New Moon (55 page)

I strode down the long driveway, out the iron gate, past the coconut palms, into my life, which was waiting in the Miami afternoon. I encountered something almost prehistoric, that had no name or meaning. I felt drained and feverish, an atavism of Bill-Dave
Saturdays. I tasted a toasted almond popsicle in my mind. I walked for miles, past houses, fallen coconuts and oranges, lamp posts, stores, trying to harbor every breath of tropical flowers, to record each feeling and its echo, singing the old songs in my heart, and telling myself, with feigned drama, that it was over.

I did not see Betsy again, nor did I have any further communication with her; yet periodically I dreamed of that mansion with its iron gates and palms.

I come long distances through the South or find myself in Florida to my astonishment and decide to look her up—why not? I go to the front door and am told she doesn’t live there anymore … or that she has died. Or she appears, hopeful and shining, as she was, in some version of that living room. Or she is an old woman, sad and defeated…. And I long to recover the purity of the feeling I had for her once.

The dream has a vague background synesthesia woven from strands of Betsy’s song for Bob that Arista summer, Bryan Hyland’s American ghost ballad “Sealed With a Kiss.” A more profound and mournful hymn than its dippy title, its resolution of minor into major chords holds a devotional tension all the way from Bach’s organ music and old English lute songs to the Beatles’ “And I Love Her”:

Such was the landscape of astral Betsyland, as the dream grew and changed with my own aging. In one version she was divorced and caring for dozens of young children in a slum; in another, she was on her way to the beach with no appreciation for how far I had come to find her. She nodded a quick hello and hurried on.

For years we never spoke in dream, but then we did and, though I don’t remember what she said, it scalded new light and sensation along the perimeters of an unlived life. I experienced a Pacific wilderness, fragments of an Australian Aboriginal ceremony, a beach far older than Miami where she showed me patches of glacial ice, gullies exiting from the planet’s core among ordinary sunbathers
and palm trees; then she vanished into a crowd. Or she came from a room in an old Hardy Boys book and provided the resolution to a different mystery.

When I awakened I felt a tremendous loss, but also a wonder and freshness for having been there. I was never
not
regenerated by that dream.

I know that Betsy wasn’t an appropriate girlfriend and that she was kept alive in me in the form she first manifested: as the anima, the mirror of my lost female self but also the presence of the Other, a naiad from a time before language. At a moment of life change—of leaving my mother’s gloomy household—she appeared in the guise of a Dade County cheerleader to lead me into the care and spaciousness of the world, to insist that I fulfill her potential in me … to open my heart ahead of time to women who
would
love me. Without her I would have been stumbling across the threshold from darkness into darkness.

Yet “anima” is a name for a symbolic transformation of many masks. Her form of appearance changes as we change, bringing latent parts of ourselves to consciousness as they are needed, discarding familiar reference points so that we become estranged to ourselves. We think we are dying, or in love. That’s where the rest of our life always emerges, from the muse who leads us where we weren’t able to go on our own.

But just because Betsy was the projection of a force inside me, a stand-in for a mother I didn’t have (and that Aunt Bunny couldn’t be) does not mean she was not an eligible girl. In truth, eros failed, and our lives twained without either of us understanding who the other was or might be. Perhaps such broken romances are absolved by the universality of the feminine and masculine (yes, we are all the same woman, the same man, acting out the same metadrama). Perhaps our losses are healed recurrently in later love. But there remain holes in the dreamtime, things ever needing mending, alternate realities floating through space-time, seeking planets and possibilities for their rendering. Through their eternal return we experience we will never be made whole. Not in this body, on this world anyway—nor in this swift-moving slick of relativity.

That night Helene and I went to a drive-in. In the car she leaned against me as I put my arm around her. She giggled at the atrocious comedy on the screen:
“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”
starring Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, and a host of other comedians and vaudeville refugees. I felt apart and disinterested. A dying man kicked a bucket away—ha, ha, ha. Helene roared and grabbed and shook me as if to squeeze some humor out of a stuffed ape.

On the way home I slid back across the front seat, but she told me it was proper in Miami Beach for a date to sit flush against the driver: “Don’t embarrass me!” I felt that that was silly and also made me an obstruction, so I angled myself against the door. We didn’t talk. She pulled into the driveway, and stared at me. I longed to be on that jet plane going home.

“It’s over for you with Betsy,” she said. “Why don’t you take me seriously?”

