The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

  He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of van Gogh's room in Aries. Beneath the clock face of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the "g"s and "f"s. It read, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's. Wasn't that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no "too," no emphasized you, just exactly the same words thrown back at him like some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—"You bark at them," Marilyn used to say—was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora's lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling "Z"—as in Zorro. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew? He had to lie down.

  he had bekka for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to the Cartoon Network. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, as the cartoons flashed on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but he tried his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every visit, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week, Bekka had said to him, "When you and Mommy were married, we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you're divorced and we always have spaghetti."

  "Which do you like better?" he'd asked.

  "Neither!" she'd shouted, summing up her distaste for everything, marriage and divorce. "I hate them both."

  Tonight, he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of Justice League, eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. "Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny."

  "And a bunny?" Ira said. When the family was still together, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, "Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!" There'd been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew that Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bath-time reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.

  "A dog and a bunny," Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit's bloody head in its mouth.

  "So, what do you think about that?" he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.

  Bekka shrugged and chewed. "Whatever," she said, her new word for "You're welcome,"

  "Hello,"

  "Goodbye," and "I'm only eight."

  "I really just don't want all his stuff there. His car already blocks our car in the driveway."

  "Bummer," Ira said, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore."

  "I don't want a stepfather," Bekka said.

  "Maybe he could just live on the steps," Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.

  "Besides," she said, "I like Larry better. He's stronger."

  "Who's Larry?" Ira said, instead of "bummer."

  "He's this other dude," Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a "dudette."

  "Bummer," Ira said. "Big, big bummer."

  he phoned zora four days later, so as not to seem pathetically eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. "Hi, Zora? This is Ira," he said, and then waited—narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say?—for her response.

  "Ira?"

  "Yes. Ira Milkins."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who you are."

  Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. "We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate's?" His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.

  "Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh—Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy."

  "Yeah, the Jew. That was me." Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on. There was a man of theatre for you.

  "That was a nice dinner," she said.

  "Yes, it was."

  "I usually skip Lent completely."

  "Me, too," Ira said. "It's just simpler. Who needs the fuss?"

  "But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."

  Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.

  "But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."

  Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger. Mom. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the Homo sapiens working Jewish mother—but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.

  "What kind of home do you run?" he asked.

  "Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."

  Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I love pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.

  "Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes."

  Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.

  "Well, would you like to meet for a drink?" Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of weariness and the cheery pseudo-professionalism of someone in the dully familiar position of being single and dating.

  "Yes," Ira said. "That's exactly why I called."

  "you can't imagine the daily drudgery of routine pediatrics," Zora said, not touching her wine. "Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Wope. Here's an exciting one: juvenile-onset diabetes. Day after day, you have to look into the parents' eyes and repeat the same exciting thing—'There are a lot of viruses going around.' I thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they'd gone into such a depressing field they all said, 'Because the kids don't get depressed.' That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don't get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children's books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog."

  "Now, what's a hedgehog, exactly?" Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. "I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers."

  "They're—well, what does it matter, if they're all wearing little polka-dot clothes, vests and hats and things?" she said irritably.

  "I suppose," he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. Th
ey caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts, like "Why are these things called napkins rather than lapkins?" He tried to focus on the visuals, on her pumpkin-colored silk blouse, which he hesitated to compliment her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had threatened to call off their wedding because he had too strenuously admired the fabric of the gown she was having made; then he had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of "mourning dove," a color he had read about in a wedding magazine. "Are you homosexual?" she had asked. "You must tell me now. I won't make the same mistake my sister did."

  Perhaps Zora's irritability was only job fatigue. Ira himself had creative hankerings. Though his position was with the Historical Society's human-resources office, he liked to help with the society's exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show about the state's first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.

  "What happens in your hedgehog tale?" Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he now wished he hadn't ordered. He was coveting Zora's wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While other people's cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, on her Honda Zora had a large bumper sticker that said, "Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy, greenish-blue meat is bad for you."

  "The hedgehog tale? Well," Zora began, "the hedgehog goes for a walk because he is feeling sad—it's based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house with a sign on it that says, 'Welcome, Hedgehog: This could be your new home,' and because he's been feeling sad the thought of a new home appeals to him. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators—well, I'll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that."

  "I don't know about that family of alligators."

  She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak. "Every family is a family of alligators," she said.

  "Alligators. Well—that's certainly one way of looking at it." Ira glanced at his watch.

  "Yeah. To get back to the book. It gives me an outlet. I mean, my job's not terrible. Some of the kids are cute. But some are impossible, of course. Some are disturbed, and some are just spoiled and ill-behaved. It's hard to know what to do. We're not allowed to hit them."

  "You're 'not allowed to hit them'?" He could see that she had now made some progress with her wine.

  "I'm from Kentucky," she said.

  "Ah." He drank from his water glass, stalling.

  She chewed thoughtfully. Merlot was beginning to etch a ragged, scabby line in the dried skin of her bottom lip. "It's like Ireland but with more horses and guns."

  "Not a lot of Jews down there." He had no idea why he said half the things he said. Perhaps this time it was because he had once been a community-based historian, digging in archives for the genealogies and iconographies of various ethnic groups, not realizing that other historians generally thought this a sentimental form of history, shedding light on nothing; and though shedding light on nothing didn't seem a bad idea to him, when it became available he had taken the human-resources job.

