Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

He had perhaps wept bitterly that afternoon as she kissed his knees. She had come up to open the house for the season. (All round the edge was written the date of the wedding and in a corner was the artist’s signature.) Her husband was a college traveler for a publishing house and was on the road, her son and daughter were staying at their grandparents’ for the day. Her flesh was cool.

“I was on holiday with my wife traveling in a small hired car like a violent toy.”

Rebecca was fair. Let me have a mist of tears in her eyes, of acrid joy and shame, of despair.

“The three plates are arranged as usual, each in the center of one of the sides of the square table. This is, of course, old news. How softly we had slid off the edge of civilization.”

“The author divides gardens into an infinity of styles?”

She lay on the bed and opened her thighs and they made love without elaboration. When he got home he was exhausted.

One day there was a photograph in the paper of a deceased seer who resembled a great bag of holy relics — innocent symbol that tortured his blood.

“What is a Stravinsky?”

“I am forced to assume that the latter was at that time not a real human being but a fleeting-improvised man, because he otherwise would have been so dazzled by the light phenomena which he must have seen — they occupied almost 1/6th to 1/8th part of the sky — that he would have expressed astonishment in some way.”

“Of course he was insane. It is no wonder lesbians like women.”

“He even succeeded in transforming specific pieces of music to his palate, following the composer step by step.”

“One can hear his precise voice recording these picayune disasters as jokes.”

They walked to the edge of the black lake stretching out before them, the red and blue neon on the far shore clear in the hot dark.

Having reached the threshold, she turned and, raising her two hands to the dark veil over her face, she blew a distant kiss to those who had evoked her. Lovely Jewish girl from the remote and exotic Bronx. He put her number in his address book, but he wouldn’t call her. To those who have not studied the nature of language in any depth, the experience of number association will show immediately what must be grasped here, namely, the combinatory power that orders its ambiguities, and they will recognize in this the very mainspring of the unconscious. He watched her go into the house and saw the door close. Whose hand had touched her secret thighs?

“From the manner in which the libertine welcomes her attackers, it’s plainly to be seen how inured she is to this hard use.” He was excited and frightened, and got an erection. But he would not call her.

“I get the subject to pass the fingers of his right hand through his hair, so as to get a little coating of the natural oil on them, and then press the balls of them on the glass.”

Nothing was like anything said it was after all. When he got off the train in Brooklyn an hour later, he saw his friends through the window of the all-night diner, pouring coffee into the great pit of their beer drunks.

Even then he did not move, but waited until the heavy footfalls sounded to the bottom of the stairs. In the bedroom, she turned down the spread and fluffed the pillows, then sat and undressed. It’s too impossible to invent conversation for them. He luxuriously lowered himself on the bed and put an arm over his eyes. The moonlight of her teeth, the smell of her flesh, vague sweat and perfume. All summer long we have heard the chant of the husband’s newly discovered perfidy.

“What were they to do? She tottered, holding the umbrella crookedly while he went to his knees and clasped her, the rain soaking him through, put his head under her skirt and kissed her belly, licked at her crazily through her underclothes … the story of that, Madam, is long and interesting, but it would be running my ‘history’ all upon heaps to give it you here. They worked desperately at it being August, but under the sharkskin and nylons those sunny limbs were hidden. The maimings of love are endlessly funny … as are the tiny figures of talking animals being blown to pieces in cartoons.”

But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury.

“What sort of god borrows a Chrysler and goes to the Latin Quarter? Give these children a Silver Phantom — and a chauffeur!”

“I assume that I have the liberty to withdraw, at any time according to my need or desire, from the large sum small sums?”

“Take your clothes off! Please?”

“In the old days a chamber was a bedroom.”

“Oh, oh,” she said, and closed the door. “You good fuck, Jack,” she smiled in her lying whore way.

While she confessed her sins, I waited, extremely anxious to see the outcome of such an unexpected action.

A Cadillac station wagon passed and then stopped about fifteen yards ahead of him and she got out. The woman was gentle, the light glinting off her gold incisor and the tiny cross at her throat. He stopped to float a match down the brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on.

She lay down on the ground and he lay next to her, stroking her breasts until her nipples were erect under her cotton blouse. She was a little high and he messed all over her slip.

Thus the young ladies there are as much ashamed of being cowards and fools as the men.

She was wearing white shorts and sneakers and a blue sweatshirt.

“You know I was sixteen a month ago.”

He appeared to great advantage behind the white napery and silver platters of the table and displaying his arms with a knife and fork. He went to get a Coke and brought it back to her, but she only sipped at it, then said O God! and bent over to throw up.

“My period,” she said.

He gave the fire a hard look and took to handling absently his yellow stumps for teeth.

She had been to the Copa, to the Royal Roost, to Lewisohn Stadium to hear the Gershwin concert. It would be a great pleasure for me to allow him to meet her there, in a yellow chiffon cocktail dress and spike heels, lost in prostitution, a scene of upstairs where there is a second floor from door to door. I’ll put her virgin flesh into a black linen suit, a single strand of pearls around her throat. Did she have to go to the Museum of Modern Art? These considerations crossed my mind with a certain rapidity. Did I say that she had honey-colored hair?

There was one boy who had almost made her — he was never quite still, there was always a tapping foot somewhere. Or the impatient opening and closing of a hand. He didn’t want to know what the pre-med student she was “dating” said when he held her. He thought he would weep.

Their procession, led by the Hungarian, soon disappeared behind the stock exchange. At three o’clock, he kissed her good night on Yellowstone Boulevard in a thin drizzle. He fought against the thought of her so that he would not have to place her subtle finesse in these streets of vulgar hells, benedictions, and incense. The other three lost their senses immediately, running wildly about the streets with their heads in the air, or suddenly starting off at a furious gallop directly away from the car.

They were at the amusement park at Lake Hopatcong with two other couples. The first time he touched her breasts he cried in his shame and delight. The third time it was simply that he followed the other two. When they went out into the courtyard again in the evening, the late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything … aromatic breeze.

The book being opened, the paper of diamonds was first taken out, and there they were! Every one. Yes, it seemed a possible world: the sound of a car radio in the cool nights, collective American memory.