Sorrentino - Aberration of starlight

GILBERT SORRENTINO

Aberration of Starlight

T om Thebus is singing in a monotone under his breath, singing in the sunlight that turns the croquet lawn on which he stands into a dazzle of green. Ill Never Smile Again. His mind is not on the game that he is playing with Ralph and Grace Sapurty, but he interrupts the whispered and only partly recollected lyric of the song again and again to look over the lie of the balls and the possible shots that he considers for them as well as for himself: he does this with a casual professionalism, an insouciance carefully kind and tinged with camaraderie and humility, so that neither of his opponents becomes annoyed, ever, at his advice. On the contrary, they are flattered by his attentions.

He glints an occasional smile across the lawn at the woman who sits on a canvas chair in the shade of the umbrella trees at the very edge of the lawn, just this side of the large and beautifully tended kitchen garden. His smile is easy and warm, a smile that he thinks of as one of his good points. He is, indeed, vain about it, as he is vain about his small, scrupulously trimmed moustache and his wavy brown hair. She avoids his smile and his eyes, afraid, he knows, that he will discover in her eyes her admiration for and delight in him. She hides behind a copy of Liberty. But he knows that she admires him, and his actions, although performed as if he is not aware that she is considering each one of them with enormous care, are choreographed for her pleasure. He crouches now, his hair softly gleaming with rose oil, then stands straight, filling his briar from an old leather tobacco pouch. Mr. Sapurty is gesturing with his mallet toward two balls that lie close together on a slight incline beneath the heavy, powdery-blue flowers of a giant hydrangea. Tom Thebus, lighting his pipe, nods, and then gestures as well, using the stem of his pipe. It is a gesture that he has seen made in countless movies, and he imitates it flawlessly. Grace Sapurty shifts from one foot to another, smiling foolishly at him, her fingers touching the pink and yellow embroidered flowers on the bodice of her sundress.

Mr. Sapurty takes his shot. His ball hits the edge of the wicket planted at the base of the hydrangea and rolls down the incline. Tom Thebus smiles, not a smile of triumph, but one of good fellowship. Brothers in difficult straits, his smile says. Tough luck, it says.

Tough luck, he says. Thats a hard shot. He turns then and fires a glance straight at the woman in the shade and this time their eyes meet and she flushes, turns a page of her magazine, then another, looking down blindly at her lap. Tom walks toward his ball, his mallet on his shoulder, peering up with his eyes only toward a second-floor window that overlooks the lawn. He sees behind the dotted-Swiss curtain that hangs there the dark shape of the old man.

As he lines up his shot, his impeccably white shoes planted on either side of his mallet, he begins to whisper again. Ill never love again until I smile at you. And then he sees, coming around the front of the house, the heavy-thighed body of Helga Schmidt. She is smiling a general greeting at all the figures on the lawn, her hand raised, but her eyes are twisted upward and to the left, focusing on the flat white of the dotted-Swiss curtain. Tom smiles as well, but not at Helga.

Copyright 1980 by Gilbert Sorrentino

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House

of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sorrentino, Gilbert. Aberration of starlight.

I. Title

PZ4.S7i7Ab [PS3569.07] 813.54 80-5280 ISBN 0-394-51189-1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Chappell Music Company: Lyrics reprinted from On Miami Shore by William Le Baron and Victor Jacobi. Copyright 1919 by Chappell & Co., Ltd. Copyright renewed. Published in the U.S.A. by Chappell & Co., Inc. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Columbia University Press: Excerpt reprinted from The New Columbia Encyclopedia by permission of the publisher, Columbia University Press, New York.

Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. and William Heinemann Ltd: Excerpt reprinted from Kashmiri Song by Laurence Hope from the book Indian Love. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. and William Heinemann Ltd, London.

Edwin H. Morris & Company: Lyrics reprinted from Prisoner of Love by Leo Robin, Clarence Gaskill and Russ Columbo. Copyright 1931 Edwin H. Morris & Company, A Division of MPL Communications, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Charles Scribners Sons: Excerpts from Invictus by William Ernest Henley and Envoy to the Toiling of Felix by Henry Van Dyke are reprinted courtesy of Charles Scribners Sons.

Manufactured in the United States of America

23456789

FIRST EDITION

To Jack OBrien

aberration of starlight.. . The true path
of light from a star to an observer is
along the straight line from the star
to the observer; but, because of the component
of the observers velocity in a direction
perpendicular to the direction to the star,
the light appears to be traveling along a path
at an angle to the true direction to the star.

The New Columbia Encyclopedia

iQuien no escribe una carta?

iQuien no habla de un asunto muy importante,

muriendo de costumbre y llorando de oido?

Cesar Vallejo

lis negalent pas leurs destins

Indecis commes feuilles mortes

Guillaume Apollinaire

Although our information is incorrect, we do not vouch for it.

Erik Satie

T here is a photograph of the boy that shows him at age ten. He is looking directly into the camera, holding up a kitten as if for our inspection, his right hand at her neck, his left underneath her body, supporting the animals weight. The sun is intensely bright, and he squints at us, smiling, his white even teeth too large for his small face. Because of this squint we cannot see that his left eye is crossed. Behind him are the edges and planes of farm buildings faded watery red, and the deep shadows that they cast on the ground. In the shade of a haymow a half-grown Holstein calf lies, also looking directly at us: although we cannot see them, because of her distance from the anonymous photographer, flies swarm and settle, rise, swarm and settle around her pacific eyes. The kitten is striped, her eyes slits in the sunlight.

The boys hair is black and freshly combed, glistening with a brilli-antine known as rose oil, given to him by Tom Thebus and bought at the five-and-ten in Hackettstown. To the boy, this dark-pink, almost cerise liquid, its odor unlike any rose ever grown on this earth, is a palpable manifestation of a world of beauty and delight. In this world his mother will be happy. In this world the memory of his dead grandmother will fade subtly into lies about her goodness. In this world his grandfather will be, always, the confident and arrogantly serene gentleman that he is when he plays croquet.