The Moon In Its Flight (21 page)

Claire made occasional trips back to Brooklyn to see Dot, her “mommy,” and her two brothers, both of whom still lived with “mommy,” and, it pleases me to think, were still virgins. There they are, coming out of eleven o’clock Mass. “Lookit her,” Brian says to Mickey, of a comely young woman, “what a fuckin’ dog.” “A dog is right,” Mickey snarls. So they diluted their rabid lusts. Let’s imagine that on one of these trips Claire ran into “Swede,” and after a night of joyous dancing and drinking in a little joint in Bayside, the two old pals went to bed together. “Swede” confessed that he was married, but that he thought of Claire all the time. None of this probably happened, for I understand that “Swede” had fallen off a roof about a year after he and Claire had indulged in their initial dalliance. He had been trying to adjust a television antenna so that he wouldn’t have to watch the Yankees play in blurry snowstorms. Of course he was a Yankee fan.

In time, the accommodation mentioned became too boring, too burdensome, so Claire took Justin, by now an NCO in the army of sociopaths forever garrisoned in the Republic, and they went to—oh, I don’t know. Lawton, perhaps, or St. Louis. No, Seattle! That’s where they went, Seattle. Even then, a
great place to live.
It was just great. Or maybe Dan left Claire after another sour argument, complete with tears and rage as decorations to his insistence that neither Claire nor anybody else would keep him from seeing Justin, by Jesus Christ! Of course, Dan would have been pleased never to look upon his berserk son’s face again. In any event, they separated. Some thought it touching that Dan took his trumpet with him, along with his NYSM scales book. Others, infected with reality, laughed.

Five or six years after Dan and Claire had divorced, we discover, as they say, Dan in a Greenwich Village bar. He’s in town to bury his mother, and has accepted an old neighborhood friend’s invitation to have a drink on the last night of the wake. He is dressed in a gray sharkskin suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie whose Windsor knot is too big for his shirt collar, a gray raincoat with raglan sleeves, and a dark-brown porkpie hat. He looks, not to be harsh, the perfect rube. He lives in Vacaville, which may account for the figure he cuts.

He is being contemptuously superior with his old friend, who, to Dan’s patronizing amusement, is an insurance underwriter. Dan, you may be interested to know, works as a clerk in the main branch of the Sacramento Public Library, but has told his friend that he runs a small literary agency in San Francisco, “so
much
fresh talent there,” he says. Why he lives so far from the oven of creativity is not brought up. Dan sneers at the friend, the bar, the Village, at poor old New York itself, bastion of all that is wrong with everything. Then, suddenly, and, one might say, belligerently, he begins to recite a rigid poem by James Fremont. When he finishes, he looks smugly at his old friend. “I still write the occasional poem,” he says. The old friend is happily impressed, and they order another round. “How’s Claire, by the way?” the friend asks. “You ever see her?” Dan looks at him, his face rotten with disgust. “Claire?” he says. “Fuck Claire! You know she won’t,” and tears come to his eyes, “she won’t let me see
Justin?”
He takes out a handkerchief and pokes at his eyes. “That boy was my whole life.”

I have no idea what happened to Dan or Claire as the years passed, although somebody told me that he’d heard that Claire married an ex-priest who wasn’t quite sure he was heterosexual; he also had a limp. This seems much too plausible to be true. Justin, as you know, became a musician, so to speak. But Dan more or less just disappeared into one of many California towns, most of them in the desolate miles of woods between the North Bay and the Oregon border, a land that bursts into flames each fall, to the residents’ enduring surprise.

I have, I’m sorry to say, no nice conclusion to this story, which is, I admit, not much of a story after all. But concerning Dan, at least, I can, and will, borrow a few words from Scott Fitzgerald’s chronicle of another splintered and self-deluded man as coda: “In any case, he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.”

LOST IN THE STARS

The way which can be followed is not the true way.

—TAO TE CHING

People are, for the most part, locked into their minds, and their professions of belief in various ideologies or faiths, their opinions and scattered absurdities are but the knowable aspects of the lives they move through as best they can. This may be because of the regularity with which language pretends a simplification, a clear categorization of the particularized darkness that is the mind’s. And so religions and credos and their stupefying shibboleths are often spectacularly successful in duping and soothing us, their creaking yet elaborate language systems shamelessly representing themselves as the contraptions of God or his long-dead confidants. This is comforting folly, and we know that the most reprehensibly smug creeping Jesus lives, much of the time, despite his rigid beliefs, in the midnight of his brain, lost therein like the rest of us.

Consider the young, reasonably well-mannered men who killed so many people on September 11th. There they are, as unremarkably, as sadly ordinary as any representative American one can conjure up: anonymous, with their 5.75 haircuts and Timex “Explorer” watches, GAP T-shirts and overpriced running shoes, Hanes briefs and white athletic socks, and their Dockers khakis. They may well be full of Domino’s cardboard pizza or Big Macs, turning, despite their love of Allah, into chemical-laced excrement in their bowels. They might as well be American, citizens of Big Faucet, South Dakota, or Willow Lake, New Jersey. Insofar as their linguistic commerce goes, they are surely the salt of the earth: “I like very much to learn fly big jet plane nice,
O.K.
, good buddy?” Of spiritual matters large and small, they have no doubts, they have no qualms, their relationship with their morose and irritable God is one that would make the most dedicated Bible-thumper, yea, with snakes and timbrels, screaming and writhing, white roses and accordions, and thunder and lightning, wild with envy. Their stern yet loving Father has certainly spoken to these men in thus wise: “Kill, my young stalwarts, this is my inscrutable message to you, oh, don’t ask why. And know that paradise awaits for all eternity, with its dark-eyed virgins anxious to make your acquaintance.”

