New Moon (57 page)

I returned to the room where she was reading, and we talked idly for half an hour—my evasion now a barrier between us because
I couldn’t tell her the truth. We left in time to hitch back before her curfew—a thoughtful goodnight kiss at the doorstep. She said she’d see me soon. There was no evident cloud on the horizon, just a deepening of the puzzle. I assumed things would go on as they had and culminate somehow. I didn’t think beyond that; I barely even thought
that.
Hitching back from Smith in the rear of a car full of kids, I stared numbly at the night. In my mind, indelibly stuck, refusing to let my thoughts go blank, were the words of “Wild About my Lovin’” as plunked by Tripp on his guitar:

Two days later I got a letter:

I didn’t realize it then, but that note was farewell. Mine, not hers. Ginny was the enchantress I had been seeking for years, so she wasn’t easy to give up, but she was inscrutable and had a fiancé. Though wild horses wouldn’t have kept me from her—on a conscious level anyway—I had reshuffled the tarot and was ready to deal new cards.

I came upon her letter ten years later while cleaning out files and was moved to tears. How thoughtful and eloquent she had been, how heartfelt her statement, and generous! I was a stubborn child, twisted up inside. In all my bravado of complexity and themes within themes, I couldn’t hear her simple rightness and respond to her as she deserved.

So I tried to answer ten years late and say “I’m sorry.” I wrote to Smith for her address and found out she had left after sophomore year; they had an address for her under a married name in Cochabamba, Bolivia, care of the Peace Corps. My letter came back “addressee unknown.”

The last time I saw Ginny was a summery April Saturday a few weekends after her trip to Virginia. I hitched to Smith in high spirits and went to her house and asked for her.

“Hi, hi,” she said excitedly, poking her head out of the kitchen. “I can’t see you today. I’ve got lunch duty and then a big paper to write. But call me—we’ll set another time.”

I’m sure I would have, but before I could, the fortune teller laid down a different hand.

As a twelve-year-old I read lots of adult science fiction so, when asked to write a term paper in Second Form English at Horace Mann, I had a ready topic: “Themes and Symbols in the Work of Robert Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon.” That was when I incorporated the notion of alternate probabilities into my life.

Sheckley’s premise was that the present is made up of infinitesimal minutiae. The movement of a single object by a careless time-traveller could alter the whole course of history. What if a rock had been seized as a weapon in a moment of battle by the chief who was to unite the American Indian tribes into a nation that discovered Europe? What if that rock were kicked out of his
reach a thousand years earlier by a time-traveller from a 22nd-Century Indian Empire? If the chief were then prematurely killed for the cudgel being beyond his reach, the traveller might find not only that he had no country to return to but that he himself was impacted in time and space, unable to be born.

“Worlds without end,” wrote Sheckley, “emanating from events large and small; every Alexander and every amoeba creating worlds, just as ripples will spread in a pond no matter how big or how small the stone you throw. Doesn’t every object cast a shadow?”

My life was made of such shadows, a raffle of undrawn lots. Ever since reading Sheckley’s story I had played a game with probabilities, tinkering with paths to alternate universes. Periodically I would take an unplanned route to check if it made a calculable difference in my life. While I could not (of course) know what I missed by my detours, I never succeeded in altering fate in any obvious way. On this morning, as promising as its blue sky, yellow buttercups, and dandelion riots, I was disappointed in not having Ginny go out into the spring with me, and I did not want to return to Amherst.

What I failed to see was that she was receding anyway at light speed, already a residue of something ineffable. Upon reaching the turnoff to the hitching post, I decided to cast my lot with the ripples … and pivoted in the opposite direction. Then I walked three-quarters of the way around a block rather than corner to corner.

Whether by accident or subliminal design, I came to Laura Scales House and remembered Lindy. I went in and asked for her at the desk. I was in luck. Minutes later she appeared in the stairwell.

“What a surprise! I was sitting in the smoker feeling depressed and sorry for myself, not able to do a stitch of work, wishing I had some wonderful visitor … and then you just arrive.” I asked if she would like to go for a walk into town, maybe a glass of lemonade; and she nodded. “Wait, though,” she added. “I want to go upstairs and change.”

She came back wearing a blue and white striped polo shirt, a light sweater, and tan slacks. After a hiatus of almost six months we took our second walk into Northampton. After ordering sweet rolls and
lemonades at a café, we picked up our narratives at an outdoor table.

It hadn’t been working out for her in Philly; she felt used on the weekends and then cast aside—no real conversation, no emotional contact. So, she wasn’t going there for a while, and Saturdays were particularly lonely. Her classes were also discouraging, her teachers uninspired, even vindictive, mainly concerned with a narrow line of critical thinking.

I could object similarly about Amherst, but at least I had a few good courses now and was surrounded by lively people at Phi Psi. I told her about Paul Goodman’s visit, Schuyler, D. H. Lawrence’s
Rainbow,
and a bit about Ginny. I even recounted how the ripples had led me to her doorstep. She found that remarkable and foolhardy, but she was the perfect audience, for she heard and gave back every nuance and resonance.

We returned to the campus, a charge of ideas and rhythm between us. Everywhere sun, birds, flowers filled the air, and my mind and heart. I told her a sudden inkling—that Freud had discovered only the method of symbols, but nature itself from the beginning of time had been creating clones, replicas, cues. I identified them wheeling about: the screech of blue jays, patterns of clouds and leaves, signals not needing interpretation or criticism. “The trouble with our teachers is they think they can explain things. But there’s nothing to explain. There’s only the breeze, the Wheel of Fortune, clover, a horse in a cave at Lascaux, billions of stars.”

