The Moon In Its Flight

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.

I must add a coda to the story of that Sunday. In a cab on the way home, my wife, smelling womanly and ruttish, stroked me, and then, when we kissed, gently pushed her tongue into my mouth with a voluptuousness that had for a long time been absent from our marriage. And when we got into our apartment, she urged me to the floor as she pulled up her skirt and we made love profoundly, in that serious way known only to the married. Lying, exhausted, next to my sweaty and dozing wife, I thought that this sudden sexual magic would, perhaps, protect me from what lay in wait for me with Clara. I should say that I hoped it would protect me. But I knew that this behavior had been but an aberration. My wife could have driven me into a reeling delirium of lewdness and abandon, yet nothing would have been able to halt the corrosive idiocy that was about to seize me.

I met Ben and Clara about six months before my wife and I separated. We kept putting off steps toward a separation, mostly because of inertia or sloth or cowardice. We lived what I might call a reasonable if delicately adjusted life, but we both knew that the inevitable would soon occur. Once in a while we made love, but this was only to prove to ourselves that we were able to arouse each other, that we were, in effect, still attractive, I suppose. My penis, in such instances, was no more than a kind of mechanical toy that doggedly performed its manly task. We rarely quarreled, for we were rarely together. What my wife did during the long hours, sometimes the long days that we spent apart was of no concern to me. Nor, I knew, were my comings and goings of interest to her. None of this, I assure you, has anything to do with Ben and Clara, but it’s the rare spouse who doesn’t like to talk about dead or dying marriages, and to turn them, heartlessly, into the grimmest of jokes. The jokes are surely more lethal when children are involved, and when the hatred-infused couple pretends to the world and, of course, to themselves, that they’d rather suffer screaming agonies than forgo custody of or visitation rights with their children. They mean this at the time, through the tears and threats and shouted insults, and it takes a year, or perhaps two, before the adored children bore and irritate them, before they begin to conjure excuses for not seeing them over the weekend, or, conversely, to invent stories whereby the children may be got rid of for a day or two so as to accommodate a new lover — always a really wonderful person. This sickening desire to be thought of as busily independent marvel, noble and self-sacrificing parent, and righteously angry ex-spouse seems very American. What both parties usually really want is adolescent freedom and plenty of money to indulge its inanities: that’s the glittering dream. As for the children, it’s been my observation that Americans despise children, despite the ceaseless sentimental propaganda to the contrary.

In any event, I hadn’t known Ben and Clara more than a few weeks — perhaps it was but a few days — when Ben decided to enter into a kind of emotional collaboration with me, an odd partnership, formed in alliance against Clara. I didn’t truly realize this until some few weeks later, and by then, Clara and I had already been adulterous, and I had no interest in who was doing what to whom for whatever reason. So long as I could see a future of sex with Clara, Ben’s motives were of no importance. I think that I had some notion that she’d ultimately become a wife to both of us, but that Ben, and only Ben, would have to suffer the usual domestic antagonisms. I would possess, unbeknownst to him, the spectacular whore.

Ben and I were sitting in their kitchen, and Clara was out. Ben seemed to me intent on making me believe that he was wholly unconcerned with her whereabouts, although he may well have been enraged and humiliated because of his knowledge of her wantonness. He may have considered that apathy and boredom would play better with me, the stranger on whom he had designs. I don’t know. He was playing what even I could see — and I couldn’t see much — was a weak hand. And yet, now, when I reflect on our wounded lives, I see that I have made the recorder’s mistake of deciding that this was but an act on Ben’s part, because I had, then, decided it was an act. But all memories, as even cats and dogs know, are suspect. As if it mattered.

We had got about halfway through a quart of cheap Spanish brandy, when Ben decided to make me, as I’ve suggested, a partner in his marital combat. I’m pretty sure I went along with this pathology, because, as I recall, I thought that any revelation about Clara would allow me to get closer to her, to become — it is absurd to say so — indispensable to her. I wanted a glimpse, that is, of her wonderful weakness, her amoral shabbiness. I would have been anything, or played at being anything, to stay in — the phrase is wildly comic — the bosom of the family. That Ben and Clara were, in some absolute married way, as one in their warped lives, was a truth that I would not countenance for a long time. Well, for years.

Ben had got quite drunk, and had pressed on me a book of Robert Lowell’s poems, but I had no clear sense of what he wanted me to do about it or with it. I put the book on the table, I took a drink, I picked the book up and leafed through it. Christ only knows what sort of raptly attentive face I had put on, but Ben suddenly remarked that Clara had given him the book last Christmas, because she knew how much he liked Lowell. I nodded and gravely riffled the pages, assuming what I hoped would pass as a pose of deferential admiration for Ben’s superb taste. And Clara’s! Ben’s and Clara’s! Ben repeated his line about this being a Christmas present from Clara, and at that moment, I looked, as I instantly realized I was meant to look, at Clara’s inscription. It read: Xmas 1960 to Ben. That the message was but a flat statement of fact was comically clear: this book had been given to Ben by someone on a date specified. Other than that, all was wholly suppressed. I looked up and Ben was smiling sadly at me, oh, we were partners, we were pals incorporated, but I was not yet wholly aware of my position as Clara’s future enemy, only as Ben’s confidant. I’m ashamed to say that I believe I felt sorry for him, the put-upon recipient of such cold apathy.

