Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

The bartender buys him one back and he tells him that his wife is having a baby. Well, well, the man says. He looks at the paper bag. Tom cannot tell him that her clothes are in there. He feels ashamed — carrying around a woman’s clothes! Good luck! The bartender raps the bar with his knuckles.

Janet takes Tommy and goes to her mother’s house in Connecticut. Enough! Enough of your bimbos and tramps. You can’t take Tommy away! You wait and see who can or who can’t. She returns after six weeks. He embraces her and they cry and make love on the floor outside the bathroom.

One girl he picks up on a corner under the El takes him to her place near Erie Basin. Scrabbling and scratching in the walls. Just the fuckin rats. They don’t bother nobody. He cannot maintain an erection in his fright and horror. A big strong guy like you? He gives her a fin.

So I’m batty because I want you to leave your stockings and shoes on? What about you, hah? What about you, Janet? Didn’t you ever notice that all you really like to do is suck? Every goddamn thing winds up with you going down and I’m sick of it. And I’m crazy! Janet sits still on the edge of the bed in her slip, her face pale but for a flush across her cheekbones. I’m going downstairs now to read, she says. Oh, Janet! Janet? Janet, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say … I didn’t mean to say anything like that. Really. She lies down on the bed and closes her eyes with her fingertips. You are rotten, Tom. You are a mean, rotten man.

Tells what’s her name? Ruth? That he wants to be engaged to her. The perfect wife. He has always admired nurses. She masturbates him, sitting straight up with her eyes directly in front of her in the Fortway one Thursday night. That’s that. Now she can get fucking lost. Three weeks of coffee for a hand job.

He runs into Susan in downtown Brooklyn. She is coming out of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank in a Nile-green tweed suit and a little hat to match, small dotted veil over her face, green pumps. O-ho! Spending the old man’s money while he sweats in the salt mines? Chinese restaurant where there is luncheon dancing. She moves her belly gently, almost modestly, against his erection. Smiles right into his face. What a nervy bitch! Her terrific smell, my God! Jesus, kid, you are absotively the tops, whoo. Now, dear Tom, if you had a little place that we could go? I got the old perambulator parked down near Court Street. In a car? I’m a married woman, shame on you. He pushes against her belly, clenches his teeth. Besides, you don’t really take me seriously? I really love Alex. Store teeth and all? You are a son of a bitch. But with a heart of gold, right? Oh sure, and a gold something else, too, in your opinion.

The sales conference in Washington at which he botches his presentation: “Selling the Second Unit.” Keeps saying “depresson,” though cold sober. The city terrifies and saddens him. In a hotel bar some old, really old slut gives him the cold shoulder. Masturbates in his room.” On the train home he sees a girl, remote, in the sunny haze of a field, sitting placidly on a rock. He starts, it’s Janet! Exactly like Janet when he first met her. What in the name of Jesus? He feels a chill.

The four of them pretty well looped by now. Alex and Susan go into the kitchen to make sandwiches. Their giggling, then silence, then whispers, and Alex breathing hoarsely. Why not us too? he asks Janet. He pulls her dress up and sits her, laughing, on the couch. Don’t come in for a few minutes! he calls, yanking her step-ins down. Why, what ever can you be doing? Susan laughs. This is terrible, Janet says, putting her heels up on the couch, her hands on her knees.

When she goes this time she stays away for three months.

Ruth? Ruth? He has been away — the Midwest. Big business pressure. Big deals. Really. Take a walk, my phony friend. You ugly bitch!

I can’t see Tommy? Again? What the hell do I give a good God damn about your fucking father and his fucking country fair? He’s my son!

Buys three new pipes. In a month they have the familiar sour taste. His new Borsalino and a Studebaker. Can sell a meat-cutting machine to a vegetarian. Crackerjack. Crack-er -jack!

Alex and his new moustache. Hey! Ronald Colman! You like it too, Susan? She smiles what he takes to be a dirty smile.

