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

the first rank of mourners. What is surprising is that Hope went with him. Joe stood there in the calm morning, his face a marvel of abstraction, Hope beside him, her flat stare finding useful employment, in a strikingly severe black-and-silver dress that she had bought a month earlier for an important opening. They were so anxious for each other that they kissed and clutched and fumbled in the taxi home from Queens. Perhaps it was the first step to trying it again together.

THE DIGNITY OF LABOR

    The White Shirt
    Some young man, Bill will do for a name, out of the Army for three months and tinged, if you will, all right, tinged with a gloom well short of despair, got a job. This was Bill’s first job, save for six months spent as a dishwasher and three years as an infantryman, neither of which are now considered actually to be jobs, but are thought of as burdens, or perhaps misfortunes. How wise and wonderful the world has become, filled to bursting with careers!
    There he was, in the basement stockroom of Art Adventures, an art-supply store in midtown Manhattan. One of the somewhat shabby and unenthusiastic of Bill’s chores was to fill exceedingly small glass jars with glaringly bright poster paints “in all popular colors,” these paints having been mixed in hundredgallon vats in Art Adventures’ laboratory, you’ll pardon the word, affix identifying labels to these filled jars, and stack them, in neatest rows, on the steel shelves reserved for them and other sundries of the art business.
    Bill’s immediate boss was an adenoidal schlepper from Ozone Park whose name was Stewie, a self-proclaimed hipster, drenched in mambo lore, who sang, hummed, and whistled, day in and day out—to employ a poster-paint phrase—“Rock Around the Clock.” Had Stewie’s name not been Stewie, it would have been Carl, Ernie, Cliffie, or Sheldon. Now you know who he is! Of course, Stewie took stern delight in telling Bill and his colleague, a Puerto Rican headbreaker, Felix, what to do and how to do it. Felix had been “given a break” and hired, freshly paroled, God only knows why, out of Coxsackie; he often quietly mused, when he and Bill took a smoke break, on the possibility of accidentally maybe stabbing Stewie to death. So the days of that sunny, crisp fall passed, a ragged dream of honest work’s rewards and the second chance.
    One morning, Stewie told Bill and Felix that he wanted the jars of poster paint shelved so that the virtually unnecessary labels—which comically and redundantly described the startling red or sickly green paints within their jars as RED or green—faced forward, so that, Stewie wisely reasoned, you fuckin well know what you’re fuckin pickin when you fill a fuckin order. He was a logical sort, take him all in all. Bill suggested, gently, gently, that this seemed wasteful of time and effort, for a half-blind drunken idiot could tell the difference between colors, and in the dark, for Christ sake. But Stewie, with the sort of ravaged and tottering intelligence that might well have sent him to law school had he not been so ambitious, was not having any of this. Yizzel fuckin do what I say, he noted; or, perhaps, yizzel fuckin do it right; or yizzel fuckin well do it. Bill rejoined, weakly, that, hell, come on, there’s nobody who could mistake RED for YELLOW, etcetera. But this argument cut no ice with Stewie. Felix, attentive to this dialogue, fingered the switch-blade knife in his pocket, his eye on Stewie’s pallid neck, till the latter ended the conversation by arguing that Bill just thought he was a wise guy because he’d been in the fuckin Army. Bill fell silent, searching for the arcane meaning hidden in this observation, but gave up. What the hell. Felix, in a quiet aside, suggested to Bill that they might seriously injure Stewie’s sconce with a carelessly wielded gallon jug of India ink, the faggot punk jive motherfucker.
    I have not yet mentioned Mr. Pearl, the stockroom supervisor,