The Abyss of Human Illusion

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  Charlotte’s family—and Charlotte as well—refused to pronounce the name of the restaurant correctly, even though they had heard Guy, as well as various waiters and the owner, say the word many times. They called it the MY-LANNO, seeming to savor the disappointed look on Guy’s face. He’d corrected them the first few weeks, and then realized what was being done: this was a subversive marginalization of him. MY-LANNO was an American word, or should be. Period. And so Guy, without calling attention to it, began to say “MY-LANNO” as well, and was aware of the smug contempt of Charlotte and her parents in their easy victory.

  Now he had lost, one might say, virtually everything but his business, and had become just another dim, wayward American—or so he perhaps regretfully thought. But Charlotte was still his, still blond and blue-eyed, still nice to look at. It wasn’t really important to be what he had once been. Was it? “Are you and Sophie free for dinner Sunday at the MY-LANNO?” he’d ask his father-in-law. Who would pause to think about his answer, oh yes, pause to think about it.

  — XLIX —

  Billy and his wife, Audrey, were vegetarians, and, like many people who embrace what they consider to be salutary and superior modes of behavior, they, in their perfection, slowly yet relentlessly marginalized all those friends who were not of their dietary persuasion. In this, they were, perhaps, much like cultists, whose happily demented myths make them smugly exclusionary. As the years passed, and up to their elbows in brown rice and tofu, they made many new friends of their ilk, of course.

  When one first met Billy, who was a routing clerk for UPS, it seemed, for some reason, that he “did” something interesting: something artistic, perhaps; or excitingly political—shadowy, vague, radical. He wore a long, well-trimmed beard, round wire-rim glasses, and smoked a lot of marijuana, which he was candid but not too candid about—as if it wasn’t really worth hiding, yet just lawless enough to keep from the unanointed, the squares. To be enlightened as to his smoking habits was to feel—or at least, many people felt themselves to be—intimate adepts. After knowing Billy a little while, however, it became clear that what he “did” was work as a routing clerk for UPS and stay half-stoned at all times. Still, his rickety “mystique” (such were the times) somehow prevailed, amid the smoke and the perfected ravings of the Stones, the Dead, the Airplane, and other assorted multimillionaire rebels. He was a UPS routing clerk, yes, and nothing else, but he was so perfectly hip that it still seemed as if there was something secret and darkly interesting about his life, though it was, metaphorically speaking, a life that possessed the quality of a paper bag.

  Audrey was a large, hefty, yet rawboned woman of a startling homeliness: she wasn’t ugly or deformed; her features were regular, as they say, but there was a blank neutrality to her face, a kind of dumb look, and her body, oddly enough, seemed to be dumb as well, if that makes any sense. Those who know Audrey will understand this. She deferred to Billy in all things, and was given to small, consciously half-suppressed smiles when some fringe idea—political, artistic, sexual—was mentioned over the broccoli-rutabaga casserole, as if the mysterious Billy knew all about such things, was involved in such things, had, perhaps, thought up such things. She contributed to Billy’s phantom panache by herself pretending that he “did” something. For all I know, she may well have thought that Billy had a secret, romantic life that he kept from her so as to protect her and their snug domesticity. Where he got the time to lead this life, she would not explore, for when he was not at the UPS job, he was usually at home, cannabis-paralyzed, his ears wide open to the music on their stereo. Rock on, man!

  Audrey began attending a macramé class at a nearby community college (Macramé: Fun and Function), and began a small friendship with a woman, some fifteen years her junior, who expressed fascination and delight at the fact that Audrey was a vegetarian, and mentioned, more than once, that she had long considered abandoning meat. Things went along, and Audrey invited her to dinner a few weeks later, at which she and Billy seemed to get along very well. She loved the dinner—eggplant, tomatoes, fresh corn, and yellow squash made into a kind of pedestrian ratatouille, salad, carrot cake—one of Audrey’s specialties—and herb tea. Billy suggested that he “did”—oh, it’s not, he hinted, important—this and that, and Akina, the new friend, was deeply impressed by the reticence of the really interesting Billy. Audrey, of course, helped the scene along, as always: smiles, silences, the works.

  They began seeing a lot of Akina, a small, dark woman who wore, more often than not, a strained, worried expression, as if she were about to be interrogated, and whose light-coffee complexion appeared to be—how to put this?—manufactured. Perhaps it was. It was summer now, and when the three went to the beach, Akina, who couldn’t swim, seemed either unaware or uncaring that a profusion of her black pubic hair flourished wildly at either side of her bathing suit’s crotch. This sight may have maddened Billy, for soon he and Akina were committing adultery with, as they say, abandon, and soon Billy moved out, leaving Audrey hurt and bewildered.

  Billy left his job at UPS, at Akina’s urging, so that he could “do” all the things that he was capable of; she had realized, of course, that Billy could do nothing at all, but she thought that with his—with his what?—he would make a really great life for them both. Billy had some money, slyly saved in a bank account unknown to Audrey, and they lived off that and the few dollars Akina made working in a boutique on St. Mark’s Place, just then beginning its ascent into the diligently fake disreputability it would soon attain. He ignored Audrey’s pleas for financial help, smoked more “dynamite weed” than ever, and, with Akina’s urging, began to eat meat again: vegetarianism was for dumb fucks—like Audrey! They did a lot of laughing over their lamb chops.