Get the goddamn divorce any time you goddamn well want it, yes, yes, I don’t give a damn, I won’t contest a thing. Say hello to your dee-lightful mother, Carrie Nation, O.K.? And you can go to hell too, hear? And you can also go fuck yourself too! Mrs. Cocksucker! Tell your mother that.

He’s still a young man, everything will work out fine. Meet somebody who knows the score. Touch of grey in his hair. Distinguished.

Listen Alex, I don’t want to impose on you. You didn’t expect a guest for supper, for Christ sake. Susan looks at him, same old lying come-hither smile. How he’d like to stick his dick right into that smile. Maybe she’s got false choppers too. We’ve got plenty to eat, Tom, I’m roasting a chicken. Crosses her legs. Leans back in the chair. The way her dress rides up, the creamy lace at the edge of her slip, legs stretching the silk stockings tight, sheen of metal. That son of a bitch Alex. Don’t even know what to do with that piece.

Maybe some nice mature divorcee. Knows the score. No illusions.

He barely hears the soft whispering, the sighing, of the tall sweet grass of the churchyard as the twilight comes down and the first fireflies begin their slow erratic scribbling on the blue air. Should he come to mind, one sees him on the crumbling stone steps of the church across the road from the farmhouse, a curiously elegant figure in that decidedly inelegant boarding-house world, dressed in rumpled summer whites and old black-and-white spectators, luminous against the softer, chalky white of the wooden building. He is tapping a stick against the edge of the step on which he sits.

His head is slightly inclined toward the churchyard as if he is listening for the sound of women’s laughter as it was, faint and musical, during the Sunday evening church fairs of years before; swept now nervously away and up, into the dark leaves of the old elms, by a sudden damp gust that bursts out from behind the faded red of the farm buildings sprawled in thin gloom beyond the white house, so that there is left again but the sighing of the grass, of which he now becomes cognizant. He places his stick across his lap and he too sighs.

He is uncomfortably afflicted by an odd loneliness for his recently dead wife, yet he knows that he is better off without her and her claustrophobic oppression of him. That spirit which he still possesses within him is cruelly mangled; the rest rots in the ground of Holy Cross with Bridget. In a sense he is indeed but a white figure, nothing more, perfectly two-dimensional. He stands now, leaning his weight on his stick, looking past the farm buildings and across the fields rolling toward the smudged bluish foothills over which summer lightning shivers: Louis Stellkamp is driving the cows in, he hears their faint lowing and the barking of the mangy herd dog. His grandson is out there in the fields, running behind the cows, clapping his hands and grunting in imitation of Louis.

His daughter sits on the porch with three other guests in the soft mixed light of the evening and the lampglow from the dining room. Frieda and Eleanor are clearing the supper dishes from the tables. He looks across the road at his daughter, also in white, his chin up in reproach, but she does not see him, or she pretends not to see him. He bangs his stick sharply against a step, twice, then another time, the cracks sudden and decisive in the quiet. She still does not look at him, or, in any case, he cannot see whether she does or not. Ralph Sapurty, rocking slowly and smoking a cigar, raises his arm and waves, then lets it drop; the old man does not acknowledge him. The fool in his Weber and Fields plus fours talks so much he spits, and his wife with a face that would stop a clock! Grace Sapurty is there too, he knows, although he has left his pince-nez in his room: he can make out the bilious pink of one of her flouncy, silly dresses, and hear her high laughter as she tells another story about her wonderful son and his hardware store in Elizabeth. The fourth figure leans against the porch railing, half sitting; it is, of course, that of Tom Thebus. The old man feels a rush of helpless anxiety and anger and sits again. The mosquitoes will eat you alive over there! he hears Grace Sapurty call to him, and he waves toward the porch, dismissing her concern. The thin bitter sweetness of citronella is now apparent to him, the scent of summer, Bridget in her shapeless white dresses, the flash of her gold tooth.