New Moon (78 page)

The background purred with energy, periodic lilts of laughter. Our guest was late. He was ten minutes late … twenty-five minutes late and counting. I tried to soothe the audience by giving an extemporaneous talk on his connections to esoteric traditions, couching everything in an attempt at academic language. Their looks ranged from hauteur to bemusement. Lindy waited by the highway, hoping to flag Bloisius and save precious minutes.

After my speech, the din grew audibly more discordant, impatient. I peeked outside to check. Lindy was halfway up the stairs, pointing frantically behind her. Near the bottom the master was huffing and puffing step by step with Joby right behind him—and behind her, Button, his tall elfin girlfriend. He peered up through the spiral railing and waved as though there wasn’t a care in the world. I glanced down and smiled in relief. Two minutes later, under a full head of steam, he burst into the room dangerously out of breath. While people gasped at his appearance he lit a cigarette and dragged away as if to restore his oxygen.

He looked around at the portraits of famous poets who had visited Amherst over the years, his eyes finally alighting on the one most associated with the school. “After all, Robert Frost is dead!”—his opening words. The undulation in the crowd was discernible, like a sinkhole opening up.

Kelly had introduced himself with a sacrilege, and before anyone could react he began reading:

It was a tour de force entry, at least to my mind, a swaggering tort sweeping verse out of a fusty Frost museum into the urgency of the moment. But not everyone thought he was as wonderful as I did. It was Brakhage redux; a good portion of academia straggled out between poems.

When the reading was over, folks adjourned back at Phi Psi for cider and doughnuts with the poet. Then Kelly signaled “Finis” and drove Lindy and me and his two women into town to a restaurant in Bloisius.

We sat at a booth where he ordered dinner for three while we got dessert for ourselves. “I don’t apologize for my opening remark,” he said at once. “I knew you would present an overly generous version of me, and I preferred to destroy that quickly. It is useless to read to people who want to be polite.” Then he took out his Camels, gave one each to Joby and Button, and offered a third to Lindy.

She shook her head. “If I’m going to smoke, I might as well stick to my filters.”

“Do you believe they’re less dangerous?”

“Of course.”

“Who are you to allow the Surgeon General of this nation to make important decisions for you? Do you know that filter-tips have the most carcinogous tobacco?” She stared at him silently, lighting her Newport. He held up his package of Camels and gently stroked the
emblem. “Does this little animal look as though he could harm you?”

She blew smoke coquettishly across the table.

On the way back to Smith she was friendly and excited. She held my hand as we walked to Laura Scales. “I enjoyed tonight. You were alive, more yourself.” We stood holding each other, then a long kiss and, with a skip, she was off and in the door.

A week later Diane Wakoski arrived for our series, and I drove over to Smith to fetch Lindy again for the event. She was worried she was going to be late for a nine-thirty babysitting gig at the home of Miss Vendler, her modern-poetry teacher. In the car she let me know right off that she was coming under protest, then continued to complain all the way there.

“But this is
our
series.”

“Don’t kid yourself whose series it is. This is Amherst, Phi Psi, Richard Grossinger. I’m a girl along for the ride.”

I tried to revive the mood with quips about Kelly’s reading. But she stayed on a dour track, making like she wasn’t a poet herself and my accomplice, acting as if Aspen had never happened. “I guess you’re the only one who has prerogatives,” she finally retorted, “the only one allowed to dispense magic.”

I couldn’t win, so I told myself we hadn’t reached the pivotal octave. I half-believed it, half-thought I was piling cosmological license atop wishful thinking.

Schuy and Dona arrived at the last moment. They were now married and living together in Belchertown, and Diane was their favorite poet. “She rules over our marital discord,” Dona joked. “She always gives me new excuses to dump this guy.”

To their delight our visitor read her “Six of Cups” poem:

Afterwards, Lindy and I rushed to the car and sped back to Northampton. Miss Vendler stood on the porch checking her watch. “I’m not amoral,” Lindy said as she patted me on the knee and hurried down the driveway. She turned to add, “It’s just that I’m like Diane. There’s more than one of me. Remember, it’s harder to destroy an illusion than what the illusion stands for.”

“But also don’t forget the flowers in those gold cups,” I called back, “the star held and exchanged by children.”

“Just because I don’t tell you every second doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten!”

Her riddle lifted my spirits, but I didn’t know how to convert it. “I’m just a guy,” I thought. “I can’t do this without more help.” Driving back to Phi Psi I wailed the finale of Welton’s poem in my mind like a rock song:

And then the last line that filled the universe with such hope:

The following weekend Lindy and I travelled to Cambridge for Stan Brakhage’s lecture and film-showing at Harvard. We had dinner with him afterwards, causing us to drive back late. We were in our alternate reality again, as she was cold and proper, slipping defiantly from my affection as though it were a first date. There was nothing left on the surface, so I had to go deeper.

I didn’t shave on Sunday or the next day. I watched myself change.
I wasn’t going to fake it anymore. The roughness was what I felt like. My hand reached instinctively for the stubble. I was no longer a stagehand; I could wait for Godot with the big boys too. After a week, a dark beard had begun to form.

I still carried Lindy’s letter of August 30th. These were the days I reread it most often, when she seemed irretrievable. I couldn’t have made it all up, I told myself. She had to be there, the person I had loved, somewhere inside.

A few nights later we met at Smith for Cocteau’s
Orpheus.
“I may be quite fed up with you,” she teased, “but you’re still the best company I know for Cocteau.”

