The Moon In Its Flight (25 page)

I was by now, as you might imagine, stupefied by this soap opera of love gone awry, of love locked out in all the cold and rain, as Max Kester’s 1933 lyric remarked, in an aberrant flaring of talent never revealed by Max again, who, clearly, never realized himself. I may have even sung the opening line to my friend, a gin-smeary grin on my face, but probably not; he was one of the troops who pretended never to have
heard
a popular song, his musical tastes running to what has come to be known as, God help us, “easy jazz.” Or maybe it’s “easy-listening jazz.” I wanted to tell him that he was boring me to fucking death, but in the irritation of my impatience, I told him that he should start keeping a diary, in which he could make up lies about his
wife’s
behavior, making it all up, making up anything, writing down anything, an-y thing!, that came into his head. Then, after he had thirty or forty pages he could, I suggested, leave the diary where his wife could find it. She’d read it, I told him, because of her suspicions concerning his dalliance with the office siren. Right? Sure! Then, after she’d read his crackpot fantasies, lies, ramblings, maybe, just maybe, in amazed disgust, she’d let him “live life,” as he probably liked to say, with, of course, suitable hambone emphasis. I did not, as I remember, have to spell out that by “living life,” I meant carefree carrying-on with the assistant assistant. My point, as I recall, was that his wife might think him too weird to annoy with the domestic. In effect, he’d lie his way to freedom. He seemed to like this idea, but my memory of the evening is, understandably, hazy. All I clearly remember after my grotesque suggestion is his maudlin description of Ms. Cubicle’s legs as “like a fawn’s.” Oh Jesus.

About six months later, he unexpectedly called me up to thank me for my advice of that sodden evening, which advice, he wanted me to know, he had taken. I had all but completely forgotten about this boneheaded “plan,” and when he refreshed my memory of it (my hesitant conversation, designed to make him tell me what I’d forgotten, was mistaken by him, as I’d hoped, for unassuming, good-guy modesty), I laughed a quiet, friendly laugh, and waited for him to get off the phone. But he thanked me again, and added that his marriage was better than ever, stronger and more assured, loving, fulfilling, wonderfully this and thrillingly that, and that he, his blossoming wife, and the wonderfully giving young woman from the office were together every weekend, sometimes even more often. For “marvelous interludes” (he said this). These “interludes” were “psychic springboards” to self-realization, which led to humble introspection and knowledge, even if imperfect, of self. I wanted to reach through the phone to strangle him, but I laughed warmly, and eased out of the conversation, but not before he said that he’d call me again, and I said
wonderful!
The impossible bastard!

I’ve lost touch with this adventurous soul, thank God, but I can surmise (one of my mother’s favorite words) that my friend’s wife did indeed find the diary where he’d left it—probably on the kitchen sink!—read it to discover intelligence about her young rival, and then recognized herself as surely as if she’d written the pages, found herself in her husband’s improbable, even neurotic descriptions, as incontrovertibly as if he had prepared a factual report for a detective agency. She saw, or so I imagine, in this unreal woman, this phantom, her real self. And she was moved and even flattered by his acute attention to detail, his acumen, his understanding, his analysis of her many failings. Most tellingly, she wept at his magnanimity in forgiving her for the sins she had never committed. She found, that is, in the pages of that bogus notebook, an instance of her husband’s amazing capacity for empathy, sympathy, and compassion; and noted, delightedly, his growth toward a profound self-awareness and self-knowledge. And so they’d fallen in, well, love, more or less, all over again. Common as dirt.

Bud Powell

This is a story that was told to me by a man I once worked with as part of a location-and-preparation team at an advertising agency. I repeat it, changing nothing in the way of details, and leaving out what seems to me to be the extraneous, the hyperbolic, and the contradictory. I suppose I might say I’ve made the story my own. It should be kept in mind that these events took place in the late fifties, which suggests, perhaps, that nothing much changes in the goings on between men and women.

A young man and the young wife of a friend of his found themselves—a nice, neutral phrase, I think—drunkenly dancing in the middle of a crowded, noisy, drunken party on Riverside Drive. This man’s wife and this woman’s husband were also at the party, somewhere in the sweaty clamor of the apartment. The dancers danced, let’s assume, into a dark bedroom, where they instantly gave in to their lusts. Emerging twenty minutes later, they became part of the human furniture of the party again, with no one, as they say, the wiser.

Save that the woman, for obscure reasons of her own, decided to tell her husband of her adventure with his friend. Why she did this is anybody’s guess; perhaps it is to be classed with the bitter mystery Yeats ascribes to love. Her husband, in a concupiscent, irrational rage, struck her, raped her, and then left the house, weeping and cursing. Three days later, in a studio apartment in Chelsea, wherein lived a restaurant hostess and her high-school teacher boyfriend—the latter an old friend of the husband’s—he drank a quart of vodka and cut his wrists with a penknife, a table knife, and a beer-can opener, which, I just now recall, used to be called a “church key.” Those were the days. He came to in Bellevue’s psychiatric ward; more precisely, on a gurney in a corridor of the ward, his lacerations nicely dressed, and with a savage hangover. He felt like a complete fool, and why not? There can be little more humiliating than a failed suicide. When he was finally interviewed by a staff psychiatrist, who spoke, as if chosen to play the stereotype, little English, and asked
how do you feel?,
he said that he felt fine. The psychiatrist noted that he was out of touch with reality, and perhaps manic-depressive (the term used in those innocent, benighted days). A few days later, and to the same question, put to him by another psychiatrist, who was kind enough to offer him a cigarette, he answered, in an excess of candor,
terrible,
and it was noted that he was clinically depressed, and suicidal. Well, he probably was.

