A Strange Commonplace Read online

  Praise for Gilbert Sorrentino

  “Gilbert Sorrentino has all the wit and charm of the great raconteur. His affection for the music of language is as fresh and appealing as that of a kid in love.”

  —ROBERT COOVER

  “For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique figure in our literature. He reminds us that fiction lives because artists make it…. To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition and relentless passion.”

  —DON DELILLO

  “Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative, no matter how clever and intelligent, and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, but for all that, cleansing, light.”

  —JEFFREY EUGENIDES

  “For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid-20th-century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word.”

  —HARRY MATHEWS

  “Salute Gilbert Sorrentino! His is the spirit that keeps American fiction alive and kicking.”

  —MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

  “Perhaps in a hundred years or so, readers and literary critics alike will recognize Gilbert Sorrentino’s brilliance as an uncompromising American artist who recasts his singular, iconoclastic vision in each of his modernist masterpieces.”

  —AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

  Praise for Lunar Follies

  “Hilarious … vintage Sorrentino, with the sonar ear and wicked wink.”

  —HARPER’S

  “Like a reckless heir to Borges, Barthelme and Groucho Marx, Gilbert Sorrentino co-opts the language of critical discourse to subvert his audience’s preconceptions … [a] dizzying, very funny book.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “The satire of Lunar Follies hews so close to the bone that it saws right through it … Sorrentino’s savagery can be Swiftian, usually exaggerating by just the slightest degree the debased language of the cultural marketplace… . Exhilarating.”

  —WASHINGTON POST

  “Lunar Follies is yet another wily variation on the weaving of narrative betwixt itself: a slim collection of fictional art reviews of nonexistent art installations … Sorrentino’s skewer of all things postmodern is of course a grandly postmodern piece itself.”

  —VILLAGE VOICE

  “A bravura feat of parody.”

  —THE BELIEVER

  “Can a two-page list of paintings and artists rejected by a gallery, for instance, really be considered literary fiction? Yes, hilariously so…. Savor this book, which is highly recommended.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL (STARRED REVIEW)

  Praise for The Moon in Its Flight

  “The title piece of this collection is among the ten best stories in the history of American literature; its availability in book form—along with the other nineteen stories collected—is long overdue.”

  —REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION

  “The highest pleasure of reading Sorrentino is found in his individual sentences, which are so delightful they could be enjoyed plucked randomly from the pages … . The Moon in Its Flight is a thrilling retrospective of (and, for those uninitiated, a wonderful introduction to) Sorrentino’s uniquely brilliant body of work.”

  —MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

  “The best stories here force us to consider and reconsider how we approach the very act of reading… . In bringing down the walls that typically fortify a narrator from his audience, in exposing the artifice behind the art, Sorrentino requires us to extend that healthy distrust not only to what we read but also to the narratives shaping the world around us.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Possessing both the grace of James Joyce and the snap and crackle of Tom Wolfe, this insightful offering by the two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist is a must-read for those who fancy fiction served on wry.”

  —BOOKLIST

  “[Sorrentino] drives the machinery of his stories like a fancy new coupe whose engine he perfectly understands.”

  —SEATTLE TIMES

  Praise for Little Casino

  “As usual, I am so awed by the fertility of Gilbert Sorrentino’s imagination, so envious of his intelligence, and so astonished at his daring technical prestidigitation, that I’m tempted to spill out my own inkpot and weep. Except that I was also left laughing deliciously all the way.”

  —DAVID MARKSON

  “Crafty, wise, profoundly sane, this novel is simply a masterpiece.”

  —BRADFORD MORROW

  “Far from being overly highbrow … Sorrentino manages to be thrillingly disorienting and, at the same time, quite accessible. Told in prose that crackles with wit and verve, Little Casino is another testament to Sorrentino’s unconventional and darkly comic genius.”

  —BOOKSENSE.COM

  “In Little Casino, Sorrentino … displays his intelligence, exuberance and wisdom, making his novel both entertaining and incisive.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES

  “There are books like Finnegans Wake that teach you how to read them as you go. Then there are books like Gilbert Sorrentino’s new Little Casino that make you forget how to read anything else.”

  —PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER

  “Sorrentino shows no lack of energy or invention in [Little Casino] as he brings his linguistic wizardry to bear on a trio of obsessions: lust, lost loves, and lingerie.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  A STRANGE COMMONPLACE

  COPYRIGHT © 2006 by Gilbert Sorrentino

  COVER + BOOK DESIGN Linda Koutsky

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, Saint Paul, MN 55114. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: Coffee House Press, 27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals help make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book. To you and our many readers across the country, we send our thanks for your continuing support.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP DATA

  Sorrentino, Gilbert.

