The Abyss of Human Illusion

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  One day, the lovers “ran off” to live together, love together, hump each other crazy, and do this forever and ever, et cetera.For some reason, they headed in the man’s somewhat exhausted car, a nauseatingly green Ford Granada, to his home town, Lawton, Oklahoma. He had been born and raised in this burg, in which his parents and sister, washed in the blood of the lamb, still lived in a clapboard house, “the old homestead,” as the whole family liked to call it, smilingly: they might well have been the salt of the earth, or a pinch of it, anyway. The couple fucked their way, delirious and exhausted, through many motels, and on many occasions, pulled off the road to satisfy their enduring itch. They were, it goes without saying, seized by Paphian mania. The birds sang for them, and the sunshine glowed upon their stunned and unsated faces. There had never been a love like this in the history of the world, never.

  When they reached Lawton, and the woman had been introduced to Dad, who did and liked as hobbies, and Mom, deeply involved in, and Sis, a member of the Something and the Whatever; and after the shock of this surprise visit to the old homestead, it became almost immediately clear to the folks at home that this somewhat desperate-looking woman of forty or so, in a too-tight sweater and dirty jeans, was not, she was most assuredly not the prodigal’s wife; and, soon after, they realized that, even more damning, she was someone else’s wife. These sinful revelations were squeezed out of the couple over two or three days, the family working as an inquisitorial team, their Christian smiles of love and understanding slowly fading, fading, fading into masks of righteous and gray anger: sic transit gloria caritatis. On the third day, the woman got up and sat on the back porch, smoking and looking out over the grim landscape, seemingly good for growing nothing but spite and hatred. She knew that she had already surrendered.

  It will probably come as no surprise that the man, the seducer, the lover, he who would sacrifice all or at least some for his Helen, obeyed his family’s injunctions, their orders—given him with many tears and prayers by the bushel—to, well, ditch the whore tramp and beg Jesus to forgive him. The next afternoon, while his lover, who had slept on a mattress on the floor of a closet during their stay, was watching an old movie on TV, he came to her, falling to his knees in front of her, weeping and praying, and begged Jesus to forgive them both, and to wash them clean in his Sacred Blood that would always and as well as for all Eternity! She went upstairs, packed her nylon overnight bag, put her dirty clothes in a paper shopping bag, and sat on the floor: she was thirty-nine years old and had been—was it possible?—bewitched.

  That night they left for New York, and although they stayed at many of the same motels while en route to Lawton, the chastised sinner slept in bathtubs or in the car, with a pillow, of course, under his noble head, lest Satan steal upon him in the reaches of the night with soft music, delicate perfumes, and filthy images of the recent past. He and the woman spoke to each other, but as if he were a chauffeur to a slightly demented and dying patient. She directed him to an apartment house in Kew Gardens, and he left her standing in front of it, not before hoping that Jesus might enter her heart with his and, and soon. Then he was off, and she looked after the car, hoping that God, any God at all, would see to it that he died in a crash on the way back home. She entered the lobby, and rang the bell of an old friend, long divorced, hoping that she was home and hospitable. Then she’d see about calling her husband to explain—explain? If he even knew she’d left.

  — XLVI —

  One morning, working fitfully on a story that he knew was not going to be any good, and that each gluey additional phrase made more awkward and unwieldy, and, worse, egregiously literary and important, the old writer put his pen down and lit a cigarette, although he had just about completely given up smoking; he had no idea why—oh, to live longer and with zest and verve, and to make happy the health corps.

  He was tired, very tired, and too old and immovably marginalized for the story to make any difference to his life: what he had come to, in his mid-seventies, he had come to. He was respected, yes, he had known and been friends with many famous writers and artists, right, he had won a prize here, an award there, sure, odds and ends of distracted attention on the part of the fame machine. His current publisher, a kind of career “literary person,” had started his self-important little house with a young woman of very substantial means and a deep love of literature, of course. Their office “suite” was in Yonkers, magically transmuted to Bronxville on their letterhead. Yonkers/Bronxville was less than an hour from the city, so they could keep up (as they said) with things, yet it was quiet and relaxed, removed from the publishing frenzy (as they said) of New York. So they said and said again while they published salutary but soporific books of what one and all agreed was true literary merit. The publisher had spent his life so far working as an editor at two or three of the big mills, and had been responsible for many books of literary merit by many a spear carrier, some of whom had made back their wishful-thinking advances. But now he was an independent publisher, backed by his partner’s and, it should be known, lover’s money. He had left his unhappy wife and spoiled, unhappy children, who were, of course, really bright, for her. She understood him and his needs and hopes. The song goes on.

