Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

On the morning of my erotic christening, there was no teasing, no off-color jokes or winks or grins, and there had been none for the preceding week, during which time I had been wholly aware of the arrangement. I can’t remember what my mother had been told concerning my night away from home, but my father had concocted something having to do with the business. I was, as my mother well knew, expected to ultimately join my father’s business as a partner.

That night, after dinner at Monte’s Venetian Room in Brooklyn, during which my father talked to me about school, and thrilled me by complimenting me on the dark, sober tie that my mother had insisted I wear, one of his cronies drove me to Manhattan in my father’s Fleetwood sedan. He was tall and very dark and disconcertingly still, and we had nothing at all to say to each other. I was intimidated by him, really — his name, not that it matters, was Lou Angelini — by his taciturnity, his air of respect for me as the boss’s son, and his rigorously conservative dress. We arrived at the Hotel Pierre, in those days even quieter and more elegant, more raffinée than it is now. I hardly remember what happened then, but I recall my sense of clumsiness and awkwardness as we walked through the lobby, terribly slowly, because of Lou’s slight limp, the effect of what he called a “war wound.” But we did, finally, get on an elevator, and then, finally, reached a door in the long, muffled corridor.

Lou knocked quietly, twice, and when the door opened, a pretty girl of nineteen or twenty smiled at us. She had ash blond hair and although her eyes were elaborately made up, her lips were their natural soft pink. Lou looked at her, in her silk robe, up and down, and then left without a word. From that moment on, I was in a detached state of blissful shock, or perhaps happy stupor, as Grace, who later told me that she was half-Italian and half-Polish, showed me, in her words, a few things, more than a few things, that I might like. In the middle of the night we ordered room service and ate ham and eggs and drank cognac-and-ginger-ale highballs. There was nothing romantic or spongy about Grace, and yet she wasn’t cold or bored. She was, in fact, what my mother, the circumstances of course being different, would have called “full of fun.” When, at maybe four in the morning, she and I danced — that is, she taught me steps to the samba — to the soft radio, it was with a grave sense of play. It was intensely erotic and yet, although we were both naked, not bluntly sexual. Everything seemed magical, and I was obviously insane with pleasure. I had lost all sense of shame with this girl and had, too, of course, fallen in love with her. I even asked her if I might, maybe, call her sometime, a request that was met by a big smile whose import was instantly decipherable: it said, You are a boy.

I remember Grace’s body pretty well, her long waist, small breasts, the dark auburn of her neat pubic hair. She told me that she thought my father was a real sport, and I knew, instantly, that he had often spent the night with her. She would be, to my father, a nice kid, but a whore, and had her womanly role; not, surely, my mother’s role, or the role of the nice unknown girl that my father assumed I would discover and marry, but a valuable role. I always thought to tell Clara that had she been more like the whore that Grace was, rather than the bogus whore that she so contemptuously fabricated, I could have really, well, really loved her. I never said a word, and it has only recently occurred to me that I remained silent because I had no idea of what I truly meant to say, without sounding more like a fool than I had already proven myself to be.

On a very cold winter Saturday, I got two phone calls, not an hour apart, from Clara and an old sometime acquaintance, Robert. Both calls carried the news that Ben was very near death, that he had, indeed, about ten days to live. Robert was serious and somber, his voice an annoying mix of manufactured sadness and the self-important tone that bad news seems to make, for many people, mandatory. I did not, of course, let on to him that this was not bad news to me. Clara was her usual glacially sardonic self, much too ironically detached to be affected by something so banal as death. As always, I found in her distantly gelid tones the erotic quality that had unfailingly undone me. It had been perhaps six years since I’d heard from either Clara or Ben, and my first reaction to this sudden news was no better than apathetic. As the phrase has it, I didn’t care whether he lived or died.

Ben, according to Clara, would be very happy to see me, and would I come? There was, Clara told me, plenty of room in the big wooden house that they’d bought on the Hudson, and my presence would make for a sort of reunion, I think she said, an event, which word she used without the hint of a dark smile. Robert also insisted — he told me that he was speaking for the, God help us, “family”—on the wondrous quality that my presence at the deathbed would add. I was tempted to say “to the festivities?” but kept my mouth shut. It had been so long, what a long time, it’s been years, and years, and so long, and on and on. So we chattered, the three of us. It had, really, not been long enough, it would never be long enough. And yet, I agreed to go, knowing what a disgusting carnival it would be. There would be present the shattered rabble from Ben’s past life, along with the fawning students, the grim, scowling artistic platoon from the nearby town, the arts reporter on the local rag, and, surely, the predictably ill-dressed colleagues in the English Department, who were too hip, too distracted by art and ideas to care about clothes, man, but among whom, I was virtually certain, Ben had cut a bohemian, Byronic, urbane figure — the dandy amid the rubes — for almost fifteen years. And, too, there would be Clara, the discreetly bored, aging bitch about whom the panting saps to whom she’d thrown the occasional sexual pourboire of one kind or another, would circle to proffer drinks, sandwiches, lights for her cigarettes, and condolences. They would, each seedy associate professor and second-rate graduate student, smile tenderly and longingly at the strong wife, this astonishing woman who hid her grief with wit and repartee. And each would be happy to believe that this fascinating tramp had taken him, and only him, into bed, car, bathroom, cellar, or backyard. What passion had been theirs! Etcetera. Meanwhile, the smudged and blurry wives and girlfriends lurked on the far side of this erotic Arcadia, being, as always, good sports, anonymous in their calf-length skirts and terrifyingly red lipstick.

Later that day, I regretted my decision to travel up to that grim third-rate college into whose zombie life Ben had settled. But when all is said and done, whenever that may be, I really did want to see Ben die, or, more precisely, watch him slide toward death out of, so to speak, the corner of my eye. None of his destructive asides or poisonous denigrations could save him, and for this I was thankful. I felt no guilt about any of these thoughts, or, better, desires, for I’d always, as I’ve already mentioned, hated Ben for putting me in the way of Clara, and then for getting in the way of me and Clara. The son of a bitch couldn’t win, as far as I was concerned. Of course, the three of us had conspired in this plan of desire and need and demand and destruction, and it was somehow contingent upon our simmering dislike of each other. I was curious, too, to see if Clara still held him — and me — in the venereal contempt that was the perfect expression of her nature. I had cuckolded Ben for years and years, although “cuckolded” is not the right word, as I think I’ve pointed out. I had, from the beginning, been permitted to discover that there was a good chance that Ben had, early on, found out about our passionate indiscretions. I have no authentic recollection of what I then thought of this, but I can guess that I somehow, in some skewed pathology of gratitude, felt a sense of privilege at being the recipient of this couple’s comradely attentions. I do know that I had come to worship what I took to be our wondrous freedom with an intensity that went beyond the imbecile.