Not three weeks later, I fucked Clara, almost accidentally, or so I believed, standing up in that same kitchen, while Ben was out getting beer. She had her period, but I didn’t care, nor did she. Later, I sat in miserable stickiness as I drank one of the beers that Ben had brought back. The kitchen smelled of sex and blood, and my pants were flagrantly stained at the fly. I realized, yet without any shame, what a brutta figura I must have made. That Ben did his best not to notice made it clear that I had somehow been played for a fool. For a chump, really. Since I was quite obviously crazy, it didn’t matter to me.

Clara had been promiscuous long before I knew her, and from what I gathered over time, promiscuous long before she married Ben. She was recklessly sexual, with a vast anxious dedication to erotic adventure, although the word surely glamorizes her activities. She pursued these affairs with the sedulous dedication of a collector of anything, with, that is, the dedication of a kind of maniac. That such sexual avocation is solemnly described as “joyless” or “empty” doesn’t fit in Clara’s case: she was wholly and matter-of-factly pleased with her churning libido, and the prospect of picking up some happily dazed copying-machine salesman in the desolate lobby of a local movie theater and then silently and efficiently blowing him in his parked car delighted her.

Ben knew, before their marriage, all about her penchant for what she may well have thought of as the free life, and was much too hip and blasé to think that he could change her ways. Such a belief was, to Ben, just so much middle-class bullshit Christian baloney. But he did believe something that was much more absurd than faith in love as rescuer of the emotionally damaged, morally skewed spouse of song and story. To put it as simply as possible, he believed that Clara’s marriage to him would effect a change in her behavior. He would do nothing, or so I carefully reconstructed his thinking; there would be neither admonition nor recrimination, neither scorn nor anger, neither sorrowful displays nor contemptuous remarks. There would be nothing save an unspoken pity for this poor slut. Clara, annexed to Ben’s relaxed, nonjudgmental, affectless, and cynical life, would, so he thought, abruptly stop her frantic couplings in hallway and bathroom and rooftop and automobile, in park and doorway and elevator and cellar and toilet stall, her clothes on or off or half-off or undone. Her sex life would seem, when held against Ben’s sangfroid, utterly and irredeemably square, the provincial doings of a suburban Jezebel in sweaty congress with her balding neighbor. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Clara’s honeymoon and marriage was but a brief interlude in her marriage to herself, to her own endlessly interesting desires.

I never asked either Ben or Clara how accurate my guess was concerning Ben’s expectations and Clara’s blithe thwarting of those expectations. Not that they would have admitted anything of the sort — I can see Ben’s bemused stare and Clara’s smile. There is, however, the strong probability that it was when Ben came to realize that their union would do nothing to change Clara in the least, that he abandoned the marriage and became his wife’s dutiful if somewhat bored collaborator, and a voyeur who followed her erotic meanderings with a detached interest.

Ben liked to reveal, in near-comic confidence, snippets of his life with Clara. He did this, or so I believe, in the hope that I would tell Clara what he’d told me, and so irritate her into thinking that he and I had managed some sort of fragile rapport that wholly excluded her. Sometimes I would pass Ben’s confidences on to her, sometimes not; sometimes I’d embroider or condense Ben’s stories, and sometimes invent things that he’d never even hinted at.

One of the things he told me, at a time when I was sure that he knew of my affair with his wife, was that Clara had always, and without fail, faked her orgasms. He was enormously amused by this, for, or so he said, he was delighted that Clara thought that she was duping him into thinking that he was a perfect lover. But Ben was as duplicitous as he claimed she was, for his gratified and satisfied response to her moans and gasps and soft screams, to her sated smile, was utterly counterfeit. His fake-masculine response to her fake-feminine pleasure filled her with a sense of, in his pleased words, “smug triumph.” At bottom, then, he was unconcerned with her sexual pleasure or the lack of it, and it amazed him — I can almost hear his laughter — that Clara, Clara for Christ’s sake! — held to the notion that he cared whether she came or not, and that, unbelievably, she was disturbed lest he discover her deception. But Ben was interested only in his own orgasm: as far as he was concerned, Clara could have stupendous, wracking orgasms, real or pretend, by the score, lie in bed a mannequin, fall, for Christ’s sake, asleep—all was immaterial to him, so long as he came. What Clara did or did not do was Clara’s affair. That she worked so hard at her conjugal dramatics somehow — how can I put this—touched Ben, so much so that he never even came close to suggesting that he even suspected that she might be faking. “Deluded, pathetic girl,” is what he once called her.

