The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  There’s not much left to say. Clifford’s next two books were like dozens of others, literate if vulgar, “better than” kill-and-fuck trash, and of no account. They were much like the miles of thin, clankingly inadequate independent films that one can spend a lifetime watching blend into one another with an inevitability as depressing as it is foreseeable. Clifford, it must be said, did not “sell out,” for he had, as the old phrase puts it, “nothing that anybody wanted.” He wasn’t bad enough or smart enough to be a successful commercial hack, and he had absolutely none of the luck that would have enabled him to emerge from the slough of writhing literary hacks. Had he, when a poet, followed his Muse, as they say, into the brambles of language that were too formidable for him to contemplate, there is little doubt that he would have written bad poems; and it also seems clear that had he insisted on elaborating on the small eruptions of—art, let’s say, for want of a less generous word—in his first novel, it would have done nothing to ameliorate the zombielike qualities of the whole.

  It’s a guess, one that pleases me, that as Clifford read the proofs of this fourth novel, as he battered his way through its dreary lines of prose, a prose that seemed manufactured by a language contraption with decorative abilities, he was relieved, even pleased. This is the McCoy! I’ll have him say, or something like it, Oh boy! perhaps. Maybe this book would do it. “Scintillating,” even “wise.” And with a pronounced “attention to scenes and their riveting details, not to mention their dialogue, that is almost cinematic.” You never know.

  LIFE AND LETTERS

  Some three or four years ago, Edward Krefitz published a story that, as is the case with many stories, contained elements of his past life, elements, of course, disguised, twisted, corrupted, embellished, romanticized, and wholly fanciful. A few people recognized themselves as models for characters in the story, and were, predictably, chagrined or flattered, depending on the quality of the fiction’s distortion of their being. They all wished, surely, to be accurately portrayed, certainly; but there is accuracy and then there is meanspiritedness. So they muttered.

  Edward wasn’t interested in their scattered responses to his story when and if he got wind of them. However, the one person whom he had used as a model for a major character in the story, the one person he dearly wanted to read the story and be hurt by it, never acknowledged it, even though it had been published in a literary magazine that Edward knew this person deeply, even somewhat ridiculously admired—at least he had, years before. Edward was disappointed, since his fictional creation—vapid, obtuse, childishly cruel—was easily recognizable, and he so wanted him to be recognized by his ex-friend, if “friend” is not too exotic a word to use. Because of this disappointment, which he chafed into a kind of full-blown irritation, he made a mistake; that is, he sent the model a photocopy of the story, insincerely inscribed, and followed this, soon after, with a letter, thereby, quite perfectly, compounding his original error.

  The story, entitled, rather obscurely, “The Birds Are Singing,” was a bitter, if frail, comedy of manners (bad manners, as Edward liked to think of it), driven by the wheezing engine of the “adulterous tale,” one that was neither particularly comic nor particularly sordid. Its hero, if you will, a young husband whose authorial aspirations are at best halfhearted, has a wife, pretty and possessed of a kind of floundering hedonism. She is content to be “his” because of his aspirations and the spidery talents he owns, as well as by the fact that his literary vocation has thrown the couple into contact with other young literary people, jittery, amoral, indifferently talented, if talented at all. These companions are drawn as rapt in a cheap and shabby, vaguely hysterical delusion, and too selfish or stupid to recognize it as such. At the center of this overdone clique of the pathetic, is the major character already mentioned. This man is presented, in the most patronizing as well as nastiest prose that Edward could knock together, as a vapid dilettante; a poet, of sorts, who is hard at work on a novel that will justify the shameful fact that he is the owner of a successful messenger service for which the husband works as a bookkeeper. The boss/novelist is given to the reader as a tedious lout who confuses his sociopolitical right-thinking with artistic talent, and he is stuffed with cretinous dialogue that even Wyndham Lewis might hesitate to put into his most contemptible characters’ mouths. The boss seduces the husband’s wife in an ugly scene that boils with loathing for the pair. The husband is aware of this, but has no clear proof, and so ignores it, much as if his wife’s probable seducer is no more than a living dildo and she a disembodied vagina. He is sure, however, that this amorous clod may one day be able to help him along in his career, or what he thinks of as his career. This was, then, the bones of Edward’s story, one that he came to admire more as it aged, so to speak. The notion that the cuckolded husband finds his betrayer pitifully absurd, and his wife a virtual specter, while he emerges as a genuine if eccentric and as-yet unrealized artist pleased him, even though the story had, he knew, a somewhat manufactured air about it.

