by Lorrie Moore
“All yours,” said Dennis. He was smiling now. The whiskey brought the blood to his face in a nice way.
Mave looked down at her menu. “There’s no spaghetti and meatballs here. I wanted to order the child’s portion of the spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Dennis, shaking a finger for emphasis. With his books away and the whiskey in him, he seemed more confident. “Did I tell you the guy my wife’s seeing is Italian? Milanese, not Brooklyn. What do you suppose that means, her falling in love with an Italian?”
“It means she’s going to feel scruffy all the time. It means that he will stare at all the fuzzies on her shirt while she is telling him something painful about a childhood birthday party nobody came to. Let’s face it: She’s going to start to miss the fact, Dennis, that your hair zooms out all over the goddamn place.”
“I’m getting it cut tomorrow.”
Mave put on her reading glasses. “This is not a restaurant. Restaurants serve different things from this.”
“You know, one thing about these books for women, I have to tell you. The whole emphasis on locating and accepting your homosexual side is really very powerful. It frees and expands some other sort of love in you.”
Mave looked up at him and smiled. She was drawn to the insane because of their blazing minds. “So you’ve located and accepted?”
“Well, I’ve realized this. I like boys. And I like girls.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “I just don’t like berls.” Dennis reached again for Mave’s whiskey. “Of course, I am completely in the wrong town. May I?” He leaned his head back, and the ice cubes knocked against his teeth. Water beaded up on his chin. “So, Mave, who are you romancing these days?” Dennis was beginning to look drunk. His lips were smooth and thick and hung open like a change purse.
“These days?” There were little ways like this of stalling for time.
“These right here.”
“Right here. These. I’ve been seeing Mitch again a little.”
Dennis dropped his forehead into his palm, which had somehow flown up from the table, so that the two met midair in an unsightly smack. “Mitch! Mave, he’s such a womanizer!”
“So I needed to be womanized. I was losing my sheen.”
“You know what you do? You get all your boyfriends on sale. It’s called Bargain Debasement. Immolation by desire.”
“Look, you need to be womanized, you go to a womanizer. I don’t take these things seriously anymore. I make it a point now to forget what everybody looks like. I’m being Rudolf Bing. I’ve lost my mind and am traipsing around the South Seas with an inappropriate lover, and I believe in it. I think everybody in a love affair is being Rudolf Bing anyway, and they’re vain to believe otherwise.… Oh, my God, that man in the sweater is feeling his girlfriend’s lymph nodes.” Mave put away her reading glasses and fumbled around in her bag for the whiskey flask. That was the thing with hunger: It opened up something dangerous in you, something endless, like a universe, or a cliff. “I’m sorry. Rudolf Bing is on my mind. He’s really been on my mind. I feel like we’re all almost like him.”
“Almost like Bing in love,” said Dennis. “What a day this has been. What a rare mood I’m in.” Mave was in a long sip. “I’ve been listening to that Live at Carnegie Hall tape too much.”
“Music! Let’s talk about music! Or death! Why do we always have to talk about love?”
“Because our parents were sickos, and we’re starved for it.”
“You know what I’ve decided? I don’t want to be cremated. I used to, but now I think it sounds just a little too much like a blender speed. Now I’ve decided I want to be embalmed, and then I want a plastic surgeon to come put in silicone implants everywhere. Then I want to be laid out in the woods like Snow White, with a gravestone that reads Gotta Dance.” The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist—it had to do the food work on its own. “There. We talked about death.”
“That’s talking about death?”
“What is kale? I don’t understand why they haven’t taken our order yet. I mean, it’s crowded now, but it wasn’t ten minutes ago. Maybe it was the ice thing.”
“You know what else my wife says about this Italian? She says he goes around singing this same song to himself. You know what it is?”
“ ‘Santa Lucia.’ ”
“No. It’s the ‘Addams Family’ theme song: Their house is a museum, when people come to see-um …”
“Your wife tells you this?”
“We’re friends.”
“Don’t tell me you’re friends. You hate her.”
“We’re friends. I don’t hate her.”
“You think she’s a user and a tart. She’s with some guy with great shoes whose coif doesn’t collapse into hairpin turns across his part.”
“You used to be a nice person.”
“I never was a nice person. I’m still a nice person.”
“I don’t like this year,” said Dennis, his eyes welling again.
“I know,” said Mave. “Eighty-eight. It’s too Sergio Mendes or something.”
“You know, it’s OK not to be a nice person.”
“I need your permission? Thank you.” This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.
“But, Dennis, really, why do you think so much about love, of someone loving you or not loving you? That is all you read about, all you talk about.”
