I returned to college after Christmas with a new strategy for transferring. A dissident English professor named Roger Sale had departed Amherst with a rousing farewell speech two years earlier. Decrying his students’ blind obedience to authority and substitution of cults of personality around faculty for real scholarship, he admitted that he had been disruptively eccentric himself and said and done outrageous things in class, but that was only in order to wake “smug robots” from habits of “abstract servility:” their unspoken “contempt for knowledge” and “huddled scholasticism.” Accusing the college of “a rather dogmatic sense of its own superiority,” he proposed that its aim of excellence from its students was cultivated primarily “in order to maintain this superiority” or, more properly, its illusion. The school was “snotty, elitist, avowedly Protestant, and provincial … a box filled with agile white men like a squash court.”
His concluding elegy was a quick, wry jab at Amherst’s collective hubris: “So, I say goodbye. You are off, I hope, in spite of all I have said, to lead. I am off to where the dream is not of a whole man but of a whole society. Go to hell—and thank you.”
Sale was memorialized as an underground hero, and people compared my chapel oration to his. He was now teaching at the University of Washington. I wrote to Professor Sale before Christmas and, when I got back from Florida, I found a letter from him on the Phi Psi table, encouraging me to apply to Seattle and offering to help if I came there. I sent at once for an application.
Between semesters my roommate Greg had left for the dorms, so I reclaimed the whole space. In his former corner I hung an ancient horse from Lascaux alongside Paul Klee’s knight in a rowboat. In the Klee a comic figure speared at three crooked fish dilating through a bent shaft of opalescence, its sourceless glow lighting a universe of more and less deeply-bathed cubes from white azure to blue-black. Alongside pranced the primordial steed of our species, fierce and cute, the spare charcoal of its mane and hooves seminal to everything. These were my insignias: vortices to the unknown.
For second semester I signed up for three new classes—only Leo Marx’s American Studies section and Geology carried over. I enrolled in a seminar on D. H. Lawrence; an Abnormal Psychology course taught by Roy Heath, a visiting professor from Pittsburgh (where he was a colleague of my mother’s brother Lionel); and a survey of modern European drama. The latter was inspired by Tripp, who was directing a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that he was planning to take off-Broadway.
The three magical-realist “Jeans”—Anouilh, Giradoux, and Cocteau—were a revelation, and I became an enthusiast for the theater of cosmic irony. Rehearsals of Godot were going on day and night in the Phi Psi living room—Jeff starring as Pozzo, with a whip, monocle, greatcoat, and breath freshener alongside my former room-mate Greg’s older brother Brett as Estragon. I loved the performance of paradox, the shift into the negative space.
In these avant-garde playwrights the conventions of theater digressed into something between staged philosophy and science fiction. Men stumbled across minimal sets calling out to gods who were their own inventions, pulling characters out of parking lots in other eras. Antigone and Oedipus were reincarnated as Europeans performing Freudian myths that were themselves pre-Homeric apologues. As Anouilh put it, “I do not want to understand. I am here for something other than understanding. I am here to tell you no, and to die. To tell you no and to die.”
“No” was something I had not rehearsed enough—no to my mother, no to Leo Marx, no to PG, no to the dungeon stairs, no to Betsy. I may have demurred and rebelled, fled or disobeyed, played pranks and gone amok, but I never said a confident no or defended the bastion of my existence.
My theater teacher, Stephen Coy, was an admirer of Tripp, so, for once, I had authority on my side—free rein. For my term paper I wrote sixty pages of my own Anouilh-like imitation of Hamlet in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father cries out, “Stop in the name of Jean Cocteau!” Later, Hamlet reads a baseball magazine on his bed after delivering a key soliloquy, and America’s role in Vietnam is satirized in Denmark’s “Norwegian crisis.” The vendors selling food and souvenirs during intermissions are actors in the play and speak key lines—there was, in effect, no intermission, though the audience wouldn’t immediately know.
Passing my old Shakespearean tyrant, Professor Baird, on one of the paths that crossed the campus that winter, I let drop a “Hello, sir.”
