The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  2. Many people feel that all the mysteries of fiction have been solved, and a good thing too!

  3. It is probably not a good idea to “fuck with” memoirs in which the victim-protagonist-memoirist has already been “fucked with.”

  4. Most critics and biographers dispute the fact that Proust was satisfied with one draft, despite the discovery of the “Toulouse” notebooks.

  5. Patricia Melton Cunningham’s first novel, Wrenched from Love, will soon be published by Gusher Books, a subsidiary of Shell Oil Publishers, Ltd.

  6. “Spondulicks” most often refer to quarters and dimes, as in “Drop a spondulick on the bum.”

  7. A pasticciaccio may be translated as “a fucking mess.”

  8. Wallace Stegner, although he owned a car, did not actually like it.

  9. Death asks no quarter—nor spondulick.

  A Joke

  1. It is amazing just how many jokes people know.

  2. “Cut velvet!,” is, for instance, the punch line of one of those many jokes.

  3. The male gaze is at its most pernicious in the academic world, for reasons which will soon be made clear.

  4. Dark Corridors of Wheat has been out of print for many years, despite a relentless campaign waged by the cereal industry to make it available at a reasonable price.

  5. Maurice Bucks is on the record as saying that he “doesn’t really care all that much” about money, and after his successful takeover of the Vietnamese government, noted that “it’s got very, very little to do with money, and I want people to know that.” It has recently been reported that Mr. Bucks has contracted AIDS, which fact has led hundreds–some say thousands—to argue for the existence of God.

  6. The paper used to print the “Prairie Edition” of the Jewett biography is made of acid-free gopher skin.

  7. “Handy Sarah” is a mistake of the sort regularly attributed to this author, who, it is said, can “really write” if he “puts his mind to it,” books that are “wonderfully readable.”

  8. People no longer get soused, but, instead, succumb to their addictions, addictions which they cannot triumph over, or “lick,” unless they first admit they have a problem and then get help.

  9. Boxers are excellent swimmers, which should have alerted their owner to the suspicious nature of these two hapless dogs’ deaths; of course, the soused Sarah had never admitted that she had a problem and therefore never got help.

  10. The “haircut” joke was a favorite of saloon comedians, who often and anon told it while soused.

  11. “Aporia” is a Greek word that means “who knows?” or, in certain contexts, “what the—?”

  A Tomato

  1. A gleaming white bicycle at the bottom of a pool is an example of an aporia—but not in real life.

  2. Spaghetti alla matarazzo is not for everyone.

  3. The author had originally thought to place the gleaming white bicycle in the projection booth of the Jewel Theater, pronounced, at least in this story, “theeayter,” as if you didn’t know.

  4. The baby carriage trundled home to Mrs. Moskowitz was most probably a stroller.

  5. “A thousand drinks are not enough [to pay] for a haircut,” or so says the Albanian proverb.

  6. Basil is never used in spaghetti alla matarazzo, save by natives of the Midwest.

  7. The Surgeon General has suggested that the Moskowitz curse is, in all probability, secondhand cigarette smoke.

  8. The green umbrella by the motel pool is a motif that some wag had once thought of donating to Raymond Carver.

  9. “Carver,” in this text, has no relation to the late writer (see above).

  10. That the author does not tell us what “tomatoes are cheaper” than may be an instance of a free aporia, or, in the parlance of narratology, an ekphrasis.

  11. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” he laughed.

  TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER

  These were all very slight experiences, of course,

  but the remarkable thing was that they happened all over again,

  exactly the same. Actually they were always there.

  —ROBERT MUSIL

  He rose and fumbled about in an escritoire until he found the clipping: “They stood in the dark in the driving rain underneath her umbrella.” Can all this have really taken place in America? Obviously, it was abnormal. Maybe not the men, who mostly go out to work, but the women, who are most inclined to talk and who have nothing to do.

  He had a good job in advertising and they lived in Kew Gardens in a brick semi-detached house; certainly the reader will recall such shoddy incidents in his own life.

  “Welcome to the scene of the extraordinary … outrage!”

  Not even fake art or the wearisome tricks of movies can assist them. This was in 1948.

  The roar of all the traffic came hurtling in through the wide-open window, the liquid moonlight filling the small parking area outside the gates to the beach. What was the scent of the perfume she wore? Why did he not pick her out of her red plush chair and sit her on his knee? He got up and closed the door, then lay down on the bed with her and took off her jacket and brassiere. Of course it wouldn’t be sordid. He knew that it was impossible, when once the material circumstances of a function were altered, for its aesthetic expression to survive. Different thighs. What is a supper club?

  “Above all, the presence of the loved person prevents reflection, and makes us women wish to be overcome.”

  “I don’t even know where CCNY is!”

  She got up, her breasts quivering slightly, and he saw faint stretch marks running into the shadowy symmetry of her pubic hair.

  “I don’t suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or clock.”

  “We can go to Maryland and get married,” she said.

  “How do you play Mah-Jongg?”

  A woman of brilliance and audacity, accompanied by a mere boy, came into the place and took seats near them.