“I guess it was something special with her. It’s nothing against you; it either happens or it doesn’t.”

“How would you know?” she said. She leaned over, put her mouth on mine, and kissed me long and hard. At first I felt like pulling away, as though from a gushy relative. But she put her tongue inside and rolled it up and down. I felt a wave of excitement begin at my roots and flower through my whole body. I held her and kissed back. I was trembling, as she sucked me further into the kiss. But instead of continuing, she pulled away and looked back at me probingly. She said, “Let’s go inside. There’s time for us.”

Not really. Her parents were sitting up, so she went straight to her room. The next morning she rushed out early for rehearsal and she had a date with Bozo the lawyer that night. I left the following noon and didn’t see her again until five years later in Detroit when she had three children by him and was no longer singing professionally.

I returned to college after Christmas with a new strategy for transferring. A dissident English professor named Roger Sale had departed Amherst with a rousing farewell speech two years earlier. Decrying his students’ blind obedience to authority and substitution of cults of personality around faculty for real scholarship, he admitted that he had been disruptively eccentric himself and said and done outrageous things in class, but that was only in order to wake “smug robots” from habits of “abstract servility:” their unspoken “contempt for knowledge” and “huddled scholasticism.” Accusing the college of “a rather dogmatic sense of its own superiority,” he proposed that its aim of excellence from its students was cultivated primarily “in order to maintain this superiority” or, more properly, its illusion. The school was “snotty, elitist, avowedly Protestant, and provincial … a box filled with agile white men like a squash court.”

His concluding elegy was a quick, wry jab at Amherst’s collective hubris: “So, I say goodbye. You are off, I hope, in spite of all I have said, to lead. I am off to where the dream is not of a whole man but of a whole society. Go to hell—and thank you.”

Sale was memorialized as an underground hero, and people compared my chapel oration to his. He was now teaching at the University of Washington. I wrote to Professor Sale before Christmas and, when I got back from Florida, I found a letter from him on the Phi Psi table, encouraging me to apply to Seattle and offering to help if I came there. I sent at once for an application.

Between semesters my roommate Greg had left for the dorms, so
I reclaimed the whole space. In his former corner I hung an ancient horse from Lascaux alongside Paul Klee’s knight in a rowboat. In the Klee a comic figure speared at three crooked fish dilating through a bent shaft of opalescence, its sourceless glow lighting a universe of more and less deeply-bathed cubes from white azure to blue-black. Alongside pranced the primordial steed of our species, fierce and cute, the spare charcoal of its mane and hooves seminal to everything. These were my insignias: vortices to the unknown.

For second semester I signed up for three new classes—only Leo Marx’s American Studies section and Geology carried over. I enrolled in a seminar on D. H. Lawrence; an Abnormal Psychology course taught by Roy Heath, a visiting professor from Pittsburgh (where he was a colleague of my mother’s brother Lionel); and a survey of modern European drama. The latter was inspired by Tripp, who was directing a production of Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
that he was planning to take off-Broadway.

The three magical-realist “Jeans”—Anouilh, Giradoux, and Cocteau—were a revelation, and I became an enthusiast for the theater of cosmic irony. Rehearsals of
Godot
were going on day and night in the Phi Psi living room—Jeff starring as Pozzo, with a whip, monocle, greatcoat, and breath freshener alongside my former room-mate Greg’s older brother Brett as Estragon. I loved the performance of paradox, the shift into the negative space.

In these avant-garde playwrights the conventions of theater digressed into something between staged philosophy and science fiction. Men stumbled across minimal sets calling out to gods who were their own inventions, pulling characters out of parking lots in other eras. Antigone and Oedipus were reincarnated as Europeans performing Freudian myths that were themselves pre-Homeric apologues. As Anouilh put it, “I do not want to understand. I am here for something other than understanding. I am here to tell you no, and to die. To tell you no and to die.”

“No” was something I had not rehearsed enough—no to my mother, no to Leo Marx, no to PG, no to the dungeon stairs, no to Betsy. I may have demurred and rebelled, fled or disobeyed, played pranks and gone amok, but I never said a confident no or
defended the bastion of my existence.