  The model for the boss was, of course, the man, Peter, whom Edward wanted to anger and wound. The cause of his dislike went back almost twenty years, when he and most especially his wife, Patricia, insisted on thinking of him and Peter as partners in a small restaurant in what was then, the early seventies, a just newly fashionable SoHo. Peter was, in actuality, Edward’s boss. There had been a falling out between them as the restaurant began to make money, or, as it is said, “real” money. At this point, the friends’ differences quickly surfaced and became unmanageable. Edward felt, on the strength, really, of no more than their joint literary, ah, proclivities, let’s say, that he was being deprived of his bonus: his loft apartment, his summers on the Island, his good clothes, his this, his that. And Patricia! It’s enough to say that she simply blamed Peter for everything, from her spoiled childhood to her sullen years at Hunter and the School of Visual Arts to her haphazard marriage to Edward—Edward, who had been cheated of his rightful partner’s place as entrepreneur and literary force. She hated Peter, even more, perhaps, than she hated Edward some few years later, at the time of their separation and divorce; hated Edward so cleanly and thoroughly for his varied failures, that in her last conversation with him she’d told him, rather sadly, understandingly, and even sweetly, that in their eight years of marriage he had never once made her come. He stood quietly before her news, looking, as an old phrase has it, like death chewing on a cracker.

  After the dissolution of the friendship and “partnership,” Edward began teaching beginning creative-writing courses at coolie wages; writing reviews for Booklist, Library Journal, and the like; freelancing as a copy editor and proofreader; and, in general, living the shaky life of the barely published and virtually unknown author. Patricia worked as an editorial assistant for a small scholastic publisher, and they got by, seeing, if not the same friends they had been seeing, the same kinds of friends. It should be mentioned that, at this time, Patricia was somewhat admiring of Edward for insisting, at her urging, of course, on his rights and perquisites, and so she regularly told him, to his delight. She was convinced that Peter, “that bastard,” was much inferior in business acumen than her husband; and as the author of a wretched little book of poems, Table d’Hote—published by Peter himself as the Chambers Street Press—he had no right to think himself superior to anybody about anything! In sum, she maintained little but an offhand, careless disregard for Peter; who, in turn, vilified her, pointedly or subtly, to people whom he knew that Edward would run into. She was, in his creation, the scattered and selfish Zelda to Edward’s hapless Scott.

  The rub was that although Edward broke off his friendship or relationship or association with Peter in a swirl of hurt feelings and envy, still, oh yes, still, he wondered if he might have been right about Patricia. About her “interference,” her “malicious interference,” as he had put it, in his work and career. That Edward’s work and career were, to be extremely kind, negligible, is neither here nor there: he thought it was w
ork; he thought it a career. Or, to gloss that particular text, it’s the rare mediocre writer who knows how mediocre he is. When Patricia left him, soon after it was apparent to her, or so he figured it, that his dissociating himself from Peter would in no way allow his star ever to grow bright enough to have a chance at dimming, left him with her peroration on his sexual limitations, he thought, he knew that Peter was right and had been right. He was ashamed of himself, he was what an earlier generation called mortified. Why had he listened to his bitch of a wife? Why had she so despised Peter?

