Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries)

  Acclaim for

  LORRIE MOORE

  and

  SELF-HELP

  “The most astute and lasting [writer] … of her generation.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Moore’s narrators have comic yet dark stories to tell: they fire off crisp, De Vriesian one-liners and then, when you least expect it, sneak in wrenching revelations.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Lorrie Moore is a terrifically beguiling writer.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  “The stories are uncommonly funny, unpredictable, and have a real edge of pain.… She walks an amazing line, balancing wild humor and anguish.”

  —Newsday

  “A remarkable debut by an original, gifted writer.… Her wry stories make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.”

  —Alison Lurie

  “Merits frequent reading.… Moore’s mastery lies in the short story.”

  —The Village Voice

  “A gift for going to the heart of heartache, for details that make your own skin tingle in recognition and for finding the absurd humor in human endeavor.”

  —Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

  “Moore is a talented writer—startlingly talented.… Her micro-managed descriptive prose shows genius, precisely pinning fluttering phenomena.”

  —New York

  “She is a true original … a Fred Astaire with words, she makes them dance so nimbly to her inner tunes.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Lorrie Moore is dazzling, funny, and smart.”

  —John Casey

  “Here are wit, charm and an underlying seriousness, all handled with a discretion many a more mature writer would find hard to match.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “America’s most wry and radiant comic writer.… Her books [are] compact, perfectly sculpted comic masterpieces.… Moore’s piquant wit and intellectual grace mesh beautifully.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “Lorrie Moore’s stories are dazzling exercises in an ingenious wisdom.”

  —New Statesman

  “A collection of nine lucid, terse, witty and often tragic stories.… She writes exceptionally well, implies a great deal more than she says, and has real style.”

  —Financial Times

  LORRIE MOORE

  SELF-HELP

  Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America, Self-Help, and Like Life, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

  ALSO BY LORRIE MOORE

  Anagrams

  Birds of America

  Like Life

  Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2007

  Copyright © 1985 by M. L. Moore

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by

  Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1985.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and

  Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Some of the stories were previously published in

  Fiction International, MSS Magazine, and Story Quarterly.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition

  as follows:

  Moore, Lorrie.

  Self-help : stories / Lorrie Moore.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O6225 S4 1985

  813′·54—dc19 84-48498

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81689-4

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  The purpose of this book is to direct attention to the various ways in which non-backboned animals reproduce … Some animals reverse sex, some shoot stimulant darts at each other, and some lose an arm while mating.

  —Haig H. Najarian

  Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones

  If you start to shake hands with someone who has lost an arm, shake his other hand. If he has lost both arms, shake the tip of his artificial hand (be quick and unembarrassed about it).

  —The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette

  Give some bones to the dogs and bury the rest around fruit trees …

  —Phyllis Hobson

  Butchering Livestock at Home

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  How to Be an Other Woman

  What Is Seized

  The Kid’s Guide to Divorce

  How

  Go Like This

  How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)

  Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love

  How to Become a Writer

  To Fill

  HOW TO BE

  AN OTHER WOMAN

  Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.

  He emerges from nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of closing up again behind him. He asks you for a light and you jump a bit, startled, but you give him your “Lucky’s Lounge—Where Leisure Is a Suit” matches. He has a nice chuckle, nice fingernails. He lights the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a starving man. He smiles as he exhales, returns you the matches, looks at your face, says: “Thanks.”

  He then stands not far from you, waiting. Perhaps for the same bus. The two of you glance furtively at each other, shifting feet. Pretend to contemplate the chemical snow. You are two spies glancing quickly at watches, necks disappearing in the hunch of your shoulders, collars upturned and slowly razoring the cab and store-lit fog like sharkfins. You begin to circle, gauging each other in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone.

  A bus arrives. It is crowded, everyone looking laughlessly into one another’s underarms. A blonde woman in barrettes steps off, holding her shoes in one hand.

  You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book. A minute goes by and he asks what you’re reading. It is Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket. Try to explain about binding warpage. He smiles, interested.

  Return to your book. Emma is opening her window, thinking of Rouen.

