The Abyss of Human Illusion

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  That Larry came to accept and then believe that what he had not said was what he had said, and that the converse was also the case, is perhaps, surprising, but only if it is not known that Larry never remembered just what he had said. He was easily convinced that opinions that he did not hold were dear beliefs, and so on. As words left his mouth, they disappeared into oblivion, or, in this case, into Martha’s linguistic workshop. So their marriage moved along, a series of deft disguises, masquerades, and incredible stories, a kind of anthology of make-believe. Both of them came to embrace the world that their conversations created as if it was life itself—it was, in a way, of course, and no worse, really, than that loved by couples who pride themselves on the honesty and candor that most often leads to misery. Their marriage was, as Larry would put it, “swell,” which Martha would call “deeply respectful of each other’s feelings.”

  — XXII —

  It was a little vanity case, its cloth covering worn and faded with years and use. It had also been subjected to the moisture of the various bathrooms in which she’d kept it since well before they were married. It sported a small, blurred, essentially useless mirror on the inside of its lid, and in its compartments were lipsticks, tweezers, nail files, emery boards, mascara, cuticle scissors, and the like.

  On its outer lid there was an inept cartoonish drawing of a little girl in pigtails and a tulip-patterned dress, and a little boy in shorts, holding hands. They wore imbecilic and oddly sinister smiles. Above these figures, in a semicircle, were the words, HANDLOME IL AL HANDLOME DOEL. He read these words every day over the seven years that they’d been married, and in his self-centeredness, and supreme lack of curiosity, he had assumed that this message was some soppy maxim, an insufferable platitude in a bastard language whose phonemes were strangely close to English yet repulsively distant and vulgar.

  After he discovered that his wife had been relentlessly unfaithful to him with God knows how many men, friends, acquaintances, pickups, the butcher, the baker—anyone in pants, as they say—and often in their bed—“their” took on a grim comic shimmer in his mind—they separated. Some months later, in a kind of sudden dazzle of lucidity, he read, he understood, he saw clearly the message on the vanity case—of course! Handsome is as handsome does. Of course! He stepped back as if slapped, for the obscurity of the message lay, all those years, in its candor. The message was, this he knew, a counter, a sign for his wife, somehow. He did not know how to put this, or think about this, but the plain message, which to him was unreadable, was her message. She had always been in plain sight, but he had failed to see her, he had dismissed her, he had not read or cared to read that which had been, always, before him.

  — XXIII —

  The elevator is huge, the size of a small apartment, and is filled with rows of desks, more, it would appear, than can fit into the space. On the rear wall of the elevator is a blackboard with chemical and mathematical symbols scattered across its surface. The door opens and he is on the sixth floor of the building in which he lived just after his divorce. This was his floor and he walks down the corridor, its walls now filthy, smeared with dirt and grease, the tiles underfoot pitted, scarred, and broken. He comes to his door and checks the apartment number, which is, rather strangely, he thinks, 6&6$6%. But he opens the door.

  The apartment is the one he lived in when he was a little boy, complete with the faded brown studio couch, the Philco floor-model radio, and the hammered copper bas-relief reproduction of The Last Supper, with its Latin inscription across the upper border: AMEN DICO VOBIS QUIA UNUS VESTRUM ME TRADITURUS EST. He hears a noise in the kitchen and looks away from the vaguely glowing image on the wall to see his mother standing in the kitchen doorway.

  She seems pleased to see him, even though he is clearly startled at her appearance, that of a young woman in a summer pinafore, her blond hair in a loose chignon. He is about to speak to her, when she says, “I hope you’re not hungry, I’m dead.” She is apologetic and he remembers that the reason he is here is to tell her why he wasn’t with her when she died. He knows that he won’t tell her the truth, but decides that a lie is all to the good in this situation, especially with the radio tuned to The Make-Believe Ballroom. She smiles at him and says that it’s all right, she knows that he wanted to be there, and “after all, who wants to travel in the bitter cold to Jersey City?!” She sits on the studio couch and motions for him to sit next to her. “I thought I’d ask you over so that we can listen to the Lux Radio Theater,” she says. “Lana Turner is on tonight. They discovered her in a drugstore, you know.” The radio is playing Bix Beiderbecke’s “Margie,” and he starts to laugh.

