The Moon In Its Flight

DECADES

Ben and Clara Stein were made for each other. I won’t go so far as to say that they were meant for each other, but it all comes out the same way. It is impossible for me, even now, after these fifteen or so years since I first met them, to think of them as anything but “the Steins.”

I have no idea how and where they met, but it might have been at a party during the Christmas vacation — this would have been back in 1955 or thereabouts. Clara was a Bard student at the time, having gone there from Bennington, to which she had gone from Antioch, to which she had gone from Brooklyn College. All this moving about had something to do with art, i.e., she went where art was “possible.” All right, I don’t know what it means, either. She published some poems in various student magazines, and in one of them an essay on Salinger’s Nine Stories, which won her a prize of twenty-five dollars’ worth of books. She was a dark, slender, hyper-nervous girl, whose father thought that she was going to be a teacher. He comforted himself with this, although I assure you that he would have sent her to school no matter what he thought she wanted to be, for, to her father, school was good, it was sunshine and bananas with cream. He had plenty of money from his business, which had something to do with electronic hospital equipment, and Clara was denied nothing.

Ben was an English major at Brooklyn College when he met Clara at this party. I will put their meeting at this party since all college parties are essentially the same and I am saved the trouble of describing it. But they met, conversation in the corner, coffee at Riker’s, and so on. Ben wore blue work shirts, tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, long scarves wound around his neck and thrown over the shoulder. His father did something. Whatever your father does, that’s what he did: the years shuffling by, marked by decaying Chevys and fevered vacations, the World Series and Gelusil. Ben’s minor was French, and he read Apollinaire and Cocteau. His reading of French anglicized him in a Ronald Firbank kind of way, and he affected a weariness and sensitivity that, on Flatbush and Nostrand, was something to see. He had a darting, arcane mind, of a kind that made Clara forever obscure the fact that she had once admired Salinger. Somewhere they found a place to be alone, and in two months Clara was pregnant. Ben married her, after a long, serious talk with her father and mother, during which Ben shook his foot nervously, flashed his compulsive smile at them, and made bewildering jokes about W. H. Auden. Clara’s father shook Ben’s hand and they both stood there, in wordless misery, laughing cordially. The father couldn’t understand how Clara had allowed this silly boy into her slim, straight body.

I first met Ben in a class in classical civilization at Brooklyn College. At the time, I was attending school on the Korean War GI Bill, and my school friends were other ex-soldiers like myself, a penurious and shabby bunch indeed. Ben was the first non-veteran I had come across who seemed to have something to do with what I then thought of as reality. We sat in the back of the room, composing obscene sonnets, to which we wrote alternate lines, while the rest of the class relentlessly took notes. Why I was going to school I really can’t tell you in any clear way: let’s say that I wanted to learn Latin. All right.

Ben and I failed that course, but Ben, who was being supported by Clara’s father, panicked. He was afraid that their monthly stipend would be cut off and that he might have to drop out of school or go to work. The reader must know that in the fifties, Ben was a member of a large minority of young people that thought that life was somehow nonexistent outside of the academy, that is, life within the university was real life — outside were those strange folk who spoke ungrammatical English and worshiped the hydrogen bomb. God knows what has happened to those scholars; I know only what has happened to Ben and Clara. In any event, I myself didn’t care about my F, but it was interesting to see Ben’s reaction to the failing grade: he begged, he pleaded, he took a makeup exam and wound up with a C for the course. When I say it was interesting, I mean that I saw that Ben was not that romantic Byronesque figure I had taken him to be. He somehow had a goal, a — what shall I call it? — “stake in life.” On the other hand, I am more or less still searching for myself, if you can stomach that phrase. Well, let that be; this is the Steins’ story.

I suppose it was at about this time that I met Clara, Ben’s other half — the banality of that expression is, in this case, perfection itself. The scene: a hot day in June. Ben had received permission to take his makeup exam. I was invited to their apartment to have a drink and some supper and “see the baby,” Caleb. At the time, I was going with a girl who regularly contributed to the Brooklyn College literary magazine, and whose father was a shop steward in what used to be a Communist local. She read The Worker, and pressed on me the novels of Howard Fast. If she has followed the pattern of her generation, she has married a pharmacist and lives in Kips Bay — but in those days she was my mistress: or, let me write it, My Mistress. How flagrantly serious we were! Lona carried her diaphragm in her bag and we discovered that John Ford was a great artist. We went together to see the Steins in their apartment in Marine Park.

