Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

He starts to reach under the bed in the dark for his bottle of Wilson’s but then thinks better of it and lies back, still. The dream has upset him. He considers the wife who appeared in it, her gentle smile, so perfect that he almost believes that she always smiled that way. And his own contented and secret smile? That young man, he? The elegant angle of his boater. The crispness of his summer suit. He seemed so absolutely at ease with that young and adoring wife. Why did she turn into Jean Whiting?

Tears of self-pity come to his eyes as he realizes that he was indeed that young once, that Bridget had once, many times, many times, smiled at him that way — a girlish smile of acquiescence, surrender. Her surrender might have been, what? More complete? More abandoned. But it was as it was, and sweet, nonetheless. His face burns as he strikes against a fantasy that he has not entertained for years, and it seems to him that his wheezy breathing will awaken his grandson asleep across the room. When it first came to him he cannot remember, but it had been after the death of their second daughter, in the dark center of the sexual death that their lives had entered. The baby’s death was his responsibility. Bridget’s pregnancy had been his responsibility. His dirty needs, as she had phrased it, had sent the infant to her grave. May God forgive him.

Perhaps it had been after that night on which Bridget had allowed him, after so long, his desires. There had been an outing on the Fourth of July to the Rockaways and she had drunk two highballs and then, in the evening, three or four glasses of beer. Her mouth had opened. Her lips were wet and juicy and they had sweated together in the hot dark bedroom of the rented bungalow in Sheepshead Bay. She had licked and sucked his tongue to muffle her moans. He thought that their lives were changing, but that holiday expression of love had been an aberration, and they fell back immediately into their bitter celibacy. That may have been the time that his obsessive and recurring daydream began. It was so clear in his mind that he thought that had she looked into his eyes she would have there discovered it in impeccable clarity, a very picture of his shameful thoughts.

He is sitting in the leather Morris chair reading the paper after supper. Bridget has finished the dishes, and although Skip is asleep, she has not come to join him in their customary silence before he says, as he says each night, “About time to go for a pint.” He suddenly looks up, and sees her at the door of their bedroom, smiling at him in unutterable lasciviousness. Her hair is loose, falling over her shoulders and back, her dark coppery hair, and her face is almost grotesquely bright with rouge and powder. Her lips are fuller, her mouth wider. She is wearing a white linen chemise, the low front bordered with pale-pink embroidered roses. Below this garment, she is naked, her belly slightly rounded with the weight she has put on since their marriage, her sex hidden in luxuriant hair slightly darker than the masses on her head. Her strong straight legs are set slightly apart and her white silk stockings catch the soft glow of the bedroom lamp. They are rolled to just above her knees and there caught tightly by pink satin garters. On her feet are the white patent-leather shoes bought for their dead daughter’s christening and not worn since. She walks toward him, still smiling, her hips swaying, her face flushed with lust and her eyes softly virginal. Taking the newspaper out of his hands and dropping it on the floor, she bends over him, her knees drawing modestly together, her teeth wetly brilliant, and kisses him, their mouths awkwardly open. Her breasts fall out of her chemise and she laughs, her mouth still on his, and begins to stroke his hidden sex, laughing lower, and then she says filthy, forbidden things into his mouth, filthy, incredible things, which he begs her to repeat as he caresses her heavy breasts. She frees his aching phallus from his trousers and straddles him, one hand guiding him into her, the other cupping one of her breasts and pushing its stiff nipple into his slavering mouth. As he begins to suck at her furiously, she starts to pump up and down on him, sinking deeper and deeper onto his throbbing erection.

Skip was so goddamn het up about going into Hackettstown with that excuse for a man, Dave Warren, that John knew — wasn’t she his flesh and blood? — that she was going to make a horse’s ass of herself buying something or other to show off to Thebus. It better not be anything that makes her look like a cheap piece of trash, or by God he’d really put his foot down! He put on a long, sad face as he saw Billy come out on the porch and look across at him on the church steps, and then felt ashamed of himself, Christ, mixing the boy up in it, he must be getting dizzy. But the boy pretended not to notice him and went back inside, huh, she’s got him dead set against me, the mean old grandfather, sure. When the boy is a little older he’ll look back and be able to see himself what a shabby piece of goods this Thebus is. God forbid that he even remembers him!

When he’d told Marie that he was very upset about her going to that den of iniquity, the WigWam, she’d looked at him but said nothing, but he knew, oh how he knew that goddamn stubborn look that she’d got from her mother. The WigWam! He could have made his fortune a hundred times over, for the love of God, had he bet that if the son of a bitch asked her out anywhere, that’s where he’d ask her. And she not even really divorced, not in the eyes of God. The last time John had gone to the WigWam was when? Ten years ago? And even then it was a nest of drunken floozies and five-hundred-dollar millionaires sniffing around their skirts like a pack of mongrels. My God, it was enough to turn your stomach. You can bet your bottom dollar that’s where that little bastard would take her. And she, like the simp she was when that slimy article turned on his five-and-ten charm, by Jesus Christ, she thought he was doing her a favor, she thought it was a compliment. No fool like an old fool. Oh, the dump was the perfect place for him to give her the old soft soap, to the tune of cheap rotgut booze and that nigger music that the young chippies jumped around to, dancing they called it! With their behinds wiggling around for anybody to see! When he’d gone a little further and said that he really didn’t want her to go, what do you even know about this man except that he’s divorced, and very pretty that is, isn’t it? the blind leading the blind, she set her face against him and said that she’d accepted the invitation and that as far as she was concerned what really got his back up was that he was scared to death of what the other boarders would think about it and she was sick and tired and fed up worrying about what a few relics that she didn’t give two cents for — and neither did he if he’d admit it — would say about anything. And then she said she wanted to wash her hair and that was that. It was easy to see that her head had been turned when she talked to her own father that way. A spectacle, no two ways about it, that’s what she was making of herself.

She was a good-looking woman, anybody with half an eye could see that, and he knew what a little bugger of a man like Thebus wanted with her — not that Marie would ever disgrace herself by letting him do — letting him get away with any smutty filth he’d cooked up. Married and a mother or not, she was as innocent as a girl, it troubled him even now to think of her and that greaseball she married doing God knows what… Well, that’s all over and done with and he’d seen many a man stop and turn around to look at her on the street and she’d walk along with her head up high as if they didn’t exist. But this one! He got around her with his Billy this and Billy that and his sad tales of his own boy — all peaches and cream and snots and tears, sure, now that he’d deserted him to chase sluts. Well, when she came back from town he’d tell her a thing or two about her precious gentleman admirer, and God bless Helga Schmidt for letting him know about it. Now there was a woman, straight as a die. Oh yes indeed, Helga Schmidt had the goods on the son of a bitch, and any man who runs after the janes the way he did was not about to change his spots just because he’d met a clean pure woman like Marie. By God, he wouldn’t put it past him to talk about marrying her, as if Marie would ever fly in the face of God, but he wouldn’t put it past him to say anything if he thought it might allow him to take liberties.