The Abyss of Human Illusion

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  Zoltan got up from the couch, and lurched toward the couple, patting, in some absurd gesture of comfort, his host’s shoulder on the way to the door. He pulled Jake away from his “partner’s” wife and then pushed his mouth into hers, lewdly, slobbering, grunting, rubbing his hands up and down her thighs. Her husband got up, very calmly, walked to the couple, and kicked his wife in her buttocks before pulling her around to face him; then he slapped her face and slapped her face again. The record had ended, and as if caught in the perfect web of the perfect cliché, the voices of people in the street were suddenly clear in their strained and vaguely hysterical revelry.

  The husband yanked and pulled his wife over to the sofa and sat her down, then looked at his old friends, and sneered at them. “Here’s your fuckin’ friend!” He opened the closet door and pulled out his overcoat and Zoltan’s, while Jake stood in the open doorway, in something more than shock—did he really know these people? The husband gave Zoltan his coat, put his on, and picked up one of the bottles of Scotch Jake had put on the floor what seemed like hours before. “I’m not interested in you people anymore,” he said. “I’ll call you soon, bitch,” he said to his wife. Then he pushed Zoltan out the door and followed him, leaving the door open: they began quarreling as they went down the stairs.

  “Jesus,” his wife said. “Jesus.” She sat sprawled on the sofa, her legs apart; both men stared at her, embarrassed. The hostess gave her a glass of straight bourbon and roughly, angrily yanked her skirt down her thighs. “Keep your skirt down!” she said. “You child.”

  — XXXVI —

  The professor had made a small but firm reputation as a translator of late nineteenth-century French poets, the lesser lights, so to speak, most especially Laforgue and Corbiere, of the great Modernist explosions of the age. His translations were quietly celebrated as definitive “for our time.”

  It may not be surprising to note that the professor, in his youth, had been an aspiring poet, but his talents were meager and so he moved resolutely, yet with a somewhat bohemian show of the devil-may-care, through his education, earning his PhD at the age of twenty-eight, and starting the nerve-wracking process of “getting settled,” i.e., being granted tenure. The professor did not quite think of himself as an academic, but as an artist, and perhaps, in his own vaguely deluded way, he was. He may have silently vowed the physician’s vow: first, do no harm.

  He ultimately got tenure at a mediocre state university, where his colleagues in the comparative literature program were to grow jealous of his small fame (an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education had included his name and a few lines on his translations in an article on “poet professors” it was noted that his work was “dazzlingly eccentric,” yet “sound in its meticulous scholarship”).

  His scholarly career had been “checkered,” for from an undergraduate interest in the “silver” or “drab” poets of the early English renaissance, he moved, unexpectedly, into an enthusiastic—or so it appeared—study of Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, The Yellow Book, etc.; in short, the English Decadence. It was rather stale stuff, but the book he made of it—and which earned his tenure—caused a stir because of his carefully ingenious argument that a pornographic homosexual novel anonymously published, ca. 1895, Teleny, was written by Oscar Wilde. His comparison of the style with that of Dorian Gray was somewhat strained, but “unusual and “daring,” especially in the argument that conflated the protagonists of both novels as the same depraved dandy. But that was that—the English Decadence, the professor learned, led nowhere but to a lifetime in, let’s say, northern Iowa. That would never do.

  And so he moved, with some flattery, here and there, some to-ing and fro-ing and faculty lunches and dinner parties, into the outer precincts of the romance languages department, and Vallejo became the center of his new book, a neohistorical study of the imagery in Trilce, that got him an offer from a very good private university, after which it was adiós to Vallejo, and the French poets were suddenly hauled from the wings, where they had, perhaps, been sitting for some time with Max Beerbohm and the Earl of Surrey.

