The Moon In Its Flight (22 page)

I knew some of the minor details of the following narrative—if I may so distinguish the somewhat rickety account that follows—but its basic elements were told me, casually and indifferently, by three or four people, no one of whom knew the whole story. This did not prevent them from attempting to fill in its sudden blanks, so as to make the story cohere, so to say, or, at any rate, achieve a sort of balance—despite the fact that there seems little balance to its particulars. And although its meanderings, its often sad climaxes and anticlimaxes, are often banal, there is a pathos, I think, at the story’s center, that attracted me, so much so that I found myself also manipulating its events by elaborating its lapses, clarifying its obscurities. I flatter myself that I have somewhat improved the tale, which may be another way of saying that I think I have made it representatively “American,” although I’d be hard put to define what I mean by that. There are scenes in this account that may strike the reader as fantastic or melodramatic, or, more often, absurdly convenient to the unfolding needs or desires of the people involved. These incidents are sometimes, but by no means always, my inventions; many are details given me by my “witnesses.” Which is not to say that they are not
their
inventions. At one point, I considered employing a simple gimmick whereby I could differentiate, for the reader, those elements of the story given me by others from those I invented or adorned. But this, or so I thought, would needlessly clutter the narrative with literary impedimenta.

It may be useful to remark that these events occurred in 1960, and while the specific nuances of feeling manifested by the “characters,” let me call them, might well manifest themselves in our postmodern era of knowingness, of amateurish license, it’s unlikely. Our time seems too overtly self-congratulatory, righteous and fretful and worriedly concerned not only that “hip” things must be
known,
but that the responses to knowing these “hip” things be the correct ones. So: 1960, March, to be precise.

Let’s put the center of events in a publishing house or advertising agency or public-relations company. Some business on the East Side in the Forties or Fifties. We have, working in this business, two young men, Campbell and Nick. Both are just short of thirty, both married about five or six years (although Nick and his wife are newly separated), both waiting, although they of course do not know this, for the sixties to take up and complete the bloody job begun in 1936 in Spain. They were living, that is, in the odd social somnambulism that was later thought, perhaps predictably, to be a cultural “ferment.”

Nick worked for Campbell in a small but important department of the firm, but after a time, since they were both given to and comfortable with collaboration, they began to function as equals, and so they thought of themselves. They were wholly different—in family, background, education, upbringing, class, and in their tastes in music and clothes, in their speech, in everything that is established by family and background and class, etc., etc., or by opposition—of the right sort—to them. Campbell was a “child of privilege,” a faded phrase, of course, much like the genteel but spent “man of slender means,” which latter he also nicely was. That is to say that Campbell’s family at this point had little of the wealth it had once enjoyed, and that their name was its gallant but inadequate substitute. Things had become even harder when his mother and father divorced, soon after Campbell’s twelfth birthday, for his apparently scatterbrain mother had no money of her own, and his father’s generous settlement on her had been squandered on clothes and jewelry and many ga-ga trips to God knows where; and his alimony payments were far less than what his mother needed to live as she wished—or, as she thought of it, deserved—to live. Campbell’s expenses had been “taken care of,” he’d gone from Andover to Princeton, after which his father’s finances became unaccountably arcane and subterranean, almost, so his attorney argued, nonexistent. Soon after Princeton, Campbell had married a young Englishwoman, Faith, who was, supposedly, an heiress to a huge ale-and-stout fortune, that of a company old and profitable enough to have had presented to its founding Welsh family the trappings, raiment, and decorations of the elite. This fortune turned out to be a fable, but at the time of the story I relate, Campbell didn’t know this; nor, for that matter, did Faith. How hopeful and wistful they must have been in their fresh young marriage, thinking but not daring to think of the wonderfully corrupting fortune that awaited them. It occurs to me that these fantasy monies might have influenced, in some tangential, “mysterious” way, Campbell’s—and perhaps Faith’s—behavior in the events that were soon to develop; but there’s no way of knowing, of course.

