Gilbert Sorrentino - The Abyss of Human Illusion

He lived alone, as might be surmised, his three failed marriages having taught him nothing about women or sex or give and take or, for that matter, anything at all. He had no children, thank God, and now, at sixty-eight, fantasies of erotic adventures in which the ex-wives lasciviously collaborated, or substituted for each other, or were blurred together with other insatiable women, real or invented, were his entertainment. Who performed what perversion and when, and how did she do it and where were they all when it happened? It was pitiable entertainment, of course, but he didn’t care one way or another; he was concentrated, obsessively, on his self, his actual body and flesh, and he accepted the knowledge that he was sick, not of any disease, but sick of himself, of his self. It surely must be a common ailment, so he thought. How to reach one’s late-sixties and not be self-loathing?

He had considered the possibility that he might actually be ill with some spectacular, malignant, fatal disease, lymphoma perhaps, or something even more devastating. Yet the thought of going to “see” his doctor filled him with a boredom and unease strong enough to bring on nausea. For a few years, soon after his last marriage had imploded in slow-motion misery, he’d gone regularly to his doctor, and to other doctors referred to, had tests and more tests, blood panels and urinalysis, examinations and biopsies, for a pain here, a twinge there, irregular bowel movements, fluttery heartbeats, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, weak urine flow, and on and on: he had become, that is, an official patient, whose responsible job it was to worry about his health and juggle doctors’ appointments and ask questions about his medications and their possible side effects (there was one drug that could, it was thrillingly advised, cause a fatal reaction after just one dose!). It was a job much more fulfilling than the one he made $12.43 an hour at, where nobody would look seriously into his face and suggest that he might have chronic prostatitis — or worse.

But one day he realized that no matter how militantly — or weirdly — obsessive he was or would be about his health, he was, at sixty-eight, good for (a nice phrase) maybe ten more years, if that, and then oblivion. It was the neurotic and worried people between thirty-five and forty-five who thought that diet and exercise and meditation and the avoidance of cigarette smoke and excessive alcohol use (alcohol abuse!) would keep them from death; and that industrious and puritanical attention to their aging bodies would take them into their happy nineties, their euphoric hundreds, into a deathlessness as groggily sweet as a California chardonnay. Their bodies would repay them for their scrupulous care.

He knew better than this, although he considered that he might well be wrong, but, sick of himself, bored with himself, there was no regimen of health to which he could subscribe without embarrassing himself deep within his psyche, or what was left of it. He of course, like any reasonable human being, considered suicide, for who would miss him? But he refused the idea when he thought that perhaps one day an actual terrible, serious, rampaging disease would enter him or awaken within his body where it had been dozing all these years, a disease that he and his doctors could “battle,” or, better, “bravely battle,” but to which he would at last grudgingly succumb. In the meantime, he decided to start drinking again, to abuse alcohol, and with abandon. Christ knows that he’d wanted a drink every hour of every day for years. If he was sick of himself and waiting for the possible declaration within his body of the presence of some malignant destroyer, why not wait drunk?

There once was a man who coveted his friend’s wife, and even though he was an Evangelical Christian, complete with closed eyes, raised arms, enraptured visage, and a well-burnished hatred of Satan, and in despite of the ninth commandment, his lust grew and flourished. So much so that he set about, with much sweaty praying in the night for his pal, God’s, personal assistance in his travails, seducing the woman. This was not as hard as he thought it might be, for she had a touch of the whore about her. And so he violated the sixth commandment: in for a nickel, in for a buck. After a time, the man had become thoroughly obsessed with the woman, mad for her, as they say, and wished no more than to be inside of her day and night. The woman’s husband was oblivious to this sexual carnival. He was the perfect cuckold; he no longer desired his wife, so believed her undesirable to others.

One day, the lovers “ran off” to live together, love together, hump each other crazy, and do this forever and ever, et cetera.For some reason, they headed in the man’s somewhat exhausted car, a nauseatingly green Ford Granada, to his home town, Lawton, Oklahoma. He had been born and raised in this burg, in which his parents and sister, washed in the blood of the lamb, still lived in a clapboard house, “the old homestead,” as the whole family liked to call it, smilingly: they might well have been the salt of the earth, or a pinch of it, anyway. The couple fucked their way, delirious and exhausted, through many motels, and on many occasions, pulled off the road to satisfy their enduring itch. They were, it goes without saying, seized by Paphian mania. The birds sang for them, and the sunshine glowed upon their stunned and unsated faces. There had never been a love like this in the history of the world, never.

When they reached Lawton, and the woman had been introduced to Dad, who did and liked as hobbies, and Mom, deeply involved in, and Sis, a member of the Something and the Whatever; and after the shock of this surprise visit to the old homestead, it became almost immediately clear to the folks at home that this somewhat desperate-looking woman of forty or so, in a too-tight sweater and dirty jeans, was not, she was most assuredly not the prodigal’s wife; and, soon after, they realized that, even more damning, she was someone else’s wife. These sinful revelations were squeezed out of the couple over two or three days, the family working as an inquisitorial team, their Christian smiles of love and understanding slowly fading, fading, fading into masks of righteous and gray anger: sic transit gloria caritatis. On the third day, the woman got up and sat on the back porch, smoking and looking out over the grim landscape, seemingly good for growing nothing but spite and hatred. She knew that she had already surrendered.

It will probably come as no surprise that the man, the seducer, the lover, he who would sacrifice all or at least some for his Helen, obeyed his family’s injunctions, their orders — given him with many tears and prayers by the bushel — to, well, ditch the whore tramp and beg Jesus to forgive him. The next afternoon, while his lover, who had slept on a mattress on the floor of a closet during their stay, was watching an old movie on TV, he came to her, falling to his knees in front of her, weeping and praying, and begged Jesus to forgive them both, and to wash them clean in his Sacred Blood that would always and as well as for all Eternity! She went upstairs, packed her nylon overnight bag, put her dirty clothes in a paper shopping bag, and sat on the floor: she was thirty-nine years old and had been — was it possible? — bewitched.

That night they left for New York, and although they stayed at many of the same motels while en route to Lawton, the chastised sinner slept in bathtubs or in the car, with a pillow, of course, under his noble head, lest Satan steal upon him in the reaches of the night with soft music, delicate perfumes, and filthy images of the recent past. He and the woman spoke to each other, but as if he were a chauffeur to a slightly demented and dying patient. She directed him to an apartment house in Kew Gardens, and he left her standing in front of it, not before hoping that Jesus might enter her heart with his and, and soon. Then he was off, and she looked after the car, hoping that God, any God at all, would see to it that he died in a crash on the way back home. She entered the lobby, and rang the bell of an old friend, long divorced, hoping that she was home and hospitable. Then she’d see about calling her husband to explain — explain? If he even knew she’d left.