The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  I assumed, or pretended to assume, in my decrepit role in the marriage, that the reason I became aroused when my wife was openly desired by other men, and why my masturbatory daydreams were only of her—as somebody else, perhaps, but always of her—and why I was swiftly carried into erotic dementia when she played her roles, especially those that required her to be someone else pretending to be her—once she was a young man, once my mother, once her mother—was because for some time my wife had, for me, little to do with the woman I married. She was, day after day, for many months, a sort of descendant of the scab-faced woman, the innocent yet somehow disturbingly soiled girl I had wed, the lusciously disfigured victim who had, recklessly and suddenly, asserted her lascivious self to suck me off in the cab that took us from the drunken chaos of our reception to that first grim, brown apartment. As her shining blond head moved ravenously between my thighs in the panels of light that slid, dreamlike, through the dark cab, I heard the slight whispering sound that her scab made as it scraped against my disheveled shirt. When I ejaculated, I had a momentary vision of my semen oozing thickly from the bright fragile surface of her face.

  I may be elaborating this scene. I don’t truly recall a “whispering sound,” and suspect that the word “shirt” has called this fevered description up, for after I came, my wife spat a mouthful of semen into the shirttails that she’d pulled from my trousers for that purpose. At that very point, while we were in the cab, and certainly before we had begun our married life, my wife seemed not to be precisely the woman I had just married. I was stunned and delighted by her sexual savoir faire, her carnal flourish, I suppose such daring can be called. I can still see, with unsettling clarity, her sly childish face as she looked up from my lap, her slick, wet mouth, her eyes cloudy with lewdness, her visage at once hers and somebody else’s. I put my hand, tenderly, on her wondrous mask, and she looked directly into my eyes and shook her head, no. As I now understand things, which is not to say that I understand anything, a different woman looked up at me, and it was she who shook her head: no. So that after the affirmation of her surprising act of fellatio, there was a puzzling negation. And in this way our marriage began.

  Which takes me, at last, to the night I wish to speak of, but before I place myself, as a young man, in that dark hallway leading to our terrible apartment, I should correct an earlier misstatement. During our marriage, I did not involve myself with other women, and I have no reason to believe that my wife had to do with other men. She had many opportunities, that is to say, I gave her many opportunities, but I don’t believe that she took advantage of them, if advantage is not too frivolous a word. I used to believe that she had fucked, everywhere and anywhere, all the men that she met, but now it seems to me that those who suggested these spectacular infidelities to me were simply adding their small donation to the general squalor.

  I walked out of a bitter-cold night of wind and snow flurries, the exhausted linoleum of the corridor popping and crackling as I trod upon its crazed and faded roses. From behind the door I heard jazz, elbowing its way through the grit and scratches of an old record. I thought it likely that my wife was alone, for she often listened to jazz while preparing supper, and yet there was no reason for me to assume that, for she often played records while guests were in the apartment. Perhaps, since we were so rarely alone, I blinded myself with optimism: I was still guileless enough then to wish for simple things, to wish for miraculous change. Or for that matter, any change at all. I opened the door to see Charlie Poor on our bed, his back against the headboard, a glass of whiskey and water in one hand and a cigarette in the other. My wife stood next to the bed in an old sweater, a pair of boy’s shorts that were much too small for her, and dirty white sneakers. She was gesturing with her cigarette. Everything was calm and still, transfixed peacefully within the perfections of Thelonious Monk.

  Now that I have begun the narrative that with any luck at all will lead me, rapidly and cleanly, to its conclusion, I apologize for the fact that I must interrupt one last time to say that this is the point at which, in all my previous attempts to tell this story, I’ve stopped. At this point, approach this scene however, this moment during which I hesitate at the open door, grateful for the soft light and the warmth, I have been unable to continue. There is, perhaps, nothing, really, to tell, and yet that nothing demands release. I have lied in many ways, lied so as to prevent the truth from escaping, even partially, fragmented and deformed, from the duplicitous narrative in which I have hitherto encased it. For instance, Charlie Poor was certainly drinking my whiskey, and my wife, although I would prefer to clothe her in a loose, full skirt, was certainly wearing boy’s shorts that were so provocatively tight that her mons veneris was perfectly defined. “Blue Monk” was on the phonograph, yes. But Charlie Poor was not stretched out on the bed—it has always been, in the past, his place on the bed that has made the narrative waver and then stagger to a dead end. This time, I hope, the truth may, by itself, be competent to tell the story, to make its incoherence somewhat lucid, perhaps even to make its incoherence somewhat coherent.

