by Lorrie Moore
“Why should I be worried? I don’t want to worry. I want to make love. Isn’t that better than worrying?”
“Not if I’m worried.”
“People won’t notice you. By the way, have you noticed that when I kiss you on the stomach, you get goose bumps?”
“Yes. I think you’re taking this pretty lightly. I mean, it’s almost unprofessional.”
“That’s because I’m an amateur. A one-hundred-percent amateur. Always and totally. Even at this. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my moments. Mmmmmm. That’s better.”
“I thought it would maybe help. But listen. I’m still worried.”
“Uhhhn. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Oh, I get it.”
“What?”
“I get it. You aren’t worried about yourself. You’re worried about me.”
X
Forty people attended her recital, which was sponsored by the city university’s music school, in which Karen was a sometime student. Somehow we made our way through the program, but when we came to the Chanler settings I suddenly wanted Karen to sing them perfectly. I wanted an angel to descend and to take away the gypsy’s curse. But she sang as she always had—off pitch—and when she came to “Ann Poverty,” I found myself in that odd region between rage and pity.
Stranger, here lies
Ann Poverty;
Such was her name
And such was she.
May Jesu pity
Poverty.
But I was losing my capacity for pity.
In the green room, her forty friends came back to congratulate her. I met them. They were all very nice. She smiled and laughed: There would be a party in an hour. Would I go? I declined. When we were alone, I said I was going back to my place.
“Why?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you come to my party? You’re my lover, after all. That is the word.”
“Yes. But I don’t want to go with you.”
“Why?”
“Because of tonight’s concert, that’s why.”
“What about it?”
“It wasn’t very good, was it? I mean, it just wasn’t.”
“I thought it was all right. A few slips. It was pretty much what I was capable of. All those people said they liked it.”
“Those people don’t matter!” I said, my eyes watering with anger. “Only the music matters. Only the music is betrayed, they aren’t. They don’t know about pitch, most of them, I mean, Jesus, they aren’t genuine musicians, so how would they know? Do you really think what we did tonight was good? It wasn’t! It was a travesty! We ruined those songs! How can you stand to do that?”
“I don’t ruin them. I sing them adequately. I project feeling. People get pleasure from them. That’s enough.”
“It’s awful,” I said, feeling the ecstatic liftoff into rage. “You’re so close to being good, but you aren’t good. Who cares what those ignoramuses think? They don’t know what notes you’re supposed to hit. It’s that goddamn slippery pitch of yours. You’re killing those songs. You just drop them like watermelons on the stage! It makes me sick! I couldn’t have gone on for another day listening to you and your warbling! I’d die first.”
She looked at me and nodded, her mouth set in a half-moue, half-smile of non-surprise. There may have been tears in her eyes, but I didn’t see them. She looked at me as if she were listening hard to a long-distance call. “You’re tired of me,” she said.
“I’m not tired of you. I’m tired of hearing you sing! Your voice makes my flesh crawl! Do you know why? Can you tell me why you make me sick? Why do you make me sick? Never mind. I’m just glad this is over.”
“You don’t look glad. You look angry.”
“And you look smug. Listen, why don’t you go off to your party? Maybe there’ll be a talent scout there. Or roses flung riotously at you. But don’t give a recital like this again, please, okay? It’s a public disgrace. It offends music. It offends me.”
I turned my back on her and walked out to my car.
XI
After the failure of Harmony of the World, Hindemith went on a strenuous tour that included Scandinavia. In Oslo, he was rehearsing the Philharmonic when he blinked his bright blue eyes twice, turned to the concertmaster, and said, “I don’t know where I am.” They took him away to a hospital; he had suffered a nervous breakdown.
XII
I slept until noon, having nothing to do at the paper and no reason to get up. At last, unable to sleep longer, I rose and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. I then took my cup to the picture window and looked down the hill to the trees of the conservation area, the view Stecker had once told me I should have.
The figure of a woman was hanging from one of the trees, a noose around her neck. I dropped my coffee cup and the hot coffee spilled out over my feet.
I ran out the back door in my pajamas and sprinted painfully down the hill’s tall grass toward the tree. I was fifty feet away when I saw that it wasn’t Karen, wasn’t in fact a woman at all, but an effigy of sorts, with one of Karen’s hats, a pillow head, and a dress hanging over a broomstick skeleton. Attached to the effigy was a note:
In the old days, this might have been me. Not anymore. Still, I thought it’d make you think. And I’m not giving up singing, either. By the way, what your playing lacks is not fanaticism, but concentration. You can’t seem to keep your mind on one thing for more than a minute at a time. I notice things, too. You aren’t the only reviewer around here. Take good care of this doll, okay?
XXXXX,
Karen
I took the doll up and dropped it in the clothes closet, where it stands to this hour.
Hindemith’s biographer, Geoffrey Skelton, writes, “[On the stage] the episodic scenes from Kepler’s life fail to achieve immediate dramatic coherence, and the basic theme remains obscure . . .”
She won’t of course see me again. She won’t talk to me on the phone, and she doesn’t answer my letters. I am quite lucidly aware of what I have done. And I go on seeing doubles and reflections and wave motion everywhere. There is symmetry, harmony, after all. I suppose I should have been nice to her. That, too, is a discipline. I always tried to be nice to everyone else.
