New Moon (70 page)

We sat in stunned humility. Each in our way, we knew that we were in a sacred space, being blessed by a priest.

In truth, it was a mystery event. If we had come in disguise, the Kellys were in disguise too, and so was the altar, camouflaged as a dingy tenement. In any
ordinary
sense the Kellys’ hut was dwarfed by Grossinger’s, but that tiny, rumpled apartment on the nether shore of the Hudson was a hologram of the entire cosmos. The Five of Pentacles had been drawn upside-down, the mendicants were
in
the temple.

Then Kelly told us to stick together and protect each other, as he assigned us the task of waking up Amherst and Smith. He handed Lindy the torn-off reading-list and bid us “God’s speed” with a mudra of his left hand, “Until the next time…. I’m sure there will be many.”

We left him copies of our work, and he promised to read them and discuss them on our return “which I hope,” he added, “will be soon.”

We drove into a different world from the one out of which we had trundled hours earlier, repairing like pilgrims from Plato’s cave who had seen how large the universe actually was. We found the way to the Taconic and followed its gentle wooded hills up through New York to meet the Thruway just before the Mass line.

“Give me a few days to get my life together,” Lindy requested at the door to Laura Scales. “It has been a radical and exhausting grail.” I nodded and drove back to Phi Psi.

Several times a week over the next two months I picked her up at Smith and we set out looking for new places to dine: a tavern in Hadley, the Aqua Vitae outside Northampton, a diner in Florence, a steak house in Springfield, the local Howard Johnson’s. There we ratified our emotional and artistic world. We protected the identity of our emerging twosome while enacting our apostasy within the Amherst-Smith demesne. Driven by an idealism and esoteric terminology few seemed to understand, we made appearances in our classes like double agents in collusion with a foreign polity, Kelly’s Bard. Most of Amherst and Smith spoke the party line, as if there were no muses or sacred paths, offering a familiar mince of cliché pieties, half-baked assertions, existential homilies—hedged bets all.

Kelly had conferred a guidance and rectitude we had long sought. For me it was not just his exemplar; it was the tarot, the Halloween ceremony, Jung, Crowley, Nelson’s angelic birds. I suddenly had numerous guides, present and transcendent. For Lindy, in her own words, “It was a breath of jarring, almost gagging cold air on the tepid waters of Smith’s academic grind, which was a constant struggle for good enough grades, nothing else. It was unbidden knowledge, an alternate artistic universe of food nourishing and necessary. I didn’t realize how starved I had been.”

Then there was her and my relationship. We had bonded incongruously and unexpectedly, as writers and seekers, but now we had reached another, more serious phase, beyond neophyte boy and girl in a gambol or expendable tryst. Kelly wanted us to succeed as a couple too, to dodge gossipy dissuasions and normative templates. He had put down a dare, given us a high bar to shoot for, but we submitted willingly, for we wanted follow his lead and gain our personal and artistic freedom.

For Lindy it was a break with the social world of her past, its dating rituals, and the sorts of men considered admirable in that sphere. I was not the guy she had been looking for or imagining, not even close—more like his antithesis. I was not only the epitome of Jewish New York but a renegade and outcast there.

And while I may have been looking for some combination of Alice in Wonderland, Cathy Carr singing “First Anniversary,” and
Emily Dickinson, I had been snagged by a combo of Simone de Beauvoir, Yvonne Rainer, and Annie Oakley.

I had no doubt found “her” too soon, but it was too late to do anything about it. We were in a trap—in my blue room with the yellow serape, not able to escape our pasts and divergent styles. We had been raised and trained differently, not only how to behave in the world but how to dress, how to witness yourself, how to be a man or a woman and how a man and a woman charm each other and expect to be charmed. Such customs ranged from the humdrum uses of social drinking and smoking to what to expect from life and love—in general how to occupy time and space and one’s own desires, plus all the vestigial habits people dredge up when they try to stay close, be best friends and a romantic couple too.

