Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"I like that," said Pinky. "You're onto something there."

her poems, as she stated in letters to friends in New York, were not going well; she had put them on the back burner, and they had fallen behind the stove. She had met this guy. Something had happened to the two of them in a cave, she wasn't sure what. She had to get out of here. She was giving her final reading to the library patrons and matrons in less than three weeks, and that would pretty much be it. I hope you are not wearing those new, puffy evening dresses I see in magazines. They make everyone look like sticky buns. It is cold. Love, Odette .

laird was curious. He kept turning his head sideways during the sit-ups. "So you and Pinky hitting it off?"

"Who knows?" said Odette.

"Well, I mean, everyone's had their difficulties in life; his I'm only a little aware of. I thought you'd find him interesting."

"Sure, anthropologically."

"You think he's a dork."

"Laird, we're in our forties here. You can't use words like dork anymore." The sit-ups were getting harder. "He's not a dork. He's a doofus. Maybe. Maybe a doink ."

"You're a hard woman," said Laird.

"Oh, I'm not," pleaded Odette, collapsing on the rubber mat. "Really, I'm not."

at night he began to hold her in a way that stirred her deeply. He slept with one hand against the small of her back, the other capped against her head, as if to protect her from bad thoughts. Or, perhaps, thoughts at all. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks. She would open her mouth before the library fellowship people, and out would come: There once was a woman from … Someone would rush to a phone booth and call the police.

But perhaps you could live only from the neck down. Perhaps you could live with the clothes you were taking off all piled on top of your head, in front of your face, not just a sweater with a too-small neck but everything caught there — pants, shoes, and socks — a crazed tangle on your shoulders, in lieu of a head, while your body, stark naked, prepared to live the rest of its life in the sticks, the boonies, the fly-over, the rain. Perhaps you could. For when she slept against him like that, all the rest of the world collapsed into a suitcase under the bed. It was the end of desire, this having. Oh, here oh here she was. He would wrap himself around her, take her head like an infant's into his hand and breathe things to her, her throat her chest, in his beginning to sleep. Go to sleep, go to sleep with me .

in the morning she warmed her arms over the blue zinnias of the gas jets and heated water for coffee and eggs. Over the newspaper, she pretended she and Pinky were Beatrice and Benedick, or Nick and Nora Charles, which is what she always pretended in a love affair, at least for a few days, until all the evidence against it overwhelmed her.

"Why are you always talking with your hands?" asked Pinky. "You think you're Jewish?"

She glared at him. "You know, that's what I hate about this part of the country," she replied. "Everyone's so repressed. If you use your body in the least way while you're talking, people think you're trying out for a Broadway show."

"Kiss me," he said, and he closed his eyes.

On a weekday Pinky would be off to his office, to work on another farm bankruptcy or a case of animal abuse. "My clients," he said wearily. "You would never want to go out to eat with them. They come into my office reeking of cowshit, they lean back in the chair, set their belly out like that, then tell you about how some Humane Society bastard gave them a summons because their goat had worms." Across his face there breathed a sigh of tragedy. "It's a sad thing not to have clients you can go out to eat with." He shook his head. "It's a sad thing, a goat with worms."

There was something nice about Pinky, but that something was not Nick Charles. Pinky was more like a grave and serious brother of Nick's, named Chuck. Chuck Charles. When you had parents who would give you a name like that, there was nothing funny anymore.

"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?"