My theater teacher, Stephen Coy, was an admirer of Tripp, so, for once, I had authority on my side—free rein. For my term paper I wrote sixty pages of my own Anouilh-like imitation of
Hamlet
in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father cries out, “Stop in the name of Jean Cocteau!” Later, Hamlet reads a baseball magazine on his bed after delivering a key soliloquy, and America’s role in Vietnam is satirized in Denmark’s “Norwegian crisis.” The vendors selling food and souvenirs during intermissions are actors in the play and speak key lines—there was, in effect, no intermission, though the audience wouldn’t immediately know.

Passing my old Shakespearean tyrant, Professor Baird, on one of the paths that crossed the campus that winter, I let drop a “Hello, sir.”

“Watcha doing?” he snapped distractedly. This of course was the man famous for his canonization of the Bard and disdain for student work. I needed to get him into my script.

“Most recently I rewrote
Hamlet,”
I deadpanned.

It would be impossible to imitate the startled grunts and outraged syllables that followed. So I cast him as a second Pollonius, wandering in from the twentieth century to dismiss the play in person.

Tripp told me that in America not being able to drive was “tantamount to not having a dick.” So, I immediately looked up “Driving Schools” in the
Yellow Pages
and enrolled in private lessons with a man who turned out to be the Northampton High football coach.

“That’s who
should
teach you!” Jeff roared with delight, as he leaped into his own vehicle and bombed onto College Street.

For six weekly sessions I hitched to Northampton. From there the coach took me out on back roads where I performed the rite of passage to his drumbeat of commands.

At Horace Mann I had taken a month-long class, so I had already experienced the weirdness-thrill of sliding behind the torus onto the throne of Bob Towers (and numerous Grossinger’s chauffeurs), then commanding a vehicle’s mazy course. My first spin began as a broken line of lurches along a block of Riverdale. But once I got
over my reticence, it was pure Penny Arcade. As I was propelling myself over the scenic drum, HM’s driving domo, Mr. Zachary, must have detected a dangerous shift because he asked me to pull over. I presumed a mechanical error.

“Don’t ever forget,” he pronounced sternly, “that every moment you are behind that wheel you hold life and death in your hands. Ever!”

“I like that one,” said the Northampton coach. “I’m going to steal it for myself.”

I made one bad move when I confused coach’s directive, turning against my own better judgment to the left, ending up in a tobacco field.

“What the fuck!” he blurted in startled horror. “‘Right!’ Right right right. Right means right.”

It was my only miscue. A month later I got my Massachusetts license in the mail.

Jeff had nailed it: the document felt like enfranchisement, tribal permission, an irrefutable coming of age.

In Psychology we began our semester by studying the etiology of neurosis, which brought back memories of my subway concierge Neil quizzing Dr. Fabian after my sessions. Our coursebook, Norman Cameron’s and Joseph Rychlak’s canonical
Personality Development and Psychopathology,
might have been Neil’s graduate text. Its opening pages christened the famous id, where torrents of primal libido got discharged until the nascent ego contained and bound them into a personal identity. Such was the emotional energy of our lives—cathected and transformed as “fantasies, daydreams, conflicts, object relations, the self, and social roles.” No more statistics to parse—this was “inner sanctum” stuff.

Dr. Heath was a mild, reassuring professor, not unlike a psychotherapist himself. Because of my background with Fabian and Friend—a legacy I recounted at our first meeting—and his connection to my Uncle Lionel, Heath and I became out-of-class buddies, sharing meals in town, sometimes with my friend Paul joining us.

Early in the term the professor took our class on a trip to
Northampton State Mental Hospital. Patients flocked around us, vying for attention. One young man cornered Paul and me and showed us a sketchpad of his inventions, page after page, meticulously drawn: men with wings, elaborate pulleys and windmills. He told us that the police had incarcerated him there to steal his work, and he asked for our help in escaping so he could apply for patents before it was too late. We promised to try.

Another guy confided to Dr. Heath that
he
was the psychiatrist and the doctors were his patients. I whispered to Paul that Anouilh would have agreed.

Then a grotesque, over-dressed elderly woman took both my wrists in her hands and told me that she knew my grandmother. Surely that couldn’t be true, for she didn’t even know my name. But people had tossed that line at me since I became a Grossinger, and I loathed it to the point of being uncivil. Grandma Jennie appeared on TV so often selling rye bread in a commercial that began, “Hello, I’m Jennie Grossinger” that, at Horace Mann and Chipinaw, kids nicknamed me “Jennie.”

Now I felt as though a madperson had read through my paranoia and was flouting it.

“Don’t let them get to you,” Dr. Heath had warned, “because they will.”

