New Moon (79 page)

We abandoned our meals and crossed the street to Phi Psi. I chose its roof as refuge. We sat there watching males stream toward dinner in the twilight. “It’s not that important,” I said finally. “If I could see all this differently it would be a vision; it would be beautiful and absurd.”

“That’s the whole of psychology you’re dismissing,” he protested.

“Yes, I know. It’s why I’m in this state.” I lay back and stared at the early bright stars, musing as though from a million miles away. “I used to think back then, when I was a kid, an infant, that my family scared me by something they did. I went through all those years of analysis trying to find the one event.”

“The original trauma,” he chimed in.

“Now I think it’s just who they were—my mother, Bob, Bunny, Paul—each in their own way.”

“It always seemed that way to me,” Paul agreed. “Just as an objective observer, I didn’t find anything about them you would think of as
parents.”

“The thing with Lindy is that she was the one who taught me about family. She gave me that in Aspen. And now tonight—it’s like finding my family, being born, having to grow up in a summer, and then losing it, all in one year. It’s hard for me to proceed with my
life as it is. The road ahead is not broken apart in a simple manner. It’s totally broken off in another dimension. Dead end! I don’t have any place to go.”

“That seems a fair picture,” he acknowledged. “So what now?”

“I either jump or try to live.”

He shifted half-facetiously, as though to stand in my way. We both laughed. “I don’t think you’re going to do that, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to stay around Phi Psi either. You sound dangerously like someone trying to prove he’s sane and rational.”

“I know. I’m speeding on the strangeness of tonight, but it’s gonna run out.”

“And you might not plan on killing yourself, but one way or another you’re going to crash.”

“I gotta walk that lonesome valley, aye Paul?”

“Yep. But the Four Seasons too:
‘Walk like a man from her!’”

We chuckled. He asked me for Schuy and Dona’s number. We went downstairs and he dialed them. He wondered if I could stay there for the night. Dona said they’d come and get me.

I grabbed a toothbrush and some clothes, and we sat in the parking lot waiting. Yes, I was going to crash, but at least the world was moving in a new direction and that would hold my attention for a while. The omnipresent Andy, who had been kicked out of school for drugs, came by and, per usual, tried to convince me to take a cube of LSD with him. He said that it was all ego, illusion anyway. Why not, why not break the through the many-colored dome? He insisted his serum would cure me of whatever was troubling me, would expose the world for what it was.

“Tonight I’m just trying to be human.”

“But it’s all illusory anyway.”

“It may be illusion, but it’s also a myth, and unless we live it and make a stand, it will repeat again and again.”

“Your choice!”

“That’s right,” Paul said grumpily.
“His
choice.”

Schuy and Dona arrived, looking harried. I started to explain, but she headed me off. “It’s not so good where we are either. We’re talking about getting divorced.”

That surprised me, but after Schuy went to bed she stayed up and explained. “Don’t believe his shit about being a tough guy. He said that making love was like breaking a horse, and I’ll tell you, I feel very much like a horse that was broken. We’ve got all of that to work through now, and I doubt we’re going to make it.”

“Would you rather be where I am?”

“I’m getting there.” She gave me a hug and showed me the unheated back room of the cabin.

I slept on a mattress, their collection of blankets and quilts tossed on top of me. Rain gusted against window, an autumnal storm at the exact pitch of my despair. Smothered in homeyness, I drifted off to dream—only to awake with a start. The first birds were chirping. It was way too early, still dark out, the sun an exotic sapphire dissolving into the world.

The storm outside had passed, but the storm within was raging and sought any contact or recognition. Those winged songsters were too beautiful, too intelligent, too implacable, too credulous. I couldn’t get them out of my head.

The world was teeming with life—with the courage of a dragonfly, a chickadee, to face another dawn, the foolishness not to know better. I couldn’t stand any of it. To exist was unbearable. I didn’t want to know or think.

Then I heard Schuy and Diana arguing, their pitch rising. That gave me a fingerhold on reality and I scurried to get dressed.