Personal traits are deep-seated and loyal and do not submit to ideology or hermetic edict. My girlfriend was scrupulous about her looks, though in a playful manner, creatively attuned to the impact of clothes, makeup, and style. She was brash and a bit wild, free and easy in her gyroscope through time and space, the nuances of flirting and touch. My ways of being and moving were unconscious, or derived cluelessly from baseball and lapsed Viola Wolfe dance lessons. I was mostly
un
aware of my appearance, lost in thoughts, forgetful that I was even being seen.

She embodied a milieu more culturally sophisticated than Betsy’s Miami Beach but similar in its self-assurance and sangfroid. She came from a strictly cordial family and had a fair amount of “Flower Girl” debutante glamour and Denver vogue to her. Trained in ballet from eight to sixteen and later modern dance, she was dazzling when she did the dance of her name. I was still trying to remember its sequence of steps.

I had an unexamined romantic penchant, a tendency toward literal, sentimental responses. By contrast, Lindy was cosmopolitan, experienced sexually and socially. She understood that relationship was complex, cantankerous, paradoxical, and that you usually got somewhere by going against the grain, confronting impediments and challenges rather than evading or pretending they could be finessed or overlooked. She was bored by pap and ritualized gestures
and by people’s knee-jerk valorizations of them, so she didn’t offer any lenient routes or passes.

I had no use for ritualized gambols any more than she did. I had tarried too long with civilians: casual wayfarers, geishas and mere narcissicists. I was ready to play for keeps with a complicated partner in a game that counted. So I tried to observe and respond conscientiously.

I wasn’t daunted by Lindy’s fast company. I had handled my mother’s onslaughts, so I didn’t flinch or back off her sometimes brutal assessments—and they were doozies, as accurate and deadly as verbal arrows got. I was stoked and challenged, for I was not only Fabian’s patient, I was his apprentice, a long-time psychological inquisitor, of late a literary and metaphysical reader too. I had trained a sensitivity to moods and projections, an attunement to paradoxes of intent. I didn’t get bogged down. I knew how to mirror and transform. I had done it for years with sundry folks from Abbey West to Betsy Sley to Jeff Tripp.

Our inconsonant rhythms and contrary histories precluded any ease of sexuality. That part of the relationship was a struggle from the get-go. She proceeded slowly, respecting old-fashioned adolescent boundaries. She did not want us taking on more than we could handle, her own social maturity notwithstanding. Liberated sex had not made her particularly happy, and she wanted off the fast track and the sorts of yardsticks and fellow travellers it provided. “I wouldn’t have blown in your ear,” she told me later, “if I thought you would have misunderstood or taken advantage like most boys. I knew I could trust you.” In that regard we were peers trying to change speeds and get in sync—her slowing down and me speeding up.

Life neophytes coming from opposite directions, we were training each other, trying to balance each other’s excesses, reforming each other’s rigidities and atavisms. That made our romance tough and diagnostic more than sexy and sweet.

We argued nightly, one more cigarette for her in the car before Smith’s curfew, trying to patch it together with a conciliatory more than romantic kiss.

Lindy was clear and acerbic and embraced the confident good-humored person when I became him, but she hectored and dismissed the perverse child. When I kneeled on the mattress looking wounded and distraught, she would say, “Enough,” and go for a walk in the Glen, or sit in the living room talking with other people, waiting for me to give it up. I despised that child too, but there was no place to hide him.

“That’s okay,” Lindy said. “So, we hate each other. It will all come out in the wash.”

Like Schuyler I was trying to scale the abyss of my failed adolescence in a single leap. Lindy was as helpful as another person, with her own destiny at stake, could be. She didn’t abandon me or get scared off when I panicked, but she also didn’t let my dramas take over or stampede her into compliance with desperate claims. She required that I make an ongoing, sincere attempt at normalization, to stop indulging and inflating my knee-jerk apostasies and paranoias. If I hadn’t, she would have been gone in a flash.

