The Moon In Its Flight (24 page)

GORGIAS

Invisible Door

I once had a friend, a dear friend, who, I believed, or was led to believe, had betrayed me, profoundly and completely. Even now, years later, I can’t bring myself to make known the circumstances, the facts, as I then perceived them to be, of this betrayal. That these circumstances, these facts, were, I discovered, malicious inventions created by another man for his own mysterious reasons, did not remedy or ameliorate the estrangement and bad feeling they—no matter how preposterous—created between me and my friend; his putative betrayal, that is, might as well have been actual. The notion that time heals or erases such aberrations and their dolorous effects has not, in my experience, been the case; on the contrary, time makes concrete and salient all initial agonies, missteps, misunderstandings, and bitterness. It takes a spectacularly willful, almost herculean courage to destroy, even to soften these ugly petrifactions, after which, and at best, there is nothing left of feeling but rubble. It is better to interiorize the waste and regret than to attempt its amelioration. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The third party I’ve mentioned, the malign, the famous meddler who stalks through so many shabby stories, had been a partner of mine and my friend in a small, ultimately unsuccessful specialty-printing business we had begun together—although the failure of the business was not, I’m fairly sure, a factor in the creation of his elaborate system of lies, painstakingly developed to convince me of my friend’s perfidy. It’s enough to say that he did his work well, and had, I suppose, the pleasure of seeing my friend and me sundered, quite wrenchingly disjointed in mutual anger and bewilderment. Friendships that collapse in this way attain to a kind of mean perfection, a hateful balance of irreconcilable integers, each of which is, or most certainly becomes, a treasured wound. I was hurt, surprised, and puzzled by the enormity of my friend’s acts; he was astonished by my abrupt decision to end our friendship. My action and his reaction were gestures sadly predicated on a corrupt syllogism, the major premise of which might have been phrased: “If a man I have no reason to trust tells me that a friend has betrayed me, I’ll sever all ties with the friend.”

The facts, as I have called them, or what I then thought to be the facts, and the subtle variations of this betrayal, were made available to me over a period of perhaps a month and a half by my indefatigable guide to—to what? Cleanliness, let’s say, an ethical, even moral cleanliness. “Look at this evidence,” he might as well have said, “look at these dispiriting, tawdry documents.
Soon all will be revealed!
And afterward, you’ll rid yourself of this false friend, and be clean!” He said, of course, nothing like this, but I’m afraid that I said something very like it to myself. With each piece of
evidence,
of
proof,
that my altruistic “assistant” brought me, I became more deliciously righteous, more insulted, more put upon and victimized. It’s now obvious that my need, my desire, perhaps, to be an object of perverse and malicious acts was the base reason for my hunger for more and more
documentation
of my friend’s cruel schemes. There was, if truth be told (I use the phrase in full awareness of its pitiful irony), plenty of damning material, early on, for me to accuse and then judge my friend, but I began to enjoy the accumulation of his misdeeds, the sweet pang of the badly used, the moral eroticism of a vast self-pity.

I at last decided that I had enough information (I have no recollection of how I came to this conclusion), and I’d already poked and rubbed at my ego’s scratch until it was red and swollen. It so turned out that at about the same time that I’d decided to confront my friend, my false, treacherous, vile friend!, he and his wife had just separated. That is, his wife had left him for a man whom she, and, to a lesser extent, her husband, had known in college, I believe. These events occurred some forty years ago, so my memory is not wholly to be trusted. This man had re-entered their lives so as to “learn how to live,” or so I understand him to have phrased it. Learn how to live! There’s nothing to say to that. He had apparently known of the couple’s marriage, its stability, love, mutual kindness, its happy child—its composure, I suppose, will cover it nicely. And so he sidled into their lives, as old peripheral acquaintances will do, as an unhappy, even miserable supplicant. Yes, he wanted them to teach him “how to live.” Nice work, as the old song says, if you can get it. I know that all of this sounds absurd, much too good to be true, as they say, too maudlin, too Hollywood, if it is not affected to say so. I heard this story, with its tellers’ predictable variations, over the years, not that any of it mattered to me. It hadn’t mattered to me when it first happened, when the loving couple decided to help the sad old pal. That my friend was soon cuckolded by this wheedling incubus and then deserted by his true-blue wife, who would later make his visitation rights anent the child a grinding humiliation, so I understand, was fine by me, fine. Just when he came to me for succor, I suppose I might call it, I was all ready with my dossier. I seem to recall, in fact, that I was somewhat annoyed that his wife was unfaithful to him with only this one man. On the other hand,
he
was a perfectly shameful choice. So that was fine.

It was painful to me for a long time to think of my friend’s specific reaction to my charges, and so I slowly forgot what it was like. It’s simply gone from my mind, lying in fragments among all the other repressed and doubly repressed and wholly distorted junk of my life. The schism affected me, I’ve come to admit, in the most thorough way, setting me on a course which has demanded (if that’s not too strong a word) that I have neither wife nor children, that I be a neglectful son, a distant, sullen, cold man with no friends worthy of the name, without even the ephemeral human connections that pass for friendships here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve lived alone for some twenty years. It’s the ideally blank place for me, with its grinning populace and its idiot sense of privilege, its lush flowers, dead grass, and year-round air pollution—the worst of which is happily called “save the air days”—and its “communities” with no sidewalks or visible populations. And then there are the millions and millions of cars, blessed cars that allow us all to avoid each other completely as we go and return, go and return, over and over. It is my country, indeed.

