Gilbert Sorrentino: The Moon In Its Flight

Occasionally, one of these old coffeepots would break down outside of Paterson or Hackensack, and we would have to wait some hours into the evening for it to come in before we could leave. At these times, the foreman would send out for sandwiches and coffee, and tell me about some terrific broad’s legs and ass and “everything else” that he had seen somewhere, anywhere. His eyes would widen in his remarkably precise nostalgia for something that had never happened. Once I invented and told him about a wild bedroom scene I had had with a “crazy hot broad” who was the wife of a good friend of mine. As I spun out the details of this lie, I realized that I was envisioning Clara Stein. So you will see the pass to which I had come.

My novel was completed, and I began the process of retyping the ragged manuscript to which I liked to think I had given my best. I began to frequent the bars I had gone to before beginning work on the book, and in them heard various reports of the Steins. Ben, Clara, and Rosalind had tried to keep their ménage going, but it was hopeless, and Ben left with Rosalind for Taos, where she left him for an Oklahoma supermarket-chain owner who had controlling interest in two of the Taos galleries. “Mountains, mountains, bring me more mountains!” the gallery directors would indubitably command their stables of rustic hacks. Then the Steins were back together again and Ben got Clara pregnant, to prove his love or his manhood or his contempt. At just about the time I heard this story, the Steins came back into New York for Clara’s abortion. Her father didn’t like the idea, but abortion, in its place … it was something like school and the sun, it was good. Their visit was a flying one, and I didn’t get to see them, but I did speak briefly with Ben on the phone. He despised the doomed fetus almost as much as he despised Clara and himself. At least that was my impression. But perhaps I was wrong, perhaps Ben was just nervous.

I had finished my novel and sent it to an editor at one of the big houses, a man whom I had met some years before at one of my English professors’ “teas.” The editor was heavy and shambling, and vodka martinis had kept him from a brilliant career. We had lunch at one of those boozy little French restaurants in the East Fifties, which I remember quite clearly because two women and a man at the table next to ours drunkenly, but seriously, talked over their sexual adventures of the previous weekend. In any event, From Partial Fires was too long, too cluttered plot-wise, it was really two novels, the characters were undeveloped and not really convincing except for the woman who was married to Jerry, what was her name? Perhaps if I rewrote? I went home, fuzzily drunk, and tore the manuscript up. My sense of relief was almost as great as it had been on the day that my Polack rose had walked out of my life. I felt free now to — do things. To do things.

One of the first things I did was to meet, at a party for somebody’s reading at the Y, a really lovely girl who studied yoga and wrote poems that were a marvel of abstract nouns, all counted off in the most meticulous measure this side of John Betjeman. She lived on St. Marks Place in a beautifully appointed apartment, into which I moved with her soon after our first lust had passed. Just before I quit my job at the soap company, I asked her to pick me up there one day after work, so that I could show her off to the foreman. Such small cruelties often return to plague me now. I like to think of them as aberrations, or deviations from a true path.

So Lynn supported me. While she worked at her job — let’s say it was in a publishing house where her intelligence would soon be revealed — I walked around a lot, drank coffee, and went to the movies. Occasionally, I wrote poems on her Olivetti, a machine that has the knack of making all poems look amateurish, or I took Lynn’s poems and tried to rework them in different rhymes. She was a demon for rhyming.

In my restless peace, after I had done my walking or my typing for the day, and while I was waiting for Lynn to come home, I often thought of the Steins, and wondered how Clara would like Lynn, or, I should say, I wondered how much Clara would dislike her. Lynn would come in around five-thirty or six, with something to make the place “cheery,” as if such things could fend off New York, lying in wait outside the windows. She would bring in some flowers, or a tiny Japanese vase; perhaps a cake from Sutter’s; a paper lantern to illuminate the late supper of linguini and clam sauce, the Chablis and Anjou pears. We would talk about art and movies and her poems. She had almost put together a first collection and was thinking of publishing it privately in a small offset edition. One of the men in the art department (that is a remarkable phrase) at the office would do a cover drawing for her — he was really good. What else would he be? Does anyone know a bad artist?

One afternoon I got very drunk at Fox’s Corner, a bar — now gone — on Second Avenue frequented by gamblers and horse-players. The reason I remember it is because that was the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas. When I got home, Lynn was waiting for me, the TV and radio both on, her face serious and white, and the ashtray filled with her half-smoked Pall Malls. She looked at me, stricken, as if someone who had loved her had died. For some reason, I was sexually aroused and knelt in front of her, then began to work her skirt up over her thighs, opening them with delicate care. She slapped at my hands, and stood up. “My God! You’re drunk! You’re drunk and can’t you see? Don’t you know what’s happened? They shot Kennedy! Kennedy is dead!” She was in a rage, and she annoyed me more than I can say — she annoyed me past reason. Smiling in a vague imitation of Ben’s compulsive rictus, I chose to be light — ah, light, gay, and facetious. “Ah, well, but what has Kennedy ever done for the novel?”

I suppose that Lynn was right to strike me — even fools can rise to what I suppose they consider to be dignity. So that was the end of that affair. It is only our own deaths that we are allowed to ridicule. I left the next day, while Lynn was at work, placing my key in the mailbox, wrapped in a piece of paper on which I had written: Ars gratia artis.

I got another job as a clerk/typist in a small printing house, and settled into a new place on Avenue B, near the Charles movie theater. At a party one night, a drunk told me that Ben and Clara and some art student had set up housekeeping together. Ben was working toward his doctorate, a study of the relation between the songs in Shakespeare’s plays and the choruses of Greek drama, and they were in Cambridge. Their son, Caleb, was at boarding school — too late to matter, of course — Ben studied and wrote and drank, the art student painted and drank, and Clara — I couldn’t imagine anything that Clara did. My only picture of it all was of Clara and the art student, arms around each other’s waists, stumbling into the bedroom while Ben groaned Claa-ra, Claa-rr-aaa? his nose in the sauce.

Soon after, I met a girl who had known Clara from high school, and she said that Clara often spoke of me in her letters; I was touched. We went, later that week, to the New Yorker, and saw La Grande Illusion for the seventh time, then took a cab to my place. The following Friday, she called and asked me if I’d like her to come over for the weekend, and I said it was fine with me. When she came in, she had a Jon Vie cake and a teal-blue candle that had been “handcrafted.” I kept still. Making love that night, she began to cry, and I thought of the foreman and his fantastic wife. Perhaps he had been telling the truth, after all.

The next few years are a blur of the most disparate things, all of them, however, very much the same in essence. My Jon Vie girl left me one night in a bar when I began to insult her because she had been talking incessantly about Saul Bellow. “Fuck you and your mockie writers,” I said, or words to that effect. “Them Jew writers don’t speak for us proletariats and blue-collar woikers.” I don’t know why I said this: I have nothing against Saul Bellow; I’ve never even read him.