Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

The next day I got on the train at Grand Central and went up to watch Ben die, and to look into the cold, blank eyes of his wife. She was composed, remote, and sisterly, settled, uncomfortably, it seemed, into her flesh, as if she were finally alive, but not quite sure of life’s demands. On the way home, I thought of how we had laid waste to our sensibilities, with a truly genuine devotion to waste: we grew old amid this waste. We would not stay away from each other until we were sure that it didn’t matter any more whether we did or not.

At the very moment that my mother died, Clara and I were in bed together in the Hotel Brittany. She and I had met by accident on Vanderbilt Avenue and had gone downtown together in a cab. Clara, in her careless and reckless way, lied to me that she was going to meet an old school friend from Bennington in the Village, and I contributed my own god-awful, transparent lie. We wound up drinking in a bar off Sheridan Square, and I was soon taking liberties, as the creaking phrase has it, with her in a booth. We had, some six months before, decided to break off our affair of three years. We had no concern, of course, with Ben’s feelings, even the ersatz ones we handily ascribed to him, but we were somewhat anxious over the possibility that a full-blown adulterous romance might impinge upon our freedom to have romances with others. We had spent some hours thrashing this out, for we were serious indeed about our prospective lusts.

The afternoon had turned into a windy, bitter night, and a thin, powder-dry snow lashed the streets with a stinging drizzle. I bought a bottle of Gordon’s and we walked through the harsh weather a few blocks to the Brittany, a faded and somewhat decrepit hotel that still retained a semblance of old glamour in the appointments of its raffish bar and taproom, a locale that featured a weekend cocktail pianist, some gifted hack with a name like Tommy Jazzino or Chip Mellodius. I had always liked the rooms in the Brittany, mostly because of the large closets, a strange thing, I grant you, to care about, since I never once registered at the desk with anything even remotely resembling luggage. The desk clerk nodded and smiled at us as I signed and paid; he probably thought he knew us from the night before, or the week before. God knows, the desperately sex-driven all have the same lost, hopeful look, the same imploring face that seems to whine please don’t disturb me before I come. Such half-mad people are called lovers, a fact usually denied by lovers. This denial is most often rooted in the dreary fact that most people fall, or once fell, into this category, and no doubt think it unique.

One of the inconsequential things that I remember about our night in that warm room, thinly edged with the smell of cigarette smoke and gin, is the fact that Clara, as she undressed, revealed herself to be wearing an undergarment that looked like a pair of rather fancy culottes: they were a kind of pale raspberry in color, trimmed with black lace. She described them, apologetically, for some reason, as a fucking goddamn slip for idiot girls. I can’t say whether they were effectively arousing or not, but they were remarkable and quite unforgettable. I’ve always wondered whether Clara, of all the women in the world, was the only one to wear this particular item of underclothing; I wonder, too, what Ben thought of her in this extravagant lingerie. I never asked her.

Clara told me that Ben was currently screwing one of his graduate students, a serious, annoyingly smart young woman from Princeton, who was, according to Clara, well ahead of academic schedule in the dowdiness department, almost in the same nonpareil league as assistant professors. The girl thought — what else? — that Ben was really aware, really brilliant, really wonderful, his blinding light hidden under the conventional academic barrel. And so young, so young to be so aware, so brilliant, so wonderful. She thought, according to Clara, that Ben would one day write an academic novel to surpass Randall Jarrell! And, in this novel, she dreamed that she might figure, barely and flatteringly disguised, as a complex and wonderfully difficult graduate student. I’m more or less painting this particular lily, as may be obvious, although Clara did actually say that Ben was screwing a graduate student. For all I know she might have looked like Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth! It pleases me to be given this glorious woman to use as a term of comparison, for this time has no understanding of her at all. She speaks, her face and body and the timbre of her voice speak to men on their own, as they say, morosely distant from wives and homes, half-drunk in the dim bars of half-empty hotels. She stands in bathroom doorways, in a skirt and brassiere, waiting for a light. She is perfectly and ideally dead, as she should be. What, in this age of speeding trash and moronic facts, would such a beauty even have to do?

We drank and smoked and Clara cried, not about Ben, certainly, but about her father’s recent death. Then I fucked her and we slept. I woke at about five in the morning, and, touching Clara’s naked body next to mine, I was instantaneously nutty with lust. As I again fucked her groaning self with a dedicated selfishness, my mother called to me. I could hear her voice as clearly as if she stood next to the bed, or in the bathroom doorway, and as I came, she called to me again, from somewhere out of the darkness of the closet, a wistful, flat, soft statement of my name. At that moment I knew that my mother had just died. How strange and perverse a moment it was, my mind on some eerie plane, Clara pushing me off and out of her, in raw annoyance that I had jounced her awake. I made, I believe, some apologies to get off the sexual hook, probably delivered with a stricken look of guilt on my face, one that suggested how wretched I felt for my lack of concern for her. She lit a cigarette, as did I, and I got out of bed to stand at the window, smoking and looking down at the freezing streets, thus completing with exhausted flair, I think, the two-bit melodrama. Clara, of course, bought none of this.

I thought, although it wasn’t really a thought, that Clara, rather than my mother, should have died, and that I could kill her, right there in the bed. The night clerk would never remember us, and I had registered under my usual fake name, “Bob Wyatt,” a moniker so insipid as to be blank. Kill her to even things up for my sad, uncompleted mother, and then commiserate with Ben and Miss Complit. I could imagine their sensitive literary comments, the lines from Hardy or Yeats, and Ben’s dim smile as I delivered the envoi with a snatch of Dylan Thomas, a poet whom Ben loathed.

I was sick with guilt, intolerable slug that I was, and waiting for despair to fall on me in its black rain. Good old despair! that most durable and aberrant and selfish of pleasures. But despair eluded me, or I it, and as the room began to admit pale January light, I went down on Clara until she very happily came. She was more or less sweet after that, and let me give her my bacon at breakfast. We sat at the table a long time, drinking coffee and smoking. I didn’t want to call the hospital and be told about my mother, I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to have to take care of the terrible details of death, the business angle, as Ben had once called it, prick that he was. But mostly, I didn’t want to have to pair my mother’s flesh and Clara’s, but it was already too late to escape that.

Of course, I write this now, years after these events, as the phrase goes. What I then thought, I don’t recall. We ate, by the way, in an Automat on Broadway, just south of Eighth Street. It’s long gone, along with all the other Automats, along with all the other every-things, but every time I pass the spot where it stood, I can smell Clara. Her subtle sexual odor is uncannily apparent, an odor that she claimed was generated exclusively for me — a preposterous confession that I, sweet Mother of God, believed for a long time. Now I’m righteously permitted, I feel, to think of her as nothing but that sexual odor. As nothing but a cunt.