The Moon In Its Flight by Gilbert Sorrentino Read Free Book Online

cold or vulgar, but Helen thought of Joe as a last fling. Joe’s feelings concerning Helen were, as you will have guessed, cold and vulgar.
    Concerning Helen’s past, there isn’t much to say. She had hacked and hewn out a lopsided icon that passed for taste, had achieved an arresting face, and had been twice married to vaguely creative men who were moderately successful in vaguely creative jobs—the sort of men who wore ascots and smoked little Dutch cigars. In her thirties she had painted a little and clumped through a few parts in off-off-off-Broadway theater; a modern-dance class and a poetry workshop were also buried in the sludge. You will understand that she was a female counterpart to Joe. The one element that totally differentiated her from him was the fact of her critical illness: death and disease are impenetrable masks behind which the pettiness and shabbiness of personality are absolutely obscured. That we tend to forgive or overlook the flaws of the doomed probably saves us all from total monstrosity. But it must be borne in mind, however ungenerously, that Helen was a shambles of half-baked ideas, insistent on her thin skin yet an opportunistic traitor to her husbands and children, the latter now grown into drugs and therapy, sickened by the mother who embraced the “idea” of, for instance, Mick Jagger as Prophet with a moronic fervor. Young, young, she was forever young as she slid toward her death, brandishing a copy of the Village Voice.
    It is important to know that Joe thought, in the first weeks of their relationship, that it was his “art” that had seduced her; it had always been his “art” that had brought him his platoons of rutting young women—it was a subtle hook that he used to snare them and then lift their skirts. And if “art” failed, Dixie would materialize out of thin—very thin, indeed—air. When Joe discovered that this was not the case with Helen he was nonplussed, then hurt, then angered. She simply took Joe to be another charming and aesthetically intense young man—much like her husbands and previous lovers. She was right, but no one had ever before so squarely confronted Joe with the fakery of his life and its picayune products. He moved in a world of fakes like himself, so that their mutual interest lay in interdependent lying. Joe thought of himself as a “coterie” poet of carefully controlled output—and so did his friends. Now, suddenly, here was Helen, who with unfeigned equanimity treated him as the amateur dilettante—in Joe’s case the phrase is not tautological—he was and always would be. It never occurred to her that Joe thought of his fabrications as poems. One night she said a poem of his reminded her somehow of saltwater taffy. That’s not bad at all. Joe wasn’t used to this sort of comment on his work; he had never got anything like it from Hope, who thought of him as a serious and neglected artist, although she would not have recognized art if it fractured her skull.
    Joe and Hope had dinner together once a week—they were civilized and understanding and good friends and so on. How they rang and rang again each boring modern change. Hope was aware that Joe and Helen were having an affair; Ed Manx had told her about Helen, and Joe had corroborated the tale—and how. In her mind it was a “friendly” affair, and somehow good for Joe: a good, mature woman to discuss art with her husband—oh, once in a while they discovered themselves in bed together, but that was almost an accident, or the price one pays for the nurture of beauty. Over her shrimp cocktail she was reliably bright and engaging. Peck and Peck all the way, with plenty of small talk about some up-to-the-minute painter “into some wild things.” Her eyes were blank with that flat stare peculiar to natives of Southern California, the ocular equivalent, one might say, of a slack mouth. She had practiced for years to achieve it, God knows why: I suspect she confused it with