New Moon (56 page)

My father was in the City that afternoon, so we had dinner in his
hotel room. He too was interested in the career implications of my lunch with Catherine Carver and, when he heard my disheartening account, without forewarning he picked up the phone and dialed without explanation. After a few seconds I realized that he had called the popular novelist Harold Robbins.

“Harold, Paul Grossinger here … yes, you can do something for me this time.” In the course of the conversation he wrote down an address. “You meet him at his place; he’ll read your work and tell you what it’s worth; then you’ll know whether this woman is just pulling on your chain.”

It had the crudity of all his offers, but I too wanted to know what Harold Robbins would make of
Salty and Sandy.
It was such a preposterous, tantalizing notion I didn’t think of passing it up. The next morning I took the bus downtown and rode an elevator to a penthouse where a middle-aged man in a silk bathrobe led me into his living room and offered me Danishes while he sat on a sofa flipping through my manuscript. After fifteen minutes he let me know he was finished by taking a deep breath. Then he said:

“You’re a writer. You’ve got a ways to go, and this stuff isn’t ready to publish, but these editors, they’re frustrated college teachers; they want to latch on to some young kid and school-marm him. I don’t know what kind of writing you’re going to do, but keep going and it will work itself out. Don’t change for her, for the promise of publication.” As I left he thought to add, “When you’re ready, come see me. I may have my own publishing company by then.”

The next time Catherine Carver wrote me I replied candidly, telling her the gist of my exchange with the author of
The Carpetbaggers.
She had a markedly unhappy response—carbon copy to Leo Marx.

“How could you even listen to such a hack!” he berated me after our next class. “First Charles Olson, then Schuyler Pardee, now Harold Robbins. I put myself out for you. Look what I get. You taught me an important lesson: never get too close to students.”

But Tripp enjoyed the Harold Robbins affair. “Serves Marx right,” he chuckled. “The fatuous dictator!”

I called a girl out of the Mount Holyoke picture book. Jane was a
tall pixie who discovered a scratchy, old
Alice in Wonderland
platter among my records and insisted we dance to it at once. Giggling compatibly and stomping like puppets, we acted out the “Lobster Quadrille”:
“‘Will you walk a little faster,’ / said the lobster to the snail. / ‘There’s a porpoise right behind us, / and he’s treading on my tail.’”

Despite our merriment and shared admiration for the mock turtle, she turned down subsequent invitations to revisit him or me.

Then one night in February I made a “picture book” date with a girl at Smith and, on the chosen Saturday, hitched over to Northampton to meet her. She was late coming downstairs and, while I stood in the foyer, a striking-looking blonde on desk duty asked where I was from and what I was studying. She was curious too about my choice of a date. When I told her how it had originated, she smiled and offered, without hesitation, that I was in for an unpleasant surprise. A silence followed. Then she confided, as if sharing another secret, that she herself was a writer.

She was a compelling being with a sad, demure face, the aura of an old-fashioned fairy-tale maiden.

This was who I should have been going out with, but then my date appeared.

Nancy was a small energy packet of girl who was already practicing the twist on the way to the highway. She was looking forward to an evening of partying and announced right off that Phi Psi was the pits and we should go elsewhere. I seemed incidental to the matter, a pinball that had put her into independent motion. She talked so incessantly about a new British rock group that it was years before I could listen to The Beatles without bias. All evening I looked forward only to getting back early enough to see if the girl was still there. She wasn’t … and I hadn’t even gotten her name.

But I was friends with a senior who dated a girl from that house, so I asked him to inquire discreetly. Her name was Ginny, and I called her the next night. “Of course I remember you,” she said.

I started to explain how she had been right about—

“Do you want to go out this weekend?” she interrupted. It was like Tripp saying, “Stop chattering.” As simple as that.

What I saw the second time was a lean, medium-height girl
with a complicated, mature face and an inexplicably heavy heart. Amid campus weekend hoopla, her melancholy was reassuring, even beguiling. Her dress had lots of lace, and she wore a pearl necklace. We caught a ride to Amherst and, after a visit to the basement (where she was much awaited by a curious Paul and crew), we went upstairs where I sat on my desk and she settled on the couch. I read to her from
The Moon
and Olson’s
Distances.
She followed from a small sheath of her own poems, concise landscapes and startlingly graphic love psalms; then she read a few favorites from my collection of D. H. Lawrence’s poems.

