Gilbert Sorrentino - Little Casino

“If hair is mussed on her forehead, if she goes in a gleam of Cos, in a slither of dyed stuff, there is a volume in the matter.”

And if her skin smells of Castile soap, he “shall spin long yarns out of nothing,” and sing them to the dreadful noise of an out-of-tune piano.

HE HAD BEEN VAGUELY AWARE, FOR SOME time, that odd and unexpected things often happened in odd and unexpected places, but he had no sense that such things could happen to him. Perry or Sam, let’s say Perry, had picked him up about seven o’clock, after supper, in his old dusty black Plymouth coupe, and they’d gone up the hill to the Blue Front for a Coke, then down to Chez Freddy, if witnesses can be believed, but nobody seemed to be around. Well, it was a May weekend, well before the season. They wound up in, of all places, the bowling alley. He didn’t know how to bowl and Perry wasn’t much good, but they rented their shoes and made fools of themselves: expected behavior for bowling alleys. A few people were there, and a couple of girls, the bowling-alley light, harsh and shadow-less, setting them in clattering and crashing space precisely. The light of bowling alleys can be proven romantic, though the steps of the proof and its final flourish may be too simple to be given credence.

He had no idea where her Evander Childs High School was, nor her Boston Post Road, nor her Mosholu Parkway, Van Cortlandt Park, Gun Hill Road, but these were mysterious places to which she belonged, and were strangely inextricable, too, in his wayward mind, from the crisp white uniforms worn by nurses, from the perfume-edged odor of sweat, or so he was compelled to believe, even from the smell of ice-cold furs and the oil-slicked glassy waters of the Narrows. He knew that something was happening, despite the banality of everything, perhaps because of the banality of everything, the musty smell of the garage, just opened after the winter, the dirty screens leaning against the sides of the house, awaiting springtime cleaning, the blowing phlox bordering the hedge. There she stood. He looked around for Perry, Perry Plymouth, where was he? and he was talking to the other girl, small and dark, with startlingly white, even teeth and a short haircut that held her face in an ebony frame. Later, that summer, his friend, Teddy, would fall in love with this dark girl, making his Italian family as unhappy as her Jewish family. “Such goeth the breaks, brother mine,” Teddy’s older brother, Joe, would say, but sadly. In any event, what was happening to him, now, could well be considered instrumental in understanding the romantic nature of bowling-alley light. Which, by curious but logical divagation, which there is no time to explain, led him to wonder, that summer, about the whereabouts of Perry.

Helen, her older sister, picked him up at the DeCamp bus stop in Caldwell that fall, in their father’s car, a powder-blue Buick. What in God’s name was he doing at the Caldwell bus stop? In the fall? Helen was engaged to a second-year medical student, Sam, whom she’d met at Jones Beach. Of him and her younger sister, Sam had said, that past August, “You sly dog.” Which reminds me that Marvin, her cousin, had said, “If she weren’t my cousin, oh yeah, oh Jesus.”

The subject of the foregoing is not at all clear, as will be obvious to the attentive reader. The subject, for all I know, may not even be in evidence.

Werner Heisenberg was not convinced by this proof, and thought it, as a matter of fact, “frivolous.” But then Heisenberg had no idea of what a bowling alley is, or, in this case, was. He is on record as saying, in reply to a question concerning bowling alleys, posed him by Lotte Knapke, “Of that which I cannot talk about, I have to keep my mouth quiet.” He of course meant “silent.”

It’s perfectly OK for New Yorkers to make fun of New Jersey and/or its residents, but it is not OK for others to do so. And I mean New Yorkers, not transplanted rubes like, say, E.B. White.

“What about a transplanted rube like Virgil Thomson?”

Fuck him, too, with his wand and his peanut-butter pie!

“I’m not quite …?”

Wand, wand, wand, for Christ sake! You never heard of a wand, and pie?

“You mean maybe a cane?”

THE NIGHT BEFORE, HE HAD WALKED HER to her house down by the lake. Thick sweet darkness of the July night. He kissed her, leaning against the cool metal of her father’s powder-blue Buick. She said that she’d see him down at the lake the next day. I’ve seen you there, a lot, she said, last year.

And there she was the next day, lying on a blanket some twenty-five yards from the pavilion, with a girlfriend. She looked up at him and smiled. Do I know you? she said. He felt like a shambling moron in the face of that candid, girlish smile, and the girlfriend was giving him the once-over. Do you, like a, want a, like a want to have Coke? he said. She laughed and got up on her knees and patted the blanket with a hand so golden that her fingernails glowed as pearls. Here, she said. Sit here. He looked at her cool lips and felt them again in the moonless night.

The jukebox in the pavilion was playing a cheap song that would become ludicrously and unimpeachably beautiful in years to come, and the girlfriend left. Lie down, she said. I had a bad feeling that you weren’t going to say hello. What? What? Wasn’t it obvious from his stricken and stupid face that his very self had become her imbecile and slave? He saw that her eyes were hazel.

For heaven’s sake, it’s too soon to know. But it’s magic, tenderly. So said Claude Thornhill, Fran Warren, Dinah Washington, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan.

She wore a white, one-piece strapless bathing suit.

Complexity of the simplest things, e.g., young men and women, or this young man and this young woman.

It doesn’t matter what lake in New Jersey this was. They were all alike. It doesn’t matter what the girl’s name was. They were all lovely.

Hopatcong, Ellen, Budd, Natalie, Hiawatha, Carole.

“I’ll close my eyes and she’ll just disappear, I know it, I know it,” the idiot says. To himself, at least.

ALTHOUGH INFORMATION, SPARSE AND unsatisfactory as it is, has been grudgingly offered by crack journalists as to the mundane origins of a mundane summer romance that began in, of all places, a mundane bowling alley, the activities of Perry have been all but ignored, not only on that particular night (of the bowling alley), but throughout the entirety of the subsequent summer.

Questions were asked, possible witnesses canvassed, and so on. No one seems to remember Perry’s activities.

Perry was seen, as we know, in conversation with the small, dark girl, and we have been told, perhaps irrelevantly, that “later that summer, his [not Perry’s] friend, Teddy, would fall in love with [her].” Did Perry also fall in love with her? Did he tell her of his notions concerning the romantic light of bowling alleys? What actually happened to Perry that summer? For that matter, what happened to him that night? All the information so far granted or gathered has been filtered through a prose utterly, even slavishly subservient to the sensibilities of an embarrassingly lovestruck young man, dazed by a girl, by her smile and her perfume, and by the concomitant and irregularly recurring image of a faceless female body in what he imagines to be a crisp white uniform. Can such a prose be trusted? Was Perry angry that the small, dark girl found, if that’s the word, Teddy? And if there was such anger, did Teddy ever learn of it? Did Perry despise himself for his amorous vacillation, procrastination, shyness?