  “I want to marry you, I can’t stand it.”

  When she slipped her coat off her breasts moved under the crocheted sweater she wore. Perhaps so much assails him that he has to close down ninety percent of himself to phenomena in order not to explode. Her eyes gray, flecked with bronze. She was fair.

  We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same.

  She was crying and stroking his hair. Was she happy? No answer probably. Against the tabletop her hand, glowing crescent moons over lakes of Prussian blue in evergreen twilights. Of course, life is a conspiracy of defeat, a sophisticated joke, endless, endless. The next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin.

  Everybody was drinking Cutty Sark. She zipped open his trousers. All night the February wind would come barreling down the wide keyway of Third Avenue, moving right over them all. He felt his heart rattling around in his chest in large jagged pieces. In her fingers a golden chain and on the chain a car key. And so through the agreeable vacation life there twitched one grim vein of tension. What he remembered was her gray cashmere coat swirling around her calves as she turned at the foot of the stairs to smile at him, making the gesture of dialing a phone and pointing at him and then at herself. How could he bear this image? It was just a rotted punctured husk.

  One day, in New York, he bought her a silver friendship ring, tiny perfect hearts in bas-relief running around it so that the point of one heart nestled in the cleft of another.

  “Let me come and sleep with you.”

  “What in the end is most apt to fill me with fever is to leaf through train schedules.”

  “Let me lie in your bed and look at you in your beautiful pajamas.”

  “I mean it,” she said.

  He said that he would change the eating habits of man!

  She smiled and asked for another coffee, taking the key and dropping it into her bag. Who can bring them to each other and allow him to enter her? No argument or persuasion could ever induce him to set up a female establishment after t
he manner of his companions. They were concerned about him. (They didn’t really know him.) He was not yet strong enough to ward off their services, and noted that that brought him into a state of dependence on them which might have evil consequences.

  “Help me. I’ll do anything you say.”

  “In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden.”

  She had white and perfect teeth. Her browned body, delicate hair bleached golden on her thighs. I staggered toward the dresser, and there like a beacon stood the lovely yellow tin. It was a joke after all.

  “I’ll hide in the closet and be no trouble.”

  “If only I had seen that decree, which had appeared in an inconspicuous place in the five newspapers I read every day, I should not have fallen into the ‘trap.’”

  He opened the button of her shorts. “All right.”

  At these words, Roberte does not know if it is from shame she trembles because the sentence is carried out, enormous, impetuous, scalding, between her buttocks, or whether it is from pleasure she is sweating.

  “If one has … faith … all things will … come! All … right!”

  “Think of a repertory of insignificant things, the enormous work which goes into studying them and getting a basic knowledge of them. What is the University of Miami? What does Benedictine cost? I want to rehabilitate this period by writing of it with the names of things most noble.”

  “A hot and breathless night toward the end of August, the patriotic smell of hot dogs and French fries in the still air?”

  He adored her. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. Believe me when I say he wanted to kiss her shoes. White lamps, soft lights.

  She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to blame.

  He had perhaps wept bitterly that afternoon as she kissed his knees. She had come up to open the house for the season. (All round the edge was written the date of the wedding and in a corner was the artist’s signature.) Her husband was a college traveler for a publishing house and was on the road, her son and daughter were staying at their grandparents’ for the day. Her flesh was cool.

  “I was on holiday with my wife traveling in a small hired car like a violent toy.”

  Rebecca was fair. Let me have a mist of tears in her eyes, of acrid joy and shame, of despair.

  “The three plates are arranged as usual, each in the center of one of the sides of the square table. This is, of course, old news. How softly we had slid off the edge of civilization.”

  “The author divides gardens into an infinity of styles?”

  She lay on the bed and opened her thighs and they made love without elaboration. When he got home he was exhausted.

  One day there was a photograph in the paper of a deceased seer who resembled a great bag of holy relics—innocent symbol that tortured his blood.

  “What is a Stravinsky?”

  “I am forced to assume that the latter was at that time not a real human being but a fleeting-improvised man, because he otherwise would have been so dazzled by the light phenomena which he must have seen—they occupied almost 1/6th to 1/8th part of the sky—that he would have expressed astonishment in some way.”

  “Of course he was insane. It is no wonder lesbians like women.”

  “He even succeeded in transforming specific pieces of music to his palate, following the composer step by step.”

  “One can hear his precise voice recording these picayune disasters as jokes.”

  They walked to the edge of the black lake stretching out before them, the red and blue neon on the far shore clear in the hot dark.

  Having reached the threshold, she turned and, raising her two hands to the dark veil over her face, she blew a distant kiss to those who had evoked her. Lovely Jewish girl from the remote and exotic Bronx. He put her number in his address book, but he wouldn’t call her. To those who have not studied the nature of language in any depth, the experience of number association will show immediately what must be grasped here, namely, the combinatory power that orders its ambiguities, and they will recognize in this the very mainspring of the unconscious. He watched her go into the house and saw the door close. Whose hand had touched her secret thighs?

