New Moon (68 page)

“I guess you’ll just have to do your ceremony without her,” Tripp said. “A worthy challenge for you.”

I answered him by writing a quick jingle based on a well-known radio station’s ad:

“That shows spirit, Grossinger,” he affirmed. “It’s a battle cry.”

On Friday we began preparations in earnest. Nelson suggested we each make a personal mandala. Most participants painted theirs on slabs of plywood; I used a black discarded nightstand top. On it I rendered my own version of Jung’s Fifth Avenue scene. I stained a white baseball with black stitches, colored the skyline of Central Park West, and placed symbols for Lindy and me reaching across the baseball and touching, while in the lower lefthand corner—with a nod to the Crowley—a stray voodoo figure, a city-side reporter, was banished.

That night I dreamed that Chuck’s subway girlfriend Julie appeared as an editor at an occult publishing house in New York. I went to her offices with my manuscript as to Viking Press to see Catherine Carver. She led me into a deserted ballroom where mammoth tarot cards hung on arrases. It had become the Museum of Natural History at night. A priest sat on a pedestal before a buffet, like those at Grossinger’s except that the carved ice figures at its center were alchemical symbols. She said, “We are the Sixth Trump, the Lovers,” and embraced me. I looked up. On the ceiling was a painting of a giant smiling angel, embodying us in her deck.

On Saturday morning Polachek’s VW bug sailed into the parking
lot, toting two records of Chinese temple music. Jim immediately set to work painting an impeccable High Priestess on a piece of plywood fifty times the size of the Waite card, a veil of extra-radiant maroon pomegranates behind her. The basement was soon filled with mandala makers from all over campus.

Chuck appeared mid-afternoon, trailing not only Josey but a short, surly kid from Bard College named Harvey Bialy. He looked like a cartoon of a fiend and spoke in an ornery manner. The three of them huddled together in the living room, a cameo of beatniks.

As far as Harvey was concerned, Bard was the center of the universe, at least for colleges, and he let everyone know that it was a “bad joke” he should be dragged up to Amherst “for a Crowleyite ceremony of all things.” Although I wouldn’t hear about it until much later, three years ago he had gotten into a fight with another kid while leaving the main branch of the New York Public Library. His adversary was racing up the massive stone stairs with a guitar when its suspended case bumped Harvey and almost knocked him down all the steps. The two got to jivin’ and calling out their stuff, and Harvey did what he often did—insulted a stranger for pleasure of it. On this occasion he apparently said something like, “After all, Woody Guthrie’s a bum.” Bobby Zimmerman began shoving him and they wrestled and punched each other on the steps, no doubt a comic spectacle.

As Tripp surveyed the arrival of my friends, he stood by the side, smirking at my characterization of Josey as a witch. “She’s a sweet, tubby Jewish girl from New York; that’s what she is,” he whispered, but once I led them to the basement she did paint a beautiful abstract Moon on a square slab of pine, vibration-like Hebrew letters rising from crayfish in a pool to form the pulsating lunar node.

The outcome was totally up for grabs as we marched to the Glen. But Nelson came through! He had arranged our mandalas amidst ten torches, placed five long candles and two squat ones on an altar, and set metal railroad poles pointing into the heavens. Marty had hung speakers in the trees, so Polachek’s bells and flutes filled the universe with its music of the spheres.

I carried an extension cord and boxes of slides I had culled from the Astronomy, Biology, and Geology Departments to the mystification of professors eager though to encourage extracurricular appreciation of their topics. We set the projector going in a loop—galaxies, flowers, amoebas, rivers, volcanos, craters of the moon, mountains, birds, the planet Jupiter, glaciers—one after another, enormous and rippling on the bedsheets strung among the trees. On the grass, torches made our mandalas shimmer and come alive. Meanwhile the real sky above was full of constellations. From the darkness came the notes of an Oriental temple. Then Nelson read the first of
Nine Tales
of bright-eyed Coyote, his journey to the Upper World via the tallest tree in Idaho Country, whereby he met his Spider ancestors who warned him that the human race was coming.

“Now this is a real party, Grossinger,” Tripp exulted, collapsing back on the grass with an appreciative sigh. I had bored him in the past by bringing Grossinger’s steaks, barbecuing in the fireplace, and declaring it a banquet.

After a while I moved into the candlelight of the altar. “Why are we out here?” I asked. And I offered glimpses of archetypes, science-fiction realms, and trick-or-treat Halloweens. “We have come,” I concluded, “finally to what we are. Through this ceremony we deny the false carnival colors and adolescent rituals of America, the neon and gloss that douse our lives with fake significance and blind us to our true natures.” I was channeling Jung, Olson, the tarot, Robert Penn Warren, and maybe Zest soap:

That was the overture. Then I reeled in a giant fish I had been trolling for years:

I reached my crescendo:

Having delivered my speech I fell silent. Then others read poems and Indian myths and offered blessings, after which we sat watching the slide loop with its billowing images while listening to temple bells. Nelson served cider and cookies.

