The Moon In Its Flight (6 page)

Joe and Hope had dinner together once a week—they were civilized and understanding and good friends and so on. How they rang and rang again each boring modern change. Hope was aware that Joe and Helen were having an affair; Ed Manx had told her about Helen, and Joe had corroborated the tale—and how. In her mind it was a “friendly” affair, and somehow good for Joe: a good, mature woman to discuss art with her husband—oh, once in a while they discovered themselves in bed together, but that was almost an accident, or the price one pays for the nurture of beauty. Over her shrimp cocktail she was reliably bright and engaging. Peck and Peck all the way, with plenty of small talk about some up-to-the-minute painter “into some wild things.” Her eyes were blank with that flat stare peculiar to natives of Southern California, the ocular equivalent, one might say, of a slack mouth. She had practiced for years to achieve it, God knows why: I suspect she confused it with
sang-froid.
Ah, she still had something for Joe; he looked at her with false warmth and affection and she looked back, laboring to emulate his falsity. What moments divine, what rapture serene.

“It’s nice and transparent,” Helen said one night of a new poem that Joe modestly represented as a “breakthrough.” Joe had been writing for five or six years and each year had one of these breakthroughs. His poems neither changed nor improved, but there was, in his insistence on aesthetic discovery, an illusion for him of amelioration in his jottings. Joe was one of those “writers” of whom one constantly thinks as a tyro; then one day the realization that the person has been pottering around for ten years or so crystallizes. It is enough to make one a yahoo. “I mean it’s very—clear, yes, right. Transparent.” Joe, in a rage, but silent, reclining on the couch under the ink drawing whose mat and frame had brought out its weakness, allowed her to unbuckle his belt and open his trousers. It was
she
who was controlling
him!
What a bitch he thought her. He watched her face disappear in the lace of her slip, her arms above her head graceful and quick. A horny old bitch. He might as well have been a truck driver or a plumber or a goddamned teacher the way she so casually used him. A journalist or editorial assistant who wanted to write a novel! God! At that moment, he began to hate her, his spurious heritage stirring him to combat, gallant. She gently pushed him back on the couch and reached behind to unhook her brassiere. Old raunchy dumb bitch.

So Joe began to speak of her, vulgarly and openly, at the bar in which he was something of a figure. It was a mean and poisonous place of third-rate painters, hangers-on, dedicated filmgoers, and arty idiots, pots and looms in every pocket, who were just passing through. The controlled and amused voice came forth from his expertly hirsute face, his Italian leather jacket was creased—so—in soft, elegant folds. He joked of her tremendous passion for him, her raging and almost “embarrassing” sexual hungers, the luscious nightgowns and intriguing underwear she bought to excite him. It was pathetic. He felt it almost his duty. Her tears. Her moans of gratitude. Where did they think he got this leather jacket? Nothing like an old broad! He and his auditors shuffled and chuckled, a bunch of regular guys that
la vie d’art
would never change. His words punctuated the long tale of malice and vindictiveness and failure that the bar spun out endlessly.

As Helen got sicker, she made herself progressively more ridiculous by trying to be vivacious and girlish for Joe—who rarely went out with her anymore. She played right into the hands of his shabby stories about her, so that when they did meet someone that Joe knew, her behavior was such that Joe all but snickered and winked. He was contemptuous toward her, rude and arrogant—he assaulted her, getting even and getting even again for that “saltwater taffy,” that “transparent,” her sexual aggressiveness, the Italian leather jacket. Those ragged cavalrymen of his fantasy rode their broken nags out of the morning mists, bent on slaughter.

As it would happen, Helen, with the predictability of melodrama, fell in love with Joe. He was so delicate, so vulnerable, yet so proud. At the moment that Joe realized that, he lied that he and Hope were thinking of “trying it again together.” He was precisely if not subtly cruel.

He visited her almost daily at the hospital during her final confinement, bringing her flowers, magazines, books—once, quite unbelievably, he brought her a copy of
As I Lay Dying:
he had turned almost recklessly mean. What was there to lose? He occasionally held her hand and felt generous and forgiving. I like to think that Joe considered these small attentions instances of a refined sense of
noblesse oblige.

He of course went to the funeral in a new midnight-blue suit: nothing could have kept him out of the first rank of mourners. What is surprising is that Hope went with him. Joe stood there in the calm morning, his face a marvel of abstraction, Hope beside him, her flat stare finding useful employment, in a strikingly severe black-and-silver dress that she had bought a month earlier for an important opening. They were so anxious for each other that they kissed and clutched and fumbled in the taxi home from Queens. Perhaps it was the first step to trying it again together.

