The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

by Lorrie Moore

  Pinky reached across the table and touched her hair. She had had it permed into waves like ramen noodles the week before. "A little ethnic kink is always good to see," he said. "What are you, Methodist?"

  on their second date they went to a movie. It was about creatures from outer space who burrow into earthlings and force them to charge up enormous sums on their credit cards. It was an elaborate urban allegory, full of disease and despair, and Odette wanted to talk about it. "Pretty entertaining movie," said Pinky slowly. He had fidgeted in his seat through the whole thing and had twice gotten up and gone to the water fountain. "Just going to the bubbler," he'd whispered.

  Now he wanted to go dancing.

  "Where is there to go dancing?" said Odette. She was still thinking about the part where the two main characters had traded boom boxes and it had caused them to fall in love. She wanted either Pinky or herself to say something incisive or provocative about directorial vision, or the narrative parameters of cinematic imagery. But it looked as if neither of them was going to.

  "There's a place out past the county beltline about six miles." They walked out into the parking lot, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek—intimate, premature, a leftover gesture from a recent love affair, no doubt—and she blushed. She was bad at love. There were people in the world who were good at love and people who were bad at it. She was bad. She used to think she was good at love, that it was intimacy she was bad at. But you had to have both. Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, "Listen to this!" but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap. It reminded her of a dinner party she had gone to once, where dessert was served on plates printed with French songs. After dinner everyone had had to sing their plate, but hers had still had whipped cream on it, and when it came her turn, she had garbled the notes and words, frantically pushing the whipped cream around with a fork so she could see the next measure. Oh, she was bad, bad like that, at love.

  Pinky drove them six miles south of the county beltline to a place called Humphrey Bogart's. It was rough and wooden, high-beamed, a former hunting lodge. On a makeshift stage at the front, a country-western band was playing "Tequila Sunrise" fifteen years too late, or perhaps too soon. Who could predict? Pinky took her hand and improvised a slow jitterbug to the bass. "What do I do now?" Odette kept calling to Pinky over the music. "What do I do now?"

  "This," said Pinky. He had the former fat person's careful grace, and his hand at the small of her back felt big and light. His scar seemed to disappear in the dancelight, and his smile drove his mustache up into flattering shadow. Odette had always been thin and tense.

  "We don't dance much in New York," she said.

  "No? What do you do?"

  "We, uh, just wait in line at cash machines."

  Pinky leaned into her, took her hand tightly to his shoulder, and rocked. He put his mouth to her ear. "You've got a great personality," he said.

  on Sunday afternoon Pinky took her to the Cave of the Many Mounds. "You'll like this," he said.

  "Wonderful!" she said, getting into his car. There was a kind of local enthusiasm about things, which she was trying to get the hang of. It involved good posture and utterances made in a chirpy singsong. Isn't the air just snappy? She was wearing sunglasses and an oversize sweater. "I was thinking of asking you what a Cave of Many Mounds was, and then I said, 'Odette, do you really want to know?'" She fished through her pocketbook. "I mean, it sounds like a whorehouse. You don't happen to have any cigarettes, do you?"

  Pinky tapped on her sunglasses. "You're not going to need these. It's dark in the cave." He started the car and pulled out.

  "Well, let me know when we get there." She stared straight ahead. "I take it you don't have any cigarettes."

  "No," said Pinky. "You smoke cigarettes?"

  "Once in a while." They drove past two cars in a row with bleeding deer strapped on them like wreaths, like trophies, like women, she thought. "Damn hunters," she murmured.

  "What kind of cigarettes do you smoke? Do you smoke Virginia Slims?" asked Pinky with a grin.

  Odette turned and lowered her sunglasses, looked out over them at Pinky's sun-pale profile. "No, I don't smoke Virginia Slims!"

  "I'll bet you do. I'll bet you smoke Virginia Slims."

  "Yeah, I smoke Virginia Slims," said Odette, shaking her head. Who was this guy?

  Ten miles south, there started to be signs for Cave of the Many Mounds, cave of the many mounds 20 miles, cave of the many mounds 15 miles. At 5 miles, Pinky pulled the car over onto the shoulder. There were only trees and in the far distance a barn and a lone cow.

  "What are we doing?" asked Odette.

  Pinky shifted the car into park but left the engine running. "I want to kiss you now, before we get in the cave and I lose complete control." He turned toward her, and suddenly his body, jacketed and huge, appeared suspended above her, hovering, as she sank back against the car door. He closed his eyes and kissed her, long and slow, and she left her sunglasses on so she could keep her eyes open and watch, see how his lashes closed on one another like petals, how his scar zoomed quiet and white about his cheek and chin, how his lips pushed sleepily against her own to find a nest in hers and to stay there, moving, as if in words, but then not in words at all, his hands going round her in a soft rustle, up the back of her sweater to her bare waist and spine, and spreading there, blooming large and holding her just briefly until he pulled away, gathered himself back to himself, and quietly shifted the car into drive.

  Odette sat up and stared out the windshield into space. Pinky moved the car back out onto the highway and picked up speed.

  "We don't do that in New York," rasped Odette. She cleared her throat.