The most exquisite tumblers, tall and paper-thin, filled with icy Medaglia d’Oro topped with whipped cream. Hennessy Five Star. Sliced avocados with lime wedges. Crisp, salty rye and Brie. In my faded khaki shirt, the shoulder ripped where I had fumbled in removing the patch that had once identified me, I ate and drank and understood why Ben had been concerned with his grade. Clara made it clear that the Hennessy was a gift from her father, who apparently was good for little else. “In his freaking air-conditioned Cadillac!” she said. “What else?” Ben said. “De gustibus.” Lona was into her harangue on the symmetrical beauties of Barbary Shore, Ben was depleting the Cognac, the baby was crying. We spoke of Charles Olson, of whom I was then scarcely aware. Clara thought he was “pure shit,” a fake Ezra Pound: she knew him from Bard or Bennington or someplace. Norman Mailer was also “shit,” as was the Communist party, Adlai Stevenson, peace, war, and Ben. Ben would twitch slightly and say Cla-ra, Claa-ra, Claa-rr-aa? Lona and I soon left. At the door, Ben showed me a split in the sole of his shoe, to demonstrate his penury. I soon came to realize that Ben was always broke — I mean that was his mask. His life, financially speaking, was remarkably stable — but he was always broke. The attainment of this attitude was a talent of Ben’s class, which attitude has persisted, and even refined itself. At the time, I was naïve enough to think that one had to be without money to be broke.

Lona and I separated soon after. I remember taking a ferry ride that afternoon and, later in the day, going to Luigi’s, a bar near the college, where I got drunk on 2-for-35 Kinsey and beer chasers. Sad, sad, I wanted to be sad. It was delicious.

Some time passed and I lost track of the Steins. Ben had graduated and he and Clara and the baby had left town, Ben gone to some assistantship in the Midwest. I had left school and was working in a factory on Pearl Street, operating a punch press that stamped out Teflon gaskets and couplings. The work exhausted me, but I took comfort in the fact that it left my mind free to write. Of course, if one’s mind is too free while working a punch press, one can part with a finger or two. But I was caught in the mythology of the struggling writer in America; in retrospect, I see that I contributed some small part to the myth myself. It is not a comfort — but then, what is? At night, I was slogging through a gigantic and unwieldy novel, From Partial Fires, which had long before got completely out of control, but which I persisted in thinking would make my name. I don’t know what else I did. I did have an affair with a girl who worked in the factory office, who regarded my manuscript with awe; we saw a lot of movies together and afterward would go to my apartment on Coney Island Avenue and make love. She would leave at midnight; I would walk her to the subway, then return to stare at the thick prose I had last composed. I don’t think I have ever been closer to despair.

Suddenly the Steins were back, just for the summer. Ben was going to work in some parks program to bring culture to somebody in the guise of demotic renderings of Restoration comedy. Almost every Saturday we all went to the beach in Ben’s car. June, my lover, could not understand the Steins, and they thought of her as an amusing yahoo. Clara delighted in asking June questions like which of “the Quartets” she preferred most. Ben drank vast quantities of vodka and orange juice, as did I. One day I was fired for having taken off three Mondays in a row, and was lucky enough to get on unemployment. June hit me with her beach bag the next Saturday when I called her my “little Polack rose,” and she walked off to the bus, crying. Clara seemed delighted and cheerful the rest of the day, and toward twilight we swam together far out into the ocean. Ben seemed to me then the luckiest of men.

Toward Labor Day, Ben became entangled in an affair with a girl named Rosalind, a flautist who attended Juilliard. He would spend the afternoons with her in her loft on East Houston Street. Clara said nothing, but began to take Dexedrine in large amounts, and to comment on my sexual attractiveness whenever Ben was paying attention. Ben would grimace, and say Claa-r-aa, Claa-rr-aaa? One day, when Rosalind had come to the beach with us, and she and Ben had gone walking along the water’s edge, hand in hand — innocent love! — collecting shells, I leaned over and kissed Clara and she slapped me, then scratched my face. She was trembling, and flushed. “You rotten son of a bitch! You rotten bastard son of a bitch!” But she said nothing to Ben — as if he would have heard her.

