The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

by Lorrie Moore

  "What do you write poems about?" he asked her once in the middle of the night.

  "Whores," she said.

  "Whores," he repeated, nodding in the dark.

  She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, "Fine. I'm on page…" and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day. "The Wadsworth is a little too literaturey for me."

  "Wordsworth," she corrected. They were in his kitchen, drinking juice.

  "Wordsworth. Isn't there a poet named Wadsworth?"

  "No. You're probably thinking of Longfellow. That was his middle name."

  "Longfellow. Now who's he again?"

  "How about Leaves of Grass? What did you think of the poems in there?"

  "OK. I'm on page fifty," he said. Then he showed her his gun, which he kept in his kitchen in a leather case, like a trombone. He kept a rifle, he said, in the basement.

  Odette frowned. "You hunt?"

  "Sure. Jews aren't supposed to hunt, I know. But in this part of the country it's best to have a gun or two." He smiled. "Bavarians, you know. Here, try it out. Let me see how you look with a gun."

  "I'm afraid of guns."

  "Nothing to be afraid of. Just heft it and look down the top of the barrel and line up the sights."

  She sighed, lifted the gun, pressed the butt hard against her right shoulder, and aimed it at the kitchen counter. "Now, see the notch in the metal sticking up in the middle of your barrel?" Pinky was saying. "You have to get the bead in the middle of the notch."

  She closed her left eye. "I can feel the urge coming on to blow away that cutting board," she said.

  "Gun's not loaded. Probably not till spring. Turkey season. Though I've got tags for deer."

  "You hunt turkeys?" She put the gun down. It was heavy.

  "You eat turkey, don't you?"

  "The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line." She paused and sighed again. "What do you do, go into a field and fire away?"

  "Kind of. You try to catch them midflight. You know, I should take you deer hunting. It's the last two days, this weekend, and I've got tags. Have you ever been?"

  "Pulease," she said.

  it was cold in the woods. She blew breath clouds, then rings of cigarette smoke, into the dead ferns. "It's nice out here. You don't suppose we could just watch nature instead of shoot it."

  "Without hunting, the deer would starve," said Pinky.

  "So maybe we could just cook for them." They had brought along a bottle of Jim Beam, and she twisted it open and took a swig. "Have you ever been married?"

  "Once," said Pinky. "God, what, twenty years ago." He quickly shouldered his rifle, thinking he heard something, but no.

  "Oh," she said. "I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask."

  "How about you?"

  "Not me," said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

  She looked down at her chest. "I don't think orange is anyone's most flattering color," she said. They were wearing blaze-orange hats and vests. "I think we look like things placed in the middle of the road to make the cars go around."

  "Shhhh," said Pinky.

  She took another swig of Jim Beam. She had worn the wrong kind of boots—gray, suede, over the knees, with three-inch heels—and now she studied them with interest. One of the heels was loose, and mud was drying on the toes. "Tell me again," she whispered to Pinky, "what makes us think a deer will cross our path?"

  "There's a doe bed not far from here," whispered Pinky. "It attracts bucks."

  "Bucks, doe—thank God everything boils down to money, I always say."

  "During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate."

  "So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed."

  Pinky's gun suddenly fired into the trees, and the noise filled the woods like a war, spilling to the ground the yellowing needles of a larch.

  "Ahhhhhh!" Odette screamed. "What is going on?" Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "Damn!" shouted Pinky. "I missed!" He stood up and went crashing through the underbrush.

  "Oh, my God!" cried Odette, and she stumbled after him, snapping the same twigs underfoot, ducking the same barbed wire. "Where are we going?"

  "I've only wounded the deer," Pinky called over his shoulder. "I've got to kill it."

  "Do you have to?"

  "Keep your voice down," said Pinky.

  "Fuck you," said Odette. "I'll wait for you back where we were," but there was a sudden darting from a bush behind her, and the bleeding deer leaped out, in a mournful gallop, its hip a crimson gash. Pinky raised his gun and fired, catching the deer in the neck. The air shimmered in the echo, and the leaves fell from a horse chestnut. The deer's legs buckled, and when it tipped over, dead in some berry bushes, its eyes never blinked but stayed lidless and deep, black as outer space.

  "I'll leave the entrails for the hawks," Pinky said to Odette, but she was not there.

  Oh, the ladies come down from the Pepsi Hotel

  Their home has no other name

  than the sign that was placed

  like a big cola hell: Pepsi-Cola Have a Pepsi Hotel.

  Only a few of Odette's poems about whores rhymed—the ones she'd written recently—but perhaps the library crowd would like those best, the anticipation of it, knowing what the next word would be like though not what it would be; stanza after stanza, it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

  The local library association had set up a lectern near the windows of the reference room and had arranged chairs in rows for about eighty people. The room was chilly and alarmingly full. When Odette read she tried to look out past the faces, toward the atlases and the biographical dictionaries. She tugged on the cowl of her sweater and pulled it up over her chin between poems. She tried to pretend people's heads were all little ears of corn, something a dance instructor had once told her ballet class to do when she was seven and they had had to dance before the parents.

