The Abyss of Human Illusion

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  Many years earlier, he’d had a friend, much younger than he, who had, “out of the blue,” as they say, committed suicide. This friend had once told him that when he opened the paper each morning he would do so in the absurd yet overwhelming hope—perhaps even belief—that he’d come across a story in which he would figure as somebody, as anybody at all, as a name in the newspaper. He wanted, he said, to read some surprising news about himself: before he disappeared like all the other ciphers.

  He looked out the window at the rain-washed patio and thought that he couldn’t recall his young friend’s name, nor, for that matter, his face. Then he realized that he’d been, perhaps, remembering another young man altogether, a character in a play or movie. A novel. Someone who had never been.

  — X —

  He loves a girl, who, as it turns out, does not love him, and so he wastes years of his life trapped in a wretched cliché. This is, as everyone knows, the oldest of news. At the time that he met the unattainable girl, another girl, whom he treated with a distant, friendly formality, tinged with a benign contempt, adored him and would have done anything for him, had he but asked. She was, as they say, “the girl for him.” This is but more old news.

  But since life is, essentially, and maddeningly, a series of mistakes, bad choices, various stupidities, accidents, and unbelievable coincidences, everything played itself out just as it should have; although a shift this way or that in this young man’s life, an evening at a friend’s house avoided, a day at the beach cut short because of rain—anything you can dream up, the more absurd the better—would have led to wholly different results, each one of which would have played itself out precisely the way it should have. There is no way to bargain with life, for life’s meaning is, simply, itself. Perhaps this is why one society after another relentlessly invents its gods and the byzantine complexities of the religions in which those gods are enclosed forever: somebody to talk to, to cajole, to beg and bribe. That nothing helps doesn’t matter, for, most importantly, the gods can be blamed. They “work in mysterious ways.”

  — XI —

  Here is a bed in a room that glows in early-morning light. The new white shades drawn against the sun soften the light to a pale yellow. A woman of perhaps twenty-five sits against the headboard, leaning back against two pillows, laughing. She has on a white nightgown, the bosom of ecru lace; the right shoulder strap has slipped down to her upper arm. Drawn to her waist is a pale-blue blanket and white counterpane.

  A man sits on the edge of the bed, at its foot, wearing a white athletic shirt, and blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts. He, too, is laughing, half-turned toward the woman. The bed may be broken in some way, for it tilts at an angle to the floor. The man is a little younger than the woman, but beginning to lose his hair. He reaches toward her and touches her arm softly. She puts her left hand over his, and, just at that moment, the Angelus is heard faintly but clearly on the Sunday morning air.

  A boy of three enters the room, and stands, happily looking at the enormous strangers on the bed. He is in Dr. Denton pajamas, of a color almost identical to that of the blanket. The light in the room is a little yellower. It’s going to be a nice day, but not a portent of days to come.

  — XII —

  While he was at work each day, an old friend who was staying with him and his wife until he could find an apartment, and who was, in the meantime, perfectly at home in his hosts’ apartment, passed the long days by making love to his friend’s wife, whom he didn’t much care for, but, well, there she was, vapid and bored and available.

  The host felt, rather than knew, that the pair couldn’t wait for him to leave for work in the morning so that they could happily get to their rutting. On weekends, the tension in the apartment virtually sizzled. The man had no knowledge, no proof, no evidence of his cuckolding, no hint was ever given, no suggestion, leer, no shifting of eyes.

  Every day after lunch, the husband threw up, and every night, he would stare out the kitchen window for hours, smoking one cigarette after another. His friend found another apartment after three months and moved out, taking the husband’s Zippo lighter, a gold graduation-gift fountain pen, a can opener, all the change that was in a little bowl on the kitchen table, as well as three shirts, nicely selecting those fresh from the Chinese laundry.

  His wife remarked, that first night, with an almost brilliant sincerity, that it was really good to have the place to themselves again. She was, of course, pregnant.

  — XIII —

  His doctor, surprisingly, not his dentist, is doing something profoundly invasive in his mouth. She’s sliced open his gum, and is scraping and ripping and picking, with a sharp metal instrument, at tooth and bone. He doesn’t feel any pain, but a remote, muffled discomfort, and a dull, insistent pressure has taken over his right eye and temple.

  He realizes that he has, quite helplessly and without volition, gently closed his jaw on her fingers, and she tells him so, but his attempts to open his mouth are unsuccessful. She looks at him and smiles, but the smile is one of patronization, of domination, the same smile that she wears when he lies on her examination table and she palpates and fingers his abdomen, scrotum, and penis for signs of disease or possible malignancy. His concern, at these times, is that he will get an erection and embarrass himself and her.

  He looks up at her smile and nods his head, then opens his mouth. Blood slides down his numb chin and onto the paper bib he wears over a plastic apron. She nods in turn and removes her skirt, then recommences her attack on the infection in his gum, her lower abdomen and thighs pressed against his shoulder. Perhaps she will mount him, carefully and silently, when she finishes the procedure. He hopes so, for he is thoroughly aroused.

