The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  The facts, as I have called them, or what I then thought to be the facts, and the subtle variations of this betrayal, were made available to me over a period of perhaps a month and a half by my indefatigable guide to—to what? Cleanliness, let’s say, an ethical, even moral cleanliness. “Look at this evidence,” he might as well have said, “look at these dispiriting, tawdry documents. Soon all will be revealed! And afterward, you’ll rid yourself of this false friend, and be clean!” He said, of course, nothing like this, but I’m afraid that I said something very like it to myself. With each piece of evidence, of proof, that my altruistic “assistant” brought me, I became more deliciously righteous, more insulted, more put upon and victimized. It’s now obvious that my need, my desire, perhaps, to be an object of perverse and malicious acts was the base reason for my hunger for more and more documentation of my friend’s cruel schemes. There was, if truth be told (I use the phrase in full awareness of its pitiful irony), plenty of damning material, early on, for me to accuse and then judge my friend, but I began to enjoy the accumulation of his misdeeds, the sweet pang of the badly used, the moral eroticism of a vast self-pity.

  I at last decided that I had enough information (I have no recollection of how I came to this conclusion), and I’d already poked and rubbed at my ego’s scratch until it was red and swollen. It so turned out that at about the same time that I’d decided to confront my friend, my false, treacherous, vile friend!, he and his wife had just separated. That is, his wife had left him for a man whom she, and, to a lesser extent, her husband, had known in college, I believe. These events occurred some forty years ago, so my memory is not wholly to be trusted. This man had re-entered their lives so as to “learn how to live,” or so I understand him to have phrased it. Learn how to live! There’s nothing to say to that. He had apparently known of the couple’s marriage, its stability, love, mutual kindness, its happy child—its composure, I suppose, will cover it nicely. And so he sidled into their lives, as old peripheral acquaintances will do, as an unhappy, even miserable supplicant. Yes, he wanted them to teach him “how to live.” Nice work, as the old song says, if you can get it. I know that all of this sounds absurd, much too good to be true, as they say, too maudlin, too Hollywood, if it is not affected to say so. I heard this story, with its tellers’ predictable variations, over the years, not that any of it mattered to me. It hadn’t mattered to me when it first happened, when the loving couple decided to help the sad old pal. That my friend was soon cuckolded by this wheedling incubus and then deserted by his true-blue wife, who would later make his visitation rights anent the child a grinding humiliation, so I understand, was fine by me, fine. Just when he came to me for succor, I suppose I might call it, I was all ready with my dossier. I seem to recall, in fact, that I was somewhat annoyed that his wife was unfaithful to him with only this one man. On the other hand, he was a perfectly shameful choice. So that was fine.

  It was painful to me for a long time to think of my friend’s specific reaction to my charges, and so I slowly forgot what it was like. It’s simply gone from my mind, lying in fragments among all the other repressed and doubly repressed and wholly distorted junk of my life. The schism affected me, I’ve come to admit, in the most thorough way, setting me on a course which has demanded (if that’s not too strong a word) that I have neither wife nor children, that I be a neglectful son, a distant, sullen, cold man with no friends worthy of the name, without even the ephemeral human connections that pass for friendships here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve lived alone for some twenty years. It’s the ideally blank place for me, with its grinning populace and its idiot sense of privilege, its lush flowers, dead grass, and year-round air pollution—the worst of which is happily called “save the air days”—and its “communities” with no sidewalks or visible populations. And then there are the millions and millions of cars, blessed cars that allow us all to avoid each other completely as we go and return, go and return, over and over. It is my country, indeed.

  I don’t recall precisely when I discovered that the proofs of my friend’s betrayal were, in essence, distortions, manufactures, subtle as well as crude lies. This is not to say that my “informant” was a genius of deception. Sadly enough, although sadly is hardly the word—perhaps monstrously is more to the point—the shoddiness of the materials were virtually apparent to me all the time I was collecting them. So that I was not surprised to be brought face to face with the irrefutable fact of their falsity. It’s the cheapest psychology to say that it is obvious that I wanted to hurt my friend and to smash our friendship, but that I did so with such devious ruthlessness astounds me even now. I find it, perhaps oddly, somewhat admirable.

