The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

  "Thanks," said Scarp. "So what have you been working on lately? You had the under-thirty prize thing—what was that—three years ago?"

  "Three? What year is it now?"

  "Eighty-eight."

  "Eighty-eight," repeated Harry. "Well, the prize thing was actually then four years ago."

  "Not under thirty anymore, I'll bet." Scarp smiled, studying Harry's eyes.

  "Nope," said Harry, glancing away. "Not for a while."

  "So what have you been doing?"

  It was like talking to the playwriting police. You needed alibis. "I've been lying in my apartment," said Harry, "eating bonbons and going, 'What year is this?'"

  "Right." Scarp laughed inscrutably. He picked up his drink, then put it down again without taking a sip. "As you know, I'm always looking for writers for the show. I've been doing some of the writing myself lately, and I don't mind that. But I thought you and I should get to know each other. I think you have a great handle on contemporary language and the… uh…"

  "Postmodern imagination?" suggested Harry.

  "Absolutely."

  "Of the young deracinated American?"

  "Absolutely," said Scarp.

  Absolutely. It wasn't even absolutely to Harry, and he was the one who'd said it.

  "So just informally, as friends, tell me what you've been up to," said Scarp. "There's no pressure here, no design. We're just getting to know each other."

  "Actually I've been working on this play that I feel pretty good about, but it's long and is taking a lot out of me."

  "You know, I used to want to write plays. What's this one about, or can't you talk about it?" Scarp started in on his drink, settling back into a listener's sit.

  "I'm primitively secret about my work," said Harry.

  "I respect that, absolutely," said Scarp. He scowled. "Your family from this country?"

  Harry stared at Scarp: His eyes were lockets of distraction. What did it mean? "Yes," said Harry. He had to get Scarp back, get him interested, and so he began telling Scarp, in the most eloquent sentences he could construct, the story of the town his ancestors had founded in the Poconos, and what had become of it recently with radon gas, and the flight to Philly and Pittsburgh. It was a sad, complicated tale, jeweled with bittersweet wisdom, and he was lifting it in its entirety from the central speech of his play.

  "That's amazing," said Scarp, apparently impressed, and it gave Harry confidence. He barreled on ahead, with the story of his parents' marriage, his father's alcoholism, his cousin's sex change operation, and a love affair he had once had with one of the Kennedy girls. These were fragile tales he had managed to hone carefully in the writing of his play, and as he spoke with Scarp the voices of his characters entered his mouth and uttered their lines with poignancy and conviction. One had to say words, and these were the words Harry knew best.

  "Astonishing," said Scarp. He had ordered another round of drinks, at the end of which Harry was regaling him with the play's climactic scene, the story of Aunt Fussbudget Flora—funny and wrenching and life-affirming in its way.

  "The lights went dim, and the moon spilled onto her pillow in pale oblongs. We were all standing there, gathered in a prayer, when she sighed and breathed her very last word on earth: 'Cripes.'"

  Scarp howled in laughter. "Miraculous! What a family you have. A fascinating bunch of characters!" Harry grinned and sat back. He liked himself. He liked his life. He liked his play. He didn't feel uneasy or cheaply spent, using his work this way, or if he did, well, he pushed that to one side.

  "Harry," said Scarp, as he was signing for the check. "This has been a real pleasure, let me say."

  "Yes, it has," said Harry.

  "And though I've got to run right now—to have dinner with someone far less engaging, let me tell you—do I have your word that you will consider writing something for me sometime? We don't have to talk specifically now, but promise me you'll give it some thought. I'm making a troth here."

  "And it shall set you free," said Harry. "Absolutely."

  "I knew I would like you," said Scarp. "I knew we would hit it off. In fact, where do you live? I'll get a cab and drop you off."

  "Uh, that's OK," said Harry, smiling. His heart was racing. "I could use the walk."