Ginny was from Wisconsin, though she had spent lots of time in the South; she was a sophomore like me and was also thinking of transferring. She bore many of the same sorts of grievances toward Smith that I did toward Amherst, bemoaning the ritualized dating, materialistic values, and downbeat teachers. She was a kindred being, though her depth was ungaugable.

After she had finished the last Lawrence poem, there was a silence, and I asked if she wanted to dance. It was so obviously a request for contact I at once regretted it. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I added with a bashful grin.

She said she didn’t like to dance but gestured for me to come by her on the couch. I did. We looked at each other, and I saw in her a mirror of my wanting, a mouth opening, and I met it. We kissed long, repeatedly. I reached out from my heart and held her against me. This was what I had waited for, so many tangled years from the dream of Annie Welch. It wasn’t just a single kiss, or a feint in a game I didn’t understand. It was a time and place to do nothing else but feel someone and be kissed, and kiss. And there was so much to it—hair, a neck, a back, a backbone, a face, lips, a tongue, pausing for a breath and looking at each other, beginning again simultaneously.

As we walked silently back to the College Street hitching corner, she said, “I could feel it that first time I saw you. I knew this would happen.”

During February and March we went out each Saturday night, sometimes to dinner, sometimes to a movie, but always to my room
where we took up kissing and caressing. Loving was not some elusive thing in my future; it was as intrinsic as the desire that led to it, in fact more so, for not being fantasy. I was in a waking dream.

I was astonished to hear Ginny had a boyfriend in law school in Virginia whom she was thinking of marrying. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing with me, but she was open about her feelings. “You’re very wonderful,” she said, “but I don’t know who you are. You don’t even know. You’re the original ‘ugly duckling,’ and I have no idea what you’ll become. I’m the first person to reach you, so I can touch only so much. But I love the part of you you let me touch. Anything else going on in my life is immaterial to that.”

I wasn’t nearly that articulate. I couldn’t communicate or even understand my absorption in her, but I clung to it like a life raft. I wasn’t infatuated the way I had been with Betsy or even Harriet at Wakonda. I didn’t idolize Ginny, but I was addicted to her. She seemed dainty and fragile, opaque and ulterior, so that my passion seemed to dissipate right through her, but it didn’t matter because the weekends had become their own intoxication.

My Lawrence course had built slowly, and now, in this spring of the birth of eros,
The Rainbow
and
Women in Love
imbued me with the lives of men I might yet be. Paul Goodman may have seen only adolescent lust, but Lawrence detected a spirit drawing souls together beyond discourse. It was a force lodged in our hungering cores, transforming not sublimating, giving rise to the miracles of domesticity and children: the generations of creature life on Earth. Mutual attraction was as natural and unconscious as fields of flowers and wild rabbits, and it was not discardable as mere instinct or id; it was the basis of civilization, of church, of art, of the starry heavens too. It was the mystery of existence, even as I had suspected.

Lawrence meant regular rough and scarred men and women, not just playboys and dandies; in fact, he mocked the big talkers and had his women prevail over them, their eros actual and boundless rather than an adjunct of male fantasy:

Desiring
was
the mystery. I felt that profoundly with Ginny. It wasn’t a wish that came to an end in fulfillment; it went on forever. And then Lawrence …

A secondary affair? How incredible to think and believe that and then be able to say it! Certainly my physics and geology teachers wouldn’t agree. Even my Lawrence professor considered it mere rhetoric.

Ginny said one night that she wanted to smother my pain. She hugged me and stroked my back, but I still felt untouched and wanted her hand to go to my penis. She resisted the cue. “It’s too soon,” she said and instead began a long kiss. I felt the magnetic flow of my attention onto her and wanted to find its resolution. I drew her thread deeper and deeper into my own being She was so luminous and evanescent I couldn’t feel where I met her ostensible seduction—or joined the ragged edge of my own desire. My attraction toward this girl was sinuous and indirect, like an old, old cloth bearing some of her lace and elegance, a gap across which I could feel nothing but waves of curiosity and wonder. The thing between us was a faint, unexamined amber, a glow fluttering alive at the slightest friction.

