The Moon In Its Flight
Read The Moon In Its Flight Online
Authors: Gilbert Sorrentino
Other Books by Gilbert Sorrentino
POETRY
The Darkness Surrounds Us
Black and White
The Perfect Fiction
Corrosive Sublimate
A Dozen Oranges
Sulpiciae Elegidia: Elegiacs of Sulpicia
White Sail
The Orangery
Selected Poems 1958-1980
FICTION
The Sky Changes
Steelwork
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Flawless Play Restored: The Masque of Fungo
Splendide-Hôtel
Mulligan Stew
Aberration of Starlight
Crystal Vision
Blue Pastoral
Odd Number
A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles
Rose Theatre
Misterioso
Under the Shadow
Red the Fiend
Pack of Lies
Gold Fools
Little Casino
ESSAYS
Something Said
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography by William McPheron
COPYRIGHT © 2004 by Gilbert Sorrentino
COVER + BOOK DESIGN Linda Koutsky
COVER PHOTO © Mel Curtis, Getty Images
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP DATA
Sorrentino, Gilbert.
The moon in its flight : stories / by Gilbert Sorrentino.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56689-152-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-56689-289-6 (ebook)
1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.O7M66 2004
813’.54—DC22 2004000665
PRINTED IN CANADA
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines in which many of these stories first appeared: The Moon in Its Flight
(New American Review,
1971), Decades
(Esquire,
1977;
The Best American Short Stories 1978),
Land of Cotton
(Harper’s,
1977), A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles
(Conjunctions,
1985), The Sea, Caught in Roses
(Zyzzyva,
1990), Times Without Number
(Private Arts,
1992), Pastilles
(Trafika
[Prague], 1994), In Loveland
(Common Knowledge,
1996), Things That Have Stopped Moving
(Conjunctions,
1997), Sample Writing Sample
(Arshile,
1997), Allegory of Innocence
(Matrix
[Montreal], 1998), Facts and Their Manifestations
(The Southern California Anthology,
1999), Gorgias
(Conjunctions,
2001), Life and Letters
(Conjunctions,
2001), It’s Time to Call It a Day
(Bluesky Review,
2003),
Perdido (BOMB,
2004), Lost in the Stars
(Fence,
2004).
“A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles” was also published in a signed, limited edition, with woodcuts by David Storey, by the Grenfell Press (New York, 1986).
CONTENTS
A BEEHIVE ARRANGED ON HUMANE PRINCIPLES
FACTS AND THEIR MANIFESTATIONS
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
THINGS THAT HAVE STOPPED MOVING
THE MOON IN ITS FLIGHT
This was in 1948. A group of young people sitting on the darkened porch of a New Jersey summer cottage in a lake resort community. The host some Bernie wearing an Upsala College sweatshirt. The late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything. There were perhaps eight or nine people there, two of them the people that this story sketches.
Bernie was talking about Sonny Stitt’s alto on “That’s Earl, Brother.” As good as Bird, he said. Arnie said, bullshit: he was a very hip young man from Washington Heights, wore mirrored sunglasses. A bop drummer in his senior year at the High School of Performing Arts. Our young man, nineteen at this time, listened only to Rebecca, a girl of fifteen, remarkable in her New Look clothes. A long full skirt, black, snug tailored shirt of blue and white stripes with a high white collar and black velvet string tie, black kid Capezios. It is no wonder that lesbians like women.
At some point during the evening he walked Rebecca home. She lived on Lake Shore Drive, a wide road that skirted the beach and ran parallel to the small river that flowed into Lake Minnehaha. Lake Ramapo? Lake Tomahawk. Lake O-shi-wa-noh? Lake Sunburst. Leaning against her father’s powder-blue Buick convertible, lost, in the indigo night, the creamy stars, sound of crickets, they kissed. They fell in love.
One of the songs that summer was “For Heaven’s Sake.” Another, “It’s Magic.” Who remembers the clarity of Claude Thornhill and Sarah Vaughan, their exquisite irrelevance? They are gone where the useless chrome doughnuts on the Buick’s hood have gone. That Valhalla of Amos ’n’ Andy and guinea fruit peddlers with golden earrings. “Pleasa No Squeeza Da Banana.” In 1948, the whole world seemed beautiful to young people of a certain milieu, or let me say, possible. Yes, it seemed a possible world. This idea persisted until 1950, at which time it died, along with many of the young people who had held it. In Korea, the Chinese played “Scrapple from the Apple” over loudspeakers pointed at the American lines. That savage and virile alto blue-clear on the subzero night. This is, of course, old news.
Rebecca was fair. She was fair. Lovely Jewish girl from the remote and exotic Bronx. To him that vast borough seemed a Cythera—that it could house such fantastic creatures as she! He wanted to be Jewish. He was, instead, a Roman Catholic, awash in sin and redemption. What loathing he had for the Irish girls who went to eleven o’clock Mass, legions of blushing pink and lavender spring coats, flat white straw hats, the crinkly veils over their open faces. Church clothes, under which their inviolate crotches sweetly nestled in soft hair.
She had white and perfect teeth. Wide mouth. Creamy stars, pale nights. Dusty black roads out past the beach. The sunlight on the raft, moonlight on the lake. Sprinkle of freckles on her shoulders. Aromatic breeze.
Of course this was a summer romance, but bear with me and see with what banal literary irony it all turns out—or does not turn out at all. The country bowled and spoke of Truman’s grit and spunk. How softly we had slid off the edge of civilization.
The liquid moonlight filling the small parking area outside the gates to the beach. Bass flopping softly in dark waters. What was the scent of the perfume she wore? The sound of a car radio in the cool nights, collective American memory. Her browned body, delicate hair bleached golden on her thighs. In the beach pavilion they danced and drank Cokes. Mel Tormé and the Mel-Tones. Dizzy Gillespie. “Too Soon to Know.” In the mornings, the sun so crystal and lucent it seemed the very exhalation of the sky, he would swim alone to the raft and lie there, the beach empty, music from the pavilion attendant’s radio coming to him in splinters. At such times he would thrill himself by pretending that he had not yet met Rebecca and that he would see her that afternoon for the first time.
The first time he touched her breasts he cried in his shame and delight. Can all this really have taken place in America? The trees rustled for him, as the rain did rain. One day, in New York, he bought her a silver friendship ring, tiny perfect hearts in bas-relief running around it so that the point of one heart nestled in the cleft of another. Innocent symbol that tortured his blood. She stood before him in the pale light in white bra and panties, her shorts and blouse hung on the hurricane fence of the abandoned and weed-grown tennis court and he held her, stroking her flanks and buttocks and kissing her shoulders. The smell of her flesh, vague sweat and perfume. Of course he was insane. She caressed him so far as she understood how through his faded denim shorts. Thus did they flay themselves, burning. What were they to do? Where were they to go? The very thought of the condom in his pocket made his heart careen in despair. Nothing was like anything said it was after all. He adored her.