Free A Strange Commonplace by Gilbert Sorrentino

later, after he’d checked, he had made a mental list of the missing items, which he then carefully transferred to a notebook: A 1960 Bodley Head edition of Ulysses, without a dust jacket; a Lamy combination pen-and-pencil in gray matte finish, with extra ink refills and leads; a heavy black woolen sweater with a shawl collar that a junkie friend of hers had stolen; a ten-inch Revere Ware skillet; a black-and-white-striped apron from Pottery Barn; a pair of porcelain egg coddlers; an oven mitt; a set of four wooden cooking spoons; a plastic lazy Susan; a Kent hairbrush; a loofah; an unopened package of Hanes briefs; a tobacco-colored suede jacket from B. Altman; a nickel-plated Zippo lighter; a paperweight of highly polished petrified wood; a Richard Avedon photograph, framed in chrome, of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; three LP’S: Sonny Rollins’s Newk’s Time, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and Dexter Gordon’s Our Man in Paris; and paperback copies of The Sacred Fount, Pierre, The Confidence Man, The Plumed Serpent, and García Lorca’s Selected Poems. And, along with her flowered skirt, she’d left, at the back of a drawer in the little room he hopefully called his study, a black French garter belt and a pair of tangled off-black nylons. Was this by design, and how could he tell? The gray homburg, though, gave him an eerie feeling, as if the hat had a malign, extravagant power to do him harm. He wouldn’t touch it, not yet, not even to throw it out. He made himself a drink—she hadn’t taken the J.W. Dant anyway—and sat on the couch. It had to have been Jenny, the horny bitch, who’d told her. Her best friend, of course. How pleased she must have been to stab Elaine’s ego. They’d known each other since high school in Midwood, they even looked alike, had got stoned together, found the Village together. They were built the same and often shared each other’s clothes, even shoes and underwear, so Elaine said. He recalled the night they’d come into the bar together, both in black gabardine suits and black sunglasses, their black hair pulled back into chignons; for a brief moment, he couldn’t tell one from the other. He lit another cigarette, and said, aloud: So, I got bored with Elaine and started fucking her double, what a champ, they even look alike naked. About a week later, he went into the bar and saw Elaine, sitting over a pink gin and talking with Louie, the day bartender. He sat down next to her and ordered a draft beer. What the hell was that all about? he said, you even took a fucking oven mitt? And what’s with that weird filthy homburg? You left your print skirt, too. I threw it out! She turned on her bar stool so that her knees touched his thigh. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elaine, even the goddamn bowl you bought me for my change, Jesus, that’s really small. And the hat! What is with the hat? Are you crazy? she said, are you going crazy? I’m Jenny, look. Look, I’m Jenny. I don’t know anything about hats or skirts, you ought to get back to work on whatever it is you were working on, get back to work. He was looking at her full in the face, she was Jenny, sure, probably, she was Jenny, of course. She was Jenny, she looked just like her. You can have your skirt back if you want, he said. I only said I threw it out. He wanted to ask her about the meaning of the hat on the table but he knew that she’d lie to him.

In Dreams
    I WALK INTO THE DINER AND SIT AT THE COUNTER, THEN order a piece of cheesecake and a cup of coffee, which, I’m pleased to see, are both in front of me just as I finish ordering. “Some service.” The waitress stands directly behind me and says that it’s because she’s got Monday off this week. “You can’t hypnotize people who don’t want to be hypnotized.” Three young men in a booth are shouting and screaming with laughter, then they smash crockery on the floor and throw the cream