Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

The summer moved toward its end, and they never spoke of that afternoon, or her impenetrably candid message. It was as if nothing had happened. Nothing had happened.

Twenty-five years later, he saw her, walking quickly, outside the Port Authority terminal. She was wearing a cashmere polo coat, beige stockings, and tan pumps. She didn’t see him. He would have preferred it had she been standing in front of the Plaza. Too late, of course. He thought that her name was Nina, perhaps.

There used to be a downtown hotel in a mid-sized city in northeastern Pennsylvania that had been, forty years earlier, the premier establishment of its kind in the region. But with the advent of turnpikes and the demise of railroad travel, it fell out of favor, and, over two decades, became a mainly residential hotel for retirees who were comfortably affluent, but wholly unfashionable, like the hotel itself. Yet the hotel had a bar and lounge that had been designed as a perfect replica of an ocean liner’s first-class saloon: it was a jewel of black and silver and white, with art deco murals, chrome-accented bar stools, and lacquered black tables. The barmen were impeccable in their tuxedo-like uniforms, the drinks were large and perfectly mixed, and there was neither jukebox nor radio. It was the sort of place that, once discovered, was never spoken of.

He found himself there one night, after driving into town just in front of a growing autumn rainstorm, and unable to find the Sheraton that had been recommended to him. When he saw the hotel’s name spelled out, in incandescent bulbs, on its marquee, he smiled and pulled into its small parking lot. He registered, and after a shower in his room, walked downstairs to the bar, and sat in pleased amazement at its ambience. He drank a martini, smoked, then ordered another. He was alone, or so he thought, but when he leaned back on his stool to light another cigarette, he saw, in the soft, silvery light that shone through the racks of bottles, a girl at the end of the bar. He looked at her, quickly, and as she lifted her head from the evening paper spread out on the bar, the light caught her short, black hair and the pearl choker that set off her simple black dress. She looked at him and nodded, civilly, without smiling. He turned to his fresh cocktail, his face burning, a thrill of awe and fear in possession of his entire body. It seemed to be the girl, it couldn’t possibly have been the girl, a lifetime had passed, it couldn’t be the girl. But it was the girl. He finished his martini and ordered a third, then looked again at the end of the bar, but she had left; only her newspaper, empty glass, and some bills were there. He thought that now he might die, since he couldn’t understand his life at all anymore. Surely he had imagined this girl, imagined how she looked. He had imagined nothing. There she had been.

The Monopoly hotel that he’d found in his drawer after Labor Day could well have been the one that she’d held out to him on her palm. But how? She’d closed her fingers over it, and then he’d made a fool of himself.

He had not been especially interested in her, and then he was painfully in love with her. He thought himself into her body, into her stillness, into her reserve and modesty. That she often wore a pearl choker to the beach rendered him sleepless.

She had, he realized later, held the hotel out to him twice, it was simply itself, so obvious, so mysterious in its candor. It was but one element, one figure in a rebus, the rest of which was missing, or never created.

He passed her on the street many years later. Her hair was graying, and all that he could recall after the shock of seeing her was that she had worn a dark-red silk scarf. He’d seen her from a distance, crossing against the light in front of the Plaza. A rainy day, gray and chilly, red and yellow leaves plastered to the wet pavement. It had always, of course, been too late.

Whatever remnants of stylistic eccentricity peculiar and unique to Clifford’s fiction had long since been leached out of it by a dogged series of accommodations, emendations, compromises, and authorial, shall I say, understandings. His current editor was a reasonable man, so Clifford believed, and the suggestions that he made substantive and intelligent. And he had stuck by Clifford, despite the disappointment of his last book, patiently waiting for “his” writer to achieve that perfect blend of the conventionally literary and the cannily specious that would announce a breakthrough.

Now, reading the proofs of his fourth novel, Clifford saw, not with anything so dramatic as a shock, but saw with a kind of sudden, pleased candor, that not only had he, at last, quite thoroughly assassinated the prose that was once his, with its errors and tics and flourishes, its obsessions and syntactical aberrations; but that the staid, clean, undemanding — he thought of it as functional — prose within which his characters now suffered their warm and imperfect, their wonderfully human, oh so human! travails, was not only not his, but was, quite remarkably, nobody’s. It was an excruciatingly polished, forward-march prose, with suitable, occasional filigrees of clever simile and analogy, and splashes of the contemporary demotic; a prose that seemed happily familiar, as if it had been there all the time, waiting to be read, but just once. And, too, his characters, his flawed and fascinating people , were deployed as neat packages, their histories and quirks economically posited well before their thrust-and-parry colloquies. They looked, so Clifford thought, as if they had decided on things by themselves , sans authorial interference. “They more or less started doing what they wanted to do,” he could imagine himself saying to an interviewer.

This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers — well-written, with fully developed characters, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were — as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.

How did all this bad luck befall Clifford? He’d begun his dim career as a poet, one of minor, limited gifts. At unexpected moments, there had appeared to him (although “appeared” may be dramatizing such occasions) the notion of the poem that would invite him to venture beyond his given odds and ends of “talent,” that would invite him to give up his conception of the poem as a vector of sensitive thought concerning his own highly edited but sensitive life. But since he had a small reputation, a fear of the untried, and, most importantly, a terror of writing a poem that would not look like his poems (he had, he believed, a style), these realities conspired to keep him writing a constipated verse that was, at its best, as some friend cruelly said behind his back, “like Sylvia Plath without the rag on.” What to do?