The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  I’ve wondered, more than once, if my friend’s widow, who married her lover soon after her husband’s suicide, accepted—I was about to say knew—her lover’s real name. Of course, she must have, yet consider how strange it must have been for her to gasp and whisper her beloved’s ersatz name during their first fornications, and then to discover that this name, cried out in passion, was one that had been forced upon him by her mad husband. It might then be thought that the early sexual acts between the adulterers were, in effect, acts performed by the wife with a total stranger, sexual gestures of a doubled infidelity. Perhaps my dead friend, in uncanny vengeful prescience, obliterated his partner’s self so that his faithless wife would be unfaithful to his successor as well as to him, despite the presence of that successor’s flesh.

  Reality, or, if you will, that which we constrain ourselves to believe, is, beyond all philosophies, also that which we make of what happened. Unexpected connections do, of course, sometimes make for unexpected forms. For instance, I see that this story is, essentially, about a set of disappearances. I had not intended that to be its burden, although any further attempt to say what I meant to say is out of the question.

  THINGS THAT HAVE STOPPED MOVING

  Since Ben Stern’s death, I’ve come to admit that Clara always brought out the worst in me. This is not to say that her husband’s death caused this admission; nor do I mean to imply that had I never known Clara I would have been, as the nauseating cant has it, a better person who learned to like myself. I suppose I don’t quite know what I mean to say. When I think of the years during which the three of us abraded each other, and of Ben’s melodramatic deathbed farewell, a ghastly seriocomic scene in which I participated with a kind of distant passive elation, I feel compelled to get at, or into, or, most likely, to slink around the banal triangle of desire, lust, and expediency that we constructed, again and again. Simply put, we met, became intimates, and relentlessly poisoned each other. With our eyes wide open, to paraphrase the old song. I never really much liked this essentially spoiled couple, and “spoiled” is the word. Somebody once remarked that “spoiled” means precisely what it says, and that spoiled people cannot be repaired; they rot. And Ben and Clara were decidedly rotten. I was no less rotten, although “flimsy” might be a better word, and one could argue that I brought out the worst in Clara. As for Ben, well, he was absolutely necessary for Clara and me to dance our dance. I was sure, almost from the beginning—a portentous phrase, indeed—that Ben was well aware of Clara’s “playing around,” if you will, with me and with all the other men with whom she regularly had a few laughs, as she liked so robustly, and somehow innocently, to put it. She could act the real American-girl sport, Clara could, a master of the disingenuous: My goodness!, I can hear her saying, just what am I doing in bed with this stranger? There was, to speak in figures, a kind of heuristic script to which the three of us had limited access, so that each of us could add to, delete from, and revise this script in the preposterous belief that the others would act according to these changes. What actually happened, as they say, was that over the years, each one of us was continually subject to the whims, betrayals, neuroses, and general vileness of the other two. We pretended otherwise, which pretense thoroughly subverted any possibility of our living lives that were even slightly authentic. I confess that my hope, really more of a velleity than a hope, now that these thirty-five years are good and dead, is that Clara is good and dead as well. Perhaps she is. That I don’t know, one way or another, is dismally perfect.

  My lust for Clara was awakened and made manifest as an adjunct to a lawful, if rare and surprising coupling with my wife, a sexual diversion that occurred on a Sunday afternoon as counterpoint to Ben and Clara’s own marital intercourse. We had known the Sterns a few months when they asked us to their apartment for Sunday afternoon drinks and lunch. My wife had met, I believe, Ben and Clara once or twice, and made it clear that she disliked them: she said that they looked like magazine photographs, make what you will of that. But I had long since stopped caring about her likes and dislikes and their motivations. I consented to go, but said something, perhaps, about my wife already having made plans—something to explain what I was certain would be her refusal to accompany me. But she said she’d come, to my surprise.

  I was, by that time, wholly aware of Clara’s subtly provocative behavior, but as yet had no nagging desire for her, although I was fascinated by the assertiveness of her body, by her—or its—way of walking and standing and sitting, the way, I suppose, that its femininity situated itself in the world. But she was, after all, married to Ben, who seemed to me then funny, intelligent, and, well, smart and candid. I was very taken with him and found myself somewhat reluctantly, but happily, borrowing his style, for want of a better word.

  An achingly cold Sunday in January: we chatted, gossiped, ate, rather lightly, but drank a good deal. As the afternoon progressed, and the streets took on the cold gray patina of a deep New York winter day moving toward its early palest-rose wash of twilight, we began, blithely, to inject the sexual into our conversation. We told lascivious stories and jokes in blatantly vulgar language, and every other word seemed loaded with the salaciously suggestive. My wife blushed beautifully enough to unexpectedly excite me; to put it plainly, the four of us were aroused, and giddy with desire. Rather abruptly, Ben and Clara rose and walked from the living room/bedroom into the adjacent kitchen, and almost immediately my wife and I heard the rustle of clothes, Clara’s quick gasp, and then the panting and grunting of their copulation. My wife and I were quite helplessly thrown, by the situation, at each other, and, fully dressed and somewhat deliriously, we fucked on the edge of the couch, recklessly driven by the sounds from the kitchen.

