Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

After I dried myself and her, she lay on the bed, smiling at me. “I’m here for two days,” she said. “You’re not mad at me? Am I all right?” “Why should I be mad at you?” “Come and sleep,” she said, “and when we wake up I’ll show you some funny things I can do.” “Sure,” I said, and then she closed her eyes and was asleep in a minute. I dressed and left, and walked aimlessly for an hour, wanting to go back to the hotel. She could call me Ben again. She could show me the funny things she knew how to do. I finished my drunk in a bar on Sixth Avenue, just off Fourteenth Street, and lost my wallet in the cab that took me home.

The next day I called Mrs. Stein at the hotel, and the desk clerk told me that she had checked out very early. It strikes me now that I never even knew why she had come in, that she might have come in for no other reason than to see me. But if I know Clara, she came in to see her mother and father, or to have her teeth checked, or to buy some clothes. She wouldn’t come all the way from California just for old times’ sake. I know Clara.

I’m living now in a very decent apartment in an old, rather well-kept building on Avenue B and Tenth Street, with the estranged wife of a studio musician. She makes a very good salary as a buyer for Saks, so I have quit my job. Outside, Tompkins Square Park and the streets reel under the assaults of the hordes of mindless consumers of drugs. But in here we are safe behind our triple locks and window gates. About once a month my girl, who is really quite brilliant — she graduated magna cum laude in political science from Smith — and I invite a young filmmaker and his wife over, and we watch blue movies that they shot in a commune in Berkeley. We drink wine and smoke a great deal of marijuana and what happens happens. Each time they come over, we all pretend horror that “something” may happen, what with the wine and the grass and the movies. We laugh and make delicately suggestive remarks to each other. It seems clear that the young filmmaker’s wife likes me a great deal. Each time they come is a new time, and no one speaks of the last time.

I’ve begun to write poems again, or let me be honest and say that they are attempts at poems. But they seem sincere to me. They have a nice, controlled flow. My girl likes them.

This morning I got a letter from Ben. It had taken three weeks to reach me because it had been sent to the Avenue c address. I don’t really know what I’m going to do about it.

I’m reading it again now. Somewhere in the building a young man is singing a song, accompanying himself on the guitar. I can’t make out the words, but I know that they are about freedom and love and peace — perfect peace, in this dark world of sin.

dere old pal—

you wuz alwaze crazee not to be into life. out here in colorado — the country will bring us peace — we are together, all together, suzanne, a sweet luvlee thing an clara too. come out an see us. good bread an good head aboundin. a commune for all us lost — ists. dig on it!

ah jeezus! we all wuz sikk or wounded but now we’re gunna get healed. come on! you aint so g/d old.

luv,

ben

Joe Doyle was born a bastard whose natural father’s name had been Lionni, or Leone. I have no idea what man owned the name Doyle. Let’s imagine his true sire to be a loudmouth who spent his days in a candy store in the Bronx, reading The Green Sheet and betting hopeless long shots. When one speaks of the People, one must remember that Joe’s father is always to be included among them. Whole novels, inexplicably, have been written exploring such characters. Perhaps these novels allow them to persist.

Along about the time that Joe decided that he would be a “writer,” his father’s name shifted in his head so that he came to think of it as Lee. In any event, he led everyone he knew to believe that he believed that the name was Lee. Ah, mystery. Why his father would have changed his name from Lee to Lionni was unexplained, but such a puzzle only served to make everything more hazily romantic. Once an aberration is seized upon, its possible variations are virtually limitless: consider advertising. Soon after this, Joe came to consider himself, I swear it, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, and the dear old shattered South, the grand old decayed plantations, the beautiful old smoldering mansions became part of his heritage. It might have been true if things had been a little this way, or a little that way, right? So Joe perhaps thought of it.

This spangled rubbish was useful to Joe’s life; with it, he could wrench his father out of roachy shotgun flats and busboy jobs in Horn and Hardart’s and fold him into pink clouds that glowed with the light of romance. He was no longer the man his mother had often bitterly and mockingly described to him, an unemployed lover in a Crawford suit-with-two-pairs-pants and Woolworth’s rose-oil pomade, shining his hair to oilcloth, but a quixotic, footloose hero whose rebel blood drove him to disappear from the verminous kitchens in which Joe had grown up. Joe, of course, had this same imaginary blood.

He kept all this glittering lost glory subtly in the background, exposing it discreetly when it could get him something, and functioned off its energy. It was indeed an engine of sorts, and did not at all interfere with his job, his social life, or his “writing.” Joe became what he called an artist — and how he loved that word; I can hear him now: “Well, as far as Flaherty being an artist … “—because to be an artist was to be the stubborn Reb in retreat. He began to write poems, actual words, count ‘em, words, on actual paper. It was “interesting,” and admitted him to a world that seemed to offer more than the world of, say, numismatics. That the poems were indeed accepted as art has little bearing on this story — although I suspect that it is not so much a story as a minor change upon a common fable. The world is filled with talented and intelligent people who produce arty bits and pieces by which other talented and intelligent people are somehow nourished; they get what they need for their ailments. Sometimes I think it is all nothing but Joes with their variants of sham honeysuckle and Alabama nights on the one hand, and on the other those who come within range of that nailed-together glamour. It is all exciting and everyone is very pleased.

Joe first met Helen Ingersoll in 1965, some five years after he manufactured his paper-magnolia legend. He and a friend, Ed Manx, had gone to a poetry reading at a grim, creaking little theater downtown, just off Second Avenue. I believe the theater is now a macrobiotic restaurant or a “head shop”—it is not my fault that the generation’s nomenclature is spectacularly ugly. The poet was a smudgy friend from the fifties who had been living in the Southwest for years and had returned for a month or so to attend to some family matter. His current poems were about freedom and adobe and white sand, mesas and mountains, in the way that Robert Frost’s poems are about America — that is, these concepts were laid on like high-gloss enamel. One can imagine the scarred little table behind which the bard sat, his can of beer and black spring binders at his elbow, reading, oddly enough, from a book of verse he had published almost ten years earlier, at a time when he had entertained a powerfully unreal conception of his gifts. He read these old poems as if they were examples of youthful aberration. Which is to say that he laughed at what he now considered to be their “boudoir sentiments”—his term. When Joe asked him about New Mexico or Colorado or some other chic wasteland, he said, “I never knew what a long line could be, baby, till I saw those mountains.” You get the idea. Joe and Ed drank from a pint of Dant that Ed had in his raincoat, their faces fixed in a blank, intense look behind which boredom crawled and scuffled. At the intermission, they went across the street to a bar and never got back to the reading.