She shifted the conversation to
Moby Dick,
the subject of the paper she was trying to write when I arrived, and I pointed at the sun that Ahab said he would strike if it insulted him.
“That
is the White Whale,” I said as we glanced briefly at the blinding disk. “The same primal force is there. Ahab wanted to strike at the heart of nature itself. Moby Dick was just his passing snare.”

“I can see that,” Lindy said. “So much more powerful than a symbol to be a real breathing creature, a real sun.” She was lucid and sparkling, tall and strong, challenging me with a forcefulness that met my own. She spoke not of magic and literary allusions, as I was wont, but of emotions and feelings and how hard it was to reach people. “For me they always seem to skitter over my surface
like bugs. Their shallowness even betrays this lovely day. Maybe only the trees and fields can be touched, and they don’t speak. Certainly I couldn’t touch Steve, or Jon before that, and it doesn’t appear as though you could touch Ginny.”

I adored her directness. Her face conveyed an Athena-like intelligence, and her eyes were filled with both sensuality and knowledge. I felt that afternoon like the Magician presiding over the First Trump, spinning out worlds without diminution. She was the Priestess of the Second Trump, deepening them, weaving them together, making the universe calm and lovely. After our snacks we found a place on the grass and held court there till late afternoon. Then we hiked back to Wiggins Tavern for dinner.

This was the beginning—we both must have known.

The following Saturday I met her again, downstairs in Laura Scales. She was more dressed up, in a blouse and dark skirt, light perfume, and we hitched to Amherst together. I felt uncertain who we were as boy and girl. To me she was as perfect as anyone could be, present and contacting, sexy by force of her intelligence but also stunning with a Circê look I could never resist. She was tall and statuesque, regal but lithe, her body a dancer’s, elegantly poised, strong and nimble, large hips, full but delicate breasts. Every movement was comely and aesthetic, her own, no wasted motion. She honored a vaguely crablike scuttle as she walked, a sideways predilection, breaking up lines, casting spirals about me, her swoops and gestures as fresh and entertaining as her talk. Her mouth was large and sensuous, her pale eyes intense and focusing under heavy brows. Was this a date?

We took a table in the Phi Psi social room, drank beer, ate pretzels, talked. I felt so pleased to be with her even if she wasn’t entirely a girlfriend. There was a brief predicament when Jon peeked in with his current consort, but he saw Lindy and was quickly out of there.

I asked her if she had noticed him and she nodded. “He’s still chaperoning around
les
selected
femmes
like some sort of mogul. He’s pretty gross.”

“He’s also a fake. For all of us still, it’s our parents’ money,” I said. “We haven’t done anything yet. It’s so easy to pretend and lose who you are.”

“For girls it’s especially easy. You’re taught to please men, to be what they like, and you do that so easily you don’t even realize you’re doing it.” She paused. “This friendship is a great relief to me, like a break from the whole tyranny of dating.”

My heart sank at that comment, but I didn’t back off. In the first chapter of
The Rainbow
Tom Brangwen was carrying a load of seed in his cart out of Nottingham through Cossethay; that’s when “she” passed him on the road—the unknown woman who corralled his mind and soul. “The load of seed” was both a cargo and a symbol, not just for the male gamete but the germinal force itself. Tiny seeds birth us blindly into being, and in their ripening bear us toward fruition. We don’t have a choice, Lawrence warned. When we least expect it, nature summons men and women from obscurity to be each other’s lovers.

There was a silence between us, and she said, “let’s dance,” and I said “okay.” The Phi Psi basement was the setting, but it had become another, almost allegorical space. I held her almost fragilely as if to preserve every molecule of our contact, its different weight, scent, her blouse, the feel of her head against mine, the tightness of her bones and muscles, her sweet, gentle angularity. She was denser and springier than Ginny—
she was there.

I didn’t know what was proper—dance close, dance chastely apart—but she automatically danced close. I felt myself transported, as much by the sense of our fitting together—the solidity and definiteness of her and me—as by an erotic feeling. I was inundated by her whole presence and bearing. It was the first dance that didn’t feel spurious or self-conscious.

I was the deejay. It was my own tape playing, a compilation I had made in the fall, a band from the movie
The Alamo
 … the Brothers Four. I heard it as the theme song of
The Rainbow:

Oh, everything! In that moment every intimation I ever had filled me. I didn’t have to know the answer or articulate the mystery. Just as I was, I was complete.

I experienced the generations of life on Earth, how single men and women each come into being, grow, find lovers, have babies,
plant their crops, die. I had spent my time on dream planets. But Lindy was the grace of the whole West—and I was holding her.

And then she did something startling. She playfully blew in my ear, not just once, but continuously, a soft, sustained breath. I had never felt anything so tender and tantalizing. My body froze in rapture, as though all my attention had to go into perceiving this before it passed. She blew harder, looked at me, smiled, then blew in my other ear. With adolescent awkwardness I felt myself become hard and extend out against her. She acknowledged that with a smile, and then shifted her head and put her tongue in my ear and rolled it there so smoothly and deeply I felt as though it were passing through my brain. I drifted in bliss trying to make that ear even more available to her. And, at last, my feeling sustained the feeling in the song:

Now I glimpsed the pathway to the center and saw how rich and complicated the world was—not my mind but the world. Everything I had both feared and wanted had an existence, an autonomous tangibility. In my senses I tumbled through primal symbols, fragments of memories … a tulip garden at the edge of creation, the forest of my sixth-grade dream, the essence of those aromatic vines coursing through my ears. I saw a friend I had as a child named Phil, a magician Dr. Fabian, kids from Bill-Dave baseball, Chipinaw campers singing “Friends” in a chain, all combined in me, all once, all briefly, because they didn’t have to be (and nothing in the universe could be) forever. I wanted to acknowledge them each and thank them for being alive, for me being alive, for sustaining me to get this far, to this large a reckoning.