He most certainly, though, wanted me to tell Clara this story, of course, and he also wanted me to fret over whether Clara was faking with me. But I didn’t tell her, because I realized, despite my attempts to deny and then to rationalize it, that I felt the same way as Ben: I didn’t care, either. I once lightly asked Clara what sort of lover Ben was, and she said that he was more of a masturbator than a lover. I think I might have gone a little red at this, for that was what Ben had once said about Clara, and I wondered to whom Clara had said this about me. Outside of, doubtlessly, Ben.

The occasions were rare on which I angered and irritated Clara, and when I did, she’d let me know it, as they say, in devious, often astonishingly petty ways, which she never, of course, recognized at all. To describe them is unimportant to the point I want to make, such as it is.

Sometimes Clara would wear an expression of bored smugness, barely but not noticeably concealed by “good manners.” It was quite a face. It was at such times that I would obliquely suggest — in different ways, using different words and emphases and approaches — that her expression was very much like that of a clutch of well-off and marvelously dim white Protestants she unaccountably admired. This was an expression developed and trained early on, at about the time, in fact, that these people find that the world has been constructed and arranged for their pleasure, but that it is also filled with others who want to partake of that pleasure — which is certainly not their due! — without permission.

Such a comment would mildly annoy Clara, but she would become angry only when I’d suggest that many of her pals’ mundane pleasures quite wonderfully killed at least some of the bastards off: to wit, alcohol, cocaine, polo, fast cars, horses, skiing, sex, mountain climbing, etc. I would add that although this was surely just, it wasn’t nearly enough to even the score in terms of the grief and misery they caused just by being alive, with their prep schools and sailboats, monopolies and stock-exchange seats, securities and trust funds, private beaches and stables, custom-last shoes and shark lawyers; and, of course, their terror of knowledge, contempt for art, and the polite fucking Jesus that they trot out when needed. Despite the fact that I would run through this routine, with slight variations, at, as one might say, the drop of a top hat, it would always, always get to Clara. She’d sit back in her chair, or lean on the bar, or turn toward me in bed, to treat me to that perfectly constructed face: it was all I could do not to call it cruelly to her attention. But to what purpose? Her anger at my venom — often, but not always, real — toward her beloved idiots was weirdly felt, offered up on what was, figuratively speaking, a tasteful Episcopalian altar. Clara was, for Christ’s sake, Jewish! And still, and still, her vapid, excruciatingly imitative expression was an homage to and defense of that ghastly cadre that, quite naturally, thought of her — when forced to think of her — as a vulgar bitch who would not, no, not ever do.

The showgirl with whom I lost my virginity when I was sixteen was only two or three years older than I, but she was so overwhelmingly sophisticated, sexually, that I was awed throughout the entirety of the night I spent with her. We did a number of things that I had hitherto known of only as escapades in pornographic stories and pictures — those rare few I had seen. I was so thoroughly made to realize my own naïveté, that years passed before I could even begin to admit to my callowness. Until that time of candid acceptance, I had managed to turn that night into a liaison of sexual equals, although, as I say, it was nothing of the kind. Her influence, if that’s the word, was so profound that I afterward often felt dumbstruck and inept before women with whom I was about to go to bed: that is to say that they would sometimes “become” her, or, more accurately, I would revert to the flustered youth of that night. Such situations, which occurred without warning, usually proved disastrous, as one may well imagine.

My father had arranged this adventure for me, and such was his presence in my life at the time that I thought this arrangement wholly reasonable, even judicious. I can’t recall how the night was planned, but I’m quite certain that my father did not ask my opinion. He didn’t know if I was a virgin or not, but assumed, given the era and his knowledge of his own life and those of his peers, that I was. He was correct. He clearly believed that it was his paternal duty to introduce me to sex in, as he would surely have put it, “the right way.” And so he arranged for me to spend the night with a showgirl from the Copacabana, in those days a glittering tawdry nightclub near the Plaza, emblematic of flashy, four A.M. New York, whose clientele was predominantly made up of tough men in silk shirts packing wads of cash, little of which had been honestly come by.