  “What weather,” you hear him sigh, faintly British or uppercrust Delaware.

  Glance up. Say: “It is fit for neither beast nor vegetable.”

  It sounds dumb. It makes no sense.

  But it is how you meet.

  At the movies he is tender, caressing your hand beneath the seat.

  A
t concerts he is sweet and attentive, buying cocktails, locating the ladies’ lounge when you can’t find it.

  At museums he is wise and loving, leading you slowly through the Etruscan cinerary urns with affectionate gestures and an art history minor from Columbia. He is kind; he laughs at your jokes.

  After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife’s name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm. When he says, “How do you feel about that?” don’t say “Ridiculous” or “Get the hell out of my apartment.” Prop your head up with one hand and say: “It depends. What is intellectual property law?”

  He grins. “Oh, you know. Where leisure is a suit.”

  Give him a tight, wiry little smile.

  “I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about this,” he says.

  Say: “Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough.” Show him your bicep.

  When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

  You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: “Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.”

  It is like having a book out from the library.

  It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

  You meet frequently for dinner, after work, split whole liters of the house red, then wamble the two blocks east, twenty blocks south to your apartment and lie sprawled on the living room floor with your expensive beige raincoats still on.

  He is a systems analyst—you have already exhausted this joke—but what he really wants to be, he reveals to you, is an actor.

  “Well, how did you become a systems analyst?” you ask, funny you.

  “The same way anyone becomes anything,” he muses. “I took courses and sent out resumes.” Pause. “Patricia helped me work up a great resume. Too great.”

  “Oh.” Wonder about mistress courses, certification, resumes. Perhaps you are not really qualified.

  “But I’m not good at systems work,” he says, staring through and beyond, way beyond, the cracked ceiling. “Figuring out the cost-effectiveness of two hundred people shuffling five hundred pages back and forth across a new four-and-a-half-by-three-foot desk. I’m not an organized person, like Patricia, for instance. She’s just incredibly organized. She makes lists for everything. It’s pretty impressive.”

  Say flatly, dully: “What?”

  “That she makes lists.”

  “That she makes lists? You like that?”

  “Well, yes. You know, what she’s going to do, what she has to buy, names of clients she has to see, et cetera.”

  “Lists?” you murmur hopelessly, listlessly, your expensive beige raincoat still on. There is a long, tired silence. Lists? You stand up, brush off your coat, ask him what he would like to drink, then stump off to the kitchen without waiting for the answer.

  At one-thirty, he gets up noiselessly except for the soft rustle of his dressing. He leaves before you have even quite fallen asleep, but before he does, he bends over you in his expensive beige raincoat and kisses the ends of your hair. Ah, he kisses your hair.

  CLIENTS TO SEE

  Birthday snapshots

  Scotch tape

  Letters to TD and Mom

  Technically, you are still a secretary for Karma-Kola, but you wear your Phi Beta Kappa key around your neck on a cheap gold chain, hoping someone will spot you for a promotion. Unfortunately, you have lost the respect of all but one of your co-workers and many of your superiors as well, who are working in order to send their daughters to universities so they won’t have to be secretaries, and who, therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It is like having a degree in failure. Hilda, however, likes you. You are young and remind her of her sister, the professional skater.

  “But I hate to skate,” you say.

  And Hilda smiles, nodding. “Yup, that’s exactly what my sister says sometimes and in that same way.”

  “What way?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says Hilda. “Your bangs parted on the side or something.”

  Ask Hilda if she will go to lunch with you. Over Reuben sandwiches ask her if she’s ever had an affair with a married man. As she attempts, mid-bite, to complete the choreography of her chomp, Russian dressing spurts out onto her hands.

  “Once,” she says. “That was the last lover I had. That was over two years ago.”

  Say: “Oh my god,” as if it were horrible and tragic, then try to mitigate that rudeness by clearing your throat and saying, “Well, actually, I guess that’s not so bad.”

  “No,” she sighs good-naturedly. “His wife had Hodgkin’s disease, or so everyone thought. When they came up with the correct diagnosis, something that wasn’t nearly so awful, he went back to her. Does that make sense to you?”

