The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore Read online

  The shaker appeared before him. He shook some salt around on his plate and stared at it.

  Now Linda made a stern, effortful smile, struggling to cut something with her knife. Was it meat? Was it poultry? It was consoling to think that, for a change, the rich had had to pay a pretty penny for their chicken while his was free. But it was not consoling enough. "If you don't think I as a woman know a thing or two about prejudice, you would be sadly mistaken," Linda said.

  "Hey, it's not that easy being a man, either," said Bake. "There's all that cash you have to spend on porn? and believe me, that's money you never get back."

  He then retreated, turned toward his left, toward Suzy, and leaned in. "Help me," he whispered in her ear.

  "Are you charming the patrons?"

  "I fear some object may be thrown."

  "You're supposed to charm the patrons."

  "I know, I know, I was trying to. I swear. But she's one of those who keeps referring to Brocko as 'Barama.'" He had violated most of Suzy's dinner-talk rules already: No politics, no religion, no portfolio tips. And unless you see the head crowning, never look at a woman's stomach and ask if she's pregnant. He had learned all these the hard way.

  But in a year like this one, there was no staying away from certain topics.

  "Get back there," Suzy said. The sculptor was tapping Suzy on the arm again.

  He tried once more with Linda Santo the evil lobbyist. "Here's the way I see it—and this I think you'll appreciate. It would be great at long last to have a president in the White House whose last name ends with a vowel."

  "We've never had a President whose last name ended with a vowel?"

  "Well, I don't count Coolidge."

  "You're from what part of Chicago?"

  "Well, just outside Chicago."

  "Where outside?"

  "Michigan."

  "Isn't Michigan a long way from Chicago?"

  "It is!" He could feel the cool air on the skin between his socks and his pantcuffs. When he looked at her hands, they seemed frozen into claws.

  "People talk about the rock-solid sweetness of the heartland, but I have to say: Chicago seems like a city that has taken too much pride in its own criminal activity." She smiled grimly.

  "I don't think that's true." Or was it? He was trying to give her a chance. What if she was right? "Perhaps we have an unfulfilled streak of myth-making. Or perhaps we just don't live as fearfully as people do elsewhere," he said. Now he was just guessing.

  "You wait, my friend, there are some diabolical people eyeing that Sears Tower as we speak."

  Now he was silent.

  "And if you're in it when it happens, which I hope you're not, but if you are, if you are, if you are, if you're eating lunch at the top or having a meeting down below or whatever it is you may be doing, you will be changed. Because I've been there. I know what it's like to be bombed by terrorists—I was in the Pentagon when they crashed that plane right down into it and I'll tell you: I was burned alive but not dead. I was burned alive. It lit me inside. Because of that I know more than ever what this country is about, my friend."

  He saw now that her fingernails really were plastic, that the hand really was a dry frozen claw, that the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partially repaired. He saw how she was cloaked in a courageous and intense hideosity. The hair was beautiful but now he imagined it was probably a wig. Pity poured through him: he'd never before felt so sorry for someone. How could someone have suffered so much? How could someone have come so close to death, so unfairly, so painfully and heroically, and how could he still want to strangle them?

  "You were a lobbyist for the Pentagon?" was all he managed to say.

  "any faux pas?" asked Suzy in the cab on the way back to the B and B, where warm cookies would await them by their door, tea packets in the bath, their own snore strips on the nightstand.

  "Beaucoup faux," said Bake. He pronounced it foze. "Beaucoup verboten foze. Uttering my very name was like standing on the table and peeing in a wineglass."

  "What? Oh, please."

  "I'm afraid I spoke about politics. I couldn't control myself."

  "Brocko is going to win. All will be well. Rest assured," she said, as the cab sped along toward Georgetown, the street curbs rusted and rouged with the first fallen leaves.

  "Promise?"

  "Promise."

  He was afraid to say more. He did not know how much time he and Suzy might even have left together, and an endgame of geriatric speed-dating—everyone deaf and looking identical; "What? I can't hear you? What? You again? Didn't I just see you?"—all taking place midst bankruptcy and war might be the real circle of hell he was destined for.

  "Don't ever leave me," he said.

  "Why on earth would I do that?"

  He paused. "I'm putting in a request not just for on earth, but even for after that."

  "OK," she said, and squeezed his meaty thigh. At least he had once liked to think of it as meaty.

  "I fear you will someday decide I'm less than adequate," he said.

  "You're adequate," she said, her hand still on his leg.

  He cleared his throat. "I'm adequate enough."

  She kept her hand there and on top of hers he placed his, the one with the wedding ring she had given him, identical to her own. He willed all his love into the very ends of his fingertips and watched as his hand clasped hers, studied the firm, deliberate hydraulics of its knuckles and joints. But she soon turned her head away and looked out the window, showing him only her beautiful hair, which was lit like gold by the passing streetlamps, as if it were something not attached to her at all.

