New Moon (29 page)

I felt an unexpected surge of tears.

Then she remembered about Billy and began to list the exciting things we could do together. Right then and there I knew I had made a mistake.

I had five days of breathing room before my friend’s arrival, so I made the most of them, throwing myself into an old-fashioned Grossinger’s spree. The first morning in the country Michael, Jimmy, and I took sleds to the golf course and raced one another down hills. We were daredevil clowns, flying over bumps and tumbling into drifts. Then, noisy enough to be hushed by Uncle Abe, we hit the dining room at the peak of lunch, hair covered with ice balls. After gobbling down potato pancakes and pineapple blintzes, we ordered all four desserts (cookies, lime sherbet, strawberry shortcake, and date-nut slices) and went back out for a snowball fight.

All day long I was the kid from Grossinger’s, the native son, carefree and reckless—I had heard the call of the wild. At night I reverted to the scion of Horace Mann, an equally sublime role.

“Richard’s doing his Egyptian hieroglyphs,” Michael announced. Aunt Bunny smiled and half-heartedly told him to get back to his own homework. But you couldn’t change the spots on the leopard or turn Grossinger’s into the Sorbonne. It was near impossible to disengage from the Hotel’s mood of dalliance and return to my lettered allotments. No one there paid more than lip service to schoolwork or grades. Toys, desserts, TV shows, and whims of recreation ruled. Michael and James at best raced through an abridged version of a spurned ritual. The mere solving of a page of math problems or translation of a Latin chapter—assignments on which I spent hours per night and entire weekends in New York—seemed as alien here as decoding a document from a Phoenician shipwreck.

I’d be in my hardcore study mode, bearing down, driven by monastic pride, as from the background came decibels of
77 Sunset Strip
or
What’s My Line?,
the whole family watching, a rite I adored too, particularly our last call for milk shakes, cookies, and ice-cream sodas from the canteen. For that I took a break and crossed over.

Later in the week the air turned warm, and the snow melted. It
was suddenly spring. Upon hearing that I was studying biology, Milty found an old microscope somewhere in his domain and presented it to me. The next morning I collected water from the lake; then Michael and I kneeled on the floor of his room, directing sunlight from the machine’s mirror through a slide. It illuminated paramecia and other tumbling creatures: a miraculous spectacle—a world inside a world, shut off and immune, invisible except for the curve of a tiny round glass.

Michael was amazed to see such beings, astonished that they looked like real animals, swimming about with a purpose. I told him that we were like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole after swallowing the EAT ME cake, too large to make ourselves known.

The next morning I brought the metal scope to a different pool, the golf-course water-hole. Kneeling on its edge, I used a dropper to fetch a bead of elixir, put it on a slide, and found an unexpected treasure: a bumper crop of one of the secondary phyla Mr. Moody had cursorily scooted over—dozens of whiskered rotifers whirling about and caroming off each other.

After dipping an empty honey jar and filling it with the pond’s broth, I carted my sample and the microscope around and demonstrated the animalcule circus, first to a flabbergasted Milty, then to an applauding Grandma Jennie, finally to Aunt Bunny and Michael and James. Cute rotifers collided and veered among the diatoms and plankton like a cartoon of tiny cats, unaware that they had been in a pond and were no longer there. “What a delightful discovery you have made,” Aunt Bunny declared. “And not a golfer would suspect it; he would only be concerned with his lost strokes.”

Before dinner I returned the unviewed remainder to their home.

That Friday the event I had set into motion came to its inescapable denouement. Ray pulled up at the house. I prayed for PG’s car to be empty. It wasn’t. My friend got out and stood in the road, yawning. I observed him from the upstairs window: a diffident, self-conscious boy I barely knew, in a suit jacket and tie with a beat-up suitcase. He didn’t belong here.

I wanted to run away, to never have been wiled by him or shared
intimacies on the subway. I hated the part of myself that had been needy enough to befriend him. Michael grunted in slapstick, declaring, “Your friend looks like Iggy.” He didn’t, but this was no joke and I refused to meet his flippancy.

“Aren’t you going to show me the Hotel?” Billy asked excitedly as I led him upstairs. I had talked about it enough; now it was at hand. I managed a nod. As my mother liked to say, “You made your bed; now you can lie in it.”

