The Abyss of Human Illusion

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  When she’d cleaned up the vomit, she went upstairs again, dressed, left the building, walked to the nearby hack stand, and was at the hospital in twenty minutes, to discover that he’d died in the doctor’s car. Later, back in the apartment, walking about in her slip, a private luxury that she suddenly became happily aware of, she found his watch and chain, his sterling silver pocketknife, and his wallet, with some four hundred dollars in it, on the dresser in his bedroom. She could hear his voice clear in her mind: “The hospital is nothing but a den of thieves. Worse than the goddamn firemen.” She sat down on the bed and lit one of his Lucky Strikes. “Bye-bye, Poppa,” she said.

  — XXX —

  He was certain that a man at his wife’s office, a coworker, of whom she spoke patronizingly but of whom she spoke every day, had become her lover. And when she joined a gym or an aerobics class or an exercise group or whatever it was that she joined, it was, surely, so that she could have a reason to be out of the house every Tuesday night for the obvious purpose.

  He was delighted by this surprising, wholly unexpected occurrence, this astonishing “bump,” as it were, in their marriage; but he did his best to feign his disappointment on Tuesday evenings, and even, sometimes, show a touch of irritation at not having her company—“not even for supper,” as he would occasionally grumble. And, too, he would sometimes, in a small twitch of malice, ask her questions about her “nights out,” sometimes causing her to lie so childishly that she would blush at her efforts. It was satisfying for him to watch, in a travesty of innocence, her discomfiture.

  His marriage to her was an absurdity, but she was doing and had done as she’d promised before the wedding: she’d stay at her well-paid job and he’d stay at home to write. He had not yet been published, but had three “really encouraging” letters from important magazines, and he was actively looking for an agent, and he was working, more or less, on his first novel. She never complained and even took the garbage out and did all the grocery shopping on Saturdays or Sundays. When she began to commit adultery, he thought, just for a moment, as they say, that she, well, she deserved some fun. But what most enthralled him was the notion, the idea, the hope that she was in love with the office gallant and would, perhaps, leave home, but somehow continue to pay the bills. This was, no matter how it was sliced, an impossibility—if she left him, he’d be forced to go to work, and literature would be the poorer. He may have even thought something like this—surely, he had a fairly high opinion of his talents, else why, after all, would he write? Why indeed?

  But, he thought, but perhaps he could persuade her to take a vacation now, that is, in the winter, get away from her job, her responsibilities, the apartment and the grind, baby, and, well, let’s face it, him. If he did it right, hauled out his self-deprecating smile, if he didn’t seem too anxious, he might get her to take two weeks, even three, and spend that time—as she would, wouldn’t she?—with her lover down in the romantic Caribbean. She’d pay the bills up to date, of course, and leave him cash for food and incidentals. He’d be alone, taken care of, and free to hope that her admirer would beg her to come and live with him so that their idyll could become permanent. On the other hand, he might well grow tired of her, idyll or not, and sooner rather than later. This worried him, but in the meantime, there were Tuesdays.

