The Moon In Its Flight (31 page)

On a very cold winter Saturday, I got two phone calls, not an hour apart, from Clara and an old sometime acquaintance, Robert. Both calls carried the news that Ben was very near death, that he had, indeed, about ten days to live. Robert was serious and somber, his voice an annoying mix of manufactured sadness and the self-important tone that bad news seems to make, for many people, mandatory. I did not, of course, let on to him that this was not bad news to me. Clara was her usual glacially sardonic self, much too ironically detached to be affected by something so banal as death. As always, I found in her distantly gelid tones the erotic quality that had unfailingly undone me. It had been perhaps six years since I’d heard from either Clara or Ben, and my first reaction to this sudden news was no better than apathetic. As the phrase has it, I didn’t care whether he lived or died.

Ben, according to Clara, would be very happy to see me, and would I come? There was, Clara told me, plenty of room in the big wooden house that they’d bought on the Hudson, and my presence would make for a sort of reunion, I think she said, an
event,
which word she used without the hint of a dark smile. Robert also insisted—he told me that he was speaking for the, God help us, “family”—on the wondrous quality that my presence at the deathbed would add. I was tempted to say “to the festivities?” but kept my mouth shut. It had been so long, what a long time, it’s been years, and years, and so long, and on and on. So we chattered, the three of us. It had, really, not been long enough, it would never be long enough. And yet, I agreed to go, knowing what a disgusting carnival it would be. There would be present the shattered rabble from Ben’s past life, along with the fawning students, the grim, scowling artistic platoon from the nearby town, the arts reporter on the local rag, and, surely, the predictably ill-dressed colleagues in the English Department, who were too hip, too distracted by art and ideas to care about clothes, man, but among whom, I was virtually certain, Ben had cut a bohemian, Byronic, urbane figure—the dandy amid the rubes—for almost fifteen years. And, too, there would be Clara, the discreetly bored, aging bitch about whom the panting saps to whom she’d thrown the occasional sexual pourboire of one kind or another, would circle to proffer drinks, sandwiches, lights for her cigarettes, and condolences. They would, each seedy associate professor and second-rate graduate student, smile tenderly and longingly at the strong wife, this astonishing woman who hid her grief with wit and repartee. And each would be happy to believe that this fascinating tramp had taken him, and only him, into bed, car, bathroom, cellar, or backyard. What passion had been theirs! Etcetera. Meanwhile, the smudged and blurry wives and girlfriends lurked on the far side of this erotic Arcadia, being, as always, good sports, anonymous in their calf-length skirts and terrifyingly red lipstick.

Later that day, I regretted my decision to travel up to that grim third-rate college into whose zombie life Ben had settled. But when all is said and done, whenever that may be, I really did want to see Ben die, or, more precisely, watch him slide toward death out of, so to speak, the corner of my eye. None of his destructive asides or poisonous denigrations could save him, and for this I was thankful. I felt no guilt about any of these thoughts, or, better, desires, for I’d always, as I’ve already mentioned, hated Ben for putting me in the way of Clara, and then for getting in the way of me and Clara. The son of a bitch couldn’t win, as far as I was concerned. Of course, the three of us had conspired in this plan of desire and need and demand and destruction, and it was somehow contingent upon our simmering dislike of each other. I was curious, too, to see if Clara still held him—and me—in the venereal contempt that was the perfect expression of her nature. I had cuckolded Ben for years and years, although “cuckolded” is not the right word, as I think I’ve pointed out. I had, from the beginning, been permitted to discover that there was a good chance that Ben had, early on, found out about our passionate indiscretions. I have no authentic recollection of what I then thought of this, but I can guess that I somehow, in some skewed pathology of gratitude, felt a sense of privilege at being the recipient of this couple’s comradely attentions. I do know that I had come to worship what I took to be our wondrous freedom with an intensity that went beyond the imbecile.

The next day I got on the train at Grand Central and went up to watch Ben die, and to look into the cold, blank eyes of his wife. She was composed, remote, and sisterly, settled, uncomfortably, it seemed, into her flesh, as if she were finally alive, but not quite sure of life’s demands. On the way home, I thought of how we had laid waste to our sensibilities, with a truly genuine devotion to waste: we grew old amid this waste. We would not stay away from each other until we were sure that it didn’t matter any more whether we did or not.

At the very moment that my mother died, Clara and I were in bed together in the Hotel Brittany. She and I had met by accident on Vanderbilt Avenue and had gone downtown together in a cab. Clara, in her careless and reckless way, lied to me that she was going to meet an old school friend from Bennington in the Village, and I contributed my own god-awful, transparent lie. We wound up drinking in a bar off Sheridan Square, and I was soon taking liberties, as the creaking phrase has it, with her in a booth. We had, some six months before, decided to break off our affair of three years. We had no concern, of course, with Ben’s feelings, even the ersatz ones we handily ascribed to him, but we were somewhat anxious over the possibility that a full-blown adulterous romance might impinge upon our freedom to have romances with others. We had spent some hours thrashing this out, for we were serious indeed about our prospective lusts.

