The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Sorrentino Read Free Book Online Page A

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 —
    H e 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