Appearing in a brief cameo in his own film, the director set the stage by addressing the handsome Orpheus, played by actor Jean Marais, moments before a riot ensued at Café des Poets.
“Etonnez nous!”
(“Astonish us!”), Cocteau said. Orpheus was baffled, not inclined to take the offer seriously, secure in his popularity and fame. Then two motorcyclists rolled in, forerunners of the ones Kenneth Anger transposed into
Scorpio Rising.
As they felled the poet Cegeste, a sedan trailing the cyclists pulled up, and Death, a fashionably dressed woman, got out of the back. She ordered them to put Cegeste’s fatally wounded body inside. “Why are you standing around, staring?” she demanded. “Get in!”

“Who me?” asked Orpheus, looking around.

“Get in!” she repeated, gesturing.

Then her chauffeur Heurtebise whisked them away.

When Orpheus awoke in Death’s room,
she
was gone. All that remained were the chauffeur and the car. Now the hero madly sought this woman, Death herself. Since he did not know where to look for her, he sat in her car, obsessively transcribing message fragments that came over its radio, cosmic rays written (in truth) by Cegeste in her company.

Orpheus didn’t realize that Death had also fallen in love with him.

Without permission of the authorities, Death next took Orpheus’ wife Eurydice. Even so, it was Death that Orphée grieved after—as mystery, as lover—not his stolen partner.
“Etonnez nous,”
indeed!

One after another, characters in the movie wore special gloves to touch and pass through the liquid surface of mirrors into the Underworld. There, salesmen carried panes of imaginary glass through ruins.

“Out of sheer habit,” Heurtebise told them, for they were no longer alive, let alone in a place where glass was used.

Finally Orpheus made it to Death’s boudoir, only to learn that she was not all-powerful, that her love for him would salvage nothing, was a trite sentimental distraction in the eyes of the gods. They were two petty criminals who would be seized, separated, and punished.

Cocteau’s Death was neither ruler nor goddess or effectual against the real forces of the cosmos, Gurdjieff’s octave-hopping pulses. She was a face of an eternal form—one draw of Card Thirteen amid trillions of shuffles—authorized to act solely from higher-vibrational orders. When Orpheus asked her who gave these commands, expecting like John Wayne to charge in and stand up to this goon, Death shrugged and told him, “No one knows. The messages of Creation are carried from dimension to dimension, region to region of an invisible bureaucracy like so many tom-toms beating across Afrique.”

The only hope was for Cocteau to run the movie backwards, against the wind of time, to undo the damage and restore Orpheus and Eurydice to their myth. The backdraft of reversed hours and days rippling their hair, the characters travelled motionlessly toward the initial incident at
Café Des Poets
—Death and Heurtebise laboring against not only gravity but a more fundamental dimensional force to achieve a nubbin of free will, Cocteau’s spoof of Sartre and Camus. “We must, we must,” Death shouted. “Without our wills we are nothing.”

Afterwards, sparked by such magic, Lindy and I experienced a resurgence of our former spark over tea on Green Street. We chatted away excitedly until moments before curfew and then had to run back to Laura Scales. Shivering as the icy November wind cut through us, she lamented not being able to afford a good coat.

The next morning I went to a store in town and bought her the bushiest overcoat I could find. My heart beating in empathy and
terror, I showed up unannounced bearing its enormous box. She was furious at my intrusion, but I impishly handed it to her.

“Think twice now,” she said. “Are you sure you still want to be giving me things?”

I nodded perversely. From the outside I could see how foolish I looked, how quickly she was becoming someone else. From the inside I could only blunder on, led by angels or muses.

That evening she called me. She told me how mortified she was to open the box and find the coat.

“I can’t stand you, Richard. This is the end. This is really the end.”

I stood there in the stairwell holding the phone. My body rang with shock waves. “Do you realize how low it is to try to buy back someone’s love when they don’t want it?”

I said yes.

She described in agonizing detail how she had to take it into town on her bike, return it to the store, ask that my money be refunded. I told her that she had been freezing, that we were old and close friends, but she said I was making an ass out of myself and, additionally, that she had another date that night. I shouldn’t call her again for at least three months. It hadn’t worked, she added, just being friends.

I went back to my room, cried briefly; then pulled myself together. I was curious to know how much of me was left. There was something there in the center, thin and stringy, a rag perhaps, but at least I could feel it.

Sometime afterwards I heard a knock. I opened the door and was surprised to see my sophomore-year friend Paul. He was visiting from Clark in nearby Worcester where he was a graduate student in psychology. He heard my woes and said we should walk. I nodded and put on my coat. We traversed the railroad tracks, across the bridge where Lindy and I had accompanied Tripp the previous spring.

I tried to salvage the summer by a description of it, to probe it for a flaw, a clue; to rekindle its glow in my memory. Even as I entertained us I kept dragging out and postponing the conclusion of my narrative. It was as though as long as I could talk I could
breathe on the summer’s ember and keep it alive.

It was only a story, words, but as long as I held the stage by speaking them, I could nurse the withering play, keep the audience in their seats, extend the reality that was. I dreaded the approaching lesion of meaning and hope, for I never knew how to get past its shadow, how to find myself again.

A story, words—but a landmark in the void.

We continued to Valentine and got in line. I would have a life, I told myself. I would eventually find someone else. In fact Elsie had mentioned introducing me to her “very beautiful friend.” I tried to picture who this woman might be. I had a moment of fragile elation, a chance to start over. With our trays we crossed the dining room and found a table. Then I saw in the far corner Lindy sitting with Black. I jumped to my feet. Paul glanced over his shoulder, whistled, then frowned. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.