The Moon In Its Flight by Gilbert Sorrentino Page A

spectators who gathered about like so many wretched flu sufferers, each vying for a moment of an exhausted physician’s time, each brandishing a crusted eyecup, or pitifully displaying badly soiled linen in a puerile bid for attention. It is one thing to deal with the orgiastic and the exhibitionistic in an area which is, let us admit, a dreary seadrome like La Bbec, but such activity, such shocking hedonism in a supposedly refined family setting, is, as a rude prospector, in quite another context, put it, “like a Bowie knife ’mid th’ aspic.” As to these noted activities, made depressingly public, they needed no Rosetta stone of the sensual in order for them to have been clearly—all too clearly!—understood. Granted, the balmy temperatures of these climes may have contributed to the general moral collapse, but the erotic pandemonium of gardyloos, shrieks, halloos, yodels, screams, and full-throated bellowings cannot be blamed on the weather, and must stand forever as a blot on this otherwise handsomely managed season. Some grumblers have suggested that morality and discretion were treated by the rentiers as mere trade-ins for the considerable monies provided by what this same disaffected group calls (worshipfully), with no reservations whatsoever, an ochlocracy. A small minority of older, successful tradesmen and professionals sneer at the younger and overtly “conspicuous” crowd as “rabid stearin,” but that is, surely, going a little too far. In any event, the stencils went up later that day, each bearing its remonstrative jussive in blazing red: DESIST! Yet the very next morning, the butterweed around the ransacked and noisome gazebo was crushed and broken, the machine for instant cupellation lay smashed at the bottom of the sea, and the shipment of New Testaments was but smoldering ashes. A noted conservative humanitarian of excellent family was found, sans trousers and underpants, bound and gagged in the ladies’ room, and time itself seemed to have retired—perhaps for good! Yet the antique chipper still had a fine edge to its blade, and the more obstreperous protesters were being, finally, brutally harassed. That afternoon, all the self-proclaimed prudes left, taking their health implements and “green things” with them, and the youthful contingent of regulars triumphantly flew the peter, thereby recalling those compatriots who, earlier in the summer, had unwillingly and unhappily vanished. All in all, the lesson learned, then, might be phrased, “a surfeit of emendation sometimes turns to delighted glee,” or, as an old proverb teaches, “else.”

A BEEHIVE ARRANGED ON HUMANE PRINCIPLES

    So can you predict the exact date on which the “pearly” rain will fall? Are you a slave to such quirks of clairvoyance? Is there a testament, if you don’t think that’s too strong a word, for or against behavior of that sort? Would red flowers or white, or pink for that matter, be any the less useless to you? Or their motions, such as they are, in the wind? Speaking of wind, do you remember those long-ago parades, held in gales of lilacs, so it seemed, or were they actually merely lilac butterflies? And do you recall how the children and their mothers aped the yokels who marched in those Midwestern uniforms and plumes? Weren’t they always the dead white of sails, or snow, of, in short, winter as you once experienced it? Do you think of the usual creaking boughs and bitter frosts when you hear that “music”? Wasn’t it on one of those festive days that you butchered the peacocks? Those you claimed lived behind the house of the girl with the out-of-tune guitar? Didn’t you tell me her name was Regina, Regina Lake, or Regina Star? Now that I think of it, weren’t you and she the closest of friends when she was still a virgin? And isn’t she now the Regina Lake or Star whose sex life is the subject of the monographs on perversion that you collect? She and you flew pigeons off the roof, didn’t