They prepared “the papers,” or whatever it is they do, to have him sent to Pilgrim State, got in touch with his wife (again, I assume), and put him into a locked ward, where he realized, after a day, that his silent ward mate, in the next bed, was Bud Powell. Bud Powell! Is it possible, he may have thought, that this is
the
Bud Powell? The great Bud Powell? He looked like Bud, although he was emaciated, and his eyes were clouded over and filled with bitter sadness.

The next day, after they’d been given their medication, he asked him, he almost shouted in his nervousness, his question: “Are you Bud Powell? The jazz, the piano, jazz piano?” And Bud said: “I used to be, but I don’t think I am anymore. They don’t have a piano, you dig?” That’s all he said, and the next day he was transferred or released.

The husband, a week or so later, was committed, after a hearing at which his wife testified, if that’s the correct word, and then signed him over to Pilgrim State. He spent a period of almost eleven months there, and was then released, no longer a danger to himself or others, as the phrase goes. He returned to his wife, who pretended that nothing had happened between the eve of the party and the present, and that he was a new acquaintance of limited intelligence. She had a lover now, not, of course, the friend who’d been with her in the dark bedroom, but one of her husband’s ex-co-workers, a rather pale, somehow flimsy-looking man, with a curious and feverishly enraged interest in the Hungarian uprising and its subsequent suppression by Soviet armor: this is apparently all that anybody had ever really noticed about him. He would soon take over his father’s extremely successful and lucrative bathroom-furnishings business, but at the time, he was working as a reinsurance clerk at the Fidelity and Casualty Insurance Company on Maiden Lane. Fidelity and casualty! That’s very neat.

This arrangement was all right with the husband, or at least he had nothing to say about it. He wondered, actually, so I understand, what in God’s name he had
ever
seen in this taut, smirking woman, who had become falsely obsessed, falsely, mind you, with classic Mexican cuisine while he’d been away at “the farm,” as he always smilingly said. He was sure that he was stable, and patiently awaited each weekend, when his wife and the reinsurance clerk would go away on what she called “a jaunt” for two, sometimes three days, and leave him alone. He was, if not happy, no more miserable than many. I understand that all three of these people are dead now, and so, of course, is Bud.

IN LOVELAND

I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I’ve not been able to bring it off, for I’ve never been able to invent—inhabit, perhaps—the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything. I have even, at times, tried to tell the undecorated truth, which attempts virtually clang with mendacity, a callow sort of mendacity that wishes to be recognized as such, and so forgiven. I might call it the mendacity of youth, although I’m not at all certain how youth is currently defined.

At that time, my wife and I were living behind a barber shop, in a small studio apartment that was reached by means of a long, narrow corridor that seemed to belong to the barber shop, I don’t quite know how. The apartment, too, seemed more like an adjunct to the shop than it did an entity unto itself, and, perhaps because of this, I hated it. My wife was a very small woman, I might say a tiny woman, but her body was arrestingly erotic. It should have looked, given her size, like a child’s body, but it did not: she was a kind of aphrodisiacal miniature, a striking doll. Whenever she, alone, approached the corridor entranceway from the street, the scum congregated on the sidewalk, in a crass parody of the manly chorus boys in the musical comedies of the era, would ogle her, fondle themselves, make sucking and kissing noises, and proclaim what they’d like to do to her. She invariably insisted that they never offended her and I chose to believe her. I really didn’t care one way or another: those fools had no sense of her actuality, and I suspect that her calm, dispassionate gaze forced them to see themselves for the curious filth it suggested they were.

Our bed dominated the apartment, and was what, I later discovered, is called queen-sized, a term that almost shines with poignancy. This bed had a presence beyond its fact, probably because of something so mundane as its size relative to the total floor space of the room. It served my purposes, such as they were then, to think of the bed as having some special quality, as more than it was, as a symbol, in fact. As a symbol for
what,
I had no idea. But I wanted to write, more precisely, I wanted to be thought of as a writer, and I had started many stories having to do with the power that the bed exerted over various darkly tragic sagas, whose whining narrators were more unhappy and misunderstood, more irrevocably doomed than is, even melodramatically, possible. The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable. Our marriage was, at this point, in the early stages of irreversible decay. My wife and I often talked for hours about our problems, our refined problems, sure that we were facing them honestly—a favorite word—sure that although they were unique, they were certainly solvable. We wasted a great deal of time in these thoughtful, respectful, futile colloquies. “Irreversible decay” is a phrase that I permit to stand as a reminder of its use in the first sentence of one of my early stories, “The Bower of Bliss.” The sentence read, “Although Amanda and I did not know it, the mutually ecstatic shudder that put period to our lovemaking on that breathless midsummer night, was the first subtle tremor of the irreversible decay that had infected our perhaps too bright union.” “Ecstatic shudder,” “subtle tremor,” “too bright union”! Even “Amanda” proceeds from the abyss of machine fiction. I couldn’t write because I so wanted to impress people with the fact that my writing revealed a knowledge of writing. I was, I think, unaware of this.