THE DIGNITY OF LABOR

The White Shirt

Some young man, Bill will do for a name, out of the Army for three months and tinged, if you will, all right, tinged with a gloom well short of despair, got a job. This was Bill’s first job, save for six months spent as a dishwasher and three years as an infantryman, neither of which are now considered actually to be
jobs,
but are thought of as burdens, or perhaps misfortunes. How wise and wonderful the world has become, filled to bursting with careers!

There he was, in the basement stockroom of Art Adventures, an art-supply store in midtown Manhattan. One of the somewhat shabby and unenthusiastic of Bill’s chores was to fill exceedingly small glass jars with glaringly bright poster paints “in all popular colors,” these paints having been mixed in hundredgallon vats in Art Adventures’ laboratory, you’ll pardon the word, affix identifying labels to these filled jars, and stack them, in neatest rows, on the steel shelves reserved for them and other sundries of the art business.

Bill’s immediate boss was an adenoidal schlepper from Ozone Park whose name was Stewie, a self-proclaimed hipster, drenched in mambo lore, who sang, hummed, and whistled, day in and day out—to employ a poster-paint phrase—“Rock Around the Clock.” Had Stewie’s name not been Stewie, it would have been Carl, Ernie, Cliffie, or Sheldon. Now you know who he is! Of course, Stewie took stern delight in telling Bill and his colleague, a Puerto Rican headbreaker, Felix, what to do and how to do it. Felix had been “given a break” and hired, freshly paroled, God only knows why, out of Coxsackie; he often quietly mused, when he and Bill took a smoke break, on the possibility of accidentally maybe stabbing Stewie to death. So the days of that sunny, crisp fall passed, a ragged dream of honest work’s rewards and the second chance.

One morning, Stewie told Bill and Felix that he wanted the jars of poster paint shelved so that the virtually unnecessary labels—which comically and redundantly described the startling red or sickly green paints within their jars as RED or green—faced forward, so that, Stewie wisely reasoned, you fuckin well know what you’re fuckin pickin when you fill a fuckin order. He was a logical sort, take him all in all. Bill suggested, gently, gently, that this seemed wasteful of time and effort, for a half-blind drunken idiot could tell the difference between colors, and in the dark, for Christ sake. But Stewie, with the sort of ravaged and tottering intelligence that might well have sent him to law school had he not been so ambitious, was not having any of
this.
Yizzel fuckin do what I say, he noted; or, perhaps, yizzel fuckin do it right; or yizzel fuckin well do it. Bill rejoined, weakly, that, hell, come on, there’s nobody who could mistake RED for YELLOW, etcetera. But this argument cut no ice with Stewie. Felix, attentive to this dialogue, fingered the switch-blade knife in his pocket, his eye on Stewie’s pallid neck, till the latter ended the conversation by arguing that Bill just thought he was a wise guy because he’d been in the fuckin Army. Bill fell silent, searching for the arcane meaning hidden in this observation, but gave up. What the hell. Felix, in a quiet aside, suggested to Bill that they might seriously injure Stewie’s sconce with a carelessly wielded gallon jug of India ink, the faggot punk jive motherfucker.

I have not yet mentioned Mr. Pearl, the stockroom supervisor, shipping (he preferred to call it “traffic”) coordinator, keeper of the inventory, and he who answered to Art Adventures’ purchasing agent. Mr. Pearl had a sad little desk, about as big as a minute, as simple people were wont to say in “a more innocent time” (see: Second World War, the Holocaust, Korean “police action,” etc.). On this lugubrious surface, he marshaled his inventory records, daily-order forms, back-order memoranda, pens, pencils (red, green, blue), erasers, and scarred wooden ruler. And off it he ate his lunch, a homely, unassuming, and pedestrian sandwich, a nice piece of fresh fruit, and a pint of milk, the last wrapped in wax paper in the superstitious belief—daily disproved—that this helped keep the milk cool. He was, one might say, a sap. And from the vantage of this handkerchief-sized desk, he looked kindly upon young Stewie, and why? As if you didn’t know!
Because he had once been just like young Stewie.
Yea, even unto his sweaty face and dingy cardigan.