  The new house, eponymously Solomon & Sorel, published, it so turned out, the same sorts of books for which he had been responsible in the frenzied world of Publishing, Inc. They were respectable, they did no harm, they exhibited to a degree the shopworn tropes and humanistic razzmatazz beloved of reviewers (“as if we have lived with these confused characters through their so-human travails,” etc.), and they were much like the bunk published by the latest thirty-year-old genius with the fresh eye and astonishing grasp, the one who makes us look anew at literature, but they were, to the chagrin of S&S, destined for the great void. Perhaps soon they’d luck out, although this phrase in its vulgar candor, was not used.

  The house—Solomon was the publisher, Sorel the wealthy lover named, in exchange for the rent, “editor-in-chief”—picked up on the old writer, who is as we know currently smoking; they told him that if he didn’t have a current publisher—this was but a courtesy comment—S&S would be honored to be his outlet; he was marvelously this and courageous that and unfairly the other thing and tra la la la la. S&S (known already, cruelly, as So-So House) offered him an advance that would, he calculated cynically, cover his rent for not quite two months, an amount so modest, as they had no shame in saying, that it seemed to be a kind of honorarium presented him for being alive.

  So they would publish the novel that had been rejected thirty-seven times, and after the novel, a collection of his short stories: with four or five new ones added to the twenty or so he’d published in his lifetime, they’d have a very attractive book, their phrase. The writer agreed, although he knew that he had very little creative juice left. His good early work was all o.p., and when he looked at it, he couldn’t recognize any of it as his. His energy had been left in bars and beds, in quarrels and envies, in bitter disappointments. He was written out, and knew it.

  Solomon, and Sorel, too, for that matter, presented, over lunch with him, their notions of the possibilities that these two new books would open—he might well, finally, be recognized for the master that he was. The old writer listened and smiled, the hot air blowing about him at the table. He knew that his novel would silently appear and slowly disappear; his stories would barely appear and quickly disappear, and Solomon and Sorel would soon discover that he was not quite pleasant enough, not nearly as enthusiastic as he, well, should have been, and then decide that their relationship with him was not all that it should be. So that would be that; the old writer could see all this with ferocious clarity.

  But he wrote on, and would write on, bored with his work, bored with himself, bored with pure Solomon and breathless Sorel, bored with the very idea that any of this meant anything at all to anyone at all. Solomon had said that he was hopeful that his “Village novel,” as he called Jaunty Jolly, might be nominated for one
of the more prestigious prizes, the PEN/Faulkner, perhaps? It was about time. Perhaps the NBA? Why not?

  The old writer put the yellow legal pad he’d been writing on into a fresh file folder, on which he wrote Stories. He’d look at the story tomorrow, although he didn’t want to look at words any more, especially his own. But he would, he would. He should have stopped this foolishness years ago, but he didn’t know what else to do and he was not quite ready to disappear into dead silence. Not with the PEN/Faulkner waiting! He was almost amused.

  — XLVII —

  THE PARK

  Donnie had gone in to San Antonio with two other soldiers from his advanced training company in Fort Sam Houston’s Medical Field Service School. After hours of drinking in one dump after another, and the boisterous, aimless wandering in search of shabby adventure that is the soldier’s substitute for leisure, he somehow lost his companions, or they him. He wandered around in the vicinity of the Alamo, and then “found himself,” almost literally, on a bench in the middle of a little park, broke and stupid drunk. He hoped that an M.P. or A.P. patrol wouldn’t find him, for he was their perfect catch; and he knew, too, that a city cop would be all too happy to arrest him, one of the flood of vermin that daily spoiled the city. His “civilian” clothes of khakis, low-quarters, and a hideously figured shirt—an AWOL shirt, as it was known—would fool nobody: he was most clearly a soldier and a drunken bum. So he sat, breathing deeply, and looking around nervously and fatalistically: he was drunk and broke in the middle of the San Antonio night; what else was there to say? He thought, absurdly, that if he could manage to walk without staggering, he might be able to get to the bus depot, which was, he was certain, not too far; there, he could look like any other dumb soldier waiting to get back to Fort Sam. He had no money, but the main thing now was for him to get off the street.