  "No?" Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh.

  "No, it's, um, the cash machines. You just… you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life you're just always"—her hand sliced the air—"there."

  "please do not touch the formations," the cave tour guide kept shouting over everyone's head. Along the damp path through the cave there were lights, which allowed you to see walls marbled a golden rose, like a port cheddar; nippled projections, blind galleries, arteries all through the place, chalky and damp; stalagmites and stalactites in walrusy verticals, bursting up from the floor in yearning or hanging wicklessly in drips from the ceiling, making their way, through time, to the floor. The whole cave was in a weep, everything wet and slippery; still, ocher pools of water bordered the walk, which spiraled gradually down. "Nature's Guggenheim," said Odette, and because Pinky seemed not to know what she was talking about, she said, "That's an art museum in New York." She had her sunglasses perched high on her head. She looked at Pinky gleefully, and he smiled back at her as if he thought she was cute but from outer space, like something that would soon be made into a major motion picture and then later into a toy.

  "… The way you can remember which are which," the guide was saying, "is to remember: When the mites go up, the tights come down…"

  "Get that?" said Pinky too loudly, nudging her. "The tights come down?" People turned to look.

  "What are you, hard of hearing?" asked Odette.

  "A little," said Pinky. "In the right ear."

  "Next we come to a stalagmite which is the only one in the cave that visitors are allowed to touch. As we pass, it will be on your right, and you may manhandle it to your heart's content."

  "Hmmmph," said Pinky.

  "Really," said Odette. She peered ahead at the front of the group, which had now gathered unexcitedly around the stalagmite, a short stumpy one with a head rubbed white with so much touching. It had all the appeal of a bar of soap in a gas station. "I think I want to go back and look at the cave coral again."

  "Which was that?" said Pinky.

  "All that stuff that looked like cement broccoli. Also the chapel room with the church organ. I mean, I thought that looked pretty much like an organ."

  "… And now," the guide was saying, "we
come to that part of our tour when we let you see what the cave looks like in its own natural lighting." She moved over and flicked a switch. "You should not be able to see your hand in front of your face."

  Odette widened her eyes and then squinted and still could not see her hand in front of her face. The darkness was thick and certain, not a shaded, waltzing dark but a paralyzing coffin jet. There was something fierce and eternal about it, something secret and unrelieved, like a thing not told to children.

  "I'm right here," Pinky said, stepping close, "in case you need me." He gave her far shoulder a squeeze, his arm around the back of her. She could smell the soupy breath of him, the spice of his neck near her face, and leaned, blind and hungry, into his arm. She reached past the scratch of her own sweater and felt for his hand.

  "We can see now how the cave looked when it was first unearthed, and how it had existed eons before, in the pitch dark, gradually growing larger, opening up in darkness, the life and the sea of it trapped and never seeing light, a small moist cavern a million years in the making, just slowly opening, opening, and opening inside…"

  when they slept together, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass of water when she asked for one.

  "When ya going back to New York?" he asked, and because it was in less than four weeks, she said, "Oh, I forget."

  Pinky got out of bed. He was naked and unselfconscious, beautiful, in a way, the long, rounded lines of him, the stark cliff of his back. He went over to the VCR, fumbled with some cassettes in the dark, holding each up to the window, where there was a rainy, moony light from the street, like a dream; he picked up cassette after cassette until he found the one he wanted.

  It was a tape called Holocaust Survivors, and the title flashed blood red on the television screen, as if in warning that it had no place there at all. "I watch this all the time," said Pinky, very quietly. He stared straight ahead in a trance of impassivity, but when he reached back to put an arm around Odette, he knew exactly where she was, slightly behind one of his shoulders, the sheet tight across her chest. "You shouldn't hide your breasts," he said, without looking. But she stayed like that, tucked close, all along the tracks to Treblinka, the gates to Auschwitz, the film lingering on weeds and wind, so unbelieving in this historical badlands, it seemed to want, in a wave of nausea and regret, to become perhaps a nature documentary. It seemed at moments confused about what it was about, a confusion brought on by knowing exactly.

  Someone was talking about the trucks. How they put people in trucks, with the exhaust pipes venting in, how they drove them around until they were blue, the people were blue, and could be shoveled out from a trapdoor. Past some barbed wire, asters were drying in a field.

  When it was over, Pinky turned to her and sighed. "Heavy stuff," he said.

  Heavy stuff? Her breathing stopped, then sped up, then stopped again. Who on earth was entitled to such words?

  Who on earth? She felt, in every way it was possible to feel it, astonished that she had slept with him.

  she went out with him again, but this time she greeted him at his own door, with a stiff smile and a handshake, like a woman willing to settle out of court. "So casual," he said, standing in the doorway. "I don't know. You East Coast city slickers."

  "We got hard hearts," she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.

  When they slept together again, she tried not to make too much of it. Once more they watched Holocaust Survivors, a different tape, out of sequence, the camera still searching hard for something natural to gaze upon, embarrassed, like a bloodshot eye weary and afraid of people and what they do. They set fire to the bodies and to the barracks, said a voice. The pyres burned for many days.