Outside, edging into the woods, I tried to pick up a sign, bracing for novelty’s end—the crash. But it had already happened.

It was all pain. In all directions all I could feel was pain. No clue anywhere. The natural world seemed to stretch unabated in every direction. This was the heart of Mordor.

And those foolhardy birds were saying, “This is the way you make
Shekhinah.
Did you think it was easy to make
Shekhinah
? Does this look like a world in which anything of value comes easily?” They were singing William Carlos Williams too:

“My heart rouses / thinking to bring you news / of something that concerns you / and concerns many men…, news that men die miserably every
day / for lack of….
 ”

I had no parents anymore, no girlfriend, no self, no path, no way in, no out. What was keeping me alive?

I came back. The three of us ate breakfast together while they jousted black humor about their impending separation.

I told them I thought their life was very beautiful, even their arguing was beautiful. I warned them there wouldn’t be anything better. They smiled at my naïveté, and Schuy drove me back to Phi Psi on his way to class. A few months later they were divorced, and a year after that he was dead in Illinois, an apparent suicide on a motorcycle.

I packed a few things and set off in the Mustang. In my head was Lindy’s lyric once for her lover Steve:
“Try to remember a time in September…. ”
Its haunting tune imbued me like the clarion of another world—not an ordinary other world but an alternative universe, a Europe ruled by American Indian tribes, myself someone else there
“… when life was an ember…. ”
I couldn’t let go of the melody and the runes that appeared in it automatically like stars at twilight. Its minor chord was an epode, ringing down a corridor, illumining that other life, a different childhood: not me but Jeffrey or Rodney or Keith. I could have been one of them instead.

The notion was magnificent, and it was hollow; it was exquisite and capacious beyond knowing, but it was all somber Septembers, going back to the dawn of consciousness. The cabin in Aspen was as old as Welsh alphabet trees and Central Park autumns of my childhood. I was lost in a grim and grievous miasma. I had always been lost.

All I wanted was to get inside this damn thing—the song, the mellowness, the dreary, streaked-rain, gold/red world, to sustain even its sadness, to become its old age. And sing the words someday from within, like my stepfather when he was young and brought home our first record,
“Cruising down the river / on a Sunday afternoon…. ”
From there I would follow a radically different path to the present, become the mensch he wanted me to be, able to bear this life,
“a tender and callow fellow”
who could roll with the punches.
But that was no longer in play, maybe never was.

I established a single plan. I would go once more to see Lindy. I would try to recover the girl from Aspen. If that failed—as surely it would—I’d continue into the City and meet Elsie’s friend. I made the necessary phone calls and then set out on the mission.

Summoned by the Laura Scales switchboard, Lindy stormed downstairs. “What in the world lets you think you can browbeat me!”

But the anteroom was no place to talk, so we went outside and sat on the curb. I told myself melodramatically that at least our unborn children would want me to make one last try.

“I don’t think that we’re the only people for each other,” I said. “But we had something special once, and if we’re going to drop it I want us to drop it together.” I paused to let her stop me, but she didn’t. “I feel as though I haven’t seen you since Denver. I’ve been carrying around this letter—“I held it out for her, but she shook her head as indication she didn’t need to see it. “A different Lindy came back on that plane. I can say goodbye if that’s what you want, but I don’t want to abandon you.”

Her response was a gasp of outrage followed by a haughty frown. “I don’t believe that kind of stuff,” she said, “and you are very unperceptive to keep trying it.”

I let the resonance of the car absorb me. I accepted finally that it was over. But instead of going straight into the City I detoured via Kelly at Bard. He sat in the outer room, the sybilline Button at his side. I came as the knight to the throne and told him I was sorry to intrude, but I had two questions to ask and then would be gone. “Go ahead,” he said.

The phone rang. As he reached for it he handed me a piece of paper, a poem of Chuck’s.

“See if this takes care of the first one.”

When he finished his conversation I told him there was no need now to ask the first question.

“Why don’t you rephrase it anyway. Tell me the answer you have gotten.”

“Where is the other world that shadows this one? The answer is: There is no other world; everything is here.”