Harvey was visibly moved. “I want a copy of that talk,” he declared back in the House. “There are people at Bard who will be very interested.
Very
interested!”

On Sunday night Lindy called to find out how the “great event” had gone. I talked a blue streak … incident after incident, trying to make my speech again to her … until she told me to stop because she wanted to say something. “I had a terrible weekend. I don’t know what I ever saw in him. Outside the city room and Denver he lost all his luster. It was a fantasy, I guess. Will you forgive me for all I’ve put you through, kiddo?”

Three days later on my twentieth birthday I received a pair of communications in the mail. They fit together magically. Aunt Bunny was out of the hospital and her friends were holding a celebration in Manhattan. I also got a packet from Harvey’s teacher at Bard, the poet Robert Kelly; he enclosed a mimeographed batch of his recent work called “Weeks” while indicating that he would like to meet “the author of that wonderful Halloween prayer.” Kelly was a well-known hermetic writer in the lineage of Charles Olson.

The entire universe seemed to be wheeling around me and changing course. I felt a rush of infinite possibility. I called Lindy and suggested that we could manage both events, the party and visiting Kelly, by staying at the Hotel, a perfect median point. That way she could meet Aunt Bunny, see Grossinger’s, and come with me to Bard. Then I held my breath. Her response: “What a delightful idea and invitation!”

Waves of awe and gratitude spilled over me, the precise obverse of panic. The future seemed open-ended, ransomed at last.

On November 5th I drove to Smith lightheaded, an old vigilance taunting me with the dread that she wouldn’t be there. But she was
standing outside Laura Scales in her down jacket with her suitcase; she looked at me with her wise gray eyes, hugged me, and handed me a package and a card with a poem, saying, “Belated happy birthday, honey.” The package had a cotton dress shirt, and the poem began:

She started to get in the passenger side, but I handed her the keys. She splashed along the snowmelt highway, down Massachusetts into Connecticut while we talked about a hundred things—her break-up with Jim, Aunt Bunny’s homecoming, Kelly’s poems, Jung, Crowley, her terrible teachers at Smith.

My own class there had become a travesty. Stanley Elkin, a thickset, sarcastic man, told us at the first meeting he could never get dates with Smith girls when he was in college so he was going to take his revenge. It was a joke, of course, but it became the effective reality. The seminar consisted of little more than his thespian parodies and denigrations of our work.

He claimed that all stories were about obsessions—no exceptions—and he dared us to prove otherwise. That seemed a cheap gimmick, so I took him up on it. The first piece I wrote was in the style of Beckett, about a man walking down a hall, which was on the Earth, which was in the Solar System, which was in the Milky Way. I described the hall in great detail, but nothing happened:

“Hiya,” said a man on his left.

“Good day. Bad day tomorrow, though,” said a woman on his left.

“Hello,” said a woman on his right.

“Pleased to see you again,” said a woman on his left.

Elkin called it a fake.

“I guess the obsession is my trying to fool you,” I offered.

He barked in the affirmative.

The day before in class, I told Lindy, Elkin had been tearing down a girl’s story. I jumped to her defense. When he said, “You have an antiquated view of literature,” I began to quote out loud
from the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of William Faulkner, an author I knew he admired.

Lindy and I both knew that sermon well—an artist at the apex of public honor proclaiming that our work was a statement of undying faith against atomic holocaust. At first Elkin tried to shout me (and Faulkner) down, but when I kept going, he conceded, “So the man was a promoter. He had a fine sense of theater. Give him a platform, and he knew what to do. But don’t believe a word of it. He didn’t.”

“Why,” I declaimed, “is it such a crime in these institutions to claim that a work has meaning and touches the soul? Why is there an almost pathological denial of emotion and spirit? These things aren’t the enemy. They’re the source of everything that matters. Yet our teachers mock us as if they were naïve and puerile indulgences.”

We were beginning to see, and tell each other, that we had been taught nihilistically. Witty progressive liberalism was the sole acceptable mode of discourse—a tyranny of fashion that Lindy, with her deep sense of humanity and associative mind, suffered more than I.

We bonded over such conversation and our spirits lifted. As we neared New York at dusk, the years rushed through me like alighting birds. Road signs proclaimed the Westchester towns from which Rodney, Jake, and Keith once commuted: Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Scarsdale, Yonkers…. Across the fields I saw a lit subway, the train I had ridden, its unknowing passengers looking out toward the highway at unknown cars. Despite everything, this was the egg in which I was hatched.

I took over driving and wove through a familiar maze of streets to a midtown apartment. We parked in an underground garage and rode the elevator up.

It was a fashionable affair: people standing around with drinks, Bunny in the center, her attention splintered a dozen ways. She seemed as I remembered her, perhaps a bit subdued. She acknowledged our arrival with a beaming smile. Later she joined us, and she and Lindy talked about her illness, then Smith. I stood beside them, delighted at bringing two great women together. When Lindy went
to get her coat, Bunny used almost the words Lindy had written during the summer when talking about herself and Steve, “I hope you haven’t found her too soon.”