  A man, perhaps five years older than he, was quite suddenly standing in front of him, and he waited to hear the cold command, “Stand up, soldier,” but instead heard the man saying that the M.P.’s were due on their rounds through the park any minute and he’d be pinched for sure. Did he have any place to go for the night? He had no place to go, no; no place to go.

  THE HOTEL

  The man lived or was staying in a room at the Cactus Hotel, an old frame building of three floors on the edge of the West Side, the Mexican district. The place was bleak but clean, as was the room that they entered on the top floor. The mended sheets looked as if they’d been changed recently, and two paper-thin towels on door hooks were not noticeably soiled. There was a bathroom in the hall that served the three or four guests, so to speak, who lived on the floor. He stripped to his briefs and T-shirt in the bathroom, washed with a cake of Lifebuoy that the man had given him, and dried himself with one of the towels, which had a faint aroma of Aqua Velva. When he got back to the room, the man was in bed and apparently asleep. Sitting at the side of the bed was a small fat man with thick-lensed glasses, wearing a dirty, wrinkled suit and a gray fedora with a ridiculously wide brim. He was talking, rather urgently, to the man in the bed about a movie that, he remembered, had to do with a gangster who had a recurring nightmare about being lost in a rainstorm, a white rainstorm, yeah, he was crazy. The man in the bed made no reply. “Do you remember Kay Francis?” he said to Donnie. “She had a little lisp. There’s a woman whose ass I’d like to fuck.” Donnie smiled faintly and got into bed and the fat man asked to look at his feet, and Donnie, although he had no idea why, stuck his legs out. The man examined each toe, then carefully and lovingly licked his soles. Donnie lay there, oddly pleased, amused even, and then the fat man got up and as he turned to leave, said “Kay Francis,” and stroked his crotch. The whole scene seemed absolutely natural and even banal. This was the sort of thing that happened at the Cactus Hotel, certainly. Donnie got under the sheet and turned out the shadeless lamp at the side of the bed, then lay, staring awake, after a time realizing, although he didn’t want to realize it, that he was sexually aroused, that he wanted the man next to him to turn and reach over and touch him, kiss him, do whatever he wanted. What was the matter with him? Two weeks earlier he had fucked three whores in Nuevo Laredo, he certainly wasn’t a fag! But he wanted the man to reach over and touch him, touch him, and ask him to do things with him. He turned on his side, his face burning with shame and lust. He knew the man was awake and aware of his desires, and knew, too, that all he had to do was make the first move. He lay rigid, astonished and revolted by his erection.

  THE MORNING

  The man bought them both chili with beans, flour tortillas, and a couple of cold Carta Blancas the next morning in a little Mexican hole in the wall, said he had to get to work, and they shook hands. Donnie felt ill at ease, in the knowledge that the man had surely known of his aberrant desire of the night before, but nothing, of course, was said by either of them, and the little fat man’s visit or appearance was as if it had never occurred; it existed as a vague invention.

  Donnie walked, losing his way three or four times, to the bus depot and as he got to the entrance a Sergeant First Class with an I Corps patch came out and Donnie asked him if maybe he could spare a buck toward a ticket back to Fort Sam. The sergeant laughed at him: “Walk, you sorry fuck,” he said.

  Donnie spent the next six hours panhandling while avoiding M.P.’s until he finally had enough money to buy a ticket back to the fort. He got to his barracks about 4:00 p.m.; a couple of semi-drunks were playing rummy on top of a foot locker, drinking Lone Star and eating hot cherry peppers; otherwise the almost silent barracks had that sad, chaotic Sunday look. One of them looked up, and smiled. “Hey, daddy cool—you get you some hot Meskin ass?” Donnie smirked and pumped his fist. “Fuckin’ A.”