Perhaps the best way to present Nick is to comment on his wonderment, an amused wonderment, at Campbell’s elegant shabbiness, which Nick originally took as a sign of what one might call sartorial dumbness. Campbell’s jackets, for instance, were out of style, as Nick thought of style, threadbare, battered, rumpled, and none too clean; and his beautiful oxford shirts, ten years old at least, although perfectly laundered, were faded and frayed at the cuffs. His English shoes, repaired and repaired again, and polished innumerable times to a glovelike hand, were as strange to Nick as was his hair, always shaggy and seemingly combed in great haste; and his ties were carelessly knotted and slightly askew. Nick, of course, had no notion or experience of these persistent prep-school affectations, in place so long that they no longer seemed affectations but laws, cultural truths, the regulations of an Episcopalian God. Nick, nobody’s fool, as they say, quickly came to realize that Campbell had chosen this “look,” which made him, to Nick, an eccentric, or perhaps an exotic.

There’s little point in giving much of Nick’s background; we may assume that it was the opposite of Campbell’s, i.e.; what Campbell was, Nick was not. And yet, as I’ve said, they worked well together, they began to like each other, and their daily discoveries of each other’s quirks and oddities and cultural opinions served to strengthen their growing camaraderie. The marginalized niche in the department wherein they worked became truly theirs, their work flourished, their work was, in fact, extraordinarily good. Rather quickly, their daily labors became pleasures to which they looked forward.

It became apparent to Nick, in the first month or two of their acquaintance—apparent and almost unbelievable—that Campbell had never been in an Automat, and had to be instructed in these restaurants’ ways. He’d never eaten 15¢ hamburgers at Grant’s: bloody rare miniatures topped with rings of delectably half-fried onions, nor drunk their extraordinary birch beer on tap. He’d never eaten a hot dog with mustard and onions in tomato sauce from a Sabrett cart. The 2 FOR 35¢ blended whiskey specials at Blarney Stone and White Rose saloons were a revelation to him—as indeed were the proletarian brands of booze like Kinsey Silver Label, Three Feathers, Four Roses, Fleischman’s, Wilson “That’s All,” and Paul Jones—and he had no notion that these saloons’ spreads of sliced cheese, baloney, spiced ham, cherry peppers, pickles, raw onions, coleslaw, pickled beets, crackers, bread, and mustard were free—they were
free
—to anyone who had a beer or two at the bar. What a world this was! Campbell, that is to say, evidently had no knowledge whatsoever of Manhattan west of Fifth Avenue and south of Fortieth Street. Or so Nick said as he charged Campbell with this extraordinary ignorance. He was an innocent, deposited each morning at Grand Central, to which he returned each evening to be taken back to Connecticut, or some other barely imaginable place. This is surely something of an exaggeration, and yet it is true that Nick took a consistently surprised, even charmed Campbell to the shoddy remainder bookstores and back-date magazine emporiums in and around Times Square, to Toffenetti’s and Marco Polo’s (“Ham ’n’ Eggs Are My Game”), to the Forty-second Street Tad’s Flame Steak ($1.69!!), and to God knows how many lost, dark bars in the Forties off Broadway or Seventh Avenue, where they sat with their Rheingold drafts and talked fitfully with the battered whores and bust-out horse-players waiting for The New Day A-Comin’ Tomorrow. For Campbell, these mundane comings and goings that he and Nick shared at lunch hour or after five, became romantic adventures, and Nick a knowing guide possessed of the most profoundly arcane knowledge of the city, the
actual
city.

It was no doubt true that Campbell knew little of this New York, unremarkable and workaday New York. Campbell’s city was the nighttime metropolis of taxis from Grand Central or Penn Station for choreographed evenings with girls from Wellesley or Smith or Mount Holyoke, of silly rendezvous at the Plaza and the Pierre and the Biltmore for Old Fashioneds, or tables at the Blue Angel or the Le Ruban Bleu, of petrifying string quartets at Carnegie Recital Hall; and then taxis back to Grand Central or Penn Station. The specifics of such evenings may have differed from these, but the general spirit of such entertainments was unvarying. There was no other New York for Campbell, certainly not an actual New York; the boroughs, for instance, with their millions, did not quite exist. It might not be too ridiculous to guess that Campbell’s city was a kind of theatrical or cinematic “event.”

