The Moon In Its Flight Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    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