Gilbert Sorrentino - A Strange Commonplace

RALPH SAID THAT HE’D EXPERIENCED A MORAL REBIRTH when he married Inez, a marriage that seemed incomprehensible to me and to many others who knew these somewhat fragmentary people — perhaps sketchy is a better descriptive. And while Ralph may have been reborn, morally or ethically or otherwise, this pious state did not prevent him from beginning an affair with Claire, a beautiful and somewhat unsettlingly placid woman who was, quite perfectly, one of Inez’s oldest friends. This surrender to the flesh, as the increasingly insufferable Ralph, in all his evangelical glory, might have put it, occurred just eight months into his conjugal annus mirabilis. To rehearse the ups and downs of this shabby amour, Inez’s suspicions — mundane, at best — the usual tears and quarrels, etcetera, would be tedious for me, and for you as well. It’s enough, perhaps, to say that the affair never quite attained even the lowest level of banality, the “star-crossed,” but wallowed just outside it, much as the lukewarm souls who are not permitted to enter hell congregate in its anteroom, bitching and moaning. In any event, Ralph and Claire blundered into her pregnancy, at which news Ralph, predictably and immediately, recoiled from any and all responsibility for his part in this misfortune. That Claire was surprised and hurt by this is, quite probably, a testament to her lack of acumen; that is, it seems clear that she never had an understanding of Ralph’s character, or, more accurately, his lack of character. After a few afternoons of sobbing and shouting and laying blame, mixed with loathsome prayers in which he begged Jesus to make Claire see her sins, he cut Claire out of his life. And then for some inexplicable reason, he put out the base story that Claire had been sleeping with her younger brother, Ray — a dim bulb, indeed — for a year or more, and was pregnant with his child. Perhaps Ralph thought of this as a narrative to set nicely in place as a counter to what may have been Claire’s desperate threat to tell Inez about the affair, such as it was. Nobody believed Ralph about Ray, most notably because he and Claire as an “item” had been an open secret for some time — to all, apparently, but Inez. If Claire were pregnant, the idea of Ray as the incestuous culprit was beyond absurdity. So Ralph, by this odious act, not only elaborated his petty, mean self, he also established that self as monumentally dumb. As someone said, not even Jesus on a good day could forgive such a prick. Claire, however, did go to see Inez, and, amazingly, told her that, yes, she were pregnant, it was true, and by Ralph! He had raped her in the bathroom at a party that they’d all been at a few months earlier, well, he didn’t rape her, but he took advantage of her drunkenness. This was, of course, a lie in every respect. Inez, who had never been reborn in the sublime mystery of marriage as had her spouse, believed it in all details, down to Claire’s description of looking at the black-and-white tiles on the bathroom floor as the deed was done. She took it in hook, line, sinker, float, rod, and reel. She wanted to. She began sleeping, quite openly, with Bill, a very bad guitar player but profoundly dedicated smoker of marijuana, hashish, kif, rope, old rags, hay, and newspaper; he introduced himself as “Tripper"; as Groucho Marx said, “Ah, he was a witty man.” Ralph soon left her, Bible and all—“I have my pride!”—I like to think of him saying, and went to San Francisco, Land of Heart’s Desire, where he worked for a time in the Classifieds department of the Chronicle. Claire’s child was stillborn and she and Ray moved to Phoenix. Soon after Ralph left town, Inez told Bill that she’d been having second thoughts and felt it was best for her to be alone for a while. Bill understood, surely, and asked her if maybe she could let him have fifty bucks or so, he had some dry cleaning and laundry and, you know. Sure, she said, you need clean clothes. Right, he said, his terrifying guitar slung over his shoulder.

HE STOOD IN THE WINDLESS COLD, WATCHING THE skaters at Rockefeller Center, their voices and laughter clear in the gray late afternoon. She wore a black silk blouse, they were in somebody else’s apartment, it was early morning. They drank coffee with the friend whose apartment it was and then he left for work. There was a girl in a bright green skating costume with a matching tam, the hem of the skirt trimmed with fur. They undressed and made love on the couch and then lay quietly, smoking, snow whirling past the windows into the street, the trees bordering the park opposite glowing with accumulating whiteness. He lay half-asleep, his lips against her shoulder, her breath warm and slow on his flesh. The girl fell and the young man she was with helped her up; neither of them could skate very well, but they were young and perfect. She put on a record that the friend had left on the coffee table: “You Better Go Now.” The girl had long, straight legs and good thighs but her physical beauty could not keep her from looking awkward on the ice, and this awkwardness, he knew, endeared her to the young man. Jeri Southern sang, a small and absolute perfection, long lost and almost forgotten: “Remind Me.” They made love again, the voice soft from across the dim room, the snow getting thicker, blunting the street noises, piling up on the windowsills.

