第15章 See the Moon?

I KNOW YOU THINK Im wasting my time. Youve made that perfectly clear. But Im conducting these very important lunar hostility studies. And its not you wholl have to leave the warm safe capsule. And dip a toe into the threatening lunar surround. I am still wearing my yellow flower which has lasted wonderfully.

My methods may seem a touch irregular. Have to do chiefly with folded paper airplanes at pres?ent. But the paper must be folded in the right way. Lots of calculations and worrying about edges. Show me a man who worries about edges and Ill show you a natural-born winner. Cardinal Y agrees. Columbus himself worried, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. But he kept it quiet.

The sun so warm on this screened porch, it re?minds me of my grandmothers place in Tampa. The same rusty creaky green glider and the same faded colored canvas cushions. And at night the moon graphed by the screen wire, if you squint. The Sea of Tranquillity occupying squares 47 through 108. See the moon? It hates us.

My methods are homely but remember Newton and the apple. And when Rutherford started out he didnt even have a decently heated laboratory. And then theres the matter of my security check -- Im waiting for the government. Somebody told it Im insecure. Thats true. I suffer from a frightful illness of the mind, light-mindedness. Its not catching. You neednt shrink.

Youve noticed the wall? I pin things on it, souve?nirs. There is the red hat, there the book of in?structions for the Ant Farm. And this is a traffic ticket written on a saints day (which saint? I dont remember) in 1954 just outside a fat little town (which town? I dont remember) in Ohio by a cop who asked me what I did. I said I wrote poppy?cock for the president of a university, true then.

You can see how far Ive come. Lunar hostility studies arent for everyone. Its my hope that these. . . souvenirs. . . will someday merge, blur -- cohere is the word, maybe -- into something meaningful. A grand word, mean?ingful. What do I look for? A work of art, Ill not accept anything less. Yes I know its shatteringly ingenuous but I wanted to be a painter. They get away with murder in my view; Mr. X. on the Times agrees with me. You dont know how I envy them. They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, theres that), and lo! people crowd about and cry, "A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!" Fantastic metaphysical advantage. You hate them, if youre am?bitious.

The Ant Farm instructions are a souvenir of Sylvia. The red hat came from Cardinal Y. Were friends, in a way. I wanted to be one, when I was young, a painter. But I couldnt stand stretching the canvas. Does things to the fingernails. And thats the first place people look. Fragments are the only forms I trust.

Light-minded or no, Im. . . riotous with mental health. I measure myself against the Russians, thats fair. I have here a clipping datelined Mos?cow, four young people apprehended strangling a swan. Thats boredom. The swans name, Borka. The sentences as follows: Tsarev, metalworker, served time previously for stealing public prop?erty, four years in a labor camp, strict regime. Roslavtsev, electrician, jailed previously for taking a car on a joyride, three years and four months in a labor camp, semi-strict regime. Tatyana Voblikova (only nineteen and a Komsomol member too), technician, one and a half years in a labor camp, degree of strictness unspecified. Anna G. Kirushina, technical worker, fine of twenty per cent of salary for one year. Anna objected to the strangula?tion, but softly: she helped stuff the carcass in a bag.

The clipping is tacked up on my wall. I inspect it from time to time, drawing the moral. Strangling swans is wrong. My brother who is a very distinguished pianist . . . has no fingernails at all. Dont look its horrible. He plays under another name. And tunes his piano peculiarly, some call it sour. And renders ragas he wrote himself. A night raga played at noon can cause darkness, did you know that? Its extraordi?nary.

He wanted to be an Untouchable, Paul did. That was his idea of a contemporary career. But then a girl walked up and touched him (slapped him, actually; its a complicated story). And he joined us, here in the imbroglio. My father on the other hand is perfectly com?fortable, and thats not a criticism. He makes flags, banners, bunting (sometimes runs me up a shirt). There was never any question of letting my father drink from the public well. He was on the Well Committee, he decided who dipped and who didnt. Thats not a criticism. Exercises his creativ?ity, nowadays, courtesy the emerging nations. Green for the veldt that nourishes the gracile Grants gazelle, white for the purity of our revolutionary aspirations. The red for blood is under?stood. Thats not a criticism. Its what they all ask for.