  In his new post, he modestly requested of the creative writing program if he might teach a course in literary translation, under its auspices of course, and his growing celebrity made this a cinch, especially since he offered to teach it in addition to his regular course load. So there he was, a writer, in effect, at last. He was very much “like” a writer, even, with his beret and faded denim shirts, his bicycle and worn corduroys. Well

  He married a graduate student some two years later, a washed-out young woman of great sensitivity, who made a first–play splash with a little one-acter called ¡Ay Caramba! “Its intermittent sizzle comes from its winningly disingenuous juxtaposition of Hebrew linguistics, Twelve-Step dogma, the CIA, and the ties between them,” asserted the Village Voice, with guarded enthusiasm. They are both middle-aged now, and the professor’s wife has all but given up writing and has begun showing her photographs at a “discriminating” gallery in town. The professor now teaches but one course a semester, a freshman seminar in the English Decadence, in which he assigns his own book, self-deprecatingly, to be sure. He loves the fact that his bluntly sexual chapter on Teleny makes his students look at him with a surprised respect. And, not to forget, he is writing poetry again, and publishing it in the literary magazine of the English department, Redwood Review.

  — XXXVII —

  He’d finally got a job checking freight for the King Assembly Agency, working on a North River platform of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with whose checkers and car loaders the assembly agency worked in tandem.

  The weather had grown increasingly colder as January progressed, and one morning, as he walked into the violent wind blowing up Fortieth Street from the river, he knew that this day, the first truly cold day on his new job, would be astonishingly cruel. And so it was.

  His marriage had been steadily disintegrating, even though it was barely more than a year old. His wife looked at him, or so he thought, with a passive, almost friendly, benign contempt, although he had no idea why: perhaps he was wrong. He certainly could not have furnished any “proof” or examples of this contempt, but it was there, he knew. It was there. He believed that one day soon he’d be given a sign of some sort to prove, to his satisfaction, that his wife happily despised him, and always had, that their marriage was teetering on the edge of collapse, and that she was ready to take advantage of any catalyst to give it a careless push.

  Al, the foreman, took a look at him in his absurdly inadequate clothing, and gave him a woollen watch cap to pull over his ears, his ears and his stupid head, the head of what Al had, on this bitter day, called, dismissively, a “college boy.” The cap kept his head from freezing, but did nothing for his body or his feet, numbed into two chunks of icy flesh from the frigid concrete floor of the platform. This was his true initiation into the world of brutally hard work, “honest,” as they say, work.

  The sign would arrive and he would see it or feel it deeply; there would be no doubt of it. Then, only then, armed with this certainty, he could confront his wife and ask her to tell him the truth. The truth. Perhaps, he occasionally thought, she wasn’t aware of how she treated him, how she talked to him with equal measures of impatience and patronization, wasn’t aware of how she was to him. His candor would awaken her own, and perhaps something would be made clear between them, and “things” might then be brought cleanly to a conclusion, before both of them were drained of their youth and what was left of their honesty. It never occurred to him that if his wife consciously acted toward him in the manner he thought—he knew—she did, that she might like it, that she might like doing this to him, that she had married him so that he would always be near, waiting patiently to be insulted and demeaned.

  On the following day he would wear long underwear, put a few sheets of newspaper between two sweaters, and don a scarf, the cap that Al had given him, heavy gloves, and two pairs of socks under his old low quarters. He would b
e a worker instead of a chump, sad in his chump’s ignorance.

  On the evening of that first bleak and bitter day, when he took himself home, a core of terrible ice sat solid inside his body; all the way home on the subway, the bus, the three-block walk to the small apartment that he and his wife were slowly fading away in, he shook with the cold. A glass of straight bourbon couldn’t get him warm, nor could the spaghetti, of which he had seconds and then thirds. It did nothing. He trembled and shook at the table and while he watched television and, undressing for bed, shook even more fiercely as the cool air of the bedroom touched his bare flesh. And then he realized that this was the sign, this frozen center of his body, his pitiful, stupid body was her body, too: they were both dead or dying. His wife asked him, for the first time, what the matter was. She smiled as if vaguely annoyed by the intolerable ague that possessed him. Are you sick? she asked. Oh yes, he was indeed.