  "If you're sure," said Scarp. "Listen, this was great. Truly great." He shook Harry's hand again, as limply as before. "Fabulous."

  there is a way of walking in New York, midevening, in the big, blocky East Fifties, that causes the heart to open up and the entire city to rush in and make a small town there. The city stops its painful tantalizing then, its elusiveness and tease suspended, it takes off its clothes and nestles wakefully, generously, next to you. It is there, it is yours, no longer outwitting you. And it is not scary at all, because you love it very much.

  "Ah," said Harry. He gave money to the madman who was always singing in front of Carnegie Hall, and not that badly either, but who for some reason was now on the East Side, in front of something called Carnegie Clothes. He dropped coins in the can of the ski-capped woman propped against the Fuller Building, the woman with the pet rabbit and potted plants and the sign saying, I have just had brain surgery, please help me. "Thank you, dear," she said, glancing up, and Harry thought she looked, startlingly, sexy. "Have a nice day," she said, though it was night.

  Harry descended into the subway, his usual lope invigorated to a skip. His play was racing through him: He had known it was good, but now he really knew. Glen Scarp had listened, amazed, and when he had laughed, Harry knew that all his instincts and choices in those lovely moments over the last four years, carefully mining and sculpting the play, had been right. His words could charm the jaded Hollywood likes of a Glen Scarp; soon those words, some lasting impression of them, might bring him a ten- or even twenty-thousand-dollar television episode to write, and after that he would never have to suffer again. It would just be him and Breckie and his play. A life that was real. They would go out and out and out to eat.

  The E train rattled west, then stopped, the lights flickering. Harry looked at the Be a Stenographer ad across from him and felt the world was good, that despite the flickering lights, it basically, amazingly, worked. A man pushed into the car at the far end. "Can you help feed me and my hungry kids?" he shouted, holding out a paper cup, and moving slowly down Harry's side of the car. People placed quarters in the cup or else stared psychotically into the reading material on their laps and did not move or turn a page.

  Suddenly a man came into the car from the opposite end. "Pay no attention to that man down there," he called to the riders. "I'm the needy one here!" Harry turned to look and saw a shabbily dressed man with a huge sombrero. He had electric Christmas tree lights strung all around the brim and just above it, like some chaotic hatband. He flicked a button and lit them up so that they flashed around his head, red, green, yellow. The train was still stopped, and the flickering overheads had died altogether, along with the sound of the engine. There was only the dull hum of the ventilating system and the light show from the sombrero. "I am the needy one here," he reiterated in the strangely warm dark. "My name is Lothar, and I have come from Venus to arrest Ronald Reagan. He is an intergalactic criminal and needs to be taken back to my planet and made to stand trial. I have come here to see that that is done, but my spaceship has broken down. I need your assistance so that I can get it done."

  "Amen!" someone called out.

  "Yahoo," shouted Harry.

  "Can you help me, people, earthlings. I implore you. Anything you can spare will aid me in my goal." The Christmas tree lights zipped around his head, people started to applaud, and everyone dug into their wallets to give money. When the lights came on, and the train started to go again, even the man with the hungry kids was smiling reluctantly, though he did say to Lothar, "Man, I thought this was my car." When the train pulled into Forty-second Street, people got off humming, slapping high fives, low fives, though the station smelled of piss.

  Harry's happiness last
ed five days, Monday through Friday, like a job. On Saturday he awoke in a funk. The phone had not rung. The mail had brought him no letters. The apartment smelled faintly of truck and sewage. He went out to breakfast and ordered the rice pudding, but it came with a cherry.

  "What is this?" he asked the waiter. "You didn't use to do this."

  "Maraschino eyeballs." The waiter smiled. "We just started putting them on. You wanna whipped cream, too?"

  When he went back home, not Deli but a homeless woman in a cloth coat and sneakers was sitting in his doorway. He reached into his pocket to give her some change, but she looked away.

  "Excuse me," he said. "I just have to get by here." He took out his keys.

  The woman stood up angrily, grabbing her shopping bags. "No, really, you can sit here," said Harry. "I just need to get by you to get in."

  "Thanks a lot!" shouted the woman. Her teeth were gray in the grain, like old wood. "Thanks!"

