Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

Campbell somewhat melodramatically pretended exasperation at Nick’s delay, but he was, in truth, deeply annoyed. Nick imagined him wondering “what else can I do?” But within a day or two, Nick proposed a tentative date, subject to change, oh yes, for his visit. From that very moment, Campbell said nothing more about Faith, nor did he bring in any more photographs. It is, by the way, to be noted that Nick had simply kept what he thought of as the “flower girl” photograph, and it joined the beach picture — which Campbell had silently left under Nick’s blotter pad — in his desk drawer. Neither of them mentioned this. Nick would, now and again, and against his better judgment, slyly look at the images that he had by now laid imaginative claim to, but Campbell pretended not to notice this. At any rate, he made no comments. As an indication of Nick’s shaky state of mind at this time, it’s pertinent to remark that he would not permit himself to take the photographs home, for that, he tortuously believed, would suggest the perverse. On the other hand, it had occurred to him to ask his estranged wife to accompany him on his suburban visit; or to tell her that he was in love again; or to send her copies of the photographs with an enclosed message of vile triumph. After these chimeras passed, he was half-certain that Campbell had turned him into an idiot.

Campbell, to repeat, did not mention Faith or the weekend or how lovely the cool evenings were on the lawn that looked down across dense woods to the river. He stopped “selling” the visit, and was careful not to say anything that might unsettle Nick. He had his plans, although they were more like hopes, as we’ll see. He did not know, however, the extent to which Nick was by now enthralled — besotted — by the images that he had memorized. As far as Campbell knew, the photos were erotically promising to Nick, suggestive of Faith’s “enlightenment,” as he might have said. But Nick, following the sad, trite script that is known by heart to half the world, felt a vast, contemptuous resentment of Campbell, who not only knew the breathless delight of sleeping with this Aphrodite, he had certainly and lasciviously subjected her — this adoring and trusting woman! — to his, to Nick’s gaze. This blithe contradiction held that Faith had bravely offered her body to the unknown yet noble Nick because she knew that she would immediately love him; but also that she was the unwilling subject of a lewd experiment that forced her modest self to be ogled and sullied by a stranger, the depraved Nick. He almost, but not quite, thought of Faith as the victim of “a terrible fate.” You see how addled he’d become. That Campbell had been changed into a rival for his own wife’s affections, her imagined sexual enthusiasms, was a notion that Nick never allowed fully to assert itself. It was — he knew this — absurd even to think of this woman whom he “knew” by means of two stiffly posed photographs, taken and revealed for reasons that were still obscure, and perhaps specious. Yet he could feel her breasts in his hands.

About a week or so before Nick’s promised visit, Campbell’s manner subtly changed. Perhaps that’s putting it too decisively; it’s enough to say that Nick caught him, on a half-dozen occasions, staring at the wall, an expression of wretchedness, a kind of bereft gloom, on his face. Nick stifled his anger: how dare he mope around with the beautiful and gentle Faith awaiting him on the beach, at their bedside, half-naked and shamed in the role of sexual victim that had been dishonorably urged upon her? But the coming weekend visit would remedy all, and if love had to be painfully extruded from the vulgarity that Campbell had created, that’s what would, what must be done. It’s quite probable that Nick, certainly, and Campbell as well, were on the edge of an imbecile eroticism. As for Faith, no one knows, or knew, with any certainty, just what she was doing — if anything — in this shabby drama. She waited, did she not?

One afternoon, glum Campbell told Nick that he and Faith had quarreled “hurtfully” a week earlier, over something that was petty and inconsequential, but which served to awaken the hidden angers and, well, disappointments in their marriage. He’d left the house, bought a pint of vodka, and driven to a little pebble beach on the river. He sat on the hood of the car, drinking and smoking, hating Faith and his marriage, his “fucking charity house,” as he put it, envying Nick’s separation and freedom. The rest of his story was rushed, fragmented, elliptical, and told with his face partly averted. A young man had driven up in an old coupe and parked next to Campbell’s car. He looked like a college student — maybe high school. They’d talked about women and shared the vodka, and Campbell told him of the quarrel with Faith, to which the young man said that he’d just broken up with his girl, who was nothing but a fucking whore bitch. He opened Campbell’s fly and his own, and they kissed and fondled each other, and then the young man knelt in front of Campbell and sucked him off, although Campbell said, in a whisper, “he mouthed me,” while masturbating himself to climax. Then he said good-bye and smiled in the darkness — Campbell could see his teeth — and drove off. When he got in, Faith was asleep, just as well, God! What was wrong with him? He’d never tell Faith, never, he didn’t think, some things just can’t be told. He looked at Nick with a fake rueful grin that said “but I can tell you, can’t I?” Nick shook his head in what could have been disapproval or chagrin or both.

Well. There it surely was. Campbell was letting him know, with a glancing candor, why he wanted Nick to visit. His convenient, halting tale — true or not — was a confession of his desire for Nick, who thought, with scorn, that Campbell didn’t have the nerve to make a straightforward pass at him, but had to use his wife as a lure. All right, you son of a bitch! He’d go up to their house, he wanted Faith, didn’t he? he was beginning to dream about her. So he thought then; but later in the day, it became clear to him that Campbell would get what he had schemed to get from the beginning if he visited. That would never do! Rather than fend off Campbell, or worse, listen to him speak of his desire and devotion, for an entire weekend, he would give up Faith. So crazed was he that he actually thought this — that he would “give up”— give up! — a woman who existed only in Campbell’s occasional remarks and two small images. He wasn’t so demented, though, as to think that she would be crushed by his sacrifice.

On that Friday, he said that he’d have to cancel the weekend, something about his goddamned wife and her shyster lawyer and a division of things that they’d bought and been given for their apartment, they had to meet and talk and do this and that and this and that; on and on he blathered hysterically, while Campbell listened in silence.

Now that this crisis, if it may be called that, had been temporarily resolved, or shelved, a hint of normality was restored to their relationship. It was not as it had been, and they most often ate lunch separately, while their after-five strolls and drinks became rare. All references to a weekend in Connecticut disappeared from their conversation, and Faith may as well have never lived. In the careful politeness of mutual embarrassment, they silently conspired to pretend that no invitation had ever been made to “the Campbells’,” or, if one had, that it could not have been “seriously entertained,” as they say. For that matter, there were no photographs of Faith in existence, certainly not in Nick’s desk drawer. Perhaps there was no Faith, no wife at all. Their friendship, of course, was over, and though they still worked well together, they had few conversations that were not professional or centered on public events. So the late spring and summer passed.