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

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.”
    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 —
    T he 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