Yet she counted on my originality and prowess for dead-reckoning, my willingness to improvise and make unconventional choices, as I pushed her to break her obedience to spurious authority and decorum and to be her quirkiest, most free-associative self.

I had to learn how to my discriminate contradictory passions on the fly: the generosity of creative imagination (good) versus tantrums of mere contrariness (bad). My pranks, fears, and epiphanies ran in overlapping synapses, so it was a challenge to sort them out and retain my dignity as well as any ease or flair. I didn’t always stay on the beam of that one because I hadn’t experienced, at a baseline level, that
the tracks, though parallel, weren’t the same.
To my family it was
all
perverse and insane, every insight and audacity. As far as they were concerned, I had
no
visionary or aesthetic gifts. At best I was meant to become a lawyer or hotel executive. The trouble was, I had allowed myself to be minimalized and depreciated in my own mind too.

By what presumption was I purporting to court this woman? At times I would wake with a start like a man on a tightrope who had never been trained in the art; it seemed sheer overreach and bluff.
I hadn’t even dated yet. It was a wonder that Lindy even liked me, let alone perhaps loved me, that she saw a diamond in the rough.

When she was feeling good about our relationship, she might at random moments, even in public, let her entire weight suddenly collapse against mine like a modern dancer in an informally choreographed
pas de deux.
As I shifted with varying degrees of success to absorb her impact without losing balance, often stumbling a bit, she would pronounce with self-deprecating satire: “A man you can lean on!”

She was invoking a current fashion ad that ran regularly in the
New York Times Magazine
and
New Yorker.
A woman in a worksuit of blended polyester inclined like the Tower of Pisa against nothing but the words “A man you can lean on—that’s Klopman!” The issue of whether I was solid enough to hold up her weight too (if necessary) was crucial because Klopman had been her long-time standard. Before me, there were Steve and Jim and others like them—super-confident males. When she was dubious or incensed by my failings—the absurdity of even considering me boyfriend material—she treated the clothing ad as gospel and made comments like, “I need a different kind of man, and you need someone you can lean on too. If we keep forcing the issue, we are both going to end up on the floor.”

I tended to judge how we were doing by how seriously she took Klopman.

She decided to go to a friend’s house outside Boston for Thanksgiving (“Remember, familiarity breeds contempt,” she warned, amused that I had thought the word was “content.”). I went to the Hotel and used it as a base to revisit Bard. It turned out that Kelly had guests on that day, so Harvey led me to the home of Jonathan Greene, a married student and poet. Beside the fireplace after dinner I participated in an evening of scuttlebutt during which I fielded questions about myself. Harvey sat there smoking his pipe, nodding and smirking, tossing an occasional jibe like “Don’t forget, he’s not only got Amherst but Grossinger’s to live down.”

I visited Kelly the next afternoon. He expressed concern about
my “travelling without Lindy.” I acknowledged his warning and promised to return together, but he was already on to the next topic.

“Why did you tell Harvey and Jonathan your story and yet never a word to me, even about Grossinger’s?” I was dumbfounded that he already knew, then abashed as I pictured myself chattering away while the disciples prepared their report for the master. But was he saying that I should have told him my life tales too, or that I made an ass out of myself by telling them at all?

“It didn’t seem appropriate.”

“You’re right. It wasn’t. I caught the attention of the part of you that is awake, and you didn’t think to waste my time on such nonsense. Having Lindy with you helped; you were in too serious a situation to dawdle. With those others it was just nervous energy, nothing that counts in play. That’s okay. You defined them too. Nothing lost.”

He had a very definite opinion about my relationship to Grossinger’s. “You must have accumulated good karma in a previous lifetime. Grossinger’s is the universe’s way of rewarding you. Don’t reject it. That would be ungracious. Try to put it to good use. Since it is a blessing to you, try to be a blessing to
it.
Not in a culturally ritualistic way, as everyone will insist at the waste of both your time and theirs, but in the true sense of magi bearing gifts. Respect the karma of your family members too. Don’t deprive them of your knowledge or compassion out of second-rate political claptrap.”