Gilbert Sorrentino - A Strange Commonplace

FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS NOW I’VE KNOWN A WOMAN whose husband, almost that many years ago, was utterly crazy about — the phrase, I realize, dates me — a younger friend of hers, whom he thought unimpeachably beautiful; often, upon meeting her, he would quote Marlowe’s lines on Helen in Doctor Faustus, throwing wide his arms and declaiming the famous words in a graceless parody of ham acting that was neither funny, nor, to my mind, appropriate, and that embarrassed his wife, the young woman, and anyone else unlucky enough to be awkwardly present. Even more embarrassing was the obvious fact that this rote performance was a transparent attempt to conceal his deep feelings for Clara, I believe her name was. Clara had a younger brother, who, early one morning, was, astonishingly, shot to death from a passing car while standing outside a Bay Ridge diner. She never really recovered from this stupid and abrupt death, and the husband, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, took immediate advantage of her rickety emotional state, to seduce her. Clara became pregnant, which led, or so I believe, to the breakup of the marriage, although the man’s wife, my woman friend, even after all these years, has never so much as suggested that this was the case; she has never even suggested that the two were intimate. Clara must have had an abortion or suffered a miscarriage, because no child was, to my knowledge, ever born. Clara’s Uncle Ray, so the rumor went, came looking for what he called her boyfriend, soon after the latter, filled with self-pity, had moved out of the apartment, and beat him up badly, breaking his nose, jaw, and two teeth. Clara was married, about six months later, to a young black man who was involved in the music business, or maybe it was the real-estate business. Given the time and the place and Clara’s yahoo relatives, they moved away. Quite recently, my woman friend told me that Clara had died just a few years into her marriage. It took me a moment to realize that this had happened some thirty-five years ago, perhaps because my friend seemed so pleased — delighted even — about her death, and spoke of it as a recent event. We’re both alone, as you may have surmised, and since we get along fairly well, I’ve decided to ask her if she’d consider living with me. Marriage is out of the question, since she is still married to the man she has, for many years, called the lover.

HE CALLED A MAN WHO HAD BEEN A FRIEND OF HIS youth, but to whom he had not spoken for forty-one years. They had simply lost touch, as the smartly descriptive phrase has it. He didn’t know it, but he called because he needed to make a story for himself, since the always changing story that he had held in his mind for all those forty-one years was his friend’s story, not his. So he called, getting the number from Los Angeles information. The old friend sounded the same as he’d always sounded, slightly drunk and bored, but he became irritable when he realized who was calling. Why the hell are you calling me after all this time? is, essentially, what he said. This angered the caller, and the story that he had prepared to release, is perhaps the word, became another story. He called, he lied, because of the considerable amount of money he owed the old friend, you remember that loan you gave me when I stayed with you and Jenny in San Francisco? The story was emerging into the eternal present of all stories, an insubstantial present, a chimera. The old friend remembered the loan, of course! It’s about time, he said, Jesus Christ, it’s been thirty-five years or more. He was taking the place assigned him in the rising fantasy edifice. And, the caller said, as well as the debt, I also came across that old copy of your Bomba the Jungle Boy that we used to have such laughs over, but, he said, he’d decided to keep that — for old times’ sake: nice touch, the boys’ book. It hardly needs to be said that the man owed his old friend nothing, nor did the old friend ever give or lend him a copy of any book that was not what he considered serious. Yet and yet, the old friend said that he wanted Bomber or whatever it was called back, and the money, too. He was doing very well in the role. The caller said that he’d just remembered the day he left the apartment on, what was it, Baker Street? Dolores? and said good-bye to him and Jenny, and how the old friend had insisted that he come up with two hundred, or was it three hundred dollars? For the food he’d eaten, and the other things that he’d used, during his two-week stay with them. Apparently, the old friend had completely forgotten that the caller had bought all the booze and cigarettes, put gas in the car, picked up the check at the restaurants they’d gone to, apparently, he’d, sure, just forgotten all that on the day he’d packed up and left the apartment. The story was getting very clear now, and sharply delineated, and he hauled it rapidly up into the light. He reminded the old friend of the day that he and Jenny had gone shopping for a birthday present for him, a suede jacket was it? From Emporium Capwell? He remembered that day, didn’t he? Of course. That was the day that he and Jenny had gone to a motel in Belmont where they’d spent the better part of the afternoon. The old friend made some kind of a noise and then told him to go and fuck himself the son of a bitch that he was. To which the caller replied with a question having to do with the old friend’s alcoholism, was he still a drunk? Or had he found temperance, joy, and Jesus? There was a click on the other end of the line, the same sound that is present in many stories as well as films, a reassuring click that all is moving along as it should, a click that tells us where we are. He wondered if the old friend and Jenny were still together, she’s an old woman now, of course. She’d been really sweet, if a little naive, always just a step behind the then-current drivel and fashions and notions and truths. But he’d been touched that she’d gone to the trouble of faking an orgasm in the motel, as if she thought he’d care one way or another. So had he gone to a motel with her? He’d wanted to, standing there on Post Street, with the old friend’s suede jacket in its gleaming box.

HE GOT OFF THE SUBWAY AT A STOP HE HADN’T EVEN seen for more than forty years, walked up the stairs to the street and then down the block. The Alpine was still there, but now it was a multiplex, showing all the latest blow-’em-up, imbecile-comedy, fake-sex movies. The saloon that had been next door was now a mosque: the drunks and laughter, assignations and fistfights, gropings and jukebox hits now dead and displaced by benevolent and peaceful Islam and its benevolent and peaceful teachings. He would have gone in to see any movie at all, but that would have spoiled the effect of the cheap booze, of the fictitious and romanticized past that he’d decided to swallow, to breathe in, to anoint himself with. What he wanted to see was Tarzan and Laurel and Hardy; Robert Benchley and a Pete Smith Specialty; Red Dust and Beau Geste; something with Rondo Hatton or Bruce Cabot or Jack Lambert or Barton MacLane or Binnie Barnes or Gail Patrick or Claire Trevor or the sublime Jack Carson. He wanted to sprawl in a broken seat and eat Neccos and Jujubes, Black Crows and Nibs and Walnettos. This was not true. What he wanted was to be alive somewhere else, in some other time, to tell his mother things that she didn’t want to hear. To watch a playground softball game with his father, who would go home with him to a supper his mother had never made, a small-town, happy American supper, lavish with steaming gravy boats, bright vegetables, creamy mashed potatoes, a supper with homemade pies cooling on the windowsill for Pete the Tramp and Hans and Fritz to pinch. He wanted to eat Charms lollipops in all their strange, unearthly reds and greens and yellows and purples. He wanted his father to pick him up and carry him all the way home, and not to be the weak skirt-chaser that he had been and that had finally wrecked his idyllic marriage to his patient, loving, devoted wife. So his mother had always said, and so he had always believed, even though it was a perfect lie, smooth and lustrous from much-contented calibrations and adjustments. He believed it even now, standing in the breezy shade. Oh, not really, but he believed it even now. Men and women passed by, people who had not yet been born when he’d refined his pity for his mother and his loathing for his father — and vice versa — to a fine consistency, one of alienation and bitterness and inadequacy. Do they still make Nibs? They don’t make Walnettos. He wished that he could chafe his barely breathing nostalgia into a delicious, a self-satisfied sadness, but he was not only too old to dupe himself, he was too old to pretend that he could. Maybe he’d go in anyway and see a movie that starred some young actor who looked like a crazed frog irresistible to women.