  Audrey knew that Billy would tire of Akina, re-embrace his lost, mysteriously vacant life, and return home to her. She suggested that this sort of thing had happened before and that she was, always, to blame for Billy’s sexual escapades, and that they had been mutually planned. She smiled Billy’s secret smile, his I-can’t-talk-about-it smile, and lighted a cigarette made of some sort of rank legume. “Billy,” she said, “well … Billy.” Then she changed the subject; she, and it, obscured in a cloud of smoke that smelled very like a burning barn.

  —L—

  He didn’t understand Los Angeles. It seemed to him a demented collection of buildings scattered haphazardly over a vast area. This lack of understanding was profoundly intensified by the fact that he not only was unable to drive, he had no sense of direction. The old friends from New York with whom he and his restive and discontented wife were staying, took them here and there during their two-week visit, but his pale role as complaisant passenger made the city even more lavishly and bewilderingly strange, for he was never able to locate or isolate or even remember anything that might have served as a landmark, and only knew where he was moments before his host turned into the street where his little cottage stood behind a scrubby lawn that ran directly to the curb with no sidewalk intervening, a commonplace, as he discovered, in California: a place with no sidewalks: pedestrians knew just where they stood.

  Perhaps this sense of disconnection, this topographical anomie, contributed to his emotional desuetude, his stunned vacancy, when his wife abruptly left him one sunny, blue Los Angeles day, with a man she had met at a party they’d attended, a man whose name he didn’t know nor face remember: a nonentity, if it came to that. The note she left for him was cheerful, even breezy, as if he had been in on the whole affair and had helped plan it. But he soon realized that he, too, had become a nonentity, now that his wife had left him, that he had “lived,” so to speak, only in relation to her and her curiously blithe selfishness. His host and hostess were enormously kind to him, and took great care not to seem pitying, although this care was in itself a form of pity, as he and they knew. He was, perhaps, made more contemptible to himself as he thought, as he knew, that the man who had stolen—as he had come to think of it—stolen his wife, did not know his
name or face either; he could clearly hear his wife’s voice: “Oh, what do you care what his name is? Take me away!” His face burned with the cuckold’s shame.

  He spent two week’s after his wife’s departure drinking steadily, one might say stupidly; he drank until he passed out, began drinking again when his brain flickered awake, then drank until he passed out—this went on and on, and half-permitted him to think that he didn’t know what had happened to him: well, he didn’t. After he sobered up, he left Los Angeles, defeated and dulled, to return to New York on a Trailways bus so as to grind himself into his misery a little more, a little deeper; a man of perhaps fifty in the seat next to him performed fellatio on him in the dark early morning somewhere near Joliet, and he absurdly thought that he was getting even with his wife, the bitch. Someone liked him, even if it was this sad old cocksucker.

  But New York was of no help, it didn’t feel at all like home to him, it existed in a kind of aquatic grayness of sleet and dark clouds and sympathetic friends, all of whom performed their parts as carefully as possible, rarely bringing up his wife save once in a while, to call her a bitch, a whore, even, transgressively, a cunt. He stayed with two of these friends, a man and wife, and in the comically sad way in which life crawls and stumbles its way through time, this couple had always been thought of by their passive guest with a kind of jolly but mocking contempt: now he slept on their pull-out Carlyle couch, ate their food, and drank their liquor.

  He began to talk to them about his wife, to confide in them, to think of them as the intimate friends that they assuredly were not. In his neurotic and uxorious gloom, he said, in many different ways, the same thing over and over to them: Where is my wife? I want my wife! He would take her back no matter what, ask her nothing, forgive her everything, she could walk on him, kick him, she could spit on him! if only she would come back to him, come back and make him the complete slave and idiot of abasement that he so longed to be. His was a continuing performance that went beyond humiliation, a groveling masochism of which he embarrassingly seemed fully aware. They watched him in silence as he blubbered and wailed; it was horrifying. But not to him.

  A week or two into the crazed life that he was sedulously creating for himself, he found out, somehow, that his wife and her kidnapper, her rapist, her Svengali and sinister sexual magician, her depraved wizard, her slavering satyr with his enormous phallus eternally ready for her, only her … he found out that they were living in St. Louis. He had no address for them, and no way of thinking them—of thinking her—into the landscape: what did St. Louis look like? But he unexpectedly got the address from his host, who had a friend in St. Louis, an assistant professor at Washington University. He had no idea how any of this had come about.

