Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

“Literature is language turning into ambiguity. I grant you it will be unbelievable.”

These destructive and bittersweet accidents do not happen every day.

NOTE: This story comprises 177 sentences, 59 of which are taken from 59 separate works by 59 different authors. The remaining 118 sentences are from one of my own earlier stories. Certain sentences have undergone slight changes in punctuation.

She said that she’d got on an uptown local at Canal Street, gone to sleep, and, waking, just fifteen minutes later, found herself in Brooklyn at the end of the line on Ninety-fifth Street, a weird miracle, she said. This is the same girl who got thrown out of Six Happiness on Mott Street a couple of nights earlier for knocking everything off the table and shouting “fuck the Communist bastards!” From Canal to Ninety-fifth Street in fifteen minutes while going the wrong way, dream on, sweetheart, and in the meantime straight, no chaser?

She’d been drinking all afternoon with some friends in a bar that used to be on Greenwich Avenue near Christopher Street but that’s long gone now. They all went down to Chinatown to eat and she kept drinking, beer, and vodka from a full pint that she had in her bag. She wasn’t really a drunk, but that day she was plastered. The story was that her husband, a really lousy painter who lived off her and spent every day in McSorley’s soaking up ale, had been relentlessly unfaithful to her with anybody who’d stand still, but you hear a lot of stories. After dinner, on Elizabeth Street, she got separated from her friends, although they might have conveniently lost her, seeing that she’d become an impossible embarrassment. She must have got a cab and took it to the Cedar, the new one, new then, anyway, on what? Eleventh Street? and sat at the bar nodding over a whiskey sour and trying not to fall off her stool. At about 2:00 A.M., she left the bar, walked east to Broadway, then down to Eighth Street and into the subway station. The change-booth attendant had to call the police because she was standing on a bench about halfway down the platform, screaming and sobbing about Canal Street disappearing and her friends disappearing and the whole world vanishing. She calmed down right away, and the cops took her to the Sixth Precinct station house and let her sober up there, even bought her coffee, since she was well-dressed and good-looking. She moved about two months later to a loft in Long Island City, then to some suburb outside Chicago. She’d been, incidentally, an editor at Mademoiselle when she married the rotten painter. Not that it matters.

She got on the Fourth Avenue Local at Canal Street for the short trip to Twenty-third Street. It was 2:45 A.M. The doors slid shut, the train lurched and banged, the car’s lights shivering on and off. She was alone in the car, and had a violently painful red-wine headache. As far as she could tell, there was no one in the cars before and behind hers. The train screamed into Prince Street’s deserted station, nobody boarded or got off, and the train barged on through the dark. After a minute or so, it entered Eighth Street, but when she looked out the smudged and greasy windows she saw that the station signs read Canal Street. She got up, frightened; the train had not gone backward. But this was Canal Street. Bewildered, she took a step toward the doors, and just as they were closing, lurched out onto the platform, losing one of her high-heeled pumps. An old Chinese woman, her face half-turned to look down the silent tracks, stood at the end of the platform, two crammed and battered paper shopping bags at her feet. One read: Jade Mountain; the other: Six Happiness. A panic possessed her as the old woman, abandoning her bags, turned and shuffled down the platform toward her, her face taut with a fear that seemed to be just short of terror.

He doesn’t recall this, or pretends not to, but when he first met, many years ago now, the woman who would become his wife, she was wearing a cashmere polo coat, pale beige stockings and tan pumps, and a dark-red silk scarf. There was, or he pretended that there was, nothing odd or unusual about this, since he had forgotten, or pretended that he had forgotten, an incident in the past, an incident that would have made the woman’s dress notable. Interestingly enough, at the time, the incident, now, perhaps, forgotten, seemed overwhelmingly important, as a matter of fact, unforgettable.

On this warm Florida night, his father is telling him, once again, of the dance at which he met his wife and, of course, his mother. Elements of this story change, as they will in stories, but the delight, even the passion with which his father evokes this young woman, just sixteen, and her sumptuous black hair in a chignon and wide, white-silk ribbon, and her green eyes, remain always the same. He fell in love instantaneously, painfully, with her face and figure, her womanly stillness and provocative reserve. After they had been “keeping company,” as his father put it, for six months, he gave her a silver charm, a tiny shoe, to commemorate their meeting at a dance. His father falls silent, and he knows that the old man is thinking of his wife’s death, the dreamlike suddenness with which she was struck down by a cab outside the Plaza, after a day of shopping. He was barely four at the time, and he recalls, or seems to recall, that she had bought him a maroon wool challis scarf, returned to his father, torn and stained, by the police. Surely, his father told him this, for he remembers no scarf. He makes another highball, and about a quarter of an hour later, his father’s new wife enters the kitchen, with a bag of groceries. She is not pleased to see that he is still there, and that both he and her husband are drinking. Her waxy, blue-black hair creates a somewhat grotesque frame for her sixty-year-old face, although she is disturbingly attractive to him. Irrationally, he wonders about the fate of the silver-shoe charm, but cannot ask at the moment, and, later, forgets to ask. A month later his father is dead, and the shoe is lost along with the sad and isolate detritus of gone lives.

On chilly, rainy days toward the end of summer, when it was too cold to go down to the lake, they’d usually walk over to her house and talk and play Monopoly on the screened porch. In the late afternoon, she’d serve iced tea, and they’d smoke and leaf through magazines and look out at the Rose of Sharon tree dripping on the lawn. The grass shone brightly green in the odd half-light.

She was a tall girl, at once slender and large, serious in her body, with profoundly black hair and noticeably clear green eyes. Her skin was smoothly tan and there was about her a reserve that was oddly provocative in its stillness. And although they had all known each other for a half-dozen summers, she remained curiously distant. Some of the girls thought that she was a snob, but it was her womanliness that confused them. She usually wore a modest, black one-piece bathing suit to the lake, and, occasionally, a pearl choker. There were certain things that people simply would not say in front of her; everyone wished her approval.

One gloomy, dank afternoon, while he was in the kitchen helping her with the iced tea and emptying ashtrays, he, in a kind of half-crazed trance, put his hand on the strip of warm golden skin between the waistband of her white linen shorts and her seersucker halter, then leaned stupidly to kiss her upper lip. It was cool velvet, slicked with delicious sweat, salty sweet. She gave him a look of absolute calm, one that came from behind the bright clarity of her eyes. Then, in a strange silence, she held out her hand, opened it, and showed him, on her palm, a Monopoly hotel, gleaming a perfect, symmetrical red. He glanced at it and then at her, bewildered and yet exultant, when she closed her hand and turned to the sink. He knew that this was a private message, he knew this. But it was opaque, cryptic, it was impossible. And it was so because of the adoration of her that had so ruthlessly overwhelmed him: because she knew that he would not understand the message, she sent it. He was stupid, there in that small summery kitchen, with love and yearning. He wanted to kiss her knees, her feet, in their fragile golden sandals. The others were calling for them to come back to the game, and he held his hands up in front of him, awkwardly, and, foolish with desire, said something foolish. He would, he knew, never be a man, it would be too much to ask of him.