  I have not, as I think I’ve implied, attempted to “patch things up” with my friend. What would be the point? And what would I say? “I was wrong, and I was always wrong, and I knew that I was wrong. However!” And then there is the fact that I was exasperated, furious, even, with my friend, when I had incontrovertible proof that all my allegations against him were false. He seemed to me, then, as he still does, I’m afraid, so weak, so pitiful, so inconsequential, unable to have committed the sins I’d accused him of. Good Christ! He’d had no courage at all, he’d done nothing, not one thing that I’d—I don’t know how to say this—that I’d wanted him to have done, perhaps. How could I ask him to forgive me, when I couldn’t forgive his intolerable innocence, his insufferable friendship? He was much, oh much less than the perfidious monster I’d longed for him to be. It was too much to ask of me that I invite him into my life, such as it is, again; or that I ask to enter his. It is too much, for that matter, to ask anything of me.

  Recently, I have come to see that I had been waiting, all those many years ago, waiting for I really don’t know how long, for an invisible door I’d yearned to discover, to open, so that I could walk through it and away from life, for good and all.

  The Diary

  A man I once knew somewhat casually married a woman because she reminded him of another woman he had earlier wanted to, had, in fact, planned to marry, but did not, for reasons that, as he once remarked, “are best forgotten.” He loved the woman he ultimately married, but after a few years, this was no longer the case. Forgive me for the triteness of this situation, which is as “common,” as my mother used to say, “as dirt,” although she was usually speaking of people of whom she disapproved, and they were, believe me, many. For the sake of candor, I should mention that my mother disapproved of the man I once knew and his wife, and I don’t doubt that she would have disapproved of the woman he did not marry, as well. I may have been influenced in my own opinions of these people because of this. Or perhaps not. It is very hard for a man to think straight about his mother, which may be why so much psychoanalysis never quite works. With honesty and candor and as much accuracy as he can command from his neurotic mind, the analysand reveals all; but that all is, of needs, attenuated, twisted, and fictionalized. If and when the analyst finally peels away the sincere and intricately fabricated layers to get to what he and his patient agree is the truth, they’ve usually found, as Oscar Levant famously said of Hollywood, “the real tinsel underneath.” But this is frivolous digression.

  My friend and I met one night, ten years or so into his marriage, over drinks in a bar we had regularly patronized at a time when both of us worked for the same publisher, in its unglamorous school department, a claustrophobic section of the house devoted to satisfying the medieval textbook-adoption requirements of, for the most part, the State of Texas. It was there that I learned that Texas more or less fed the entire company, and that we had a vice president whose job was, essentially, to fish and play golf with the members of the textbook-adoptions board. I find it pleasant to recall these things when I read of publishers and editors speaking of their devotion to good letters.

  The bar was off Madison Avenue in the Forties, a neighborhood that has always unaccountably made me feel successful, a harmless delusion. We sat in the back room and ordered marti
nis, then he abruptly told me that his marriage seemed to be, that it really, more or less, might be, probably, well, was, in serious trouble. I didn’t care one way or another, for I had come to realize that my mother’s notion of this man and his insubstantial snob of a wife had become mine, I really don’t know how, and even though my mother had been dead for almost four years. I’ve neglected to mention that my mother once met this couple in a restaurant. They were not at their best, so my mother let me know. It turned out, not surprisingly, that his marriage was “in serious trouble,” because of his adulterous mooning over a young woman in the office of the company he now worked for as something called a “marketing-systems analyst,” a term dismal enough to bewitch an academic. It also came out that he had been driven to this absurd behavior (this was his version of the story; I never heard his wife’s, nor did I want to) because of—what a surprise!—his wife. She, paralyzed with ennui in her job as a legal secretary in a tort mill, after having been equally paralyzed during her brief tenure as what I had been told she called a “gold-plated housewife” (with the implication that she was much too gifted to scrub the toilet), had become a devoted follower of a “psychic enabling” discipline, a combination of Zen, Hinduism, evangelical something or other, and nature in all its glorious something or other. As we began our fourth martinis, I found out, from my sad friend, that the discipline involved some brilliant claptrap that had to do with “energy vortices,” access to which would open devotees the path to self-knowledge or self-realization or self-acceptance, or maybe it was self-love or self-actualization—whatever, it insisted on rapt attention to one’s inimitable Being. It was, no doubt, another polished grift, happily based on the surety that the most petty, vapid, selfish, envious, and useless people can be convinced that they live lives of real importance and consequence, are thinkers of subtly finespun thoughts, and, most importantly, deserve to be happy.

