Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

At that time, my wife and I were living behind a barber shop, in a small studio apartment that was reached by means of a long, narrow corridor that seemed to belong to the barber shop, I don’t quite know how. The apartment, too, seemed more like an adjunct to the shop than it did an entity unto itself, and, perhaps because of this, I hated it. My wife was a very small woman, I might say a tiny woman, but her body was arrestingly erotic. It should have looked, given her size, like a child’s body, but it did not: she was a kind of aphrodisiacal miniature, a striking doll. Whenever she, alone, approached the corridor entranceway from the street, the scum congregated on the sidewalk, in a crass parody of the manly chorus boys in the musical comedies of the era, would ogle her, fondle themselves, make sucking and kissing noises, and proclaim what they’d like to do to her. She invariably insisted that they never offended her and I chose to believe her. I really didn’t care one way or another: those fools had no sense of her actuality, and I suspect that her calm, dispassionate gaze forced them to see themselves for the curious filth it suggested they were.

Our bed dominated the apartment, and was what, I later discovered, is called queen-sized, a term that almost shines with poignancy. This bed had a presence beyond its fact, probably because of something so mundane as its size relative to the total floor space of the room. It served my purposes, such as they were then, to think of the bed as having some special quality, as more than it was, as a symbol, in fact. As a symbol for what, I had no idea. But I wanted to write, more precisely, I wanted to be thought of as a writer, and I had started many stories having to do with the power that the bed exerted over various darkly tragic sagas, whose whining narrators were more unhappy and misunderstood, more irrevocably doomed than is, even melodramatically, possible. The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable. Our marriage was, at this point, in the early stages of irreversible decay. My wife and I often talked for hours about our problems, our refined problems, sure that we were facing them honestly — a favorite word — sure that although they were unique, they were certainly solvable. We wasted a great deal of time in these thoughtful, respectful, futile colloquies. “Irreversible decay” is a phrase that I permit to stand as a reminder of its use in the first sentence of one of my early stories, “The Bower of Bliss.” The sentence read, “Although Amanda and I did not know it, the mutually ecstatic shudder that put period to our lovemaking on that breathless midsummer night, was the first subtle tremor of the irreversible decay that had infected our perhaps too bright union.” “Ecstatic shudder,” “subtle tremor,” “too bright union”! Even “Amanda” proceeds from the abyss of machine fiction. I couldn’t write because I so wanted to impress people with the fact that my writing revealed a knowledge of writing. I was, I think, unaware of this.

Our marriage was, indeed, falling apart, for many reasons, none of which is worth commenting on, that is to say, any reason might do. We had been married for almost five years, and my wife was allowing, or helping, perhaps, her boredom and restlessness to surface when and how it pleased. Had she been anything other than glumly dissatisfied, I might have been disturbed. As it was, her quiet and dazed contempt, her wayward anomie, passed right by me, as the phrase has it. I had no way of combating it, or her, anyway, assuming that I noticed. I had no idea what to do — assuming that I noticed. All this took place in the benighted days before husbands were sensitive to their wives’ needs, as they are now. In any event, I began dreading the walk down the corridor, the sight of my wife sprawled on the bed — the symbolic bed — reading, it seemed to me, always, The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. That can’t be so, but since the title has, so to speak, declared itself, let it stand. I hated to see her there, her perfect little body, her small feet, her blond hair in a carelessly provocative upsweep, her toreador pants defining her thighs and buttocks and softly bulging pudenda. It was a kind of shabby ordeal.

She was too complete and complacent in her tiny model of a body, reading, or not reading, or just there, doing anything, I don’t know. Occasionally, I’d find her naked, or half-naked, after a shower, and this was worse: her womanly parts looked as if they’d been supplied her, as if she’d rented them at a costume shop. It was always hard for me to believe that her breasts were teacup-size, that her dirty-blond wedge of pubic hair was not even the size of a business card. Who was this woman?

We had been married almost five years earlier, after knowing each other for fifteen months. At the time we met, she was the best friend of a woman that I had been planning to marry, but who had been seduced, a week before we were to have been engaged, by my best friend, whom she was, eventually, to marry. This is neither here nor there, although I believe that their marriage is quite successful. I realize, as I write this, that I have no way of knowing this: the last I heard from them, via a pretentious Christmas card, was that they were living in one of the smug, self-congratulatory towns of the San Francisco Bay Area.

All I clearly remember of my earlier love is that she often liked to be fully dressed when we fucked — she had what may be characterized as a masculine pornographic imagination. I draw no moral from this penchant, but do think of it, from time to time, with a pang of lewd nostalgia, as perfectly befits the dirty old man I have all but become. Sometimes she even, marvelously, wore a hat. It was, she said, like being fucked by somebody she’d bumped into on the street or the subway. And so it was. I say, “all I clearly remember,” but that is, of course, only an expression. I remember many, oh, many things about her, for instance, the oddly asymmetrical v of her pubic hair. She was extremely attractive, and I can’t really blame my old friend for his loss of control. I blame her, of course, because a woman is more than just — more than just what? I know nothing about women. I remember things like hats.

Perhaps my wife and I were propelled or pushed or excited into marriage because of her mishap, the accident that she suffered shortly prior to our wedding: she somehow slipped and then fell down a flight of subway stairs, cutting, bruising, and very badly abrading one side of her face. I can’t clarify what I mean when I say “excited into marriage,” but the accident had the effect of making us agree to move the wedding date up by about a month, as if, somehow, we had to marry while she bore this painful blazon. I later considered writing about this injury and the huge scab that asserted itself as its astonishing manifestation, for it seemed — it still seems — a symbol of our disastrous marriage. It was not, any more than the bed was, but the idea that I might force it into one made me feel like a writer. That I even considered a narrative flowering from the fact of her wound was, finally, enough. I never wrote a word.

Her scab covered the left side of her face from jaw to hairline in a grim parody of deformation. There was about it, at once, a sense of the overwhelmingly repulsive and the breathlessly desirable, much in the same way that the human sex organs are hideously attractive. I can’t say that I thought this at the time, but I do seem to recall becoming aroused during the ceremony — so much so that my vows came in troubled quaverings. When we kissed to seal our compact, I thought that I might burst into ragged, tense laughter. She smiled at me, one side of her mouth held immobile by the thick scab: I wanted to fuck us into hysteria, there, in the minister’s study, before the wedding guests. Later, at the small reception given for us at her mother’s house, we found ourselves together in the kitchen, and I vulgarly put her hand on the hard lump in my trousers and then bent to lick her scabbed face. She rubbed me, flushed and quivering, and then, immediately, she was, at a sound from the doorway, in front of the refrigerator, into which she stared. I could see her legs trembling from her thighs to the doll-sized white heels she had on. I leaned against a table and smiled brilliantly at the doorway, amazed at the ruttishness that possessed me. It was her — and my — bitch friend, who looked at us and raised her eyebrows. As if she knew what we knew! As if she could. We glared insanely at her.