The Moon In Its Flight (12 page)

Years later, bitterly alone and quarreling constantly with rude hosts on St. Helena, “Tod” regretted not having victimized Florida in the “Sonnet Days,” so-called when the fabled
bateaux à noyer
were available to him by the thousands.

Florida! he would think ruefully.

Vive Coral Gables! Vive Miami Beach! Vive Biscayne Bay!

He collapsed in tears onto the bezique.

How he had wished to experience, and absorb, golden sands, pavilion music, swamps, fens, bogs, fevers, malaria, gators, and ringworm.

The Trocadero! The Gold Coast! Malibu! Little Havana!

Berrigan did not, of course, give a thought to the fire ants, skeeters, or raccoons. In his mind was the image of the deathless pantoum, one of the more elusive optical illusions. It always seemed about the size of a very large lemon. So “Tod” startled himself needlessly.

Oscaloosa! Osceola! San Fernando! Dixie, Dade, and DeSoto! Broward and Hernando!

Too late, perhaps, Berrigan realized that it was his artistic destiny to realize the futility of optical illusions—in his life as well as in his work!—for the pleasure and instruction of others. There were plenty of them!

The bezique floated away on a zephyr, followed by cards, tiles, and dice. But the sand, he knew, was forever, if not here, then in, say, Spain or Massachusetts.

California

History suggests that “Tod” was often effervescent at parties, to which he was rather disconcertingly drawn. His notebook was always in evidence, and yet.… He would, more often than not, assume the persona of a football player or ironworker, a sign of the subverted signifier.

Defeat seemed almost sweet to him. He remembered Waterloo and the thrill of surrender. And to Wellington, a covert practitioner of the unnatural! As a contemporary quipped, “You should take a look already at the tight pants he wears by the dragoons!” Was defeat but another optical illusion?

Soon, he was in California, where he spent several months dreaming of a great shining railroad that would connect the stunning beauty of the North with the breathtaking beauty of the South. And over the projected scene there projectively hung the scent of projected lemons, long present in this paradise before the advent of wheat, the advent of the avocado, the advent of the radish and the pear and the apricot! Long before the advent of the guava! The scarlet tomato!, the latter a gift from our proud Mexican “amigos,” happy to have been born to the honest hoe, the honest shovel, the honest broom. Not for such the corrupting dreams of wealth!

The Dream Is Over

Yet official business, in the guise of the Code St. Mark’s, the School Cabal, and the Troublin’ Mind Committee, forced the restless innovator back to New York. From there, he was dispatched to Elba for the ordeal of the Hundred Days for “extraneous
ibitas,”
a charge that whipped him into a cold fury of nonchalance.

Waking one morning in a lather of sweat, he noticed, at the door of his bedroom, two of the largest lemons he had ever seen. Although conventional wisdom scoffed and snickered, they were quite big!

“Josephine,” he called quietly into the melancholy darkness. The lemons rustled in the corridor. He felt as if he had lost his mind, or as if he was about to be compromised by radical groups he’d somehow offended by a thought he’d entertained. Now Florida seemed to be no more than the optical illusion he had always suspected it to be even when good friends had assured him of its actual size, more or less. Where now the quiet breeze?

“Josephine,” he called again, but the lady was not there. No more would she assure “Tod” that he was of average height and average build, of, in fact, a decent size, much larger, in fact, than any
lemon
she had ever seen. And no more would she explain to him that everything in life is but an optical illusion, or something like it, no more remind him that somebody had once said that a hero removes all fruits from their places.

ALLEGORY OF INNOCENCE

They discovered a cache of old books, replications, wooden fences, a spangled gypon, assorted spheroids, and many other items, as yet unidentified. The Director, despite his unnerving obsession with luminous white dresses—and their ever-varying representations in his collection of Christian Fundamentalist pamphlets—was lucid enough to assert that some of the more common fabrics would forever remain mysterious as to their composition. “Dried grit,” “Leaves,” “Pebbles,” “Rifle,” “Fishing rod,” were but some of the names they tried attaching to some of the things, although it was clear that nothing quite fit. One of the group of assistants—actually, more than one—thought that certain of the larger umbrellas looked like navy-blue melton overcoats, admittedly an eccentric notion. Hub shards were quickly identified, as were metal brassiere caps, and, though grotesque enough, they were not as grotesque as many of the other “discoveries.” At about this time, the Director took to covering himself with mounds of his cherished gossamer evening gowns, the color of new snow, and neglecting, for days, his investigation of the woody perennials that were doubtlessly clues to the identification of the least familiar clumps.

One of the young women in the motivational group said that she’d
seen
one or two of the brightly colored biloxis in what she called “the better shops,” but her suddenly recovered memories put the kibosh on that assertion. In addition, the lost items of clothing obscured the logic, so to speak, of the biloxis’ arrangement. After one of the most beautifully delicate of the random crystals disintegrated, every puta bag in the area was seized by security, even though such bags had never been used for anything other than extramarital sexual powwows, or, as the bitch of an editor put it, “adventures.” “Security must consider puta bags vectors of blazing darkness, rather than the simple, filthy things they really are,” a lissome assistant remarked, her beautifully shod feet nonchalantly “parked” on the desk.