I should make it clear that my father had not asked me my thoughts concerning his plans, not because he held me cheap or thought of me as insignificant, but because, as a Sicilian, he knew that his decision was unerringly correct, beyond cavil, and that this was so because he was, all in all, perfect. Sicilians, as somebody said, cannot be “reformed” or taught anything because they know that they are gods: and it was as a god that my father planned my entrance into manhood. Sicilians are essentially serious people, never moreso than when smiling and chatting pleasantly with strangers, that is, with people who are not part of their lives in any way that matters. The smiles and warm, intimate stories are but devices that serve as charming barriers behind which little can be seen or known. A Sicilian can talk with someone for years and deliver a sum total of information over this time that, considered objectively, comes to a handful of comic anecdotes and a gigantic mass of the most elaborately empty details. And all of these data seemed deeply personal, private, and revelatory. Under the easy conversational brio, the Sicilian has been continuously sizing up his interlocutor, and arranging the stories and putative intimate details that will be perfect just for him. I have no way to analyze or explain such odd behavior: it is simply the fact. My father, being this way, wanted me to be this way, expected it, really. And so, the loss of my virginity as a prerequisite to becoming a passable man, could not be the result of some dalliance with a “nice girl,” both of us a little drunk after a party. Such frivolity was for The Americans, as my father called those citizens who, whatever else they may have been, were surely not gods. These digressions lead me to another, a kind of exemplar of my father’s way of thinking. When he was an old man, some few months before his death, I heard him tell some men with whom he had struck up a kind of friendship in the hospital while recovering from a triple-bypass operation, that he had been a trapeze flyer in his native Italy but had been forced to flee Mussolini because of his Jewish mother, who had been one of the great equestriennes in the Hungarian circus world. He told this story with such an expression of wistful regret that for a moment I thought it might be true, that he had kept some fantastic secret from me and my mother, that he was actually Jewish! But it had to do with his lack of concern about what he told these hospital acquaintances. They were, in his mind, mere Americans, with no idea of what a man’s life is and should be. He was, that is, amusing himself by seeing how far he could go with these childish men, eager to swallow childish lies in the same way that they swallowed childish games on television. I now believe that what he wanted, at all costs, was to assist me in avoiding such American childishness, and thus help me into his ideal of manhood in what he knew to be the only proper way.

On the morning of my erotic christening, there was no teasing, no off-color jokes or winks or grins, and there had been none for the preceding week, during which time I had been wholly aware of the arrangement. I can’t remember what my mother had been told concerning my night away from home, but my father had concocted something having to do with the business. I was, as my mother well knew, expected to ultimately join my father’s business as a partner.

That night, after dinner at Monte’s Venetian Room in Brooklyn, during which my father talked to me about school, and thrilled me by complimenting me on the dark, sober tie that my mother had insisted I wear, one of his cronies drove me to Manhattan in my father’s Fleetwood sedan. He was tall and very dark and disconcertingly still, and we had nothing at all to say to each other. I was intimidated by him, really — his name, not that it matters, was Lou Angelini — by his taciturnity, his air of respect for me as the boss’s son, and his rigorously conservative dress. We arrived at the Hotel Pierre, in those days even quieter and more elegant, more raffinée than it is now. I hardly remember what happened then, but I recall my sense of clumsiness and awkwardness as we walked through the lobby, terribly slowly, because of Lou’s slight limp, the effect of what he called a “war wound.” But we did, finally, get on an elevator, and then, finally, reached a door in the long, muffled corridor.

Lou knocked quietly, twice, and when the door opened, a pretty girl of nineteen or twenty smiled at us. She had ash blond hair and although her eyes were elaborately made up, her lips were their natural soft pink. Lou looked at her, in her silk robe, up and down, and then left without a word. From that moment on, I was in a detached state of blissful shock, or perhaps happy stupor, as Grace, who later told me that she was half-Italian and half-Polish, showed me, in her words, a few things, more than a few things, that I might like. In the middle of the night we ordered room service and ate ham and eggs and drank cognac-and-ginger-ale highballs. There was nothing romantic or spongy about Grace, and yet she wasn’t cold or bored. She was, in fact, what my mother, the circumstances of course being different, would have called “full of fun.” When, at maybe four in the morning, she and I danced — that is, she taught me steps to the samba — to the soft radio, it was with a grave sense of play. It was intensely erotic and yet, although we were both naked, not bluntly sexual. Everything seemed magical, and I was obviously insane with pleasure. I had lost all sense of shame with this girl and had, too, of course, fallen in love with her. I even asked her if I might, maybe, call her sometime, a request that was met by a big smile whose import was instantly decipherable: it said, You are a boy.

I remember Grace’s body pretty well, her long waist, small breasts, the dark auburn of her neat pubic hair. She told me that she thought my father was a real sport, and I knew, instantly, that he had often spent the night with her. She would be, to my father, a nice kid, but a whore, and had her womanly role; not, surely, my mother’s role, or the role of the nice unknown girl that my father assumed I would discover and marry, but a valuable role. I always thought to tell Clara that had she been more like the whore that Grace was, rather than the bogus whore that she so contemptuously fabricated, I could have really, well, really loved her. I never said a word, and it has only recently occurred to me that I remained silent because I had no idea of what I truly meant to say, without sounding more like a fool than I had already proven myself to be.

