Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

I admired Bill, but it was in his best interest, or so I felt, never to say so, at least not to him. It was better to mention my admiration for him to other people whom I didn’t admire at all, but who, or so I learned, admired Bill. He liked to repair cars and trucks and with the money he saved over and above his living expenses he planned on buying a very large, green canvas patio umbrella for his favorite table near the pool in our motel’s courtyard. “Let me tell you about another great umbrella I saw in Monkey Ward’s yesterday,” he’d chuckle.

“Tomato sounds good, Bill,” I muttered quietly, looking out at the chipped enamel table by the pool as if seeing it for the first time. “Fresh basil O.K.?” Bill nodded but it was a distracted nod. He was thinking, I knew, of Dolly Rae and the bicycle that both obsessed and, in some dark, strange way, frightened her. Then he was gone in a swirl of cigarette smoke, and I wondered how many minutes had been taken off my life this time.

Six months earlier, when I’d left school to work for a man who made authentic Shaker furniture for people who loved it for its spirit and its subtle hint of the last Shaker colony on Biscayne Bay, I’d met Bill at the Jewel, the only movie house in town. The Jewel showed the kind of offbeat films that you’d never see at the Octiplex out at the Big River Mall, and had a reputation for being cutting edge. It was run by a man called “Chet,” who made up in loud brio what he lacked in subtle verve. Bill had been carrying a bag of what turned out to be ripe tomatoes, and we struck up a conversation almost instantly, although I can’t recall a word of it. All I do know is that somehow our shared delight in tomatoes led to an arrangement whereby we moved into the Red Wagon Motel together and split all expenses. So far, it had worked out wonderfully well, but I was beginning to worry about his growing anxiety concerning Dolly Rae and the bicycle. But our first few months together were idyllic, and Bill’s pleasure in imagining the green umbrella that would highlight the pool area was my pleasure as well.

As soon as he became aware of Dolly Rae, everything began to change, subtly at first, and then, quite overtly. Dolly Rae, it turned out, not only understood more, much more about Bill’s umbrella dream than I ever could, but she had innumerable stories about bicycles and the role that they’d played in the settling — she’d called it “the gentling”—of the hard-bitten Wheat Corridor back in her home state. Her favorite bicycle color was tomato red, and when Bill discovered this, he was a goner. He’d do anything to impress Dolly Rae, and began making up stories about crawdaddies and drinking bouts and God knows what. And then, one day, Dolly Rae took him over to her motel and showed him, shimmering and blurred at the bottom of their pool, a white bicycle that seemed to glow in the water. He stood and looked at it in silence, and then, suddenly, at the instigation of her little brother, Carver, she jumped into the pool and swam to the bottom. She had her hands on the bicycle and was hauling it to the surface, but although she broke the water with it, it was impossible for her to get it out of the pool. And Bill knew, he just knew, that his help wasn’t wanted. As she relinquished her grip on what Bill had decided to call a “symbol,” and let it sink, dreamily, to the bottom, Carver whispered to Bill that she’d never get it out, she’d been trying for days, it wasn’t going to be pulled out of that darn water!

Each day, often more than once, before her stint at the Jewel or after it, Dolly Rae would plunge fiercely into the pool and wrestle with the white bicycle. And each day, Bill, sullen with despair, would ask her why she needed to do this. She would look at him coolly, the kind of look that said that she wished she was looking at him for the first time, and asked him to explain, again, what a “symbol” is. It was more and more obvious to me, if not to Bill in his agony of wonder, that life simply goes on and on until, one sad day, it stops.

Sometime after that, so Bill told me one night, looking up suddenly from a patio-furniture catalogue, Dolly Rae began calling people on the phone at random, baiting them, misrepresenting herself, telling jokes about Schultz and Moskowitz and, afterward, crying bitterly. Bill told me that he thought the calls humanized her, softened her somehow — his phrase was “gentled her,” much to my bitter amusement — but that Dolly Rae maintained that they were just as frustrating as trying to haul that bicycle out of the pool. He began to see less of her, and as he grew quieter, I noticed that he had stopped mentioning the green umbrella. It had become, at least for me, a symbol to set against the symbol that he had created for Dolly Rae.

“Be back soon?” I asked, staring into the space above the pool. He nodded, and said, “Sure, where else would I be?”

I smiled and made the gesture of slicing a tomato, then mimed swimming up, through dark, cold water, with a bicycle cradled in my arms, a bicycle that would not, that could not ever reveal its secrets. He laughed, ruefully, and as the sun moved behind the outer cottages, I said, quietly, “Schultz is dead.”

“And tomatoes are cheaper,” Bill replied.

NOTES

A Desk

1. The actual, whatever it may look like, does not “roar on.”

2. Many people feel that all the mysteries of fiction have been solved, and a good thing too!

3. It is probably not a good idea to “fuck with” memoirs in which the victim-protagonist-memoirist has already been “fucked with.”

4. Most critics and biographers dispute the fact that Proust was satisfied with one draft, despite the discovery of the “Toulouse” notebooks.

5. Patricia Melton Cunningham’s first novel, Wrenched from Love, will soon be published by Gusher Books, a subsidiary of Shell Oil Publishers, Ltd.

6. “Spondulicks” most often refer to quarters and dimes, as in “Drop a spondulick on the bum.”

7. A pasticciaccio may be translated as “a fucking mess.”

8. Wallace Stegner, although he owned a car, did not actually like it.

9. Death asks no quarter — nor spondulick.

A Joke

1. It is amazing just how many jokes people know.

2. “Cut velvet!” is, for instance, the punch line of one of those many jokes.

3. The male gaze is at its most pernicious in the academic world, for reasons which will soon be made clear.

4. Dark Corridors of Wheat has been out of print for many years, despite a relentless campaign waged by the cereal industry to make it available at a reasonable price.

5. Maurice Bucks is on the record as saying that he “doesn’t really care all that much” about money, and after his successful takeover of the Vietnamese government, noted that “it’s got very, very little to do with money, and I want people to know that.” It has recently been reported that Mr. Bucks has contracted AIDS, which fact has led hundreds — some say thousands — to argue for the existence of God.

6. The paper used to print the “Prairie Edition” of the Jewett biography is made of acid-free gopher skin.

7. “Handy Sarah” is a mistake of the sort regularly attributed to this author, who, it is said, can “really write” if he “puts his mind to it,” books that are “wonderfully readable.”

8. People no longer get soused, but, instead, succumb to their addictions, addictions which they cannot triumph over, or “lick,” unless they first admit they have a problem and then get help.