Campbell, then, apparently looked upon Nick as someone who would soon reveal to him the knowledge of all the wondrously, beautifully commonplace,
essential
things he had missed in his vapid life. That Nick knew how to transfer from, say, the Lex to the Fourth Avenue Local at Fourteenth Street was the commonest sort of knowledge, but to Campbell it made Nick a hero of the street. This was, it goes without saying, daft, but no more so than the awe of those who wonder at the sophistication of the man who understands and appreciates wine or polo or bridge or antiques or baroque music. All trifling expertise, as Nick might have said had he thought or cared to say it, is as one. Campbell was even more impressed because Nick had no curiosity concerning Campbell’s world. If such a world was one made manifest, so Nick seemed to make clear, by Campbell’s dopey clothes and annoying accent and the chilly stories he told of “swotting” for exams and smuggling beer into dormitories, Nick was content to remain ignorant of and distant from it. He never said this to Campbell, but his polite yet fixed smile of attention was more candid than any remark might have been: a drink at the Plaza, ice cream at Rumpelmayer’s, blinis and caviar at the Russian Tea Room with its
ghastly
pink napkins, none of these things were of any interest or concern to Nick. They were for other people, those who were intent on
being
something. Nick, in his stiff Crawford suits, Flagg Brothers shoes, Tie City polyester repp stripes, under his gleaming Brylcreem hair, was somehow aristocratically self-contained. This, true or not, enthralled, awed, delighted, and charmed Campbell. So their unlikely friendship developed, neither of them knowing one important thing about the other. This turned out to be a serious matter, indeed; although deeper knowledge may not have changed a single impending act or decision of theirs.

One day, after lunch, Campbell told Nick that he’d been telling Faith about him, and their lunchtime and after-work “adventures,” as he had taken to calling their peregrinations, self-consciously yet delightedly. Well, they
were
adventures, at least for him, and he had made that clear to Faith. In any event, she’d very much
love
to have him as a guest up in Connecticut, and as for Campbell, it went without saying that he would be so pleased, and so on. In sum, Nick was invited for a weekend at any time, at his leisure: it was up to him to set a date. At this point, things, for Nick, become a little awkward; not only was the invitation sudden and unexpected, but Nick felt, obscurely, that he was being steered into something. Yet he and Campbell got along, did they not?, they worked well together, they were compatible: and Faith was probably terrific. So what was wrong? Nick’s immediate response, had he articulated it, would have been a polite “no.” For somehow behind or beneath the odd bonhomie that easily existed between the two men, was something that nagged at Nick, that made him feel uneasily like—what? A sap, maybe? He had thought, uncertainly, for some time, that Campbell’s innocence and enthusiasm were manufactured, and that his astonished reactions to the mundane this and that to which Nick introduced him were spurious, that he was “putting on an act.” He felt that Campbell was maybe playing him—or playing with him—for some hidden reason of his own. And now, suddenly, Faith was supposedly in a state of eager curiosity about him. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll let you know—thanks.”

About a week or so later, Nick had decided, despite his subtle discomfort, to accept the invitation, his objections—although they weren’t really that—laid aside. That morning, by peculiar coincidence, Campbell thrust at Nick a handful of color photographs of himself and Faith on an almost empty beach. He had about him a faintly proud, uxorious air, as if he had said, “How do you like my beautiful wife?” Nick, nodding and smiling, as people will, looked through the photographs of the couple, both in swimsuits, both smiling disarming smiles. There were photos of the two of them together, embracing, mugging, wading in the surf; and shots of Campbell and Faith, each alone. She was very lovely, precisely the sort of young wife who would live, or so Nick thought, in some old New England house, no doubt one that her family had bought the young couple as a wedding gift. She was tall and slender, with a nicely formed, lithe body, long straight hair, glossy rich in the rich sun of the rich beach on which they were relaxing or “cavorting,” was the odd word that came to Nick unbidden. But in one photograph, which made Nick, in quick reaction, pull his head sharply back and raise his eyes to Campbell’s, then look down again, Faith stood, unsmiling, looking directly at the camera with what seemed an almost painful sexual intensity. Her hands were cupped beneath her breasts, which were half-out of her bra, in an offering. She was, Nick thought, Nick knew, offering
him
her breasts, and herself. This glaringly erotic image had been specifically made for him, of course it had. It had been posed by her and by Campbell for him! As he looked up again, Campbell, blushing to his hairline, was reaching for the pack of photographs, embarrassed, nervously laughing, reaching and saying something, saying, “Oh,
hell,
Nick, I didn’t mean for that one to be—it’s, you know, it’s, I’m sorry. It’s personal.” And he took the photographs back.