  * * *

  Paper Losses

  although kit and rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no-nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, Kit and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old, lusty love mutated to rage. It was both their shame and demise that hate (like love) could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shone a spotlight down for it to seize. Do your stuff, baby! Who is the best? Who's the man?

  "Pro-nuke? You are? Really?" Kit was asked by her friends, to whom she continued, indiscreetly, to complain.

  "Well, no." Kit sighed. "But in a way."

  "Seems like you need someone to talk to."

  Which hurt Kit's feelings, since she'd felt that she was talking to them. "I'm simply concerned about the kids," she said.

  rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She didn't know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro, one put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched. No one ever said that a man was now completely fucked-up. They said, "The guy has changed." Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement.

  He'd become a little different. He was something of a character. The brazen might suggest, "He's gotten into some weird shit." The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she'd married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but non-functional, like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months, and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally, he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. "Hey, curie," he'd call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with some
one's demented uncle: should marriage be like that? She wasn't sure.

  She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and rushed off to his office. And when he came home from work he'd disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids had gone to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this, he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course, later she would understand that all this meant that he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

  "All husbands are space aliens," her friend Jan said on the phone.

  "God help me, I had no idea." Kit began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly. "He's in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad."

  "Not on the planet he lives on. On his planet, he's a veritable Solomon. 'Bring the stinkin' baby to me now!'"

  "Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?"

  "Sure! Look at Louie North."

  "He lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven."

  "But he got some votes."

  "Yeah, and now what is he doing?"

  "Now he's promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It's a life!" She paused. "Do you fight about it?"

  "About what?" Kit asked.

  "The rockets back to his homeland."

  Kit sighed again. "Yes, the toxic military-crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don't fight, I just, well, O.K.—I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, 'What the hell are you doing?' I ask, 'Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?' I ask, 'Did you hear me?' Then I ask, 'Did you hear me?' again. Then I ask, 'Are you deaf?' I also ask, 'What do you think a marriage is? I'm really just curious to know,' and also, 'Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?' A simple interview, really. I don't believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding." She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. "I'm also interested," Kit said, "in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?"

  "No."

  "Well, maybe I'm wrong about those. I'm probably wrong. That's where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in."

  In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amid the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died.

  Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit's gums. On the counter, a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark's grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn't. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness. An unwise move and, good God, you could squander everything.

  the summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She'd been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even when buried in its favorite suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. "Why not complete the symmetry?" he wrote, which didn't even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and generally in keeping with the principles of space-alien culture.

  The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if the more formal versions of them were the ones who were divorcing—their birth certificates were divorcing!—and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not yet told her that he'd bought a new one. "Honey," she said, trembling, "something very interesting came in the mail today."

  rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center with a cold blue heat. At the funerals of two different elderly people she hardly knew, she wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe—or, rather, Raphael—again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation; it was already booked, so what could they do?

  This, at last, was what all those high-school drama classes had been for: acting. She had once played the queen in A Winter's Tale, and once a changeling child in a play called Love Me Right Now, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these performances, she had learned that time was essentially a comic thing—only constraints upon it diverted it to tragedy, or, at least, to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde—if only they'd had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disturbed and the funniness of which was never-ending.

  Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in an effort to persuade her not to join him and the children on this vacation. "I don't think you should go," he announced.

  "I'm going," she said.

  "We'll be giving the children false hope."

  "Hope is never false. Or it's always false. Whatever. It's just hope," she said. "Nothing wrong with that."

  "I just don't think you should go."

  Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab. Who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

  What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to?

  (Only later would she find out. "As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me." Kit replied.)

  And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage "irretrievably broken." What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why "irretrievably broken" like a songbird's wing? Why not, "Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?" That would suffice, and be more accurate. The words "irretrievably broken" sent one off into an eternity of wondering.

  At this point, however, she and Rafe had not yet signed the papers. And there was still the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn't look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring—which did look like a typical wedding ring—a year before, because, he said, "it bothered him." She had thought at the time that he'd meant it was rubbing. She had not been deeply alarmed; he had often shed his clothes spontaneously—when they first met, he'd been something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

  "What if I can't get my ring off?" she said to him now on the plane. She had gained a little weight during their twenty years of marriage, but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride!

  "Send me the sawyer's bill," he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye was gone!

  "What is wron
g with you?" she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space-alien values, space-alien thoughts, and the hollow, shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

  "What is wrong with you?" he snarled. This was his habit, his space-alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

  She was less worried about the girls, who were just little, than she was about Sam, her sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle, moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the state's extremely progressive divorce laws—a boy needs his dad!—she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle a little and float off and away like paper carried by wind. With time, he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d' suspecting riffraff. He would see her coming the way a panicked party guest sees someone without a nametag. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on.

  They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs—a family about to break apart forever—didn't look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers, she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local boys from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white, beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it and downplay the creases—to make her appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once glanced at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had got lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop—the words "La Caribe" emblazoned across every single thing.