Bill, poor Bill, then made the classic yet banal mistake, common enough among all lowly and callow employees, of appealing the irrational decisions of the corporal-mind to a higher, and supposedly saner authority. (May I digress for a moment? Ho! Ho! Ho!) Or, as Felix put it when Bill told him of his intentions, You must have shit for brains, coño. Cruel yet clear-eyed Felix. Mr. Pearl, seated at his toy desk, a partially destroyed baloney-and-American-cheese sandwich before him on a white handkerchief somewhat drearily adorned with a frayed, faded, embroidered “P” in an infirm pale green, his hands, shiny and grimy with charcoal dust from the drawing pencils he had personally unpacked that morning, resting on the
Mirror,
looked at Bill. Then he spoke:

Stewie is your boss just like I am, your boss, and when Stewie talks I, talk, it’s like I talk you unnastan, but, different but, like a, second boss so do as you’re told and you’ll you’ll, get along cause one hand washes, the other am I correct or, am I correct, you ain’t like the, other gazabo, the Spanish, Spanish boy from the reform, school you don’t want to be like, him, from Harlem, is he, Spanish, you’re not, Spanish are you, no offense, I get along, with all kinds of, all people, ask Stewie, Porto Rickans, the colored, ask Stewie, but you, you want to be, a real man, a mensch like they say in Jewish, like Stewie like, me, a man with a wife some day you can look up at a clean fine, American sort of a young lady, you’re a pretty clean-cut, fellow, clean-cut sort, a veteran if I’m right well, we can’t all be veterans, look at, me, look at, Stewie, I was believe it or, not, I was just, like, Stewie once upon a time, can you, believe it, can you believe it, can you, but that young fellow hasn’t found the girl of his dreams yet, but the girls, upstairs, in the office, they all, all, they like him, don’t, get, me, wrong, I’m not inferring that he don’t like the, girls, no, he just reminds, me, a lot, a lot of myself when I was first starting out on my first job as a messenger, in the garment, yes, the business, remnants, and now as you, see, as you can see, now I wear the white shirt, you see, what, I mean, the, white, shirt, the
white shirt,
if you wanna wear the white shirt you, gotta, I always say to Stewie, you got, to, and let me say it, to you, you got, to, keep your nose clean and get along, all kinds, I don’t care coloreds, Spanish persons, one hand, washes, you know, the other, Stewie knows this, oh yes, where his bread is buttered what, side it is, the hands washing, uh-huh, he’s got, his, eye on the white shirt, I tell him like a, son, I tell, Stewie you got your eye on, right, the white, right, ha ha, don’t you, and Stewie just, well, smiles, because I know his, plans, his, I was just like Stewie once can, you believe, believe it, can you, now, look at the desk, my personal desk, the pens and pencils, the white, shirt, the white, right, pens, pencils, my phone, look, you should know you, should unnastan, soon when I go, upstairs, upstairs, soon, Stewie will, be, Stewie will have, this, this will be, his desk, with the daily orders the white, yes, the white shirt, yes indeedy, the tie, the white, uh-huh, so keep your nose, clean, don’t be a wise-guy nobody, not nobody, likes a wise-guy vet, we can’t all be, no, or like that spick from the penitentiary, with a chip on, somebody will, oh yes, knock, it, off, we can’t all, for instance, you’re not Spanish, are you, no offense, we couldn’t all, all be, take Stewie who tried to join the Army, we can’t all be, or sit around in the penitentiary, living off, you know, the taxpayers, look at Stewie, who, tried, who tried to join, the Army the, Marines, but his asthma his, flat feet his, punctured ear, adenoids, some family, you know, problems out in Queens, astigmatic, an astigmatic condition, the National Guard, we’re not, all, so lucky, no, can’t all run away from obligations, join, the Army the, you know, jail, no, so you shelve the poster, the paints, like Stewie asks he’s, got, his, methods, they’re good, remember the white shirt if you got, sort of problems, am I right, am I right, am I or am I not, right, you bet your gosh-darn life I’m right, now go, take your lunch take, you got an extra, six, minutes, go ahead and, take my, advice, stay away from that shtarker, thug, that, Felix from up in Harlem, I hate, to, say it but, they’re all animals up, jabbering in Porto Rickan in, God knows what, language, like monkeys with the knives and, the guns, so keep your nose clean if you, want to get, to move up on, you know, the, ladder, like Stewie, he was nobody just, like, you a couple years, ago, a nothing you hear me.