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.

The phenomenon of my mother’s death in the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn at the moment at which I was drunkenly fucking Clara, became, some months after the funeral, the source of what I quite irrationally believed would be a revelation of sorts. Of what, I had no idea, but the temporal conjunction of the two incidents seemed too sinister not to be meaningful. I thought that I might now be able to understand the feverishly obsessive erotics occasioned in me by the thought of Clara, because of the coincidence of death and fornication. I apparently really believed that my flatly banal night in the Brittany held some lesson for my life. And yet, if truth be told — if truth be told! — the adventure was, as always with Clara, intrinsically void. My mother’s death lent it no importance; in fact, I was, surely, intent on teasing some meaning from this drunken shambles to avoid the shame of self-confrontation: that is, my mother’s death, if rightly manipulated, would redeem my debased adultery by lending it a tragic mystery. What childish perversity!

I know that had I been gifted that night with second sight, so that I could have predicted my mother’s sudden fall into death; and had I seen such catastrophe in my mind’s eye while kissing Clara’s sex through her glowing lingerie, her demise would have occasioned nothing that my lust had not already decided on. To be crudely frank, I would have crawled to Clara under any circumstances, come corruption, hell, come anybody’s death. So, then, my desire to make those two incidents yield meaning was nothing more than a way of avoiding the truth about my own lust; I wanted, that is, to make my lust important, in the same way that blinded lovers know that their ordinary couplings are unique and astonishing and bright with amorous truth.

Even now, when I think to luxuriate in self-pity, I conjure up that particular night and try to extract, from its various acts, a moral, no, a lesson, a pensum, that will serve to partially explain my general failure as a man. This failure must be somehow dependent upon the circumstances attendant upon my mother’s death. Or so I hope; for otherwise my life seems to have no meaning at all, not even that of its being. But I am always sidetracked, because I link that night with the night spent with Grace, and that, without fail, allows my father to enter the bleak world of recollection.

I occasionally dream of my father, especially when I find myself vexed by memories of Clara. In these dreams, he does workaday things, nothing strange or even unexpected. He lights an English Oval, he leans against one of his gleaming Cadillacs, he turns to me and says “Lavagetto,” he buys me a Hickey Freeman pearl-gray pinstripe suit, he takes me to the fights at the Garden where we sit ringside with big, loud men, he tells me he’s sorry about my mother, whom he always loved. When he confesses to the latter, he says something about the good veal and peppers in the Italian grocery on Baltic Street, but I know how to translate this secret dream language. But whatever he is doing or saying, he invariably wears a snap-brim fedora, and much of the time it is a white Borsalino. This hat is, I think, a figure for authority and grace and strength, for arrogance, for manhood. A figure, that is, for everything that I once wanted to possess and exhibit.

When I was sixteen, my father took me, on a hot day in August, to a pier in Erie Basin, where he was doing a complete overhaul on two Norwegian freighters. His foreman, a short, dark man of forty-five or so, whose name — the only name I ever knew him by — was Sorrow, took his cap off when he approached my father, and made a slight bow to me. I was embarrassed by this, and looked away at the huge rusting and peeling hulls of the Kristiansand and the Trondheim riding high in the water. Sorrow said something to my father in Sicilian, and my father answered in English, and gestured toward the ships. As Sorrow walked away, my father put his arm around my shoulders, and said something about the old greaseballs and their goddamn Chinese, and laughed. I should note that by this time in his life my father, who had been born just outside Agrigento and who had passed through Ellis Island at the age of ten, had invented an American birthplace for himself, and had given himself a wonderfully burlesque “American” middle name, Kendrick. My mother often delightedly said that he claimed a birthday on, sometimes, the Fourth of July, and sometimes Flag Day. And yet my mother, for all of her bitterness toward this man from whom she had been separated for twelve years, never spoke of him without a subterranean admiration and affection that I had no way of reconciling with her anger and sense of betrayal. He was to her, I now think, the only real man in the world, and she had often told me stories of their courtship and early marriage that were suffused with details that were at once innocent — almost girlish — and oddly erotic. On that pier, though, whatever he may have been to my mother, he seemed to me a magical stranger in a beautiful hat and a tropical worsted suit of so creamy a tan that it seemed to blush. I knew why Sorrow was so deferential, for my father radiated an authority that created him a figure endowed with authority: he made, that is, a self that was, then, his self. It was not, that is, the creation of someone that he was not, a kind of con-man invention that, for some reason, many people admire, but was infinitely more subtle than that: he had successfully endowed, in some mysterious way, certain traits of manhood with a style that was not naturally or specifically intrinsic to them, but which became so at the moment of his appropriation of them. It was this, I suspect, that so enthralled my mother.