On his deathbed, Hindemith has Kepler sing:
Und muss sehn am End:
Die grosse Harmonie, das ist der Tod.
Absterben ist, sie zu bewirken, not.
Im Leben hat sie keine Statte.
Now, at the end, I see it:
the great harmony: it is death.
To find it, we must die.
In life it has no place.
XIII
Hindemith’s words may be correct. But Dante says that the residents of limbo, having never been baptized, will not see the face of God. This despite their having committed no sin, no active fault. In their fated locale they sigh, which keeps the air “forever trembling.” No harmony for them, these guiltless souls. Through eternity, the residents of limbo—where one can imagine oneself if one cannot stand to imagine any part of hell—experience one of the most shocking of all the emotions that Dante names: “duol senza martíri,” grief without torment. These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights.
1986
MONA SIMPSON
Lawns
from the Iowa Review
MONA SIMPSON was born in 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and published her first stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. After earning her MFA from Columbia University, she worked as an editor for The Paris Review.
Simpson writes about the American class system through the lens of the family and its changing sociology. Alice Munro has called her families “amazing” and “heartbreaking . . . the sort who haven’t tu
rned up before in anything else I’ve read.” John Ashberry wrote, “Simpson has a remarkable gift for transforming the homely cadences of plain American speech into something like poetry.”
Simpson won the Whiting Prize for her first novel, Anywhere but Here. In 1992 she published a sequel titled The Lost Father. Off Keck Road won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has also been awarded a Literature Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent books are the novels My Hollywood and Casebook. Simpson lives in Santa Monica, California.
★
I STEAL. I’VE STOLEN books and money and even letters. Letters are great. I can’t tell you the feeling walking down the street with twenty dollars in my purse, stolen earrings in my pocket. I don’t get caught. That’s the amazing thing. You’re out on the sidewalk, other people all around, shopping, walking, and you’ve got it. You’re out of the store, you’ve done this thing you’re not supposed to do, but no one stops you. At first it’s a rush. Like you’re even for everything you didn’t get before. But then you’re left alone, no one even notices you. Nothing changes.
I work in the mailroom of my dormitory, Saturday mornings. I sort mail, put the letters in these long narrow cubbyholes. The insides of mailboxes. It’s cool there when I stick in my arm.
I’ve stolen cash—these crisp, crackling, brand-new twenty-dollar bills the fathers and grandmothers send, sealed up in sheets of wax paper.Once I got a fifty. I’ve stolen presents, too. I got a sweater and a football. I didn’t want the football, but after the package was messed up on the mail table, I had no choice, I had to take the whole thing in my day pack and throw it out on the other side of campus. I found a covered garbage can. It was miles away. Brand-new football.
Mostly, what I take are cookies. No evidence. They’re edible. I can spot the coffee cans of chocolate chip. You can smell it right through the wrapping. A cool smell, like the inside of a pantry. Sometimes I eat straight through the can during my shift.
Tampering with the United States mail is a federal crime, I know. Listen, let me tell you, I know. I got a summons in my mailbox to go to the Employment Office next Wednesday. Sure I’m scared.
The university cops want to talk to me. Great. They think, “suspect” is the word they use, that one of us is throwing out mail instead of sorting it. Wonder who? Us is the others, I’m not the only sorter. I just work Saturdays, mail comes, you know, six days a week in this country. They’ll never guess it’s me.
They say this in the letter, they think it’s out of laziness. Wanting to hurry up and get done, not spend the time. But I don’t hurry. I’m really patient on Saturday mornings. I leave my dorm early, while Lauren’s still asleep, I open the mailroom—it’s this heavy door and I have my own key. When I get there, two bags are already on the table, sagging, waiting for me. Two old ladies. One’s packages, one’s mail. There’s a small key opens the bank of doors, the little boxes from the inside. Through the glass part of every mail slot, I can see. The Astroturf field across the street over the parking lot, it’s this light green. I watch the sky go from black to gray to blue while I’m there. Some days just stay foggy. Those are the best. I bring a cup of coffee in with me from the vending machine—don’t want to wake Lauren up—and I get there at like seven-thirty or eight o’clock. I don’t mind it then, my whole dorm’s asleep. When I walk out it’s as quiet as a football game day. It’s eleven or twelve when you know everyone’s up and walking that it gets bad being down there. That’s why I start early. But I don’t rush.
Once you open a letter, you can’t just put it in a mailbox. The person’s gonna say something. So I stash them in my pack and throw them out. Just people I know. Susan Brown I open, Annie Larsen, Larry Helprin. All the popular kids from my high school. These are kids who drove places together, took vacations, they all ski, they went to the prom in one big group. At morning nutrition—nutrition, it’s your break at ten o’clock for donuts and stuff. California state law, you have to have it.
They used to meet outside on the far end of the math patio, all in one group. Some of them smoked. I’ve seen them look at each other, concerned at ten in the morning. One touched the inside of another’s wrist, like grown-ups in trouble.