  “I suppose,” say doubtfully.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Hilda is still cleaning Reuben off the backs of her hands with a napkin. “At any rate, who are you involved with?”

  “Someone who has a wife that makes lists. She has Listmaker’s disease.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” says Hilda. “That’s typical.”

  CLIENTS TO SEE

  Tomatoes, canned

  Health food toothpaste

  Health food deodorant

  Vit. C on sale, Rexall

  Check re: other shoemaker, 32nd St.

  “Patricia’s really had quite an interesting life,” he says, smoking a cigarette.

  “Oh, really?” you say, stabbing one out in the ashtray.

  Make a list of all the lovers you’ve ever had.

  Warren Lasher

  Ed “Rubberhead” Catapano

  Charles Deats or Keats

  Alfonse

  Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make “mislaid” jokes to yourself. Make another list.

  Whisper, “Don’t go yet,” as he glides out of your bed before sunrise and you lie there on your back cooling, naked between the sheets and smelling of musky, oniony sweat. Feel gray, like an abandoned locker room towel. Watch him as he again pulls on his pants, his sweater, his socks and shoes. Reach out and hold his thigh as he leans over and kisses you quickly, telling you not to get up, that he’ll lock the door when he leaves. In the smoky darkness, you see him smile weakly, guiltily, and attempt a false, jaunty wave from the doorway. Turn on your side, toward the wall, so you don’t have to watch the door close. You hear it thud nonetheless, the jangle of keys and snap of the bolt lock, the footsteps loud, then fading down the staircase, the clunk of the street door, then nothing, all his sounds blending with the city, his face passing namelessly uptown in a bus or a badly heated cab, the room, the whole building you live in, shuddering at the windows as a truck roars by toward the Queens-boro Bridge.

  Wonder who you are.

  “Hi, this is Attila,” he says in a false deep voice when you pick up your office phone.

  Giggle. Like an idiot. Say: “Oh. Hi, Hun.”

  Hilda turns to look at you with a what’s-with-you look on her face. Shrug your shoulders.

  “Can you meet me for lunch?”

  Say: “Meet? I’m sorry, I don’t eat meat.”

  “Cute, you’re cute,” he says, not laughing, and at lunch he gives you his tomatoes.

  Drink two huge glasses of wine and smile at all his of
fice and mother-in-law stories. It makes his eyes sparkle and crinkle at the corners, his face pleased and shining. When the waitress clears the plates away, there is a silence where the two of you look down then back up again.

  “You get more beautiful every day,” he says to you, as you hold your wine glass over your nose, burgundy rushing down your throat. Put your glass down. Redden. Smile. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key.

  When you get up to leave, take deep breaths. In front of the restaurant, where you will stride off in different directions, don’t give him a kiss in the noontime throng. Patricia’s office is nearby and she likes to go to the bank right around now; his back will stiffen and his eyes dart around like a crazy person’s. Instead, do a quick shuffle-ball-chain like you saw Barbra Streisand do in a movie once. Wave gigantically and say: “Till we eat again.”

  In your office building the elevator is slow and packed and you forget to get off at the tenth floor and have to ride all the way back down again from the nineteenth. Five minutes after you arrive dizzily back at your desk, the phone rings.

  “Meet me tomorrow at seven,” he says, “in front of Florsheim’s and I’ll carry you off to my castle. Patricia is going to a copyright convention.”

  Wait freezing in front of Florsheim’s until seven-twenty. He finally dashes up, gasping apologies (he just now got back from the airport), his coat flying open, and he takes you in tow quickly uptown toward the art museums. He lives near art museums. Ask him what a copyright convention is.

  “Where leisure is a suit and a suite,” he drawls, long and smiling, quickening his pace and yours. He kisses your temple, brushes hair off your face.

  You arrive at his building in twenty minutes.

  “So, this is it?” The castle doorman’s fly is undone. Smile politely. In the elevator, say: “The unexamined fly is not worth zipping.”