New Moon (31 page)

Rodney strode across the room. “Hey, man,” he called out ahead of himself, “this isn’t the way it works. Nothing’s going to happen if you park yourself. You’ve got to find a likely candidate and dance with her.”

“I don’t,” I demurred, “see any likely candidates.”

He looked around, then pointed at a crowd, “How about her? That bird over there.”

At first I couldn’t tell whom he meant, but when my eyes fell on the chosen girl, she was raised to instant charisma by his regard.

“Look at those tits.”

I grimaced but maintained contact with his bravado.

“Now, go ahead.” Mission accomplished, he returned to chatting up the raven-haired beauty he had selected.

The music played “Dream Lover” and then the music played “The Battle of New Orleans”; still no other guy approached the
one Rod had pointed out. She was wearing a tight sweater, swaying to the music. Now that he had highlighted it, I couldn’t keep my mind off her obvious bustiness. I wondered why
he
had passed on her, designating her my speed. She seemed way over my head. Plus, girls were too serious a matter for charity—well, maybe she was too stout.

I waited until waiting was unendurable and then, on the next slow song, I walked over and asked her to dance. She nodded, smiled, and we walked to the center of the room. I placed my arms around her, and we seesawed in a square while exchanging talk like “Where do you go to school?” and “Oh, so you’re Rod’s friend…. ”

Her name was Phyllis, and she came from the Bronx where she went to public school. She was amazed when I told her about Grossinger’s. After the record was over she returned to her group, and I sat down on my side. Rod, whom I had observed watching me the whole time, came across the room and played mentor to the hilt.

“I told you I was going to teach you how to act if you came to Wakonda. Now here’s your first lesson. You’ve got to hold your partner really close. Girls don’t think you like them unless they can feel you up against them, your hand full, like this—” he flashed a quick open palm “—and going up and down their back like this. Then, after the dance, you sit down with her. It’s not tag team.”

I found him crude and boastful, and I wasn’t used to translating desires into strategies. Yet I couldn’t articulate a credible alternative. What
did
I want to happen and what was I willing to do to accomplish it? I hadn’t had success doing things my way—that led only to fantasies and daydreams—so I waited out two fast dances for the next slow one:
“I’m Mr. Blue-oo-oo-uh-oo / when you say you love me…. ”

Melding with Rodney’s gumption, I got myself back to Phyllis’ spot. I approached her, our eyes met. I asked, she nodded. As we walked to an open area of the floor, I put my arm hesitantly on her waist.

I had never danced close—neither Viola Wolfe nor Dave Hecht permitted it—but I saw everyone else doing it and I realized it would happen if I just moved my hand to a different place on her
back. By that elementary gesture I fell into total intimacy. Her breasts grazed my chest, a friction I had never felt before. My penis grew hard, as a charge ran up and down my whole being.
What if she could feel me?
Holding her close was my only assurance
no one else
would. This time we said nothing at all. I could hear my heart beating. My throat was dry and becoming sore.

Now she moved her hand along my back the way Rod had instructed. Yikes! This was it! In my mind I reprised Mel Allen’s voice: “That ball is going, going…. ” I tried to picture Mickey Mantle’s homers, one after another into the stands, deep into the bleachers, far back, against a pale sun; Bob Turley’s fastballs, launched again and again out of his big easy pitching motion: a combination of play-by-play with deepening baseball images. These represented the old rhythm, the familiar grace of a childhood suddenly gone.

For the next several nights I danced with Phyllis and sat by the side talking with her. She told me about her school life, her parents, past summers at Wakonda. The real event was the dancing, and I learned from other guys to wear a large sweater to hide excitement.

After a few days I wasn’t the only one asking Phyllis to dance. My rival was Bobby Sackett. He was my loudmouth bunkmate, so I knew that he wanted to be a dentist like his father because he thought it would make him rich; his only other ambitions in life were to own a motorboat and a sports car. He regularly beat me to the club to get a jump on the dance card. If he was late, he promptly cut in on me and then monopolized Phyllis. In order to recapture her company I had to walk over to where they were sitting and invite her to dance from scratch. When I questioned her about this arrangement, she told me that we were both her friends, she didn’t favor either of us—which I couldn’t understand. I had little personal confidence, but Bobby Sackett had the visage of a crocodile and was an obnoxious ass as well. Back in the bunk he talked about Phyllis boorishly, in fact only her breasts, usually the nipples, and always in the most vulgar language.