  Soon there was silence from that room, followed by whispering and quiet laughter. My wife called out, in a silly, girlish voice, for Ben and Clara not to come in, while we cleaned ourselves and adjusted our clothing. And then we four were reunited, so to say, for another drink. We grinned foolish and oddly superior grins, as if nobody on the sad face of the sad earth had ever been so crazily free and adventurous, as if we had just performed acts foreign to grade-school teachers, waitresses, and salesmen, foreign to our parents and rigorously bourgeois queers. As if sex was only ours to deploy and control.

  When we had settled down with drinks and cigarettes in a thin aroma of whiskey and flesh, I looked up, by chance, to see Clara looking at me in such a way as to make clear that she had expected my look. What was happening? How can I get at this? Just fifteen minutes earlier, on my knees, between my wife’s spread thighs, I had known, amorphously and with a kind of dread, that I really wanted to be fucking Clara, I wanted her perched on the edge of the couch, her legs wide apart, her eyes glassy. This sudden crack of lust had come from nowhere, had no gestation, was not the trite fantasy of a passion I’d long nursed for Clara. But her look told me that she knew what I’d thought, that she’d seen into my desire, and, as importantly, that she’d felt the same way in the kitchen with Ben. I was, at that moment, amazingly, stupidly besotted.

  Less than a month later, at a party, I danced Clara into a bedroom, and pushed myself into her to come instantly, in helpless fury. Clara laughed and said that she knew it, or that it had to be that way, or something like that; but not in a manner designed to make me feel inadequate, but so as to make me believe—and I believed, oh yes—that this first carnal encounter with her had to be exactly this sort of encounter, and that it was right. My instantaneous ejaculation had been made into a venereal triumph! When we emerged into the lights of the party, our clothes were disarranged, but everyone seemed too drunk to notice or care, except, perhaps, for Ben. Or so I now think. I now think, too, that the quiet laughter from that kitchen, the whispering, was a revelation—one that I did not countenance—of the Sterns’ knowledge that I was but a step away from a dementia of lust for Clara: that I was to be their perfect fool. I grant you that this suspicion may appear too fine-tuned, too sensitive, too baseless. An
d still, whether it was planned or not, a game or not, something happened that afternoon that drew Clara and me together into a flawed affair that virtually defined the rest of my life.

  I must add a coda to the story of that Sunday. In a cab on the way home, my wife, smelling womanly and ruttish, stroked me, and then, when we kissed, gently pushed her tongue into my mouth with a voluptuousness that had for a long time been absent from our marriage. And when we got into our apartment, she urged me to the floor as she pulled up her skirt and we made love profoundly, in that serious way known only to the married. Lying, exhausted, next to my sweaty and dozing wife, I thought that this sudden sexual magic would, perhaps, protect me from what lay in wait for me with Clara. I should say that I hoped it would protect me. But I knew that this behavior had been but an aberration. My wife could have driven me into a reeling delirium of lewdness and abandon, yet nothing would have been able to halt the corrosive idiocy that was about to seize me.

  I met Ben and Clara about six months before my wife and I separated. We kept putting off steps toward a separation, mostly because of inertia or sloth or cowardice. We lived what I might call a reasonable if delicately adjusted life, but we both knew that the inevitable would soon occur. Once in a while we made love, but this was only to prove to ourselves that we were able to arouse each other, that we were, in effect, still attractive, I suppose. My penis, in such instances, was no more than a kind of mechanical toy that doggedly performed its manly task. We rarely quarreled, for we were rarely together. What my wife did during the long hours, sometimes the long days that we spent apart was of no concern to me. Nor, I knew, were my comings and goings of interest to her. None of this, I assure you, has anything to do with Ben and Clara, but it’s the rare spouse who doesn’t like to talk about dead or dying marriages, and to turn them, heartlessly, into the grimmest of jokes. The jokes are surely more lethal when children are involved, and when the hatred-infused couple pretends to the world and, of course, to themselves, that they’d rather suffer screaming agonies than forgo custody of or visitation rights with their children. They mean this at the time, through the tears and threats and shouted insults, and it takes a year, or perhaps two, before the adored children bore and irritate them, before they begin to conjure excuses for not seeing them over the weekend, or, conversely, to invent stories whereby the children may be got rid of for a day or two so as to accommodate a new lover—always a really wonderful person. This sickening desire to be thought of as busily independent marvel, noble and self-sacrificing parent, and righteously angry ex-spouse seems very American. What both parties usually really want is adolescent freedom and plenty of money to indulge its inanities: that’s the glittering dream. As for the children, it’s been my observation that Americans despise children, despite the ceaseless sentimental propaganda to the contrary.