  “From the manner in which the libertine welcomes her attackers, it’s plainly to be seen how inured she is to this hard use.” He was excited and frightened, and got an erection. But he would not call her.

  “I get the subject to pass the fingers of his right hand through his hair, so as to get a little coating of the natural oil on them, and then press the balls of them on the glass.”

  Nothing was like anything said it was after all. When he got off the train in Brooklyn an hour later, he saw his friends through the window of the all-night diner, pouring coffee into the great pit of their beer drunks.

  Even then he did not move, but waited until the heavy footfalls sounded to the bottom of the stairs. In the bedroom, she turned down the spread and fluffed the pillows, then sat and undressed. It’s too impossible to invent conversation for them. He luxuriously lowered himself on the bed and put an arm over his eyes. The moonlight of her teeth, the smell of her flesh, vague sweat and perfume. All summer long we have heard the chant of the husband’s newly discovered perfidy.

  “What were they to do? She tottered, holding the umbrella crookedly while he went to his knees and clasped her, the rain soaking him through, put his head under her skirt and kissed her belly, licked at her crazily through her underclothes … the story of that, Madam, is long and interesting, but it would be running my ‘history’ all upon heaps to give it you here. They worked desperately at it being August, but under the sharkskin and nylons those sunny limbs were hidden. The maimings of love are endlessly funny … as are the tiny figures of talking animals being blown to pieces in cartoons.”

  But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury.

  “What sort of god borrows a Chrysler and goes to the Latin Quarter? Give these children a Silver Phantom—and a chauffeur!”

  “I assume that I have the liberty to withdraw, at any time according to my need or desire, from the large sum small sums?”

  “Take your clothes off! Please?”

  “In the old days a chamber was a bedroom.”

  “Oh, oh,” she said, and closed the door. “You good fuck, Jack,” she smiled in her lying whore way.

  While she confessed her sins, I waited, extremely anxious to see the outcome of such an unexpected action.

  A Cadillac station wagon passed and then stopped about fifteen yards ahead of him and she got out. The woman was gentle, the light glinting off her gold incisor and the tiny cross at her throat. He stopped to float a match down the brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on.

  She lay down on the ground and he lay next to her, stroking her breasts until her nipples were erect under her cotton blouse. She was a little high and he messed all over her slip.

  Thus the young ladies there are as much ashamed of being cowards and fools as the men.

  She was wearing white shorts and sneakers and a blue sweatshirt.

  “You know I was sixteen a month ago.”

  He appeared to great advantage behind the white napery and silver platters of the table and displaying his arms with a knife and fork. He went to get a Coke and brought it back to her, but she only sipped at it, then said O God! and bent over to throw up.

  “My period,” she said.

  He gave the fire a hard look and took to handling absently his yellow stumps for teeth.

  She had been to the Copa, to the Royal Roost, to Lewisohn Stadium to hear the Gershwin concert. It would be a great pleasure for me to allow him to meet her there, in a yellow chiffon cocktail dress and spike heels, lost in prostitution, a scene of upstairs where there is a second floor from door to door. I’ll put her virgin flesh into a black linen suit, a single strand of pearls
around her throat. Did she have to go to the Museum of Modern Art? These considerations crossed my mind with a certain rapidity. Did I say that she had honey-colored hair?

  There was one boy who had almost made her—he was never quite still, there was always a tapping foot somewhere. Or the impatient opening and closing of a hand. He didn’t want to know what the pre-med student she was “dating” said when he held her. He thought he would weep.

  Their procession, led by the Hungarian, soon disappeared behind the stock exchange. At three o’clock, he kissed her good night on Yellowstone Boulevard in a thin drizzle. He fought against the thought of her so that he would not have to place her subtle finesse in these streets of vulgar hells, benedictions, and incense. The other three lost their senses immediately, running wildly about the streets with their heads in the air, or suddenly starting off at a furious gallop directly away from the car.

  They were at the amusement park at Lake Hopatcong with two other couples. The first time he touched her breasts he cried in his shame and delight. The third time it was simply that he followed the other two. When they went out into the courtyard again in the evening, the late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything … aromatic breeze.

  The book being opened, the paper of diamonds was first taken out, and there they were! Every one. Yes, it seemed a possible world: the sound of a car radio in the cool nights, collective American memory.

  “Literature is language turning into ambiguity. I grant you it will be unbelievable.”

  These destructive and bittersweet accidents do not happen every day.

  NOTE: This story comprises 177 sentences, 59 of which are taken from 59 separate works by 59 different authors. The remaining 118 sentences are from one of my own earlier stories. Certain sentences have undergone slight changes in punctuation.

  SUBWAY

  She said that she’d got on an uptown local at Canal Street, gone to sleep, and, waking, just fifteen minutes later, found herself in Brooklyn at the end of the line on Ninety-fifth Street, a weird miracle, she said. This is the same girl who got thrown out of Six Happiness on Mott Street a couple of nights earlier for knocking everything off the table and shouting “fuck the Communist bastards!” From Canal to Ninety-fifth Street in fifteen minutes while going the wrong way, dream on, sweetheart, and in the meantime straight, no chaser?