Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

My father won the bet, came out spotless, and then took me to Foffés on Montague Street, where he had a scotch or two, and I drank 7Ups, and then we drove to Phil Kronfeld’s, a haberdashery near the old Latin Quarter. He bought me a dozen lusciously soft, white broadcloth shirts, and, deferring to my somewhat dim taste, a half-dozen silk ties, the latter spectacularly “Broadway,” ties that my mother called “bookmaker” ties. She swore that my father had no sense at all, buying a high-school boy such expensive things, but then told me a story about his spending his last twenty dollars on a hat to impress her before they were engaged. I had heard this story, with subtle and loving variations and embellishments, many times.

When I think of that sweltering Brooklyn, so long dead, and my father in his beautiful clothes, with his strong face and huge hands; and when I think of the casually arrogant way in which he bet five thousand dollars, on a kind of whim; and when I, still and always amazed, realize that he had that money in his pocket, I sometimes get up and look at myself in the mirror. I look like my father, but I am not, not at all, like my father. What would he have said about my deformed relationship with the Sterns? About Clara standing me up God knows how many times? About the weakness or lack of will or courage that prevented me from abandoning the whore, prevented me from marrying some woman whose flaws were, at the very worst, the flaws of sanity? What?

When I dream of my father in his spotless hat and, waking, wish that I could have somehow appropriated the authority and confidence that I, of course irrationally, think it to have possessed, I am unfailingly left with the truth that it was my father’s Borsalino. And only his.

Patsy Manucci, one of my father’s drivers and a kind of sidekick who provided my father with a gin-rummy partner and a brand of raucous and mostly unintentional comedy, had a brother, Rocco, of whom, as a boy of fifteen or so, I was in awe. He was a horse of a man, almost, indeed, as thick through the chest and shoulders as a horse, and he spoke in a gravelly voice that was, as the phrase has it, too good to be true. Patsy possessed the same voice, and when the brothers had a discussion or argument about handicapping, the din of their colloquy could be heard through closed doors and even walls. My mother, who liked both brothers, said that their voices were the result of years of shouting the results from the candy store out to the street corner. I did not know what “the results” meant, but I knew that Patsy loved this crack, as he worshiped my mother, and thought it so funny that he repeated it everywhere.

He often said, with the most solemn and respectful of faces, that Rocco was a graduate of Fordham, where he’d studied medicine, a lie so preposterous that nobody ever had the heart to call him on it, or for that matter, even to laugh: people would listen to this wistful, crazy revelation and nod their heads in understanding. Life! their nods regretfully said, Ah, that’s how life is. Once, my father, in a context I no longer remember, broke this unspoken rule of solemnity, and said that Rocco had graduated from Fordham’s “upstate campus,” which caused the men with whom he’d been talking to burst into laughter. I laughed too, but had no true idea why.

Rocco was a runner for a policy operation headed by a man named Jackie Glass, who was always dressed beautifully in oxford gray or navy blue suits, white shirts, repp-striped ties, and French-toed shoes that seemed as soft as gloves. He was married to an exshowgirl, a tall, hard redhead, and they had two spoiled blond children, Marvin and Elaine, who got everything they wanted, or so it appeared to me. His wife’s name was Charl, short, I discovered, for Charlene. Jackie was connected, as the phrase had it, with one of the New York families, I don’t know which one, which gave Rocco, in my adolescent eyes, the most weighty authority: he worked for a man who worked for serious people who had a great deal to say about the running of many things, including the city.

But this was the lesser part of what enthralled me insofar as Rocco was concerned. Rocco was a gambler, but a gambler who existed in a kind of Paradiso, an Eden, an empyrean of gambling that was wholly unreal to me. One night he won sixty thousand dollars in a crap game up on Pleasant Avenue. Even in this time, when people who can barely sing, dance, act, hit a ball, or throw a punch make millions for barely doing these things, sixty thousand dollars is a lot of money; in 1944, when a seventy-five-dollar a week job was thought to be the key to a big apartment on Easy Street, it was, simply, a fantasy amount. Rocco lost the sixty grand two days later in another crap game on Elizabeth Street.

To win it. To have it. To let it all go. To say to hell with it. That’s what fascinated me about Rocco. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to live, the way I’ve wanted to act with the men and women I’ve known, with, of course, especially Clara. I’ve never had the courage, that is to say that I’ve never had the courage to act on my belief that the world, beyond all its endlessly rehearsed wonders and beauties, is absolute shit, that life is best when ignored, or somehow turned away from, and that nothing should be taken at face value. In sum, that everything is a pathetic bust. But I have always acted otherwise, as if there is, perpetually, the possibility for change, for amelioration, for friendship and love. I have, that is, always and unforgivably, acted as if there is hope. But to say: Fuck life! I’ve never managed it, or if I have, it was momentary, melodramatic gesture, empty and contemptible. I think, in effect, of losing sixty thousand dollars, and, without fail, make my craven accommodations. I will not, ever, let it all go.

Some few years into my absurd relationship with Clara, a friend of mine who had rented a ramshackle beach house on Fire Island for the month of September, had to return to the city with a little less than two weeks left on his lease. He asked me if I wanted to take the place, gratis, for this period, and I agreed, thinking to ask Clara to make some excuse and spend this time on the island with me. She had been, for some months, disconcertingly faithful to Ben, and I thought that a time alone together, as the strangely lugubrious old song has it, would work to revive our passion, a passion that, I’m afraid, I remembered as a series of dissolving pornographic tableaux. I think that one usually remembers love as a totality of experience and feeling, a complex in which the sun that falls on the kitchen table in the morning is part of the emotion attendant on the beloved; whereas lust is simply the recall of the purely and metonymically salacious. Clara was a duchess of lust, as I have tried to make clear, and images of her in diverse erotic scenes were, overwhelmingly, images of dazed carnality. In any event, I told her of my sudden luck and asked her to come. I implored her to come.

A day or two later, she told me that she’d invented a story for Ben, complete with a sick school friend or a spontaneous reunion, faked phone calls, a fantasy airline reservation, something, everything. I had no way of proving that Clara had done any of this, and I’ve long been convinced that Ben had joined in this spurious drama, had helped to fashion his own betrayal. Clara was, and probably always had been, one of the machines by the use of which Ben was assisted in his seductions of fragile students and frowzy colleagues and the wives of friends — the butcher and the baker, for all I know. Perhaps even my ex-wife. At the time, all I cared about was Clara involved in lovemaking with me. With me!