Norwegian ships, back in the forties, were generally agreed to be, by the longshoremen and stevedores, scalers and painters who worked on the Brooklyn and North River piers, the filthiest afloat. This may or may not have been true, but it was accepted as such, until even the Norwegian seamen who sailed on these tubs came to believe it, and, in a perverse way, to flaunt their ships’ squalid conditions. They may not have been any cleaner than those sailing under different flags, but their reputation for egregious feculence had been solidly fixed.

My father and I walked about half the length of the pier, and when we were about even with the fo’c’sle of one of the ships, he struck up a conversation with a man called Joe the Ice. He was in a powder-blue gabardine suit, white shirt and navy tie, and wore a little teardrop diamond in his lapel. I had come to learn that Joe had something to do with what my father called “collections,” not that it here matters. He seemed to me benign and rather affable, but he had an air of being, so to say, all business. There was a story that my Uncle Ralph told about a deckhand on a Moore McCormack tug who was still paying the weekly vig to Joe on a loan he’d made some eleven years earlier. He rarely complained, so my uncle said: he was whole and working.

I suddenly realized that my father had a wad of cash in his hand, and he said to Joe that five grand was jake with him. Joe took out a handful of cash from a tattered red manila portfolio, and counted out five thousand dollars. My father called Sorrow over, all three spoke briefly in Sicilian, and Sorrow took the ten thousand. I was astonished and bewildered, amazed, really, at having seen ten thousand dollars produced, so to speak, out of the air, in the oily heat of the Red Hook summer afternoon. My father smiled at me, and told me, in as few words, that he’d made a bet with the Ice, even money, that he could walk through the Trondheim, from the holds, up through all the decks, onto the main deck and the bridge — walk through the whole ship — without getting a spot or smudge or smear of oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat. Then he left me to Sorrow and Joe, and walked up the gangplank. I stood with the men, and, by now, a few scalers who were coming off shift. In a minute, the entire pier knew of the bet, and men waited patiently to see my father appear at the gangway. My father insisted that an electrician who worked for the Navy accompany him to make sure that everything was done right.

My father won the bet, came out spotless, and then took me to Foffés on Montague Street, where he had a scotch or two, and I drank 7Ups, and then we drove to Phil Kronfeld’s, a haberdashery near the old Latin Quarter. He bought me a dozen lusciously soft, white broadcloth shirts, and, deferring to my somewhat dim taste, a half-dozen silk ties, the latter spectacularly “Broadway,” ties that my mother called “bookmaker” ties. She swore that my father had no sense at all, buying a high-school boy such expensive things, but then told me a story about his spending his last twenty dollars on a hat to impress her before they were engaged. I had heard this story, with subtle and loving variations and embellishments, many times.

When I think of that sweltering Brooklyn, so long dead, and my father in his beautiful clothes, with his strong face and huge hands; and when I think of the casually arrogant way in which he bet five thousand dollars, on a kind of whim; and when I, still and always amazed, realize that he had that money in his pocket, I sometimes get up and look at myself in the mirror. I look like my father, but I am not, not at all, like my father. What would he have said about my deformed relationship with the Sterns? About Clara standing me up God knows how many times? About the weakness or lack of will or courage that prevented me from abandoning the whore, prevented me from marrying some woman whose flaws were, at the very worst, the flaws of sanity? What?

When I dream of my father in his spotless hat and, waking, wish that I could have somehow appropriated the authority and confidence that I, of course irrationally, think it to have possessed, I am unfailingly left with the truth that it was my father’s Borsalino. And only his.

Patsy Manucci, one of my father’s drivers and a kind of sidekick who provided my father with a gin-rummy partner and a brand of raucous and mostly unintentional comedy, had a brother, Rocco, of whom, as a boy of fifteen or so, I was in awe. He was a horse of a man, almost, indeed, as thick through the chest and shoulders as a horse, and he spoke in a gravelly voice that was, as the phrase has it, too good to be true. Patsy possessed the same voice, and when the brothers had a discussion or argument about handicapping, the din of their colloquy could be heard through closed doors and even walls. My mother, who liked both brothers, said that their voices were the result of years of shouting the results from the candy store out to the street corner. I did not know what “the results” meant, but I knew that Patsy loved this crack, as he worshiped my mother, and thought it so funny that he repeated it everywhere.

He often said, with the most solemn and respectful of faces, that Rocco was a graduate of Fordham, where he’d studied medicine, a lie so preposterous that nobody ever had the heart to call him on it, or for that matter, even to laugh: people would listen to this wistful, crazy revelation and nod their heads in understanding. Life! their nods regretfully said, Ah, that’s how life is. Once, my father, in a context I no longer remember, broke this unspoken rule of solemnity, and said that Rocco had graduated from Fordham’s “upstate campus,” which caused the men with whom he’d been talking to burst into laughter. I laughed too, but had no true idea why.