A few of the younger women, the “troops,” as they were jocularly called, suggested that a harmonics inspissator might reveal the true nature of the symmetrical devices, but they were, predictably, patronized, insulted, mocked, ogled, and ruthlessly complimented on their looks and attire by executive officers. A week later, beneath an economy-size Mammoth Nut Bar, the shipping-room mascot found yet another shocking photograph of the boss.

Amid the confusion and grumbling over the newly appointed Creative Person, another problem arose when Nan Hacktree, the author of tales based on her own warm yet mentally deranged family, stubbornly held that Wallace Wally’s novel,
Over My Dead Body,
had to be judged as something more, much more, than a book. “And I do not feature the word ‘deranged’ to describe my relatives,” Mrs. Hacktree liked to repeat. At this point, odds and ends as diverse as torn panties, obscure freak cartoons, and an aluminum soap dish were discovered in a collapsed family room. With this, the senior writers’ clique that championed redemptive dialogue became emboldened enough to denigrate such malign yet seductive imagery as garden walls, gnomons, Nazi moms in sheer nylons, and stardust. Other corrupt figures, e.g., battered work boots, crusted, sour pipes, and 1956 Chevrolets fared badly as well, especially during the waspish and misogynist lunches that were cynically thought of, by the clerical staff, as postmortems.

Within weeks, lipsticks, especially the shades Red Rider, Black Cloche, Glorious Bimbo, and Sunburn, became the preferred tools with which the more avid tyros surreptitiously polluted themselves during the demanding Creative Writing examinations. Mysteriously, the graffiti in the employees’ lounge read, in part, LES GRANDS JETS D’EAU SVELTES PARMI LES CHOSES. It may have been written by the staff comedian, whose most celebrated routine had to do with Philadelphia lawyers, silver bugles, and stupid waitresses—of course! The Collectors Association, already on the defensive because of a smutty joke told
in mixed company
by its Curator, pretended not to know anything about its holdings of pornographic bar mitzvah music and its recent purchase of the revolutionary artwork, “Money Talks.” It wasn’t long before the Meat Czar arrived at the Association offices with steaks, shoes, books, wind-up tin pigs, white ribs, cheese maps, nostalgia bastors, celebrity indices, etc., etc., more things, in fact, than you can shake a stick at.

As the weather worsened, the more serious sex workers—many of them fresh from the famous porches of the Deep South—spoke of their dreams of empty patios, cold twilights, distant voices, California sunshine, good-time Johnnies, and other crass selections too vile to enumerate. A crude wag was arrested and held overnight by the Sensitivity Committee for opining that what the ladies of the evening did “beats working.” Many psychologists attributed the young man’s cruel remark to his belief that heterosexuals are, when all is said and done, really homosexuals
underneath.

At about the same time, the Board of Directors, with the assistance of the Bureau of Culture, ascertained that Wallace Wally’s sweeping saga of a man who lost his way on the prairies,
Carnal Jitters
, had discouraged twenty-two young writers from sending gifts to casual friends, although the latter were leading simple yet zesty lives! Many of these same writers had learned their manners from the old frauds who pretended an interest in inexpensive yet robust wines, translucent spheroids, pitiful tennis afternoons,
The Journal of Virginia Woolf Journal Studies
, aerobic mania, and movie stars with really good and, like, humanistic beliefs. The Stupefatto Poll, to everyone’s amazement, discovered that the “things” that had made these young people writers in the first place—blue uniforms, lovelorn fantasies, trees hard by the handball courts, girlish laughter from a small, wooded island, etc., etc.,—were metonymic substitutes for the zeppelin, or, in Lacanian terms, the
path
of the zeppelin. “Who knew?,” Rory Stupefatto mused.

And yet, the rigid instructors stubbornly refused to designate as Actual Things the Red Ball Express, the ill-fitting cap, the perfumed and ice-cold Persian lamb coat, the Jodie suit, and the good read. Apprised of this, one of the women, a Catholic Romantic, mentioned, blushingly, that a “baloney” seemed to be “in the feverish grip of dreamlike fingers,” an exercise in incoherence that had even Father O’Flaherty holding on to his Rosary for dear life. Others were unanimous in their opinion that secondhand cigarette smoke causes sexual harassment—including unwanted compliments!—and automobile exhaust. A certain Babs, who yearned to wear small black hats with dotted veils, sheer off-black stockings, black suede pumps, and flattering accessories, had to deny herself this pleasure since her husband was seeking tenure and that was that for couture. She wished that she might get up the nerve to roll the razor-edged mileage calculator back and forth over her husband’s multicolored overview notes which, as he had often told her, had to be judged, as more, much more, than just notes. Where had she heard such bullshit before? Or had she read it somewhere—under an umbrella, perhaps, amid coffee, cigars, and good ruby port? The sun is often hotter than it seems, or so Babs had learned in the awesome stillness of the mountains.