I don’t recall precisely when I discovered that the proofs of my friend’s betrayal were, in essence, distortions, manufactures, subtle as well as crude lies. This is not to say that my “informant” was a genius of deception. Sadly enough, although sadly is hardly the word—perhaps monstrously is more to the point—the shoddiness of the materials were virtually apparent to me all the time I was collecting them. So that I was not surprised to be brought face to face with the irrefutable
fact
of their falsity. It’s the cheapest psychology to say that it is obvious that I wanted to hurt my friend and to smash our friendship, but that I did so with such devious ruthlessness astounds me even now. I find it, perhaps oddly, somewhat admirable.

I have not, as I think I’ve implied, attempted to “patch things up” with my friend. What would be the point? And what would I say? “I was wrong, and I was always wrong, and I knew that I was wrong. However!” And then there is the fact that I was exasperated, furious, even, with my friend, when I had incontrovertible proof that all my allegations against him were false. He seemed to me, then, as he still does, I’m afraid, so weak, so pitiful, so
inconsequential,
unable to have committed the sins I’d accused him of. Good Christ! He’d had no courage at all, he’d done
nothing,
not one thing that I’d—I don’t know how to say this—that I’d wanted him to have done, perhaps. How could I ask him to forgive me, when I couldn’t forgive his intolerable innocence, his insufferable friendship? He was much, oh much less than the perfidious monster I’d longed for him to be. It was too much to ask of me that I invite him into my life, such as it is, again; or that I ask to enter his. It is too much, for that matter, to ask anything of me.

Recently, I have come to see that I had been waiting, all those many years ago, waiting for I really don’t know how long, for an invisible door I’d yearned to discover, to open, so that I could walk through it and away from life, for good and all.

The Diary

A man I once knew somewhat casually married a woman because she reminded him of another woman he had earlier wanted to, had, in fact, planned to marry, but did not, for reasons that, as he once remarked, “are best forgotten.” He loved the woman he ultimately married, but after a few years, this was no longer the case. Forgive me for the triteness of this situation, which is as “common,” as my mother used to say, “as dirt,” although she was usually speaking of people of whom she disapproved, and they were, believe me, many. For the sake of candor, I should mention that my mother disapproved of the man I once knew and his wife, and I don’t doubt that she would have disapproved of the woman he did not marry, as well. I may have been influenced in my own opinions of these people because of this. Or perhaps not. It is very hard for a man to think straight about his mother, which may be why so much psychoanalysis never quite works. With honesty and candor and as much accuracy as he can command from his neurotic mind, the analysand reveals all; but that
all
is, of needs, attenuated, twisted, and fictionalized. If and when the analyst finally peels away the sincere and intricately fabricated layers to get to what he and his patient agree is the truth, they’ve usually found, as Oscar Levant famously said of Hollywood, “the real tinsel underneath.” But this is frivolous digression.

My friend and I met one night, ten years or so into his marriage, over drinks in a bar we had regularly patronized at a time when both of us worked for the same publisher, in its unglamorous school department, a claustrophobic section of the house devoted to satisfying the medieval textbook-adoption requirements of, for the most part, the State of Texas. It was there that I learned that Texas more or less fed the entire company, and that we had a vice president whose job was, essentially, to fish and play golf with the members of the textbook-adoptions board. I find it pleasant to recall these things when I read of publishers and editors speaking of their devotion to good letters.

The bar was off Madison Avenue in the Forties, a neighborhood that has always unaccountably made me feel successful, a harmless delusion. We sat in the back room and ordered martinis, then he abruptly told me that his marriage seemed to be, that it really, more or less, might be, probably, well,
was,
in serious trouble. I didn’t care one way or another, for I had come to realize that my mother’s notion of this man and his insubstantial snob of a wife had become mine, I really don’t know how, and even though my mother had been dead for almost four years. I’ve neglected to mention that my mother once met this couple in a restaurant. They were not at their best, so my mother let me know. It turned out, not surprisingly, that his marriage was “in serious trouble,” because of his adulterous mooning over a young woman in the office of the company he now worked for as something called a “marketing-systems analyst,” a term dismal enough to bewitch an academic. It also came out that he had been
driven
to this absurd behavior (this was his version of the story; I never heard his wife’s, nor did I want to) because of—what a surprise!—his wife. She, paralyzed with ennui in her job as a legal secretary in a tort mill, after having been equally paralyzed during her brief tenure as what I had been told she called a “gold-plated housewife” (with the implication that she was much too gifted to scrub the toilet), had become a devoted follower of a “psychic enabling” discipline, a combination of Zen, Hinduism, evangelical something or other, and nature in all its glorious something or other. As we began our fourth martinis, I found out, from my sad friend, that the discipline involved some brilliant claptrap that had to do with “energy vortices,” access to which would open devotees the path to self-knowledge or self-realization or self-acceptance, or maybe it was self-love or self-actualization—whatever, it insisted on rapt attention to one’s inimitable
Being.
It was, no doubt, another polished grift, happily based on the surety that the most petty, vapid, selfish, envious, and useless people can be convinced that they live lives of real importance and consequence, are thinkers of subtly finespun thoughts, and, most importantly,
deserve
to be happy.