The Moon In Its Flight (15 page)

As soon as he became aware of Dolly Rae, everything began to change, subtly at first, and then, quite overtly. Dolly Rae, it turned out, not only understood more, much more about Bill’s umbrella dream than I ever could, but she had innumerable stories about bicycles and the role that they’d played in the settling—she’d called it “the gentling”—of the hard-bitten Wheat Corridor back in her home state. Her favorite bicycle color was tomato red, and when Bill discovered this, he was a goner. He’d do anything to impress Dolly Rae, and began making up stories about crawdaddies and drinking bouts and God knows what. And then, one day, Dolly Rae took him over to her motel and showed him, shimmering and blurred at the bottom of their pool, a white bicycle that seemed to glow in the water. He stood and looked at it in silence, and then, suddenly, at the instigation of her little brother, Carver, she jumped into the pool and swam to the bottom. She had her hands on the bicycle and was hauling it to the surface, but although she broke the water with it, it was impossible for her to get it out of the pool. And Bill knew, he just knew, that his help wasn’t wanted. As she relinquished her grip on what Bill had decided to call a “symbol,” and let it sink, dreamily, to the bottom, Carver whispered to Bill that she’d never get it out, she’d been trying for days, it wasn’t going to be pulled out of that darn water!

Each day, often more than once, before her stint at the Jewel or after it, Dolly Rae would plunge fiercely into the pool and wrestle with the white bicycle. And each day, Bill, sullen with despair, would ask her why she needed to
do
this. She would look at him coolly, the kind of look that said that she wished she was looking at him for the first time, and asked him to explain, again, what a “symbol” is. It was more and more obvious to me, if not to Bill in his agony of wonder, that life simply goes on and on until, one sad day, it stops.

Sometime after that, so Bill told me one night, looking up suddenly from a patio-furniture catalogue, Dolly Rae began calling people on the phone at random, baiting them, misrepresenting herself, telling jokes about Schultz and Moskowitz and, afterward, crying bitterly. Bill told me that he thought the calls humanized her, softened her somehow—his phrase was “gentled her,” much to my bitter amusement—but that Dolly Rae maintained that they were just as frustrating as trying to haul that bicycle out of the pool. He began to see less of her, and as he grew quieter, I noticed that he had stopped mentioning the green umbrella. It had become, at least for me, a symbol to set against the symbol that he had created for Dolly Rae.

“Be back soon?” I asked, staring into the space above the pool. He nodded, and said, “Sure, where else would I be?”

I smiled and made the gesture of slicing a tomato, then mimed swimming up, through dark, cold water, with a bicycle cradled in my arms, a bicycle that would not, that could not ever reveal its secrets. He laughed, ruefully, and as the sun moved behind the outer cottages, I said, quietly, “Schultz is dead.”

“And tomatoes are cheaper,” Bill replied.

NOTES

A Desk

1. The actual, whatever it may look like, does not “roar on.”

2. Many people feel that all the mysteries of fiction have been solved, and a good thing too!

3. It is probably not a good idea to “fuck with” memoirs in which the victim-protagonist-memoirist has already been “fucked with.”

4. Most critics and biographers dispute the fact that Proust was satisfied with one draft, despite the discovery of the “Toulouse” notebooks.

5. Patricia Melton Cunningham’s first novel,
Wrenched from Love,
will soon be published by Gusher Books, a subsidiary of Shell Oil Publishers, Ltd.

6. “Spondulicks” most often refer to quarters and dimes, as in “Drop a spondulick on the bum.”

7. A
pasticciaccio
may be translated as “a fucking mess.”

8. Wallace Stegner, although he owned a car, did not actually
like
it.

9. Death asks no quarter—nor spondulick.

A Joke

1. It is amazing just how many jokes people know.

2. “Cut velvet!,” is, for instance, the punch line of one of those many jokes.

3. The male gaze is at its most pernicious in the academic world, for reasons which will soon be made clear.

4.
Dark Corridors of Wheat
has been out of print for many years, despite a relentless campaign waged by the cereal industry to make it available at a reasonable price.

