living room and reached with quaint refinement for my
hand. She was the same plain but charismatic being whose pastel portrait had hung on my wall all year. Her voice was familiar and strange, it had been in my head so long. I was in the temple of the goddess whose simulacra adorned my innermost chapel.

We sat there, she on the couch, me on the adjacent chair. We had nothing in common except a vestigial rapport, and even that an eroding memento. She was already a sorority girl, while I was quoting the
Socialist Worker
and Samuel Beckett. But I had to speak for myself: “I really looked forward to seeing you. You look great.” I had broken the seal with stilted lines I couldn’t rescind. I could see Tripp shaking his head, laughing, “Cowed, were you, by your two-bit cheerleader?”

She knew what I was carrying, so she said simply, “May I see it?”

For the next hour or so I sat there skimming magazines while she turned through the pages. My mind raced through an inventory of what she was reading—my descriptions of her, my transcriptions of her words, my fantasies of her coming to Amherst and us going off together. It didn’t matter any longer. It was a 100-percent total confession.

I stared at every last thing in that room many times, each piece of kitsch art, each item of museum-vintage furniture, the queue of
Reader’s Digest
books on the shelves, the view through the sliding glass to the pool. I had come too, like a troubadour, to the castle.

She straightened the pages neatly into a pile and returned them to their box. In her eyes I could see the answer, or perhaps it was the question, searching my own piercing look in order to understand—but, in any case, it was final, and I knew it. “You should go,” she said.

I got up and walked to the door, Betsy a step behind me. “I had hoped—” I started to say.

“You’ll find someone right for you,” she interrupted. “Thank you for letting me read it. You didn’t have to.”