For the next two days I took Billy on a tour of my alternate reality while trying to regain camaraderie. Yet habits and gestures of his that once attracted me to him now seemed pretentious and affected. As he stumbled around the rink, I pretended not to know him. Later that day I left him in a beginner’s group at the ski slope while I took the rope to the top and sped down past. What an asshole I was! But I couldn’t help myself. The next morning I avoided getting packed into a toboggan with him, squirrelling my way into a different group, leaving him to ride alone with a couple and their child.

Without the charisma I had projected onto him, Billy was a priggish adversary who resented my indifference and demanded courtesies I withheld. But he was also a decent kid who lost his way in the hullabaloo of Grossinger’s. He didn’t know how to act or what was expected of him. How could he? That was my job, his host, to make him comfortable enough to shine. Trouble was, I didn’t like him anymore. So I made things hard for him much in the way I learned to do with my brother Jon—sneakily and irreproachably. I lavished more attention on Michael—on Milty, Irv Jaffee, and Jack the waiter. This was my preserve—no intruders allowed, certainly not uncool chumps or jackasses. All along I maintained a supercilious, chatty front. He kept asking, “What’s wrong. Did I do something?”

“Nothing,” I snapped.

It seemed that, once upon a time, through an improbable act of fate, I had escaped the Towers household and been given an unwarranted dowry like Dickens’ Pip. I should have been grateful, forever humble, but I had been practicing anything but humility. Through the years of coming, as if self-effacingly, to my father’s preserve I had turned into a tyrant too. Even as I gallantly pretended
to disavow Richie Rich, I played him to the hilt, the owner’s son. I enacted my mother’s false pride, exclusivity, and misanthropy, her condescension and cruelty toward others.

New York Richard was a shy, accommodating chap, modest and deferential, nose to the grindstone. He kept a low profile and turned the other cheek. Grossinger’s Richard was a careless, slaphappy miscreant, lacking, when the chips were down, even minimal decency. Handed everything, he extended and bestowed nothing. The two selves denied, even shunned each other. Together they had conspired to fool Dr. Fabian; now they kept their scheme from Dr. Friend.

I had told myself for years that Jonny was the bad guy in our household, a bully and punk; I was his hapless victim. Now I found myself just as much a bully, in fact more so. For I was not only treating a harmless friend worse than my brother ever treated me, I was proving that this behavior of mine didn’t need a valid excuse; it was in my character: I was an irascible trickster, Martha’s son through and through. Olivia de Havilland—as Catherine in
The Heiress
—spoke my lines when I spurned Billy exactly as she would have: “Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.”

I didn’t realize this as much as forebear its tawdry implications and unconscious guilt. I felt like a centipede exposed by its rock being turned over, scurrying to dig back into the dirt.

After three days Billy and I had run out of ruses. Our silence marked the demise of our friendship. But this time I was an undisputed jerk. I had been provoked by little more than embarrassment over a boy’s ugly suitcase and provincialism.

Perhaps that’s why I nursed the story of Billy and me so long, drawing it out until even Dr. Friend was exasperated: it held an unpleasant truth which I could neither admit nor stop picking at. I couldn’t tolerate intimacy. I couldn’t permit my two identities, Horace Mann and Grossinger’s, to share a friend or, more precisely, have that friend watch me squirming between them while pretending it was business as usual. I couldn’t integrate my two selves: the docile, intellectual schoolboy and the slaphappy, arrogant prince regent. Each was the other’s worst nightmare.

“What are you really thinking?” Dr. Friend would ask tiredly, again and again. “You’re a human being, you have flaws, you don’t always behave well. Welcome to the club.”

He was right, but my split selves, even as they hid behind each other, refused to come clean, to become reconciled enough to answer.

The end of P.S. 6 for my brother marked our departure from Park Avenue. Debby was attending the private bilingual Lycée Français, so there was no longer any reason to hang on at the boundary of the Upper East Side school district. We could get more space for less money on the West Side.