  I was by now, as you might imagine, stupefied by this soap opera of love gone awry, of love locked out in all the cold and rain, as Max Kester’s 1933 lyric remarked, in an aberrant flaring of talent never revealed by Max again, who, clearly, never realized himself. I may have even sung the opening line to my friend, a gin-smeary grin on my face, but probably not; he was one of the troops who pretended never to have heard a popular song, his musical tastes running to what has come to be known as, God help us, “easy jazz.” Or maybe it’s “easy-listening jazz.” I wanted to tell him that he was boring me to fucking death, but in the irritation of my impatience, I told him that he should start keeping a diary, in which he could make up lies about his wife’s behavior, making it all up, making up anything, writing down anything, an-y thing!, that came into his head. Then, after he had thirty or forty pages he could, I suggested, leave the diary where his wife could find it. She’d read it, I told him, because of her suspicions concerning his dalliance with the office siren. Right? Sure! Then, after she’d read his crackpot fantasies, lies, ramblings, maybe, just maybe, in amazed disgust, she’d let him “live life,” as he probably liked to say, with, of course, suitable hambone emphasis. I did not, as I remember, have to spell out that by “living life,” I meant carefree carrying-on with the assistant assistant. My point, as I recall, was that his wife might think him too weird to annoy with the domestic. In effect, he’d lie his way to freedom. He seemed to like this idea, but my memory of the evening is, understandably, hazy. All I clearly remember after my grotesque suggestion is his maudlin description of Ms. Cubicle’s legs as “like a fawn’s.” Oh Jesus.

  About six months later, he unexpectedly called me up to thank me for my advice of that sodden evening, which advice, he wanted me to know, he had taken. I had all but completely forgotten about this boneheaded “plan,” and when he refreshed my memory of it (my hesitant conversation, designed to make him tell me what I’d forgotten, was mistaken by him, as I’d hoped, for unassuming, good-guy modesty), I laughed a quiet, friendly laugh, and waited for him to get off the phone. But he thanked me again, and added that his marriage was better than ever, stronger and more assured, loving, fulfilling, wonderfully this and thrillingly that, and that he, his blossoming wife, and the wonderfully giving young woman from the office were together every weekend, sometimes even more often. For “marvelous interludes” (he said this). These “interludes” were “psychic springboards” to self-realization, which led to humble introspection and knowledge, even if imperfect, of self. I wanted to reach through the phone to strangle him, but I laughed warmly, and eased out of the conversation, but not before he said that he’d call me again, and I said wonderful! The impossible bastard!

  I’ve lost touch with this adventurous soul, thank God, but I can surmise (one of my mother’s favorite words) that my friend’s wife did indeed find the diary where he’d left it—probably on the kitchen sink!—read it to discover intelligence about her young rival, and then recognized herself as surely as if she’d written the pages, found herself in her husband’s improbable, even neurotic descriptions, as incontrovertibly as if he had prepared a factual report for a detective agency. She saw, or so I imagine, in this unreal woman, this phantom, her real self. And she was moved and even flattered by his acute attention to detail, his acumen, his understanding, his analysis of her many failings. Most tellingly, she wept at his magnanimity in forgiving her for the sins she had never committed. She found, that is, in the pages of that bogus notebook, an instance of her husband’s amazing capacity for empathy, sympathy, and compassion; and noted, delightedly, his growth toward a profound self-awareness and self-knowledge. And so they’d fallen in, well, love, more or less, all over again. Common as dirt.