  — XXIV —

  Vince didn’t like people to do what he regularly accused them of never doing, if, that is, these people performed these acts after being told by Vince that they never thought to perform them. Perhaps he thought that the acts, performed precisely as he regularly complained that they were never performed, were somehow sullied or cheapened because of the fact that they occurred after his complaint. This may seem absurd to the point of a tattered neurosis, but such is the world. There are more serious insanities to ponder, surely, but we are, for the moment, caught in the toils of this one.

  For instance, let’s assume that Vince’s wife, had he a wife, never brought home from the store a particular brand of cereal that Vince liked, and that Vince often mentioned this. If, on his wife’s next shopping trip, she brought home the favored cereal, Vince would say, in irritation and contempt, tinged with sadness, that the only reason that she’d brought home the cereal was because he’d noted that she never brought it home. The cereal was diminished in value, likewise the act of buying it, because this act had not been his wife’s idea, but his.

  So Vince rather sullenly lived his life, slowly and steadily being deprived by others of many—oh, many—things that he desired (and not only tangible things, but words, acts, even let’s say, emotions and “states of being”), since others simply stopped responding to his complaints of their neglect and blithe thoughtlessness. Why bother? may well have been their rationale. He never quite knew what ultimately hit him—and hit him and then hit him again. What he did know was that nobody, not a single person, honored his requests, his desires, his needs, before he was compelled to voice them, and when he did voice them they ignored him. They ignored him! It had not always been thus, but what it had been, indeed, was crass and crude, no better than the current situation, which revealed his friends, his imaginary wife, his colleagues at work, anyone who had the least acquaintance with him, to be shallow and selfish. How wonderful it was to be right.

  — XXV —

  In his old age, childless and thrice-divorced, with all of his old friends either dead, sick, or gone to sunbaked funereal places that were beyond his wish even to imagine them, Arthur began, one day, with no plan to speak of, to tote up, idly, to be sure, his grievances: the slights he’d endured, the insults, the petty humiliations unanswered and unavenged. He listed the unreciprocated kindnesses he’d shown others, the unanswered letters, the snubs, hurts, bad manners revealed, the advantage taken of him by those he had considered friends, or, at the least, not enemies. The project, if it may be given such a name, overwhelmed him, and he began to recover incidents, long forgotten, that he added, painstakingly and precisely, to his cruel catalog. He felt as if driven before a wholly unexpected avalanche.

  He bought a notebook, rather, an accounting ledger, and meticulously divided it into twenty-six sections, given over alphabetically to those people he had, for the most part, fished out of oblivion. Now he could enter, with great care, all that these people had, he knew, he remembered, done to him. After each name—sometimes, when he had forgotten the name that went with the now-despised face, he would simply describe the person in a mnemonic shorthand—he wrote a carefully constructed synopsis of the sneer, the slight, the shabby act or remark that he attached to the person so recalled. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Arthur pulled out of the pit of lost years, miserie
s long buried, and these would serve to illuminate others, many others, in their various darknesses. And, too, many of the wounds he felt once again were, to put it gently, imagined wounds. But they were added to his expanding lists.

  His book, after a year or so, begot another, and then yet another, as his grievances grew and flowered, so that this accounting became his entire occupation. He was, if the word may be given a perverse reading, supremely content. A shabby euphoria, a Calvinist paradise.

  — XXVI —

  He sat in a latticed-metal patio chair at a metal table so battered by time and weather that its stained, dirty-white enameled surface was pitted and gouged, thoroughly ravaged by large areas of rust. The sun was low in his eyes.