“Watcha doing?” he snapped distractedly. This of course was the man famous for his canonization of the Bard and disdain for student work. I needed to get him into my script.
“Most recently I rewrote Hamlet,” I deadpanned.
It would be impossible to imitate the startled grunts and outraged syllables that followed. So I cast him as a second Pollonius, wandering in from the twentieth century to dismiss the play in person.
Tripp told me that in America not being able to drive was “tantamount to not having a dick.” So, I immediately looked up “Driving Schools” in the Yellow Pages and enrolled in private lessons with a man who turned out to be the Northampton High football coach.
“That’s who should teach you!” Jeff roared with delight, as he leaped into his own vehicle and bombed onto College Street.
For six weekly sessions I hitched to Northampton. From there the coach took me out on back roads where I performed the rite of passage to his drumbeat of commands.
At Horace Mann I had taken a month-long class, so I had already experienced the weirdness-thrill of sliding behind the torus onto the throne of Bob Towers (and numerous Grossinger’s chauffeurs), then commanding a vehicle’s mazy course. My first spin began as a broken line of lurches along a block of Riverdale. But once I got over my reticence, it was pure Penny Arcade. As I was propelling myself over the scenic drum, HM’s driving domo, Mr. Zachary, must have detected a dangerous shift because he asked me to pull over. I presumed a mechanical error.
“Don’t ever forget,” he pronounced sternly, “that every moment you are behind that wheel you hold life and death in your hands. Ever!”
“I like that one,” said the Northampton coach. “I’m going to steal it for myself.”
I made one bad move when I confused coach’s directive, turning against my own better judgment to the left, ending up in a tobacco field.
“What the fuck!” he blurted in startled horror. “‘Right!’ Right right right. Right means right.”
It was my only miscue. A month later I got my Massachusetts license in the mail.
Jeff had nailed it: the document felt like enfranchisement, tribal permission, an irrefutable coming of age.
In Psychology we began our semester by studying the etiology of neurosis, which brought back memories of my subway concierge Neil quizzing Dr. Fabian after my sessions. Our coursebook, Norman Cameron’s and Joseph Rychlak’s canonical Personality Development and Psychopathology, might have been Neil’s graduate text. Its opening pages christened the famous id, where torrents of primal libido got discharged until the nascent ego contained and bound them into a personal identity. Such was the emotional energy of our lives—cathected and transformed as “fantasies, daydreams, conflicts, object relations, the self, and social roles.” No more statistics to parse—this was “inner sanctum” stuff.
Dr. Heath was a mild, reassuring professor, not unlike a psychotherapist himself. Because of my background with Fabian and Friend—a legacy I recounted at our first meeting—and his connection to my Uncle Lionel, Heath and I became out-of-class buddies, sharing meals in town, sometimes with my friend Paul joining us.
Early in the term the professor took our class on a trip to Northampton State Mental Hospital. Patients flocked around us, vying for attention. One young man cornered Paul and me and showed us a sketchpad of his inventions, page after page, meticulously drawn: men with wings, elaborate pulleys and windmills. He told us that the police had incarcerated him there to steal his work, and he asked for our help in escaping so he could apply for patents before it was too late. We promised to try.
Another guy confided to Dr. Heath that he was the psychiatrist and the doctors were his patients. I whispered to Paul that Anouilh would have agreed.
Then a grotesque, over-dressed elderly woman took both my wrists in her hands and told me that she knew my grandmother. Surely that couldn’t be true, for she didn’t even know my name. But people had tossed that line at me since I became a Grossinger, and I loathed it to the point of being uncivil. Grandma Jennie appeared on TV so often selling rye bread in a commercial that began, “Hello, I’m Jennie Grossinger” that, at Horace Mann and Chipinaw, kids nicknamed me “Jennie.”
Now I felt as though a madperson had read through my paranoia and was flouting it.
“Don’t let them get to you,” Dr. Heath had warned, “because they will.”