  — XIV —

  When his wife of thirty-four years died, he married, soon after, a beautiful aspiring actress who was, in the best tradition of the deathless cliché, half his age. He had met her five years earlier at a party in West Hollywood at a time when there had been “a lot of interest” in filming one of his books on which an option had been taken by an “edgy young producer.” The “project” had, of course, come to nothing. The young actress grew bored with the marriage, discovering, after a year or so, that writers are, by and large, even more boring than their books; and so she left him to go back to Hollywood, where she worked in a few cinematic grotesqueries, occasional episodes of divers TV series, and a commercial or two: she made a living.

  He is now almost seventy, and shows no signs of illness, lethargy, decrepitude, or depression. He turns out a novel every other year, and while they are no better than his earlier books, they are certainly no worse. Since he was famous for a charmingly mediocre novel published at the age of twenty-eight, he is still famous for his charming mediocrities, all of which serve to recall his first, to the delight of reviewers. And so honors and awards come to him at the rate of one a year. His is a life often held up to young students of “creative writing” by their “widely published” instructors, as the sort of life to which it behooves them to aspire, a life that wearily smiles, so to speak, at the notion of art, which it pronounces “art.” He is, so it is said, on the short list for the Nobel Prize, and who is more deserving?

  — XV —

  The man was sexually and emotionally attracted to young mothers and had spent his adult life pursuing and, when he could, seducing them; he’d left a lot of wreckage behind. He met a woman, the mother of two boys, seven and five, a woman who was the wife of a casual friend. They “ran off together,” as they used to say, leaving the two boys with their father, who was, not surprisingly, angry, bewildered, and, for the moment, heartbroken. The new couple soon had a child of their own, but the fact that the young woman was now the mother of her seducer’s child ruined everything for him, and he left one day in their old Ford station wagon, a sun-faded lime-green monster that might well have served as a sad counter for their dead amour.

  He took $147.34, all the money that was in the coffee can in the refrigerator of the wretc
hed St. Louis apartment in which they lived, all the money that they had. Nobody who had known them in New York ever discovered why they had moved to St. Louis, and when the young woman returned, bitter and humiliated, to her husband and two older children, she never told them, except for some vague references to “teaching jobs.” Her husband, perhaps understandably, treated the new child as if he were a demanding visitor who would soon miraculously disappear. As for his wife, he thought of her as a stupid maid whom he occasionally and quite gently, he thought, raped.

  — XVI —

  In the winter of that year, after his post-basic training leave, he took a train to San Antonio, to report for duty at Fort Sam Houston; he would be there for three months, at the Medical Field Service School, for advanced training. On the train, he discovered that the club car was painted a pale rose; its armchairs were a soft feathery blue. A girl came in and he and she began to talk. It was very late and they were alone in the car and quite comfortable together. The train drove through the darkness, and the promise of kisses lay in every dim corner.

  After a time, the girl closed her eyes to the night rushing by outside the windows, the silent night in which black demons and black wolves ran silently through the black countryside. The train crashed on through the darkness.

  He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek, then her ear, then put his lips in a light spidery touch on her neck, first at her hairline, then down to the collar of her dress. How sweet she smelled.

  “It feels like a spider,” she said, “so soft and light. You’d better catch it.” He took a long time finding that spider; for the little monster roamed everywhere under her clothes, everywhere.

  The next morning, at sunrise, the train pulled into Dallas and she got off. He waved to her from his coach window, but she pretended not to see him. The sky was turning rose and blue.

  — XVII —

  He wasn’t intrinsically contemptible, yet there was no way, it seemed, that he could avoid being thought of with contempt, at least not by those who got to know him, men and women alike. There was a sweetness about him, an attractive innocence, when he forgot what he thought he was supposed to be; what, it sometimes appeared, he had been mysteriously instructed to be. But these instances of candor were few and short-lived.

  Most of the time he was at his worst, and this worst always manifested itself in the same way: he flagrantly and openly and with a kind of nauseating pride—real or constructed—insisted on boasting of his flaws and faults as if they were virtues.

  To note a pedestrian example of his irritating pretensions: he rarely combed or brushed his hair and, even more rarely, shampooed it; so that it was a greasy, matted tangle that smelled of rancid and sour fat. This aberration, which he would, of course, call attention to, would too, without fail, prompt him to remark that this was the way of Greek warriors, the way that Odysseus and Achilles dressed their hair. He used the word, “dressed.” It was this sort of thing, this sort of foolish affectation that made him an object of contempt, sometimes seasoned with a vague pity.

  When he died, rather suddenly, of a heart attack, nobody really cared, although there were the usual insincere obsequies. But someone said, in a fair imitation of his voice, “Death is a groove, man!”

  — XVIII —

  She was an old woman now, as he was an old man, and seeing her made him realize just how old he really, as they say, was. He thought of her as she looked, God, forty-five years ago?, as she looked on the night that he and she had surrendered to their desire for each other, a surrender nicely camouflaged by and blamed on their having had “too much to drink.” But he knew the truth and so did she. From that moment on, he relegated their lapse to the simplest of reasons, lust and its gratification, and that was, as they say, that. She soon married a friend of his and had two children, and he remained, surprising himself, a bachelor.

