Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"There's a doe bed not far from here," whispered Pinky. "It attracts bucks."

"Bucks, doe — thank God everything boils down to money, I always say."

"During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate."

"So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed."

Pinky's gun suddenly fired into the trees, and the noise filled the woods like a war, spilling to the ground the yellowing needles of a larch.

"Ahhhhhh!" Odette screamed. "What is going on?" Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Damn!" shouted Pinky. "I missed!" He stood up and went crashing through the underbrush.

"Oh, my God!" cried Odette, and she stumbled after him, snapping the same twigs underfoot, ducking the same barbed wire. "Where are we going?"

"I've only wounded the deer," Pinky called over his shoulder. "I've got to kill it."

"Do you have to?"

"Keep your voice down," said Pinky.

"Fuck you," said Odette. "I'll wait for you back where we were," but there was a sudden darting from a bush behind her, and the bleeding deer leaped out, in a mournful gallop, its hip a crimson gash. Pinky raised his gun and fired, catching the deer in the neck. The air shimmered in the echo, and the leaves fell from a horse chestnut. The deer's legs buckled, and when it tipped over, dead in some berry bushes, its eyes never blinked but stayed lidless and deep, black as outer space.

"I'll leave the entrails for the hawks," Pinky said to Odette, but she was not there.

Oh, the ladies come down from the Pepsi Hotel

Their home has no other name

than the sign that was placed

like a big cola hell: Pepsi-Cola Have a Pepsi Hotel.

Only a few of Odette's poems about whores rhymed — the ones she'd written recently — but perhaps the library crowd would like those best, the anticipation of it, knowing what the next word would be like though not what it would be; stanza after stanza, it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

The local library association had set up a lectern near the windows of the reference room and had arranged chairs in rows for about eighty people. The room was chilly and alarmingly full. When Odette read she tried to look out past the faces, toward the atlases and the biographical dictionaries. She tugged on the cowl of her sweater and pulled it up over her chin between poems. She tried to pretend people's heads were all little ears of corn, something a dance instructor had once told her ballet class to do when she was seven and they had had to dance before the parents.

They come down to the truckers

or the truckers go up

to the rooms with the curtains pell-mell.

They truck down for the fuckers

or else they fuck up

in the Pepsi Have a Pepsi Hotel.

There was silence. A door creaked open then shut. Odette looked up and saw Pinky in the back, tiptoeing over to a chair to sit. She had not seen or spoken to him in a week. Two elderly women in the front turned around to stare.

Oh, honey, they sigh; oh, honey, they say,

there are small things to give and to sell,

and Heaven's among us

so work can be play at the…

There were other stanzas, too many, and she sped through them. She took a sip of water and read a poem called "Sleeping Wrong." She slept wrong on her back last night , it began, and so she holds her head this way, mad with loneliness, madder still with talk . She then read another long one, titled "Girl Gets Diphtheria, Loses Looks." She looked up and out. The audience was squinting back at her, their blood sugar levels low from early suppers, their interest redirected now and then toward her shoes, which were pointy and beige. "I'll close," she said loudly into the mike, "with a poem called 'Le Cirque in the Rain.'"

This is not about a french monkey circus

discouraged by weather.

This is about the restaurant

you pull up to in a cab,

your life stopping there and badly,

like a dog's song,

your heart put in funny.

It told the story of a Manhattan call girl worrying a crisis of faith. What is a halo but a handsome accident I of light and orbiting dust. What is a heart I but a … She looked out at the two elderly women sitting polite and half attentive, unfazed, in the front row. One of them had gotten out some knitting. Odette looked back at her page. Chimp in the chest , she had written in an earlier draft, and that was what she said now.

Afterward a small reception was held out by the card catalogs. There were little cubes of pepper cheese, like dice, placed upon a table. There was a checkerboard of crackers, dark and light, a roulette of cold cuts. "It's a goddamn casino." She turned and spoke to Pinky, who had come up and put his arm around her.

"I've missed you," he said. "I've been eating venison and thinking of you."

"Yes, well, thank you for coming, anyway."

"I thought you read very well," he said. "Not all of it I understood, I have to admit. Some of your stuff is a little too literaturey for me."

"Really," said Odette.

People shook her hand. They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged. She lit up a cigarette.

"Do you really feel that way about men?" asked a man with a skeptical mouth.

"Do you really feel that way about women?" asked someone else.

"Your voice," said a young student. "It's like — who's that actress?"

"Mercedes McCambridge," said her friend.

"No, not her. Oh, I forget."

Several elderly couples had put on their coats and hats, but they came up to Odette to shake her hand. "You were wonderful, dear," said one of the women, gazing into Odette's nose.

"Yes," said the other, studying her own botched knitting — a scarf with an undulating edge.

"We come to these every year," said a man standing next to her. He had been searching for something to say and had come up with this.

"Well, thank you for coming this year as well," said Odette, stupidly, and dragged on her cigarette.

Kay Stevens, the woman in charge of the fellowship readings, came up and kissed her on the cheek, the sweet vanilla wax of her lipstick sticking like candy. "A big success," she said quickly, and then frowned and hurried off.

"Can I buy you a drink somewhere?" asked Pinky. He was still standing beside her, and she turned to look at him gratefully.

"Oy," she said. "Please."

Pinky drove them out past the county line to Humphrey Bogart's. He toasted her, flicked a sparkly speck of something from her cheek, looked into her eyes, and said, "Congratulations." He grew drunk, pulled his chair close, and put his head on her shoulder. He listened to the music, chewed on his cocktail straw, tapped his feet.

"Any requests?" the bandleader rumbled into the mike.

"O, give us one of the songs of Zion," shouted Pinky.

"What was that?" The words popped and roared in the mike.

"Nothing," said Pinky.

"Maybe we should go," said Odette, reaching for Pinky's hand beneath the table.

"OK," he said. "All right."

he struck a match to a candle in the dark of his bedroom, and the fire of it lit the wall in a jittery paint. He came back to her and pressed close. "Why don't I go with you to New York?" he whispered. She was silent, and so he said, "No, I think you should stay here. I could take you cross-country skiing."