New Moon (61 page)

There was no substitute or stand-in for the mystery of life itself.

And it said: feel this, you have always been willing to feel. It said: break asunder, you will know how to come back together. It said, meet your shadow before its separation from you becomes schizophrenic. It said, forfeit joy and solace; their concession will inoculate you against later loss.

You will awaken fresh, able to see the world in utter, meticulous depth, find words you never knew, taste maple for the first time, parry obliquities and chimeras (for they are as devious and bottomeless as they seem), court your lady for real.

I had been scared to death, almost obliterated at birth, but I crawled out of that venom on a leaf floated to me by a child.

A long latency followed, for I wasn’t ready to fly. Now my wings were drying off.

I panicked because, at core, I suddenly didn’t know who or where I was. My conscious self thought I was eating Kix and currants, dating at last, happy as a clam, or at least happy enough. My unconscious self realized how deep the waters had gotten, felt the bends, and sent its warning signal across the interstellar-like barrier that
separates unconscious and conscious space.

I thought I was in civic territory, another mundane neutral zone, but I wasn’t. I had entered the chapel unawares, for the gods needed to rouse me for sacred battle.

After the incident, I came to think of panic not as an enemy but a teacher and truthsayer. What I didn’t realize then was that it was also a transubstantiating shadow, a preparation by proxy for real crises that were to come. Having sparred with the ghost within, I was ready to confront forces in the world that opposed me with far more insidious gauntlets—for they could never be as dire and seminal as what I had already undergone. My family and its subculture stood against the kind of man I needed to be; they had always stood against it, and that fucked up my childhood and made my brother my foe. I had to win that ribbon on my own, have the moxie to see it through. That was what panic was teaching me. By taking the dark bath, by being immersed in the baptismal waters of Flash Gordon’s horrific shower, I was awakened, prepared, tempered.

Jon had been wrong about those ghosts: you weren’t supposed to defeat them by literal or lavish exertion, and you couldn’t defeat them, it was a false battle. The courage required was more like Christ’s: submission, obliteration, then rebirth. Faith means faith in the unbearable too.

I said “a cover story,” meaning as penetrating analysis as I can do. It is more like shreds of overlapping cover stories. No one knows the big picture. Crises with deep roots come closest to spilling the beans, to disclosing who we really are—they are looking-glasses through which our personal reality forms.

Before the end of the semester Lindy went to Penn to see her old boyfriend Steve again for a weekend. I was dismayed but still exhilarated for having gotten out of the whirlpool. I figured rather than wait this one out, I’d put myself in motion too. The previous summer I had made friends with one of the hotel drivers, a kid about five years older than me named Jimmy McAndrews. He said that any time I’d like to bypass my father and phone in a trip from Amherst
he’d be thrilled to come and get me, see that part of the world. So I called Jimmy at Traffic, and on Friday afternoon, like magic he was sitting in the Phi Psi parking lot in my father’s black Cadillac.

“I don’t think anyone really knows where the PG went,” he told me. “But no one will miss it for a while. Everyone will think someone else has it.”

It was great to have the Hotel come to me.

On the way home Jimmy heard my tale of woe about my new girlfriend who, sadly, was checking out her past guy in Philly—even that scenario so deliciously secular compared to the pagan oppression of panic. As he let me drive my first two hundred miles on the open road, we mustered a plan. Coming back on Sunday we’d intercept the last bus from Philadelphia in Hartford. Maybe she’d be on it; then we’d drive her back to Smith.

Sunday evening we filled the PG with sandwiches, fruit, cookies, and Heinekens and timed our departure so that three hours later we beat the bus by fifteen minutes. Astonished to spot me out the window, Lindy immediately got up and debarked. She collected her suitcase and jumped in.

By the time we reached Smith we were all three jiving and drinking beers.

The following week I received an acceptance letter from Seattle, but that seemed a pipe dream. Once again I went to the Phi Psi room committee, hat in hand. They assigned me the large double on the first floor for fall, to be shared with a wide-eyed sophomore-to-be from Boston named Marty.

The last visit with Lindy was agonizing. We were already planting a necessary distance between us and, as we strolled by the Smith boathouse holding hands, we argued about where our relationship was going. The time apart would be good, she said. Now that I was strong again I should build on my strength. “We can date new people and write each other as confidantes, wonderful intimate letters about our adventures.” Her jovial mood made me sulky. I accused her of tearing down what we had.

She had brought me me a goodbye card with a quote she had
hand-copied from painter Joan Miró: “Everywhere one finds the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists in staying at home and close to Nature. Nature who takes no account of our calamities.” As I read it, she added, “Remember that, dear, the next time you get stuck and I’m not around.”

She said we would always be good friends but could never be more than that. I didn’t want such a limit, didn’t see any reason for a limit now that we were parting anyway.