  They sat in the booth of the diner in the old neighborhood, a renovated and renamed diner, but the same old place, and talked over coffee. They had just come back from the cemetery where she’d buried her husband and were on the way to her elder daughter’s house where the mourners would be fed, in time-honored fashion. He had suggested coffee first and here they were.

  She seemed smaller than ever, her face thin and lined, her hair gray with a subtle wash of old-lady pale blue in it. Her breasts were virtually nonexistent, but her legs were still good, especially in the sheer black stockings she’d worn for the funeral. So you’re what, he said, sixty what? You know how old I am, she said, sixty-eight, eight years younger than you. You know that and you’ve always known that. That’s right, he said. Eight years. So we were twenty-three and thirty-one, he said. What do you mean? she said, When? Oh. Right, he said. You’ve been thinking of that all these years? she said, laughing. Not all the time, he said, Jesus! He put on an amused face, but he was blushing, and realized that he probably looked like a complete idiot. But once in a while, he said, and thought: more than you know. He felt absolutely, sickeningly empty.

  — XIX —

  She is standing at the sink in a gloomy kitchen, the palegray light from the sole window its only illumination. She’s wearing white rayon underpants and a matching brassiere, white cotton socks and slippers whose fluffy, artificial blue fur has been worn to the nap. She’s washing her lunch dishes—a sandwich plate, a cup and saucer, and a table knife. She looks up and to her right, for she feels as if someone is looking at her.

  The window looks out on a gray courtyard, its concrete darkening with beginning rain. She stands on her toes and looks out into the courtyard, for she feels that someone, certainly, is looking at her. She puts the saucer on the drainboard, and dries her hands, then folds her arms protectively across her breasts, and looks with what might be longing at her bathrobe, draped over the back of a kitchen chair, wanting to snatch the robe up and put it on now, quickly, before something happens. She finds it impossible to move, to take the step toward the chair.

  She leans against the sink, her thighs clamped together, and looks at the kitchen doorway, into the living room. Her body is rigid and she is flushed. Someone is looking at her from the courtyard or the living room. She looks at her robe again, and almost takes a step toward the kitchen chair, but does not. She is a week or so into her thirty-ninth year, and knows that she is not bad-looking, and knows that men do look at her, they do. Someone is looking at her now. She knows that this is really not so.

  She puts on her robe, wishing, perhaps, that someone would look at her, that someone in the courtyard, in the living room, some nameless phantom were waiting for her, someone to whom she could abandon herself, some beast, some animal, some sex fiend, for whom she could throw herself away, for whom she could recklessly damn herself to pleasure and hell.

  — XX —

  He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.

  Before his orders had been cut for Fort Ord and FECOM, he was stationed for a brief time at Fort Meade, Maryland. A friend of his, in the Marines at Camp Lejeune, thought it might be a good idea if they met maybe in Baltimore for a weekend of disorderly drunkenness, etc. He said O.K., and they agreed to meet at a bar on Charles Street that they both knew. He got out to the highway on a post bus to hitchhike, in clean and starched Class-A khakis. What a soldier, standing tall!

  After ten minutes, a powder-blue Cadillac Coupe deVille rocketed to a halt just past him, and then backed up, white-walls screaming, and he got in. The driver was going to Wilmington, and he’d take him right into fuckin’ Baltimore. He was a man of maybe fifty, sunburned and sweaty and absolutely drunk in that placid way that alcoholics know how to polish to perfection. On the seat, between his legs, was a quart of Gordon’s gin, from which he drank regularly. He’d occasionally light a Pall Mall, at which times he’d steer with one knee, smiling childishly. He maintained an averag
e speed of about eighty-five to ninety miles an hour, looking at the road, or so it seemed, but now and again. At one point, the car hit a patch of gravelly sand and sailed through the summer air, quite beautifully, for some twenty yards, while the driver hooted with pleasure at, perhaps, the sight of death, grinning on the hood. But the Caddy landed gently and on they went, spared for something or other. We know why the soldier was spared, of course.

  Incidentally, the driver offered the soldier a drink and a cigarette only after their unexpected flight: maybe he thought they were now true comrades.

  — XXI —

  It became clear to Larry and Martha that she didn’t, much of the time, really hear what he said to her, even though she responded in what he had thought, for some years, to be a cogent and rational way, if sometimes tangentially or abstractly. Martha absorbed Larry’s words, in some curious way, their rhythms, grammatical structures, and syntagmatic relationships, but the content of these words—assuming that there was, on occasion, “useful” content—were, to Martha, empty of meaning or even allusions to cognate meanings. She made courageous stabs at what he said, tried hard to listen, but her guesses—for that’s what they came to—were, unsurprisingly, most often startlingly wrong. So Martha constructed for their marriage an improvisatory fantasia: what Larry said became what Larry did not say, which, in turn, became what he really said—the latter Martha’s total invention. So their domestic intercourse proceeded, a strange path discoverable only as it was traveled.