Gilbert Sorrentino - The Abyss of Human Illusion

He took $147.34, all the money that was in the coffee can in the refrigerator of the wretched St. Louis apartment in which they lived, all the money that they had. Nobody who had known them in New York ever discovered why they had moved to St. Louis, and when the young woman returned, bitter and humiliated, to her husband and two older children, she never told them, except for some vague references to “teaching jobs.” Her husband, perhaps understandably, treated the new child as if he were a demanding visitor who would soon miraculously disappear. As for his wife, he thought of her as a stupid maid whom he occasionally and quite gently, he thought, raped.

In the winter of that year, after his post-basic training leave, he took a train to San Antonio, to report for duty at Fort Sam Houston; he would be there for three months, at the Medical Field Service School, for advanced training. On the train, he discovered that the club car was painted a pale rose; its armchairs were a soft feathery blue. A girl came in and he and she began to talk. It was very late and they were alone in the car and quite comfortable together. The train drove through the darkness, and the promise of kisses lay in every dim corner.

After a time, the girl closed her eyes to the night rushing by outside the windows, the silent night in which black demons and black wolves ran silently through the black countryside. The train crashed on through the darkness.

He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek, then her ear, then put his lips in a light spidery touch on her neck, first at her hairline, then down to the collar of her dress. How sweet she smelled.

“It feels like a spider,” she said, “so soft and light. You’d better catch it.” He took a long time finding that spider; for the little monster roamed everywhere under her clothes, everywhere.

The next morning, at sunrise, the train pulled into Dallas and she got off. He waved to her from his coach window, but she pretended not to see him. The sky was turning rose and blue.

He wasn’t intrinsically contemptible, yet there was no way, it seemed, that he could avoid being thought of with contempt, at least not by those who got to know him, men and women alike. There was a sweetness about him, an attractive innocence, when he forgot what he thought he was supposed to be; what, it sometimes appeared, he had been mysteriously instructed to be. But these instances of candor were few and short-lived.

Most of the time he was at his worst, and this worst always manifested itself in the same way: he flagrantly and openly and with a kind of nauseating pride — real or constructed — insisted on boasting of his flaws and faults as if they were virtues.

To note a pedestrian example of his irritating pretensions: he rarely combed or brushed his hair and, even more rarely, shampooed it; so that it was a greasy, matted tangle that smelled of rancid and sour fat. This aberration, which he would, of course, call attention to, would too, without fail, prompt him to remark that this was the way of Greek warriors, the way that Odysseus and Achilles dressed their hair. He used the word, “dressed.” It was this sort of thing, this sort of foolish affectation that made him an object of contempt, sometimes seasoned with a vague pity.

When he died, rather suddenly, of a heart attack, nobody really cared, although there were the usual insincere obsequies. But someone said, in a fair imitation of his voice, “Death is a groove, man!”

She was an old woman now, as he was an old man, and seeing her made him realize just how old he really, as they say, was. He thought of her as she looked, God, forty-five years ago? as she looked on the night that he and she had surrendered to their desire for each other, a surrender nicely camouflaged by and blamed on their having had “too much to drink.” But he knew the truth and so did she. From that moment on, he relegated their lapse to the simplest of reasons, lust and its gratification, and that was, as they say, that. She soon married a friend of his and had two children, and he remained, surprising himself, a bachelor.

They sat in the booth of the diner in the old neighborhood, a renovated and renamed diner, but the same old place, and talked over coffee. They had just come back from the cemetery where she’d buried her husband and were on the way to her elder daughter’s house where the mourners would be fed, in time-honored fashion. He had suggested coffee first and here they were.

She seemed smaller than ever, her face thin and lined, her hair gray with a subtle wash of old-lady pale blue in it. Her breasts were virtually nonexistent, but her legs were still good, especially in the sheer black stockings she’d worn for the funeral. So you’re what, he said, sixty what? You know how old I am, she said, sixty-eight, eight years younger than you. You know that and you’ve always known that. That’s right, he said. Eight years. So we were twenty-three and thirty-one, he said. What do you mean? she said, When? Oh. Right, he said. You’ve been thinking of that all these years? she said, laughing. Not all the time, he said, Jesus! He put on an amused face, but he was blushing, and realized that he probably looked like a complete idiot. But once in a while, he said, and thought: more than you know. He felt absolutely, sickeningly empty.

She is standing at the sink in a gloomy kitchen, the palegray light from the sole window its only illumination. She’s wearing white rayon underpants and a matching brassiere, white cotton socks and slippers whose fluffy, artificial blue fur has been worn to the nap. She’s washing her lunch dishes — a sandwich plate, a cup and saucer, and a table knife. She looks up and to her right, for she feels as if someone is looking at her.

The window looks out on a gray courtyard, its concrete darkening with beginning rain. She stands on her toes and looks out into the courtyard, for she feels that someone, certainly, is looking at her. She puts the saucer on the drainboard, and dries her hands, then folds her arms protectively across her breasts, and looks with what might be longing at her bathrobe, draped over the back of a kitchen chair, wanting to snatch the robe up and put it on now, quickly, before something happens. She finds it impossible to move, to take the step toward the chair.

She leans against the sink, her thighs clamped together, and looks at the kitchen doorway, into the living room. Her body is rigid and she is flushed. Someone is looking at her from the courtyard or the living room. She looks at her robe again, and almost takes a step toward the kitchen chair, but does not. She is a week or so into her thirty-ninth year, and knows that she is not bad-looking, and knows that men do look at her, they do. Someone is looking at her now. She knows that this is really not so.

She puts on her robe, wishing, perhaps, that someone would look at her, that someone in the courtyard, in the living room, some nameless phantom were waiting for her, someone to whom she could abandon herself, some beast, some animal, some sex fiend, for whom she could throw herself away, for whom she could recklessly damn herself to pleasure and hell.

He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.

Before his orders had been cut for Fort Ord and FECOM, he was stationed for a brief time at Fort Meade, Maryland. A friend of his, in the Marines at Camp Lejeune, thought it might be a good idea if they met maybe in Baltimore for a weekend of disorderly drunkenness, etc. He said O.K., and they agreed to meet at a bar on Charles Street that they both knew. He got out to the highway on a post bus to hitchhike, in clean and starched Class-A khakis. What a soldier, standing tall!