Back in class I questioned whether most of these inmates had real diseases—neuroses and psychoses by Cameron’s definition—or whether they were simply victims of a capitalist society. What I had observed were women deemed too grotesque or unattractive to find husbands, elderly folks without homes, prodigies who couldn’t adapt to cultural norms. I applied the sociological arguments of my American Studies reading to the terminology of my “Abnormal” textbook and wrote interlocking term papers.
Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was my link between Freud’s theory of neurosis and the addictions of our rat-race civilization. Goodman had connected the anguish and exile of individuals to the vapid materialism of our culture, almost gleefully assaulting the world in which my parents had spent their lives: “human beings working as clowns … thinking like idiots … Alternately, they are liars, confidence men, smooth talkers, obsequious, insolent…. ” No kidding! That covered the landscape, from Grossinger’s and the Nevele to midtown Manhattan and the conclaves of politicians. No wonder Godot never came. No wonder Quemoy, Matsu, and the Cuban Crisis. No wonder Betsy, Helene, and the rest … Barbie dolls, startlets in soap operas, dupes in vehicles for capitalism. Even our sexuality didn’t belong to us. Schuyler was right—“Growing Up Absurd” was the least of it: “If there is nothing worthwhile, it is hard to do anything at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question, is one nothing?”
The source of these proclamations, Mr. Goodman himself, visited Marx’s class—he was a friend of the professor. A group of us went to lunch with our guest afterwards. I had expected a thoughtful social critic, even a compassionate elder, so I was unprepared for the gruff, belligerent curmudgeon who spat sermons at us and pushed aside our questions by saying that kids our age cared about fucking and nothing else. After he made that assertion the third time—seemingly oblivious to the fact he had already said it twice—Schuy and I stomped out.
Goodman’s book remained seminal to me, but in my mind I had appropriated it from its author. The man was right, of course: we were stuck in adolescent fantasies and probably useless for more nuanced discourse. But that didn’t make us libidinal beasts without discernment. It wasn’t sex that drew me; it was the texture of seductive feelings. It was the way things changed and were changed into each other in the tinder and alchemy of masturbation, a vast, cryptic river flowing into “Oh, Shenando’h, I love your daughter…. ”
I was roused at one level by the lure of girls but at another by the fathomless labyrinths of feeling in myself where guises radiated deeper guises and were entangled mysteriously, one veil over another, closer to Keats’ nightingale than Playboy magazine.
We were all bound away somewhere, across some “wide Missouri,” coming from, going to, an insoluble riddle. That’s what I sought in my own erotic depth, the sense of how deep I went—and my desire went.
For Goodman and Beckett the magic of desire had been lost in the sludge of the world—discarded in the garbage cans of Tripp’s stagesets. At finale, the prophets warned, we will find our hearts and souls empty; we will be unable to go on. But I was still brimming with hope. I honored Beckett because he was spare and pure, but I didn’t want my birthright stolen by cynics and lesser muck-a-mucks.
Catherine Carver spent many months with the finished draft of Salty and Sandy and the polished sections of The Moon, and she finally wrote back that, although I was very talented, I had not yet written a book publishable by Viking. She trusted that by continuing to work with her I would get to that point. She presumed that we would talk the next time I was in New York.
I was crestfallen, though I knew all along that something wasn’t right. My writing felt too childlike and iconoclastic for the world of Saul Bellow. Yet my fantasies of the future were tied to being a novelist, and this woman was my Tom Greenwade—he was the scout who found Mickey Mantle when sent to look at another Oklahoma player. She had discovered me and was my champion in the bigtime.
With no fallback life on tap I skipped a Friday of classes and took the bus into Manhattan to meet Miss Carver for lunch. She picked a distinguished literary restaurant where she told me right off that The Moon was going in a dangerous direction, away from reliable narrative into occultism, and she warned me again about reading Olson. “You are no longer making believable stories or creating characters who are real. Some of the writing in The Moon is truly inspired, but I think it belongs in essays, not novels. Even so, you are elevating the tarot to an unwarranted, almost absurd level.” She wanted more Grossinger’s, more irony, more satire, more sex—in general, more action and less philosophy.
