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

sang-froid. Ah, she still had something for Joe; he looked at her with false warmth and affection and she looked back, laboring to emulate his falsity. What moments divine, what rapture serene.
    “It’s nice and transparent,” Helen said one night of a new poem that Joe modestly represented as a “breakthrough.” Joe had been writing for five or six years and each year had one of these breakthroughs. His poems neither changed nor improved, but there was, in his insistence on aesthetic discovery, an illusion for him of amelioration in his jottings. Joe was one of those “writers” of whom one constantly thinks as a tyro; then one day the realization that the person has been pottering around for ten years or so crystallizes. It is enough to make one a yahoo. “I mean it’s very—clear, yes, right. Transparent.” Joe, in a rage, but silent, reclining on the couch under the ink drawing whose mat and frame had brought out its weakness, allowed her to unbuckle his belt and open his trousers. It was she who was controlling him! What a bitch he thought her. He watched her face disappear in the lace of her slip, her arms above her head graceful and quick. A horny old bitch. He might as well have been a truck driver or a plumber or a goddamned teacher the way she so casually used him. A journalist or editorial assistant who wanted to write a novel! God! At that moment, he began to hate her, his spurious heritage stirring him to combat, gallant. She gently pushed him back on the couch and reached behind to unhook her brassiere. Old raunchy dumb bitch.
    So Joe began to speak of her, vulgarly and openly, at the bar in which he was something of a figure. It was a mean and poisonous place of third-rate painters, hangers-on, dedicated filmgoers, and arty idiots, pots and looms in every pocket, who were just passing through. The controlled and amused voice came forth from his expertly hirsute face, his Italian leather jacket was creased—so—in soft, elegant folds. He joked of her tremendous passion for him, her raging and almost “embarrassing” sexual hungers, the luscious nightgowns and intriguing underwear she bought to excite him. It was pathetic. He felt it almost his duty. Her tears. Her moans of gratitude. Where did they think he got this leather jacket? Nothing like an old broad! He and his auditors shuffled and chuckled, a bunch of regular guys that la vie d’art would never change. His words punctuated the long tale of malice and vindictiveness and failure that the bar spun out endlessly.
    As Helen got sicker, she made herself progressively more ridiculous by trying to be vivacious and girlish for Joe—who rarely went out with her anymore. She played right into the hands of his shabby stories about her, so that when they did meet someone that Joe knew, her behavior was such that Joe all but snickered and winked. He was contemptuous toward her, rude and arrogant—he assaulted her, getting even and getting even again for that “saltwater taffy,” that “transparent,” her sexual aggressiveness, the Italian leather jacket. Those ragged cavalrymen of his fantasy rode their broken nags out of the morning mists, bent on slaughter.
    As it would happen, Helen, with the predictability of melodrama, fell in love with Joe. He was so delicate, so vulnerable, yet so proud. At the moment that Joe realized that, he lied that he and Hope were thinking of “trying it again together.” He was precisely if not subtly cruel.
    He visited her almost daily at the hospital during her final confinement, bringing her flowers, magazines, books—once, quite unbelievably, he brought her a copy of As I Lay Dying: he had turned almost recklessly mean. What was there to lose? He occasionally held her hand and felt generous and forgiving. I like to think that Joe considered these small attentions instances of a refined sense of noblesse oblige.
    He of course went to the funeral in a new midnight-blue suit: nothing could have kept him out of