Back in class I questioned whether most of these inmates had real diseases—neuroses and psychoses by Cameron’s definition—or whether they were simply victims of a capitalist society. What I had observed were women deemed too grotesque or unattractive to find husbands, elderly folks without homes, prodigies who couldn’t adapt to cultural norms. I applied the sociological arguments of my American Studies reading to the terminology of my “Abnormal” textbook and wrote interlocking term papers.

Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd
was my link between Freud’s theory of neurosis and the addictions of our rat-race civilization. Goodman had connected the anguish and exile of individuals to the vapid materialism of our culture, almost gleefully assaulting the world in which my parents had spent their lives: “human beings working as clowns … thinking like idiots … Alternately, they are
liars, confidence men, smooth talkers, obsequious, insolent…. ” No kidding! That covered the landscape, from Grossinger’s and the Nevele to midtown Manhattan and the conclaves of politicians. No wonder Godot never came. No wonder Quemoy, Matsu, and the Cuban Crisis. No wonder Betsy, Helene, and the rest … Barbie dolls, startlets in soap operas, dupes in vehicles for capitalism. Even our sexuality didn’t belong to us. Schuyler was right—“Growing Up Absurd” was the least of it: “If there is nothing worthwhile, it is hard to do anything at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question, is one nothing?”

The source of these proclamations, Mr. Goodman himself, visited Marx’s class—he was a friend of the professor. A group of us went to lunch with our guest afterwards. I had expected a thoughtful social critic, even a compassionate elder, so I was unprepared for the gruff, belligerent curmudgeon who spat sermons at us and pushed aside our questions by saying that kids our age cared about fucking and nothing else. After he made that assertion the third time—seemingly oblivious to the fact he had already said it twice—Schuy and I stomped out.

Goodman’s book remained seminal to me, but in my mind I had appropriated it from its author. The man was right, of course: we were stuck in adolescent fantasies and probably useless for more nuanced discourse. But that didn’t make us libidinal beasts without discernment. It wasn’t sex that drew me; it was the texture of seductive feelings. It was the way things changed and were changed into each other in the tinder and alchemy of masturbation, a vast, cryptic river flowing into
“Oh, Shenando’h, I love your daughter…. ”

I was roused at one level by the lure of girls but at another by the fathomless labyrinths of feeling in myself where guises radiated deeper guises and were entangled mysteriously, one veil over another, closer to Keats’ nightingale than
Playboy
magazine.

We were all bound away somewhere, across some “wide Missouri,” coming from, going to, an insoluble riddle. That’s what I sought in my own erotic depth, the sense of how deep
I
went—and my desire went.

For Goodman and Beckett the magic of desire had been lost in
the sludge of the world—discarded in the garbage cans of Tripp’s stagesets. At finale, the prophets warned, we will find our hearts and souls empty; we will be unable to go on. But I was still brimming with hope. I honored Beckett because he was spare and pure, but I didn’t want my birthright stolen by cynics and lesser muck-a-mucks.

Catherine Carver spent many months with the finished draft of
Salty and Sandy
and the polished sections of
The Moon,
and she finally wrote back that, although I was very talented, I had not yet written a book publishable by Viking. She trusted that by continuing to work with her I would get to that point. She presumed that we would talk the next time I was in New York.

I was crestfallen, though I knew all along that something wasn’t right. My writing felt too childlike and iconoclastic for the world of Saul Bellow. Yet my fantasies of the future were tied to being a novelist, and this woman was my Tom Greenwade—he was the scout who found Mickey Mantle when sent to look at another Oklahoma player. She had discovered me and was my champion in the bigtime.

With no fallback life on tap I skipped a Friday of classes and took the bus into Manhattan to meet Miss Carver for lunch. She picked a distinguished literary restaurant where she told me right off that
The Moon
was going in a dangerous direction, away from reliable narrative into occultism, and she warned me again about reading Olson. “You are no longer making believable stories or creating characters who are real. Some of the writing in
The Moon
is truly inspired, but I think it belongs in essays, not novels. Even so, you are elevating the tarot to an unwarranted, almost absurd level.” She wanted more Grossinger’s, more irony, more satire, more sex—in general, more action and less philosophy.

She was asking me to abandon the writing that was most meaningful to me. I needed the view from Luna to transcend the banality of my own plots. I needed the scope of Olson and Beckett to yank me out of beach parties and teen gossip and get me into the greater cosmos.