She was asking me to abandon the writing that was most meaningful to me. I needed the view from Luna to transcend the banality of my own plots. I needed the scope of Olson and Beckett to yank me out of beach parties and teen gossip and get me into the greater cosmos.
My father was in the City that afternoon, so we had dinner in his hotel room. He too was interested in the career implications of my lunch with Catherine Carver and, when he heard my disheartening account, without forewarning he picked up the phone and dialed without explanation. After a few seconds I realized that he had called the popular novelist Harold Robbins.
“Harold, Paul Grossinger here … yes, you can do something for me this time.” In the course of the conversation he wrote down an address. “You meet him at his place; he’ll read your work and tell you what it’s worth; then you’ll know whether this woman is just pulling on your chain.”
It had the crudity of all his offers, but I too wanted to know what Harold Robbins would make of Salty and Sandy. It was such a preposterous, tantalizing notion I didn’t think of passing it up. The next morning I took the bus downtown and rode an elevator to a penthouse where a middle-aged man in a silk bathrobe led me into his living room and offered me Danishes while he sat on a sofa flipping through my manuscript. After fifteen minutes he let me know he was finished by taking a deep breath. Then he said:
“You’re a writer. You’ve got a ways to go, and this stuff isn’t ready to publish, but these editors, they’re frustrated college teachers; they want to latch on to some young kid and school-marm him. I don’t know what kind of writing you’re going to do, but keep going and it will work itself out. Don’t change for her, for the promise of publication.” As I left he thought to add, “When you’re ready, come see me. I may have my own publishing company by then.”
The next time Catherine Carver wrote me I replied candidly, telling her the gist of my exchange with the author of The Carpetbaggers. She had a markedly unhappy response—carbon copy to Leo Marx.
“How could you even listen to such a hack!” he berated me after our next class. “First Charles Olson, then Schuyler Pardee, now Harold Robbins. I put myself out for you. Look what I get. You taught me an important lesson: never get too close to students.”
But Tripp enjoyed the Harold Robbins affair. “Serves Marx right,” he chuckled. “The fatuous dictator!”
I called a girl out of the Mount Holyoke picture book. Jane was a tall pixie who discovered a scratchy, old Alice in Wonderland platter among my records and insisted we dance to it at once. Giggling compatibly and stomping like puppets, we acted out the “Lobster Quadrille”: “‘Will you walk a little faster,’ / said the lobster to the snail. / ‘There’s a porpoise right behind us, / and he’s treading on my tail.’”
Despite our merriment and shared admiration for the mock turtle, she turned down subsequent invitations to revisit him or me.
Then one night in February I made a “picture book” date with a girl at Smith and, on the chosen Saturday, hitched over to Northampton to meet her. She was late coming downstairs and, while I stood in the foyer, a striking-looking blonde on desk duty asked where I was from and what I was studying. She was curious too about my choice of a date. When I told her how it had originated, she smiled and offered, without hesitation, that I was in for an unpleasant surprise. A silence followed. Then she confided, as if sharing another secret, that she herself was a writer.
She was a compelling being with a sad, demure face, the aura of an old-fashioned fairy-tale maiden.
This was who I should have been going out with, but then my date appeared.
Nancy was a small energy packet of girl who was already practicing the twist on the way to the highway. She was looking forward to an evening of partying and announced right off that Phi Psi was the pits and we should go elsewhere. I seemed incidental to the matter, a pinball that had put her into independent motion. She talked so incessantly about a new British rock group that it was years before I could listen to The Beatles without bias. All evening I looked forward only to getting back early enough to see if the girl was still there. She wasn’t … and I hadn’t even gotten her name.
But I was friends with a senior who dated a girl from that house, so I asked him to inquire discreetly. Her name was Ginny, and I called her the next night. “Of course I remember you,” she said.
I started to explain how she had been right about—
“Do you want to go out this weekend?” she interrupted. It was like Tripp saying, “Stop chattering.” As simple as that.
