Trance by Christopher Sorrentino

Author:Christopher Sorrentino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

The reason that Guy has to send Randi out to rent another house in the middle of the season is an inapt admission Guy made to his older brother, Ernest, in Las Vegas, Nevada, earlier in the summer.

Happily subsidizing the excesses of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Guy had zipped cross-country yet again, this time to visit his parents, to reassure himself of their silent complicity in his activities and incidentally to have a dip in their pool and slip into their Jacuzzi to submit his genitals to the constant warm caress of its jets. There he’d come face-to-face with Ernest.

“Oh, it’s you,” his mother said. She was dressed, just a little before noon, like a woman who intended to forcefully communicate her eternally thwarted desire to eat lunch at a nice restaurant. Guy leaned to kiss her but before the lying gesture had a chance to fully take shape she turned from him at the threshold and walked into the unit. He followed her, swinging the olive drab canvas poke that held his clothes and toiletries.

“Oho! The prodigal returns.” There Ernest sat in the living room, nice and settled, looking very Vegasy in crisp new khakis, loafers, and a sport shirt. At his feet were shopping bags from Penney’s and a couple of other stores, filled with shirt cardboard and tissue paper and other packaging. Ensconced, is how he looked. The shopping trip had probably happened in the morning. That was Ernest’s great time, a smile for everybody and a slap on the back. Their parents fried his eggs and poured his coffee for him, that son of a fucking bitch. It was appalling. The guy was a bullshitter who honed his bullshit to its brightest burnish in the a.m., and Guy sometimes felt that of all the effortful attempts he’d made to get his parents to recognize one kind of truth or another, the most effortful of these attempts occurred whenever he was trying to convince them of the mendacious dissemblance that charged the nucleus of Ernest’s character. The Breakfastime Ernest remained embedded in their consciousness as a sort of Norman Rockwell son, paper opened to the sports page and propped up against the sugar bowl.

Now Ernest held a tall glass filled with ice and club soda colored with what looked to be a splash of bourbon. Guy knew these as Ernest’s visiting-Mom-and-Dad highballs. He would sit around the house the entire day, pacing himself, a subtle drunk, steadily emptying and refilling these junior prom drinks. Around five he’d go and lie down, pulling an electric blanket over himself in the frigid cold of their parents’ bedroom, and sleep off the muzzy edges of the drunk until he awoke an hour or so later, sharp and mean enough to make their mother cry over dinner. Then he’d take the car and head out to the bars, where he’d drink until he fell off his stool.

“Hello, Ernest.”

“I like the look. You look real natural, Guy-Guy. Like a guy who crashes the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic for the atmosphere.

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