But how clean was I? Though I said nothing I would lie in bed imagining reaching inside her sweater and touching her, or having her pull her sweater over my head and letting me lick
those nipples. I would feel my erection pushing to the end of possible space.

On his home court Rodney grew ever more despotic, never deigning to join us in board games or softball, compulsively primping with a comb before the mirror as if he were Kookie Byrnes on
77 Sunset Strip.
It was almost diabolic the way he combed and recombed his black strands with Brylcreem, putting on layers of aftershave lotion and doing fake karate leaps half-naked, landing with his hand around his jock and a
kiai
-like shout—purpose, even tone, unclear. What did he think a man was? What kind of man did he want to be, did he think any of us should be?

On the pretense of helping his father do maintenance he prowled the girls’ camp with self-appointed authority, plucking sweethearts effortlessly. He used the darkroom for his trysts, mainly with Harriet, the first night’s damsel, an Indian-complexioned girl from Montreal with a sad, profound face. He didn’t talk about much else—it was girls or Pan X enlargements.

Our rapport had evaporated, our good times a million miles away. I couldn’t imagine what I had seen in him, he was obviously a lunkhead. I had invented and aggrandized him even as I had demoted and discarded Billy. Commuting heroes and cads, I was my mother’s son.

Rodney and I had one serious confrontation that August. He heard that a dog had treed a cat in the woods and ran to get his Rolliflex to catch the action. Moments later I heard too and came right behind him. He carried a tripod and set it at the base of the tree. As I arrived he exploded at me. “This is a prize-winning shot, you asshole. Get outa here. I’ve had enough of your fucking stealing my ideas.”

I ignored him for the rest of the summer. He was easy to give up; he had become the enemy.

It was now Harriet who beguiled me. In my fantasies she was the one I rescued, as I reclaimed my spaceship and set the old opera in motion. She and I built a house and sat out at night on our farm in another solar system, the Earth’s sun a star in our sky.

From dozing I was awakened by a creak of doors and whispers. This was the fabled raid. A bunch of girls had made it past the lax
guards, and they quickly matched up with guys. I could hear them making out, giggling. I had no idea whether Phyllis was there, but the sounds of making out were disturbing. For all the gossip, I had never been in a room where “it” was happening. I pulled the covers over my head and burrowed deep in my romantic innocence.

The proximity of attainable sex should have emboldened me, but I was chastened by people my age making animal-like sounds. Plus I didn’t relish competing with a pompous creep for Phyllis’ affections. Bobby was too showboaty and gregarious. I wanted out of his idiot crosshairs. I hated how he pretended to savor our rivalry as much as her company, posing dumb challenges to keep it going. Every time I danced with Phyllis he went through a charade of allowing me a certain quota of time before cutting in. Back at the bunk he liked to tally how much he was winning by, but he’d always add, as if genteelly, “Of course, we’ll let her have final say.”

By then I didn’t know if I cared about Phyllis that much or saw her as a person beyond the force of my desire, which at times seemed so overwhelming it would dissolve me. The trouble was, I was also offended by her presence, by the debauchery of my attraction to her more than anything in her personality or style. She was pleasant and ordinary enough, maybe a bit gross. But I didn’t like her flaky temperament and contrived ethicalness, her severe countenance when viewed at a certain angle, as if she were already an old lady. In an involuntary twist one night when I was fantasizing making out with her, she turned into a wrinkled crone like the sneezing baby of Wonderland who became a pig in Alice’s arms. Phyllis was as repugnant as she was alluring—now young and erotic, now a harridan and hag.

I couldn’t help it. I was tending my own changeling shadow. Because I didn’t dote on Phyllis like Joan Snyder, she became, in lieu of a muse, the exemplar of my kinkiness and guilt. Half the time I couldn’t bear to meet her eyes as we danced and gabbed, to risk having her read my thoughts, to watch her watching me watch her and guess my motives and real opinion. I preferred my chaste daydreams and idealized trysts with Harriet.

One night, I grew irritated enough to ask Phyllis to promise to
finish our dance.