  Bud Powell

  This is a story that was told to me by a man I once worked with as part of a location-and-preparation team at an advertising agency. I repeat it, changing nothing in the way of details, and leaving out what seems to me to be the extraneous, the hyperbolic, and the contradictory. I suppose I might say I’ve made the story my own. It should be kept in mind that these events took place in the late fifties, which suggests, perhaps, that nothing much changes in the goings on between men and women.

  A young man and the young wife of a friend of his found themselves—a nice, neutral phrase, I think—drunkenly dancing in the middle of a crowded, noisy, drunken party on Riverside Drive. This man’s wife and this woman’s husband were also at the party, somewhere in the sweaty clamor of the apartment. The dancers danced, let’s assume, into a dark bedroom, where they instantly gave in to their lusts. Emerging twenty minutes later, they became part of the human furniture of the party again, with no one, as they say, the wiser.

  Save that the woman, for obscure reasons of her own, decided to tell her husband of her adventure with his friend. Why she did this is anybody’s guess; perhaps it is to be classed with the bitter mystery Yeats ascribes to love. Her husband, in a concupiscent, irrational rage, struck her, raped her, and then left the house, weeping and cursing. Three days later, in a studio apartment in Chelsea, wherein lived a restaurant hostess and her high-school teacher boyfriend—the latter an old friend of the husband’s—he drank a quart of vodka and cut his wrists with a penknife, a table knife, and a beer-can opener, which, I just now recall, used to be called a “church key.” Those were the days. He came to in Bellevue’s psychiatric ward; more precisely, on a gurney in a corridor of the ward, his lacerations nicely dressed, and with a savage hangover. He felt like a complete fool, and why not? There can be little more humiliating than a failed suicide. When he was finally interviewed by a staff psychiatrist, who spoke, as if chosen to play the stereotype, little English, and asked how do you feel?, he said that he felt fine. The psychiatrist noted that he was out of touch with reality, and perhaps manic-depressive (the term used in those innocent, benighted days). A few days later, and to the same question, put to him by another psychiatrist, who was kind enough to offer him a cigarette, he answered, in an excess of candor, terrible, and it was noted that he was clinically depressed, and suicidal. Well, he probably was.<
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  They prepared “the papers,” or whatever it is they do, to have him sent to Pilgrim State, got in touch with his wife (again, I assume), and put him into a locked ward, where he realized, after a day, that his silent ward mate, in the next bed, was Bud Powell. Bud Powell! Is it possible, he may have thought, that this is the Bud Powell? The great Bud Powell? He looked like Bud, although he was emaciated, and his eyes were clouded over and filled with bitter sadness.

  The next day, after they’d been given their medication, he asked him, he almost shouted in his nervousness, his question: “Are you Bud Powell? The jazz, the piano, jazz piano?” And Bud said: “I used to be, but I don’t think I am anymore. They don’t have a piano, you dig?” That’s all he said, and the next day he was transferred or released.

  The husband, a week or so later, was committed, after a hearing at which his wife testified, if that’s the correct word, and then signed him over to Pilgrim State. He spent a period of almost eleven months there, and was then released, no longer a danger to himself or others, as the phrase goes. He returned to his wife, who pretended that nothing had happened between the eve of the party and the present, and that he was a new acquaintance of limited intelligence. She had a lover now, not, of course, the friend who’d been with her in the dark bedroom, but one of her husband’s ex-co-workers, a rather pale, somehow flimsy-looking man, with a curious and feverishly enraged interest in the Hungarian uprising and its subsequent suppression by Soviet armor: this is apparently all that anybody had ever really noticed about him. He would soon take over his father’s extremely successful and lucrative bathroom-furnishings business, but at the time, he was working as a reinsurance clerk at the Fidelity and Casualty Insurance Company on Maiden Lane. Fidelity and casualty! That’s very neat.