A call tonight from Gregory, my son by my first wife. Seventeen and at MIT already. Recently hes been asking questions. Suddenly hes conscious of himself as a being with a history. The telephone rings. Then, without a greeting: Why did I have to take those little pills? What little pills? Little white fills with a "W" on them. Oh. Oh yes. You had some kind of a nervous disorder, for a while. How old was I? Eight. Eight or nine. What was it? Was it epilepsy? Good God no, noth?ing so fancy. We never found out what it was. It went away. What did I do? Did I fall down? No no. Your mouth trembled, that was all. You couldnt control it. Oh, OK See you. The receiver clicks. Or: What did my great-grandfather do? For a living I mean? He was a ballplayer, semi-pro ball?player, for a while. Then went into the building business. Whod he play for? A team called the St. Augustine Rowdies, I think it was. Never heard of them. Well. . . Did he make any money? In the building business? Quite a bit. Did your father inherit it? No, it was tied up in a lawsuit. When the suit was over there wasnt anything left. Oh. What was the lawsuit? Great-grandfather diddled a man in a land deal. So the story goes. Oh. When did he die? Lets see, 1938 I think. What of? Heart attack. Oh. OK See you. End of conversation. Gregory, you didnt listen to my advice. I said try the Vernacular Isles. Where fish are two for a penny and women two for a fish. But you wanted MIT and electron-spin-resonance spectroscopy. You didnt even crack a smile in your six-ply heather hopsacking. Gregory youre going to have a half brother now. Youll like that, wont you? Will you half like it? We talked about the size of the baby, Ann and I. What could be deduced from the outside. I said it doesnt look very big to me. She said its big enough for us. I said we dont need such a great roaring big one after all. She said they cost the earth, those extra-large sizes. Our holdings in Johnsons Baby Powder to be considered too. Wed need acres and acres. I said well put it in a Skinner box maybe. She said no child of hers. Displayed under glass like a rump roast. I said you havent wept lately. She said I keep getting bigger whether I laugh or cry. Dear Ann. I dont think youve quite. . . What you dont understand is, its like somebody walks up to you and says, I have a battleship I cant use, would you like to have a battleship. And you say, yes yes, Ive never had a battleship, Ive always wanted one. And he says, it has four six-teen-inch guns forward, and a catapult for launch?ing scout planes. And you say, Ive always wanted to launch scout planes. And he says, its yours, and then you have this battleship. And then you have to paint it, because its rusting, and clean it, be?cause its dirty, and anchor it somewhere, because the Police Department wants you to get it off the streets. And the crew is crying, and there are silverfish in the chartroom and a funny knocking noise in Fire Control, water rising in the No. 2 hold, and the chaplain cant find the Palestrina tapes for the Sunday service. And you cant get anybody to sit with it. And finally you discover that what you have here is this great, big, pink-and-blue rockabye battleship. Ann. Im going to keep her ghostly. Just the odd bit of dialogue: "What is little Gog doing." "Kicking." I dont want her bursting in on us with the fresh?ness and originality of her observations. What we need here is perspective. Shes good with Gregory though. I think he half likes her. Dont go. The greased-pig chase and balloon launchings come next. I was promising once. After the Elgar, a summa cum laude. The university was proud of me. It was a bright shy white new university on the Gulf Coast. Gulls and oleanders and quick howling hur?ricanes. The teachers brown burly men with power boats and beer cans. The president a retired ad?miral whod done beautiful things in the Coral Sea. "You will be a credit to us, George," the admiral said. Thats not my name. Im protecting my iden?tity, what there is of it. Applause from the stands filled with mothers and brothers. Then following the mace in a long line back to the field house to ungown. Ready to take my place at the top. But a pause at Pusan, and the toy train to the Chorwon Valley. Walking down a road wearing green clothes. Korea green and black and silent. The truce had been signed. I had a carbine to carry. My buddy Bo Tagliabue the bonus baby, for whom the Yanks had paid thirty thousand. We whitewashed rocks to enhance our area. Colonels came crowding to feel Bos hurling arm. Mine the whitest rocks. I lunched with Thais from Thailand, hot curry from great galvanized washtubs. Engineers bang?ing down the road in six-by-sixes raising red dust. My friend Gib Mandell calling Elko, Nevada on his canvas-covered field telephone. "Operator I crave Elko, Nevada." Then I was a sergeant with stripes, getting the troops out of the sun. Tagliabue a sergeant too. Triste in the Tennessee Tea Room in Tokyo, yakking it up in Yokohama. Then back to our little tent town on the side of a hill, boosting fifty-gallon drums of heating oil tentward in the snow. Ozzie the jeep driver waking me in the middle of the night. "They got Julian in the Tango Tank." And up and alert as they taught us in Leadership School, over the hills to Tango, seventy miles away. Whizzing through Teapot, Tempest, Toreador, with the jeeps