Down the hall in another universe the Phi Psi jug band was closing out the evening, Paul on base and kazoo, Jenkins on slide guitar, Toby rapping thimbles on a washboard, Paul’s new girlfriend blowing into a jug. Half of my attention wended toward them as I observed Ginny moving, eyes cast upward, in her own quiet, a
rhapsodic trance beyond me, the face of a white moon.

I couldn’t go there; I wouldn’t find her if I went. Her essence was a mystery to me: who she was, who she
thought
she was, what sort of woman she would one day become. For all her animal propinquity, her casually lewd presence, she might as well have been a literary figure, Ursula in
The Rainbow,
a girl in the dazzling glare of her own fantasies and apotheosis.

I let go of the Delphic Oracle till another day. We hitched back to Smith.

A Saturday night later, I picked a handful of flowers in the Glen behind Phi Psi and brought them to Smith. Ginny strolled downstairs, short sleeves and a skirt for the warmer weather, a quixotic smile. Delighted with the gift, she insisted on finding a jar and taking them to her room. Then we hitched a ride to Phi Psi.

We spent an hour downstairs, talking with Paul, Phil, and Ellen … drinking tap beer. Ginny was a saint in pale sequins, as we danced to Patti Page, the “Tennessee Waltz,” so that I felt like the hero of Hamilton Basso’s
View from Pompey’s Head
at the crossroads of his life, dancing with his sweetheart even as the song, matching its words, stole her away
(“Now I know just how much I have lost ….”).
We went upstairs. The blossoms-on-peach fabric that made up her dress swooped in and under to follow her shape, framing the line of her breasts. Without a word we fell into our tryst, our only interest each other’s bodies.

I strained against prior boundaries to contact her, to come to a verdict, to know what followed. She was telling me stories of her brothers in Baltimore, her summer in France where the family she was living with broke apart before her eyes.

I reached under her blouse for the first time and felt the band of her bra in back. She continued to clench and kiss, and I moved to the front and explored the frilliness covering her breasts. Deeper waves rolled through me, and I rubbed against her with my groin and pulled her onto me. She responded effortlessly, as if she was already there. Our bodies wound in frictioned counterpoint, rhythms and chords I never knew. Something darker and older than desire was drawing me now. At odd junctures I felt flat, as
though its current had stopped and nothing was happening, but the spark kept reigniting.

Her face in semi-darkness was a vague almost inhuman mask, floating in its own space, its arc of contemplative romanticism. I kept reaching out through a feeling in my penis that was spreading throughout my body, trying to hold her on it, hold me in her ambiance. I put her hand against my hardness, but she took it away. I sat upright and looked at her with questioning eyes.

“We’re still not there yet,” she said. “We can’t force it.”

“Why aren’t we there?”

“I don’t know. There’s something missing. It’s not you. There just hasn’t been enough time.”

I trusted her, but I was suspicious. “Is it because of your friend in Virginia?”

“I’m going to see him next weekend, and I want to be clear. Yes, I sleep with him. But he’s not the problem I have with you. I’m overwhelmed by you. I care terribly for you. But you’re more than I can deal with.”

I turned on the light, and we sat in silence. She put a hand gently on my face. In my unslaked craving, the mercy of her gesture was too much.

I left the room. I ran up the stairs to the third floor, through the attic onto the roof. I stood in the night air. At a distance I could appreciate her again. As a fantasy, she filled me with desire. I climbed back through the hatch and lay on my bed fully dressed. I wanted to cry, but my throat and eyes were hardened against it. Instead I reached for my genitals and rubbed them. I spat on my hand, then rubbed harder. There were no tears there either, only the dull side of disappointed lust. I strained to summon the scene in my room back into my mind so that this time she took hold of my hardness. Staring blankly into her face in my mind I pulled the current up through my surging breath and shot out a bitterness into the sheets, my fingers instantly on top of its warm film, rubbing it into the surface in some meager extension of pleasure.