  "Not too many," she said. "I did know an Armenian family, growing up. At least I think they were Armenian."

  When the check came, she ignored it, as if it were some fly that had landed and would soon be taking off again. So much for feminism. Ira pulled out his state worker's credit card and the waitress came by and whisked it away. There were, he was once told, four seven-word sentences that generally signalled the end of a relationship. The first was "I think we should see other people" (which always meant another seven-word sentence: "I am already sleeping with someone else"). The second seven-word sentence was, reputedly, "Maybe you could just leave the tip." The third was "How could you forget your wallet again?" And the fourth, the killer of all killers, was "Oh, look, I've forgotten my wallet, too!"

  He did not imagine that they would ever see each other again. But when he dropped her off at her house, walking her to the door, she suddenly grabbed his face with both hands, and her mouth became its own wet creature exploring his. She opened up his jacket, pushing her body inside it, against his, the pumpkin-colored silk of her blouse rubbing on his shirt. Her lips came away in a slurp. "I'm going to call you," she said, smiling. Her eyes were wild with something, as if with gin, though she had only been drinking wine.

  "O.K.," he mumbled, walking backward down her steps in the dark, his car still running, its headlights bright along her street.

  the following week, he was in Zora's living room. It was beige and white with cranberry accents. On the walls were black-framed photos of her son, Bruno, at all ages. There were pictures of Bruno lying on the ground. There were pictures of Bruno and Zora together, the boy hidden in the folds of her skirt, Zora hanging her then long hair down into his face, covering him completely. There he was again, naked, leaning in between her knees like a cello. There were pictures of him in the bath, though in some he was clearly already at the start of puberty. In the corner of the room stood perhaps a dozen wooden sculptures of naked boys that Zora had carved herself. "One of my hobbies, which I was telling you about," she said. They were astounding little things. She had drilled holes in their penises with a brace-and-bit to allow for water in case she could someday sell them as garden fountains. "These are winged boys. The beautiful adolescent boy who flies away. It's from mythology. I forget what they're called. I just love their little rumps." He nodded, studying the tight, sculpted buttocks, the spouted, mushroomy phalluses, the long backs and limbs. So: this was the sort of woman he'd been missing out on, not being single all these years. What had he been thinking of, staying married for so long?

  He sat down and asked for wine. "You know, I'm just a little gun shy romantically," he said apologetically. "I don't have the confidence I used to. I don't think I can take my clothes off in front of another person. Not even at the gym, frankly. I've been changing in the toilet stalls. After divorce and all."

  "Oh, divorce will do that to you totally," she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. "It's like a trick. It's like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, 'Stand there.' And so you do. Then boom!" From a drawer in a china hutch, she took out a pipe, loaded it with hashish from a packet of foil, then lit it, inhaling. She gave it to him. "I've never seen a pediatrician smoke hashish before."

  "Really?" she said, with some difficulty, her breath still sucked in.

  the nipples of her breasts were long, cylindrical, and stiff, so that her chest looked as if two small plungers had flown across the room and suctioned themselves there. His mouth opened hungrily to kiss them.

  "Perhaps you would like to take off your shoes," she whispered.

  "Oh, no," he said.

  There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew people but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.

  "Where are you?" Ira said in the dark. He decided that in a case such as this he could feel a chaste and sanctifying distance. It wasn't he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it. Zora's candles on the nightstand were heated to clear pools in their tins. They flickered smokily. He tried not to think about how, before she had even lit them and pulled back the bedcovers, he had noticed that they were already melted down to the thickness of buttons, their wicks blackened to a crisp. It was not good to think about the previous burning of the bedroom candles of a woman who had just unzipped your pan
ts. Besides, he was too grateful for those candles—especially with all those little wonder boys in the living room. Perhaps by candlelight his whitening chest hair would not look so white. This was what candles were made for: the sad, sexually shy, out-of-shape, middle-aged him. How had he not understood this in his marriage? Zora herself looked ageless, like a nymph, with her short hair, although once she got his glasses off she became a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or the Blob, except that she smelled good and, but for the occasional rough patch, had the satiny skin of a girl.

  She let out a long, spent sigh.

  "Where did you go?" he asked again anxiously.

  "I've been right here, silly," she said, and pinched his hip. She lifted one of her long legs up and down outside the covers. "Did you get off?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Did you get off?"

  "Get off?" Someone else had asked him the same question once, when he stopped in the jetway to tie his shoe after debarking from a plane.

  "Have an orgasm. With some men it's not always clear."

  "Yes, thank you. I mean, it was—to me—very clear."

  "You're still wearing your wedding ring," she said.

  "It's stuck, I don't know why—"

  "Let me get at that thing," she said, and pulled hard on his finger, but the loose skin around his knuckle bunched up and blocked the ring, abrading his hand.

  "Ow," he finally said.

  "Perhaps later with soap," she said. She lay back and swung her legs up in the air again.

  "Do you like to dance?" he asked.

  "Sometimes," she said.

  "I'll bet you're a wonderful dancer."

  "Not really," she said. "But I can always think of things to do."

  "That's a nice trait."

  "You think so?" and she leaned in and began tickling him.