canvas top flapping. Pfc. Julian drunk and disorderly and beaten up. The MP sergeant held out a receipt book. I signed for the bawdy remains. Back over the pearly Pacific in a great vessel decorated with oranges. A trail of orange peel on the plangent surface. Sitting in the bow fifty miles out of San Francisco, listening to the Stateside disc jockeys chattering cha cha cha. Ready to grab my spot at the top. My clothes looked old and wrong. The city looked new with tall buildings raised while my back was turned. I rushed here and there visiting friends. They were burning beef in their back yards, brown burly men with beer cans. The beef black on the outside, red on the inside. My friend Horace had fidelity. "Listen to that bass. Thats sixty watts worth of bass, boy." I spoke to my father. "How is business?" "If Alaska makes it," he said, "I can buy a Hasselblad. And were keeping an eye on Hawaii." Then he photographed my veteran face, f.6 at 300. My fa?ther once a cheerleader at a great Eastern school. Jumping in the air and making fierce angry down-the-field gestures at the top of his leap. Thats not a criticism. We have to have cheer?leaders. I presented myself at the Placement Office. I was on file. My percentile was the percentile of choice. "How come you were headman of only one stu?dent organization, George?" the Placement Officer asked. Many hats for top folk was the fashion then. I said I was rounded, and showed him my slash. From the Fencing Club. "But you served your country in an overseas post." "And regard my career plan on neatly typed pages with wide margins." "Exemplary," the Placement Officer said. "You seem married, mature, malleable, how would you like to affiliate yourself with us here at the old school? We have a spot for a poppycock man, to write the admirals speeches. Have you ever done poppycock?" I said no but maybe I could fake it. "Excellent, excellent," the Placement Officer said. "I see you have grasp. And you can sup at the Faculty Club. And there is a ten-per-cent discount on tickets for all home games." The admiral shook my hand. "You will be a credit to us, George," he said. I wrote poppycock, sometimes cockypap. At four oclock the faculty hoisted the cocktail flag. We drank Daiquiris on each others sterns. I had equipped myself -- a fibreglass runabout, someplace to think. In the stadia of friendly shy new universities we went down the field on Gulf Coast afternoons with gulls, or excit?ing nights under the tall toothpick lights. The crowd roared. Sylvia roared. Gregory grew. There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising. Moonstruck I was, after a fashion. Sitting on a bench by the practice field, where the jocks chanted secret signals in their underwear behind tall canvas blinds. Layabout babies loafing on blan?kets, some staked out on twelve-foot dog chains. Brown mothers squatting knee to knee in shifts of scarlet and green. I stared at the moons pale day?time presence. It seemed. . . inimical. Moonstruck. Were playing Flinch. You flinched. The simplest things are the most difficult to ex?plain, all authorities agree. Say I was tired of p***yc**k, if that pleases you. Its true enough. Sylvia went up in a puff of smoke. She didnt like unsalaried life. And couldnt bear a male ac?quaintance moon-staring in the light of day. Decent people look at night. We had trouble with Gregory: who would get which part. She settled for three-fifths, and got I think the worst of it, the dreaming raffish Romany part that thinks science will save us. I get matter-of-fact midnight telephone calls: My EE instructor shot me down. What happened? I dont know, hes an ass anyhow. Well that may be but still -- Whens the baby due? January, I told you. Yeah, can I go to Mexico City for the holidays? Ask your mother, you know she -- Theres this guy, his old man has a villa. . . . Well, we can talk about it. Yeah, was grandmother a Communist? Nothing so distin?guished, she -- You said she was kicked out of Ger?many. Her family was anti-Nazi. Adler means eagle in German. Thats true. There was something called the Weimar Republic, her father -- I read about it. We had trouble with Gregory, we wanted to be scientific. Toys from Procreative Playthings of Princeton. O Gregory, that Princeton crowd got you coming and going. Procreative Playthings at one end and the Educational Testing Service at the other. And that serious-minded co-op nursery, that was a mistake. "A growing understanding between parent and child through shared group experi?ence." I still remember poor Henry Harding III. Under "Sibs" on the membership roll they listed his, by age: 26 25 23 20 19 15 10 9 8 6 O Mrs. Harding, havent you heard? They have these little Christmas-tree ornaments for the womb now, they work wonders. Did we do "badly" by Gregory? Will we do "better" with Gog? Such questions curl the hair. Its wiser not to ask. I mentioned Cardinal Y (the red hat). Hes a friend, in a way. Or rather, the subject of one of my little projects. I set out to study cardinals, about whom science knows nothing. It seemed to me that cardinals could be known in the same way we know fishes or roses, by classification and enumeration. A per?verse project, perhaps, but who else has embraced this point of view? Difficult nowadays to find a point of view kinky enough to call ones own, with Sade himself being carried through the