“Not if Bobby cuts in.”

“Well, would you rather dance with him? That’s okay with me.”

“Why don’t you cut in on him?”

I shook my head at the stupidity of this game. When she responded to his tap a moment later, I turned and left the hall. It was Bobby who went on the next raid. He returned boasting of total triumph. I didn’t believe him, but I also didn’t care.

Near the end of the summer Rodney surprisingly asked another girl, not Harriet, to the Wakonda prom. It was Karen, whom we collectively had come to regard as the sexiest woman at camp. Not a girl—a dame. Tall and lissome, she wore skimpy blouses, talked like a starlet, and strolled casually with her whole body in motion. She seemed quite aware of how sexy she looked and wanted everyone to know it. “What a bod,” I overhead a counselor say. “Now that’s one fine piece of ass.” Her face was pale and Cleopatra-like, and she smelled of spice. Although a camper, she dated counselors, and gossip had her sleeping with more than one.

She reminded me of Jayne Mansfield, whom I had met recently in the family section of Grossinger’s. Accompanied by her agent George Bennett, a former Grossinger’s publicist, she enthused about riding on an elephant in New York the day before—then admitted how little she liked it “but Georgey set me up so I had to follow through.” Then, patting me on the head, she said, “What a cute little boy!” Back at Horace Mann, guys asked exactly which strands of hair. They wanted her direct transmission. (“I’m not surprised,” a friend remarked years later. “It’s not every day that one gets
Shaktipot
from Jayne Mansfield.”)

Karen was dark-haired, sleek, certainly not buxom—not at all like Jayne in looks or presence—but she exuded the same bombshell energy.

“And she’s fast,” Rodney announced to his fans in the bunk. “She gives.”

The moment when I could have appeared out of the blue and asked Harriet to the prom passed in a twinkle. A caustic, runty kid nicknamed The Bug must have had his eyes on her too because he
found her at once, invited her, and won her pledge to go with him. I was astonished. He didn’t come up to her shoulders and hadn’t been to the social hall all summer, but he kept saying he was going to get inside her pants. By challenging such comments, I ended up in a fistfight with him. We wrestled on the ground until counselors pulled us apart.

Back at the Hotel I sat in the den and told Aunt Bunny my tales of the summer. “I feel badly for you,” she said, “but you certainly make it into a great story.”

She had her own news: she had hired a teacher from the Liberty public school to live in the smaller guest room because Uncle Paul wasn’t around enough to serve as a father. “Your brothers need more male discipline and companionship,” she explained. “In this permissive environment they are getting out of hand.”

Jerry MacDonald was a former semi-pro shortstop, and ten minutes after I met him I thought he was the greatest guy ever. A marginally chubby young man with the sweetest of classic Irish faces, he continued to slay me with his playful disposition and cheerful laugh on top of feigned bafflement at local characters and high jinks. He knew how to be simultaneously fun-loving, courtly, and modest at Grossinger’s, not an easy trifecta.

We spent our first afternoon together on the ballfield, hitting fungos. I had never played with anyone that good before, who hit the ball so high and far and put such zing on his throws. “You’re not too bad yourself,” he volunteered generously.

“Yeah, but you came down from a higher league.”

“Pretty funny, but I’ll take it.”

Afterwards I led him on a tour of the grounds.

“This is some kind of place for an old Celtic ballplayer to end up,” he said with a grin. “When do I get to wake up?”

At Christmastime Wakonda held its winter reunion at a studio in downtown Manhattan. I took a break from Saturday homework and rode the IRT down Broadway; from there I walked to the address on the invitation. It was an indifferent social hall midtown,
the sort of joint I regularly strolled past without notice. I spent an hour in the crowd, munching cookies, drinking sodas, bored. After reminiscing with a few acquaintances, I was on my way out when I got tapped on the shoulder. I looked around … it was Karen. She was wearing a Wakonda T-shirt and had on very red lipstick. “Richie,” she said, speaking my name though I had never spoken to her, “guess what? I’m going to Grossinger’s on Washington’s Birthday. Are you going to be there?”

“Yes,” I managed. There was no other answer possible. But I had never gone there that weekend. It was my mother’s birthday.

“Good. Then I’ll see you.”