  They come down to the truckers

  or the truckers go up

  to the rooms with the curtains pell-mell.

  They truck down for the fuckers

  or else they fuck up

  in the Pepsi Have a Pepsi Hotel.

  There was silence. A door creaked open then shut. Odette looked up and saw Pinky in the back, tiptoeing over to a chair to sit. She had not seen or spoken to him in a week. Two elderly women in the front turned around to stare.

  Oh, honey, they sigh; oh, honey, they say,

  there are small things to give and to sell,

  and Heaven's among us

  so work can be play at the…

  There were other stanzas, too many, and she sped through them. She took a sip of water and read a poem called "Sleeping Wrong." She slept wrong on her back last night, it began, and so she holds her head this way, mad with loneliness, madder still with talk. She then read another long one, titled "Girl Gets Diphtheria, Loses Looks." She looked up and out. The audience was squinting back at her, their blood sugar levels low from early suppers, their interest redirected now and then toward her shoes, which were pointy and beige. "I'll close," she said loudly into the mike, "with a poem called 'Le Cirque in the Rain.'"

  This is not about a french monkey circus

  discouraged by weather.

  This is about the restaurant

  you pull up to in a cab,
r />   your life stopping there and badly,

  like a dog's song,

  your heart put in funny.

  It told the story of a Manhattan call girl worrying a crisis of faith. What is a halo but a handsome accident I of light and orbiting dust. What is a heart I but a… She looked out at the two elderly women sitting polite and half attentive, unfazed, in the front row. One of them had gotten out some knitting. Odette looked back at her page. Chimp in the chest, she had written in an earlier draft, and that was what she said now.

  Afterward a small reception was held out by the card catalogs. There were little cubes of pepper cheese, like dice, placed upon a table. There was a checkerboard of crackers, dark and light, a roulette of cold cuts. "It's a goddamn casino." She turned and spoke to Pinky, who had come up and put his arm around her.

  "I've missed you," he said. "I've been eating venison and thinking of you."

  "Yes, well, thank you for coming, anyway."

  "I thought you read very well," he said. "Not all of it I understood, I have to admit. Some of your stuff is a little too literaturey for me."

  "Really," said Odette.

  People shook her hand. They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged. She lit up a cigarette.

  "Do you really feel that way about men?" asked a man with a skeptical mouth.

  "Do you really feel that way about women?" asked someone else.

  "Your voice," said a young student. "It's like—who's that actress?"

  "Mercedes McCambridge," said her friend.

  "No, not her. Oh, I forget."

  Several elderly couples had put on their coats and hats, but they came up to Odette to shake her hand. "You were wonderful, dear," said one of the women, gazing into Odette's nose.

  "Yes," said the other, studying her own botched knitting—a scarf with an undulating edge.

  "We come to these every year," said a man standing next to her. He had been searching for something to say and had come up with this.

  "Well, thank you for coming this year as well," said Odette, stupidly, and dragged on her cigarette.

  Kay Stevens, the woman in charge of the fellowship readings, came up and kissed her on the cheek, the sweet vanilla wax of her lipstick sticking like candy. "A big success," she said quickly, and then frowned and hurried off.

  "Can I buy you a drink somewhere?" asked Pinky. He was still standing beside her, and she turned to look at him gratefully.

  "Oy," she said. "Please."

  Pinky drove them out past the county line to Humphrey Bogart's. He toasted her, flicked a sparkly speck of something from her cheek, looked into her eyes, and said, "Congratulations." He grew drunk, pulled his chair close, and put his head on her shoulder. He listened to the music, chewed on his cocktail straw, tapped his feet.

  "Any requests?" the bandleader rumbled into the mike.

  "O, give us one of the songs of Zion," shouted Pinky.

  "What was that?" The words popped and roared in the mike.

  "Nothing," said Pinky.

  "Maybe we should go," said Odette, reaching for Pinky's hand beneath the table.

  "OK," he said. "All right."

  he struck a match to a candle in the dark of his bedroom, and the fire of it lit the wall in a jittery paint. He came back to her and pressed close. "Why don't I go with you to New York?" he whispered. She was silent, and so he said, "No, I think you should stay here. I could take you cross-country skiing."

  "I don't like cross-country skiing," she whispered back. "It reminds me of when you're little and you put on your father's slippers and shluff around the house like that."

  "I could take you snowmobiling up by Sand Lake." There was another long silence. Pinky sighed. "No, you won't. I can see you phoning your friends back East to tell them you'd decided to stay and them shrieking, 'You did what?'"

  "You know us East Coasters," she said desperately. "We just come into a place, rape and pillage."

  "You know," said Pinky, "I think you are probably the smartest person I have ever known."

  She stopped breathing. "You don't get out much, do you?"

  He rolled back and stared at the shadowed ceiling, its dimples and blotches. "When I was in high school, I was a bad student. I had to take special classes in this house behind the school. It was called The House."