  He wanted to go to her in strange and alien St. Louis, to plead his case, to beg her, implore her, to dare ask her if she’d had enough abandoned and filthy sex with her seducer; but feared that she certainly would accept his pleadings, his tears, with perverse delight, would abuse him with a word or two of contempt, and send him home alone. He knew this, knew that she was a bitch, a worthless bitch, shallow and corrupt and cruel: oh how he wanted her, she was his bitch! He asked his host then if he would consent to go to St. Louis and, through his friend at the university, meet with his wife, plead for him, set out his case for him, ask her why she’d left, ask her, ask her, ask her, even if he had to do it in front of her smirking lover. He would pay for his trip, his airfare and all expenses, and even include a bonus for his trouble, although he was not so totally unbalanced as to use the word “bonus.” And so the friend left, but was back within three days, for his wife and her amour had apparently left St. Louis, and there was no way of knowing where they had gone. The husband, in his by-now usual imbecilic daze, finally left his friends’ apartment after finding one of his own, a dark and wretched shotgun flat on Fourth Street and Avenue D, a perfect venue to complement his mood of not-quite-suicidal misery. How the streets churned with ignorance and poverty and hatred and violence. Perfect.

  The weeks passed and he began, slowly, very slowly, to consider the rash frenzy, really, of his request to his “friend,” the weakness he had revealed to him in his unvarnished pleading that he go as his—what was it?—representative? intermediary? envoy? to his wife. He had exposed himself to this man and his wife, and he was certain that he had given them a social or psychological gift that they would use against him in some way in the future, he didn’t know when, but at some moment in a year or two or more, he’d be confronted with the whining, puerile, blubbering image of his collapse into bathos, he would be presented, as it were, as a milquetoast to whomever would listen. For now it was clear to him that the couple he had thought of with such dismissive contempt for so many years, had thought of him in the same way.

  COMMENTARIES

  — I —

  … Kraft French Dressing, glowing weirdly orange … The label on the bottle describes this dressing as “creamy.” So it was in 1934, so it is now. No one has ever discovered why this dressing, with its odd tang of sugary vinegar, was and is called “French,” nor has anyone suggested a reason for its strange, pumpkin-like color. It is highly popular.

  … a bottle of Worcestershire sauce … This sauce was Lea and Perrins, considered by virtually everyone to be the ne plus ultra of Worcestershire sauces. The brand has been made since 1835, and its paper wrapper surely adds to its special cachet. For many years, the label on the bottle noted that it was the recipe of a “nobleman in the county,” or, perhaps, “country,” but that information is no longer provided.

  — II—

  … the Shadow … The Shadow’s name was Lamont Cranston, and his assistant and (perhaps) fiancée and/or lover was Margo Lane. She was always described as “the lovely Margo Lane.”

  … Philco floor-model radio … Philco radios have not been manufactured for many years.

  … his black cloak and black slouch hat … While the Shadow wore such raiment in the pulp stories conceived by author Walter B. Gibson, producers of the radio version, which concerns us here, working within the constraints of the medium, imbued the character with a secret power that he had “learned in the Orient,” the power “to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him.” Nor, of course, could listeners: it could not have mattered what he wore.

  … his unearthly laughter … The Shadow was good, a fighter of crime and oppression, yet the boy is terrified. This might suggest that children know that good may instantly become evil, and vice versa.

  — III —

  … standing at a dark window … Fictional characters who stand at dark windows are often constrained to look down at streets gleaming with rain. But not here.

  — IV —

  … his mother sits with a highball … In this instance, Canada Dry ginger ale and Seagram’s 7 blended whisky. The term “highball” is no longer in general use.

  … he has been talking, quarreling … The quarrel was about money, specifically, a loan from his father-in-law on which the father would like to delay payment. His wife has taken her father’s side in this argument, not, perhaps, a good sign for the stability of the marriage.

  — V —

  … a drone of music … It may be inferred that the narrator does not like the music in question. But the conversation? What deductive inference are we to draw from the singular selection, for further commentary, of one type of “drone”?

  … The cab was waiting … A checker cab, one of the small, lost pleasures of New York life.

  … wearing his wife’s clothes … This is somewhat puzzling. Either the woman was the wife’s size, or the wife’s clothing was of the one-size-fits-all variety.

  — VI —

  … his wife dead for many years … His wife’s name was Constance (Connie), and his children’s Rose, Maria, Grace, and Alexander (Alex).

  — VII —

  … Carol and … the girls’ last names, in order, are: Brookner, Kalmas, Margolis, Imperato, Jorgensen, Pincus, Aquino, Griffin,
Wasserman, Chaves, Newman, Bello, Scisorek, Vail, and Kirkjian.

  … the shade of a birch tree … It may have been a poplar, or whatever you prefer.

  — VIII —

  … store-brand English muffin … The store, A&P; the brand, Jane Parker.

  …peanut butter … The peanut butter is also the A&P’s own brand. Ann Page.

  … a cigarette … He smokes Camel Lights and Marlboro Lights.

  … the old story of the death camp survivor … The story: after being liberated from Auschwitz, a Jew tells another Jew that he’s going to leave soon for Brazil or Chile or Laos or Pakistan—someplace that is not in Europe. The other Jew says, “It’s so far!”, to which the first Jew replies, “Far from what?”

  —IX —

  … the sliding glass door … This suggests, but does not, certainly, prove, that the mise-en-scène is California.