The afternoon had turned into a windy, bitter night, and a thin, powder-dry snow lashed the streets with a stinging drizzle. I bought a bottle of Gordon’s and we walked through the harsh weather a few blocks to the Brittany, a faded and somewhat decrepit hotel that still retained a semblance of old glamour in the appointments of its raffish bar and taproom, a locale that featured a weekend cocktail pianist, some gifted hack with a name like Tommy Jazzino or Chip Mellodius. I had always liked the rooms in the Brittany, mostly because of the large closets, a strange thing, I grant you, to care about, since I never once registered at the desk with anything even remotely resembling luggage. The desk clerk nodded and smiled at us as I signed and paid; he probably thought he knew us from the night before, or the week before. God knows, the desperately sex-driven all have the same lost, hopeful look, the same imploring face that seems to whine
please don’t disturb me before I come.
Such half-mad people are called lovers, a fact usually denied by lovers. This denial is most often rooted in the dreary fact that most people fall, or once fell, into this category, and no doubt think it unique.

One of the inconsequential things that I remember about our night in that warm room, thinly edged with the smell of cigarette smoke and gin, is the fact that Clara, as she undressed, revealed herself to be wearing an undergarment that looked like a pair of rather fancy culottes: they were a kind of pale raspberry in color, trimmed with black lace. She described them, apologetically, for some reason, as a fucking goddamn slip for idiot girls. I can’t say whether they were effectively arousing or not, but they were remarkable and quite unforgettable. I’ve always wondered whether Clara, of all the women in the world, was the only one to wear this particular item of underclothing; I wonder, too, what Ben thought of her in this extravagant lingerie. I never asked her.

Clara told me that Ben was currently screwing one of his graduate students, a serious, annoyingly smart young woman from Princeton, who was, according to Clara, well ahead of academic schedule in the dowdiness department, almost in the same nonpareil league as assistant professors. The girl thought—what else?—that Ben was really aware, really brilliant, really wonderful, his blinding light hidden under the conventional academic barrel. And so young, so young to be so aware, so brilliant, so wonderful. She thought, according to Clara, that Ben would one day write an academic novel to surpass Randall Jarrell! And, in this novel, she dreamed that she might figure, barely and flatteringly disguised, as a complex and wonderfully difficult graduate student. I’m more or less painting this particular lily, as may be obvious, although Clara
did
actually say that Ben was screwing a graduate student. For all I know she might have looked like Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth! It pleases me to be given this glorious woman to use as a term of comparison, for this time has no understanding of her at all. She speaks, her face and body and the timbre of her voice speak to men on their own, as they say, morosely distant from wives and homes, half-drunk in the dim bars of half-empty hotels. She stands in bathroom doorways, in a skirt and brassiere, waiting for a light. She is perfectly and ideally dead, as she should be. What, in this age of speeding trash and moronic facts, would such a beauty even have to
do?

We drank and smoked and Clara cried, not about Ben, certainly, but about her father’s recent death. Then I fucked her and we slept. I woke at about five in the morning, and, touching Clara’s naked body next to mine, I was instantaneously nutty with lust. As I again fucked her groaning self with a dedicated selfishness, my mother called to me. I could hear her voice as clearly as if she stood next to the bed, or in the bathroom doorway, and as I came, she called to me again, from somewhere out of the darkness of the closet, a wistful, flat, soft statement of my name. At that moment I knew that my mother had just died. How strange and perverse a moment it was, my mind on some eerie plane, Clara pushing me off and out of her, in raw annoyance that I had jounced her awake. I made, I believe, some apologies to get off the sexual hook, probably delivered with a stricken look of guilt on my face, one that suggested how wretched I felt for my lack of concern for her. She lit a cigarette, as did I, and I got out of bed to stand at the window, smoking and looking down at the freezing streets, thus completing with exhausted flair, I think, the two-bit melodrama. Clara, of course, bought none of this.

I thought, although it wasn’t really a thought, that Clara, rather than my mother, should have died, and that I could kill her, right there in the bed. The night clerk would never remember us, and I had registered under my usual fake name, “Bob Wyatt,” a moniker so insipid as to be blank. Kill her to even things up for my sad, uncompleted mother, and then commiserate with Ben and Miss Complit. I could imagine their sensitive literary comments, the lines from Hardy or Yeats, and Ben’s dim smile as I delivered the
envoi
with a snatch of Dylan Thomas, a poet whom Ben loathed.

I was sick with guilt, intolerable slug that I was, and waiting for despair to fall on me in its black rain. Good old despair!, that most durable and aberrant and selfish of pleasures. But despair eluded me, or I it, and as the room began to admit pale January light, I went down on Clara until she very happily came. She was more or less sweet after that, and let me give her my bacon at breakfast. We sat at the table a long time, drinking coffee and smoking. I didn’t want to call the hospital and be told about my mother, I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to have to take care of the terrible details of death, the business angle, as Ben had once called it, prick that he was. But mostly, I didn’t want to have to pair my mother’s flesh and Clara’s, but it was already too late to escape that.

Of course, I write this now, years after these events, as the phrase goes. What I then thought, I don’t recall. We ate, by the way, in an Automat on Broadway, just south of Eighth Street. It’s long gone, along with all the other Automats, along with all the other every-things, but every time I pass the spot where it stood, I can smell Clara. Her subtle sexual odor is uncannily apparent, an odor that she claimed was generated exclusively for me—a preposterous confession that I, sweet Mother of God, believed for a long time. Now I’m
righteously
permitted, I feel, to think of her as nothing but that sexual odor. As nothing but a cunt.