  A strange commonplace/ Gilbert Sorrentino. p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56689-182-0 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-56689-182-5 (alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-56689-287-2 (ebook)

  1. Suburban life—Fiction.

  2. Psychological fiction.

  3. Domestic fiction.

  I. Title.

  ps3569.07S77 2006

  813’.54—DC22

  2005035804

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  I passed through extraordinary places, as vivid as any I ever saw where the storm had broken the barrier and let through a strange commonplace: Long, deserted avenues with unrecognized names at the corners and drunken looking people with completely foreign manners.

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Ridiculous the waste sad time

  Stretching before and after.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  Book One

  In the Bedroom

  Success

  Born Again

  Lovers

  Another Story

  Movies

  Pair of Deuces

  In Dreams

  On the Roof

  A Familiar Woman

  In the Diner

  Happy Days

  C
laire

  Rockefeller Center

  Brothers

  A Small Adventure

  Another Small Adventure

  Cold Supper

  Pearl Gray Homburg

  An Apartment

  Saturday Afternoon

  The Jungle

  Snow

  Rain

  The Alpine

  A Wake

  Book Two

  Happy Days

  Claire

  Another Story

  Lovers

  Pair of Deuces

  Cold Supper

  An Apartment

  Success

  A Small Adventure

  Pearl Gray Homburg

  In Dreams

  Movies

  Born Again

  Snow

  A Familiar Woman

  On the Roof

  The Jungle

  In the Bedroom

  Rockefeller Center

  Another Small Adventure

  Saturday Afternoon

  The Alpine

  In the Diner

  Brothers

  Rain

  A Wake

  In the Bedroom

  AFTER HER HUSBAND LEFT HER FOR SOME FLOOZIE WHO was supposed to be an executive secretary at the crummy half-assed company he’d worked at for years without a raise or even so much as a bottle of cheap whiskey at Christmas, she packed up a few things, took the girl, and moved in with her cousin Janet on Gerritsen Avenue. She’d get the rest of her things after her father had spoken with the rat about his plans for taking his clothes out of the house: she didn’t ever want to see his face again. She should have known that something was going on when he took to wearing a ridiculous homburg instead of his usual fedora. She’d laughed at the hat and he’d blushed and then got angry. Now that she thought back on this she realized that the tramp must have said something about how distinguished he’d look in a homburg, and the damn fool went to the haberdashery, probably the Owl Men’s Shop, where the kike told him he could be a banker in a hat like that. Happy as a clam. After a couple of weeks, she went back to the house to pack a suitcase with some of her toiletries, and found a note from him on the kitchen table, pinned under a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. “Dear Sweetheart, I’ve made a great mistake but I love you only, you, can you forgive me? Please call me at Ralph’s or leave a message with him for a time I can talk to you. I love you, and want our marriage to last more than you can know.” She put the letter in her handbag, went upstairs to their bedroom, and opened a drawer in her dresser. In among her lingerie and stockings she found his white silk scarf, the one with the blue polka dots that she’d always liked so much. She startled herself by laughing convulsively, then threw the scarf on the floor and stepped on it. The son of a bitch bastard son of a bitch.

  Success

  AT THE WHITE-WINE BOOK PARTY, AN EVENT HIS NERVOUS publisher had never even begun to conceive of as a portent of his memoir’s surprising and modest but somewhat hysterical celebrity, he bumped into Napoleon, a “bro,” as the cant of the day momentarily had it, who had been one of his drug suppliers in his high school days. Napoleon was quite different now, dressed in a dark, conservatively cut suit, and an elegant tie against a gleaming white shirt. He thought to say how far they’d come from the old days, but realized how jejune such a remark would be and kept still. Napoleon’s card announced him as an Entertainment Consultant, and listed addresses in both Chelsea and Williamsburg. They laughed and postured, the usual half-true stories were hauled out, and Napoleon’s wife, Claire, smiled brilliantly in her role as ignorant but pleased outsider. She was an arrestingly beautiful young woman, whom the memoirist immediately decided to pursue; his pursuit of her led to a sexual encounter some weeks later, then another, and soon they were lovers. According to Claire, Napoleon was not interested in her comings and goings, and had other girls. This fact, true or not, somewhat tarnished the exoticism of the affair for the memoirist, and he felt on the cusp of boredom. One day, Claire, pale and nervous and chain-smoking the execrable Gitanes that sex had instructed him to tolerate, told him that she’d been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He comforted her with assorted clichés, held her tenderly, fucked her with what he was certain was sensitive caring, and sent her home with a stricken yet deeply compassionate look on his face: sadness beyond words, of course. That was that! He had, after all, literary responsibilities, publicity tasks to honor, people to talk to and cultivate, too many things to do to permit this exhausted intrigue to continue. She might want sympathy or understanding or whatever it is that the incurably sick want. Well, she was married. He stopped calling her, and did not acknowledge the messages she left on his answering machine. That, indeed, was that. She died less than a year later, while he was in Los Angeles, where he had moved to further his romantically stalled career, as he probably liked to think of it.