  Charlie Poor was a man made out of cardboard, surely not what, even then, I would call a friend, but then again he was not much flimsier than anyone else we knew. There was an almost grandiosely specious quality about his casual facade because of the tense and worried personality that it barely concealed. He had been, quite recently, one of my employers, the part-owner of a small specialty-jobs printing shop for which I’d worked as a general office assistant for about six months. Charlie, when he discovered that I was a published writer, so to speak, so to speak, very much wanted to be my friendly boss, my colleague, my buddy. He had some idea, not that it was, or is rare, that I had some special knowledge of and entrée to the literary world, to magazines and editors and agents, to fashion and glamour. It’s too good to be true, but Charlie wrote poetry, oh yes. That my wife had taken to writing poetry is, perhaps, even more remarkable, another indication, as if one were needed, to prove that life insists on the wearisome banal. Charlie slowly became peripheral to my life, to our lives, and I’m fairly certain that within a month of my going to work for him at Midtown Artistic Print he had been to at least one weekend party at our apartment.

  Charlie fired me after six months or so. Of course, he didn’t want to fire me, not my colleague and friend, Charlie. He was devastatingly, ruinously compassionate, almost parodically concerned with the dignity of existence and the wonders of nature, perpetually simmering with anger over injustices done to all sentient beings—he often used these phrases verbatim. Charlie did not want to fire me, no, it was his older partner, who, like, wore suits, man, and, like, ties, and who didn’t know what was happening, who really fired me. But of course Charlie had to do the dirty work. I am probably imagining that he wore a hurt look as he told me the bad news, how sad he was, how somber. He said that he hoped there would be no hard feelings, no reason for us to stop seeing each other socially. Of course not, dear Charlie! What understanding scum we were.

  I don’t recall how Charlie insinuated himself into our lives after that, but he certainly did. It may have been the result of my craven response to his crude act, that is, Charlie responded to what he correctly took to be weakness. With the passage of time, however, I have come to realize that I was possessed of the same bogus emotions and shredded ethics as Charlie, and that I could just as easily, had our roles been reversed, have fired Charlie, my face dark with fake anger and embarrassment, crocodile tears standing nobly in my eyes, the stone-cold world too much for my sensitive spirit. Charlie knew this, I think. I’m pretty sure that Charlie knew this. It was a question of, well, the breaks.

  I closed the door and my wife turned toward me, smiling, welcoming me, cordially and politely, into my own house, into the circumstances of my own life. I was greeted, that is, as a friend who had dropped by to say hello to my wife and to me, treated as, for example, Charlie Poor. The apartment was dimly lit by night-table lamps on either side of the bed, and by a larger
lamp that sat in the center of a small maple-veneer table flanked by two battered armchairs. Everything was, or should have been, instantly visible as I closed the door and blew on my cold hands. My wife turned toward me, smiling. She was smoking a cigarette and drinking whiskey and water, her skintight shorts wedged into her crotch. “Blue Monk.” The bed was empty and perfectly made, tight and without a wrinkle. She turned to me, she put her drink down, or picked it up, she mimed a kiss, she gestured familiarly with her cigarette toward me, toward this old friend come to tell her thrilling stories of the fabled world. Tell me! her gesture said, sit down, dear old friend, and tell me!

  For a long time this scene persisted in my memory, until I forced myself to face the fact that it was but fabrication. My wife with a cigarette, my wife in the soft light, my wife chatting with somebody, with Charlie Poor, relaxed on the bed, my wife turning toward me, smiling, relieved to see me home, safe from the bitter night, home again, home at last: this was all gauze.

