The Moon In Its Flight (28 page)

My wife joined Charlie and me in the laughter we managed to produce: What an astonishing likeness! What a surprise! Look at the angle of the cap it’s marvelous! And the cigarette! How mercilessly casual we were. I have no recollection of my feelings at that moment of joviality, but flatter myself that they were murderous. I suspect, though, that did I experience the violence of pain, I also must have had the sense that I had no right to such feeling, that I was, indeed, the guest in the apartment, and that the authentic I sat in my chair, relaxed, after a blissful day in which this legitimate husband had fucked and fucked again, the woman who was my wife but not, somehow, the woman I had fallen in love with and married.

What else could these two lovers have done but confess their lustful acts, a confession emblematized in such a way as to reveal to me my unreality, my meaninglessness as both a husband and a man? It was not quite enough for them to cuckold me, it was necessary to occlude me and by their revelation, to make me into a cipher, to turn my betrayer into me. I have often wondered how far they went that day in their masquerade. Did Charlie Poor wear my overcoat and my cap as he mounted my wife? Did she cry my name into his bespectacled blank face in the same parody of ecstasy with which she equipped the spurious orgasms she fashioned for me, and by which I pretended to be thrilled?

A long time after, I came to think that Charlie Poor had never quite possessed any actuality prior to that day and its sad events. At the moment at which my wife, for it would have had to be my wife who thought of it, created Charlie as me, when he was ordered to assert himself, so to speak, as me, his always tentative and flickering self slipped away, shed whatever tenuous presence it had. In the quiet of that dim, gray afternoon, he must have absented his precarious self in the sexual act: I believe, that is, that he was able to perform this act only as I, so that I had been with my wife that afternoon, as Charlie Poor. I had entered her familiar flesh, as Charlie first became nothing and then became me. This is too dark for me to understand, or even want to understand, but Charlie Poor was not only the agent of my erasure but of his own as well. By becoming me he obliterated himself and became nobody. I wonder, though, if he had been, for a flash, himself completely, that is, did he have the pleasure of knowing that
he
was fucking my wife?

There is little more to be said. My life went on, as did theirs, although after my wife and I separated, I lost touch with both of them. All for the best. I might end, though, by noting that this recording of tangled events has brought to mind an old friend of mine, a suicide dead now for more than thirty years, whose wife, at a particularly difficult time in their marriage, when he was in a mental hospital suffering from the blackest self-destructive depression, began an intense affair with the man who was her husband’s partner in the small business they had started together. This man appeared with my friend’s wife at parties, bars, restaurants, at, in short, all those places that she and her husband frequented. He even went with her, doggedly, to the sanitarium on Sundays. On all these occasions, his role was that of the faithful support for the worried and uncertain wife, the strong and selfless escort and close family confidant. It was, as may well be guessed, extravagantly obvious to everyone that he was hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with his partner’s wife, so much so that he seemed, in her presence, to be little more than yearning incarnate. Unsurprisingly, he attempted, with her halfhearted assistance, to disguise his desire as hearty bonhomie: he was the good pal, so to speak. No one cared, one way or another, and in the curious way of shifting groups of shifting alliances, wives, husbands, lovers, and friends, the man had no identity for anyone beyond that of the business partner of their familiar friend. He was transparent and weightless, insubstantial. He was, additionally, afflicted with two names, that is, he had two different given names and two different surnames, one set of which, for some private, grimly comic reason, had been given him by his partner, had literally been conferred upon him. And it was by this name that he, despite ineffectual protestations, had been introduced, by my friend, socially, and it was by this name that everyone, including my friend’s wife, initially knew him. After her husband had been hospitalized, his partner’s insistent revelation of his true name had little effect: he remained the persona known to all.

I’ve wondered, more than once, if my friend’s widow, who married her lover soon after her husband’s suicide, accepted—I was about to say knew—her lover’s real name. Of course, she must have, yet consider how strange it must have been for her to gasp and whisper her beloved’s ersatz name during their first fornications, and then to discover that this name, cried out in passion, was one that had been forced upon him by her mad husband. It might then be thought that the early sexual acts between the adulterers were, in effect, acts performed by the wife with a total stranger, sexual gestures of a doubled infidelity. Perhaps my dead friend, in uncanny vengeful prescience, obliterated his partner’s self so that his faithless wife would be unfaithful to his successor as well as to him, despite the presence of that successor’s flesh.

Reality, or, if you will, that which we constrain ourselves to believe, is, beyond all philosophies, also that which we make of what happened. Unexpected connections do, of course, sometimes make for unexpected forms. For instance, I see that this story is, essentially, about a set of disappearances. I had not intended that to be its burden, although any further attempt to say what I meant to say is out of the question.

