Little Casino by Gilbert Sorrentino Page B

says something about it. He lifted his head to see her looking at the snow falling past the window. She stands up, her warm thighs touch his upturned face, and she pulls her white slip off over her head. She is wearing white underclothes. He watches her take a breadbox down from a closet shelf. A breadbox? He hasn’t seen a breadbox since the Depression. This was the early evening of their wedding day? Maybe. She lights a cigarette and puts the pack down on top of her pale-blue dress, thrown carelessly on the bookcase. “So what are your lewd plans for me this evening, you dirty filthy thing?” she says. O gay sweet careless love.

    The congruences of life are as relentless as they are poignant. Love, O love, O careless love.
    “That this man, or one of them, is pleased that this woman, or one of them, is wearing white underclothes, would seem to strongly suggest that he is easily pleased.”
    I was under the impression that we were more or less done with that pale-blue dress. Not that I mind!
    “A man delighted with his beloved’s dress is a man who is, one might argue, easily delighted.”
    Is this woman, or women, or whatever the hell is going on here, Dolores?
    “Dolores asserts herself again in this memoir, although I use the word ‘memoir’ as a figure of speech, of course.”
    “Memoir” or not, Dolores and her lady friends are heartbreakers all.
    Harke, all you ladies that do sleep:
            the fayry queen Proserpina
    Bids you awake and pitie them that weepe;
            you may doe in the darke
    What the day doth forbid:
            feare not the dogs that barke,
                    Night will have all hid.
    “With the golden crown, Aphrodite,
    Cypri munimenta sortita est.”
    “Thou with dark eyelids.”

The Christmas tree

    S HE IS ON HER KNEES, NEXT TO THE Christmas tree, her forearms on the edge of the worn couch. Her posture is reverential, even pious, although her skirt is up around her waist and her panties are down to the middle of her thighs, so that her buttocks are invitingly prominent between the torn white-lace trim of her slip and the dark tops of her stockings. He fucks her slowly and with fixed determination, by the living Christ he’ll prove to her that she loves him, no matter what she thinks she feels. He knows, though, that she doesn’t love him anymore, which is why he is fucking her so seriously. It would be nice if there were some goddamn heat in the dump of an apartment! He hates his stupid life, and hates hers even more. But he’ll show the bitch what a real fuck is. It is an intensely and violently erotic moment.

    The couple so flagrantly and vulgarly spied upon for the voyeuristic pleasure of the reader (who is always in my thoughts) has been married for almost eleven years.
    The magnificent “Blue Seven,” by Sonny Rollins, is playing on the phonograph during what I think should be called—and why not?—this “erotic moment.”
    The Christmas tree! It could well have become, had this erotic moment been turned into a story, an image, crisp with irony, yet poignant with shared memory. Perhaps the reader once engaged in lovemaking under or next to a Christmas tree, and so can relate, and relate well, to the truth of the scene.
    There are very few stories that we have not heard, popular opinion notwithstanding, very few indeed.
    Writing, such as it is, that doesn’t quite become story, is often described, even condemned, as self-indulgent. And so it is. And no! The meaning of “such as it is” is not clear. It seems, somehow, crisp with irony.
    The reader is always in my thoughts, as I think I’ve admitted.

4th of July

    T HEY REMEMBERED, FOR YEARS, THE BAR becue they went to in East Orange, in somebody’s car. It was a lovely 4th of July, cool and sunny and dry, with a steady, fresh breeze off the Atlantic. In any event, that’s where death began or, perhaps, asserted itself. When questioned about it a few months later, everyone