  — XXXI —

  He didn’t quite know what was happening to him, but something was happening to him, surely. Or had it happened already? Probably. Or had it been happening all along, as they say? Perhaps. It certainly was sharply reminiscent of what had happened to him—at least once—in the past. But what “past”? Yesterday? Two weeks ago? Nineteen forty-nine? Or longer ago than that? He was old enough to know that he’d forgotten many things that were once of urgent importance. What things? Had it happened in the days of Juicy Fruit and the Milano Restaurant, the latter long gone? And did they still make Juicy Fruit gum the same? What “sort” of thing had happened to him as he stood on the cold Manhattan street outside the Milano, his mouth packed with Juicy Fruit, his hand in his mother’s hand; they were waiting for his father? They were waiting for his father. Is that all that happened? What did that have to do with what was happening to him now? And did this bring to mind the Milano? The cold streets, the pinkish wash of the sky over the Hudson River? Juicy Fruit? The Milano. The Milano. It had no significance for him, yet he remembered it, only as a name, though. Nothing more specific, save for the open boxes of cigars in the glass case by the cash register. His father bought a cigar and talked to the owner in Italian as he paid him. Is that what happened? Did he ever actually go to the Milano, or was the place existent only in his mother’s stories? But he had had a mouth full of Juicy Fruit. Is he becoming a little hazy in his mind? He is. What is happening to him is happening to him, let it go at that. Whatever happened, then, happened during the Great Depression, of which his grandfather, years later, slightly drunk on cheap whiskey, liked to say, “what was so great about it?” That happened. Was it the war that had happened to him? The brave and necessary war, the war that “we” hated, but fought to end This and stop That and make sure that The Other Thing would never happen again, or at least not for four or five years. That must have been it. It? What happened, of course. That was it. If Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and somebodies here and there—the Axis—had won, what then? If they had got the BOMB first, what then? They would have dropped it on—us? An unholy act. It didn’t happen. If they had the planes and the tanks and the vast industrial might of a brave free people with lots of time and a half and double time on Sundays, what then? If they had been an Aroused Giant or two? Something else would be happening to him right now, and many other different things would have happened to him already. Death? Is that what is happening to him? What are the telltale signs of death, anyway? One may be the well-dressed man who has quietly entered his room and who looks very much like Fredric March, who did a “brisk trade” back in the days of the Great Depression and the righteous war that brought it to a happy close. He is pleased that he remembers Fredric March, whom he always thought of, to be truthful, as a hambone.

  — XXXII —

  The old man who lived in the apartment above his had a slight limp and wore a prosthetic shoe of some sort, black, ugly, and heavy, and such was the nature of his handicap, that it compelled him, it seemed, to wear the shoe all the time, so that he limped and clumped and shuffled about on his obviously rugless floors. In addition to this thumping, he played both his television and his radio at such a high volume that his neighbor could hear virtually every word spoken or screamed by the hysterical or ecstatic or soberly serious sports broadcasters and news anchors and reporters who were, apparently, the only representatives of the “news and entertainment world” permitted into the apartment of the relentlessly noisy old man.

  Yet the neighbor never complained, for he had invented an entire if sketchy history for the old man, one which cast him in the role of the outcast and marginalized elder who had lost everything: whose wife had died in misery; whose children were callous and ungrateful; who had lost his friends to death and illness and dementia. He dressed badly, most often in baggy gray twill pants, faded and threadbare flannel shirts, ragged-edged suspenders, and scuffed and virtually colorless shoes, one of which, of course, was the weird monstrosity that apparently rarely came off his foot. He was certainly a veteran of the Second World War, wounded, but not gallantly, in action and now living precariously on his small disability payments and his equally small Social Security check. For what could he have been other than a clerk in some office in the financial district, some nervous nobody in a shiny black suit and not-too-fresh frayed shirt, carrying papers from one file drawer to the next for thirty years or more? He was a widower, yes, surely, a bit of detritus, flotsam, one of life’s insulted; and so if he clumped and banged aimlessly about while listening to baseball or football or basketball or who the hell knew? bowling or billiards or marbles, that was but a minuscule recompense for the life he was living and
had lived.

  One afternoon, the sound of the television was so loud that the neighbor’s apartment was brutally, almost, one might say, contemptuously assaulted, the noise a palpable entity in the air, the walls, the ceiling; the noise seemed to emerge from the drains in the sinks and bathtub, from the toilet bowl, it was cruel. He had to go upstairs and ask him to please, to please, to if you don’t mind. So he went upstairs.

  He knocked at the door and then rang the bell of this pathetic, probably half-deaf old man. He knocked again. The door opened and a woman of perhaps forty, not quite forty, lovely of face and figure, stood in the doorway. She was in a yellow raw-silk robe, partly open to reveal her near-nude body, one that the gossamer robe seemed rather to emphasize than conceal. Can I help you? she said, maybe. He didn’t know what she said. She said something. The noise behind her was shattering, but she smiled at him, blithely, happily. Is there something that we can do? Or something. She said something. Her smile was friendly but slightly patronizing, the sort of smile that the young reserve for old men. She looked at him looking at her and pulled the robe closer around her body. Oh, he said. I thought, he said. But he did not say what he thought.