THINGS THAT HAVE STOPPED MOVING

Since Ben Stern’s death, I’ve come to admit that Clara always brought out the worst in me. This is not to say that her husband’s death caused this admission; nor do I mean to imply that had I never known Clara I would have been, as the nauseating cant has it, a better person who learned to like myself. I suppose I don’t quite know what I mean to say. When I think of the years during which the three of us abraded each other, and of Ben’s melodramatic deathbed farewell, a ghastly seriocomic scene in which I participated with a kind of distant passive elation, I feel compelled to get at, or into, or, most likely, to slink around the banal triangle of desire, lust, and expediency that we constructed, again and again. Simply put, we met, became intimates, and relentlessly poisoned each other. With our eyes wide open, to paraphrase the old song. I never really much liked this essentially spoiled couple, and “spoiled” is the word. Somebody once remarked that “spoiled” means precisely what it says, and that spoiled people cannot be repaired; they rot. And Ben and Clara were decidedly rotten. I was no less rotten, although “flimsy” might be a better word, and one could argue that I brought out the worst in Clara. As for Ben, well, he was absolutely necessary for Clara and me to dance our dance. I was sure, almost from the beginning—a portentous phrase, indeed—that Ben was well aware of Clara’s “playing around,” if you will, with me and with all the other men with whom she regularly had a few laughs, as she liked so robustly, and somehow innocently, to put it. She could act the real American-girl sport, Clara could, a master of the disingenuous:
My goodness!,
I can hear her saying,
just what am I doing in bed with this stranger?
There was, to speak in figures, a kind of heuristic script to which the three of us had limited access, so that each of us could add to, delete from, and revise this script in the preposterous belief that the others would act according to these changes. What actually happened, as they say, was that over the years, each one of us was continually subject to the whims, betrayals, neuroses, and general vileness of the other two. We pretended otherwise, which pretense thoroughly subverted any possibility of our living lives that were even slightly authentic. I confess that my hope, really more of a velleity than a hope, now that these thirty-five years are good and dead, is that Clara is good and dead as well. Perhaps she is. That I don’t know, one way or another, is dismally perfect.

My lust for Clara was awakened and made manifest as an adjunct to a lawful, if rare and surprising coupling with my wife, a sexual diversion that occurred on a Sunday afternoon as counterpoint to Ben and Clara’s own marital intercourse. We had known the Sterns a few months when they asked us to their apartment for Sunday afternoon drinks and lunch. My wife had met, I believe, Ben and Clara once or twice, and made it clear that she disliked them: she said that they looked like magazine photographs, make what you will of that. But I had long since stopped caring about her likes and dislikes and their motivations. I consented to go, but said something, perhaps, about my wife already having made plans—something to explain what I was certain would be her refusal to accompany me. But she said she’d come, to my surprise.

I was, by that time, wholly aware of Clara’s subtly provocative behavior, but as yet had no nagging desire for her, although I was fascinated by the assertiveness of her body, by her—or its—way of walking and standing and sitting, the way, I suppose, that its femininity situated itself in the world. But she was, after all, married to Ben, who seemed to me then funny, intelligent, and, well, smart and candid. I was very taken with him and found myself somewhat reluctantly, but happily, borrowing his style, for want of a better word.

An achingly cold Sunday in January: we chatted, gossiped, ate, rather lightly, but drank a good deal. As the afternoon progressed, and the streets took on the cold gray patina of a deep New York winter day moving toward its early palest-rose wash of twilight, we began, blithely, to inject the sexual into our conversation. We told lascivious stories and jokes in blatantly vulgar language, and every other word seemed loaded with the salaciously suggestive. My wife blushed beautifully enough to unexpectedly excite me; to put it plainly, the four of us were aroused, and giddy with desire. Rather abruptly, Ben and Clara rose and walked from the living room/bedroom into the adjacent kitchen, and almost immediately my wife and I heard the rustle of clothes, Clara’s quick gasp, and then the panting and grunting of their copulation. My wife and I were quite helplessly thrown, by the situation, at each other, and, fully dressed and somewhat deliriously, we fucked on the edge of the couch, recklessly driven by the sounds from the kitchen.

Soon there was silence from that room, followed by whispering and quiet laughter. My wife called out, in a silly, girlish voice, for Ben and Clara not to come in, while we cleaned ourselves and adjusted our clothing. And then we four were reunited, so to say, for another drink. We grinned foolish and oddly superior grins, as if nobody on the sad face of the sad earth had ever been so crazily free and adventurous, as if we had just performed acts foreign to grade-school teachers, waitresses, and salesmen, foreign to our parents and rigorously bourgeois queers. As if sex was only ours to deploy and control.

When we had settled down with drinks and cigarettes in a thin aroma of whiskey and flesh, I looked up, by chance, to see Clara looking at me in such a way as to make clear that she had
expected
my look. What was happening? How can I get at this? Just fifteen minutes earlier, on my knees, between my wife’s spread thighs, I had known, amorphously and with a kind of dread, that I really wanted to be fucking Clara, I wanted her perched on the edge of the couch, her legs wide apart, her eyes glassy. This sudden crack of lust had come from nowhere, had no gestation, was not the trite fantasy of a passion I’d long nursed for Clara. But her look told me that she knew what I’d thought, that she’d seen into my desire, and, as importantly, that she’d felt the same way in the kitchen with Ben. I was, at that moment, amazingly, stupidly besotted.

Less than a month later, at a party, I danced Clara into a bedroom, and pushed myself into her to come instantly, in helpless fury. Clara laughed and said that she knew it, or that it had to be that way, or something like that; but not in a manner designed to make me feel inadequate, but so as to make me believe—and I believed, oh yes—that this first carnal encounter with her had to be exactly this sort of encounter, and that it was
right.
My instantaneous ejaculation had been made into a venereal triumph! When we emerged into the lights of the party, our clothes were disarranged, but everyone seemed too drunk to notice or care, except, perhaps, for Ben. Or so I now think. I now think, too, that the quiet laughter from that kitchen, the whispering, was a revelation—one that I did not countenance—of the Sterns’ knowledge that I was but a step away from a dementia of lust for Clara: that I was to be their perfect fool. I grant you that this suspicion may appear too fine-tuned, too sensitive, too baseless. And still, whether it was planned or not, a game or not, something happened that afternoon that drew Clara and me together into a flawed affair that virtually defined the rest of my life.