What I saw the second time was a lean, medium-height girl with a complicated, mature face and an inexplicably heavy heart. Amid campus weekend hoopla, her melancholy was reassuring, even beguiling. Her dress had lots of lace, and she wore a pearl necklace. We caught a ride to Amherst and, after a visit to the basement (where she was much awaited by a curious Paul and crew), we went upstairs where I sat on my desk and she settled on the couch. I read to her from The Moon and Olson’s Distances. She followed from a small sheath of her own poems, concise landscapes and startlingly graphic love psalms; then she read a few favorites from my collection of D. H. Lawrence’s poems.
Ginny was from Wisconsin, though she had spent lots of time in the South; she was a sophomore like me and was also thinking of transferring. She bore many of the same sorts of grievances toward Smith that I did toward Amherst, bemoaning the ritualized dating, materialistic values, and downbeat teachers. She was a kindred being, though her depth was ungaugable.
After she had finished the last Lawrence poem, there was a silence, and I asked if she wanted to dance. It was so obviously a request for contact I at once regretted it. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I added with a bashful grin.
She said she didn’t like to dance but gestured for me to come by her on the couch. I did. We looked at each other, and I saw in her a mirror of my wanting, a mouth opening, and I met it. We kissed long, repeatedly. I reached out from my heart and held her against me. This was what I had waited for, so many tangled years from the dream of Annie Welch. It wasn’t just a single kiss, or a feint in a game I didn’t understand. It was a time and place to do nothing else but feel someone and be kissed, and kiss. And there was so much to it—hair, a neck, a back, a backbone, a face, lips, a tongue, pausing for a breath and looking at each other, beginning again simultaneously.
As we walked silently back to the College Street hitching corner, she said, “I could feel it that first time I saw you. I knew this would happen.”
During February and March we went out each Saturday night, sometimes to dinner, sometimes to a movie, but always to my room where we took up kissing and caressing. Loving was not some elusive thing in my future; it was as intrinsic as the desire that led to it, in fact more so, for not being fantasy. I was in a waking dream.
I was astonished to hear Ginny had a boyfriend in law school in Virginia whom she was thinking of marrying. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing with me, but she was open about her feelings. “You’re very wonderful,” she said, “but I don’t know who you are. You don’t even know. You’re the original ‘ugly duckling,’ and I have no idea what you’ll become. I’m the first person to reach you, so I can touch only so much. But I love the part of you you let me touch. Anything else going on in my life is immaterial to that.”
I wasn’t nearly that articulate. I couldn’t communicate or even understand my absorption in her, but I clung to it like a life raft. I wasn’t infatuated the way I had been with Betsy or even Harriet at Wakonda. I didn’t idolize Ginny, but I was addicted to her. She seemed dainty and fragile, opaque and ulterior, so that my passion seemed to dissipate right through her, but it didn’t matter because the weekends had become their own intoxication.
My Lawrence course had built slowly, and now, in this spring of the birth of eros, The Rainbow and Women in Love imbued me with the lives of men I might yet be. Paul Goodman may have seen only adolescent lust, but Lawrence detected a spirit drawing souls together beyond discourse. It was a force lodged in our hungering cores, transforming not sublimating, giving rise to the miracles of domesticity and children: the generations of creature life on Earth. Mutual attraction was as natural and unconscious as fields of flowers and wild rabbits, and it was not discardable as mere instinct or id; it was the basis of civilization, of church, of art, of the starry heavens too. It was the mystery of existence, even as I had suspected.
Lawrence meant regular rough and scarred men and women, not just playboys and dandies; in fact, he mocked the big talkers and had his women prevail over them, their eros actual and boundless rather than an adjunct of male fantasy:
… her limbs vibrated with anguish towards him wherever she was, the radiating force of her soul seemed to travel to him, endlessly, endlessly, and in her soul’s own creation, find him….
Desiring was the mystery. I felt that profoundly with Ginny. It wasn’t a wish that came to an end in fulfillment; it went on forever. And then Lawrence …
There is only one clue to the universe … the individual soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and moons and atoms is a secondary affair … the death-result of living individuals.