Placards advertising “apartments available” on façades of stone buildings had been invisible mainstays of New York, background art in an illustrated Gotham. Now as I saw them with fresh eyes, I imagined life inside each unknown monolith with six or seven cryptic rooms to let: kitchen, living room, dining room, bedchambers. Every time we were given a key and shown around, it was like briefly being another family, filling those spaces with our meals and melodramas.

After a six-week search, my mother and Bob settled on an affordable unit in a huge twin-towered building on the Park at 90th, the Eldorado Towers; we became denizens of 8C, 300 Central Park West. Bare of furniture, the space was evocative, an uninterpreted dream. A small cubicle with its own bathroom adjoined the room deeded to Jon and me. It was pronounced my study in order to allow me to work at night after he went to bed.

“How do you like it?” my mother asked.

I surveyed the gloomy nook overlooking a dark courtyard and answered without thinking, that it looked a bit cramped. That sounded ungrateful, so she slammed the door, adding a few seconds later from down the hall, “You’ll learn to like it. At least you better.”

Before the move she took me downtown to buy furniture for both my study and the “boys’ bedroom,” though she far exceeded their combined capacity—throwing in a desk and bureau for Debby, some chairs for the living room, and assorted tables. Then she charged it
all to Grossinger’s by having me sign the slip. We had performed this ritual numerous times—the previous summer the Hotel paid for Jonny’s as well as my Chipinaw clothes. My autograph was gold.

“They can afford it,” she said, “and they owe me this.”

I played a prank on Jon soon after we moved in. I attached a ball of string to the cord of the ceiling light in my study and ran it under the door into our bedroom. I took the remaining core into bed with me and, after an interval of feigned sleep, tugged the string to turn on the light. Jon propped himself up. “Who’s in there?” he whispered.

“I don’t know. Maybe someone’s gotten in the back door.”

I shook the string to create a rattling noise. Then I jerked it twice in succession to turn the light off and on again.

He jumped out of bed. “I’m getting Mommy.”

“No, wait.” I hadn’t meant for it to get that far.

I heard him waking them up, so I pulled on the string to turn out the light, but it snagged. I pulled harder and harder.

They were walking down the hall. They were opening the study door. I gave one last frantic yank! The light went out, the string came loose, and there was a crash of things falling off my desk—shades of Richard Oranger.

I pulled and pulled on that string until finally I got to the knot at its end, which I gripped to my belly like life itself. When they burst into the bedroom, I was frozen in perfect mime of sleep.

Jon and I didn’t fight physically anymore. We had begun to find language for our quarrel. Before sleep we lay in bed, dickering philosophies across the room. In our customary debate he took the viewpoint that the main goal in life was to have fun. “You have to agree to that, Richard!” he insisted. “How could you not admit something so obvious?” He thought I was denying it only to provoke him.

I, in turn, argued that the point of life was to figure out who we were.

“You think you’re such a bigshot,” he rejoined, “with that doctor
telling you stuff. You don’t know anything. What you’re saying is so stupid and fake! Even the rabbi calls you an infidel, but you try and get away with being superior and holy.”

That was household orthodoxy: on top of my other vices Jonny was a good Jew and I was the quintessential anti-Semite. Furthermore, anything colored by psychoanalysis was discredited perforce, as if obvious to anyone with half a brain, anyone except indoctrinated fools like Richard Grossinger.

We had no subtexts, no sublimations, no shadows. Paradoxes were prohibited within ten yards of discourse. The Towers family meant to go the distance by declamations, fake moralities, and righteous indignation. They were interested in things, not their effects.

For the rest of my sojourn in 8C Jon challenged me on this point—meaningfulness over fun—not considering I might really believe what I was saying, that it wasn’t a ploy to get his goat, though I could see he wasn’t having much fun. In fact, he was miserable, fighting ghosts, performing other compulsive rituals.

He would put a hand on the light bulb of his desk lamp and dare himself to keep it there. When that became unbearable, he cried out in pain and asked me to remove it because he would be a coward if
he
did it. He would read the same page again and again, reaching the end and then going back to the beginning. Desperate to break the spell, he would transfer the responsibility, summoning me from across the room or my study to turn his page, to dispatch the demon so he could read his book.

He was not unaware of these self-imposed torments, but he believed he was enjoying himself nevertheless because fun was his priority. These episodes were not anti-fun, they were just a different path to gratification.