  — XXXIII —

  He is about halfway through the book of poetry, the selected poems of one of his friends, published some two months earlier, but only recently acquired. He turns a page and feels a touch, a nudge, a slight caress of nausea, and then, quickly, it overwhelms him, his stomach tumbles and writhes and cold sweat pops out on his brow and scalp. He puts the book on the desk, the pages flat on its surface. His shirt, he realizes, is soaked, and he gags, then rises to rush to the bathroom when he realizes that the nausea has passed. He sits down in his chair and leans back, looks out the window at his street crusted over with an inch or two of new snow, as he wishes he were.

  He wishes, too, that he had a cigarette, that he’d never given up smoking, what was the point of it? He wishes this, he wishes that, he wishes his old bar hangout was still open, Christ oh Christ what doesn’t he wish? He picks up the book and closes it, places it at the side of his desk, the book, this book by a friend of his, this book that has made his gorge rise, and he smiles at the worn-velvet cliché. “My gawje has rizzed,” he says to the book. This is a book of some two hundred and fifty poems, by a friend of his, not a close friend but a friend nonetheless. And yet the poems have sickened him. He is on the edge of feeling shame: doesn’t he like poetry? Did he ever like it? Is everything he’s ever said or thought about it a lie, accompanied by a pose and a fake biography, pushed this way a little, turned that way a little more, and, overall, a shabby clutch of faded aesthetics. Maybe. Perhaps. It’s too late to care.

  More to the point, really, is the true cause of the nausea not the poems themselves but that they were written by his friend? That’s what he should face: does he despise him? His friend is a great success in the small, almost always weaselly world of poetry, its sweaty ambitions, its minuscule rewards, its grim teaching appointments, its pathetic prizes, its insincere enthusiasms. His friend’s career grew and blossomed by means of—of what? It is this carefully built career that the man won’t look at, won’t face. He picks up the book and riffles the pages. Oh for Christ’s sake, think it, say it. By means of a determined transformation. His friend, an arrogant, selfish, cruel, egocentric yet charming man of sociopathic bent, to put the very best face on it, changed, oh yes, transformed his public presence into one of a subtly nuanced and delicate humility, transformed his entire life and world into the very picture of the sensitive artist, forever grateful and decently but not egregiously or embarrassingly humble before the attentions paid him, oh yes indeed. Thanks, thanks, thanks, he can hear him, thanks, so wonderful to be here, how kind of you all.

  He sits in glum silence, thinking, knowing that the whole truth that he has admitted, if it is truth, is too tawdry to be sad, too banal to be bitter. Why, though, has it taken him so long to realize, to admit that his friend, his caring, concerned friend, warmly open to the earth and all the men and women on its roiling and corrupted surface, is not only a relentlessly self-promoting careerist, but worse, a third-rate poet? The fault is his, but he will not, he will never examine it.

  — XXXIV —

  They had decided to go on what Basil called an “excursion” into the mountains, such as they imagined them, and so quickly set off. Soon they reached a little town, most of which seemed to be—was, in fact—an old-fashioned amusement park, replete with all manner of rides, many of which, like the Tunnel of Love and the Ferris Wheel, struck the travelers as quaint, and perhaps pointless. They were, however, pleased, although Louise was embarrassed when a jet of air, suddenly released from a hole in the floor over which she was standing unawares, blew her skirt up around her waist. Her blushes pleased a leering clown who was, apparently, “in charge” of the air jet. The mountains seemed to be just outside the town, although it became apparent that the town was deep within the mountains. “Perhaps this is the excursion,” Alex said.