  He was drinking canned 3.2 beer from a case that sat half under the table on the concrete floor; the beer was warm and metallic in his mouth and he’d drunk eighteen cans of it: he wasn’t, however, really drunk. Surely, he could stand up easily and walk into the beer hall from which a low-pitched roar of aimless anger and boredom and hilarity issued without cease. The other tables on this little concrete apron were mostly empty, but here and there other drunks sat drinking resignedly.

  He could easily, easily walk into the beer hall but he didn’t care to, no. Above the low monotonous din there now floated a female singer’s voice, all blond and clean, remarking on the fact that she is lonesome and sorry and wondering if you are too, whoever you is. Then she stopped but the roar went on. He pulled open his fly buttons and slid himself forward on the chair, then pissed on the concrete between his feet, while he drank, stupidly, from a fresh can of beer. Maybe the drunks at the other tables would notice the pool of urine spreading on the concrete beyond his table, but they didn’t and they wouldn’t. They’re all pissing on the ground, too, he thought. He knew it. Nobody wanted to go to the latrines in the beer hall, for Christ’s sake.

  Somebody—two somebodies—came out onto the concrete apron, headed for an empty table, each carrying a case of beer: one had Lone Star, the other Pearl. They were smoking and laughing, squinting into the late sun in their shining new fatigues. It was Rosie! One of them was Rosie! And the other was Koenig? Koenig! It was amazing, it was amazing, amazing. He put both hands on the table to push himself up on his feet and walk through the little pond of his urine, Rosie would see how dumb and funny that was, he’d walk over and say hello to them, Rosie and Koenig. Sit down and remember that chickenshit motherfucker platoon sergeant who got killed, thank God, just like they got killed. But now they were back, back here in the grim Texas sunlight, back and alive among the drunken living. They didn’t die after all? Only that cracker prick of a sergeant got it, checked the fuck out. Good. He got ready to get up, he could do it, easy.

  — XXVII —

  More stories than we care to acknowledge are poignant yet wholly banal, and perhaps those that we insist on as poignant are not that at all, but are, rather, bathetic, sentimental, saccharine, or, even more dreadful, creakingly “worldly.” Perhaps this one fits the mold, if it can be called a story.

  There were two friends, young men, filled with idealism, and the love, just burgeoning, for art and the artist’s life. We know them well. One becomes a high school English teacher, the other moves to Los Angeles and begins work at a talent agency in Beverly Hills, in, of course, the mailroom. After a few years he opens his own agency, and ten years later, is successful and rich, a millionaire “many times over.”

  The friends’ correspondence, once brisk and regular, slowly peters out into a letter now and again, strained and brief, and finally settles into the official “holiday greetings and how is Susan” cards. The teacher is sure—and in this he is correct— that his millionaire friend stopped writing first because he has passed beyond their youthful friendship and become “too good” for him, although he does not think this prim and vaguely parental phrase. Here he is, in Queens, while “the famous agent”—and he does think this—shops on Rodeo Drive and has dinner with movie stars.

  But the reason that the Los Angeles friend stopped writing is more subtle than this, more convoluted, perhaps. He broke off the correspondence because of his muddled belief that his old friend has long held him in contempt for his success, and for how that success was achieved; that he had somehow sold out his talents, his artistic soul, etc., etc. But this is not true, the teacher has always been pleased for if envious of his friend, and has, very unlike him, known, ever since they were just past their post-adolescence, that neither of them were artists, nor had any talent for art of any kind, and that his friend did not know this. He often recalls a letter that he received soon after his friend went to work for the agency, the gist of which was that it would be a great place to gather material for his novel, which he had finally seriously started. It was, of course, never ended.

  This is, as suggested, not much of a story, although another writer, Henry James for an ideal instance, might be attracted to its small cruelties and faint ironies and take it on.