When the Steins left in September for their Midwestern life, Rosalind went with them. I heard that Ben had jumped the island on some eight-lane highway in Indiana and almost killed them all. I can’t imagine that it was anything other than an accident; he had Rosalind, he had Clara, he had money. I think I got another job at just about that time, dispatching trucks for a soap company located on the North River. The foreman kept telling me stories about how he used to screw his wife every night so that she wept in hysterical joy. It would be nice if I could say that I thought the foreman was telling the truth, but he was not. He lied desperately, almost gallantly, watching the sun go down over the ugliness of north Jersey each evening as we waited for the trucks to return.

Occasionally, one of these old coffeepots would break down outside of Paterson or Hackensack, and we would have to wait some hours into the evening for it to come in before we could leave. At these times, the foreman would send out for sandwiches and coffee, and tell me about some terrific broad’s legs and ass and “everything else” that he had seen somewhere, anywhere. His eyes would widen in his remarkably precise nostalgia for something that had never happened. Once I invented and told him about a wild bedroom scene I had had with a “crazy hot broad” who was the wife of a good friend of mine. As I spun out the details of this lie, I realized that I was envisioning Clara Stein. So you will see the pass to which I had come.

My novel was completed, and I began the process of retyping the ragged manuscript to which I liked to think I had given my best. I began to frequent the bars I had gone to before beginning work on the book, and in them heard various reports of the Steins. Ben, Clara, and Rosalind had tried to keep their ménage going, but it was hopeless, and Ben left with Rosalind for Taos, where she left him for an Oklahoma supermarket-chain owner who had controlling interest in two of the Taos galleries. “Mountains, mountains, bring me more mountains!” the gallery directors would indubitably command their stables of rustic hacks. Then the Steins were back together again and Ben got Clara pregnant, to prove his love or his manhood or his contempt. At just about the time I heard this story, the Steins came back into New York for Clara’s abortion. Her father didn’t like the idea, but abortion, in its place … it was something like school and the sun, it was good. Their visit was a flying one, and I didn’t get to see them, but I did speak briefly with Ben on the phone. He despised the doomed fetus almost as much as he despised Clara and himself. At least that was my impression. But perhaps I was wrong, perhaps Ben was just nervous.

I had finished my novel and sent it to an editor at one of the big houses, a man whom I had met some years before at one of my English professors’ “teas.” The editor was heavy and shambling, and vodka martinis had kept him from a brilliant career. We had lunch at one of those boozy little French restaurants in the East Fifties, which I remember quite clearly because two women and a man at the table next to ours drunkenly, but seriously, talked over their sexual adventures of the previous weekend. In any event, From Partial Fires was too long, too cluttered plot-wise, it was really two novels, the characters were undeveloped and not really convincing except for the woman who was married to Jerry, what was her name? Perhaps if I rewrote? I went home, fuzzily drunk, and tore the manuscript up. My sense of relief was almost as great as it had been on the day that my Polack rose had walked out of my life. I felt free now to — do things. To do things.

One of the first things I did was to meet, at a party for somebody’s reading at the Y, a really lovely girl who studied yoga and wrote poems that were a marvel of abstract nouns, all counted off in the most meticulous measure this side of John Betjeman. She lived on St. Marks Place in a beautifully appointed apartment, into which I moved with her soon after our first lust had passed. Just before I quit my job at the soap company, I asked her to pick me up there one day after work, so that I could show her off to the foreman. Such small cruelties often return to plague me now. I like to think of them as aberrations, or deviations from a true path.

So Lynn supported me. While she worked at her job — let’s say it was in a publishing house where her intelligence would soon be revealed — I walked around a lot, drank coffee, and went to the movies. Occasionally, I wrote poems on her Olivetti, a machine that has the knack of making all poems look amateurish, or I took Lynn’s poems and tried to rework them in different rhymes. She was a demon for rhyming.

