The Moon In Its Flight

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  Rocco was a runner for a policy operation headed by a man named Jackie Glass, who was always dressed beautifully in oxford gray or navy blue suits, white shirts, repp-striped ties, and French-toed shoes that seemed as soft as gloves. He was married to an exshowgirl, a tall, hard redhead, and they had two spoiled blond children, Marvin and Elaine, who got everything they wanted, or so it appeared to me. His wife’s name was Charl, short, I discovered, for Charlene. Jackie was connected, as the phrase had it, with one of the New York families, I don’t know which one, which gave Rocco, in my adolescent eyes, the most weighty authority: he worked for a man who worked for serious people who had a great deal to say about the running of many things, including the city.

  But this was the lesser part of what enthralled me insofar as Rocco was concerned. Rocco was a gambler, but a gambler who existed in a kind of Paradiso, an Eden, an empyrean of gambling that was wholly unreal to me. One night he won sixty thousand dollars in a crap game up on Pleasant Avenue. Even in this time, when people who can barely sing, dance, act, hit a ball, or throw a punch make millions for barely doing these things, sixty thousand dollars is a lot of money; in 1944, when a seventy-five-dollar a week job was thought to be the key to a big apartment on Easy Street, it was, simply, a fantasy amount. Rocco lost the sixty grand two days later in another crap game on Elizabeth Street.

  To win it. To have it. To let it all go. To say to hell with it. That’s what fascinated me about Rocco. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to live, the way I’ve wanted to act with the men and women I’ve known, with, of course, especially Clara. I’ve never had the courage, that is to say that I’ve never had the courage to act on my belief that the world, beyond all its endlessly rehearsed wonders and beauties, is absolute shit, that life is best when ignored, or somehow turned away from, and that nothing should be taken at face value. In sum, that everything is a pathetic bust. But I have always acted otherwise, as if there is, perpetually, the possibility for change, for amelioration, for friendship and love. I have, that is, always and unforgivably, acted as if there is hope. But to say: Fuck life! I’ve never managed it, or if I have, it was momentary, melodramatic gesture, empty and contemptible. I think, in effect, of losing sixty thousand dollars, and, without fail, make my craven accommodations. I will not, ever, let it all go.

  Some few years into my absurd relationship with Clara, a friend of mine who had rented a ramshackle beach house on Fire Island for the month of September, had to return to the city with a little less than two weeks left on his lease. He asked me if I wanted to take the place, gratis, for this period, and I agreed, thinking to ask Clara to make some excuse and spend this time on the island with me. She had been, for some months, disconcertingly faithful to Ben, and I thought that a time alone together, as the strangely lugubrious old song has it, would work to revive our passion, a passion that, I’m afraid, I remembered as a series of dissolving pornographic tableaux. I think that one usually remembers love as a totality of experience and feeling, a complex in which the sun that falls on the kitchen table in the morning is part of the emotion attendant on the beloved; whereas lust is simply the recall of the purely and metonymically salacious. Clara was a duchess of lust, as I have tried to make clear, and images of her in diverse erotic scenes were, overwhelmingly, images of dazed carnality. In any event, I told her of my sudden luck and asked her to come. I implored her to come.

  A day or two later, she told me that she’d invented a story for Ben, complete with a sick school friend or a spontaneous reunion, faked phone calls, a fantasy airline reservation, something, everything. I had no way of proving that Clara had done any of this, and I’ve long been convinced that Ben had joined in this spurious drama, had helped to fashion his own betrayal. Clara was, and probably always had been, one of the machines by the use of which Ben was assisted in his seductions of fragile students and frowzy colleagues and the wives of friends—the butcher and the baker, for all I know. Perhaps even my ex-wife. At the time, all I cared about was Clara involved in lovemaking with me. With me!

  We took the ferry from Bay Shore one warm morning, and then clomped along the boardwalk to a disreputable, weathered shack in Ocean Bay Park. Clara had laughed on the ferry as she described Ben’s sour expression as she prepared to leave. She had a neat, well-turned story for almost every occasion, and in me the most willing of listeners. Nothing was on my mind but her, I had become desire, ah, how wonderful and dirty she was, her light perfume piquant with the salt air of the Sound. The moment we slammed the door of the musty shack, Clara almost coyly pulled off her T-shirt and stepped out of her shorts. Was I not the most finished of seducers?

  Those ten days, however, ended with my morose wallowing in bitter nostalgia. Clara, of course, noticed my tragic expression, and, although people’s feelings held little interest for her, she was manifestly disturbed that this germ of misery might make me less reliant a sexual partner than she had bargained for. She had given me two weeks of her time and had spent her energy to be with me; she did not expect gloom and silence. My ill-concealed distemper and preoccupied air turned the last few days of our sojourn into a chilly period of reading and glum card games.