  — XXVIII —

  Steve had subscribed to the New Yorker for some seven or eight years, and doggedly read all the fiction in every issue, trying to absorb and internalize, I suppose is a just word, the strained sophistication of the prose, its nervous hipness, aloof disingenuousness, its remote, somewhat bored whimsy. It goes without saying, perhaps, that he had “submitted” his own stories, they were many, to the magazine for five years, faithfully sending a story out on the day after he got one back, its rejection slip clipped to his beautifully printed-out “stuff,” as he called his work. There was never a note, encouraging or otherwise, written on the slips; for that matter, it was my fantasy that the rejection slips were attached to the papers in a strangely dissociated way, that they had somehow found the stories and seized upon them as prey: no human agency seemed ever to have been involved. I once suggested that he send his stories to a magazine that was, well, not as impressed with itself but he gave me, as it is said, a look.

  I sometimes wanted to tell him my own opinion of the magazine’s fiction, but never did, for it is not possible to use the phrase “a New Yorker story,” without its devotees hustling to the journal’s defense, smirking at one’s gauche ignorance, and telling—and telling again—the offending and pitiable ignoramus that there is no such thing as a New Yorker story, that there might have been, years ago, such a thing, but that now—look, just look!—Hip and Engaged and Transgressive and Absolutely Unexpected, brékékékék koáx koáx, and just plain Well Written! They wouldn’t publish Faulkner for Christ’s sake! Not their sort of thing.

  So I said nothing; on the contrary, I took notes on certain stories, on certain phrases, on bright wise similes, so that Steve and I could discuss their subtleties. I don’t know why I did this, save that I was feeling a little bad for him. One day, the latest issue had a story in it written by a young woman who had been, ten years earlier, in a writing workshop with Steve at the New School. Steve read the story three or four times that first day, turning to look at the author’s name—Joye Lapidus—again and again, her name in that “beautiful, beautiful” New Yorker typeface. It is beautiful, I said, classic, traditional, aristocratic, really. Look at the “e” in “Joye.” He nodded, and I knew he was seeing “Steven.”

  — XXIX —

  The old man knew he was dying. The doctor had come after an episode of terrible agony that he’d endured that morning, and after the briefest of looks at his patient, who twitched and writhed and rocked in pain, he said that he wanted him admitted to the hospital immediately. But the stubborn old fool refused to go in an ambulance, and the doctor, who knew his catalog of neuroses and prejudices and insanities virtually by heart, said that he’d drive him in his car, which was parked right in front of the building. “I’ll not have the horse’s ass gawms staring at me in an ambulance, by Jesus,” the old man said. “Goddamned fools and creeping Jesus Lutherans, may God damn them to hell.”

  He asked the doctor to go down and wait in his car, he’d be right down, he wanted to put on
some clothes, he’d be goddamned if he’d leave the house in his pajamas like some shanty Irish greenhorn. The doctor told him not to be too long, then repeated this information accompanied by a pointing and admonishing index finger, and left.

  The old man put on a starched white shirt, a dark-blue tie with a small light-blue paisley figure on its ground, an Oxford gray shadow-striped suit with vest, black shoes and black silk socks, and a gray homburg. Then he left, with his daughter, who had been standing, during the doctor’s visit, in the kitchen, looking out at the neighboring roof. She didn’t want to have this sick father, she didn’t want to have this dead father, she didn’t want to have to be alive to put up with this. But here she was; with this mean, dying old man. She was afraid and relieved that he’d probably not recover this time.

  On the landing between the ground and second floor, the old man stopped, stood straight for a moment, then bent over and vomited black, grainy blood, once and then again. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, then inspected his shoes and trouser cuffs for stains. “You’d better clean this mess up, Skeezix,” he said, “the Scowegian will have a fit and you’ll never hear the end of it.” She went back up the stairs. “I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I get dressed,” she said, and he waved her away and, panting with the pain in his innards, continued down, cold sweat making his face shine resplendently with doom.