5. Maurice Bucks is on the record as saying that he “doesn’t really care all that much” about money, and after his successful takeover of the Vietnamese government, noted that “it’s got very, very little to do with money, and I want people to know that.” It has recently been reported that Mr. Bucks has contracted AIDS, which fact has led hundreds–some say thousands—to argue for the existence of God.

6. The paper used to print the “Prairie Edition” of the Jewett biography is made of acid-free gopher skin.

7. “Handy Sarah” is a mistake of the sort regularly attributed to this author, who, it is said, can “really write” if he “puts his mind to it,” books that are “wonderfully readable.”

8. People no longer get soused, but, instead, succumb to their addictions, addictions which they cannot triumph over, or “lick,” unless they first
admit they have a problem
and then
get help.

9. Boxers are excellent swimmers, which should have alerted their owner to the suspicious nature of these two hapless dogs’ deaths; of course, the soused Sarah had never admitted that she had a problem and therefore never got help.

10. The “haircut” joke was a favorite of saloon comedians, who often and anon told it while soused.

11. “Aporia” is a Greek word that means “who knows?” or, in certain contexts, “what the—?”

A Tomato

1. A gleaming white bicycle at the bottom of a pool is an example of an aporia—but not in real life.

2. Spaghetti
alla matarazzo
is not for everyone.

3. The author had originally thought to place the gleaming white bicycle in the projection booth of the Jewel Theater, pronounced, at least in this story, “thee
ay
ter,” as if you didn’t know.

4. The baby carriage trundled home to Mrs. Moskowitz was most probably a stroller.

5. “A thousand drinks are not enough [to pay] for a haircut,” or so says the Albanian proverb.

6. Basil is never used in spaghetti
alla matarazzo,
save by natives of the Midwest.

7. The Surgeon General has suggested that the Moskowitz curse is, in all probability, secondhand cigarette smoke.

8. The
green umbrella
by the
motel pool
is a motif that some wag had once thought of donating to Raymond Carver.

9. “Carver,” in this text, has no relation to the late writer (see above).

10. That the author does not tell us what “tomatoes are cheaper”
than
may be an instance of a free aporia, or, in the parlance of narratology, an ekphrasis.

11. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” he laughed.

TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER

These were all very slight experiences, of course,
but the remarkable thing was that they happened all over again,
exactly the same. Actually they were always there.

—ROBERT MUSIL

He rose and fumbled about in an escritoire until he found the clipping: “They stood in the dark in the driving rain underneath her umbrella.” Can all this have really taken place in America? Obviously, it was abnormal. Maybe not the men, who mostly go out to work, but the women, who are most inclined to talk and who have nothing to do.

He
had a good job in advertising and they lived in Kew Gardens in a brick semi-detached house; certainly the reader will recall such shoddy incidents in his own life.

“Welcome to the scene of the extraordinary … outrage!”

Not even fake art or the wearisome tricks of movies can assist them. This was in 1948.

The roar of all the traffic came hurtling in through the wide-open window, the liquid moonlight filling the small parking area outside the gates to the beach. What was the scent of the perfume she wore? Why did he not pick her out of her red plush chair and sit her on his knee? He got up and closed the door, then lay down on the bed with her and took off her jacket and brassiere. Of course it wouldn’t be sordid. He knew that it was impossible, when once the material circumstances of a function were altered, for its aesthetic expression to survive. Different thighs. What is a supper club?

“Above all, the presence of the loved person prevents reflection, and makes us women wish to be overcome.”

“I don’t even know where CCNY is!”

She got up, her breasts quivering slightly, and he saw faint stretch marks running into the shadowy symmetry of her pubic hair.

“I don’t suppose anybody ever
deliberately
listens to a watch or clock.”

“We can go to Maryland and get married,” she said.

“How do you play Mah-Jongg?”

A woman of brilliance and audacity, accompanied by a mere boy, came into the place and took seats near them.

“I want to marry you, I can’t stand it.”

When she slipped her coat off her breasts moved under the crocheted sweater she wore. Perhaps so much assails him that he has to close down ninety percent of himself to phenomena in order not to explode. Her eyes gray, flecked with bronze. She was fair.