A secondary affair? How incredible to think and believe that and then be able to say it! Certainly my physics and geology teachers wouldn’t agree. Even my Lawrence professor considered it mere rhetoric.
Ginny said one night that she wanted to smother my pain. She hugged me and stroked my back, but I still felt untouched and wanted her hand to go to my penis. She resisted the cue. “It’s too soon,” she said and instead began a long kiss. I felt the magnetic flow of my attention onto her and wanted to find its resolution. I drew her thread deeper and deeper into my own being She was so luminous and evanescent I couldn’t feel where I met her ostensible seduction—or joined the ragged edge of my own desire. My attraction toward this girl was sinuous and indirect, like an old, old cloth bearing some of her lace and elegance, a gap across which I could feel nothing but waves of curiosity and wonder. The thing between us was a faint, unexamined amber, a glow fluttering alive at the slightest friction.
Down the hall in another universe the Phi Psi jug band was closing out the evening, Paul on base and kazoo, Jenkins on slide guitar, Toby rapping thimbles on a washboard, Paul’s new girlfriend blowing into a jug. Half of my attention wended toward them as I observed Ginny moving, eyes cast upward, in her own quiet, a rhapsodic trance beyond me, the face of a white moon.
I couldn’t go there; I wouldn’t find her if I went. Her essence was a mystery to me: who she was, who she thought she was, what sort of woman she would one day become. For all her animal propinquity, her casually lewd presence, she might as well have been a literary figure, Ursula in The Rainbow, a girl in the dazzling glare of her own fantasies and apotheosis.
I let go of the Delphic Oracle till another day. We hitched back to Smith.
A Saturday night later, I picked a handful of flowers in the Glen behind Phi Psi and brought them to Smith. Ginny strolled downstairs, short sleeves and a skirt for the warmer weather, a quixotic smile. Delighted with the gift, she insisted on finding a jar and taking them to her room. Then we hitched a ride to Phi Psi.
We spent an hour downstairs, talking with Paul, Phil, and Ellen … drinking tap beer. Ginny was a saint in pale sequins, as we danced to Patti Page, the “Tennessee Waltz,” so that I felt like the hero of Hamilton Basso’s View from Pompey’s Head at the crossroads of his life, dancing with his sweetheart even as the song, matching its words, stole her away (“Now I know just how much I have lost ….”). We went upstairs. The blossoms-on-peach fabric that made up her dress swooped in and under to follow her shape, framing the line of her breasts. Without a word we fell into our tryst, our only interest each other’s bodies.
I strained against prior boundaries to contact her, to come to a verdict, to know what followed. She was telling me stories of her brothers in Baltimore, her summer in France where the family she was living with broke apart before her eyes.
I reached under her blouse for the first time and felt the band of her bra in back. She continued to clench and kiss, and I moved to the front and explored the frilliness covering her breasts. Deeper waves rolled through me, and I rubbed against her with my groin and pulled her onto me. She responded effortlessly, as if she was already there. Our bodies wound in frictioned counterpoint, rhythms and chords I never knew. Something darker and older than desire was drawing me now. At odd junctures I felt flat, as though its current had stopped and nothing was happening, but the spark kept reigniting.
Her face in semi-darkness was a vague almost inhuman mask, floating in its own space, its arc of contemplative romanticism. I kept reaching out through a feeling in my penis that was spreading throughout my body, trying to hold her on it, hold me in her ambiance. I put her hand against my hardness, but she took it away. I sat upright and looked at her with questioning eyes.
“We’re still not there yet,” she said. “We can’t force it.”
“Why aren’t we there?”
“I don’t know. There’s something missing. It’s not you. There just hasn’t been enough time.”
I trusted her, but I was suspicious. “Is it because of your friend in Virginia?”
“I’m going to see him next weekend, and I want to be clear. Yes, I sleep with him. But he’s not the problem I have with you. I’m overwhelmed by you. I care terribly for you. But you’re more than I can deal with.”
I turned on the light, and we sat in silence. She put a hand gently on my face. In my unslaked craving, the mercy of her gesture was too much.