“Put the starving people of the world together in a room, and what you get is a lot of conversation about roast beef. They should be talking about the Napoleonic Code?” At the mention of roast beef, Mave’s face lit up, greenish, fluorescent. She looked past Dennis and saw the waitress coming toward their table at last; she was moving slowly, meanly, scowling. There was a large paper doily stuck to her shoe. “I mean …” Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice … He grabbed Mave’s wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve been dozing off,” Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve been having this conversation alone.” He tightened his grip. “I mean, have I?”
Like
Life
Everybody likes the circus.
Clowns! elephants! trained horses! peanuts!
Everybody likes the circus.
Acrobats! tight-rope walkers! camels! band music!
Suppose you had a choice of going to the circus
or painting a picture. Which would you choose?
You’d choose the circus.
Everybody likes the circus.
—V. M. Hillyer and E. G. Huey,
A Child’s History of Art
ALL THE MOVIES that year were about people with plates in their heads: Spirits from another galaxy gather in a resort town at night, taking over the townspeople—all but the man with the plate in his head. Or: A girl with a plate in her head wanders a city beach, believing she is someone else. Evidence washes up on shore. There are sailors. Or: A woman dreams of a beautiful house in w
hich no one lives, and one day she passes the actual house—a cupola, gables, and a porch. She walks up to it, knocks on the door, and it is opened slowly by her! a woman who is a twin of herself, grinning. She has a plate in her head.
Life seemed to have become like that. It had burst out of itself, like a bug.
In February a thaw gave the city the weepy ooze of a wound. There were many colds, people coughing in the subways. The sidewalks foamed to a cheese of spit, and the stoops, doorways, bus shelters were hedged with Rosies—that is what they were called—the jobless men, women, children with gourd lumps or fevers, imploring, hating eyes, and puffed lavender mouths, stark as paintings of mouths. The Rosies sold flowers: a prim tulip, an overflowing iris. Mostly no one bought any. Mostly it was just other Rosies, trading bloom for bloom, until one of them, a woman or a child, died in the street, the others gathering around in a wail, in the tiny, dark morning hours, which weren’t morning at all but night.
THAT YEAR was the first that it became illegal—for those who lived in apartments or houses—not to have a television. The government claimed that important information, information necessary for survival, might need to be broadcast automatically, might need simply to burst on, which it could do. Civilization was at stake, it was said. “Already at the stake,” said others, who had come to suspect that they were being spied on, controlled, that what they had thought when they were little—that the people on the television could also see you—now was true. You were supposed to leave it plugged in at all times, the plastic antenna raised in a V—for victory or peace, no one could say.
Mamie lost sleep. She began to distrust things, even her own words; too much had moved in. Objects implanted in your body—fillings, earrings, contraceptives—like satellite dishes, could be picking up messages, substituting their words for yours, feeding you lines. You never knew. Open your mouth, it might betray you with lies, with lackadaise, with moods and speak not your own. The things you were saying might be old radio programs bounced off the foil of your molars, or taxi calls fielded by the mussely glove of your ear. What you described as real might be only a picture, something from Life magazine you were forced to live out, after the photography, in imitation. Whole bodies, perhaps, could be ventriloquized. Approximated. You could sit on the lap of a thing and just move your lips. You could become afraid. You could become afraid someone was making you afraid: a new fear, like a gourmet’s, a paranoid’s paranoia.
This was not the future. This was what was with you now in the house.
Mamie lived in a converted beauty parlor storefront—a tin ceiling, a stench of turpentine, and extra sinks. At night her husband, a struggling painter, moody and beer-breathed, lay sleeping next to her, curled against her, an indifferent whistle in his nose. She closed her eyes. What all to love in the world, went a prayer from her childhood. What all to love?
The lumber of his bones piled close.
The radiator racked and spitting. Heat flapping like birds up the pipes.
SHE REMAINED AWAKE. On nights when she did sleep, her dreams were about the end of life. They involved getting somewhere, getting to the place where she was supposed to die, where it was OK. She was always in a group, like a fire drill or a class trip. Can we die here? Are we there yet? Which way can it possibly be?
Or else there was the house dream. Always the house dream, like the movie of the dream of the house. She would find a house, knock on the door, and it would open slowly, a wedge of dark, and then stop, her own profile greeting her, hanging there midair like a chandelier.
Death, said her husband, Rudy. He kept a small hatchet under the mattress, in case of intruders. Death. Last year she had gone to a doctor, who had looked at her throat and a mole on her back, studying them like Rorschachs for whatever he might see in them. He removed the mole and put it floating in a pathologist’s vial, a tiny marine animal. Peering in at her throat, he said, “Precancer”—like a secret or a zodiac sign.
“Precancer?” she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. “Isn’t that … like life?” She was sitting, and he was standing. He fumbled with some alcohol and cotton balls, which he kept on the counter in kitcheny-looking jars, the flour and sugar of the medical world.
He took her wrist and briefly squeezed. “It’s like life, but it’s not necessarily life.”