Rocco was a runner for a policy operation headed by a man named Jackie Glass, who was always dressed beautifully in oxford gray or navy blue suits, white shirts, repp-striped ties, and French-toed shoes that seemed as soft as gloves. He was married to an exshowgirl, a tall, hard redhead, and they had two spoiled blond children, Marvin and Elaine, who got everything they wanted, or so it appeared to me. His wife’s name was Charl, short, I discovered, for Charlene. Jackie was connected, as the phrase had it, with one of the New York families, I don’t know which one, which gave Rocco, in my adolescent eyes, the most weighty authority: he worked for a man who worked for serious people who had a great deal to say about the running of many things, including the city.

But this was the lesser part of what enthralled me insofar as Rocco was concerned. Rocco was a gambler, but a gambler who existed in a kind of Paradiso, an Eden, an empyrean of gambling that was wholly unreal to me. One night he won sixty thousand dollars in a crap game up on Pleasant Avenue. Even in this time, when people who can barely sing, dance, act, hit a ball, or throw a punch make millions for barely doing these things, sixty thousand dollars is a lot of money; in 1944, when a seventy-five-dollar a week job was thought to be the key to a big apartment on Easy Street, it was, simply, a fantasy amount. Rocco lost the sixty grand two days later in another crap game on Elizabeth Street.

To win it. To have it. To let it all go. To say to hell with it. That’s what fascinated me about Rocco. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to live, the way I’ve wanted to act with the men and women I’ve known, with, of course, especially Clara. I’ve never had the courage, that is to say that I’ve never had the courage to act on my belief that the world, beyond all its endlessly rehearsed wonders and beauties, is absolute shit, that life is best when ignored, or somehow turned away from, and that nothing should be taken at face value. In sum, that everything is a pathetic bust. But I have always acted otherwise, as if there is, perpetually, the possibility for change, for amelioration, for friendship and love. I have, that is, always and unforgivably, acted as if there is hope. But to say: Fuck life! I’ve never managed it, or if I have, it was momentary, melodramatic gesture, empty and contemptible. I think, in effect, of losing sixty thousand dollars, and, without fail, make my craven accommodations. I will not, ever, let it all go.

Some few years into my absurd relationship with Clara, a friend of mine who had rented a ramshackle beach house on Fire Island for the month of September, had to return to the city with a little less than two weeks left on his lease. He asked me if I wanted to take the place, gratis, for this period, and I agreed, thinking to ask Clara to make some excuse and spend this time on the island with me. She had been, for some months, disconcertingly faithful to Ben, and I thought that a time alone together, as the strangely lugubrious old song has it, would work to revive our passion, a passion that, I’m afraid, I remembered as a series of dissolving pornographic tableaux. I think that one usually remembers love as a totality of experience and feeling, a complex in which the sun that falls on the kitchen table in the morning is part of the emotion attendant on the beloved; whereas lust is simply the recall of the purely and metonymically salacious. Clara was a duchess of lust, as I have tried to make clear, and images of her in diverse erotic scenes were, overwhelmingly, images of dazed carnality. In any event, I told her of my sudden luck and asked her to come. I implored her to come.

A day or two later, she told me that she’d invented a story for Ben, complete with a sick school friend or a spontaneous reunion, faked phone calls, a fantasy airline reservation, something, everything. I had no way of proving that Clara had done any of this, and I’ve long been convinced that Ben had joined in this spurious drama, had helped to fashion his own betrayal. Clara was, and probably always had been, one of the machines by the use of which Ben was assisted in his seductions of fragile students and frowzy colleagues and the wives of friends — the butcher and the baker, for all I know. Perhaps even my ex-wife. At the time, all I cared about was Clara involved in lovemaking with me. With me!

We took the ferry from Bay Shore one warm morning, and then clomped along the boardwalk to a disreputable, weathered shack in Ocean Bay Park. Clara had laughed on the ferry as she described Ben’s sour expression as she prepared to leave. She had a neat, well-turned story for almost every occasion, and in me the most willing of listeners. Nothing was on my mind but her, I had become desire, ah, how wonderful and dirty she was, her light perfume piquant with the salt air of the Sound. The moment we slammed the door of the musty shack, Clara almost coyly pulled off her T-shirt and stepped out of her shorts. Was I not the most finished of seducers?

Those ten days, however, ended with my morose wallowing in bitter nostalgia. Clara, of course, noticed my tragic expression, and, although people’s feelings held little interest for her, she was manifestly disturbed that this germ of misery might make me less reliant a sexual partner than she had bargained for. She had given me two weeks of her time and had spent her energy to be with me; she did not expect gloom and silence. My ill-concealed distemper and preoccupied air turned the last few days of our sojourn into a chilly period of reading and glum card games.

