by Lorrie Moore
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 Queensboro 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 office 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."
The elevator has a peculiar rattle, for all eight floors, like someone obsessively clearing her throat.
When he finally gets the apartment door unlocked, he shows you into an L-shaped living room bursting with plants and gold-framed posters announcing exhibitions you are too late for by six years. The kitchen is off to one side—tiny, digital, spare, with a small army of chrome utensils hanging belligerent and clean as blades on the wall. Walk nervously around like a dog sniffing out the place. Peek into the bedroom: in the center, like a giant bloom, is a queen-sized bed with a Pennsylvania Dutch spread. A small photo of a woman in ski garb is propped on a nightstand. It frightens you.
Back in the living room, he mixes drinks with Scotch in them. "So, this is it," you say again with a forced grin and an odd heaving in your rib cage. Light up one of his cigarettes.
"Can I take your coat?"
Be strange and awkward. Say: "I like beige. I think it is practical."
"What's wrong with you?" he says, handing you your drink. Try to decide what you should do:
1. rip open the front of your coat, sending the buttons torpedoing across the room in a series of pops into the asparagus fern;
2. go into the bathroom and gargle with hot tap water;
3. go downstairs and wave down a cab for home.
He puts his mouth on your neck. Put your arms timidly around him. Whisper into his ear: "There's a woman, uh, another woman in your room."
when he is fast asleep upon you, in the middle of the night, send your left arm out slowly toward the nightstand like a mechanical limb programmed for a secret intelligence mission, and bring the ski garb picture back close to your face in the dark and try to study the features over his shoulder. She seems to have a pretty smile, short hair, no eyebrows, tough flaring nostrils, body indecipherably ensconced in nylon and down and wool.
Slip carefully out, like a shoe horn, from beneath his sleeping body—he grunts groggily—and go to the closet. Open it with a minimum of squeaking and stare at her clothes. A few suits. Looks like beige blouses and a lot of brown things. Turn on the closet light. Look at the shoes. They are all lined up in neat, married pairs on the closet floor. Black pumps, blue sneakers, brown moccasins, brown T-straps. They have been to an expensive college, say, in Massachusetts. Gaze into her shoes. Her feet are much larger than yours. They are like small cruise missiles.
Inside the caves of those shoes, eyes form and open their lids, stare up at you, regard you, wink at you from the insoles. They are half-friendly, conspiratorial, amused at this reconnaissance of yours, like little smiling men from the open hatches of a fleet of military submarines. Turn offthe light and shut the door quickly, before they start talking or dancing or something. Scurry back to the bed and hide your face in his armpit.
In the morning he makes you breakfast. Something with eggs and mushrooms and hot sauce.
Use his toothbrush. The red one. Gaze into the mirror at a face that looks too puffy to be yours. Imagine using her toothbrush by mistake. Imagine a wife and a mistress sharing the same toothbrush forever and ever, never knowing. Look into the medicine cabinet:
Midol
dental floss
Tylenol
Merthiolate
package of eight emory boards
razors and cartridges
two squeezed in the middle
toothpaste tubes: Crest and Sensodyne
Band-Aids
hand lotion
rubbing alcohol
three small bars of Cashmere Bouquet stolen from a hotel
On the street, all over, you think you see her, the boring hotel-soap stealer. Every woman is her. You smell Cashmere Bouquet all over the place. That's her. Someone waiting near you for the downtown express: yup, that's her. A woman waiting behind you in a deli near Marine Midland who has smooth, hand-lotioned hands and looks like she skis: good god, what if that is her. Break out in cold sweats. Stare into every pair of flared nostrils with clinical curiosity and unbridled terror. Scrutinize feet. Glance sidelong at pumps. Then look quickly away, like a woman, some other woman, who is losing her mind.
Alone on lunch hours or after work, continue to look every female over the age of twelve straight in the nose and straight in the shoes. Feel your face aquiver and twice bolt out of Bergdorf's irrationally when you are sure it is her at the skirt sale rack choosing brown again, a Tylenol bottle peeking out from the corner of her purse. Sit on a granite wall in the GM plaza and catch your breath. Listen to an old man singing "Frosty the Snowman." Lose track of time.
"You're late," Hilda turns and whispers at you. "Carlyle's been back here twice already asking where you were and if the market survey report has been typed up yet."
Mutter: "Shit." You are only on the T's: Tennessee Karma-Kola consumption per square dollar-mile of investment market. Figures for July 1980-October 1981.
Texas—Fiscal Year 1980 Texas—Fiscal Year 1981 Utah.
It is like typing a telephone directory. Get tears in your eyes.
Clients To See
1. Fallen in love(?) Out of control. Who is this? Who am I? And who is this wife with the skis and the nostrils and the Tylenol and does she have orgasms?
2. Reclaim yourself. Pieces have fluttered away.
3. Everything you do is a masochistic act. Why?
4. Don't you like yourself? Don't you deserve better than all of this?
5. Need: something to lift you from your boots out into the sky, something to make you like little things again, to whirl around the curves of your ears and muss up your hair and call you every single day.
6. A drug.
7. A man.
8. A religion.
9. A good job. Revise and send out resumes.
10. Remember what Mrs. Kloosterman told the class in second grade: Just be glad you have legs.
"what are you going to do for Christmas?" he says, lying supine on your couch.
"Oh. I don't know. See my parents in New Jersey, I guess." Pause. "Wanna come? Meet my folks?"
A kind, fatherly, indulgent smile. "Charlene," he purrs, sitting up to pat your hand, your silly ridiculous little hand.
he gives you a pair of leather slippers. They were what you wanted. You give him a book about cars.
"ma, open the red one first. The other package goes with it."
"A coffee grinder, why thank you, dear." She kisses you wetly on the cheek, a Christmas mist in her eyes. She thinks you're wonderful. She's truly your greatest fan. She is aging and menopausal. She stubbornly thinks you're an assistant department
head at Karma-Kola. She wants so badly, so earnestly, to be you.
"And this bag is some exotic Colombian bean, and this is a chocolate-flavored decaf."
Your father fidgets in the corner, looking at his watch, worrying that your mom should be checking the crown roast.
"Decaf bean," he says. "That's for me?"
Say: "Yeah, Dad. That's for you."
"who is he?" says your mom, later, in the kitchen after you've washed the dishes.
"He's a systems analyst."
"What do they do?"
"Oh… they get married a lot. They're usually always married."
"Charlene, are you having an affair with a married man?"
"Ma, do you have to put it that way?"
"You are asking for big trouble," she says, slowly, and resumes polishing silver with a vehement energy.
Wonder why she always polishes the silver after meals.
Lean against the refrigerator and play with the magnets.
Say, softly, carefully: "I know, Mother, it's not something you would do."
She looks up at you, her mouth trembling, pieces of her brown-gray hair dangling in her salty eyes, pink silverware cream caking onto her hands, onto her wedding ring. She stops, puts a spoon down, looks away and then hopelessly back at you, like a very young girl, and, shaking her head, bursts into tears.
"i missed you," he practically shouts, ebullient and adolescent, pacing about the living room with a sort of bounce, like a child who is up way past his bedtime and wants to ask a question. "What did you do at home?" He rubs your neck.
"Oh, the usual holiday stuff with my parents. On New Year's Eve I went to a disco in Morristown with my cousin Denise, but I dressed wrong. I wore the turtleneck and plaid skirt my mother gave me, because I wanted her to feel good, and my slip kept showing."
He grins and kisses your cheek, thinking this sweet.