Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

I assumed, or pretended to assume, in my decrepit role in the marriage, that the reason I became aroused when my wife was openly desired by other men, and why my masturbatory daydreams were only of her — as somebody else, perhaps, but always of her — and why I was swiftly carried into erotic dementia when she played her roles, especially those that required her to be someone else pretending to be her — once she was a young man, once my mother, once her mother — was because for some time my wife had, for me, little to do with the woman I married. She was, day after day, for many months, a sort of descendant of the scab-faced woman, the innocent yet somehow disturbingly soiled girl I had wed, the lusciously disfigured victim who had, recklessly and suddenly, asserted her lascivious self to suck me off in the cab that took us from the drunken chaos of our reception to that first grim, brown apartment. As her shining blond head moved ravenously between my thighs in the panels of light that slid, dreamlike, through the dark cab, I heard the slight whispering sound that her scab made as it scraped against my disheveled shirt. When I ejaculated, I had a momentary vision of my semen oozing thickly from the bright fragile surface of her face.

I may be elaborating this scene. I don’t truly recall a “whispering sound,” and suspect that the word “shirt” has called this fevered description up, for after I came, my wife spat a mouthful of semen into the shirttails that she’d pulled from my trousers for that purpose. At that very point, while we were in the cab, and certainly before we had begun our married life, my wife seemed not to be precisely the woman I had just married. I was stunned and delighted by her sexual savoir faire, her carnal flourish, I suppose such daring can be called. I can still see, with unsettling clarity, her sly childish face as she looked up from my lap, her slick, wet mouth, her eyes cloudy with lewdness, her visage at once hers and somebody else’s. I put my hand, tenderly, on her wondrous mask, and she looked directly into my eyes and shook her head, no. As I now understand things, which is not to say that I understand anything, a different woman looked up at me, and it was she who shook her head: no. So that after the affirmation of her surprising act of fellatio, there was a puzzling negation. And in this way our marriage began.

Which takes me, at last, to the night I wish to speak of, but before I place myself, as a young man, in that dark hallway leading to our terrible apartment, I should correct an earlier misstatement. During our marriage, I did not involve myself with other women, and I have no reason to believe that my wife had to do with other men. She had many opportunities, that is to say, I gave her many opportunities, but I don’t believe that she took advantage of them, if advantage is not too frivolous a word. I used to believe that she had fucked, everywhere and anywhere, all the men that she met, but now it seems to me that those who suggested these spectacular infidelities to me were simply adding their small donation to the general squalor.

I walked out of a bitter-cold night of wind and snow flurries, the exhausted linoleum of the corridor popping and crackling as I trod upon its crazed and faded roses. From behind the door I heard jazz, elbowing its way through the grit and scratches of an old record. I thought it likely that my wife was alone, for she often listened to jazz while preparing supper, and yet there was no reason for me to assume that, for she often played records while guests were in the apartment. Perhaps, since we were so rarely alone, I blinded myself with optimism: I was still guileless enough then to wish for simple things, to wish for miraculous change. Or for that matter, any change at all. I opened the door to see Charlie Poor on our bed, his back against the headboard, a glass of whiskey and water in one hand and a cigarette in the other. My wife stood next to the bed in an old sweater, a pair of boy’s shorts that were much too small for her, and dirty white sneakers. She was gesturing with her cigarette. Everything was calm and still, transfixed peacefully within the perfections of Thelonious Monk.

Now that I have begun the narrative that with any luck at all will lead me, rapidly and cleanly, to its conclusion, I apologize for the fact that I must interrupt one last time to say that this is the point at which, in all my previous attempts to tell this story, I’ve stopped. At this point, approach this scene however, this moment during which I hesitate at the open door, grateful for the soft light and the warmth, I have been unable to continue. There is, perhaps, nothing, really, to tell, and yet that nothing demands release. I have lied in many ways, lied so as to prevent the truth from escaping, even partially, fragmented and deformed, from the duplicitous narrative in which I have hitherto encased it. For instance, Charlie Poor was certainly drinking my whiskey, and my wife, although I would prefer to clothe her in a loose, full skirt, was certainly wearing boy’s shorts that were so provocatively tight that her mons veneris was perfectly defined. “Blue Monk” was on the phonograph, yes. But Charlie Poor was not stretched out on the bed — it has always been, in the past, his place on the bed that has made the narrative waver and then stagger to a dead end. This time, I hope, the truth may, by itself, be competent to tell the story, to make its incoherence somewhat lucid, perhaps even to make its incoherence somewhat coherent.

Charlie Poor was a man made out of cardboard, surely not what, even then, I would call a friend, but then again he was not much flimsier than anyone else we knew. There was an almost grandiosely specious quality about his casual facade because of the tense and worried personality that it barely concealed. He had been, quite recently, one of my employers, the part-owner of a small specialty-jobs printing shop for which I’d worked as a general office assistant for about six months. Charlie, when he discovered that I was a published writer, so to speak, so to speak, very much wanted to be my friendly boss, my colleague, my buddy. He had some idea, not that it was, or is rare, that I had some special knowledge of and entrée to the literary world, to magazines and editors and agents, to fashion and glamour. It’s too good to be true, but Charlie wrote poetry, oh yes. That my wife had taken to writing poetry is, perhaps, even more remarkable, another indication, as if one were needed, to prove that life insists on the wearisome banal. Charlie slowly became peripheral to my life, to our lives, and I’m fairly certain that within a month of my going to work for him at Midtown Artistic Print he had been to at least one weekend party at our apartment.

Charlie fired me after six months or so. Of course, he didn’t want to fire me, not my colleague and friend, Charlie. He was devastatingly, ruinously compassionate, almost parodically concerned with the dignity of existence and the wonders of nature, perpetually simmering with anger over injustices done to all sentient beings — he often used these phrases verbatim. Charlie did not want to fire me, no, it was his older partner, who, like, wore suits, man, and, like, ties, and who didn’t know what was happening, who really fired me. But of course Charlie had to do the dirty work. I am probably imagining that he wore a hurt look as he told me the bad news, how sad he was, how somber. He said that he hoped there would be no hard feelings, no reason for us to stop seeing each other socially. Of course not, dear Charlie! What understanding scum we were.

I don’t recall how Charlie insinuated himself into our lives after that, but he certainly did. It may have been the result of my craven response to his crude act, that is, Charlie responded to what he correctly took to be weakness. With the passage of time, however, I have come to realize that I was possessed of the same bogus emotions and shredded ethics as Charlie, and that I could just as easily, had our roles been reversed, have fired Charlie, my face dark with fake anger and embarrassment, crocodile tears standing nobly in my eyes, the stone-cold world too much for my sensitive spirit. Charlie knew this, I think. I’m pretty sure that Charlie knew this. It was a question of, well, the breaks.