Remind me

Not to mention that I love you

The girl and her friend were gone, and it had begun to snow. They dressed and looked at each other and he felt such a sudden surge of misery that he thought he’d have to sit down. She put on her coat and a scarf. Do you want to have some breakfast? she said, it’s not quite nine o’clock, we can go to the Automat on Broadway? He put his collar up against the snow and started walking toward Fifth Avenue. He put his collar up against the snow and took her hand and they started walking toward Broadway. Her hair glittered with snowflakes and her eyes were ebony in the platinum light. I don’t want to leave you, he said, I don’t want you to leave. We’re going to have breakfast, she said, and then I have to go home. Stay today, he said, or tonight, I mean come back tonight. Let’s not talk about this now, she said, please please, let’s walk and have breakfast and be with each other the way we can, all right? He decided to walk to Forty-second Street and get the subway at Grand Central. He didn’t feel so good, maybe he’d stop off at a little bar he liked off Vanderbilt Avenue. He could have a drink, or a couple of drinks, or he could get drunk. He stopped in front of a candy store and he held her at the waist. All right, he said, but this is really impossible, it’s sad and impossible. Let’s just, she said, let’s just — you’re going to kill me if you don’t stop saying what you say. All right, he said, all right. It was harder to be with her than not to be with her, that was the truth. She had a way of tilting her head, a way of just doing it.

I had a feeling when I met you

You’d drive me crazy if I let you

DOCTOR GREENLEAF SENT HIS NURSE TO THE LAB TO PICK up a temporary bridge and two posts for a patient who would be in the following morning at nine. It was late in the afternoon and he told her to go home from the lab with the prosthesis — he’d see her in the morning. His last patient of the day, Claire Page, had to have a broken root removed from a molar, a procedure that he was hoping he could accomplish with little trouble. Doctor Greenleaf, whom his patients called Ralph, was nervous and excited — although he denied this to himself — for he would be alone with Claire, a sturdy, subtly provocative widow in her mid-forties, a strawberry blonde with a clear complexion and brown eyes. He was, to be blunt, sexually obsessed with her, and regularly fantasized about the two of them, rapt in their passion, together on a beach in the Caribbean, a chalet in the Swiss Alps, an autumnal path in Central Park, all of these civilized adventures preludes or postludes to shameless, burning sex. He would, in this blurry and absurd romance of a future, be free, of course, of Inez, his bored wife, and their two spoiled, graceless children; Claire would love him, deeply yet sadly, for she would feel the guilt of the femme fatale, the carnal engine that would shatter his troubled, unhappy, yet safe and, of course, lawful marriage. Yet their erotic attraction to each other would be so intense as to drive them to abandon and sacrifice everything to their sacred lust, a lust that thrilled and blinded and made them drunk; so Ralph knitted these clichés together. When Claire walked into his operating room, he was already half-aroused by his recurrent daydream and its elaborations. She settled into the chair and he lowered it to its horizontal position. He glanced at her legs, which, he was certain, oh yes, yes, he was certain that she’d revealed, as if accidentally, to mid-thigh. Sure, she had slipped her skirt up as she made herself comfortable in the chair. She felt, of course she did, she felt as he did! She smiled at him, nervously, pulling at her paper bib, her wondrous hair gleaming in the cold light of his overhead lamp. He’d use a light general anesthetic, he said, just a little, so she wouldn’t have to put up with the numbness of an injection, she’d be able to enjoy her dinner. She was pleased, for she dreaded dentistry, despite Ralph’s gentle expertise, he’d been such a wonderful dentist for her. She was under, and Ralph began working on her tooth, but it was almost impossible for him to concentrate. His breathing was ragged and he was fully erect. He watched his hands, tender and strong and caring, push her skirt up carefully and slowly, watched them fondle her belly and thighs and crotch, watched them unbutton her blouse and caress her breasts. He opened his fly and began to masturbate, then bent to kiss her between her legs. He was moaning, and Claire woke up just as his nurse entered the room. His nurse entered the room! For the smallest sliver of a second he thought that he could just kill the two women and flee. There is little point in detailing what happened after this incident, save to say that the newspapers and local television stations wiped out his career overnight, he lost his license, and he spent eleven months in prison after pleading to two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct, reduced from sexual battery and attempted rape. A lawsuit, of course, was pending. Inez took the opportunity to file for divorce so that she could marry a good friend of theirs, Marty, with whom she’d been sleeping for three years — although she actually made love to him on his office desk every two weeks or so. When she saw Claire she thought her a brassy, overweight whore, of course, and doubted that Ralph, that cold fish, ever did anything at all with her or with any other woman — awake, asleep, unconscious, or dead! When Ralph was released from prison, he left the state when it was legally permissible to do so and disappeared for three years, after which he landed, as they say, in Oldsmar, Florida, a small gulf town, with a license to practice in the state in hand. He opened an office, hired a nurse and a part-time receptionist, a woman older than he, whom he married a year later. One afternoon, a voluptuously built woman in her mid-forties came into the office to make an appointment for an initial checkup and routine hygiene and cleaning. She was a widow, it turned out, and her name, quite unbelievably, was Claire. She was, too, a strawberry blonde, although this state had been attained with professional aid. But still. But still. Coincidence, as life proves over and over again, is so routine as to beggar comment. He smiled warmly at Claire as his wife made the appointment and noticed that her legs and hips were very much like Claire’s, they were Claire’s. Perhaps she would need, in the future, some extensive dental work, a new partial; or perhaps she would have to come in late, the last patient; she might need emergency care on a Sunday. This time he’d give Claire enough to keep her peacefully under for a good while, long enough for him to show her that he still loved her, and to do his work the right way, befitting a doctor of his experience and abilities.