Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

Joe began talking to Ed about Hope, his wife, how terrific she was, how lovely, how understanding and intelligent, what a son of a bitch he had been to her, and yet, and yet, what good friends they were now that they were separated. I’m certain that he even did a few time steps to the old tune that goes, “We see more of each other than when we were together.” He could be a master of nausea without half trying. She was doing well, working as a secretary-receptionist-girl Friday in an uptown gallery devoted to the What’s Selling School. She really had great taste, Joe said; she felt useful now, truly involved with the art world she had always just touched the edges of. I can almost see Hope’s lacquered face placid among the wares on display; I can almost hear her telling some broke painter, desperate in his wrinkled tie, to bring in a selection of color slides. They drank some more, silent in the contemplation of Hope’s splendor. Then, just for the ride, and because he was a little drunk, Joe went uptown with Ed to see Helen.

She had asked Ed up to advise her on the right mat and frame for a small ink drawing that she had been given as a gift, and while Ed and she talked things over, Joe walked around the apartment, looking at her small and somewhat precious collection of pictures and books. He was, one might say, zeroing in on his intentions regarding this attractive woman. She was mature — another word that Joe liked; she was the Sarah Lawrence or Barnard alumna who had been around. Life had used her, as she had used life, and so on. Joe felt as if he were strolling into a relevant movie, all pained faces and swallowed dialogue and blurred focus. He helped himself to another vodka and caught Helen’s eye. She seemed delicately faded to him; there was something irrevocably broken about her. He slouched against the wall, gallant and aristocratic; against the tattered and streaming gray sky of his mind the Stars and Bars cracked in the wind.

On the way downtown, Ed told him that she was forty-two and undergoing chemotherapy treatments for leukemia. To Joe, this was an unexpected perfection — how could she resist, her tragedy upon her, the gift of himself that he would offer? Joe’s opinion of himself was based solidly on his being a product of that solipsistic aristocracy that clumps itself about the nucleus of art — which latter gives it breath and rationale. He was, in his sham individuality, a dime a dozen. So was Helen.

Joe didn’t know this about Helen — nor did he know it about himself, certainly. Helen, in fact, qualified for him as representative of that breeding and careless grace with which his fabulous past was suffused, and she took her place in that misty locale where Joe’s father sipped juleps and played croquet on emerald lawns, the sun dazzling off his white flannels and linen cap. There was a patina he felt he could scrape and strip off her very person and place on his own in mellow and lustrous layers. For Helen, Joe was young enough to be interesting, but not so young as to be gauche and trite in his desire. So they became lovers. I don’t know how to say this without seeming either cold or vulgar, but Helen thought of Joe as a last fling. Joe’s feelings concerning Helen were, as you will have guessed, cold and vulgar.

Concerning Helen’s past, there isn’t much to say. She had hacked and hewn out a lopsided icon that passed for taste, had achieved an arresting face, and had been twice married to vaguely creative men who were moderately successful in vaguely creative jobs — the sort of men who wore ascots and smoked little Dutch cigars. In her thirties she had painted a little and clumped through a few parts in off-off-off-Broadway theater; a modern-dance class and a poetry workshop were also buried in the sludge. You will understand that she was a female counterpart to Joe. The one element that totally differentiated her from him was the fact of her critical illness: death and disease are impenetrable masks behind which the pettiness and shabbiness of personality are absolutely obscured. That we tend to forgive or overlook the flaws of the doomed probably saves us all from total monstrosity. But it must be borne in mind, however ungenerously, that Helen was a shambles of half-baked ideas, insistent on her thin skin yet an opportunistic traitor to her husbands and children, the latter now grown into drugs and therapy, sickened by the mother who embraced the “idea” of, for instance, Mick Jagger as Prophet with a moronic fervor. Young, young, she was forever young as she slid toward her death, brandishing a copy of the Village Voice.

It is important to know that Joe thought, in the first weeks of their relationship, that it was his “art” that had seduced her; it had always been his “art” that had brought him his platoons of rutting young women — it was a subtle hook that he used to snare them and then lift their skirts. And if “art” failed, Dixie would materialize out of thin — very thin, indeed — air. When Joe discovered that this was not the case with Helen he was nonplussed, then hurt, then angered. She simply took Joe to be another charming and aesthetically intense young man — much like her husbands and previous lovers. She was right, but no one had ever before so squarely confronted Joe with the fakery of his life and its picayune products. He moved in a world of fakes like himself, so that their mutual interest lay in interdependent lying. Joe thought of himself as a “coterie” poet of carefully controlled output — and so did his friends. Now, suddenly, here was Helen, who with unfeigned equanimity treated him as the amateur dilettante — in Joe’s case the phrase is not tautological — he was and always would be. It never occurred to her that Joe thought of his fabrications as poems. One night she said a poem of his reminded her somehow of saltwater taffy. That’s not bad at all. Joe wasn’t used to this sort of comment on his work; he had never got anything like it from Hope, who thought of him as a serious and neglected artist, although she would not have recognized art if it fractured her skull.

Joe and Hope had dinner together once a week — they were civilized and understanding and good friends and so on. How they rang and rang again each boring modern change. Hope was aware that Joe and Helen were having an affair; Ed Manx had told her about Helen, and Joe had corroborated the tale — and how. In her mind it was a “friendly” affair, and somehow good for Joe: a good, mature woman to discuss art with her husband — oh, once in a while they discovered themselves in bed together, but that was almost an accident, or the price one pays for the nurture of beauty. Over her shrimp cocktail she was reliably bright and engaging. Peck and Peck all the way, with plenty of small talk about some up-to-the-minute painter “into some wild things.” Her eyes were blank with that flat stare peculiar to natives of Southern California, the ocular equivalent, one might say, of a slack mouth. She had practiced for years to achieve it, God knows why: I suspect she confused it with sang-froid. Ah, she still had something for Joe; he looked at her with false warmth and affection and she looked back, laboring to emulate his falsity. What moments divine, what rapture serene.

“It’s nice and transparent,” Helen said one night of a new poem that Joe modestly represented as a “breakthrough.” Joe had been writing for five or six years and each year had one of these breakthroughs. His poems neither changed nor improved, but there was, in his insistence on aesthetic discovery, an illusion for him of amelioration in his jottings. Joe was one of those “writers” of whom one constantly thinks as a tyro; then one day the realization that the person has been pottering around for ten years or so crystallizes. It is enough to make one a yahoo. “I mean it’s very — clear, yes, right. Transparent.” Joe, in a rage, but silent, reclining on the couch under the ink drawing whose mat and frame had brought out its weakness, allowed her to unbuckle his belt and open his trousers. It was she who was controlling him! What a bitch he thought her. He watched her face disappear in the lace of her slip, her arms above her head graceful and quick. A horny old bitch. He might as well have been a truck driver or a plumber or a goddamned teacher the way she so casually used him. A journalist or editorial assistant who wanted to write a novel! God! At that moment, he began to hate her, his spurious heritage stirring him to combat, gallant. She gently pushed him back on the couch and reached behind to unhook her brassiere. Old raunchy dumb bitch.