The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  I never asked either Ben or Clara how accurate my guess was concerning Ben’s expectations and Clara’s blithe thwarting of those expectations. Not that they would have admitted anything of the sort—I can see Ben’s bemused stare and Clara’s smile. There is, however, the strong probability that it was when Ben came to realize that their union would do nothing to change Clara in the least, that he abandoned the marriage and became his wife’s dutiful if somewhat bored collaborator, and a voyeur who followed her erotic meanderings with a detached interest.

  Ben liked to reveal, in near-comic confidence, snippets of his life with Clara. He did this, or so I believe, in the hope that I would tell Clara what he’d told me, and so irritate her into thinking that he and I had managed some sort of fragile rapport that wholly excluded her. Sometimes I would pass Ben’s confidences on to her, sometimes not; sometimes I’d embroider or condense Ben’s stories, and sometimes invent things that he’d never even hinted at.

  One of the things he told me, at a time when I was sure that he knew of my affair with his wife, was that Clara had always, and without fail, faked her orgasms. He was enormously amused by this, for, or so he said, he was delighted that Clara thought that she was duping him into thinking that he was a perfect lover. But Ben was as duplicitous as he claimed she was, for his gratified and satisfied response to her moans and gasps and soft screams, to her sated smile, was utterly counterfeit. His fake-masculine response to her fake-feminine pleasure filled her with a sense of, in his pleased words, “smug triumph.” At bottom, then, he was unconcerned with her sexual pleasure or the lack of it, and it amazed him—I can almost hear his laughter—that Clara, Clara for Christ’s sake!—held to the notion that he cared whether she came or not, and that, unbelievably, she was disturbed lest he discover her deception. But Ben was interested only in his own orgasm: as far as he was concerned, Clara could have stupendous, wracking orgasms, real or pretend, by the score, lie in bed a mannequin, fall, for Christ’s sake, asleep—all was immaterial to him, so long as he came. What Clara did or did not do was Clara’s affair. That she worked so hard at her conjugal dramatics somehow—how can I put this—touched Ben, so much so that he never even came close to suggesting that he even suspected that she might be faking. “Deluded, pathetic girl,” is what he once called her.

  He most certainly, though, wanted me to tell Clara this story, of course, and he also wanted me to fret over whether Clara was faking with me. But I didn’t tell her, because I realized, despite my attempts to deny and then to rationalize it, that I felt the same way as Ben: I didn’t care, either. I once lightly asked Clara what sort of lover Ben was, and she said that he was more of a masturbator than a lover. I think I might have gone a little red at this, for that was what Ben had once said about Clara, and I wondered to whom Clara had said this about me. Outside of, doubtlessly, Ben.

  The occasions were rare on which I angered and irritated Clara, and when I did, she’d let me know it, as they say, in devious, often astonishingly petty ways, which she never, of course, recognized at all. To describe them is unimportant to the point I want to make, such as it is.

  Sometimes Clara would wear an expression of bored smugness, barely but not noticeably concealed by “good manners.” It was quite a face. It was at such times that I would obliquely suggest—in different ways, using different words and emphases and approaches—that her expression was very much like that of a clutch of well-off and marvelously dim white Protestants she unaccountably admired. This was an expression developed and trained early on, at about the time, in fact, that these people find that the world has been constructed and arranged for their pleasure, but that it is also filled with others who want to partake of that pleasure—which is certainly not their due!—without permission.

  Such a comment would mildly annoy Clara, but she would become angry only when I’d suggest that many of her pals’ mundane pleasures quite wonderfully killed at least some of the bastards off: to wit, alcohol, cocaine, polo, fast cars, horses, skiing, sex, mountain climbing, etc. I would add that although this was surely just, it wasn’t nearly enough to even the score in terms of the grief and misery they caused just by being alive, with their prep schools and sailboats, monopolies and stock-exchange seats, securities and trust funds, private beaches and stables, custom-last shoes and shark lawyers; and, of course, their terror of knowledge, contempt for art, and the polite fucking Jesus that they trot out when needed. Despite the fact that I would run through this routine, with slight variations, at, as one might say, the drop of a top hat, it would always, always get to Clara. She’d sit back in her chair, or lean on the bar, or turn toward me in bed, to treat me to that perfectly constructed face: it was all I could do not to call it cruelly to her attention. But to what purpose? Her anger at my venom—often, but not always, real—toward her beloved idiots was weirdly felt, offered up on what was, figuratively speaking, a tasteful Episcopalian altar. Clara was, for Christ’s sake, Jewish! And still, and still, her vapid, excruciatingly imitative expression was an homage to and defense of that ghastly cadre that, quite naturally, thought of her—when forced to think of her—as a vulgar bitch who would not, no, not ever do.

  The showgirl with whom I lost my virginity when I was sixteen was only two or three years older than I, but she was so overwhelmingly sophisticated, sexually, that I was awed throughout the entirety of the night I spent with her. We did a number of things that I had hitherto known of only as escapades in pornographic stories and pictures—those rare few I had seen. I was so thoroughly made to realize my own naïveté, that years passed before I could even begin to admit to my callowness. Until that time of candid acceptance, I had managed to turn that night into a liaison of sexual equals, although, as I say, it was nothing of the kind. Her influence, if that’s the word, was so profound that I afterward often felt dumbstruck and inept before women with whom I was about to go to bed: that is to say that they would sometimes “become” her, or, more accurately, I would revert to the flustered youth of that night. Such situations, which occurred without warning, usually proved disastrous, as one may well imagine.

  My father had arranged this adventure for me, and such was his presence in my life at the time that I thought this arrangement wholly reasonable, even judicious. I can’t recall how the night was planned, but I’m quite certain that my father did not ask my opinion. He didn’t know if I was a virgin or not, but assumed, given the era and his knowledge of his own life and those of his peers, that I was. He was correct. He clearly believed that it was his paternal duty to introduce me to sex in, as he would surely have put it, “the right way.” And so he arranged for me to spend the night with a showgirl from the Copacabana, in those days a glittering tawdry nightclub near the Plaza, emblematic of flashy, four A.M. New York, whose clientele was predominantly made up of tough men in silk shirts packing wads of cash, little of which had been honestly come by.

  I should make it clear that my father had not asked me my thoughts concerning his plans, not because he held me cheap or thought of me as insignificant, but because, as a Sicilian, he knew that his decision was unerringly correct, beyond cavil, and that this was so because he was, all in all, perfect. Sicilians, as somebody said, cannot be “reformed” or taught anything because they know that they are gods: and it was as a god that my father planned my entrance into manhood. Sicilians are essentially serious people, never moreso than when smiling and chatting pleasantly with strangers, that is, with people who are not part of their lives in any way that matters. The smiles and warm, intimate stories are but devices that serve as charming barriers behind which little can be seen or known. A Sicilian can talk with someone for years and deliver a sum total of information over this time that, considered objectively, comes to a handful of comic anecdotes and a gigantic mass of the most elaborately empty details. And all of these data seemed deeply personal, private, and revelatory. Under the easy conversational brio, the Sicilian has been continuously sizing up his interlocutor, and arranging the stories
and putative intimate details that will be perfect just for him. I have no way to analyze or explain such odd behavior: it is simply the fact. My father, being this way, wanted me to be this way, expected it, really. And so, the loss of my virginity as a prerequisite to becoming a passable man, could not be the result of some dalliance with a “nice girl,” both of us a little drunk after a party. Such frivolity was for The Americans, as my father called those citizens who, whatever else they may have been, were surely not gods. These digressions lead me to another, a kind of exemplar of my father’s way of thinking. When he was an old man, some few months before his death, I heard him tell some men with whom he had struck up a kind of friendship in the hospital while recovering from a triple-bypass operation, that he had been a trapeze flyer in his native Italy but had been forced to flee Mussolini because of his Jewish mother, who had been one of the great equestriennes in the Hungarian circus world. He told this story with such an expression of wistful regret that for a moment I thought it might be true, that he had kept some fantastic secret from me and my mother, that he was actually Jewish! But it had to do with his lack of concern about what he told these hospital acquaintances. They were, in his mind, mere Americans, with no idea of what a man’s life is and should be. He was, that is, amusing himself by seeing how far he could go with these childish men, eager to swallow childish lies in the same way that they swallowed childish games on television. I now believe that what he wanted, at all costs, was to assist me in avoiding such American childishness, and thus help me into his ideal of manhood in what he knew to be the only proper way.

  On the morning of my erotic christening, there was no teasing, no off-color jokes or winks or grins, and there had been none for the preceding week, during which time I had been wholly aware of the arrangement. I can’t remember what my mother had been told concerning my night away from home, but my father had concocted something having to do with the business. I was, as my mother well knew, expected to ultimately join my father’s business as a partner.

  That night, after dinner at Monte’s Venetian Room in Brooklyn, during which my father talked to me about school, and thrilled me by complimenting me on the dark, sober tie that my mother had insisted I wear, one of his cronies drove me to Manhattan in my father’s Fleetwood sedan. He was tall and very dark and disconcertingly still, and we had nothing at all to say to each other. I was intimidated by him, really—his name, not that it matters, was Lou Angelini—by his taciturnity, his air of respect for me as the boss’s son, and his rigorously conservative dress. We arrived at the Hotel Pierre, in those days even quieter and more elegant, more raffinée than it is now. I hardly remember what happened then, but I recall my sense of clumsiness and awkwardness as we walked through the lobby, terribly slowly, because of Lou’s slight limp, the effect of what he called a “war wound.” But we did, finally, get on an elevator, and then, finally, reached a door in the long, muffled corridor.

  Lou knocked quietly, twice, and when the door opened, a pretty girl of nineteen or twenty smiled at us. She had ash blond hair and although her eyes were elaborately made up, her lips were their natural soft pink. Lou looked at her, in her silk robe, up and down, and then left without a word. From that moment on, I was in a detached state of blissful shock, or perhaps happy stupor, as Grace, who later told me that she was half-Italian and half-Polish, showed me, in her words, a few things, more than a few things, that I might like. In the middle of the night we ordered room service and ate ham and eggs and drank cognac-and-ginger-ale highballs. There was nothing romantic or spongy about Grace, and yet she wasn’t cold or bored. She was, in fact, what my mother, the circumstances of course being different, would have called “full of fun.” When, at maybe four in the morning, she and I danced—that is, she taught me steps to the samba—to the soft radio, it was with a grave sense of play. It was intensely erotic and yet, although we were both naked, not bluntly sexual. Everything seemed magical, and I was obviously insane with pleasure. I had lost all sense of shame with this girl and had, too, of course, fallen in love with her. I even asked her if I might, maybe, call her sometime, a request that was met by a big smile whose import was instantly decipherable: it said, You are a boy.

  I remember Grace’s body pretty well, her long waist, small breasts, the dark auburn of her neat pubic hair. She told me that she thought my father was a real sport, and I knew, instantly, that he had often spent the night with her. She would be, to my father, a nice kid, but a whore, and had her womanly role; not, surely, my mother’s role, or the role of the nice unknown girl that my father assumed I would discover and marry, but a valuable role. I always thought to tell Clara that had she been more like the whore that Grace was, rather than the bogus whore that she so contemptuously fabricated, I could have really, well, really loved her. I never said a word, and it has only recently occurred to me that I remained silent because I had no idea of what I truly meant to say, without sounding more like a fool than I had already proven myself to be.

  On a very cold winter Saturday, I got two phone calls, not an hour apart, from Clara and an old sometime acquaintance, Robert. Both calls carried the news that Ben was very near death, that he had, indeed, about ten days to live. Robert was serious and somber, his voice an annoying mix of manufactured sadness and the self-important tone that bad news seems to make, for many people, mandatory. I did not, of course, let on to him that this was not bad news to me. Clara was her usual glacially sardonic self, much too ironically detached to be affected by something so banal as death. As always, I found in her distantly gelid tones the erotic quality that had unfailingly undone me. It had been perhaps six years since I’d heard from either Clara or Ben, and my first reaction to this sudden news was no better than apathetic. As the phrase has it, I didn’t care whether he lived or died.

  Ben, according to Clara, would be very happy to see me, and would I come? There was, Clara told me, plenty of room in the big wooden house that they’d bought on the Hudson, and my presence would make for a sort of reunion, I think she said, an event, which word she used without the hint of a dark smile. Robert also insisted—he told me that he was speaking for the, God help us, “family”—on the wondrous quality that my presence at the deathbed would add. I was tempted to say “to the festivities?” but kept my mouth shut. It had been so long, what a long time, it’s been years, and years, and so long, and on and on. So we chattered, the three of us. It had, really, not been long enough, it would never be long enough. And yet, I agreed to go, knowing what a disgusting carnival it would be. There would be present the shattered rabble from Ben’s past life, along with the fawning students, the grim, scowling artistic platoon from the nearby town, the arts reporter on the local rag, and, surely, the predictably ill-dressed colleagues in the English Department, who were too hip, too distracted by art and ideas to care about clothes, man, but among whom, I was virtually certain, Ben had cut a bohemian, Byronic, urbane figure—the dandy amid the rubes—for almost fifteen years. And, too, there would be Clara, the discreetly bored, aging bitch about whom the panting saps to whom she’d thrown the occasional sexual pourboire of one kind or another, would circle to proffer drinks, sandwiches, lights for her cigarettes, and condolences. They would, each seedy associate professor and second-rate graduate student, smile tenderly and longingly at the strong wife, this astonishing woman who hid her grief with wit and repartee. And each would be happy to believe that this fascinating tramp had taken him, and only him, into bed, car, bathroom, cellar, or backyard. What passion had been theirs! Etcetera. Meanwhile, the smudged and blurry wives and girlfriends lurked on the far side of this erotic Arcadia, being, as always, good sports, anonymous in their calf-length skirts and terrifyingly red lipstick.

  Later that day, I regretted my decision to travel up to that grim third-rate college into whose zombie life Ben had settled. But when all is said and done, whenever that may be, I really did want to see Ben die, or, more precisely, watch him slide toward death out of, so to speak, the corner of my eye. No
ne of his destructive asides or poisonous denigrations could save him, and for this I was thankful. I felt no guilt about any of these thoughts, or, better, desires, for I’d always, as I’ve already mentioned, hated Ben for putting me in the way of Clara, and then for getting in the way of me and Clara. The son of a bitch couldn’t win, as far as I was concerned. Of course, the three of us had conspired in this plan of desire and need and demand and destruction, and it was somehow contingent upon our simmering dislike of each other. I was curious, too, to see if Clara still held him—and me—in the venereal contempt that was the perfect expression of her nature. I had cuckolded Ben for years and years, although “cuckolded” is not the right word, as I think I’ve pointed out. I had, from the beginning, been permitted to discover that there was a good chance that Ben had, early on, found out about our passionate indiscretions. I have no authentic recollection of what I then thought of this, but I can guess that I somehow, in some skewed pathology of gratitude, felt a sense of privilege at being the recipient of this couple’s comradely attentions. I do know that I had come to worship what I took to be our wondrous freedom with an intensity that went beyond the imbecile.

  The next day I got on the train at Grand Central and went up to watch Ben die, and to look into the cold, blank eyes of his wife. She was composed, remote, and sisterly, settled, uncomfortably, it seemed, into her flesh, as if she were finally alive, but not quite sure of life’s demands. On the way home, I thought of how we had laid waste to our sensibilities, with a truly genuine devotion to waste: we grew old amid this waste. We would not stay away from each other until we were sure that it didn’t matter any more whether we did or not.