In my restless peace, after I had done my walking or my typing for the day, and while I was waiting for Lynn to come home, I often thought of the Steins, and wondered how Clara would like Lynn, or, I should say, I wondered how much Clara would dislike her. Lynn would come in around five-thirty or six, with something to make the place “cheery,” as if such things could fend off New York, lying in wait outside the windows. She would bring in some flowers, or a tiny Japanese vase; perhaps a cake from Sutter’s; a paper lantern to illuminate the late supper of linguini and clam sauce, the Chablis and Anjou pears. We would talk about art and movies and her poems. She had almost put together a first collection and was thinking of publishing it privately in a small offset edition. One of the men in the art department (that is a remarkable phrase) at the office would do a cover drawing for her — he was really good. What else would he be? Does anyone know a bad artist?

One afternoon I got very drunk at Fox’s Corner, a bar — now gone — on Second Avenue frequented by gamblers and horse-players. The reason I remember it is because that was the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas. When I got home, Lynn was waiting for me, the TV and radio both on, her face serious and white, and the ashtray filled with her half-smoked Pall Malls. She looked at me, stricken, as if someone who had loved her had died. For some reason, I was sexually aroused and knelt in front of her, then began to work her skirt up over her thighs, opening them with delicate care. She slapped at my hands, and stood up. “My God! You’re drunk! You’re drunk and can’t you see? Don’t you know what’s happened? They shot Kennedy! Kennedy is dead!” She was in a rage, and she annoyed me more than I can say — she annoyed me past reason. Smiling in a vague imitation of Ben’s compulsive rictus, I chose to be light — ah, light, gay, and facetious. “Ah, well, but what has Kennedy ever done for the novel?”

I suppose that Lynn was right to strike me — even fools can rise to what I suppose they consider to be dignity. So that was the end of that affair. It is only our own deaths that we are allowed to ridicule. I left the next day, while Lynn was at work, placing my key in the mailbox, wrapped in a piece of paper on which I had written: Ars gratia artis.

I got another job as a clerk/typist in a small printing house, and settled into a new place on Avenue B, near the Charles movie theater. At a party one night, a drunk told me that Ben and Clara and some art student had set up housekeeping together. Ben was working toward his doctorate, a study of the relation between the songs in Shakespeare’s plays and the choruses of Greek drama, and they were in Cambridge. Their son, Caleb, was at boarding school — too late to matter, of course — Ben studied and wrote and drank, the art student painted and drank, and Clara — I couldn’t imagine anything that Clara did. My only picture of it all was of Clara and the art student, arms around each other’s waists, stumbling into the bedroom while Ben groaned Claa-ra, Claa-rr-aaa? his nose in the sauce.

Soon after, I met a girl who had known Clara from high school, and she said that Clara often spoke of me in her letters; I was touched. We went, later that week, to the New Yorker, and saw La Grande Illusion for the seventh time, then took a cab to my place. The following Friday, she called and asked me if I’d like her to come over for the weekend, and I said it was fine with me. When she came in, she had a Jon Vie cake and a teal-blue candle that had been “handcrafted.” I kept still. Making love that night, she began to cry, and I thought of the foreman and his fantastic wife. Perhaps he had been telling the truth, after all.

The next few years are a blur of the most disparate things, all of them, however, very much the same in essence. My Jon Vie girl left me one night in a bar when I began to insult her because she had been talking incessantly about Saul Bellow. “Fuck you and your mockie writers,” I said, or words to that effect. “Them Jew writers don’t speak for us proletariats and blue-collar woikers.” I don’t know why I said this: I have nothing against Saul Bellow; I’ve never even read him.

At about the time of this unpleasantness, I began to write again, but found it unsatisfying, both as act and product. I thought that I might write a detective story and get enough money to leave my job and go somewhere, but I couldn’t get past the first chapter. What made me quit the whole thing was coming across a magazine one day in the 8th St. Bookshop; in it, there was a poem by Benjamin Stein. I can’t remember all of the poem, but it was cast in a curious and affected language, a kind of modernist cant then abounding. The first few lines ran:

I touch ya, ya touch

me, yer bellie an mine.

ole catullus wuz rite

1,000,000 kisses …

On the contributors’ page, it said that Mr. Stein was an “ex-professor of English now living in the Bay Area with his wife and son.” I can’t express the feeling of defeat that this little poem carried into my very spirit. I did understand, however, that my own aborted “return to writing” had the closest affinities to this ridiculous trash of Ben’s.