streets on the shoulders of sociologists, cheers and shouting, ticker tape unwinding from high windows. . . The why of Cardinal Y. Youre entitled to an explanation. The Cardinal rushed from the Residence waving in the air his hands, gloved in yellow pigskin it appeared, I grasped a hand, "Yes, yellow pigskin!" the Cardinal cried. I wrote in my book, yellow pigskin. Significant detail. The pectoral cross contains nine diamonds, the scarlet soutane is laundered right on the premises. I asked the Cardinal questions, we had a con?versation. "I am thinking of a happy island more beautiful than can be imagined," I said. "I am thinking of a golden mountain which does not exist," he said. "Upon what does the world rest?" I asked. "Upon an elephant," he said. "Upon what does the elephant rest?" "Upon a tortoise." "Upon what does the tortoise rest?" "Upon a red lawnmower." I wrote in my book, playful. "Is there any value that has value?" I asked. "If there is any value that has value, then it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case, for all that happens and is the case is accidental," he said. He was not serious. I wrote in my book, knows the drill. (Oh I had heard reports, how he slunk about in the snow telling children he was Santa Claus, how he disbursed funds in unauthorized disbursements to unshaven men who came to the kitchen door, how his housekeeper pointedly rolled his red socks together and black socks together hinting red with red and black with black, the Cardinal patiently unrolling a red ball to get a red sock and a black ball to get a black sock, which he then wore to?gether. . .) Cardinal Y. Hes sly. I was thorough. I popped the Cardinal on the patella with a little hammer, and looked into his eyes with a little light. I tested the Cardinals stomach acidity using Universal Indicator Paper, a scale of one to ten, a spectrum of red to blue. The pH value was 1 indicating high acidity. I measured the Cardinals ego strength using the Minnesota Multiphastic Muzzle Map, he had an MMMM of four over three. I sang to the Cardi?nal, the song was "Stella by Starlight," he did not react in any way. I calculated the number of gal?lons needed to fill the Cardinals bath to a depth of ten inches (beyond which depth, the Cardinal said, he never ventured). I took the Cardinal to the ballet, the ballet was "The Conservatory." The Car?dinal applauded at fifty-seven points. Afterward, backstage, the Cardinal danced with Plenosova, holding her at arms length with a good will and an ill grace. The skirts of the scarlet soutane stood out to reveal high-button shoes, and the stagehands clapped. I asked the Cardinal his views on the moon, he said they were the conventional ones, and that is how I know all I know about cardinals. Not enough perhaps to rear a science of cardinalogy upon, but enough perhaps to form a basis for the investiga?tions of other investigators. My report is over there, in the blue binding, next to my copy of La Geomancie et la Neomancie des Anciens by the Sei?gneur of Salerno. Cardinal Y. One can measure and measure and miss the most essential thing. I liked him. I still get the odd blessing in the mail now and then. Too, maybe I was trying on the role. Not for myself. When a child is born, the locus of ones hopes. . . shifts, slightly. Not altogether, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike attitudes, like the mother of a tiny Lollobrigida. Drunk with possibility once more. I am still wearing my yellow flower which has lasted wonderfully. "What is Gog doing." "Sleeping." You see, Gog of mine, Gog o my heart, Im just trying to give you a little briefing here. I dont want you unpleasantly surprised. I cant stand a startled look. Regard me as a sort of Distant Early Warning System. Here is the world and here are the knowledgeable knowers knowing. What can I tell you? What has been pieced together from the reports of travellers. Fragments are the only forms I trust. Look at my wall, its all there. Thats a leaf, Gog, stuck up with Scotch Tape. No no, the Scotch Tape is the shiny transparent stuff, the leaf the veined irregularly shaped. . . There are several sides to this axe, Gog, con?sider the photostat, "Mr. WB Yeats Presenting Mr. George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies." Thats a civilized gesture, I mean Beerbohms. And when the sculptor Aristide Maillol went into the printing business he made the paper by chewing the fibers himself. Thats dedication. And here is a Polaroid photo, shows your Aunt Sylvia and me putting an Ant Farm together. Thats how close we were in those days. Just an Ant Farm apart. See the moon? It hates us. And now comes JJ Sullivans orange-and-blue Gulf Oil truck to throw kerosene into the space heater. Driver in green siren suit, red face, blond shaved head, the following rich verbal transaction: "Beautiful day." "Certainly is." And now settling back in this green glider with a copy of Man. Dear Ann when I look at Man I dont want you. Unfolded Ursala Thigpen seems ever so much more desirable. A clean girl too and with interests, cooking, botany, pornographic novels. Someone new to show my slash to. In another month Gog leaps fully armed from the womb. What can I do for him? I can get him into AA, I have influence. And make sure no harsh moonlight falls on his new soft head. Hello there Gog. We hope youll be very happy here.