  "Come back!" he called. "It's perfectly OK!" But the woman staggered halfway down the block, turned, and started screaming at him. "Thanks for all you've done for me! I really appreciate it! I really appreciate everything you've done for me my whole life!"

  To relax, he enrolled in a yoga class. It was held three blocks away, and the teacher, short, overweight, and knowledgeable, kept coming over to Harry to tell him he was doing things wrong.

  "Stomach in! Shoulders down! Head back!" she bellowed in the darkness of the yoga room. People looked. She was not fond of tall, thin men who thought they knew what they were doing. "Head back!" she said again, and this time tugged on his hair, to get his head at the right angle.

  "I can't believe you pulled my hair," said Harry.

  "Pardon me?" said the instructor. She pressed her knee into the middle disks of his spine.

  "I would just do better," said Harry loudly, "if you wouldn't keep touching me!"

  "All right, all right," said the teacher. "I won't touch you," and she walked to the other side of the darkened room, to attend to someone else. Harry lay back for the deep breathing, spine pressed against the tough thread of the carpet. He put his hand over his eyes and stayed like that, while the rest of the class continued with headstands and cat stretches.

  The next week Harry decided to try a calisthenics class instead. It was across the street from the yoga class and was full of white people in pastel Spandex. Serious acid disco blared from the corner speakers. The instructor was a thin black man, who smiled happily at the class and led them in exercises that resembled the motion of field hands picking cotton. "Pick that cotton!" he shouted gleefully, overseeing the group, walking archly among them. "Pick it fast!" He giggled, clasping his hands. "Oh, what sweet revenge!" The class lasted an hour and a half, and Harry stayed on for the next class as well, another hour and a half. It strangely encouraged and calmed him, and when he went to the grocery store afterward, he felt almost serene. He lingered at the yogurt and the freshly made pasta. He filled his cart with mineral water, feeling healthy and whole again, when a man one aisle away was caught shoplifting a can of bean-with-bacon soup.

  "Hey!" shouted the store manager, and two large shelf clerks grabbed the man with the soup. "I didn't do nothing!" yelled the man with the soup, but they dragged him by the ears across the store floor to the meat counter and the back room, where the butchers worked in the day and there they began to beat him, until he could no longer call out. Trails of red smeared the floor of the canned goods aisle, where his ears had split open like fruit and bled.

  "Stop it!" cried Harry, following the men to the swinging meat doors. "There's no reason for this sort of violence!" and after two minutes, the employees finally let the shoplifter go. They shoved him, swollen and in shock, out the swinging doors toward the exit.

  Harry turned to several other customers, who, also distressed, had come up behind him. "My God," said Harry. "I had two exercise classes today, and it still wasn't enough." He left his shopping cart and fled the store for the phone booth outside, where he dialed the police. "I would like to report a crime. My name is Harry DeLeo, and I am standing on the corner of Eighth and—"

  "Yeah. Harry DeLeo. Trucks. Look, Harry DeLeo, we got real things," and the policeman hung up.

  at night Harry slept in the other room, the "living" room, the room decorated in what Breckie called Early American Mental Institution, the room away from the windows and the trucks, on the sharp-armed sofa, damp towels pressed at the bottom of the bedroom door, so he would not die in his sleep, though that had always been his wish but just not now. He also pressed towels against the bathroom door, in case of an overflow. Safe, barricaded, sulfurous, sandwiched in damp towels like the deviled eggs his mother used to bring to picnics: When he slept he did so dreamlessly, like a bug. In the mornings he woke early and went out and claimed a booth in The Cosmic Galaxy until noon. He read the Times and now even the Post and the News. Sometimes he took notes in the margins for his play. He felt shackled

  in nightmare, and in that constant state of daydream that nightmare gives conception to, creature within creature. In the afternoons he went to see teen movies starring teens. For brief moments they consoled him in a way he couldn't explain. Perhaps it was that the actors were all so attractive and in high school and lived in lovely houses in California. He had never been to California, and only once in the last ten years—when he had gone home with Breck to visit her parents in Minnesota—had he been in a lovely house. The movies reminded him of Breckie, probably that was it, those poreless faces and hairless arms, those idealistic hearts knowing corruption for the first time and learning it well. Harry would leave the movie theater feeling miserable, stepping out into the daylight like a criminal, shoulders bent into coat-hanger angles, in his body the sick heat of hangover, his jacket rumpled as a sheet.

