Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

It may be useful to remark that these events occurred in 1960, and while the specific nuances of feeling manifested by the “characters,” let me call them, might well manifest themselves in our postmodern era of knowingness, of amateurish license, it’s unlikely. Our time seems too overtly self-congratulatory, righteous and fretful and worriedly concerned not only that “hip” things must be known, but that the responses to knowing these “hip” things be the correct ones. So: 1960, March, to be precise.

Let’s put the center of events in a publishing house or advertising agency or public-relations company. Some business on the East Side in the Forties or Fifties. We have, working in this business, two young men, Campbell and Nick. Both are just short of thirty, both married about five or six years (although Nick and his wife are newly separated), both waiting, although they of course do not know this, for the sixties to take up and complete the bloody job begun in 1936 in Spain. They were living, that is, in the odd social somnambulism that was later thought, perhaps predictably, to be a cultural “ferment.”

Nick worked for Campbell in a small but important department of the firm, but after a time, since they were both given to and comfortable with collaboration, they began to function as equals, and so they thought of themselves. They were wholly different — in family, background, education, upbringing, class, and in their tastes in music and clothes, in their speech, in everything that is established by family and background and class, etc., etc., or by opposition — of the right sort — to them. Campbell was a “child of privilege,” a faded phrase, of course, much like the genteel but spent “man of slender means,” which latter he also nicely was. That is to say that Campbell’s family at this point had little of the wealth it had once enjoyed, and that their name was its gallant but inadequate substitute. Things had become even harder when his mother and father divorced, soon after Campbell’s twelfth birthday, for his apparently scatterbrain mother had no money of her own, and his father’s generous settlement on her had been squandered on clothes and jewelry and many ga-ga trips to God knows where; and his alimony payments were far less than what his mother needed to live as she wished — or, as she thought of it, deserved — to live. Campbell’s expenses had been “taken care of,” he’d gone from Andover to Princeton, after which his father’s finances became unaccountably arcane and subterranean, almost, so his attorney argued, nonexistent. Soon after Princeton, Campbell had married a young Englishwoman, Faith, who was, supposedly, an heiress to a huge ale-and-stout fortune, that of a company old and profitable enough to have had presented to its founding Welsh family the trappings, raiment, and decorations of the elite. This fortune turned out to be a fable, but at the time of the story I relate, Campbell didn’t know this; nor, for that matter, did Faith. How hopeful and wistful they must have been in their fresh young marriage, thinking but not daring to think of the wonderfully corrupting fortune that awaited them. It occurs to me that these fantasy monies might have influenced, in some tangential, “mysterious” way, Campbell’s — and perhaps Faith’s — behavior in the events that were soon to develop; but there’s no way of knowing, of course.

Perhaps the best way to present Nick is to comment on his wonderment, an amused wonderment, at Campbell’s elegant shabbiness, which Nick originally took as a sign of what one might call sartorial dumbness. Campbell’s jackets, for instance, were out of style, as Nick thought of style, threadbare, battered, rumpled, and none too clean; and his beautiful oxford shirts, ten years old at least, although perfectly laundered, were faded and frayed at the cuffs. His English shoes, repaired and repaired again, and polished innumerable times to a glovelike hand, were as strange to Nick as was his hair, always shaggy and seemingly combed in great haste; and his ties were carelessly knotted and slightly askew. Nick, of course, had no notion or experience of these persistent prep-school affectations, in place so long that they no longer seemed affectations but laws, cultural truths, the regulations of an Episcopalian God. Nick, nobody’s fool, as they say, quickly came to realize that Campbell had chosen this “look,” which made him, to Nick, an eccentric, or perhaps an exotic.

There’s little point in giving much of Nick’s background; we may assume that it was the opposite of Campbell’s, i.e.; what Campbell was, Nick was not. And yet, as I’ve said, they worked well together, they began to like each other, and their daily discoveries of each other’s quirks and oddities and cultural opinions served to strengthen their growing camaraderie. The marginalized niche in the department wherein they worked became truly theirs, their work flourished, their work was, in fact, extraordinarily good. Rather quickly, their daily labors became pleasures to which they looked forward.

It became apparent to Nick, in the first month or two of their acquaintance — apparent and almost unbelievable — that Campbell had never been in an Automat, and had to be instructed in these restaurants’ ways. He’d never eaten 15¢ hamburgers at Grant’s: bloody rare miniatures topped with rings of delectably half-fried onions, nor drunk their extraordinary birch beer on tap. He’d never eaten a hot dog with mustard and onions in tomato sauce from a Sabrett cart. The 2 FOR 35¢ blended whiskey specials at Blarney Stone and White Rose saloons were a revelation to him — as indeed were the proletarian brands of booze like Kinsey Silver Label, Three Feathers, Four Roses, Fleischman’s, Wilson “That’s All,” and Paul Jones — and he had no notion that these saloons’ spreads of sliced cheese, baloney, spiced ham, cherry peppers, pickles, raw onions, coleslaw, pickled beets, crackers, bread, and mustard were free — they were free —to anyone who had a beer or two at the bar. What a world this was! Campbell, that is to say, evidently had no knowledge whatsoever of Manhattan west of Fifth Avenue and south of Fortieth Street. Or so Nick said as he charged Campbell with this extraordinary ignorance. He was an innocent, deposited each morning at Grand Central, to which he returned each evening to be taken back to Connecticut, or some other barely imaginable place. This is surely something of an exaggeration, and yet it is true that Nick took a consistently surprised, even charmed Campbell to the shoddy remainder bookstores and back-date magazine emporiums in and around Times Square, to Toffenetti’s and Marco Polo’s (“Ham ’n’ Eggs Are My Game”), to the Forty-second Street Tad’s Flame Steak ($1.69!!), and to God knows how many lost, dark bars in the Forties off Broadway or Seventh Avenue, where they sat with their Rheingold drafts and talked fitfully with the battered whores and bust-out horse-players waiting for The New Day A-Comin’ Tomorrow. For Campbell, these mundane comings and goings that he and Nick shared at lunch hour or after five, became romantic adventures, and Nick a knowing guide possessed of the most profoundly arcane knowledge of the city, the actual city.

It was no doubt true that Campbell knew little of this New York, unremarkable and workaday New York. Campbell’s city was the nighttime metropolis of taxis from Grand Central or Penn Station for choreographed evenings with girls from Wellesley or Smith or Mount Holyoke, of silly rendezvous at the Plaza and the Pierre and the Biltmore for Old Fashioneds, or tables at the Blue Angel or the Le Ruban Bleu, of petrifying string quartets at Carnegie Recital Hall; and then taxis back to Grand Central or Penn Station. The specifics of such evenings may have differed from these, but the general spirit of such entertainments was unvarying. There was no other New York for Campbell, certainly not an actual New York; the boroughs, for instance, with their millions, did not quite exist. It might not be too ridiculous to guess that Campbell’s city was a kind of theatrical or cinematic “event.”