  Over the next several years, as Edward established himself as a reliable contributor of short fiction and reviews to a myriad of magazines, he vacillated in his feelings about both Peter and Patricia. He heard many stories of Peter’s financial success, and of his mockery of him and his work, of him and his contemptible third-rate literary niche, of Patricia. And concerning her, concerning her … although Edward’s thoughts of her were tinged with pain and embarrassment, he yet felt, in some unbalanced way, protective of her—even more absurd, he felt loyal to her. And so he began, again, to blame Peter for this and for that and for, well, for everything. It is simple to understand, then, why “The Birds Are Singing” was written, why it was important to Edward that Peter read it, why it was important that he respond to it with, at the very least, irritation. Edward wanted to demonstrate things to Peter, salient among which was that he had, indeed, become a writer, by Christ, and that his writer’s eye had been sharp enough all those many years ago to see Peter for what he had been: he’d not been fooled, for a moment, by him!—who had been crude and grasping and filled with contempt for him and Patricia, whom he’d hurt and somehow embittered. Edward wanted, simply, to get even with Peter. And so strong was his desire, perhaps his need, to knife Peter, to shock him with a view of himself as a vulgar, cheap, mean poseur, that, as already noted, he sent a copy of the story to him, followed, a week or so later, by a letter.

  Dear Peter,

  I hope you got the new story I sent a few days ago. This is all out of the blue, I know, but “the old days” have been on my mind lately. I thought that you, more than anyone, would “see” the story clearly, and recognize the furniture, so to speak. It’s maybe a little dark, and nobody comes off too well, but I think it’s pretty true to the feel of that time, confused as things were. Anyway, drop me a line if the spirit moves you. I often wonder how we came to part so completely, considering how our differences, whatever they were, seem so trivial now. I hear, by the way, that you are doing fine with a specialty catering business, as well as with a new restaurant in Chelsea. I got this from Marge, who also gave me your address. I’m pleased for you, really. Take care, and cheers,

  Fondly,

  Ed

  As suggested, the “gift” of the story to Peter was a mistake, one that was richly compounded by the above letter. And as if to polish these mistakes into perfection, Edward, awash in the lies of nostalgia that his acts had awakened, quite unaccountably and foolishly, began to feel bad about everything that had happened: the story, its grotesque caricature of Peter, its dispatch to him, the letter, and, most tellingly, their shattered friendship, which Edward managed to burnish into much more than it had ever been or ever could have been. This broken relationship he now nimbly contrived to place, such were the powers of corrupted memory, on the shoulders of Patricia. She was, yes she was, yes, yes, she was to blame, the snob, the cynical snob, the bitch. And to think that he had felt that she had cared about him, had thought to protect his interests, Jesus Christ! There had been no reason, had there, for him and Peter to break their easygoing relationship, their, in a way, partnership? They were in accord on ideas, notions of the comic and the absurd, politics, books, on notions of what was good. Hadn’t this been the case? He even thought, fleetingly, to be sure, of calling Patricia, if he could track her down, to ask her, to yell at her, to do something! And so he poked at himself, rereading, two or three times, “The Birds Are Singing” with distaste and regret and a growing sense of shame.

  A month passed, during which time Edward thought of calling Peter every day, to maybe make a date for lunch or a drink? To talk, to mend fences. He might, he could, he would, yes, apologize for the story itself. One day he received a letter from Peter, and opened it with hope and pleasure. Peter, of course, felt the way he did; he, too, wanted to resume their old camaraderie, tempered, surely, changed, but still real. Patricia’s malice would be diluted, it would be banished, at last.

  Dear Ed,

  I was surprised and I guess shocked to get your piece and the follow-up letter after all this time, it’s really been a long time! The piece brought back those days in that little dump in SoHo that we called the cash-eater, remember? I hope that the piece and letter are ways of saying that bygones should be bygones. Maybe things will be O.K. between us again, that would be terrific.

  I’m doing pretty well. Marge is right that I have a little café in Chelsea on 20th Street near 9th, the Arles. And the catering business, Peter’s Specialty Cuisine, maybe Marge told you, is in a loft building on Hudson near Houston on the 4th floor, you can imagine the hassles with the Fire Dept. and the Buildings Dept. and the Board of Health and so on! But everything is fine now, I’m making a living, as they say, married for sixteen years now with a fourteen-year-old daughter. We live in Bronxville.