  — XLVIII —

  Five years before the crash of October 1929, Guy Bonney—the name an Americanization of Gaetano Bonifacio—married Charlotte Briczewicz, a girl of Polish extraction. He’d met her at a “good clean dance” in Saint Rocco’s basement, and they began keeping company, as they used to say, soon after. Her family was bitterly unhappy, fearing, perhaps, that the pure Polish blood of their ancient Tarnowski line would be forever tainted. Guy was a Catholic, but … On the other hand, Guy’s family was accepting of Charlotte, the marriage, and even what they considered to be her strange moralistic family—it’s fine to be Catholic, but the Briczewiczes seemed, well, a little crazy? As Mr. Bonifacio said after a visit “All the saintsa pitcha all over the house-a! Madonn’!” They were aware, too, of the slightly disguised bigotry of Charlotte’s family toward “Eyetalians,” but, perhaps because of their roiled Mediterranean ancestry, figured that since we are all mongrels that it doesn’t much matter who marries anybody.

  Guy began to do well in the small home-contracting and remodeling business he’d begun with an older brother, Angelo, and soon a son was born to the couple, who were living in a small frame house in Gerritsen Beach. They were happy, more or less, but Charlotte, swayed by her parents and their unrelenting campaign, had begun to feel superior to Guy, and to find many occasions on which to suggest to him that he was, ah, lacking in some of those things that made America a great country for real Americans. His father, my God, she often noted as if in passing, could hardly speak English, and even Guy, even Guy had a faint accent, not much, but a little. It was sometimes a little embarrassing when they stepped out for the evening with another “nice” couple (“nice” may be read as “refined” Americans). Guy wondered why his supposed accent had never been mentioned before they were married. Well, she was a pretty good wife, despite her growing oddities.

  Guy’s business had, of course, suffered because of the deepening Depression, but with ingenuity, a little luck, and some contacts he’d made, he got a city contract here, some NRA work there, and so on, and they seemed to be doing just fine. This, it may come as no surprise, annoyed the Briczewicz family, and, for that matter, Charlotte herself, even though she had a new bedroom suite, an electric refrigerator—a Frigidaire!—and a gray Persian lamb coat. The
story, which emerged, sluglike, from the muck of her family’s gossip, was that Guy—Guytanno!—was some kind of a gangster or something, or that he was mixed up with gangsters; something was going on. Wasn’t his office on Wolcott Street in Red Hook, where all the Black Hand guineas lived and figured out ways to steal from decent Americans? Them and the kikes? The atmosphere between Guy and his in-laws was not exactly poisonous, but he was made to understand that he’d better “be good” to Charlotte and her little Stanley, even though the poor baby, so they thought, was sadly corrupted; thank God that he was at least blond. It was the Novena that Mrs. Briczewicz had made to the Infant Jesus of Prague that gave them that small gift. Well, God had his reasons, but they could be hard to understand.

  Guy tried to pay as little heed to this blanket malice as possible, and, in what was a misplaced attempt to persuade his in-laws to warm to him, to convince them that he was a good solid American husband and father, he regularly invited them to dinner with him and Charlotte and the baby. They dined, always, in a restaurant on Forty-forth Street just west of Eighth Avenue, the Milano, to which, it should be said, he drove them in a new Packard that his excellent credit had made it possible for him to buy: they looked wisely at each other as they settled into its rear seat. His “mom” and “dad” always accepted these invitations, for Charlotte had made it clear to them that they needn’t worry that the Eyetalian family would accompany them: she had to suffer their loud hospitality once a month at their house in Bath Beach, and she’d let Guy know, indeed, that that was enough! His in-laws despised the fact of the Milano almost as much as they despised the fact of the Packard, but most of all, they were angry that Guy had the money to pay for these dinners! Where did he get this money? Nonetheless, they packed the food in, from the antipasto through the cannoli and espresso with anisette, complaining that this “spicy Eyetalian food” would, as always, give them terrible heartburn. “It’s just like all Eyetalian food,” Mrs. Briczewicz said, with wondrous regularity. “You’d think that after being in this country all these years they’d learn how to cook the right way.” She would shake her head at such barbarian intransigence.