  — XXXVIII —

  He was a third-rate painter, who believed, because he had started painting as a ten-year-old in England, that he had been born a kind of prodigy, of the sort that simply could not blossom in the United States. When he came to America at fifteen, with his mother and father, he was enrolled in public high school, where his meager talents impressed his teachers, whose knowledge of painting had been gleaned from worn postcards from the Met and Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick, and so on. They knew that their pupil was—what was he?—he was far more talented and knowledgeable than anyone else in their classes or in the school, for that matter. All this praise and blather enforced his fantastic conception of himself. So his adolescence and young manhood passed, and at twenty-two or so he was turning out canvases that were banal parodies of de Kooning. In this, it must be said, he was not alone. He was quite insufferable in every way, suffused, as he was, with monstrous illusions of his restless and iconoclastic genius, although one had to know him for a time before these aberrations showed themselves plain.

  It so happened that he met a beautiful and funny and intelligent girl at one of the scores of parties that tended to erupt, acne-like, in the downtown “scene” of the mid-fifties, those carnival days. To the astonishment of everyone, he and this girl began an affair, and, six months later, married. It seemed clear that she married him because of what she took to be his genius and because of her devotion to this genius; and he married her because she—only properly—flattered him and, well, she was beautiful. “See?” he seemed to say to his peers, all of them peering out enviously from behind their inert versions of “Bill” and “Franz” and “Jackson.” She was, as noted, intelligent and educated, but basically ignorant of art when she married the whiz. But. Ah, but.

  But her marriage to him brought her, quite naturally, into contact with many artists on an almost daily basis—dinners, shows, openings, parties, weekends in the Hamptons before the sands had turned to gold dust, raucous and drunken Provincetown softball games, and so on. And these painters, as well as their wives and lovers, said enough, usually obliquely and glancingly, but enough, to let her know that they thought of her man as, well, not much of an artist, and a bit of a bore. Even more damaging to the connubial partnership, she began to: 1) see the work of good, sometimes very good, painters who were her husband’s peers; and 2) develop a critical eye, a set of aesthetic measures, a way of thinking about painting that was independent of her husband’s essentially envy-tainted remarks. And so she began to see clearly his work, and to battle with herself over what she thought to be her growing, silent betrayal of him. But he was, well, he was, really, not very good. Not very good at all.

  Slowly, softly, and as they say, as quietly as the famous little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, she began to think of him differently and then to treat him differently; she moved from a kind of genial tolerance to vague patronizing denigrations to blunt contempt. After two years, she left him. He continued to paint, of course, but his anger and unhappiness did nothing for his work, which, in point of fact, got worse. This was the period in which he did a series of what he called “Suburb” paintings, about which even his friends were uncomfortably silent. Some of these daubs were hung on the walls of new restaurants in the newly named SoHo; later, he moved to England, where his career foundered and collapsed.

  — XXXIX —

  TO THE EDITOR:

  Sheldon Dufoy’s letter to last week’s “Faith Base” section was in very poor taste and lacking of good sense and education in the Christian religion field. The Bible tells all Christians who are true Christians that there is no way of entering Heaven unless you are born again and accepting Jesus Christ in your heart as the only true Lord of the Universe, be it vast or otherwise, it does not matter for the Lord God is all Supreme.

  There is no other god or gods, and Mohammed (or Allah), Moses, Talmud, Buddha, Zen, Hindu Deity, and others, for instance, of the Eskimos, Africans, Bushmen, Pygmies, and so on are, are all false gods that lead nowhere but to everlasting torture in the fiery flames of Hell forever in eternity, Mr. Dufoy’s secular humanistic beliefs and fashionable liberal ideas are not based on the Holy Bible, which alone, he might not be aware of, is the Word of God.