  "Harry, you look like shit," said Deli in front of his building. She was passing out fliers for the 25 Cent Girls pavilion. She was wearing a patched vinyl jacket, a red dress, and black pumps with no stockings. "But hey. Nothing I can do for you—except here." She handed him a flier. Twenty-five Cents! Cheap, Live, and Naked! "I got myself a day job—ain't you proud of me, Harry?"

  Harry did feel proud of her, though it surprised him. It did not feel quite appropriate to feel proud. "Deli, I think that's great," he said anyway. "I really do!" Peep show fliers were a start. Surely they were a start.

  "Yeah," said Deli, smiling haughtily. "Soon you be asking me to marry you."

  "Yup," said Harry, jiggling the key in the lock. Someone in the middle of the night had been jabbing at it with a knife, and the lock was scraped and bent.

  "Hey, put on some of that music again, would you?" But Harry had gotten the door open, and it slammed behind him without his answering.

  There was mail: a form letter from an agency interested in seeing scripts; an electric bill; a letter from the Health Department verifying his complaint call and advising him to keep after the precinct dispatcher; a postcard for Breckie from some old friend named Lisa, traveling through Italy. What a place, gal., it said. Hello to Harry. He put it on his refrigerator with a magnet. He went to his desk and from there stared over at it, then stared back at his desk. He went to the window overlooking the street. Deli was still down there, passing out fliers, but people were not taking them anymore. They were brushing by, pretending not to see, and finally she just stood there, in the middle of the sidewalk, frowning, no longer trying, not thrusting a flier out to anyone, just letting the crowds break in front of her, like a wave, until she turned and walked with them, up to the corner, to the light, and threw her fliers into the trash, the way everyone else had done.

  The next day Harry got a phone call from Glen Scarp. "Harry, my man, I'm in Jersey directing a scene for a friend. I've got an hour between seven and eight to have a quick drink with you. I'm taking a chopper. Can you make it?"

  "I don't know," said Harry. "I'm busy." It was important to be cagey with these guys, to be a little unavailable, to act as if you, too, had a helico
pter. "Can you give me a call back later?"

  "Sure, sure," said Scarp, as if he understood too clearly. "How about four-thirty. I'll give you a call then."

  "Fine," said Harry. "I should know better then what my schedule's like"—he stifled a cough—"for the evening."

  "Exactly," said Scarp. "Fabulous."

  Harry kept his dirty clothes in a laundry bag at the bottom of his closet. He grabbed the bag up, crammed into it two other pairs of underwear, which had been floating around, and dashed across the street to the Korean laundromat with a large box of generic heavy-duty laundry detergent. He did his wash in an excited fashion, got pushy in claiming a dryer, went next door and ordered a fried egg sandwich to go, with ketchup, and ate it back at the laundromat, sitting on the window ledge, next to a pimp with a satin tie.

  At four-thirty, when Scarp called, Harry said, "All's squared away. Just name the place."

  This time they met at a restaurant called Zelda. Harry was wearing clean underwear and socks.

  "No one ever uses apostrophes anymore, have you noticed?" said Harry. He had been here before and had, in fact, said this before. "It makes restaurants sound like hurricanes." Zelda specialized in eclectic Louisiana cooking. It served things like salmon fillets with macaroni and cheese, both with bones. Capes, ponchos, and little sundresses hung from the ceiling. It was strictly a crazed southern woman's idea of a restaurant.

  Harry and Scarp sat in the bar section, near the piano, hemmed in on every side by potted plants.

  Scarp was fishing for descriptions. "There's no—"

  "Business like show business!" burst out Harry.