  I had been made wretched—blue is, I suppose, the best word—by a delicate, faded memory evoked by ocean and beach, a memory of fifteen years earlier, when I woman I had loved, loved to distraction, spent a summer with me in a rented cottage on the Island’s North Shore. There is little point in rehearsing the serene joy of that summer, other than to say that I could not, perhaps did not want to drive from my mind the image of her sitting across from me in the early twilight on the little flagstone patio behind the two-room cottage. She was, in this image, always in white: shorts and T-shirt, skirt and blouse, pinafore, crisply dazzling summer dress, and her tan glows warmly against the candor of her lovely white clothing. She holds a gin and tonic, and as she leans forward to light her cigarette from my proffered match, she looks up and her dark eyes astound me.

  I did a really thorough job of destroying this love when we returned to the city in the fall, by means of a cruel apathy, one that I even more cruelly pretended was a distraction caused by painful personal concerns that could not be shared with anyone—especially with her. So that was that. I saw her, many years later, well after my marriage and divorce, while Clara and I were in the early phase of our demented, futile eroticism. It was in sad Tompkins Square, on a gray, humid day just made for mania. We did not acknowledge each other, but the look of understanding that crossed her face, the comprehension of my flimsy reality that registered on her calm, beautiful features, almost stopped my heart. She had, as the phrase so aptly puts it, seen right through me. I thought to speak to her, to ask her—I don’t know—to help me, perhaps? I thought I’d vomit, but was spared at least that shame.

  Wittgenstein famously closes the Tractatus by writing that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” I’m not certain that I agree with this beautifully subtle, frigid refutation, or, perhaps, critique, of the empty blather with which we are surrounded every day. My rejected and buried Roman Catholicism rouses itself at this proposition, flaunting, quietly to be sure, the garrulous sacrament of penance as counterbalance to Wittgenstein. God knows, the very act of confession, the snug dark of the confessional, the confessor’s aloof profile in the gloom—all these virtually guarantee that the penitent will most certainly attempt to speak, in halting improvisations or rehearsed platitudes, about those sins and crimes and dark longings which cannot ever be represented in language. Silence will not do in the confessional, and the unspeakable always finds a voice, garbled and inexact though it may be.

  Yet outside of the fierce niceties of the elaborate ritual that makes Roman Catholicism a sly, gay, and mysterious game, never to be understood by functional and palsy-walsy Christianity, I do indeed understand Wittgenstein’s blunt postscript. It has been my experience that we cannot speak about anything at all, and yet we rattle on, our ceaseless chatter so much a part of our lives t
hat even the hackneyed concept of “last words” is enshrined as a phenomenon of grave importance, as if it matters what anyone says entering the dark nullity. We refuse, really, just as if we were all ensconced permanently in a universal confessional, to pass over the unspeakable in silence. We start. We continue. We go on and on, through childhood and adolescence, fornication and pain and disease and death. Talking to make sense—how sad the very idea!—of childhood and adolescence, fornication and pain and disease and death.

  This story that I have told, or made, such as it is, for instance, with a half-submerged truth here and a robustly confident lie there, with a congeries of facts and near-facts everywhere, this story is an exhibit of speech about something of which I cannot speak. For years, I did pass over it, quite obediently, so to say, in silence. Then, for no reason that I can point to, I decided to ease my mind by speaking, if not the unspeakable, then the difficult to speak. As I half-knew they would, each page, paragraph, clause, sentence, each word pulled relentlessly and stubbornly away from that which I had thought to say. So that my speech, I now see, has made the past even more remote and unfocused than silence would have. But I declare that I have spoken the truth, or something very close to it.

  When I say that my narrative is not quite representative of the actuality of the experiences it purports to represent, I play no semiological games. That is to say that were the act of signification a wholly successful transaction with the real, I could still never have effected the proper transaction. I have no language for it, there is no language for it. Just as well that words are empty. How terrifying true representation would be!

  This story is dotted with flaws and contradictions and riddled with inconsistencies, some of which even the inattentive reader will discover. Some of these gaffes may well be considered felicities of uncertainty and indeterminacy: such is prose. The tale also, it will have been clear, occasionally flaunts its triumphs, small though they may be. I am afraid that the final word about the gluey, tortuous, somehow glamorously perverse relationship that Ben and Clara and I constructed and sent shuffling into the world hasn’t been arrived at; but perhaps the unspeakable has had created some sad analogue of itself, if such is possible. Something has been spoken of, surely, but I can’t determine what or where it is.

  In any event, I’ve spent a fair amount of time and attempted a degree of care in the creation and arrangement of these fragments. There are moments or flashes when I believe that I have seen myself, in a quirk of syntax, as I really was, when I can swear that Ben or Clara are wholly if fleetingly present in these simulacra of the past. Moments, flashes, when this admittedly inadequate series of signs seems to body forth a gone time. But I know that this is nonsense, nothing but a ruse with which I have been faithfully complicit so as to make the landscape of my life seem more valuable and interesting than it ever was.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  The Moon In Its Flight

  Decades

  Land Of Cotton

  The Dignity Of Labor

  The Sea, Caught In Roses

  A Beehive Arranged On Humane Principles

  Pastilles

  Allegory Of Innocence

  Sample Writing Sample

  Times Without Number

  Subway

  Facts And Their Manifestations

  It’s Time To Call It A Day

  Life And Letters

  Perdido

  Lost In The Stars

  Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

  Gorgias

  In Loveland

  Things That Have Stopped Moving