  When I opened the door, she was at the kitchen sink, washing salad greens, from which task she looked up to greet me. She smiled over her shoulder, she said something, probably, hi or hello or cold? I might add here that before her accident, my wife disliked salad, had always disliked it, so she told me, but that afterward, she ate it daily, sometimes twice a day, she, as they say, couldn’t get enough of it. I’d completely forgotten about this, and it is only the representation of her at the sink, washing greens, that has brought it to mind. So it would seem that my wife’s accident, her ecstatically disfigured face, will insist on intruding, despite my best intentions. Apparently there is no way for me to consider our marriage without admitting how powerfully our lives were affected by her damaged reality, her damaged self. As I have said, too often, I fear, I was morbidly attracted by her scab, and found ways to—use it. I would, for instance, watch my wife dressing, and compare the textures and colors of her smashed face to those of her underclothes and stockings, her skirts and blouses and dresses, her shoes. Gazing wanly, she would watch me watching her in the mirror. Her face would there appear even more strangely hurt, since her wound would be, of needs, on the wrong side. Looking at her reflection, I would feel faint, off-balance, urgently lustful. If, on our wedding night, it had seemed insane for me to imagine that my sweet bride had been substituted for by a sexually sophisticated changeling, who had arrived beneath the veil of a timely injury, this changeling, hooking her brassiere or putting in her earrings, had been, in turn, replaced by the woman in the mirror. I would beg this woman to touch me, satisfy me, while I stared at the reflected pornography of my delusion. I would not believe, should she accede to my desires, that I was not being seduced by a stranger, or by one or another stranger, someone I had met anywhere, at, for instance, our wedding. After my exquisitely shameful ejaculation, I would lie or stand, trembling, next to her, silent within her silence. I think that we were afraid to speak and so, perhaps, define the luxury of disgust we both loved. It was what we really loved.

  I walked to my wife and put my hands on her waist, then bent and kissed the back of her neck, smelled her damp, clean hair. I touched my tongue to her flesh and she squirmed, turning her head voluptuously one way and then another, as if in sexual pleasure, but her movements were, and so I understood them to be, theatrical and exaggerated. She opened her thighs slightly and pushed her buttocks against my groin in an ironic, bawdy gesture of invitation. In a gesture equally cynical, I roughly cupped her breasts in my hands and ground my crotch against her, laughing until she, too, laughed, and then we bucked and jerked in a grotesque masque of licentious abandon. My smile must have been that of a corpse, the flesh of her young breasts was dead in my hands, our hearts were frozen. I stepped back from her to end the maniacal scene, then turned to face the phonograph so as to have a pretext to release her breasts.

  In the armchair at the far side of the small table, close to the meticulously made bed, there, smiling, I sat, looking directly into my eyes. I felt as if some terrible, clammy liquid, cold and thick, was traveling up my spine, thence spreading into my chest and heart, which, surely, stopped beating. I sat, looking at me standing looking at me sitting. All occurred on a timeless plane, or, perhaps, an atemporal plane, one on which time had never existed and had no possibility of existing. The event hung suspended, removed from the diachronic, yet with no synchronic relation to anything else existent. It was as if death had abruptly usurped life’s province, everything around my replica and me continued, but we had stopped, we had slid off the edge of the real. The feeling that overwhelmed me, if I may analogize this uncanny rent in the mundane, was much like the one I remember when, at twelve, I first saw a pornographic picture. It was at lunchtime, down the street from the schoolyard, and the picture, a photograph of two women and a man in sexual congress for which I had neither language nor image, made me dizzy, then nauseated, and then, although my skin was filmed over with cold oily sweat, it scorched my heart: I had become ill, sick with sex, the dreamy corruption of its lustful actuality had beckoned to include me. The creased photograph opened to me the insane adult world: beyond dances, popular songs, dates, marriages, beyond friendships and handholding and parents, school and books, movies and relatives. I saw directly into the sexual cauldron, into its neurosis and pain and obsession, its bestiality, its hairy, sweaty stench, its delirium and darkness and joy. I felt as if raised off the concrete, and then I fainted, although I stood firmly on my feet, my eyes open, fixed on the static record of that trio of happy animals which had been pushed into my hands. I looked at their white, flawed bodies, their entranced smiles, their glazed eyes looking into the secret places of selfish pleasure: I could almost hear them grunting and snuffling in their rapturous absence. Adults, these were adults. That their joy frightened and sickened me did not prevent me from recognizing their banality: they could have been, they were, anybody. The few articles of clothing that they had not removed testified to their pathetic humanity. They were vulnerable, ordinary, common, I knew all three of them, they were the neighbors.