Fred had loaned me his mythical Rambler for the trip to Bradley, Hartford-Springfield’s airport, so I drove the forty-five minutes there. I kissed her quickly. Our goodbye passed without lingering—a girl with a suitcase merging into the crowd.

Upon my arrival at Grossinger’s my father told me with a hint of sadistic fanfare, “You’ve been promoted to desk clerk.” I flashed him a cod-liver-oil look. Playing hotel was not in my plans, plus a visible front-office role afforded no loopholes for escape. After thinking about it for a day I told him I’d rather find my own job.

He was momentarily speechless. “Okay,” he responded with a series of perturbed nods. “I’ll give you a week. If you don’t get something by then you’re washing dishes all summer.”

That seemed a fair challenge. My main impasse, transportation, was quickly solved when Grandma Jennie offered to lend me her Lincoln Continental, the JG, for the summer. It was far too ostentatious a vehicle for a nineteen-year-old with radical visions and only three hundred miles under his belt, but there were no ready alternatives. I knew that my father gave her periodic grief about it; apparently she held her ground because, other than continually making me re-park it in a spot that existed only in his mind, he never interceded.

Lindy was going to intern at the
Rocky Mountain News
in Denver, and I figured a newspaper was the most promising opportunity for me too. Setting off in my oversized white sedan, I turned east out of Ferndale onto Route 52 and drove fifteen miles to Ellenville, site of the Nevele. For the next three days I tried newspaper offices from there through Monticello, Liberty, and smaller villages, filling
out employment forms that were probably in files discarded when computers took over thirty-five years later.

Then I worked my way west on 52—the less populous direction out of Liberty along the Delaware River, across train tracks into Hortonville, past ramshackle farms and covered bridges. This was even less promising: no newspapers at all. On my last allotted day I came to the Pennsylvania border town of Callicoon, thirty miles from home. On its main street I saw a classic Norman Rockwell storefront:
The Sullivan County Democrat.
It seemed too mirage-like to be real, a façade I might have conjured as the state line imposed a fateful barrier. Compared to my cognitive map of Grossinger’s home county, Pennsylvania was as uncharted and remote as Wyoming, and my prospects were sliding fast, dishwashing on the horizon. I poked my head in far enough to glimpse an alcove dominated by hanging galleys and stacks of metal type.

Its proprietor was a mountain of a man named Fred Stabbert. He extended a hand to the young stranger and, with a cordial bark, grilled him in the doorway, his bulk precluding further entry.

He was succinct: he’d hire me once he determined I wasn’t running away from home. “The last place I need trouble from is Grossinger’s.” The
Democrat
was the one anti-hotel paper in a conservative Republican county, and it struck Fred as odd that the son of the owner of its largest resort should show up at his door looking for work.

I was ecstatic. The twenty-two miles from Callicoon to the G. flew by like ten. Fred no doubt took pleasure in his phone call to Paul Grossinger that afternoon. I imagined their cagey exchange. My father said nothing initially, but at dinner that night he seemed genuinely pleased—though he added quixotically, “So you don’t want to go into the hotel business?”

“You know I want to be a writer.”

He agreed he knew that.

I sent Lindy an account of these events and began work on Monday.

For the first week at the
Democrat,
I sat at a desk proofreading county news and writing captions for photographs of car wrecks, retiring supervisors, and high-school swimming stars. Fred kept
teasing that he was working me up to bigger things.

I enjoyed the time there regardless, especially bag lunches with him, his sister, and the rest of the crew by Callicoon Creek, luxuriating in sun and breeze off the water, exchanging regular chitchat and repartees. I tried to bring everyone a dessert from the previous night’s meal at the Hotel. My boxes of cakes and cookies were much anticipated, the politics behind them discounted, their yummies promptly eulogized and devoured.

Finally Fred dispatched me across the Delaware into Pennsylvania to cover a town meeting about snow removal. I mailed my front-page article to Lindy.

Her job in Denver was comparable, except that she was an intern at a big-city daily. She proofread too and rewrote other people’s articles. Otherwise, she was sent to cover veterans’ meetings and hundredth birthdays. Her first letter detailed all that and then stated explicitly everything I most feared:

Fred directed me to Ellenville to talk to a Japanese man who was saturating the Hudson and Delaware Valleys with cherry trees. I took down his tale: immigration to America, homesteading in rural New York, a vow to spread this gift from his homeland to his adopted country. I posed him in front of his orchard. My boss loved the story and decided I was more valuable hunting up
human-interest features than proofreading. I was given free rein to come and go.

I drove to small socialist hotels and bungalow colonies—diametric opposites of Grossinger’s—where I interviewed guests and staff. I met Kurt Shillberry, the most vocal opponent of the resorts’ tax breaks. He thought that establishments like Grossinger’s should pay for their share of County services at a rate in keeping with their revenue. Shifting restlessly on the couch, my father perused the published interview, then guffawed, “You’re a dreamer!” But at least he smiled.