And now I know. Everything I thought those three years, worst years of my life, turns out to be true. The ones here get letters. Keri’s at Santa Cruz, Lilly’s in San Diego, Kevin’s at Harvard, and Beth’s at Stanford. And like from families, their letters talk about problems. They’re each other’s main lives. You always knew, looking at them in high school, they weren’t just kids who had fun. They cared. They cared about things.
They’re all worried about Lilly now. Larry and Annie are flying down to talk her into staying at school.
I saw Glenn the day I came to Berkeley. I was all unpacked and I was standing there leaning into the window of my father’s car, saying, “Smile, Dad, jeez, at least try, would you?” He was crying because he was leaving. I’m thinking oh, my god, some of these other kids carrying in their trunks and backpacks are gonna see him, and then finally, he drives away and I was sad. That was the moment I was waiting for, him gone and me alone and there it was and I was sad. I took a walk through campus and I’d been walking for almost an hour and then I see Glenn, coming down on a little hill by the infirmary, riding one of those lawn mowers you sit on, with grass flying out of the side and he’s smiling. Not at me but just smiling. Clouds and sky behind his hair, half of Tamalpais gone in fog. He was wearing this bright orange vest and I thought, fall’s coming.
I saw him that night again in our dorm cafeteria. This’s the first time I’ve been in love. I worry. I’m a bad person, but Glenn’s the perfect guy, I mean for me at least, and he thinks he loves me and I’ve got to keep him from finding out about me. I’ll die before I’ll tell him. Glenn, OK, Glenn. He looks like Mick Jagger, but sweet, ten times sweeter. He looks like he’s about ten years old. His father’s a doctor over at UC Med. Gynecological surgeon.
First time we got together, a whole bunch of us were in Glenn’s room drinking beer, Glenn and his roommate collect beer cans, they have them stacked up, we’re watching TV and finally everybody else leaves. There’s nothing on but those gray lines and Glenn turns over on his bed and asks me if I’d rub his back.
I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. In high school, I was always ending up with the wrong guys, never the one I wanted. But I wanted it to be Glenn and I knew it was going to happen, I knew I didn’t have to do anything. I just had to stay there. It would happen. I was sitting on his rear end, rubbing his back, going under his shirt with my hands.
All of a sudden, I was worried about my breath and what I smelled like. When I turned fourteen or fifteen, my father told me once that I didn’t smell good. I slugged him when he said that and didn’t talk to him for days, not that I cared about what I smelled like with my father. He was happy, though, kind of, that he could hurt me. That was the last time, though, I’ll tell you.
Glenn’s face was down in the pillow. I tried to sniff myself but I couldn’t tell anything. And it went all right anyway.
I don’t open Glenn’s letters but I touch them. I hold them and smell them—none of his mail has any smell.
He doesn’t get many letters. His parents live across the Bay in Marin County, they don’t write. He gets letters from his grandmother in Michigan, plain, even handwriting on regular envelopes, a sticker with her return address printed on it, Rural Route #3, Guns Street, see, I got it memorized.
And he gets letters from Diane, Di, they call her. High school girlfriend. Has a pushy mother, wants her to be a scientist, but she already got a C in Chem 1A. I got an A+, not to brag. He never slept with her, though, she wouldn’t, she’s still a virgin down in San Diego. With Lilly. Maybe they even know each other.
Glenn and Di were popular kids in their high school. Redwood High. Now I’m one because of Glenn, popular. Because I’m his girlfriend, I know that’
s why. Not ’cause of me. I just know, OK, I’m not going to start fooling myself now. Please.
Her letters I hold up to the light, they’ve got fluorescent lights in there. She’s supposed to be blond, you know, and pretty. Quiet. The soft type. And the envelopes. She writes on these sheer cream-colored envelopes and they get transparent and I can see her writing underneath, but not enough to read what it says, it’s like those hockey lines painted under layers of ice.
I run my tongue along the place where his grandmother sealed the letter. A sharp, sweet gummy taste. Once I cut my tongue. That’s what keeps me going to the bottom of the bag, I’m always wondering if there’ll be a letter for Glenn. He doesn’t get one every week. It’s like a treasure. Cracker Jack prize. But I’d never open Glenn’s mail. I kiss all four corners where his fingers will touch, opening it, before I put it in his box.
I brought home cookies for Lauren and me. Just a present. We’ll eat ’em or Glenn’ll eat ’em. I’ll throw them out for all I care. They’re chocolate chip with pecans. This was one good mother. A lucky can. I brought us coffee, too. I bought it.
Yeah, OK, so I’m in trouble. Wednesday, at ten-thirty, I got this notice I was supposed to appear. I had a class, Chem 1C, pre-med staple. Your critical thing. I never missed it before. I told Glenn I had a doctor’s appointment.
OK, so I skip it anyway and I walk into this room and there’s these two other guys, all work in the mailroom doing what I do, sorting. And we all sit there on chairs on this green carpet. I was staring at everybody’s shoes. And there’s a cop. University cop, I don’t know what’s the difference. He had this sagging, pear-shaped body. Like what my dad would have if he were fat, but he’s not, he’s thin. He walks slowly on the carpeting, his fingers hooked in his belt loops. I was watching his hips.