  Most importantly, Ed, really, I mean really, is how fantastically brave and honest and forgiving you are to have written this piece, which I’ve read three times now. It must have taken a lot of courage, moral courage, as they say, to use yourself as a model for the husband character, Ned, that poor bastard who is so painfully and cruelly and flagrantly betrayed by his wife and friend. Who, if I read right, are Patricia and me, of course. It amazes me, just floors me, to realize, all these years later, that you knew, all along, probably from the beginning, that Patricia and I were lovers and stayed lovers for a year and a half. We were so crazy that we didn’t care whether we hurt you or not, although we were careful not to be obvious about meeting each other, and we were certain that you didn’t know. Patricia’s bad-mouthing me really should have worked, although you obviously saw right through it. What makes me feel worse than the affair is that we ended our friendship for the wrong reason, or maybe I should say over something that wasn’t even real!

  Now, with this marvelous piece, you are letting me know that you knew, you knew all along, and you let it go, maybe for friendship or love, I don’t know. It’s just fantastic. You’re a wonderful writer, as I always thought you were. Please write again, stay in touch!

  Your old partner,

  Peter

  Unlikely as it may seem, when Edward read this letter, he decided that Peter had maliciously and carefully contrived to humiliate him with a confession of an imagined adultery. Peter and Patricia, good God! How ridiculous. Edward felt stupid and clumsy to have thought Peter worthy of his concern. He tore up the letter, and then sat down to read “The Birds Are Singing” once again.

  PERDIDO

  In 1953, or early 1954, Dan Burke was seeing, as they used to say, Claire Walsh, who was pregnant by another man, a lummox known as “Swede” to his lummox friends. Dan had recently been discharged from the Navy, and while he and Claire had been amorous companions during his rare shore leaves, she was far from averse to impromptu sexual adventures with congenial civilians while Dan was at sea. Thus, her dalliance with “Swede,” who was, incidentally, a reinsurance clerk on Maiden Lane: this permitted him to tell the occasional citizen who asked about his job that he was “on Wall Street.” He enters our story as a catalyst.

  Dan didn’t know that Claire was pregnant, but since he and she had never engaged in anything more than what was called—and still may be, for all I know—“heavy petting,” he assumed that she was a virgin. Who knows why? When she told Dan that she was going to have a baby, he was, sequentially, astonished, hurt, disgusted, and angry. Then he asked her to “go down on” him, which she did. He felt, in some clouded, blurred way,
even with “Swede,” whom he did not know at all. Then he asked her to marry him and she consented, with much blubbering, snots, and tears. He didn’t love her, nor she him, and nothing that they did at the outset of their marriage allowed love to establish itself and stagger free of the grim truth of their situation, as love, despite the long odds, may occasionally do. So their marriage began, not utterly bleak, but surely not aglow. It should be said immediately, I believe, that their marriage did not succeed, and was over some eight or nine years later. Not bad, considering.

  Dan began working at a bookstore in the Village, Marboro, to be precise, on Eighth Street, home of the authentic bullfight poster from colorful Méjico! (It gives me pause—what a comfortable phrase—when I recall that the bullfight poster was once virtually epidemic in the apartments of the hip and chosen, and then the latter and the posters suddenly vanished.) One of Dan’s co-workers was a man by the name of James Fremont, a poet who had been published in Zero, Neurotica, and Prairie Schooner, and had a handwritten rejection note from an editor, or somebody, at Poetry, suggesting that he “try us again.” Which he did and did again, never managing to make further human contact, however contemptuous, with the famous magazine. In the meantime, Claire had begun to read this and that and have opinions on this and that as well. The plot, as you may discern, is not truly thickening, but it might be jelling a little. These people seem as if they’re about to “take a step,” probably into disaster.

  The serendipitous conjunction of the well-read, and, in the best tradition of the Village of those days, slightly shaggy, tweedy, and insufferably superior published poet, and the unhappy, directionless Dan and Claire, created the perfect climate for emotional calamities of many sorts and sizes. Dan began to write poetry (“of course!,” I hear you say) under the condescending tutelage of James, and Claire began to go to bed with him on those evenings when she was supposed to be seeing old “girlfriends,” attending suddenly fashionable poetry readings at any number of bohemian traps, or going to see “films” at the New Yorker or Thalia. Dan would stay home in their one-bedroom apartment on Blake Avenue in East New York—at that time, not yet the sister neighborhood of 1945 Stalingrad—and dream his old dream of playing jazz trumpet, another enthusiasm that had hysterically played itself out at the New York School of Music (Sunset Park branch), over a little less than eight months.