Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

Claire found out about one of these affairs, threatened to leave the apartment, leave The City, take Justin away, to do all those things that she should do to be free, did Dan not stop seeing the bitch, bimbo, whore, slut, tramp. Suicide was threatened once or twice. This was all a play that humanity has acted in for centuries, of course, but it was no less painful for being so sublimely banal. So Dan broke off the arrangement, as he thought of it, and was faithful for a month or so; then it was back to the adultery follies. Claire, rescued from emotional collapse, briskly punished Dan by taking up with a marvelous painter, a friend of a friend of her last lover’s wife. He painted the crystalline exhalations of the Bay and sky and so on and so forth, and suggested to Claire that James Fremont was, well, how to put it? unimportant. As was Dan, his bad poems and his bad job and his drunken crap about his trumpet, Jesus, that trumpet. After a month with the adoring Claire, the painter told her that he “found it difficult” for him to work and continue to see her; he was “into” a collage tryptych that was, well, “draining.” Claire cried and cried and, two nights later, bashed Dan on the head with a Revere Ware pot. “You!” she yelled. “You! You! You!”

I don’t know what happened over the next few years, but Dan and Claire must have reached some sort of accommodation, a grim marital dance of necessary exchanges, with no questions asked about late nights out, unexplained absences, missing articles of clothing, whispered telephone conversations, and the like. Occasionally, there must have occurred a vicious and mean-spirited quarrel over a lover who appeared to exist, for one or the other of them, on a plane slightly higher than the merely sexual, or, to put it in Dan’s polished words, “I know the fuck is more than just a quick fuck to you!” But by and large they just grew older.

Claire made occasional trips back to Brooklyn to see Dot, her “mommy,” and her two brothers, both of whom still lived with “mommy,” and, it pleases me to think, were still virgins. There they are, coming out of eleven o’clock Mass. “Lookit her,” Brian says to Mickey, of a comely young woman, “what a fuckin’ dog.” “A dog is right,” Mickey snarls. So they diluted their rabid lusts. Let’s imagine that on one of these trips Claire ran into “Swede,” and after a night of joyous dancing and drinking in a little joint in Bayside, the two old pals went to bed together. “Swede” confessed that he was married, but that he thought of Claire all the time. None of this probably happened, for I understand that “Swede” had fallen off a roof about a year after he and Claire had indulged in their initial dalliance. He had been trying to adjust a television antenna so that he wouldn’t have to watch the Yankees play in blurry snowstorms. Of course he was a Yankee fan.

In time, the accommodation mentioned became too boring, too burdensome, so Claire took Justin, by now an NCO in the army of sociopaths forever garrisoned in the Republic, and they went to — oh, I don’t know. Lawton, perhaps, or St. Louis. No, Seattle! That’s where they went, Seattle. Even then, a great place to live. It was just great. Or maybe Dan left Claire after another sour argument, complete with tears and rage as decorations to his insistence that neither Claire nor anybody else would keep him from seeing Justin, by Jesus Christ! Of course, Dan would have been pleased never to look upon his berserk son’s face again. In any event, they separated. Some thought it touching that Dan took his trumpet with him, along with his NYSM scales book. Others, infected with reality, laughed.

Five or six years after Dan and Claire had divorced, we discover, as they say, Dan in a Greenwich Village bar. He’s in town to bury his mother, and has accepted an old neighborhood friend’s invitation to have a drink on the last night of the wake. He is dressed in a gray sharkskin suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie whose Windsor knot is too big for his shirt collar, a gray raincoat with raglan sleeves, and a dark-brown porkpie hat. He looks, not to be harsh, the perfect rube. He lives in Vacaville, which may account for the figure he cuts.

He is being contemptuously superior with his old friend, who, to Dan’s patronizing amusement, is an insurance underwriter. Dan, you may be interested to know, works as a clerk in the main branch of the Sacramento Public Library, but has told his friend that he runs a small literary agency in San Francisco, “so much fresh talent there,” he says. Why he lives so far from the oven of creativity is not brought up. Dan sneers at the friend, the bar, the Village, at poor old New York itself, bastion of all that is wrong with everything. Then, suddenly, and, one might say, belligerently, he begins to recite a rigid poem by James Fremont. When he finishes, he looks smugly at his old friend. “I still write the occasional poem,” he says. The old friend is happily impressed, and they order another round. “How’s Claire, by the way?” the friend asks. “You ever see her?” Dan looks at him, his face rotten with disgust. “Claire?” he says. “Fuck Claire! You know she won’t,” and tears come to his eyes, “she won’t let me see Justin?” He takes out a handkerchief and pokes at his eyes. “That boy was my whole life.”

I have no idea what happened to Dan or Claire as the years passed, although somebody told me that he’d heard that Claire married an ex-priest who wasn’t quite sure he was heterosexual; he also had a limp. This seems much too plausible to be true. Justin, as you know, became a musician, so to speak. But Dan more or less just disappeared into one of many California towns, most of them in the desolate miles of woods between the North Bay and the Oregon border, a land that bursts into flames each fall, to the residents’ enduring surprise.

I have, I’m sorry to say, no nice conclusion to this story, which is, I admit, not much of a story after all. But concerning Dan, at least, I can, and will, borrow a few words from Scott Fitzgerald’s chronicle of another splintered and self-deluded man as coda: “In any case, he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.”

People are, for the most part, locked into their minds, and their professions of belief in various ideologies or faiths, their opinions and scattered absurdities are but the knowable aspects of the lives they move through as best they can. This may be because of the regularity with which language pretends a simplification, a clear categorization of the particularized darkness that is the mind’s. And so religions and credos and their stupefying shibboleths are often spectacularly successful in duping and soothing us, their creaking yet elaborate language systems shamelessly representing themselves as the contraptions of God or his long-dead confidants. This is comforting folly, and we know that the most reprehensibly smug creeping Jesus lives, much of the time, despite his rigid beliefs, in the midnight of his brain, lost therein like the rest of us.

Consider the young, reasonably well-mannered men who killed so many people on September 11th. There they are, as unremarkably, as sadly ordinary as any representative American one can conjure up: anonymous, with their 5.75 haircuts and Timex “Explorer” watches, GAP T-shirts and overpriced running shoes, Hanes briefs and white athletic socks, and their Dockers khakis. They may well be full of Domino’s cardboard pizza or Big Macs, turning, despite their love of Allah, into chemical-laced excrement in their bowels. They might as well be American, citizens of Big Faucet, South Dakota, or Willow Lake, New Jersey. Insofar as their linguistic commerce goes, they are surely the salt of the earth: “I like very much to learn fly big jet plane nice, O.K., good buddy?” Of spiritual matters large and small, they have no doubts, they have no qualms, their relationship with their morose and irritable God is one that would make the most dedicated Bible-thumper, yea, with snakes and timbrels, screaming and writhing, white roses and accordions, and thunder and lightning, wild with envy. Their stern yet loving Father has certainly spoken to these men in thus wise: “Kill, my young stalwarts, this is my inscrutable message to you, oh, don’t ask why. And know that paradise awaits for all eternity, with its dark-eyed virgins anxious to make your acquaintance.”