THERE WAS a wrought-iron fence all around and a locked gate, but it was the bird feeder she remarked first, the wooden arms, the open mouth of boards stuck up there on a single leg. It was nearing Valentine’s Day, an angry slosh of a morning, and she was on her way to a realtor, a different one this time, not far from the Fourth and Smith stop of the F train—from where you could see the Statue of Liberty. On her way, she had come upon a house with a bird feeder. A bird feeder! And a tree in front, a towering oak, over one hundred fifty years old. A grade school teacher had brought her class to it and now stood in front of it, pointing and saying, “A hundred and fifty years ago. Can anyone tell me when that was?”
But it was the bird feeder, initially: a cross with an angle-roofed shelter at the head—a naked scarecrow bedecked with horizontals like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or an alpine motel, its wooden ledges strewn with millet seed. In the freckled snow below lay tiny condiment cups of peanut butter, knocked to the ground. A flibberty squirrel, hopping and pausing in spasms, lifted each cup to his nose and nibbled. On the feeder itself was a pair of pigeons—lidless, thick-necked, municipal gargoyles; but there, wasn’t that also a sparrow? And a grosbeak?
The house was a real house, one of the few left in New York. A falling-down Edwardian Gothic with a cupola, once painted a silvery gray and now chipping. There was a porch and latticework of carpenter’s lace—a house one would go to for piano lessons, if people still took piano lessons, a house invariably seized for a funeral home. It was squeezed between two storefronts—the realtor’s and a laundromat.
“You’re looking for a one-bedroom?” said the realtor.
“Yes,” said Mamie, though it suddenly seemed both too little and too much to ask for. The realtor had the confident hair and makeup of a woman who had lived forever in New York, a woman who knew ever so wearily how to tie a scarf. Mamie studied the realtor’s scarf, guessing the exact geometry of the folds, the location of the knot. If Mamie ever had surgery, scars in a crisscross up her throat, she would have to know such things. A hat, a scarf, a dot of rouge, mints in the mouth: Everyone in New York was hiding something, eventually.
The real estate agent took out an application form. She picked up a pen. “Your name?”
“Mamie Cournand.”
“What? Here. You fill this out.”
It was pretty much the same form she’d filled out previously at other agencies. What sort of apartment are you looking for; how much do you make; how do you make it …?
“What is children’s historical illustrator?” deadpanned the realtor. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I, uh, work on a series of history publications, picture books actually, for chil—”
“Free lance?” She looked at Mamie with doubt, suspicion, and then with sympathy to encourage candor.
“It’s for the McWilliams Company.” She began to lie. “I’ve got an office there that I use. The address is written here.” She rose slightly from her seat, to point it out.
The realtor pulled away. “I’m oriented,” she said.
“Oriented?”
“You don’t need to reach and point. This your home and work phone? This your age …? You forgot to put in your age.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five,” she repeated, writing it in. “You look younger.” She looked at Mamie. “What are you willing to pay?”
“Urn, up to nine hundred or so.”
“Good luck,” she snorted, and still seated in her caster-wheeled chair, she trundled over to the file cabinet, lifted out a manila folder, flipped it open. She placed Mamie’s application on top. “This isn’t the eighties anymore, you know.�
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Mamie cleared her throat. Deep in the back she could feel the wound sticking there, unhealed. “It hasn’t not been for very long. I mean, just a few years.” The awkward, frightened look had leaped to her eyes again, she knew. Fear making a child of her face—she hated this in herself. As a girl, she had always listened in a slightly stricken way and never spoke unless she was asked a question. When she was in college she was the kind of student sometimes too anxious to enter the cafeteria. Often she just stayed in her room and drank warm iced tea from a mix and a Hot Pot. “You live right over here?” The realtor motioned behind her. “Why are you moving?”
“I’m leaving my husband.”
The corner of her mouth curled. “In this day and age? Good luck.” She shrugged and spun around to dig through files again. There was a long silence, the realtor shaking her head.
Mamie craned her neck. “I’d like to see what you have, at any rate.”
“We’ve got nothing.” The realtor slammed the file drawerand twisted back around. “But keep trying us. We might have something tomorrow. We’re expecting some listings then.”
THEY HAD BEEN married for fourteen years, living on Brooklyn’s south slope for almost ten. It was a neighborhood once so Irish that even as late as the fifties, kids had played soccer in the street and shouted in Gaelic. When she and Rudy first moved in, the area was full of Italian men who barely knew Italian and leaned out of the windows of private clubs, shouting “How aw ya?” Now Hispanic girls in bright leotards gathered on the corner after school, smoking cigarettes and scorning the streets. Scorning, said the boys. Artists had taken up residence, as well as struggling actors, junkies, desperate Rosies in the street. Watch out, went the joke, for the struggling actors.