  Later, after a lunch of hot dogs and cotton candy, they agreed to separate so as to “explore” the amusement park and environs, and to meet later in the day by a ride called the Big Lasso, and Basil, Harry, and Anna left. Alex looked around for Louise but she had gone somewhere without so much as a word. At the hour appointed for their rendezvous, Alex obediently stood before the Big Lasso, but nobody showed up, so he spend much of the afternoon watching ferries sail to and from Platinum Carde Island, out in the middle of a startlingly turquoise-colored artificial lake. He felt abandoned and hurt, especially when, later, they returned and asked him where he’d been all day. He turned away, reddening with anger.

  Harry told him to “hop” into his convertible, which he called, for some reason, “Jewish blue,” and said that he’d always wanted to see the Sixty-ninth Street pier in Brooklyn, from which, he’d read, real ferryboats once made regular runs to and from Staten Island, at the time wholly unpopulated save for a few dozen Boy Scouts who had been forbidden to return to the “mainland” because of sexual thoughts that they had been unable to suppress despite prayers and chats with their ministers and coaches: they were no longer “clean” or “reverent,” or so Boys’ Life reported. Harry turned onto Sixty-ninth Street and headed for the pier.

  But once outside the car a few steps found them in a field of mud through whose gluey expanse they had to slog before they could reach the pier, which they could see quite clearly ahead of them; it was crowded with people, and drenched with spray from the very rough waters of the Narrows. They scraped the mud off their shoes and walked, finally, onto the pier. Basil, Louise, and Anna were sitting at a table under an umbrella, drinking beer. Basil lifted a glass in exaggerated greeting. “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer,” he said. “Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer.” “You never intended to meet at the Big Lasso,” Alex said. “You spent the whole day here!” Harry shook his head and told Alex to relax. “We were not here all day at all,” he said, “You think everything is an excursion.” Anna laughed drunkenly, but then gave Alex a threatening look. “He’s always thought everything’s an excursion. This whole dumb idea is his, isn’t it?” Alex realized that he’d lost his shoes. “Look!” he said. “Look! Look! Who’s going to buy me some new shoes? These were Flagg Brothers square-toe loafers, dyed cordovan!” He was overwhelmed by a childish rage. “You never intended to meet at the Lasso,” he said. “What friends!” They all looked at him, amused yet slightly annoyed. “Oh well,” Basil said. “What a beautiful day it is anyway, right?”

  — XXXV —

  He and his wife of a little more than a year decided to give a New Year’s Eve party for their closest friends, another recently married couple: it would just be the four of them. They were, then, surprised to find that their friends had brought along a man from the husband’s office, Zoltan, whom the husband described as his “partner.” He seemed a rather inconsequential figure, pale and faded. He sat on one end of the sofa and began to drink bourbon and
water, steadily, and with a kind of sincere devotion to the whiskey. The hostess had what she would have called—had she been asked—a “bad feeling” about him.

  It became clear to the host, despite the blurring of his thought by alcohol, that Zoltan had sexual designs on his coworker’s wife, who pretended to be blind to his unconcealed desire. That she permitted her skirt to ride up to her thighs testified to her awareness, even though she worked so as to seem blithely careless. It was, after all, New Year’s Eve, she might have said. Zoltan ogled her thighs with an ardor just slightly less pronounced than his love for his whiskey, but this was allowed to pass by all. Who can tell why? Relationships, as they now call them, faint, stumble, and collapse every day because of such social niceties: all Zoltans seem to know this, with the instinct of animals.

  Sometime just before midnight, when the little party had become somewhat waywardly morose despite the good-times Ray Charles recording that nobody had the will to dance to, the doorbell rang, and the visiting wife, the guest, assuming the hostess’s duties, opened the door to Jake, an old friend of both husbands. He stood there smiling, a quart of Scotch in each hand, his coat flung carelessly over his shoulders. He put the Scotch on the floor and took his friend’s wife in his arms, then kissed her, as they say, passionately, his mouth open, as was hers. He had his hands as low on her waist as he, perhaps, dared, but his intentions were very clear. His candor seemed merely his attempt to disguise them with “honesty.”