Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

In late September, Nick told Campbell, in his capacity as Nick’s superior, that he’d received a job offer from a firm in Chicago, and that he’d accepted. His divorce was almost settled, the final decree a week or so away, and, well, he was giving his two weeks’ notice. There may truly have been a job in Chicago, but it’s not important. It’s possible that Campbell began to say, “What job?!” but that, too, is unimportant. His face, despite a castor-oil smile so false as to be grotesque, went bone-white, so that he looked, for a few seconds, like a corpse, or, more hideously, like a theatrical version of a corpse. When there was but a week left until Nick’s departure, they managed to have a celebratory farewell lunch at a little bar that served sandwiches and hamburgers to the midday office drunks. It was, not surprisingly, a disaster, unleavened by office gossip or old jokes. Just as they were leaving, Campbell, riding on three martinis and a few beers, demanded that Nick return the “very very personal” photographs of his wife. He seemed angrily humiliated, as if Nick had inveigled him into showing him the photographs, as if he had been blackmailed. In the office, Nick gave him the pictures and Campbell roughly folded them in two and stuck them into the pages of a paperback on his desk. “This is a stupid rotten novel!” he said, belligerent and put upon.

On Nick’s last day, he packed up his few things and said that he’d be leaving a little early, what the hell. Campbell got up from his desk as if drunk — perhaps he was drunk — his face pulled into a sneer, and half-lurched, half-lunged at Nick to hold him by the forearms, the shoebox with its odds and ends held in Nick’s hands awkwardly between them. He didn’t look at Nick but stiffly bent forward and tried to kiss his mouth, missing but wetting his chin. His eyes were wide and slightly out of focus. Nick stepped away from him and said something like “Come on, Campbell!” and walked out of the office and to the elevators. Campbell was a few steps behind him and when he reached Nick he motioned to the stairwell. “Please,” he said. “Just a … please?” Nick, absurdly, looked at his watch, then followed Campbell into the stairwell, where he had slouched against a wall, looking at his shoes. Then, as if he had rehearsed, which he may well have done, Campbell begged Nick not to leave just yet, to come and stay with him — and with Faith — and with this articulation of his wife’s name he looked into Nick’s face and grinned. He knew, he said, he knew that Nick liked, well, was attracted to Faith, the photos, he said, those pictures of her. Then he stopped, simply defeated. “I love you,” he said. “I love you.” He began to wail very quietly, his hands folded high on his chest in a classic yet ridiculous pose of misery and loss. Nick’s face was flushed with anger and pity and, who can tell, perhaps with desire. “I love you, I love you!” Campbell said, blubbering now, and he put his arms clumsily around Nick’s waist just as the door opened and a janitor, carrying a bucket and mop, stepped onto the landing. Momentarily taken aback by the sight of these two flustered young men, he stood uncertainly, then, as they pulled apart, realized what he was seeing, and smiled a knowing smile, a smile that said he understood and that it was all right with him.

Invisible Door

I once had a friend, a dear friend, who, I believed, or was led to believe, had betrayed me, profoundly and completely. Even now, years later, I can’t bring myself to make known the circumstances, the facts, as I then perceived them to be, of this betrayal. That these circumstances, these facts, were, I discovered, malicious inventions created by another man for his own mysterious reasons, did not remedy or ameliorate the estrangement and bad feeling they — no matter how preposterous — created between me and my friend; his putative betrayal, that is, might as well have been actual. The notion that time heals or erases such aberrations and their dolorous effects has not, in my experience, been the case; on the contrary, time makes concrete and salient all initial agonies, missteps, misunderstandings, and bitterness. It takes a spectacularly willful, almost herculean courage to destroy, even to soften these ugly petrifactions, after which, and at best, there is nothing left of feeling but rubble. It is better to interiorize the waste and regret than to attempt its amelioration. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The third party I’ve mentioned, the malign, the famous meddler who stalks through so many shabby stories, had been a partner of mine and my friend in a small, ultimately unsuccessful specialty-printing business we had begun together — although the failure of the business was not, I’m fairly sure, a factor in the creation of his elaborate system of lies, painstakingly developed to convince me of my friend’s perfidy. It’s enough to say that he did his work well, and had, I suppose, the pleasure of seeing my friend and me sundered, quite wrenchingly disjointed in mutual anger and bewilderment. Friendships that collapse in this way attain to a kind of mean perfection, a hateful balance of irreconcilable integers, each of which is, or most certainly becomes, a treasured wound. I was hurt, surprised, and puzzled by the enormity of my friend’s acts; he was astonished by my abrupt decision to end our friendship. My action and his reaction were gestures sadly predicated on a corrupt syllogism, the major premise of which might have been phrased: “If a man I have no reason to trust tells me that a friend has betrayed me, I’ll sever all ties with the friend.”

The facts, as I have called them, or what I then thought to be the facts, and the subtle variations of this betrayal, were made available to me over a period of perhaps a month and a half by my indefatigable guide to — to what? Cleanliness, let’s say, an ethical, even moral cleanliness. “Look at this evidence,” he might as well have said, “look at these dispiriting, tawdry documents. Soon all will be revealed! And afterward, you’ll rid yourself of this false friend, and be clean!” He said, of course, nothing like this, but I’m afraid that I said something very like it to myself. With each piece of evidence, of proof, that my altruistic “assistant” brought me, I became more deliciously righteous, more insulted, more put upon and victimized. It’s now obvious that my need, my desire, perhaps, to be an object of perverse and malicious acts was the base reason for my hunger for more and more documentation of my friend’s cruel schemes. There was, if truth be told (I use the phrase in full awareness of its pitiful irony), plenty of damning material, early on, for me to accuse and then judge my friend, but I began to enjoy the accumulation of his misdeeds, the sweet pang of the badly used, the moral eroticism of a vast self-pity.

I at last decided that I had enough information (I have no recollection of how I came to this conclusion), and I’d already poked and rubbed at my ego’s scratch until it was red and swollen. It so turned out that at about the same time that I’d decided to confront my friend, my false, treacherous, vile friend! he and his wife had just separated. That is, his wife had left him for a man whom she, and, to a lesser extent, her husband, had known in college, I believe. These events occurred some forty years ago, so my memory is not wholly to be trusted. This man had re-entered their lives so as to “learn how to live,” or so I understand him to have phrased it. Learn how to live! There’s nothing to say to that. He had apparently known of the couple’s marriage, its stability, love, mutual kindness, its happy child — its composure, I suppose, will cover it nicely. And so he sidled into their lives, as old peripheral acquaintances will do, as an unhappy, even miserable supplicant. Yes, he wanted them to teach him “how to live.” Nice work, as the old song says, if you can get it. I know that all of this sounds absurd, much too good to be true, as they say, too maudlin, too Hollywood, if it is not affected to say so. I heard this story, with its tellers’ predictable variations, over the years, not that any of it mattered to me. It hadn’t mattered to me when it first happened, when the loving couple decided to help the sad old pal. That my friend was soon cuckolded by this wheedling incubus and then deserted by his true-blue wife, who would later make his visitation rights anent the child a grinding humiliation, so I understand, was fine by me, fine. Just when he came to me for succor, I suppose I might call it, I was all ready with my dossier. I seem to recall, in fact, that I was somewhat annoyed that his wife was unfaithful to him with only this one man. On the other hand, he was a perfectly shameful choice. So that was fine.