  Waves lapped. Rain beaded on a bulrush. In the bathroom she ran the tap water so he couldn't hear as she sat, ill, staring at her legs, her mother's legs. When had she gotten her mother's legs? When she crept back to his bed, he was sleeping like a boy, the way men did.

  In the morning she got up early and went to the closest thing there was to a deli and returned triumphantly with bagels and lox. Outside, the town had been museum dead, but the sky was lemony with sun, and elongations of light, ovals of brightened blue, now dappled Pinky's covers. She laid the breakfast out in them, and he rolled over and kissed her, his face waxy with sleep. He pointed at the lox. "You like that sort of stuff?"

  "Yup." Her mouth was already full with it, the cool, slimy pink. "Eat it all the time."

  He sighed and sank back into his pillow. "After breakfast I'll teach you some Yiddish words."

  "I already know some Yiddish words. I'm from New York. Here, eat some of this."

  "I'll teach you tush and shmuck." Pinky yawned, then grinned. "And shiksa."

  "All the things a nice Jewish boy practices on before he marries a nice Jewish girl. I know those."

  "What's wrong with you?"

  She refused to look at him. "I don't know."

  "I know," said Pinky, and he stood up on the bed, like a child about to bounce, toweringly naked, priapic. She could barely look. Oh, for a beaded bulrush. A train disappearing into a tunnel. "You're falling in love with me!" he exclaimed, gazing merrily down. She still had her coat on, and had stopped chewing. She stared, disbelievingly, up at him. Sometimes she thought she was just trying to have fun in life, and other times she realized she must be terribly confused. She narrowed her eyes. Then she opened her mouth wide so that he could see the train wreck of chewed-up bagel and lox.

  "I like that," said Pinky. "You're onto something there."

  her poems, as she stated in letters to friends in New York, were not going well; she had put them on the back burner, and they had fallen behind the stove. She had met this guy. Something had happened to the two of them in a cave, she wasn't sure what. She had to get out of here. She was giving her final reading to the library patrons and matrons in less than three weeks, and that would pretty much be it. I hope you are not wearing those new, puffy evening dresses I see in magazines. They make everyone look like sticky buns. It is cold. Love, Odette.

  laird was curious. He kept turning his head sideways during the sit-ups. "So you and Pinky hitting it off?"

  "Who knows?" said Odette.

  "Well, I mean, everyone's had their difficulties in life; his I'm only a little aware of. I thought you'd find him interesting."

  "Sure, anthropologically."

  "You think he's a dork."

  "Laird, we're in our forties here. You can't use words like dork anymore." The sit-ups were getting harder. "He's not a dork. He's a doofus. Maybe. Maybe a doink."

  "You're a hard woman," said Laird.

  "Oh, I'm not," pleaded Odette, collapsing on the rubber mat. "Really, I'm not."

  at night he began to hold her in a way that stirred her deeply. He slept with one hand against the small of her back, the other capped against her head, as if to protect her from bad thoughts. Or, perhaps, thoughts at all. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks. She would open her mouth before the library fellowship people, and out would come: There once was a woman from… Someone would rush to a phone booth and call the police.

  But perhaps you could live only from the neck down. Perhaps you could live with the clothes you were taking off all piled on top of your head, in front of your face, not just a sweater with a too-small neck but everything caught there—pants, shoes, and socks—a crazed tangle on your shoulders, in lieu of a head, while your body, stark naked, prepared to live the rest of its life in the sticks, the boonies, the fly-over, the rain. Perhaps you could. For when she slept against him like that, all the rest of the world collapsed into a suitcase und
er the bed. It was the end of desire, this having. Oh, here oh here she was. He would wrap himself around her, take her head like an infant's into his hand and breathe things to her, her throat her chest, in his beginning to sleep. Go to sleep, go to sleep with me.

  in the morning she warmed her arms over the blue zinnias of the gas jets and heated water for coffee and eggs. Over the newspaper, she pretended she and Pinky were Beatrice and Benedick, or Nick and Nora Charles, which is what she always pretended in a love affair, at least for a few days, until all the evidence against it overwhelmed her.

  "Why are you always talking with your hands?" asked Pinky. "You think you're Jewish?"

  She glared at him. "You know, that's what I hate about this part of the country," she replied. "Everyone's so repressed. If you use your body in the least way while you're talking, people think you're trying out for a Broadway show."

  "Kiss me," he said, and he closed his eyes.

  On a weekday Pinky would be off to his office, to work on another farm bankruptcy or a case of animal abuse. "My clients," he said wearily. "You would never want to go out to eat with them. They come into my office reeking of cowshit, they lean back in the chair, set their belly out like that, then tell you about how some Humane Society bastard gave them a summons because their goat had worms." Across his face there breathed a sigh of tragedy. "It's a sad thing not to have clients you can go out to eat with." He shook his head. "It's a sad thing, a goat with worms."

  There was something nice about Pinky, but that something was not Nick Charles. Pinky was more like a grave and serious brother of Nick's, named Chuck. Chuck Charles. When you had parents who would give you a name like that, there was nothing funny anymore.