I didn’t go back to work the next day, nor the next, and then I went in to collect my pay and tell the boss that I had to leave for Chicago because of a family emergency. I lived frugally on some money I had saved, supplemented by occasional freelance proofreading jobs, looked out the window, and mentally composed hundreds of letters to Ben and Clara. But they were impossible to write, filled, as they would have to be, with no facts at all. I suppose I was vaguely ashamed of myself.

About six weeks before the last of my savings ran out, I got into a silly conversation with some idiot I had known for years. He was buying the drinks and I, in a sponger’s honesty, kept telling him, as we got drunk, that I could not buy back. Somehow, we made plans to collaborate on a play that would exploit the ludicrous side of the flower children. “A winner, man, a winner! Maybe we could get a goddamn grant and do it in the parks even!” So we became collaborators, and I moved in with him after explaining my wretched financial status. Oh, well, not to go into it, but I began to carry on with his girl, who was always conveniently at home when he was not. She was a true Miss Post Toasties, white teeth, blue eyes, sunny California hair — ah, dear God. She, of course, told him of our indiscretions after we had had a bitter argument one night over the ultimate artistic value of the Beatles. The Beatles! You can see that I had gone beyond foolishness.

He threw me out, and I took a room by the week in the Hotel Albert until I could get up the nerve to write Ben and ask him for enough money to put down as security and the first month’s rent on a shotgun flat on Avenue c. It struck me as I wrote him that I had no one else to write to. I didn’t expect him to send me the money, but two weeks later he did, a money order for a hundred and fifty dollars, and a note: Peace. The letter was postmarked from Venice, California, another outpost of the lost battalion. I moved into the new place, started working temporary office jobs, and recovered some of my solvency. I even managed to send Ben ten or fifteen dollars a week to pay off the debt. Some months passed, during which time I heard no more from Ben, nor from Clara, either. My experience had got me another truck-dispatching job with a direct-mail company on Fourth Avenue, a few blocks north of Klein’s. I handled the trucks that made the daily post-office runs, and acted as a kind of foreman over the constantly changing personnel. Since I despised the management as much as the laborers despised me, the job was a nightmare, and I began to drink my lunches in a Fourteenth Street bar. My afternoons were passed in a boozy haze of sweat, curses, and shouts. For this, I got eighty-five dollars a week.

One afternoon, Clara called me on the job. She wanted to know if I’d like to have a drink with her after work — someone had told her where I was working and she thought … Her voice was gentle, almost gentle, and, I thought, resigned. Ben was doing what he wanted to do, write. He was happy. Did it matter to him or to Clara that he wrote badly? Did it matter to anyone? We made a date to meet in a little bar on University Place at five-thirty.

When I got there, Clara was already at the bar, working on what seemed to be, from her manner, her third Gibson. She was cool and brown in a yellow dress and yellow sandals, her hair drawn back from her face. I ordered a bourbon and soda and sat on the barstool next to her, giving her wrist what I hoped she would take to be a friendly squeeze. How I despised myself. What could I possibly have said? It is amazing that I am utterly unable to recall our conversation. Well, you must remember that I was half-drunk when I got there, and the bourbons that I subsequently drank did nothing to make me less drunk. It is odd that this should be, that I can’t remember anything of what was said, since this was surely one of the most important conversations of my life — that is, if you are willing to accept that my life is of any importance at all. On the way to the bar, I had determined to ask Clara if she would consider “being” with me during her stay in the city. Then we would see — we would see what would happen. God knows, I was no worse than Ben; in some ways, I was better. I had stayed in the city, I had stuck it out, I hadn’t fooled myself that I was a writer. I had, in short, faced the music. I don’t think that I thought of myself as a failure; not that I do now, of course. But I have come to realize that there are certain options, let us say, that are closed to me. The fashionably grubby artistic circles in New York are filled with people like me, people who are kind enough to lie about one’s chances in the unmentioned certitude that one will lie to them about theirs. Indeed, if everyone told the truth, for just one day, in all these bars and lofts, at all these parties and openings, almost all of downtown Manhattan would disappear in a terrifying flash of hatred, revulsion, and self-loathing.

