Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

Dear Ed,

I was surprised and I guess shocked to get your piece and the follow-up letter after all this time, it’s really been a long time! The piece brought back those days in that little dump in SoHo that we called the cash-eater, remember? I hope that the piece and letter are ways of saying that bygones should be bygones. Maybe things will be O.K. between us again, that would be terrific.

I’m doing pretty well. Marge is right that I have a little café in Chelsea on 20th Street near 9th, the Arles. And the catering business, Peter’s Specialty Cuisine, maybe Marge told you, is in a loft building on Hudson near Houston on the 4th floor, you can imagine the hassles with the Fire Dept. and the Buildings Dept. and the Board of Health and so on! But everything is fine now, I’m making a living, as they say, married for sixteen years now with a fourteen-year-old daughter. We live in Bronxville.

Most importantly, Ed, really, I mean really, is how fantastically brave and honest and forgiving you are to have written this piece, which I’ve read three times now. It must have taken a lot of courage, moral courage, as they say, to use yourself as a model for the husband character, Ned, that poor bastard who is so painfully and cruelly and flagrantly betrayed by his wife and friend. Who, if I read right, are Patricia and me, of course. It amazes me, just floors me, to realize, all these years later, that you knew, all along, probably from the beginning, that Patricia and I were lovers and stayed lovers for a year and a half. We were so crazy that we didn’t care whether we hurt you or not, although we were careful not to be obvious about meeting each other, and we were certain that you didn’t know. Patricia’s bad-mouthing me really should have worked, although you obviously saw right through it. What makes me feel worse than the affair is that we ended our friendship for the wrong reason, or maybe I should say over something that wasn’t even real!

Now, with this marvelous piece, you are letting me know that you knew, you knew all along, and you let it go, maybe for friendship or love, I don’t know. It’s just fantastic. You’re a wonderful writer, as I always thought you were. Please write again, stay in touch!

Your old partner,

Peter

Unlikely as it may seem, when Edward read this letter, he decided that Peter had maliciously and carefully contrived to humiliate him with a confession of an imagined adultery. Peter and Patricia, good God! How ridiculous. Edward felt stupid and clumsy to have thought Peter worthy of his concern. He tore up the letter, and then sat down to read “The Birds Are Singing” once again.

In 1953, or early 1954, Dan Burke was seeing, as they used to say, Claire Walsh, who was pregnant by another man, a lummox known as “Swede” to his lummox friends. Dan had recently been discharged from the Navy, and while he and Claire had been amorous companions during his rare shore leaves, she was far from averse to impromptu sexual adventures with congenial civilians while Dan was at sea. Thus, her dalliance with “Swede,” who was, incidentally, a reinsurance clerk on Maiden Lane: this permitted him to tell the occasional citizen who asked about his job that he was “on Wall Street.” He enters our story as a catalyst.

Dan didn’t know that Claire was pregnant, but since he and she had never engaged in anything more than what was called — and still may be, for all I know—“heavy petting,” he assumed that she was a virgin. Who knows why? When she told Dan that she was going to have a baby, he was, sequentially, astonished, hurt, disgusted, and angry. Then he asked her to “go down on” him, which she did. He felt, in some clouded, blurred way, even with “Swede,” whom he did not know at all. Then he asked her to marry him and she consented, with much blubbering, snots, and tears. He didn’t love her, nor she him, and nothing that they did at the outset of their marriage allowed love to establish itself and stagger free of the grim truth of their situation, as love, despite the long odds, may occasionally do. So their marriage began, not utterly bleak, but surely not aglow. It should be said immediately, I believe, that their marriage did not succeed, and was over some eight or nine years later. Not bad, considering.

Dan began working at a bookstore in the Village, Marboro, to be precise, on Eighth Street, home of the authentic bullfight poster from colorful Méjico! (It gives me pause — what a comfortable phrase — when I recall that the bullfight poster was once virtually epidemic in the apartments of the hip and chosen, and then the latter and the posters suddenly vanished.) One of Dan’s co-workers was a man by the name of James Fremont, a poet who had been published in Zero, Neurotica, and Prairie Schooner, and had a handwritten rejection note from an editor, or somebody, at Poetry, suggesting that he “try us again.” Which he did and did again, never managing to make further human contact, however contemptuous, with the famous magazine. In the meantime, Claire had begun to read this and that and have opinions on this and that as well. The plot, as you may discern, is not truly thickening, but it might be jelling a little. These people seem as if they’re about to “take a step,” probably into disaster.

The serendipitous conjunction of the well-read, and, in the best tradition of the Village of those days, slightly shaggy, tweedy, and insufferably superior published poet, and the unhappy, directionless Dan and Claire, created the perfect climate for emotional calamities of many sorts and sizes. Dan began to write poetry (“of course!” I hear you say) under the condescending tutelage of James, and Claire began to go to bed with him on those evenings when she was supposed to be seeing old “girlfriends,” attending suddenly fashionable poetry readings at any number of bohemian traps, or going to see “films” at the New Yorker or Thalia. Dan would stay home in their one-bedroom apartment on Blake Avenue in East New York — at that time, not yet the sister neighborhood of 1945 Stalingrad — and dream his old dream of playing jazz trumpet, another enthusiasm that had hysterically played itself out at the New York School of Music (Sunset Park branch), over a little less than eight months.

There had been another “student of trumpet” whose lessons were scheduled on Dan’s night, a nervous forty-year-old homosexual virgin, who often talked of Charlie Spivak’s “golden horn,” and of a photograph — which he would soon bring in — of Joan Crawford “eating pussy,” as he put it, his eyes crazed and shining and unfocused, as if he were the “pussy” to which Miss Crawford addressed her perverse attentions. Dan got bored by the scale book and spooked by his fellow student, who began alternating his tales of Joan Crawford’s adventures with questions as to Dan’s toilet-paper preferences. And his lips hurt after a half-hour or so of practice: this would not do. He wanted to play and show them what he was made of, what was in his heart. Oh well.

But soon, literature, as noted, became his passion, and James guided him into the strange world of Eliot and Pound and Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, the world of art and life! And life! So he and Claire had found a way to be. The trumpet was one thing, but this was quite another. And where James guided Dan, so, too, he guided Claire. She slowly acquired a slight lisp and a choppy laugh that was meant to be cold and worldly, as in: “Dan and James actually working at the Marboro supermarket (hak hak hak)! It’s too much!”

Where, you may ask, was the child in this turmoil of art and love and life? As well you might. Growing up as best he could, which, as it turned out, was none too good. He became dyslexic — known in those days as “dumb,” hyperactive — known in those days as “dumb,” truant and antisocial—“dumb” and “bad.” It’s of sad moment, perhaps, to note that he would one day murder rhythm guitar and sing spectacularly off-key in a dreadful rock band, the Unbearables, before leaving for someplace Sunny and Sunny, to be with others of his kind. Heavy! But this is incidental to the story, so-called, and I add it because I know, courtesy of my magical authorial powers, what the kid’s future will be, or in this case, was. I could, as I don’t have to tell you, have made him into a solid citizen rather than a lout. Since his status is peripheral to everything, I offer him as a bonus, an embellishment, a fillip. A tip.