  The figure in the armchair, the I, was dressed in my overcoat, scarf, and tweed cap, and had on an old pair of my horn-rimmed glasses. He sat unmoving, expressionless, his eyes on my face, which, even now, I cannot imagine. His legs were crossed the way I cross my legs, his cigarette held as I hold mine. He was Charlie Poor, and although I must have realized this almost instantly, as I stood in shock at the apparition, I knew that this simulacrum had stolen my very self. It was all, of course, meant to be a joke, a tremendous joke cooked up by Charlie and my wife to amuse me after my long day at work. I fell, oh, with perfect aplomb, into the spirit of the charade, even as I knew that the two of them had spent the afternoon in the carefully made bed. This bizarre mime was the confession of their betrayal, a confession designed to be cruel and insulting and contemptuous.

  My wife joined Charlie and me in the laughter we managed to produce: What an astonishing likeness! What a surprise! Look at the angle of the cap it’s marvelous! And the cigarette! How mercilessly casual we were. I have no recollection of my feelings at that moment of joviality, but flatter myself that they were murderous. I suspect, though, that did I experience the violence of pain, I also must have had the sense that I had no right to such feeling, that I was, indeed, the guest in the apartment, and that the authentic I sat in my chair, relaxed, after a blissful day in which this legitimate husband had fucked and fucked again, the woman who was my wife but not, somehow, the woman I had fallen in love with and married.

  What else could these two lovers have done but confess their lustful acts, a confession emblematized in such a way as to reveal to me my unreality, my meaninglessness as both a husband and a man? It was not quite enough for them to cuckold me, it was necessary to occlude me and by their revelation, to make me into a cipher, to turn my betrayer into me. I have often wondered how far they went that day in their masquerade. Did Charlie Poor wear my overcoat and my cap as he mounted my wife? Did she cry my name into his bespectacled blank face
in the same parody of ecstasy with which she equipped the spurious orgasms she fashioned for me, and by which I pretended to be thrilled?

  A long time after, I came to think that Charlie Poor had never quite possessed any actuality prior to that day and its sad events. At the moment at which my wife, for it would have had to be my wife who thought of it, created Charlie as me, when he was ordered to assert himself, so to speak, as me, his always tentative and flickering self slipped away, shed whatever tenuous presence it had. In the quiet of that dim, gray afternoon, he must have absented his precarious self in the sexual act: I believe, that is, that he was able to perform this act only as I, so that I had been with my wife that afternoon, as Charlie Poor. I had entered her familiar flesh, as Charlie first became nothing and then became me. This is too dark for me to understand, or even want to understand, but Charlie Poor was not only the agent of my erasure but of his own as well. By becoming me he obliterated himself and became nobody. I wonder, though, if he had been, for a flash, himself completely, that is, did he have the pleasure of knowing that he was fucking my wife?

  There is little more to be said. My life went on, as did theirs, although after my wife and I separated, I lost touch with both of them. All for the best. I might end, though, by noting that this recording of tangled events has brought to mind an old friend of mine, a suicide dead now for more than thirty years, whose wife, at a particularly difficult time in their marriage, when he was in a mental hospital suffering from the blackest self-destructive depression, began an intense affair with the man who was her husband’s partner in the small business they had started together. This man appeared with my friend’s wife at parties, bars, restaurants, at, in short, all those places that she and her husband frequented. He even went with her, doggedly, to the sanitarium on Sundays. On all these occasions, his role was that of the faithful support for the worried and uncertain wife, the strong and selfless escort and close family confidant. It was, as may well be guessed, extravagantly obvious to everyone that he was hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with his partner’s wife, so much so that he seemed, in her presence, to be little more than yearning incarnate. Unsurprisingly, he attempted, with her halfhearted assistance, to disguise his desire as hearty bonhomie: he was the good pal, so to speak. No one cared, one way or another, and in the curious way of shifting groups of shifting alliances, wives, husbands, lovers, and friends, the man had no identity for anyone beyond that of the business partner of their familiar friend. He was transparent and weightless, insubstantial. He was, additionally, afflicted with two names, that is, he had two different given names and two different surnames, one set of which, for some private, grimly comic reason, had been given him by his partner, had literally been conferred upon him. And it was by this name that he, despite ineffectual protestations, had been introduced, by my friend, socially, and it was by this name that everyone, including my friend’s wife, initially knew him. After her husband had been hospitalized, his partner’s insistent revelation of his true name had little effect: he remained the persona known to all.