Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

So Joe began to speak of her, vulgarly and openly, at the bar in which he was something of a figure. It was a mean and poisonous place of third-rate painters, hangers-on, dedicated filmgoers, and arty idiots, pots and looms in every pocket, who were just passing through. The controlled and amused voice came forth from his expertly hirsute face, his Italian leather jacket was creased — so — in soft, elegant folds. He joked of her tremendous passion for him, her raging and almost “embarrassing” sexual hungers, the luscious nightgowns and intriguing underwear she bought to excite him. It was pathetic. He felt it almost his duty. Her tears. Her moans of gratitude. Where did they think he got this leather jacket? Nothing like an old broad! He and his auditors shuffled and chuckled, a bunch of regular guys that la vie d’art would never change. His words punctuated the long tale of malice and vindictiveness and failure that the bar spun out endlessly.

As Helen got sicker, she made herself progressively more ridiculous by trying to be vivacious and girlish for Joe — who rarely went out with her anymore. She played right into the hands of his shabby stories about her, so that when they did meet someone that Joe knew, her behavior was such that Joe all but snickered and winked. He was contemptuous toward her, rude and arrogant — he assaulted her, getting even and getting even again for that “saltwater taffy,” that “transparent,” her sexual aggressiveness, the Italian leather jacket. Those ragged cavalrymen of his fantasy rode their broken nags out of the morning mists, bent on slaughter.

As it would happen, Helen, with the predictability of melodrama, fell in love with Joe. He was so delicate, so vulnerable, yet so proud. At the moment that Joe realized that, he lied that he and Hope were thinking of “trying it again together.” He was precisely if not subtly cruel.

He visited her almost daily at the hospital during her final confinement, bringing her flowers, magazines, books — once, quite unbelievably, he brought her a copy of As I Lay Dying: he had turned almost recklessly mean. What was there to lose? He occasionally held her hand and felt generous and forgiving. I like to think that Joe considered these small attentions instances of a refined sense of noblesse oblige.

He of course went to the funeral in a new midnight-blue suit: nothing could have kept him out of the first rank of mourners. What is surprising is that Hope went with him. Joe stood there in the calm morning, his face a marvel of abstraction, Hope beside him, her flat stare finding useful employment, in a strikingly severe black-and-silver dress that she had bought a month earlier for an important opening. They were so anxious for each other that they kissed and clutched and fumbled in the taxi home from Queens. Perhaps it was the first step to trying it again together.

The White Shirt

Some young man, Bill will do for a name, out of the Army for three months and tinged, if you will, all right, tinged with a gloom well short of despair, got a job. This was Bill’s first job, save for six months spent as a dishwasher and three years as an infantryman, neither of which are now considered actually to be jobs, but are thought of as burdens, or perhaps misfortunes. How wise and wonderful the world has become, filled to bursting with careers!

There he was, in the basement stockroom of Art Adventures, an art-supply store in midtown Manhattan. One of the somewhat shabby and unenthusiastic of Bill’s chores was to fill exceedingly small glass jars with glaringly bright poster paints “in all popular colors,” these paints having been mixed in hundredgallon vats in Art Adventures’ laboratory, you’ll pardon the word, affix identifying labels to these filled jars, and stack them, in neatest rows, on the steel shelves reserved for them and other sundries of the art business.

Bill’s immediate boss was an adenoidal schlepper from Ozone Park whose name was Stewie, a self-proclaimed hipster, drenched in mambo lore, who sang, hummed, and whistled, day in and day out — to employ a poster-paint phrase—“Rock Around the Clock.” Had Stewie’s name not been Stewie, it would have been Carl, Ernie, Cliffie, or Sheldon. Now you know who he is! Of course, Stewie took stern delight in telling Bill and his colleague, a Puerto Rican headbreaker, Felix, what to do and how to do it. Felix had been “given a break” and hired, freshly paroled, God only knows why, out of Coxsackie; he often quietly mused, when he and Bill took a smoke break, on the possibility of accidentally maybe stabbing Stewie to death. So the days of that sunny, crisp fall passed, a ragged dream of honest work’s rewards and the second chance.

One morning, Stewie told Bill and Felix that he wanted the jars of poster paint shelved so that the virtually unnecessary labels — which comically and redundantly described the startling red or sickly green paints within their jars as RED or green — faced forward, so that, Stewie wisely reasoned, you fuckin well know what you’re fuckin pickin when you fill a fuckin order. He was a logical sort, take him all in all. Bill suggested, gently, gently, that this seemed wasteful of time and effort, for a half-blind drunken idiot could tell the difference between colors, and in the dark, for Christ sake. But Stewie, with the sort of ravaged and tottering intelligence that might well have sent him to law school had he not been so ambitious, was not having any of this. Yizzel fuckin do what I say, he noted; or, perhaps, yizzel fuckin do it right; or yizzel fuckin well do it. Bill rejoined, weakly, that, hell, come on, there’s nobody who could mistake RED for YELLOW, etcetera. But this argument cut no ice with Stewie. Felix, attentive to this dialogue, fingered the switch-blade knife in his pocket, his eye on Stewie’s pallid neck, till the latter ended the conversation by arguing that Bill just thought he was a wise guy because he’d been in the fuckin Army. Bill fell silent, searching for the arcane meaning hidden in this observation, but gave up. What the hell. Felix, in a quiet aside, suggested to Bill that they might seriously injure Stewie’s sconce with a carelessly wielded gallon jug of India ink, the faggot punk jive motherfucker.

I have not yet mentioned Mr. Pearl, the stockroom supervisor, shipping (he preferred to call it “traffic”) coordinator, keeper of the inventory, and he who answered to Art Adventures’ purchasing agent. Mr. Pearl had a sad little desk, about as big as a minute, as simple people were wont to say in “a more innocent time” (see: Second World War, the Holocaust, Korean “police action,” etc.). On this lugubrious surface, he marshaled his inventory records, daily-order forms, back-order memoranda, pens, pencils (red, green, blue), erasers, and scarred wooden ruler. And off it he ate his lunch, a homely, unassuming, and pedestrian sandwich, a nice piece of fresh fruit, and a pint of milk, the last wrapped in wax paper in the superstitious belief — daily disproved — that this helped keep the milk cool. He was, one might say, a sap. And from the vantage of this handkerchief-sized desk, he looked kindly upon young Stewie, and why? As if you didn’t know! Because he had once been just like young Stewie. Yea, even unto his sweaty face and dingy cardigan.

Bill, poor Bill, then made the classic yet banal mistake, common enough among all lowly and callow employees, of appealing the irrational decisions of the corporal-mind to a higher, and supposedly saner authority. (May I digress for a moment? Ho! Ho! Ho!) Or, as Felix put it when Bill told him of his intentions, You must have shit for brains, coño. Cruel yet clear-eyed Felix. Mr. Pearl, seated at his toy desk, a partially destroyed baloney-and-American-cheese sandwich before him on a white handkerchief somewhat drearily adorned with a frayed, faded, embroidered “P” in an infirm pale green, his hands, shiny and grimy with charcoal dust from the drawing pencils he had personally unpacked that morning, resting on the Mirror, looked at Bill. Then he spoke: