The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  At the very moment that my mother died, Clara and I were in bed together in the Hotel Brittany. She and I had met by accident on Vanderbilt Avenue and had gone downtown together in a cab. Clara, in her careless and reckless way, lied to me that she was going to meet an old school friend from Bennington in the Village, and I contributed my own god-awful, transparent lie. We wound up drinking in a bar off Sheridan Square, and I was soon taking liberties, as the creaking phrase has it, with her in a booth. We had, some six months before, decided to break off our affair of three years. We had no concern, of course, with Ben’s feelings, even the ersatz ones we handily ascribed to him, but we were somewhat anxious over the possibility that a full-blown adulterous romance might impinge upon our freedom to have romances with others. We had spent some hours thrashing this out, for we were serious indeed about our prospective lusts.

  The afternoon had turned into a windy, bitter night, and a thin, powder-dry snow lashed the streets with a stinging drizzle. I bought a bottle of Gordon’s and we walked through the harsh weather a few blocks to the Brittany, a faded and somewhat decrepit hotel that still retained a semblance of old glamour in the appointments of its raffish bar and taproom, a locale that featured a weekend cocktail pianist, some gifted hack with a name like Tommy Jazzino or Chip Mellodius. I had always liked the rooms in the Brittany, mostly because of the large closets, a strange thing, I grant you, to care about, since I never once registered at the desk with anything even remotely resembling luggage. The desk clerk nodded and smiled at us as I signed and paid; he probably thought he knew us from the night before, or the week before. God knows, the desperately sex-driven all have the same lost, hopeful look, the same imploring face that seems to whine please don’t disturb me before I come. Such half-mad people are called lovers, a fact usually denied by lovers. This denial is most often rooted in the dreary fact that most people fall, or once fell, into this category, and no doubt think it unique.

  One of the inconsequential things that I remember about our night in that warm room, thinly edged with the smell of cigarette smoke and gin, is the fact that Clara, as she undressed, revealed herself to be wearing an undergarment that looked like a pair of rather fancy culottes: they were a kind of pale raspberry in color, trimmed with black lace. She described them, apologetically, for some reason, as a fucking goddamn slip for idiot girls. I can’t say whether they were effectively arousing or not, but they were remarkable and quite unforgettable. I’ve always wondered whether Clara, of all the women in the world, was the only one to wear this particular item of underclothing; I wonder, too, what Ben thought of her in this extravagant lingerie. I never asked her.

  Clara told me that Ben was currently screwing one of his graduate students, a serious, annoyingly smart young woman from Princeton, who was, according to Clara, well ahead of academic schedule in the dowdiness department, almost in the same nonpareil league as assistant professors. The girl thought—what else?—that Ben was really aware, really brilliant, really wonderful, his blinding light hidden under the conventional academic barrel. And so young, so young to be so aware, so brilliant, so wonderful. She thought, according to Clara, that Ben would one day write an academic novel to surpass Randall Jarrell! And, in this novel, she dreamed that she might figure, barely and flatteringly disguised, as a complex and wonderfully difficult graduate student. I’m more or less painting this particular lily, as may be obvious, although Clara did actually say that Ben was screwing a graduate student. For all I know she might have looked like Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth! It pleases me to be given this glorious woman to use as a term of comparison, for this time has no understanding of her at all. She speaks, her face and body and the timbre of her voice speak to men on their own, as they say, morosely distant from wives and homes, half-drunk in the dim bars of half-empty hotels. She stands in bathroom doorways, in a skirt and brassiere, waiting for a light. She is perfectly and ideally dead, as she should be. What, in this age of speeding trash and moronic facts, would such a beauty even have to do?

  We drank and smoked and Clara cried, not about Ben, certainly, but about her father’s recent death. Then I fucked her and we slept. I woke at about five in the morning, and, touching Clara’s naked body next to mine, I was instantaneously nutty with lust. As I again fucked her groaning self with a dedicated selfishness, my mother called to me. I could hear her voice as clearly as if she stood next to the bed, or in the bathroom doorway, and as I came, she called to me again, from somewhere out of the darkness of the closet, a wistful, flat, soft statement of my name. At that moment I knew that my mother had just died. How strange and perverse a moment it was, my mind on some eerie plane, Clara pushing me off and out of her, in raw annoyance that I had jounced her awake. I made, I believe, some apologies to get off the sexual hook, probably delivered with a stricken look of guilt on my face, one that suggested how wretched I felt for my lack of concern for her. She lit a cigarette, as did I, and I got out of bed to stand at the window, smoking and looking down at the freezing streets, thus completing with exhausted flair, I think, the two-bit melodrama. Clara, of course, bought none of this.

  I thought, although it wasn’t really a thought, that Clara, rather than my mother, should have died, and that I could kill her, right there in the bed. The night clerk would never remember us, and I had registered under my usual fake name, “Bob Wyatt,” a moniker so insipid as to be blank. Kill her to even things up for my sad, uncompleted mother, and then commiserate with Ben and Miss Complit. I could imagine their sensitive literary comments, the lines from Hardy or Yeats, and Ben’s dim smile as I delivered the envoi with a snatch of Dylan Thomas, a poet whom Ben loathed.

  I was sick with guilt, intolerable slug that I was, and waiting for despair to fall on me in its black rain. Good old despair!, that most durable and aberrant and selfish of pleasures. But despair eluded me, or I it, and as the room began to admit pale January light, I went down on Clara until she very happily came. She was more or less sweet after that, and let me give her my bacon at breakfast. We sat at the table a long time, drinking coffee and smoking. I didn’t want to call the hospital and be told about my mother, I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to have to take care of the terrible details of death, the business angle, as Ben had once called it, prick that he was. But mostly, I didn’t want to have to pair my mother’s flesh and Clara’s, but it was already too late to escape that.

  Of course, I write this now, years after these events, as the phrase goes. What I then thought, I don’t recall. We ate, by the way, in an Automat on Broadway, just south of Eighth Street. It’s long gone, along with all the other Automats, along with all the other every-things, but every time I pass the spot where it stood, I can smell Clara. Her subtle sexual odor is uncannily apparent, an odor that she claimed was generated exclusively for me—a preposterous confession that I, sweet Mother of God, believed for a long time. Now I’m righteously permitted, I feel, to think of her as nothing but that sexual odor. As nothing but a cunt.

  The phenomenon of my mother’s death in the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn at the moment at which I was drunkenly fucking Clara, became, some months after the funeral, the source of what I quite irrationally believed would be a revelation of sorts. Of what, I had no idea, but the temporal conjunction of the two incidents seemed too sinister not to be meaningful. I thought that I might now be able to understand the feverishly obsessive erotics occasioned in me by the thought of Clara, because of the coincidence of death and fornication. I apparently really believed that my flatly banal night in the Brittany held some lesson for my life. And yet, if truth be told—if truth be told!—the adventure was, as always with Clara, intrinsically void. My mother’s death lent it no importance; in fact, I was, surely, intent on teasing some meaning from this drunken shambles to avoid the shame of self-confrontation: that is, my mother’s death, if rightly manipulated, would redeem my debased adultery by lending it a tragic mystery. What childish perversity!

  I know that had I been gifted that
night with second sight, so that I could have predicted my mother’s sudden fall into death; and had I seen such catastrophe in my mind’s eye while kissing Clara’s sex through her glowing lingerie, her demise would have occasioned nothing that my lust had not already decided on. To be crudely frank, I would have crawled to Clara under any circumstances, come corruption, hell, come anybody’s death. So, then, my desire to make those two incidents yield meaning was nothing more than a way of avoiding the truth about my own lust; I wanted, that is, to make my lust important, in the same way that blinded lovers know that their ordinary couplings are unique and astonishing and bright with amorous truth.

  Even now, when I think to luxuriate in self-pity, I conjure up that particular night and try to extract, from its various acts, a moral, no, a lesson, a pensum, that will serve to partially explain my general failure as a man. This failure must be somehow dependent upon the circumstances attendant upon my mother’s death. Or so I hope; for otherwise my life seems to have no meaning at all, not even that of its being. But I am always sidetracked, because I link that night with the night spent with Grace, and that, without fail, allows my father to enter the bleak world of recollection.

  I occasionally dream of my father, especially when I find myself vexed by memories of Clara. In these dreams, he does workaday things, nothing strange or even unexpected. He lights an English Oval, he leans against one of his gleaming Cadillacs, he turns to me and says “Lavagetto,” he buys me a Hickey Freeman pearl-gray pinstripe suit, he takes me to the fights at the Garden where we sit ringside with big, loud men, he tells me he’s sorry about my mother, whom he always loved. When he confesses to the latter, he says something about the good veal and peppers in the Italian grocery on Baltic Street, but I know how to translate this secret dream language. But whatever he is doing or saying, he invariably wears a snap-brim fedora, and much of the time it is a white Borsalino. This hat is, I think, a figure for authority and grace and strength, for arrogance, for manhood. A figure, that is, for everything that I once wanted to possess and exhibit.

  When I was sixteen, my father took me, on a hot day in August, to a pier in Erie Basin, where he was doing a complete overhaul on two Norwegian freighters. His foreman, a short, dark man of forty-five or so, whose name—the only name I ever knew him by—was Sorrow, took his cap off when he approached my father, and made a slight bow to me. I was embarrassed by this, and looked away at the huge rusting and peeling hulls of the Kristiansand and the Trondheim riding high in the water. Sorrow said something to my father in Sicilian, and my father answered in English, and gestured toward the ships. As Sorrow walked away, my father put his arm around my shoulders, and said something about the old greaseballs and their goddamn Chinese, and laughed. I should note that by this time in his life my father, who had been born just outside Agrigento and who had passed through Ellis Island at the age of ten, had invented an American birthplace for himself, and had given himself a wonderfully burlesque “American” middle name, Kendrick. My mother often delightedly said that he claimed a birthday on, sometimes, the Fourth of July, and sometimes Flag Day. And yet my mother, for all of her bitterness toward this man from whom she had been separated for twelve years, never spoke of him without a subterranean admiration and affection that I had no way of reconciling with her anger and sense of betrayal. He was to her, I now think, the only real man in the world, and she had often told me stories of their courtship and early marriage that were suffused with details that were at once innocent—almost girlish—and oddly erotic. On that pier, though, whatever he may have been to my mother, he seemed to me a magical stranger in a beautiful hat and a tropical worsted suit of so creamy a tan that it seemed to blush. I knew why Sorrow was so deferential, for my father radiated an authority that created him a figure endowed with authority: he made, that is, a self that was, then, his self. It was not, that is, the creation of someone that he was not, a kind of con-man invention that, for some reason, many people admire, but was infinitely more subtle than that: he had successfully endowed, in some mysterious way, certain traits of manhood with a style that was not naturally or specifically intrinsic to them, but which became so at the moment of his appropriation of them. It was this, I suspect, that so enthralled my mother.

  Norwegian ships, back in the forties, were generally agreed to be, by the longshoremen and stevedores, scalers and painters who worked on the Brooklyn and North River piers, the filthiest afloat. This may or may not have been true, but it was accepted as such, until even the Norwegian seamen who sailed on these tubs came to believe it, and, in a perverse way, to flaunt their ships’ squalid conditions. They may not have been any cleaner than those sailing under different flags, but their reputation for egregious feculence had been solidly fixed.

  My father and I walked about half the length of the pier, and when we were about even with the fo’c’sle of one of the ships, he struck up a conversation with a man called Joe the Ice. He was in a powder-blue gabardine suit, white shirt and navy tie, and wore a little teardrop diamond in his lapel. I had come to learn that Joe had something to do with what my father called “collections,” not that it here matters. He seemed to me benign and rather affable, but he had an air of being, so to say, all business. There was a story that my Uncle Ralph told about a deckhand on a Moore McCormack tug who was still paying the weekly vig to Joe on a loan he’d made some eleven years earlier. He rarely complained, so my uncle said: he was whole and working.

  I suddenly realized that my father had a wad of cash in his hand, and he said to Joe that five grand was jake with him. Joe took out a handful of cash from a tattered red manila portfolio, and counted out five thousand dollars. My father called Sorrow over, all three spoke briefly in Sicilian, and Sorrow took the ten thousand. I was astonished and bewildered, amazed, really, at having seen ten thousand dollars produced, so to speak, out of the air, in the oily heat of the Red Hook summer afternoon. My father smiled at me, and told me, in as few words, that he’d made a bet with the Ice, even money, that he could walk through the Trondheim, from the holds, up through all the decks, onto the main deck and the bridge—walk through the whole ship—without getting a spot or smudge or smear of oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat. Then he left me to Sorrow and Joe, and walked up the gangplank. I stood with the men, and, by now, a few scalers who were coming off shift. In a minute, the entire pier knew of the bet, and men waited patiently to see my father appear at the gangway. My father insisted that an electrician who worked for the Navy accompany him to make sure that everything was done right.

  My father won the bet, came out spotless, and then took me to Foffés on Montague Street, where he had a scotch or two, and I drank 7Ups, and then we drove to Phil Kronfeld’s, a haberdashery near the old Latin Quarter. He bought me a dozen lusciously soft, white broadcloth shirts, and, deferring to my somewhat dim taste, a half-dozen silk ties, the latter spectacularly “Broadway,” ties that my mother called “bookmaker” ties. She swore that my father had no sense at all, buying a high-school boy such expensive things, but then told me a story about his spending his last twenty dollars on a hat to impress her before they were engaged. I had heard this story, with subtle and loving variations and embellishments, many times.

  When I think of that sweltering Brooklyn, so long dead, and my father in his beautiful clothes, with his strong face and huge hands; and when I think of the casually arrogant way in which he bet five thousand dollars, on a kind of whim; and when I, still and always amazed, realize that he had that money in his pocket, I sometimes get up and look at myself in the mirror. I look like my father, but I am not, not at all, like my father. What would he have said about my deformed relationship with the Sterns? About Clara standing me up God knows how many times? About the weakness or lack of will or courage that prevented me from abandoning the whore, prevented me from marrying some woman whose flaws were, at the very worst, the flaws of sanity? What?

  When I dream of my father in his spotless hat and, waking, wish that I could have
somehow appropriated the authority and confidence that I, of course irrationally, think it to have possessed, I am unfailingly left with the truth that it was my father’s Borsalino. And only his.

  Patsy Manucci, one of my father’s drivers and a kind of sidekick who provided my father with a gin-rummy partner and a brand of raucous and mostly unintentional comedy, had a brother, Rocco, of whom, as a boy of fifteen or so, I was in awe. He was a horse of a man, almost, indeed, as thick through the chest and shoulders as a horse, and he spoke in a gravelly voice that was, as the phrase has it, too good to be true. Patsy possessed the same voice, and when the brothers had a discussion or argument about handicapping, the din of their colloquy could be heard through closed doors and even walls. My mother, who liked both brothers, said that their voices were the result of years of shouting the results from the candy store out to the street corner. I did not know what “the results” meant, but I knew that Patsy loved this crack, as he worshiped my mother, and thought it so funny that he repeated it everywhere.

  He often said, with the most solemn and respectful of faces, that Rocco was a graduate of Fordham, where he’d studied medicine, a lie so preposterous that nobody ever had the heart to call him on it, or for that matter, even to laugh: people would listen to this wistful, crazy revelation and nod their heads in understanding. Life!, their nods regretfully said, Ah, that’s how life is. Once, my father, in a context I no longer remember, broke this unspoken rule of solemnity, and said that Rocco had graduated from Fordham’s “upstate campus,” which caused the men with whom he’d been talking to burst into laughter. I laughed too, but had no true idea why.