  Born Again

  CLAUDIA, AS SHE HAD TAKEN TO CALLING HERSELF THESE past five years, came in from her supper at the Parisian diner at about six o’clock, as usual. She’d had a hot brisket sandwich and a small salad and they’d refilled her iced tea free of charge; she was a good customer. She double-locked the door and slid the chain on, then hung up her coat. She took off her dress and slip and laid them carefully over the back of a chair, put on her pink chenille bathrobe, placed her flats in the back of the closet and slipped her feet into worn corduroy slippers. The apartment was silent, save for the thin clanking of the two radiators that warmed the small rooms. The letter from Warren that had come a week before lay on the kitchen table. She hadn’t opened it, nor would she, of course, and in a week or two, or maybe a month or even longer, she’d throw it away unread. There was something satisfyingly insulting and contemptuous about ignoring the letter. It would be, she knew, just like the others from the pig—those that she, like a fool, bothered to read—maudlin and self-pitying, filled with regrets and sentimental clichés about the sacredness of marriage and love and the gift of children from a loving God; about being together through thick and thin, about, God help us, their honeymoon even, which had become sacred. He’d have the gall, certainly he would, to mention their daughter, her daughter, pretending bitter guilt and deep remorse and talking about Jesus and salvation and being born again: enough goddamned sanctimonious evangelical Christian bullshit and broken glass, as her grandfather would say, to make a decent human being blush. She had never thought, never, that she’d hate anyone as much as she hated Warren, and she often smiled sourly to herself when she acknowledged the fact that she had permitted her hatred to ruin, utterly, what was left of her life. And Warren, with his disgusting Jesus this and Jesus that, his whining, falsely joyous Christian idiocies, had arranged his putrid life so that his past, if not virtually obliterated, was—even better—redeemed. He was the fake grateful recipient of a fake grace. Claudia thought that any God worth a nickel—even Warren’s loathsome creeping Jesus—should have mercilessly destroyed him with disease and agony and poverty. Should have killed him! It was dark in the apartment now, and she rose, quite abruptly, to walk to her small dresser and open the bottom drawer, where she kept the lingerie that she’d never wear again, not that it would fit her now. She had hidden there, although hidden from what she had no idea, an old tattered book, wrapped in the white chemise she’d worn on her wedding day, her sad and dark wedding day. She opened the book at random, and read: “For a moment Bomba was so taken aback by the sight of the jaguar that he did not stir.” She closed the book and wrapped the chemise around it, then stood staring at the window, black with night. One of these evenings she’d read the whole book through, as she hadn’t done in at least twenty years, more like twenty-five, and allow her heart to break completely. Then it would be the right time to take the pills she’d been hoarding. Maybe she’d bump into Jesus and tell him what she thought of him and give him a good one on his other goddamned cheek.

  Lovers

  FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS NOW I’VE KNOWN A WOMAN whose husband, almost that many years ago, was utterly
crazy about—the phrase, I realize, dates me—a younger friend of hers, whom he thought unimpeachably beautiful; often, upon meeting her, he would quote Marlowe’s lines on Helen in Doctor Faustus, throwing wide his arms and declaiming the famous words in a graceless parody of ham acting that was neither funny, nor, to my mind, appropriate, and that embarrassed his wife, the young woman, and anyone else unlucky enough to be awkwardly present. Even more embarrassing was the obvious fact that this rote performance was a transparent attempt to conceal his deep feelings for Clara, I believe her name was. Clara had a younger brother, who, early one morning, was, astonishingly, shot to death from a passing car while standing outside a Bay Ridge diner. She never really recovered from this stupid and abrupt death, and the husband, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, took immediate advantage of her rickety emotional state, to seduce her. Clara became pregnant, which led, or so I believe, to the breakup of the marriage, although the man’s wife, my woman friend, even after all these years, has never so much as suggested that this was the case; she has never even suggested that the two were intimate. Clara must have had an abortion or suffered a miscarriage, because no child was, to my knowledge, ever born. Clara’s Uncle Ray, so the rumor went, came looking for what he called her boyfriend, soon after the latter, filled with self-pity, had moved out of the apartment, and beat him up badly, breaking his nose, jaw, and two teeth. Clara was married, about six months later, to a young black man who was involved in the music business, or maybe it was the real-estate business. Given the time and the place and Clara’s yahoo relatives, they moved away. Quite recently, my woman friend told me that Clara had died just a few years into her marriage. It took me a moment to realize that this had happened some thirty-five years ago, perhaps because my friend seemed so pleased—delighted even—about her death, and spoke of it as a recent event. We’re both alone, as you may have surmised, and since we get along fairly well, I’ve decided to ask her if she’d consider living with me. Marriage is out of the question, since she is still married to the man she has, for many years, called the lover.