I had been made wretched — blue is, I suppose, the best word — by a delicate, faded memory evoked by ocean and beach, a memory of fifteen years earlier, when I woman I had loved, loved to distraction, spent a summer with me in a rented cottage on the Island’s North Shore. There is little point in rehearsing the serene joy of that summer, other than to say that I could not, perhaps did not want to drive from my mind the image of her sitting across from me in the early twilight on the little flagstone patio behind the two-room cottage. She was, in this image, always in white: shorts and T-shirt, skirt and blouse, pinafore, crisply dazzling summer dress, and her tan glows warmly against the candor of her lovely white clothing. She holds a gin and tonic, and as she leans forward to light her cigarette from my proffered match, she looks up and her dark eyes astound me.

I did a really thorough job of destroying this love when we returned to the city in the fall, by means of a cruel apathy, one that I even more cruelly pretended was a distraction caused by painful personal concerns that could not be shared with anyone — especially with her. So that was that. I saw her, many years later, well after my marriage and divorce, while Clara and I were in the early phase of our demented, futile eroticism. It was in sad Tompkins Square, on a gray, humid day just made for mania. We did not acknowledge each other, but the look of understanding that crossed her face, the comprehension of my flimsy reality that registered on her calm, beautiful features, almost stopped my heart. She had, as the phrase so aptly puts it, seen right through me. I thought to speak to her, to ask her — I don’t know — to help me, perhaps? I thought I’d vomit, but was spared at least that shame.

Wittgenstein famously closes the Tractatus by writing that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” I’m not certain that I agree with this beautifully subtle, frigid refutation, or, perhaps, critique, of the empty blather with which we are surrounded every day. My rejected and buried Roman Catholicism rouses itself at this proposition, flaunting, quietly to be sure, the garrulous sacrament of penance as counterbalance to Wittgenstein. God knows, the very act of confession, the snug dark of the confessional, the confessor’s aloof profile in the gloom — all these virtually guarantee that the penitent will most certainly attempt to speak, in halting improvisations or rehearsed platitudes, about those sins and crimes and dark longings which cannot ever be represented in language. Silence will not do in the confessional, and the unspeakable always finds a voice, garbled and inexact though it may be.

Yet outside of the fierce niceties of the elaborate ritual that makes Roman Catholicism a sly, gay, and mysterious game, never to be understood by functional and palsy-walsy Christianity, I do indeed understand Wittgenstein’s blunt postscript. It has been my experience that we cannot speak about anything at all, and yet we rattle on, our ceaseless chatter so much a part of our lives that even the hackneyed concept of “last words” is enshrined as a phenomenon of grave importance, as if it matters what anyone says entering the dark nullity. We refuse, really, just as if we were all ensconced permanently in a universal confessional, to pass over the unspeakable in silence. We start. We continue. We go on and on, through childhood and adolescence, fornication and pain and disease and death. Talking to make sense — how sad the very idea! — of childhood and adolescence, fornication and pain and disease and death.

This story that I have told, or made, such as it is, for instance, with a half-submerged truth here and a robustly confident lie there, with a congeries of facts and near-facts everywhere, this story is an exhibit of speech about something of which I cannot speak. For years, I did pass over it, quite obediently, so to say, in silence. Then, for no reason that I can point to, I decided to ease my mind by speaking, if not the unspeakable, then the difficult to speak. As I half-knew they would, each page, paragraph, clause, sentence, each word pulled relentlessly and stubbornly away from that which I had thought to say. So that my speech, I now see, has made the past even more remote and unfocused than silence would have. But I declare that I have spoken the truth, or something very close to it.

When I say that my narrative is not quite representative of the actuality of the experiences it purports to represent, I play no semiological games. That is to say that were the act of signification a wholly successful transaction with the real, I could still never have effected the proper transaction. I have no language for it, there is no language for it. Just as well that words are empty. How terrifying true representation would be!

This story is dotted with flaws and contradictions and riddled with inconsistencies, some of which even the inattentive reader will discover. Some of these gaffes may well be considered felicities of uncertainty and indeterminacy: such is prose. The tale also, it will have been clear, occasionally flaunts its triumphs, small though they may be. I am afraid that the final word about the gluey, tortuous, somehow glamorously perverse relationship that Ben and Clara and I constructed and sent shuffling into the world hasn’t been arrived at; but perhaps the unspeakable has had created some sad analogue of itself, if such is possible. Something has been spoken of, surely, but I can’t determine what or where it is.

In any event, I’ve spent a fair amount of time and attempted a degree of care in the creation and arrangement of these fragments. There are moments or flashes when I believe that I have seen myself, in a quirk of syntax, as I really was, when I can swear that Ben or Clara are wholly if fleetingly present in these simulacra of the past. Moments, flashes, when this admittedly inadequate series of signs seems to body forth a gone time. But I know that this is nonsense, nothing but a ruse with which I have been faithfully complicit so as to make the landscape of my life seem more valuable and interesting than it ever was.