  In any event, I hadn’t known Ben and Clara more than a few weeks—perhaps it was but a few days—when Ben decided to enter into a kind of emotional collaboration with me, an odd partnership, formed in alliance against Clara. I didn’t truly realize this until some few weeks later, and by then, Clara and I had already been adulterous, and I had no interest in who was doing what to whom for whatever reason. So long as I could see a future of sex with Clara, Ben’s motives were of no importance. I think that I had some notion that she’d ultimately become a wife to both of us, but that Ben, and only Ben, would have to suffer the usual domestic antagonisms. I would possess, unbeknownst to him, the spectacular whore.

  Ben and I were sitting in their kitchen, and Clara was out. Ben seemed to me intent on making me believe that he was wholly unconcerned with her whereabouts, although he may well have been enraged and humiliated because of his knowledge of her wantonness. He may have considered that apathy and boredom would play better with me, the stranger on whom he had designs. I don’t know. He was playing what even I could see—and I couldn’t see much—was a weak hand. And yet, now, when I reflect on our wounded lives, I see that I have made the recorder’s mistake of deciding that this was but an act on Ben’s part, because I had, then, decided it was an act. But all memories, as even cats and dogs know, are suspect. As if it mattered.

  We had got about halfway through a quart of cheap Spanish brandy, when Ben decided to make me, as I’ve suggested, a partner in his marital combat. I’m pretty sure I went along with this pathology, because, as I recall, I thought that any revelation about Clara would allow me to get closer to her, to become—it is absurd to say so—indispensable to her. I wanted a glimpse, that is, of her wonderful weakness, her amoral shabbiness. I would have been anything, or played at being anything, to stay in—the phrase is wildly comic—the bosom of the family. That Ben and Clara were, in some absolute married way, as one in their warped lives, was a truth that I would not countenance for a long time. Well, for years.

  Ben had got quite drunk, and had pressed on me a book of Robert Lowell’s poems, but I had no clear sense of what he wanted me to do about it or with it. I put the book on the table, I took a drink, I picked the book up and leafed through it. Christ only knows what sort of raptly attentive face I had put on, but Ben suddenly remarked that Clara had given him the book last Christmas, because she knew how much he liked Lowell. I nodded and gravely riffled the pages, assuming what I hoped would pass as a pose of deferential admiration for Ben’s superb taste. And Clara’s! Ben’s and Clara’s! Ben repeated his line about this being a Christmas present from Clara, and at that moment, I looked, as I instantly realized I was meant to look, at Clara’s inscription. It read: Xmas 1960 to Ben. That the message was but a flat statement of fact was comically clear: this book had been given to Ben by someone on a date specified. Other than that, all was wholly suppressed. I looked up and Ben was smiling sadly at me, oh, we were partners, we were pals incorporated, but I was not yet wholly aware of my position as Clara’s future enemy, only as Ben’s confidant. I’m ashamed to say that I believe I felt sorry for him, the put-upon recipient of such cold apathy.

  Not three weeks later, I fucked Clara, almost accidentally, or so I believed, standing up in that same kitchen, while Ben was out getting beer. She had her period, but I didn’t care, nor did she. Later, I sat in miserable stickiness as I drank one of the beers that Ben had brought back. The kitchen smelled of sex and blood, and my pants were flagrantly stained at the fly. I realized, yet without any shame, what a brutta figura I must have made. That Ben did his best not to notice made it clear that I had somehow been played for a fool. For a chump, really. Since I was quite obviously crazy, it didn’t matter to me.

  Clara had been promiscuous long before I knew her, and from what I gathered over time, promiscuous long before she married Ben. She was recklessly sexual, with a vast anxious dedication to erotic adventure, although the word surely glamorizes her activities. She pursued these affairs with the sedulous dedication of a collector of anything, with, that is, the dedication of a kind of maniac. That such sexual avocation is solemnly described as “joyless” or “empty” doesn’t fit in Clara’s case: she was wholly and matter-of-factly pleased with her churning libido, and the prospect of picking up some happily dazed copying-machine salesman in the desolate lobby of a local movie theater and then silently and efficiently blowing him in his parked car delighted her.

  Ben knew, before their marriage, all about her penchant for what she may well have thought of as the free life, and was much too hip and blasé to think that he could change her ways. Such a belief was, to Ben, just so much middle-class bullshit Christian baloney. But he did believe something that was much more absurd than faith in love as rescuer of the emotionally damaged, morally skewed spouse of song and story. To put it as simply as possible, he believed that Clara’s marriage to him would effect a change in her behavior. He would do nothing, or so I carefully reconstructed his thinking; there would be neither admonition nor recrimination, neither scorn nor anger, neither sorrowful displays nor contemptuous remarks. There would be nothing save an unspoken pity for this poor slut. Clara, annexe
d to Ben’s relaxed, nonjudgmental, affectless, and cynical life, would, so he thought, abruptly stop her frantic couplings in hallway and bathroom and rooftop and automobile, in park and doorway and elevator and cellar and toilet stall, her clothes on or off or half-off or undone. Her sex life would seem, when held against Ben’s sangfroid, utterly and irredeemably square, the provincial doings of a suburban Jezebel in sweaty congress with her balding neighbor. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Clara’s honeymoon and marriage was but a brief interlude in her marriage to herself, to her own endlessly interesting desires.