  As for the translation of God’s word maybe being not accurate and so, therefore, not the true Word of God, as was spoken by Him or Jesus Christ, his son, Mr. Dufoy should know, to lighten up his ignorance, that the Almighty God or Jesus sometimes was at the side of King James and his helpers as they labored, in spirit and giving them strength in their labors. It is almost amusing to read such displays of ignorance however, but I hope that Mr. Dufoy soon asks God into his heart, for Jesus, is always standing by miraculously every single person at the same time, waiting for such an invitation, even though it may be given by a Jewish person, despite what they have done to Him over the thousands of years ever since Adam and Eve. He forgives even them and their crucifixion of Him, hard though it is for, He is the lord of forgiveness and a great Boss, no matter how small it may seem or unimportant.

  This letter was found in the desk drawer of its author some few weeks after a massive stroke led to his death outside the Pinto movie theater, which establishment he had just exited. The film playing at the time was Hot Bottoms, starring J’Adore Vegas. The letter was tucked into an addressed, stamped, but not sealed envelope. In another drawer of the same desk there was discovered some 1,500 pages of pornographic writings by the same author, rife with solecisms, tattered grammar, bad spelling, and a syntax seemingly borrowed from a lost language.

  Notable in this work of erotica—apparently a series of linked amorous adventures—is the presence of a recurring female character, a “quivering,” “shameless,” “tremballing,” “moaning,” “large-breasted,” and “full-lipsed” young woman, who, the patient reader is told, over and over again, looks exactly like Julia Roberts, and who often has “depraved” and “perverted” sex with other women, all of whom bear the name of the deceased author’s wife, Myrna.

  When told of the discovery of this venereal cache, Myrna unhesitatingly averred that Satan was certainly the author of such filthy material, for her husband—and, as his wife, she could, she said, testify to this—knew absolutely nothing about sex. “I could tell you some stories,” she remarked, and then fell silent.

  Satan’s evil literature was burned at a ceremony conducted by the White-Robed Ladies of the choir of the Lamb’s Blood Ministries, Inc., Church, in the parking lot, to cries of “Amen!,” “Jesus!,” and “Yes!,” wails of joy, and the loud clashing of tambourines. The purification ceremony was followed by a buffet luncheon in the church’s basement, where the pastor, Ellsworth Roy Womp, noticed how her White Robe flattered Myrna’s figure.

  — XL —

  He is driving his father’s Fleetwood sedan to the latter’s house, which is near a beach that he somewhat imprecisely recalls. He is driving because his father, while he seems to be strong and alert, is an old man who has had some minor road accidents of late, “moving violations,” as they are officially called. But when he
stops to get gas, his father, without a word, gets behind the wheel and takes over the driving.

  After traveling perhaps ten or twelve miles, his father turns the Cadillac off the highway into a sparsely wooded area from which a faint dirt road leads into scrub woods and dry grass. His father, without hesitation, takes this road, and suddenly accelerates, so that they are traveling at high speed. He has the idea, which comes to him calmly, that his father wants to kill both of them and he understands why, but says nothing. His father is smiling, pleased and smug and oddly youthful in manner and appearance.

  The car bursts out of the woods and the dirt road suddenly becomes a well-paved one, smooth and straight. It appears to be the main street of a small, falsely picturesque seaside town, quaint shops and art galleries seemingly everywhere. Yet on their right is a carton-like building made of gray concrete slabs, some ten stories tall, and in the final stages of construction. On a sixth-story scaffolding, a construction worker is performing oral sex on what seems to be a businessman, who bites the handle of his briefcase in sexual pleasure. The building, in its fierce ugliness, is wholly out of place in the cutely fake little town. A sign near the outdoor freight elevator reads NEPTUNES BAYE ESTATES. His father ignores the building and remarks that this is a very nice town, clean and quiet and right on the water, even though the people who live here are for the most part disgusting fanatic Christians who believe that God speaks to them. At the end of the street lies a glistening stretch of what looks to be a bay edged by a strip of white sand. “Look how the clear blue water sparkles and glitters!” his father says. “Just the place for the family to kick back and enjoy! Work? What’s that?” He looks at his father in astonishment.