These young men know that Allah is pleased that thousands of infidels will soon be slaughtered, and since they are unbelievers, there will be no virgins for them. No halvah or falafel or lamb with rice either. Who knows what becomes of infidel dogs? On the other hand, there may be a shock in store for those soldiers of jihad, if, by some unutterable metaphysical quirk, they are made aware, in the smallest fraction of time, before oblivion, that can still be thought of as time, that “Allah” is a congeries of letters, a linguistic notion, if you will, like “flogiston” or “aporia” or “quark,” and that their deaths are—not to put too fine a point on it—meaningless. Oh, oh. Peace be upon them.

Regard this salesman, a meat-cutting-machine salesman, standing at an ice-crusted window in a room of a so-so hotel in Ohio or Pennsylvania, perhaps somewhere in the Poconos, the land, for so many years, of ga-ga honeymooners delirious in their heart-shaped bathtubs. He is looking out on the semicircular gravel drive that leads to Mohawk Boulevard and thence to the interstate; where, even now, as he smokes and tries to ignore the fact of his appalling boredom and small, regular failures, his petty defeats and debts, his emptiness and dismay, overpriced cars slam down this suicide alley, their drivers—let me be blunt—wholly uncaring about God in any of his disguises or costumes. They want to get home alive, just once more, peace be upon them. God can look after himself.

The salesman puts out his cigarette, his mind turning over darkly and heavily, and, with
Barney Miller
playing soundlessly and in washes of anemic color on the Korean swivel television in the corner, he takes off his pants and Hanes briefs, removes from his worn bag a pair of black sateen panties with nylon lace trim at the leg openings, pulls them on, and begins to masturbate. He is careful to keep his erect penis confined, the feel of the sateen on his throbbing phallus always does the trick for him. His shadowed mind with its sketchy and occulted thoughts of love and success, of his wife and the women at the branch office in Philadelphia, is concentrated in this solitary act; his secret self finds some succor in the physical world in which he tries his best to live and live each day. And he may thus soothe, for a quarter hour, his persistent malaise, he may find some small fugitive peace.

This act, tawdry as it is, may be thought of as strange and even perverse behavior, but only because, perhaps, I point it out to you, so that you may realize that you know, casually, this salesman. You both buy the paper every morning at the same store, the paper and Tic Tacs and cigarettes. “’Morning,” you both say. I agree that it’s hard to think of this man, with his balding head and scuffed L.L. Bean moccasins, whacking off, far from home, in a pair of cheap black panties. All secrets are dark.

The salesman, for whatever reason, has told himself that his wife has permitted him to use her panties for this cloistered act, whereas he bought them, of course, a few days earlier in a Wal-Mart outside Wilkes-Barre. Oddly, he is thinking of Mickey Rooney in the film
My Name Is Aram,
at the moment of his orgasm, which arrives blissfully but unexpectedly. As he surrenders completely to the weirdly thrilling and bridelike feelings that overwhelm him, gouts of semen spurt through the panties and onto the coarse bedspread.

The salesman lights a cigarette, and after depositing the soaked panties in the bathroom sink and cleaning himself off with toilet paper and a hand towel, he begins to scrub, nervously, at the soiled bedspread with tap water, the towel, and, for reasons beyond his comprehension, one of his worn, unfashionable ties. He is horrified at the possibility of the maid discovering his onanism when she comes in to make up the bed in the morning. The fucking maid, Oh Jesus, the fucking maid, he says to himself, and then suffers a massive coronary infarction and falls dead, bashing his head on the little writing desk that holds his wallet, keys, change, notebook, cigarettes, lighter, all the now useless junk of his life. Later in the week, his wife, faced with the fact of the semen-clotted panties in the sink, prefers to think that her dead husband was cruelly and disturbingly unfaithful to her with a perverted slut of a whore tramp of the Ohio or Pennsylvania evening. Otherwise—what to think? Peace be upon her.

It is quite possible, perhaps even probable, that one of the dedicated martyrs-to-be performed precisely the same hidden act—Allah notwithstanding—that the dead infidel salesman did, save, of course, for the heart attack. Let’s place the intense youth in a Great Western motel during, oh, his fifth or sixth week in the land of the Great Satan. He is standing in front of the mirror in his black sateen panties. Black panties! Evil and foul and cursed underwear made for depraved American women who, half-naked, are everywhere before one’s eyes. This young warrior had never even seen a picture of these sinful garments before he arrived in Duluth, he could not even imagine them, and here they were, by the hundreds, the thousands, in black, white, and colors, colors. They hang in plain view in Target and Sears, Penney’s and Wal-Mart, Macy’s and Ward’s, there, right there, so that anyone, even this young unsmiling zealot may buy them. Even this gloomy, rigid, sincere man, purified of all desire save the desire for a martyr’s death, may buy them. He thinks that he might buy a pair or two so as to have before his eyes a proof of American corruption and evil. His mind goes black, the truth of his apostate lust is therein buried, and, flushed, holding two pairs of these impossible wisps before him, he says to the salesgirl: “I like to buy this pretty things for my wife now please.” He takes the plastic bag, turns and leaves, burning, his closeted scenario forming in his mind, dark and silent and obscure, hidden from the decrees of the stern faithful, peace be upon them. The flesh is weak, weak, the mind a sequestered vault, airless and without light.

The young man is standing in front of the mirror in his degenerate garment, dizzy with pleasure, trembling, half-mad with fear of God’s wrath; but God, in whatever mournful guise, is, as always, nowhere to be discovered.

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Even in healthy persons, egotistic, jealous and hostile feelings and impulses, burdened by the pressure of moral education, often utilize the path of faulty actions to express in some way their undeniably existing force.… The manifold sexual currents play no insignificant part in these repressed feelings.

—SIGMUND FREUD