I left the room. I ran up the stairs to the third floor, through the attic onto the roof. I stood in the night air. At a distance I could appreciate her again. As a fantasy, she filled me with desire. I climbed back through the hatch and lay on my bed fully dressed. I wanted to cry, but my throat and eyes were hardened against it. Instead I reached for my genitals and rubbed them. I spat on my hand, then rubbed harder. There were no tears there either, only the dull side of disappointed lust. I strained to summon the scene in my room back into my mind so that this time she took hold of my hardness. Staring blankly into her face in my mind I pulled the current up through my surging breath and shot out a bitterness into the sheets, my fingers instantly on top of its warm film, rubbing it into the surface in some meager extension of pleasure.
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:
I ain’t no iceman, no iceman’s son,
But I can keep you cool till that iceman come.
Two days later I got a letter:
Dear Richard,
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for the flowers. They’ve made me so happy. My room has been warm and cheerful because every time I’ve looked at them I’ve thought of you and that wonderful part of you that I can’t understand but is so important & must survive even if transplanted in Washington. I know what you mean, Rich, about losing the words & the experience—the derivatives. I suddenly realized that everything you say means something. It is all so important and I wanted to cry out to you & ask how you understand & what you understand. I wanted you to pull me out but you can’t & I can’t and now that my panic is passed I wonder if I want it.
The flowers are dead now. There was no fuss or anything. They just died without a whimper. I couldn’t stand it—that they should die & be gone and everything would go on as usual so I write you as nearest of kin to inform you of their passing. They lived well and died bravely—not losing their dignity when their beauty faded, leaving behind a vase and a brown paper bag. More than most.
I express my—I’m overdoing this. Well Rich, thank you again. Have a good weekend. I have an exam tomorrow, then am leaving for U.Va.
’By
Ginny
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:
A time just for reaping, a time just for sowing,
The green leaves of summer are calling me home….
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.
A time to be courting
A girl of your own….
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:
Twas so good to be young then, to be close to the earth,
And to stand by your wife, at the moment of birth.
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.
The sense of doom was gone. I felt only my freedom. We left the basement and went to my room, and she lay atop and freely kissed me and laughed, and put my hands on her bare breasts. Then she jumped up like a sprite, and said, “Enough of this stuffy place.” And we climbed onto the Phi Psi roof overlooking fields between lit manors, sounds of Saturday night bands drifting together. It was peaceful just to lie there and look at stars, in the breeze feel as though the planet itself were rolling in space. I hugged her more tightly and she began to breathe harder and run her hands along me, feeling the lines of my waist, and then my chest—that secret territory, realm of imagined diseases in childhood. Her touch opened it to feeling, and I took my shirt off under the starlight.
“You look great, alive,” she said. “Beautiful. You are beautiful. Don’t you know that?” she demanded, shaking me with a smile. Lying alongside, I held her silently, feeling her shape against my chest, thinking it was her that made me beautiful.
She rolled onto her back, and I straddled her waist gently, my knees on the gravel, as she drew my hands once across her breasts and along the lines of her body. She let go and I tried to feel her without violating the dignity with which she opened to me. It was like praying.
She put her hands on my nipples and felt my torso, undid my belt. She pulled me on top of her again, and putting her tongue in my ear, reached down with her hand and held me and gently played with me—all the time the link between us lucid and real, the point of contact unbroken. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, though I didn’t think I was. “It’s a fine thing. It’s a lovely full hardness.”
And then we stopped and went no further. I lay there, her hand on my chest, exposed and joyous in this place. This was the extent of it, as much as I needed in order to feel absolved.
That night, at bedtime, I read Olson’s “Moonset” poem from Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 a.m.:
Not
the suffering one you sold
sowed me on Rise
Mother from off me
God damn you God damn me my
misunderstanding of you
I can die now I just begun to live.
My mother, Mr. Clinton, Abbey West, Betsy Sley: I could reach back to each of them and tell them, forget it, whatever happened, it’s okay. The kid is going to survive.