He nodded. “Your pain is teaching you well. Your education is accelerated in this extreme state.”

“What about Lindy? That’s my second question. I think I have given up and am going into New York to see another girl.” I was sure, in his own condition of infidelity, he would concur.

“Richard, are you going to be the troubadour all your life,” he said, “singing to women on balconies? You must abandon such a role and speak to the consciousness of the woman. Tell her what you have to tell her. Right now you are wasting your dwindling energy in groups of people living dreams, sitting around coffee houses discussing irrelevancies.”

His words surprised me. I imagined back at Smith that I was telling her my best truth, but now I realized I was greedy for confirmation, impatient. I was still playing games, a stupid troubadour’s role.

“Listen closely,” he said, “for what I am about to tell you almost everyone would miss.

“You must not make this woman into a star you cannot reach, although, God knows, you may have an easier time waking in the morning to a clear star than the rest of us having to put together a day from scratch.”

I smiled, barely.

“But that is also the astrology of hell. If you can free yourself, then take her away with you and face the risks that come your way.
Better those than the meaningless risks of the courtier.”

“And what if she won’t follow?”

“And what if we knock and the door doesn’t open? And what if it won’t close? What if the world is destroyed tomorrow? We all live in dread.”

I nodded.

“Go to her and tell her what you have to say. That’s all there is.”

“Is it like breaking a horse? Is that true?”

“No. Sometimes a certain strength is necessary because of the tyranny of words. They do fail or, rather, we fail them. But I wouldn’t liken it to breaking a horse. It is more like the electron seizing a positron in the heart of matter. Isn’t that what lies at the creation of all things?”

“Yes.”

“You have happened upon Brakhage’s old riddle: everything is as we want it, if only we knew. That’s what Chuck is telling you; he didn’t realize he wrote it for you. But he sent it, and you and it arrived minutes apart.”

“And what about the girl in the city?”

He shook his head. “Richard, don’t ever try to cut your losses. Go back and tell Lindy what you have to say. You have no other course.”

“This endless cycle is wearing.”

“We’re meant to be worn.”

Then he raised himself slowly and turned toward the inner rooms. He instructed me to talk to the sybil. “I’ll be back.”

Button spoke in ellipses, so I told her about the ghost shadow, the
waiura,
that stays connected between people even when they are apart: “It’s from Paul Radin,
World of Primitive Man.
The Maori speak of it like, ‘Be of good cheer. Our
wairua
are ever with you, although we are far off.’” I wanted to make the charm work if only because it wasn’t English or any known etymology.

As twilight fell, old things began to creep across the room.

“I sense a shadow,” she piped, “a fright. There’s a fright in the room.”

“It’s probably mine.”

“She’s not a bad girl,” she continued in Delphic
non sequitur,
“just
a bitch. We need bitches, though. They cut through the shit we create.”

Just then Kelly returned and asked at once who had dispelled the ghost. She pointed to me. He pondered and then restated his message: “People are not interchangeable. Lindy is a girl in Massachusetts. Go back to her.”

Then he cast his usual mudra over my head and bid me farewell.

“How does he know?” I asked her.

“Because he’s him.”

The shadow had not been dispelled, but it was no longer the enemy. I took it with me into the car and instead of heading for either the City or Massachusetts I turned toward Grossinger’s.

It was night-time now. A disorientation like carsickness came over me. In it I felt something alive, a thing with barely a mass or shape, but solid and at my center. I saw Kelly in my mind’s eye—Orpheus in the room with Death—and shouted aloud, “He’s right! He’s right!”

I had solved the sphinx’s riddle at last; Lindy was addressing me by picking the one person she knew I most abhorred: Black. She hadn’t broken off our connection; she had merely changed its terms. This was the final test. She was parading before me a specter of existential nihilism in order to see if I was committed enough to break through. That was the explanation for her going from the failed relationship with Steve to an irrelevant jerk like Black. She had cast a gauntlet/grail and was waiting to see if I responded. It would prove nothing if she yielded to mere entreaties and gave it away.