Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

I can’t remember the last time I was at the WigWam but it’s always been a lovely place, a very nice class of people. They keep the riffraff out.

I guess you’ve been on that road with other people? I mean, your husband? I don’t know why, but I feel so godawful jealous of him.

An eyeful in anything? Not in that old-maid’s bathing suit from when Napoleon was a cadet. Don’t say a word! You don’t have to be polite.

I’ll dust off the old perambulator and we’ll pull up there like a couple of swells. Put on the ritz a little. I’ll even wear my din-din coat.

I feel just as crazy as you. I want to do the same thing, but I don’t think the Sapurtys over there would appreciate us spooning on the church steps, do you? They don’t still say spooning, do they?

On you, on you you don’t even notice it’s old-fashioned.

What were a few of the salient qualities of Tom’s “personality”?

An easy smile. An assertive but polite manner with women, a conspiratorial camaraderie with men. An ability to tailor off-color jokes for mixed company. A “look” that bespoke unending leisure and the genius to enjoy it. A curiously half-concealed aura of what many people (mostly women) took to be sadness and the attendant fascination this aura exerted. A gentlemanly ignoring of the jealousy felt by those who took him to be a fraud.

What were his “intentions” with regard to Marie McGrath Recco?

He would take things as they came. Our subject had an eye for the ladies, and Marie Recco, although in her thirties, was a decidedly attractive woman. She was also shy and vulnerable to attention and flattery, little of which she had experienced in years.

What were some of the things about Tom that made women admire and men distrust him?

To speak but of the moment, summer 1939: He swam too well, he owned a shining green Plymouth coupe (which word he pronounced, only half-jokingly, coo-pay), he often wore white and pale yellow to set off his deep tan, he owned a half-dozen pastel slack suits, he was divorced but did not speak of his former wife to his fellow guests except in mawkishly admiring terms, he smoked Rum and Maple pipe tobacco into which he shredded bitter chocolate, his hair was always perfectly cut and combed and gleamed with rose oil, he was a successful salesman for a meat-cutting-machine company and did much of his work by telephone, work which he somewhat speciously characterized as “stealing money.”

Why did Billy Recco like him so much?

Billy thought that he would make a swell father. Billy, at this point in his life, thought that any man would make a swell father, except for his father, whom his mother had taught him to loathe and fear.

Would he make a “swell father”?

Perhaps to Billy Recco, yet he had paid and presently paid little attention to his own son, Tommy, a boy a year older than Billy. The boy had always seemed to him a mother’s son. He had no other children.

Yet it is our understanding that he brought Tommy into many conversations that he had with Billy and Marie. Was this the case?

It was.

What was the nature of these references to his son?

To wit: my big boy; my Tommy; my dear little son; poor little Tommy; Tommy used to; you remind me of; I know you’d love; and etc. These remarks and many others of the same sort were often delivered with a sigh and what Marie thought of as “a faraway look” in his eyes, which look, it may be noted, made him seem to be a sensitive soul harboring a deep grief that begged to be assuaged.

Were these instances of what we may call manfully repressed pain legitimate? Or would they best be characterized as being adopted for effect?

It is known only that Marie Recco was moved to pity and admiration by them.

Did he speak of “little Tommy” to others?

Not during this summer sojourn at the Stellkamp farm.

What did he think of John McGrath, Marie’s father?

As an obstacle to whatever “understanding” he might reach with Marie. He was correct in this thought.

What were some of the terms of opprobrium that Mr. McGrath used in regard to Tom?

At various times and in various circumstances, John McGrath is known to have said: little tin god, patch on a man’s ass, phony as a three-dollar bill, Mr. High and Mighty, five-hundred-dollar millionaire, nigger rich, coo-pay? guinea moustache, our conquering hero, couldn’t keep a wife, skirt chaser, up to no good, goddamned fool of a ladies’ man, a fart in a gale of wind, Lothario, another tale of woe, and nothing but bullshit and broken glass.

To return for a moment to Tom’s coupe — or coo-pay: Why did this mundane vehicle have the effect that it did indeed have upon people?

It spoke of independence and the devil-may-care, of freedom and youthful rakishness. Thus it appealed to the feminine libido and awakened masculine envy and fear of cuckoldry.

Was Tom indeed a maker of cuckolds?

If rumor is to be given credence, the answer is “yes.” Three men putatively so served were: Lewis D. Fielding, a junkman of Ossining, N.Y., through his wife, Barbara; Alfred Bennett Martinez, a plumber of Ozone Park, N.Y., through his wife, Danielle; William V. Bell, a shop teacher of Paterson, N.J., through his wife, Joanne. These are not their real names.

We have been given certain intelligence concerning particular words and phrases used by our subject, these serving to set him apart from what he thought of as the hoi polloi. May we be enlightened as to the nature of these distinguishing uses of the language?

He delighted in “ab-soid!”; “coozy” for “cozy”; “nook” as a term for the female genitalia; he always “built” a drink; “sunny honeys” was his name for fried eggs; he pronounced “croquet” “crocket,” save when he was losing; a navy-blue jacket that he wore on semiformal occasions was his “din-din coat” or his “soup catcher”; his briar pipes were, in winter, “mitt warmers” and in summer, “skeeter chasers”; his Plymouth coo-pay was affectionately dubbed his “perambulator”; and, among men whom he knew fairly well, he called his moustache his “womb broom” or his “pussy bumper.”

Was he in any way the injured party in the twelve-year marriage to Janet Thebus nee Baumholz of Passaic, New Jersey, a marriage that ended in a bitter divorce?

Hardly. She had been a faithful and excellent wife and mother, while Tom had been unfaithful whenever occasion presented itself, said infidelity commencing but eight months after the couple’s return from a honeymoon trip to Asbury Park.

Was there one outstanding flaw in the otherwise carefully composed whole that Tom presented to the world?

Yes, although considering our subject’s amatory successes, the flaw was apparently not an egregious one. Our subject’s trousers hung from his waist to his thighs with no readily distinguishable evidence that he possessed buttocks. It was one of the few things that he was touchy about, and it is believed that he had, on several occasions, wept in self-pity over this physiological lack. A waitress in Weehawken, N.J., nettled by his rather broad and arrogant sexual innuendoes concerning the size of her bosom, once enjoined him: “Take a powder, you assless wonder!” It had taken a month after this incident before he would remove his overcoat when calling on clients employing female help.

Was he an absolute fraud regarding his relationship with Marie?

Perhaps not an absolute fraud.

Dear Marie,

Dare I call you, Marie darling? Or should I address you, you swell thing, as Mrs. Recco, prostrating myself before your tiny feet in formality. Like a monkey in a tuxedo on a chain held by an old dago? And of course I beg you to forgive that terrible word knowing that you, dear princess and Queen of sweetness were once married to a dago and so got your name. But I don’t hold that against you, not on your life, darling!