  She rubbed his leg gently with her foot. "Are you trying to make me cry?"

  He took her hand, brought it out from beneath the covers, up to his mouth, and kissed it. "Everything's a joke with you," he said.

  "Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one."

  they spent one last night together. At his house, late, with all the lights off, they watched another cassette of Holocaust Survivors. It was about a boy forced to sing for the Nazis, over and over. Because he could sing, he was the last to be shot in the head, and when they shot him they missed the center of his brain. He was found alive. "I must think of happy things," he said now, old and staring off. "It may not be what others do, but it is what I must do." He had a beautiful voice, said a woman, another survivor. It was beautiful like a bird that was also a god with flutes.

  "Heavy," murmured Pinky, when it was over. He pressed the remote control and turned away in the darkness, toward the wall, in a curve of covers. Odette pulled herself close, placed her hands around to the front of him, palms over the slight mounds of his breasts, her fingers deep in the light tangle of hair.

  "Are you OK?" she asked.

  He twisted toward her and kissed her, and in the dark he seemed to her aged and sad. He placed one of her fingers to his face. "You never asked about this." He guided her finger along his chin and cheek, letting it dead-end, like the scar, in his mustache.

  "I try not to ask too many things. Once I start I can't stop."

  "You want to know?"

  "All right."

  "I was in high school. Some guy called me a Jew, and I went after him. But I was clumsy and fat. He broke a bottle and dragged it across my face. I went home and my grandmother nearly fainted. Funny thing was, I had no idea that I was Jewish. My grandmother waited until the next day to tell me."

  "Really," said Odette.

  "You have to understand midwestern Jews: They're afraid of being found out. They're afraid of being discovered." He breathed steadily, in and out, and the window shade flapped a little from being over the radiator. "As you probably know already, my parents were killed in the camps."

  Odette did not say anything, and then she said, "Yes. I know." And at the moment she said it, she realized she did know, somehow had known it all along, though the fact of it had stayed beneath the surface, gilled and swimming like a fish, and now had burst up, gasping, with its mouth wide.

  "Are you really leaving on Friday?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "Friday. Are you?"

  "I'm sorry, I just didn't hear what you said. There's wind outside or something."

  "I asked you if you were really leaving on Friday."

  "Oh," she said. She pressed her face hard into his neck. "Why don't you come with me?"

  He laughed wearily. "Sure," he said. "All right," knowing better than she at that moment the strange winding line between charity and irony, between shoplifting and love.

  During that last day she thought of nothing but him. She packed and cleaned out her little apartment, but she had done this so often now in her life, it didn't mean anything, not in the pit of her, not anything she might have wanted it to mean.

  She should stay.

  She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them. She should live where there were trees. She should live where there were birds. No bird, no tree had ever made h
er unhappy.

  But it would be like going to heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes. And if he came to New York, well, it would bewilder him. He had never been before, and no doubt he'd spend all his time staring up at the skyscrapers and exclaiming, "Gosh, look how tall those suckers are!"

  He would slosh through the vagrant urine, shoelaces untied. He would walk through the dog shit awaiting him like mines. He would read the menus in the windows of restaurants and whistle at the prices. He would stare at a sidewalk drunk, prone and spread-eagled and fumbling at the crotch, and he would say, not unkindly, "That guy's really got his act together." He would look at the women.

  And her restlessness would ripple, double, a flavor of something cold. She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers. She would sigh a little for the passage of time, the endless corridor of it, how its walls washed by you on either side—darkly, fast, and ever, ever.

  "what do you do, you stay overnight on the road somewhere?" he said, standing next to her car in the cold. It was Friday morning and spitting snow. He had come over and helped her load up the car.

  "I drive until dark, then I check into a motel room and read until I fall asleep. Then I get up at six and drive some more."

  "So, like, what are you bringing with you to read?" he asked. He seemed unhappy.

  She had a Vogue magazine and The Portable Jung. "Something by Jung," she said.

  "Jung?" he asked. His face went blank.

  "Yeah," she sighed, not wanting to explain. "A book he wrote called The Portable Jung" She added, "He's a psychologist."

  Pinky looked her deeply in the eyes. "I know," he said.

  "You do?" She was a little surprised.

  "Yeah. You should read his autobiography. It has a very interesting title."

  She smiled. "Who are you? His autobiography? Really?"

  "Yeah," said Pinky slowly. "It's called Jung at Heart."

  She laughed loud, to please him. Then she looked at his face, to fix him like this in her mind. He was wearing a black shirt, a black sweater, black pants. He was smiling. "You look like Zorro today," she said, strangely moved. The spidery veins at his temples seemed like things under water, tentacular and drowned. She kissed him, long and at the rim of his ear, feeling in the rolls and spaces of her brain a winding, winding line. She got into the car. Though she hadn't even started up the engine, her departure had already happened, without her, ahead of her, so that what she now felt was the taunt of being left behind, of having to repeat, to imitate, of having to do it again, and now, and again.