Well, we spoke of Ben, that’s for certain. Ah, how marvelously drunk we were getting, gazing at each other through those rose-colored glasses all drinkers wear. Ben had left Clara again and gone to a commune in Colorado with some young girl he had met at a rock concert in Los Angeles. I must have subtly inquired as to Clara’s feelings on the matter; I mean, I wanted to know if she cared, I wanted to know if she wanted him back. I clearly remember her facing me, her legs crossed, one of them brushing my calf as she swung it back and forth, the fragile glass to her mouth. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know how I said it, said anything. Probably something like, “Why don’t we just give it a try for a while? For a few days?” What I wanted to say was: “Your yellow dress. Your yellow sandals. Your dark and sweet skin. Your legs. I don’t care about Ben or anything else but you.” But I do remember her saying, “Let’s go to my hotel. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you want?” And I said something like — oh, I was determined to force her to spoil our chances, if chances they were—“Is it all right? I mean, with Ben?”

I bought a bottle of Gordon’s on the way to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and we started to drink as soon as we got to her room — no ice, no soda, just the harsh, warm gin out of the bottle. I held the bottle to her mouth as she let her dress and half-slip fall around her feet.

We made love under the shower, weaving and thrusting and shuddering in the drenching spray of hot water that seemed to make me drunker. Clara was leaning against the porcelain tiles of the stall, bent over, and I behind her, my eyes blinded by the streams of water, my mouth open to its metallic heat. “Ben!” she laughed. “Oh, Ben! You rotten son of a bitch! Split me apart, you rotten bastard! Rotten son of a bitch!” I didn’t care. I didn’t care.

After I dried myself and her, she lay on the bed, smiling at me. “I’m here for two days,” she said. “You’re not mad at me? Am I all right?” “Why should I be mad at you?” “Come and sleep,” she said, “and when we wake up I’ll show you some funny things I can do.” “Sure,” I said, and then she closed her eyes and was asleep in a minute. I dressed and left, and walked aimlessly for an hour, wanting to go back to the hotel. She could call me Ben again. She could show me the funny things she knew how to do. I finished my drunk in a bar on Sixth Avenue, just off Fourteenth Street, and lost my wallet in the cab that took me home.

The next day I called Mrs. Stein at the hotel, and the desk clerk told me that she had checked out very early. It strikes me now that I never even knew why she had come in, that she might have come in for no other reason than to see me. But if I know Clara, she came in to see her mother and father, or to have her teeth checked, or to buy some clothes. She wouldn’t come all the way from California just for old times’ sake. I know Clara.

I’m living now in a very decent apartment in an old, rather well-kept building on Avenue B and Tenth Street, with the estranged wife of a studio musician. She makes a very good salary as a buyer for Saks, so I have quit my job. Outside, Tompkins Square Park and the streets reel under the assaults of the hordes of mindless consumers of drugs. But in here we are safe behind our triple locks and window gates. About once a month my girl, who is really quite brilliant — she graduated magna cum laude in political science from Smith — and I invite a young filmmaker and his wife over, and we watch blue movies that they shot in a commune in Berkeley. We drink wine and smoke a great deal of marijuana and what happens happens. Each time they come over, we all pretend horror that “something” may happen, what with the wine and the grass and the movies. We laugh and make delicately suggestive remarks to each other. It seems clear that the young filmmaker’s wife likes me a great deal. Each time they come is a new time, and no one speaks of the last time.

I’ve begun to write poems again, or let me be honest and say that they are attempts at poems. But they seem sincere to me. They have a nice, controlled flow. My girl likes them.

This morning I got a letter from Ben. It had taken three weeks to reach me because it had been sent to the Avenue c address. I don’t really know what I’m going to do about it.

I’m reading it again now. Somewhere in the building a young man is singing a song, accompanying himself on the guitar. I can’t make out the words, but I know that they are about freedom and love and peace — perfect peace, in this dark world of sin.

dere old pal—

you wuz alwaze crazee not to be into life. out here in colorado — the country will bring us peace — we are together, all together, suzanne, a sweet luvlee thing an clara too. come out an see us. good bread an good head aboundin. a commune for all us lost — ists. dig on it!

ah jeezus! we all wuz sikk or wounded but now we’re gunna get healed. come on! you aint so g/d old.

luv,

ben